These are ever changing! I will try to keep them as updated as possible.

Meta-philosophy

Values are defined and refined by real life actions!!

Life

It's instrumentally useful to believe that brains are antennae for consciousness.

Self-confidence comes from trusting yourself to follow through with hard things you say you will do. You can do this through having hard conversations or pursuing challenging work, but there are also other ways to microdose this feeling! Working out is definitely one.

Having too little agency sucks, but having too much agency without certainty about how to direct it is worse.

Accumulating knowledge is like accumulating debt. You have to do things with it to pay it off or it builds up like toxin in your body.

Paying attention reveals and reinforces what you actually love. Hating counts as a form of attention.

People

Betting against human ingenuity is often a losing game, but we ARE bad at estimating time scales.

All interactions becomes much more enriching when assuming positive intent and that the other person has something to teach you.

Altruism comes from context. This means we don't have to worry too much about people initially doing good things for the "wrong reasons" because that's just about how everyone comes to genuinely care more.

Work

People should be compensated for their work. If you can't pay someone, give them equity, grant money, or the best recommendation letter of their life.

A lot of the most interesting new ideas come at the intersection of 3 things! We do ourselves a disservice when we don't applaud people for trying (and possibly failing) at new things

Technology

Technology really exists for 2 reasons:

• Face to face - The point of technology is to enable yourself, and other ppl to show up more fully with the people they love (Eg. Quality of life improvements to not worry about material needs)
• Shoulder to shoulder - The point of technology is to enable you to have better experiences with people (Eg. Shared awe at beautiful megastructures)

All software, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from a dating app

Generally, the goal of good software is to get the user off of it. Hinge, in its sliver of application, got this right. It should complete the task at hand to free up time/energy/resources for the user.

Along this thread, subscribing to the purpose of technology as intelligence augmentation, rather than a replacement mechanism, for jobs, social interaction, education etc. The physical world has tacit knowledge and patterns that are useful to engage with, but we may not be able to understand.

Climate

The alarmism in early 2000s and early 2010s activism served its purpose in getting climate change to the surface of public attention. Now, we need a different mode of climate story-tellling that is much more pragmatic, focused on co-benefits, and politically neutral.

Urbanism

Bike highways are super cool (extremely original thought)

Plants and vertical wooden panels are aesthetically gorgeous ways to reduce echo in a space.

Education

The only thing that is certain is that things will be changing faster, and individuals will have, what used to be, the capabilities of whole firms. The purpose of the "school of the future"

1. Setting/showcasing a standard of excellence to aspire to. This requires integration into a variety of age ranges and occupations
2. Provides social support systems as students figure stuff out

Community

Communities need to be organized and cultivated by the people within it. At Socratica, we call this the "host mindset": all participants are hosts and all hosts are just participants.

A successful community is not necessarily one that lasts forever. It should inspire forks and downstream developments.