Solve for the ___

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Every so often, I come across an insightful, anti-Straussian piece of content:

• Julian Sanchez's The Straussian Case Against Gay Marriage
• Richard Hanania on why attractive women are still high status
• Any Bryan Caplan book, blog post, or podcast

Oftentimes, I learn that the author has a largely anti-Straussian reputation.

Rarely, I come across an anti-Straussian moment from an individual with a Straussian reputation:

• Chamath speaking to Stanford GSB students, stating that the world is run by only a handful of men, and that it is your moral imperative to make money to impart your worldview on the world.
• Thiel's The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, which he later softened and reframed.
• Sam Altman on his blog and his advice to YC founders that contradict the effective mechanics of building durable companies.

In this post, I explore the reasons why there is little insightful anti-Straussian content and the forces that shift people toward Straussianism.

Why is anti-Straussian content so rare?

The following are possible explanations, in no particular order.

1. You can have more impact by being Straussian and applying insights to real world activities.

Those able to generate insights rationally opt to apply them to the real world to capture the upside instead of writing about it.

17 observations on habits, personalities, and worldviews

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Meeting successful bloggers in person feels like watching characters from a childhood TV show step into real life, especially the pseudonymous ones.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've had the opportunity to meet numerous internet-famous bloggers in person. Approximately half of my discussions happened in small groups, while the other half occurred in a one-on-one setting. My conversations with these bloggers have ranged from how they generate ideas to the personality characteristics of their kids. If you're reading this post, you're the type of person who has read many of their posts as well.

While I think I can predict the success of a given post, I don't think I can predict which bloggers will be successful. [1] Some of this can be attributed to the fact that a large component of blogger success is future post frequency, which is an unknown metric. That said, meeting them in person has left me with the beginnings of a pattern I can't yet articulate.

The following are some of my assorted notes from my in-person interactions with successful bloggers.

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1. They do at least one thing that is weird and makes you double-take.

Some anecdotes:

• There's a well-known blogger who insists on only browsing the internet on incognito mode while on a VPN and not using the trackpad. It's not that the trackpad is broken, but they use some combination of the keyboard to move their cursor around.
• One blogger uses a single monitor in vertical orientation.
• Another blogger has a specific three-monitor setup: one horizontal monitor with one vertical monitor on each side.

2. They work extremely hard and love it.

I have been working physically adjacent and in the same room as a successful blogger. Every single day without fail, he leaves after I do at night and gets there before I do in the morning. And I'm not leaving that early. I leave at around 10:30 or 11 pm, and get in at 9 or 9:30 am. More importantly, it looks like he's enjoying every single moment of being there.

On cultural polish and care

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I recently came across a video on the numerous design flaws of the YouTube search bar:

Flaws:

1. When there is text present in the search bar, the closing "X" overflows into the surrounding region vertically and on the right side.

2. The microphone icon is slightly misaligned with the search bar on the vertical axis.

3. When the search bar is in an active state, there are two redundant search bar icons (this one is more subjective).

For all the memes that working at Big Tech is just moving buttons around, even the almighty Google has yet to implement a flawless search bar. Keep in mind that Google has a strong incentive to perfect every aspect of the user experience for its 122 million+ daily active users.

Understanding YouTube's Platform Mechanics, Content Dynamics, Talent, and Market Structure

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In Don't Build an Audience, I outline the incentives and basic mechanics of YouTube:

Algorithms like the YouTube algorithm seek to maximize platform engagement. Platform engagement is highly correlated with the amount of interesting material a user receives. Early versions of algorithms were heavily weighted to serve new content from large existing content creators. On average, a post from a creator with a large following is much more likely to be engaging versus the marginal creator with no track record. This is a tractable signal of a creator's quality that is easy to implement as a model feature.

Since writing that piece, I have learned much more about YouTube microstructure thanks to many discussions with Justin Kuiper. Justin has spent over a decade as a YouTube writer and creative director, working for MatPat's Theorist channels (Game Theorists, Film Theorists, Style Theorists, and Food Theorists). His videos have amassed over half a billion views.

The following is an interview with Justin.

Background

• How did you get into scriptwriting?

I got started with YouTube scriptwriting in 2017 when a big YouTuber named MatPat found a high-effort Reddit post I made about Pokemon lore and sent me a DM asking if I wanted to write for his channel.

But my scriptwriting career began before YouTube, I actually got my start in commercial scriptwriting around 2014, when I started writing visual novels. When I looked at the market for English visual novels I saw a lot of demand that seemed underserved, and there were a lot of developers who would pay a few hundred dollars for a week of work, so it was a great way for me to get my foot in the door.

• You've been thinking about this idea of a "promise delta", can you briefly explain what that is?

It's how I think about the difference between expectations in reality. Think about situations where you were promised the world, but the content failed to meet expectations. That's negative promise delta. You got clickbaited. That sucks.

6 anecdotal explanations

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Of the 33 posts that I've written thus far, more than 25 were written between the hours of 19:00 and 01:00. There's something so serene about sitting down at my desk at night and filling in a blank canvas.

Late-night productivity seems to be a common pattern, especially among the writers and programmers I know. Most blogs and research online cite circadian rhythm and innate biology as the primary reasons for being more productive at night.

I want more control and agency over when I'm productive. I want to do something else at night that's not just lounging back in my chair by myself typing away. Having a consistent and normal sleep schedule would also do wonders for my social life.

I've experimented with countless strategies to force myself to be more productive during the day. Some things I've tried include:

• Blocking certain websites and even Wi-Fi
• Changing exercise times
• Restructuring my meal schedule
• Scheduling social plans later at night

None of it worked.

In this post, I provide six explanatory mechanisms for why I am more productive at night, in order of anecdotal explanatory power.

Following these explanations, I describe the only universally agreed upon solution I've heard for permanently shifting productivity back into the daytime.

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1. Late nights are associated with weakened mental filters, leading to less overthinking and easier flow state access.

5 explanations

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Some of the most important, intellectually interesting, and emotionally fulfilling conversations I've had in the past few years have occurred late at night. A few of these late night conversations turned to early morning conversations as they stretched until sunrise the next day.

Whenever I mention this phenomenon to friends, they overwhelmingly agree. Almost all of the canonical conversations that defined our relationship – the ones that we still reference years later – occurred late at night.

In this post, I provide five explanations for what makes late night conversations better, in order of explanatory power.

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1. Late night conversations serve as a multidimensional commitment filter, leading to less ambiguity around intentionality.

Late nights are socially understood to be personal time. All parties are signaling that they're willing to use their non-work hours to be present at that moment. This creates a peer-to-peer context with far less ambiguity around whether any networking motives are in play.

Because the discussion is happening late into the night, anyone can decide to leave whenever they want with a legitimate reason to go to sleep. When people elect to stay, they are collectively demonstrating their willingness to sacrifice their sleep to participate in the late night conversation.

2. Late night conversations typically occur with people we genuinely enjoy being around.

The people we have late night conversations with tend to be those we naturally get along with better. These can be old friends with pre-existing context or new friends that all parties expect they might get along with.

3. Late night conversations are better because they are longer and more focused.

messages from a typewriter

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AI is communist, prediction markets are libertarian

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In this post, I present a model in which religion, institutions, and AI act as top-down systems for outsourcing human thought, each shaped by a small group of elites. Then I describe how prediction markets invert this dynamic as the first bottom-up mechanism for aggregating distributed intelligence without elite mediation.

The Black Box Model of Outsourced Human Thought

The black box model of outsourced human thought can be understood as a deterministic function where any arbitrary input (diversity of humans) produces a specific output. The inputs can be any question such as "who to trust for medical advice" or "what the meaning of life is." Each black box espouses a certain worldview that they seek to disseminate.

Black boxes are necessary for any functioning society. Any given person simply does not have the time or expertise to reason about everything they encounter from first principles. Black boxes are proxies to scale trust. When you don't understand the mechanism or what is really going on, you outsource how to think and feel to various instantiations of black boxes.

Religion, institutions, and AI have been the primary instantiations of different types of black boxes. In many cases, the mechanisms of the black boxes are difficult to understand even for the small in-group elites themselves, as they may consist of too many moving pieces or be too technically difficult. Often, the black boxes resemble the complexity and evolution of a living, breathing organism.

Religion

Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin) describes religion as an organization or movement which tells people how to think.

Every major religion has a storied history of being written by or for divine figures. These divine figures represent a small set of in-group elites who tell a story about the world.

Religion has been passed down through people. People from diverse backgrounds and life experiences enter religion (often through a church) and come out shaped into what all major religions aim to produce: productive stewards of their communities.

Institutions