Omniscient Entities

Thank you for increasing my blogging ambitions

I have a lot of very sharp and capable friends. As I grow older, the more I witness an ever-widening chasm between what people can achieve and what people actually end up achieving.

The simplest explanation would be that some people are innately more capable than others and that their skills compound at a faster rate. While this is certainly true, it does not explain what you choose to work on and how hard you work.

Rather, anecdotal evidence continually suggests differences in outcomes are downstream of ambition. While some amount of ambition is probably innate, I have come to believe that much of ambition is environmental.

There aren’t very many reasons to be ambitious and work hard if you don’t have billionaire-level aspirations. Most somewhat educated people in America (and especially in Europe) act rationally by not working very hard at their job, yet lead a pretty comfortable life: baseline healthcare, money to afford most things, and ample free time.

If you’re one of these people that sees their job as a means to an end, odds are that you will assort with others who think similarly. With all your friends in a similar position in life, the group naturally homogenizes around comparable ambitions levels and naturally decays as you grow older. Once you find yourself in this local equilibrium with your identity inextricably linked to your job, friends, and lifestyle, it’s very hard to change.

One of the only ways to change this at scale is through an external entity telling you that you are capable of greater things. Omniscient entities are credible people and institutions who increase ambition at scale by providing proactive positive reinforcement before any significant evidence of realized potential.

Modern secular omniscient entities include:

Examples of omniscient entities in action:

• X/Substack/Internet Media: A collective of people provide early signals that you are producing valuable work in some dimension. You are capable of producing such good content that the audience signals that they are willing to allocate time in the future to consume the content you haven’t even created yet.
• Job/Titles: Jobs and job titles not only signal competence to future employers but also tell you that you are the type of person capable of everything associated with the title. The intern turned junior developer is likely still a net negative on the organization, but after two years on the job under a good manager, they are able to autonomously contribute to an organization. This is the time where they earn the senior engineer title.or engineer.
• Early-Stage Funding: A VC or an angel gives you money before you have any evidence of product-market fit. They believe that you will be able to figure everything out (attract talent to work for you, build a compelling product), maybe even more than you do yourself.
• Grants/Fellowships/Awards: A committee or person decides that you are talented and grants you money and/or prestige along with a peer group of similarly skilled individuals. Proactive grants may be the catalyst that leads you to break out of your local equilibrium, change peer groups, and go on to do greater things.
• Universities: Two similar students, one who went to Harvard and another who went to their local state school, start and end university with a similar skill set. The student who attended Harvard receives a Harvard diploma, but more importantly a sense that they are capable of doing greater things.

While much is discussed about the signaling value of omniscient entities, the corresponding ambition flywheel it creates is under-discussed. Top universities inundate you with stories of alumni success, secret societies, and institutional narratives that reinforce your sense of exceptional potential. This elevates your ambition as you see a credible path toward a career previously only reserved for your dreams: startup founders, Supreme Court judges, and presidents.

Nobody wants to toil in obscurity forever as they get good, so omniscient entities serve as pseudo-liquidity providers bridging their current abilities and position to their future potential. Among other things, they also bestow social capital to you that provides baseline insurance against the failure case, enabling you to take more risk.

To be sure, the reality of omniscient entities is much more bleak, channeling ambition in locally suboptimal ways via anxiety-inducing status games. Ambition at elite universities has devolved into funnels for elite human capital into replaceable high status jobs. The modal path for these graduates is high finance and consulting, a far cry from the greater things they could become. For many, university is the most powerful and last omniscient entity they will interact with in their life, and leads them toward a low-risk, comfortable, anesthetized life they never escape.

Omniscient Entity Incentives

Omniscient entities offer a linear combination of the following:

• Social capital: confers status, since status is a zero-sum game (diplomas from prestigious institutions, followers, titles)
• Financial capital: distributes money, since money is a zero-sum way of allocating existing resources (grants, equity investments)
• Skill development: teaches you specific skills (programming, writing)
• Peer groups: provides a network of like-minded individuals (friends, mentors)

Omniscient entities do not operate on a purely altruistic basis; they always receive something in return. This may include receiving equity in your company, access to your peer group, future financial donations, and more.

This blog is my way of creating my own omniscient entity. I continue to work on this blog because of you all: a collective of internet readers who inspire me to write every day and increase my blogging ambitions.

The economics of writing on the internet are quite poor, which is why good blogs are so interesting and rare. Blogging is a high opportunity cost endeavor; many top bloggers could be spending their time for much higher pay (or any pay at all). I am by no means a top blogger but I do recognize my opportunity cost when I’m writing this blog and not working on other more lucrative projects.

The incentives of writing on the internet (at least the subculture I’m interested in) uniquely selects for curiosity and earnestness. Every email I’ve received has been thought-provoking and insightful, which is incredible given that I am an anonymous blogger with less than ten posts and only 14,433 published words. Real people with real lives and real obligations spend time out of their day to read my words and craft thoughtful emails.

Thank you all for being my ethereal omniscient entity.

Appendix: Corollaries + Misc. Thoughts

• Omniscient entities must expend much more resources on a per person basis than younger counterparts. The activation energy becomes much higher as you grow older, as your opportunity cost and the scaffolding around your life increases (kids, family, etc.).
• Elite overproduction is a byproduct of omniscient entities (universities) making empty promises and their constituents believing that they are destined for great things without doing any work.
• Omniscient entities are very susceptible to their constituents Goodharting, where people are optimizing to seek validation from the entity itself instead of what it is intending to incentivize.
• Omniscient entities can prey on vulnerable people. This can be therapists or institutions. Even if you believe in the efficient omniscient entity hypothesis, this can lead to short-term adverse outcomes with society-wide ramifications.
• The solution to bad omniscient entities are more omniscient entities.
• Omniscient entities are becoming increasingly context-specific and emergent.

Prediction Hash: 6b492652ecde2fc1fe10db88c78fde0cc91d6e9b43b53a479d40294601249024