The days are long but the decades are short (2015)
blog.samaltman.com
blog.samaltman.com
I can only speak from my own perspective, but the irony is that the people I tend to be deeply impressed by don't tend to follow this sort of mechanistic or "optimized wisdom" approach to life. They tend to be more chaotic, less rational (sometimes dangerously so), often dickish but always displaying a vision of life that is deeply felt and never sterile. It may sound paradoxical and counter-intuitive, but you could follow all of the advice from the post and still lead an uninspired existence that doesn't amount to much in the end. Some other posters here mentioned how the list felt like an accusation, but I would say in my case that I felt a rush of melancholy from its superposition of being both solid actionable advice but also deeply wrong in ways I can't fully express.
A person like the author does impress me, as they probably are living up to whatever potential they were granted. I envy their wealth, freedom to work on interesting things, and the fact that they worked towards something and achieved it. But I don't get that sense of unstoppable awe and desire that I get with people like Hemingway, Napoleon, or even those few anonymous, adventurous and idiosyncratic souls you once met that you still think about from time to time. You probably have an example of the latter in your own life that instantly came to mind when reading this, or perhaps you can extrapolate a description of them through the knowledge of the world you've garnered so far.
Here’s what I wonder: is it possible to admire such people while simultaneously acknowledging they live a semi-tortured existence that may not be worth emulating?
I think the author was shooting for equanimity which may be somewhat different than how those types would be described
It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits -- like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere, or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits -- involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding -- inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, or a Roosevelt can feel himself to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, or a Blake.
Understanding is forever unattainable. Therein lies the inevitability of failure in embarking upon its quest, which is none the less the only one worthy of serious attention.
--Malcom Muggeridge
Even if a person were to attain an understanding of life (which I agree is unattainable), they would still be faced with the impermanence of it and the fact that some actions are so intense and deeply felt as to need no further justification for their undertaking. Life still has to be lived after you come to conclusions about it. Or rather, the full expression of life as far as we can understand it isn't only to be found in contemplation but also in action, creation, and simple serendipity whether thoughtless or thoughtful.
A bit like that joke where a person picks wisdom instead of a million dollars as a wish, then concludes that they should have picked the money. I mean this in a metaphorical sense, of course.
Here's a chain of logic I'm pondering:
1. Few things cut as deeply and personally as failure, especially failure where the stakes are high.
2. That implies that our failures are our most meaningful, individual experiences.
3. Which in turn implies that a life with a minimum of failure is a life with little meaning or individuality to it.
4. Does that therefore mean that those who have failed the most, who have the greatest ratio of failure to success, are the ones who are living life most vividly? How should I balance that against the obvious reality that failing sucks?
In other words, if your goal is to live a unique life, the Anna Karenina principle [1] implies that you should aim for unhappiness.
this is, again, how we get unintended (and unwanted) consequences in so many aspects of our lives (partisanship is another good example).
Sure, I didn't necessarily claim that my list was literally true. Just a thought exercise.
> you should aim to have interesting experiences and thoughts.
I think is as prone to Goodhart's Law as my suggestion to aim for unhappiness. If you try to deliberately aim for interesting experiences and avoid uninteresting ones, you'll need to gather some data first. So you ask around and see what experiences other people find interesting. But, of course, what could be more uninteresting than doing what everyone else thinks is interesting?
so why define your happiness primarily on what others think? a false premise, at the very least (but one many of us do seem to fall for from time to time). as @Bakary originally suggested, interesting lives don't seem to be led so deliberately.
Following from that first principle you rationally conclude you should kill yourself today.
Which points to a useful insight — when the real world does not agree with logic, examine your first principles.
It also has to be said that modern life isn't particularly conducive to inspired existences. At dark times in my life I've felt the exact same as you: the idea that there is some spark missing that disqualifies us from being human. But looking at it more dispassionately (pun not intended), it's clear that this is neither a helpful nor particularly correct way of framing the problem. On one hand, much of life is random, and on the other the value of small things and a contemplative life is often disparaged without reason.
I can recommend the essay The Concept of Experience by Mark Grief as it helped me a lot on this specific point.
The 2000s felt long too: High School through college to my first job.
The 2010s was over super quick. I worked full time, changed jobs twice, and got married. Hurricane Sandy in 2012 still feels like yesterday.
I can imagine the 2020s will feel even shorter. And now we know why all of our relatives always said "Wow you got so big!" every time they saw us.
Even though I think "Wear sunscreen" is not a great advice.
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/chi-schmich-sunscreen...
Why not?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation...
Let's think of being exposed to the sun as a continuum with different risks:
1. The best you can do is sun bathe every single day, all year round, avoiding mid-day hours in summer. Think "a gardener who loves being shirt-less". This scenario is related to more non-melanoma skin cancer (survival rate >99%), but both a lower incidence of melanoma, and a higher survival rate for melanoma.
2. The worst you can do is never sun bathe except for occasional heavy exposures. Think a week in the beach during summer vacation, and the rest of the year completely indoors. This scenario is related to more frequent melanoma, and a lower survival rate for it.
Sunscreen is great for #2 (people who can't or just won't be exposed often). But it's both unnecessary and undesired (since it limits the bening effects) in #1. And it also limits Vitamin D absorption.
So a better advice would be "be exposed to the sun often, every day if you can, and don't wear sunscreen when you do it".
Unless, of course, you have any degree of vanity.
Yes. And when you wake up every 10 years and go "dang, that was not the right thing to do", you realize that, even if you were successful, you are now unhappy. This one statement "pick the right thing to do" is what mankind has struggled with for 1000s of years. I have had a number of jobs, all of my previous employers would tell you I am great, work hard, have exemplary output, but you know what, every 5 years or so, I wake up and go "wait a second, this is not what I want to do. This is not right".
Not to bash the author, but "ok kids, be sure you are right, then go for it" is great... if only any of us knew what was right.
But when he goes to something like Bohemian Grove and has conversations to share insights and advice with the small transnational group that essentially rules the global political and financial system, do they also sound like this?
I don't have any first hand knowledge whatsoever but my gut feeling says the answer is likely no.
You can still relate to other people, but the fact that you could solve most of their problems on an individual basis with an instant donation that would take you all of thirty seconds creates a gulf that can't be reached over.
You can do a variety of activities, but these probably feel much less interesting than doing things that have an influence over a very large number of people. If you are, say, a CEO of a successful company that CEO role will be the only source of a certain type of feeling that can't be achieved elsewhere.
I'm certain you are right: within their technocratic circles, they probably make far less wholesome and family-friendly pronouncements about life. But it's not fundamentally contradictory, just like a person can be crippled by an addiction that turns them into a monster on a regular basis while remaining normal, wise and approachable the remainder of the time.
Parent of a three year old and an infant. I cannot tell you how fast those three years have gone by relative to any other time period in my life. It is scaring me shitless if I'm being honest.
I brought this up to my dad who laughed and was like, "How do you think I feel staring at my 30somethings son who now has his own kids?"
When I remember to pause, slow down, and enjoy the littlest of moments I find I'm the happiest. Simple, but difficult to remember. Enjoy the long day as much as possible.
This is one of the things that sounds cool on paper, and make people feel inspired, but doesn't really work like that in real world.
Being extremely good in something requires a resource (time, attention...) expenditure that easily eats the rest of life (unless you're one of the few geniuses who can afford a balanced life). In practice, if one aims really high, they will need to take a conscious decision to sacrifice a significant part of their life. This is in conflict with the "live a balanced life" message underlying many of the points of the article.
This subject is in my opinion explored with much more depth (and honesty) by Carmack in his graduation speech. [I] Advocate long, hard work [...] embrace the grind :)
It's a bit odd to hear, as it goes against conventional modern wisdom ("you hear a lot about work life-balance, work smarter not harder, and that's all fine, but there's is a quality to obsession, that is really hard to match"), but it's understandable from a position to somebody who's really trying to be "aiming to be the best in the world".
Here's a trend I see repeating itself. People in their 20s and 30s tend to say things like: "work on what you love."
But if you ask people in their 40s, 50s, even beyond, the advice is: "Learn to love what you do, no matter what it is."
So yes, "learn to love what you do" is much, much better advice.
I've watched people (younger than I am) struggle with being in jobs they didn't love, as if they were failing. The jobs may have been failing them, but they weren't failing the jobs.
If you're lucky--as I am, as Sam Altman is--then you can do what you love. Otherwise, you have to do what pays the bills and leaves you enough free time to pursue what you love.
I strongly disagree, but only on a technicality or matter of perception of what freedom means.
To me, money has nothing to do with true freedom. Money in and of itself is a prison, like any external currency, and something I have influence over but virtually no control.
Today I have money. Tomorrow, my currency could become worthless or my home could burn down by no fault of my own. I could lose my job, and what money seems available for me to enjoy myself with will become essential for supporting myself in an uncertain future.
There are other interesting facets of this, like - how many people do you know who have much more money than you, but still want more? How hard do they work for it, or how often do they think about it? Are we ever free from wanting more of this kind of freedom?
Certainly if we find a good balance and we have the fortune of earning enough money to have disposable income, it can be freeing in a sense. But it's dangerous to conflate wealth with freedom in general. It requires a lot of good sense and responsibility to use wealth wisely, I think.
I don't mean to be nit-picky or overly critical when the intent of communication was fairly clear. I'm sure Sam knows better than to equate money and freedom directly. I only think it's dangerous to use language like this in a culture like the one I live in, where people want more money so badly in order to be free, but it never affords them anything you'd recognize as freedom.
> 19) Go out of your way to help people. Few things in life are as satisfying. Be nice to strangers. Be nice even when it doesn’t matter.
27) Forgive people.
28) Don’t chase status. Status without substance doesn’t work for long and is unfulfilling.
31) Be grateful and keep problems in perspective. Don’t complain too much. Don’t hate other people’s success
35) Don’t judge other people too quickly. You never know their whole story and why they did or didn’t do something. Be empathetic.
I love this advice!
It's true that wealth can become a trap but it all depends on your inherent personality. Many would have no problem forgetting about the grind and be content using their newfound wealth to do what they want in their own zone. It just so happens that a propensity to be content is probably negatively correlated with amassing large sums so you hear about those people less often despite their great numbers. So I'd say that yes, a significant but not absurd amount of money can already go a really long way towards letting a person be free in a sense we'd all recognize.
I grew up quite poor, and it took me a lot of years earning more money than I needed to realize the dysfunction that was occurring. I'm weary of it now, but having written that, I'm realizing that most people here and reading this article are likely well aware of this and the dissection of Sam's words is unnecessary.
I don't mean to say everyone should feel this way, but I think it's important to recognize the limitations of wealth within the extents of what freedom can mean.
As I mentioned in another comment though, I'm realizing my comment was totally unnecessary here. I'll leave it, but in retrospect, it mostly served as a reminder to myself and probably belongs in a journal, not on Hacker News.
+
14) Summers are the best.
= It's always Summer Somewhere.
In spring every bit of green is celebrated by the winter survivors, but if you just came in from the other hemisphere it just feels empty.
I find this one to be interesting. We typically take such things as little more than obvious platitudes, but if you think about it from a psychology/neuroscience perspective, it's actually very interesting. Like, why can't the mind manifest such states as easily when it is older? What are the actual (as opposed to the "just so"[1] theories) underlying causes, and can they be circumvented?
"13) Keep your personal burn rate low. This alone will give you a lot of opportunities in life."
Does this mean that you should avoid making enemies?
It felt like an impersonal scolding from a person I do not even know, a list of bullet points where you failed, or at least didn't do well enough.
I know what I'm about to write might sound like I'm trolling but hear me out because it comes from a genuine place ...
His essays typically come across as "if you personally are not BUILDING something massive, you're wasting your time" ... though it's ironic since he himself doesn't build anything at all.
Instead, he spends his day looking for wagers to bet using other peoples money in hopes he'll produce a positive return (and keep some of the proceeds). Much like going to a casino with someone elses money.
Using his own definition of how people should spend their time, I don't understand how his own activities fall into that category.
I have one big problem with Altman which sullies my otherwise incredibly high opinion of him: he explicitly denies the orthogonality thesis and has created a culture at OpenAI that, to analogize scaling modals with nuclear energy, feels like one that knows something cool will happen when you collide large enough enriched uranium lumps together at high speed, but does not believe nuclear explosions are possible.
How he can deny the is/ought distinction when his own organization published Faulty Reward Functions in the Wild is beyond me.
And now many of those most concerned with safety, such as Paul Christiano, appear to be leaving OpenAI.
To accuse him of being incapable of building and scaling is incredibly obtuse. How much did YCombinator grow under his stewardship? I am more worried that he is too good at that.
GP says that Altman explicitly denies this theory and fosters a culture that might end up creating dangerous AI. Implied here is that there is a risk this might cause a truly catastrophic accident.
The parts about "safety" refers to acknowledging this danger and attempting to mitigate it.
I don't know enough about Altman or OpenAI to make any judgements on their approach, but that's a brief explanation.
I am not sure what the proper technique to get someone already entrenched in their perspective to broaden their possibility distribution is, though. Do you have any tips on that, as someone that appears to be engaged in the space and appears to advocate similarly?
The fact that he has an economic interest in doing so is very uninteresting -- everyone has an economic interest in their job. And when you're wealthy, the potential returns tend to be higher as well. I wouldn't confuse the fact that he stands to earn a lot of money from good bets with the fact that he's spending his time making bets that he thinks are impactful.
Alternatively, your view could be stated as "only operators BUILD things, and capital does not." That's a fine perspective, but it seems like it comes down to semantics. You need both capital and operators working in concert to make things come to reality and fruition. Imo, that's a close enough proxy to "BUILDING" but, again, semantics..
Just curious, do you consider bankers part of that equation. Because for either bootstrapped business or years ago prior to VC existed, bankers are the only channel of capital.
That doesn't have to come from a bank or a VC, but it can.
So the capital allocators who allocate to successful projects are a necessary component of the equation.
They may not "deserve" "most" of the credit, but you still need them around. So to loop back to your point -- if people like Sam have convictions about what to fund / how to choose, they can be a useful (even integral) part of BUILDING things.
Just because he's not an operator in the equation, doesn't mean that his exhortation is hypocritical. IMO
edit typos
The first is that, in the most literal sense, maybe 99.9% of the work/insight/decisions of such a capital allocator are going to be utterly useless since the creation of value will come from those rare investments that balloon out of proportion. I might be paraphrasing here as I recall a high-profile VC mentioning this exact concept. Maybe it was Altman himself?
The second is that even in an optimal case, it's up for debate how exceptional capital allocators are. If 99.9% of their qualities amount to nothing, are they really useful or actually gambling middlemen that could be excised from the process? We could imagine for the sake of argument that they do in fact contribute quite a bit and generate the insight necessary for that fateful 0.01% to happen (in similar fashion to the apocryphal tale of the specialist charging $1 for the hammer and $9,999 for having learned where to smash it), but it's unclear that a moderately energetic and highly but not superbly intelligent individual couldn't also do the same if given the opportunity to do so.
Even then, following the most charitable interpretation of the work of an allocator, is it efficient to give them the lion's share of the profits compared to those who do the actual work? I can't say I have the answers to these questions, nor am I advocating for an immediate Marxist revolution, but I am generally skeptical of the culture fostered in the tech world around this topic.
Steps to being a VC:
1. Have lots of money
2. Establish procedures that filter out the obvious losers, increasing odds of success from 1 in a million to maybe 1 in a thousand.
3. Leverage said money and procedures such that you statistically make money on that 1 in a thousand.
It's the same way someone with infinite money can keep going back to the Casino until they hit the jackpot (assuming no house limits, this is why house limits exist actually), or buy up all the lottery tickets until they find the winning ticket.
So anyone who privately funds businesses out of their own pocket is gambling, but they can't be removed because where else is the funding going to come from? Maybe you can crowd source if you have really good marketing and a popular idea. Beyond that nothing really exists on the scale of what VCs offer. If you hypothetically created a government office with a large enough budget to replicate the various VCs, perhaps it would be slightly more fair in terms of who gets access, but it would just be bureaucrats doing the gambling with taxpayer dollars instead of private entities out of their own budget, which wouldn't necessarily be any better if you look at the current state of government contracting/grants.
So sadly, their money and willingness to gamble is largely their use and why they're entitled to profits. The system isn't fair and it rewards the lucky more than the deserving, but without said system a lot of cool, revolutionary stuff would never have happened.
Even SpaceX and Tesla are indirect effects of the success of Paypal, which was initially funded by Peter Thiel.
As much as VCs would love to convince you they are oracles, the "Pros" often fare hardly better than chimps throwing darts at a board to pick investments.
I'd rather have the latter kind.
1.) Make you uncomfortable staying at your current cushy FAANG company (or any "cushy" tech job) by encouraging you to work on the weekends with your friends to write a business plan
2.) Convince all of you to leave your comfort zone and quit your day jobs
3.) Apply to accelerators like YCombinator for additional runway and advice from people who have done it
4.) YCombinator can then potentially fund your idea
And to be honest it is a win for society to create some discomfort among tech employees to dislodge them and turn them into potential founders as there is probably a significant amount of underutilized tech talent within "cushy" tech companies [1]. So its a triple win if it works out (tech employee who becomes a founder wins, YC wins, society wins).
[1] There's probably some aspect of this Google strategy that goes on at lower levels of many tech companies.
https://venturebeat.com/2015/05/09/google-has-a-secret-bench...
As for this essay, a lot of the points resonated with me, so I liked it. I have no clue who Sam Altman is, and I don't think it really matters.
/s