Nat Friedman --- Nat Friedman
Some things about me:
- Grew up in Charlottesville, VA
- On the Internet since 1991, which is my actual "home town"
- Went to MIT because I loved the Richard Feynman autobiographies
- CEO of GitHub from 2018 through 2021
- Live in California
- Working on reading the Herculaneum Papyri
- Tested 300 Bay Area foods for plastic chemicals
Some things I believe:
- As human beings it is our right (maybe our moral duty) to reshape the universe to our preferences
- Technology, which is really knowledge, enables this
- You should probably work on raising the ceiling, not the floor
- Enthusiasm matters!
- It's much easier to work on things that are exciting to you
- It might be easier to do big things than small things for this reason
- Energy is a necessary input for progress
- It's important to do things fast
- You learn more per unit time because you make contact with reality more frequently
- Going fast makes you focus on what's important; there's no time for bullshit
- "Slow is fake"
- A week is 2% of the year
- Time is the denominator
- The efficient market hypothesis is a lie
- At best it is a very lossy heuristic
- The best things in life occur where EMH is wrong
- In many cases it's more accurate to model the world as 500 people than 8 billion
- "Most people are other people"
- We know less than we think
- The replication crisis is not an aberration
- Many of the things we believe are wrong
- We are often not even asking the right questions
- The cultural prohibition on micromanagement is harmful
- Great individuals should be fully empowered to exercise their judgment
- The goal is not to avoid mistakes; the goal is to achieve uncorrelated levels of excellence in some dimension
- The downsides are worth it
- Smaller teams are better
- Faster decisions, fewer meetings, more fun
- No need to chop up work for political reasons
- No room for mediocre people (can pay more, too!)
- Large-scale engineering projects are more soluble in IQ than they appear
- Many tech companies are 2-10x overstaffed
- Where do you get your dopamine?
- The answer is predictive of your behavior
- Better to get your dopamine from improving your ideas than from having them validated
- It's ok to get yours from "making things happen"
- You can do more than you think
- We are tied down by invisible orthodoxy
- The laws of physics are the only limit