LH
8.9K posts
@lrhaughton
New York Times bestselling writer. A ‘rebellious’ dreamer and ‘borderline’ maniac.
@YanagizawaD #DanielKahneman, Nobel in behavioral econ/sci, would argue that AIs, properly trained and instructed, would provide a fairer evaluation b/c they'd avoid the many biases that humans consistently show when making judgements in complex situations. The book Noise explores this:
Just two humans having a perfectly natural conversation.
Americans want magic pills to get healthier when they are sleeping like shit, eating garbage, and not lifting a single weight. That's a hot take from the guy who tweets about Chili's twice a day.
Eight moats of a sustainable company in 2026: @gokulr 1. Data (Google) 2. Workflow (Veeva) 3. Regulatory (Coinbase) 4. Distribution (Intuit) 5. Ecosystem (Shopify) 6. Network (Facebook) 7. Physical infrastructure (Amazon) 8. Scale (NVIDIA) What is the most important for you @honam @rabois @shaunmmaguire @JaredSleeper @karimatiyeh?
Professional basketball players are tall. That doesn't mean playing basketball will make you taller. It means that you will be more successful at playing basketball if you are tall. And great achievers don't ask questions like "who am I?" or "what is my purpose?", not because they don't need or don't care about the answers, but because they already have those answers. Whether they got those answers from a whole lot of navel-gazing, or whether the questions were easy for them really doesn't matter much. Mindlessly aping randomly selected traits of high achievers, when you don't know which traits are causal, which are controllable, and which are both, is not a path to great achievement. It's a path to a cargo cult, where you are waving two flags around in front of a radar dish made of sticks, waiting for John Frumm to land the magic plane. Even great achievers themselves usually don't know what it is about them that made them successful, much less whether and how these traits can be imitated by others. They are as much in the dark as the rest of us, except that their success and celebrity status can sometimes imbue them with a false sense of certainty over whatever notion they have. Unusual achievements are, by definition, unusual. If we knew how to systematically duplicate them, do this, don't do that, they would not be unusual. They would be the baseline. Sure, it pretty much has to be possible to investigate and learn how humans can be more productive, successful, accomplished. But interviewing a bunch of accomplished people is not a very fruitful way to get there. You don't know which things they say are important, and neither do they. If you want to learn something, run an experiment.
It is 100% true that great men and women of the past were not sitting around moaning about their feelings. I regret nothing.
Great men of history had little to no introspection. The personality that builds empires is not the same personality that sits around quietly questioning itself. @pmarca and I discuss what we both noticed but no one talks about: David: You don't have any levels of introspection? Marc: Yes, zero. As little as possible. David: Why? Marc: Move forward. Go! I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's a real problem and it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home. David: So I've read 400 biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs and someone asked me what the most surprising thing I’ve learned from this was [and I answered] they have little or zero introspection. Sam Walton didn't wake up thinking about his internal self. He just woke up and was like: I like building Walmart. I'm going to keep building Walmart. I'm going to make more Walmarts. And he just kept doing it over and over again. Marc: If you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective. All of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy, and all the things that kind of result from that are, a kind of a manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s. Great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff. The individual runs and does all these things and builds things and builds empires and builds companies and builds technology. And then this kind of this kind of guilt based whammy kind of showed up from Europe. A lot of it from Vienna in 1910, 1920s, Freud and all that entire movement. And kind of turned all that inward and basically said, okay, now we need to basically second guess the individual. We need to criticize the individual. The individual needs to self criticize. The individual needs to feel guilt, needs to look backwards, needs to dwell in the past. It never resonated with me.
