Highlights from The Anthology of Balaji by Eric Jorgenson
Highlights from this book
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I’d like to see us ethically and technologically aligned on progress. I’d like to see humanity believing math is good. Believing generating nuclear power is good. Believing getting to Mars is good. Believing expanding is good.
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Mortality is the main source of scarcity. If we had more time (or infinite time), we would be less concerned with whether something was faster. The reason speed has value is because time has value; the reason time has value is because human life spans are finite.
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In 2009, it would have been remarkable to claim “$100 billion in equity value is being held back by outdated taxi and hotel regulations.” Uber and Airbnb showed it was true. The “next big thing” was being held back by those eighty-year-old regulations. Very, very few people were thinking about them. These things are so remarkable and hard to understand that they go unseen constantly.
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A philosopher named Frederic Bastiat has a parable about this, about what is seen and what is unseen. It requires more empathy and more imagination to think about value that isn’t seen. You can see a skyscraper. You can’t see what could have been built but wasn’t. You can’t see the cities we could build if we had regulations allowing skyscrapers to be built in two weeks rather than two years.
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The movie Limitless is about a guy who finds a wonder drug that unlocks the use of our fullest intelligence. There are side effects, but the movie is so refreshing because, at the end, the guy works out the bugs. With his super intelligence, he’s able to figure out the better version of the pill. That’s how it works in real life. We aren’t like Icarus. We had some crashes, but we figured out how to have safe, reliable planes stay up in the sky. We engineered the failures away. We figured out a way around the seemingly un-figure-out-able. Believing the next problem is solvable is a fundamental tenet of the philosophy of technology.
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The issue that stems from abstraction is people get alienated from complexity and start to believe things are easy. That’s just humans being humans. Actually, putting all those things behind an easy interface is ridiculously hard. It’s really, really, really hard to do. It’s really hard to make something easy.
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Technology changes microeconomic leverage. It expands the range of options available to each person: Accept ignorance vs. search Google Accept a broadcast vs. reply on social media Accept fiat vs. buy Bitcoin You may want to know, talk back, or opt out. Now you can.
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Technology is the driving force of history. It lies upstream of culture, and thus upstream of politics.
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Feudalism was enforced by knights on horseback in shining armor with heavy swords; guns changed that. Guns reduced the importance of physical inequality. Any man (or importantly, woman) with a gun could kill any other man, even if the shooter was old and frail and the shootee was Sir Lancelot himself. Guns destabilized the feudal hierarchy; a strong right arm was suddenly worth less than a strong left brain, because the technology and supply chain to produce muskets was suddenly critical. The gun helped catalyze the transition from feudal
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It’s not so much that decentralization is a panacea. It’s that when you are over-centralized, you decentralize. And then, if people over-decentralize, they recentralize—but around new hubs each time. So it’s bundling, unbundling, then rebundling.
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They didn’t understand programmability, permissionlessness, or peer-to-peer, and they overestimated the robustness of legacy institutions. History repeats with crypto. Crypto is more than an asset class because it transforms the custody, trading, issuance, governance, and programmability of anything scarce. It’s a new financial system, not just some ticker symbols.
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On disk → Online → On-chain. On-chain is like the third level of deployment. Files that only you care about stay on your local disk. Files that are important to others get put online. And files that are *really* important to others will get put on the blockchain. When you put information online, you get distribution, sharing, collaboration, etc. When you put it on-chain, you get immutability, verifiability, monetization, etc. On-chain is not suitable for everything, just like you don’t put everything online.
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We should prioritize this because life extension makes everything relatively cheaper. If a purchase used to cost you $100 and now costs you $1, that purchase takes 100x less time from your life because your working life produced that $100 or $1 by trading your time. Rather than spending, say, one hundred minutes of your life, you spent one minute. Life extension, or reversing aging, is the ultimate scarcity reduction. It gives everybody lots of time.
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Technological history is the history of what works; political history is the history of what works to retain power.
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The opinions of others are imperfect proxies for analyzing the data yourself. The more technical knowledge you have in an area, the less you need to rely on reputational signals. A few scientists publish a study; a few dozen people summarize it; a few million read the summaries. Then everyone argues with each other. Most of the nodes involved in that scenario are signal repeaters. What actually matters for determining truth are signal sources. Signal repeaters are valuable because they bring items to your attention. Sometimes their summaries are even reliable. But the truth is upstream.
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Popular opinion: platitude Popular fact: triviality Unpopular opinion: heresy Unpopular fact: innovation
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Everybody knows exactly how much Bitcoin you have, whether you’re Palestinian or Israeli, Democrat or Republican. There’s actually no contention over who owns what Bitcoin, which is amazing, because it’s a trillion-dollar piece of international property. That’s the kind of thing people usually fight over. That says something.
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Progress is doing some math today and doing some more math in the same area tomorrow. A little bit of compounding progress along the same direction each day adds up to something, but time spent on these sites add up to nothing. I’m not saying they have zero value; there’s some value to serendipity. You do learn the pulse of what a community is thinking. But I think we are overconsuming novelty and underconsuming purpose.
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That is news you can use, news where the locus of control is you; you can do something about it. Imagine your personal dashboard for your own fitness, diet, and sleep, and then maybe a family dashboard.
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You start tracking something completely differently, which is to the reader’s benefit. This is a new concept for basically all health magazines. All fitness content could immediately do this. Enough health tracking devices are out there now.
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Clicks and prestige would be zero-sum metrics for a decentralized activist community, but sentiment is not. You’re convincing the external world something is a good idea. Fill up the sentiment bar, and we can go to Mars.
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The time selects for the technology, and the technology selects for the ideology. The era of centralized technology had mass production and mass media. The political ideologies enabled by those technologies were Communism, Nazism, and Democratic Capitalism. For the past hundred years, they slugged it out.
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The ledger of record is the combination of all feeds of on-chain data. It subsumes social media feeds, data APIs, event streams, newsletters, and RSS. It’ll take years to build but will ultimately become the decentralized layer of facts that underpins all narratives.
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Perhaps we will see “full stack writers” who go from writing articles to producing movies themselves, like the full stack developer.
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As a guiding philosophy, “win and help win” will always outcompete “live and let live.”
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Without something to build, any intellectual movement degenerates into a status competition, where participants feel the righteousness of finding everyone else wanting without the responsibility of building what they actually want.
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Many people don’t understand that wealth can be created. My first counterexample for them: who did Steve Jobs steal all the iPhones from? If wealth is a zero-sum game, where one person’s gain is someone else’s loss, where did the phones come from? This simple example shows wealth can be created. A surprising number of people seem to believe profit is a function of sufficient malevolence. Wealth creation always attracts entitled predators.
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Money seems to be locally zero-sum (after a trade happens, Person A has –$1, Person B has +$1), but actually money is globally positive-sum. In a voluntary exchange, A and B both gain in wealth because they both get non-monetary benefit from making the trade.
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Over time, competitors with higher-quality products arose, and regulations effectively criminalized the sale of beta-quality products. Barriers to entry rose, increasing the capital required to challenge incumbents. In these industries, starting a company in your garage became much more difficult.
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These pioneers had some time before competitors and regulations created barriers to entry. The messy process of innovation resulted in many deaths from refinery fires, railroad collisions, car explosions, airplane crashes, and drug overdoses. At first, this was accepted as the price of progress. Over time, competitors with higher-quality products arose, and regulations effectively criminalized the sale of beta-quality products. Barriers
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Today, there are four possibilities for the frontier: the land, the internet, the sea, and space. If we assess where we are right now, we learn that currently 7.7B people are on land, 3.2B on the internet, about 2–3M on the high seas, and fewer than 10 in space.
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Bad Leaders Divide. Great Leaders Create. Nothing is more costly than incompetent leadership. Here is my ranking of types of leaders: socialist < nationalist < capitalist < technologist.
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As we go from demagogic socialist to nationalist to capitalist to technologist, the degree of difficulty gets harder, but more value is added to society in the medium- to long-run. Every other group benefits from technologists. Planes work. Trains work. We take all this for granted now,
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“Works in practice, not in theory.” So much stuff I saw as a scientist at Stanford worked in theory but not in practice. Many ideas are exactly the opposite. You can study some concepts only once you’ve actually built products.
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That is harder than it looks!
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Why is Mark Zuckerberg the CEO of Facebook? Because he founded Facebook. He didn’t get three billion people to agree to make a twenty-year-old kid a CEO. Every single piece of support—an employee, a user, a customer buying ads, a backlink—he acquired over time. This was a series of one-to-one transactions where he gave each of them more than they’d gotten before, making mutually beneficial trades.
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The state has far more money than anyone else. But NASA is behind SpaceX because tech isn’t capital-limited; it’s competence-limited.
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Founders are neither dictators nor bureaucrats because they are legitimate and competent. The bureaucrat is selected by election, and the dictator is selected by power, but neither is selected for competence. The selection mechanism really, really matters because it is not simply the current state of the system but how that state was achieved that is important for leaders to understand. People tend to think an institution will endure just because it has so far.
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In terms of execution heuristics, perhaps the best is Peter Thiel’s “one thing.” Everyone in the company is responsible for one thing. Each person should at all times know what their one thing is, and everyone should know everyone else’s too.
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In the early days of a startup, the most important number is the burn rate. Every single person must be indispensable. Eventually, if successful, the company starts building up some structure. Conservatism takes over. With the business growing consistently, the founder adds structure, career tracks, and a stable hierarchy. The new important measure becomes the “bus number,” the number of people who can get hit by a bus with the company still remaining functional. Suddenly, every single person must now be dispensable.
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Venture capital has many, many faults. But there are a couple interesting things about it. One of the biggest is VCs are very interested in whether they were wrong. If they pass on companies that become successful, they want to understand why they were wrong. They want to admit they were wrong and potentially invest in them now. They have financial incentive for discovering truth, which is uncommon.
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Tech’s best feature? The past is past. There is always another train leaving the station, another rocket ship blasting off. Found it, fund it, or join it. We’ll