Quote - 多读书
- 信念来源：(依赖信念)不是我的思考方式。对我而言只是——做成这件事是重要的，我们就应该一直去做，至死方休。我不需借助于信念的力量，也不会考虑乐观或悲观主义，无论如何，这一切需要有人完成。
- 思维工具：物理是万物的运行法则，此外的一切规则(包括法律)都只算是建议。我看到过很人多违反法律，却从未见过有人能打破物理定律。所谓第一性原理就是将事情拆解至最基本的原则，那些我们在底层所相信的东西，比如物理中的能量动量守恒，以此作为逻辑的出发点进行推理，检验我们对事物整体的认知和结论。
另一个工具是极限思维，将问题对象推向极限，使其中关键更为清晰，确定核心瓶颈和优化目标。以工业制造为例，通过对规模化量产成本的评估可确定成本瓶颈是在于产品设计还是规模效应。这点对于火箭制造尤为重要，很多人会将其昂贵的成本归于生产规模，但真正的关键在于实现完全的重复利用。又比如可以跳出现实限制，想象理想中的产品形态，在原子排列层面上最优选择是什么，为了实现这种排列又需要哪些工具或材料，现实中人们更倾向于沿用现有工具方法去思考最终产品形态。 - 大过滤器：在机会之窗开启时，最明智的选择就是尽快行动
- 关于货币：钱只是一种数据，而人们往往会认为金钱本身就有力量，其实这是错误的，金钱本身并没有力量。在思考过程中加入物理学的观点是非常重要的，如果你是一个亿万富翁，却被困在一个热带岛屿上，那么你的钱实际上并没有价值。因为孤岛上没有资源分配，钱则是资源分配的数据库。除了你自己，岛上没有任何资源可以分配，所以钱是无用的。所以我们可以把货币看作是一个跨时空的资源分配数据库，这个数据库或数据系统应该以什么形式出现，才能发挥最大效果呢？ 目前比特币存在一个根本性的问题——交易量非常有限，交易确认延迟过长。从这个问题的角度来看，比特币并不是一种理想的加密货币，我不否认它本身存在一定作用，比特币可能有助于解决货币数据库问题的一个方面——即财富的储存或相对义务的核算——但它作为一种日常货币没有用处。虽然狗狗币是因一个玩笑而诞生的，但我仍然认为它有很多优点。它的交易量比比特币高很多，现在如果你想做一笔比特币交易，那么这笔交易的价格非常高。比特币诞生在2008年，当时的互联网还没有现在这么先进，当时比特币的交易可能能与当时的网速同步。但现在是2021年，再过10年，这个（交易）速度会低的离谱。而且我认为货币的数量应该呈线性增长，如果一种货币过于紧缩，会随着时间推移而升值，那么人们就不愿意把这种货币花掉。
- 教育建议：我鼓励人们去大量读书，尽可能多的吸收各种知识，扩展眼界。至少对人类认知的整体全貌有一个大致的了解，去尝试接触各种事物，从而确定自己真正的兴趣所在。广泛的探索，和不同背景、不同行业、不同专业、不同技能的人交流，去尝试、去学习。我很小时候就通读了百科全书，这(对我的成长)很重要，所以去读百科全书，哪怕只是粗略的浏览。
另外，要避免零和思维，或者说要有发展的眼光，努力去做大蛋糕而不是一心内卷。我见过不少非常聪明的人会采取不道德的行事方式，通常就是因为他们在底层抱有零和心态，甚至自己都未能清醒意识到这点。对零和思维的人而言，蛋糕的大小是固定的，想要获得更多就要从别人那抢夺，而事实是蛋糕在随时间不断增长。更理性的做法是去努力做大蛋糕，考虑如何创造更多的价值，而不要费心内耗。
16:16 Source of belief
That’s really not how I think about things. I mean, for me, it’s simply this is something that is important to get done and we should just keep doing it or die trying, and I don’t need a source of strength. I don’t care about optimism or pessimism. Fuck that, we’re gonna get it done.
17:51 Tools for thinking 第一性原理 + 极限思维
Physics is the law and everything else is a recommendation. I’ve met a lot of people that can break the law, but I have never met anyone who could break physics. So first for any kind of technology problem you have to sort of just make sure you’re not violating physics.
First principles analysis, I think, is something that can be applied to really any walk of life, anything really. It’s really just saying, let’s boil something down to the most fundamental principles, the things that we are most confident are true at a foundational level, and that sets your axiomatic base, and then you reason up from there. And then you cross check your conclusion against the axiomatic truth. Some basics in physics would be like are violating conservation of energy or momentum or something like that, then it’s not gonna work.
And then another good physics tool is thinking about things in the limit. If you take a particular thing and you scale it to a very large number or to a very small number, how do things change?
29:38 Act quickly 在机会之窗开启时，最明智的选择是尽快行动
In order to pass a very important, great filter. I think we need to be a multi-planet species. It is wise for us to act quickly while the window (of opportunity) is open. Just in case it closes.
48:22 Smart contracts 我看不懂
I never, I didn’t quite understand this whole smart contract thing. I’m too downtown to understand smart contracts. I mean, my general approach to any kind of deal or whatever is just make sure there’s clarity of understanding. That’s the most important thing. And just keep any kind of deal very short and simple, plain language, and just make sure everyone understands – this is the deal, does everyone, is it clear? And what are the consequences if first things don’t happen? – but usually deals are, business deals or whatever are way too long and complex and overly lawyered and pointlessly.
53:58 Money
Like I said, just think in theory of money as information, people often will think of money as having power in and of itself. It does not. Money is information, and it does not have power in and of itself. Applying the physics tools of thinking about things in the limit is helpful. If you are stranded on a tropical island and you have a trillion dollars, it’s useless. Cause there’s no resource allocation. Money is a database of resource allocation, but there’s no resources to allocate except yourself. So money’s useless. If you’re stranded on a desert island with no food, all the Bitcoin in the world will not stop you from starving.
Just think of money as a database for resource allocation across time and space. And then what system, in what form should that
database, or data system, what would be most effective? There is a fundamental issue with, say Bitcoin, in its current form in that it’s, the transaction volume is very limited. And the latency for a properly confirmed transaction is too long, much longer than you’d like. It’s actually not great from transaction volume standpoint or latency standpoint. So it is perhaps useful as, to solve an aspect of the money database problem, which is the sort of store of wealth or an accounting of relative obligations, I suppose. But it is not useful as a currency, as a day-to-day currency.
Let’s say like you’re operating an economy, and you need to have some thing that allows for the efficient, to have efficient value ratios between products and services. So you’ve got this massive number of products and services, and need to, you can’t just barter. Cause that would be extremely unwieldy. So you need something that gives you a ratio of exchange between goods and services. And then, something that allows you to shift obligations across time, like debt, debt and equity shift obligations across time. Then what does the best job of that?
Part of the reason why I think there’s some merit to Dogecoin, even though, it was obviously created as a joke, is that it actually does have a much higher transaction volume capability than Bitcoin. The costs of doing a transaction, the Dogecoin fee is very low. Like right now, if you wanna do a Bitcoin transaction, the price of doing that transaction is very high, so you could not use it effectively for most things. And nor could it even scale to a high volume. And when Bitcoin was started, I guess around 2008 or something like that, the internet connections were much worse than they are today, like order of magnitude. I mean, they were way, way worse in 2008. So like having a small block size or whatever it is, and a long synchronization time made sense in 2008, but, 2021, or fast forward 10 years, it’s like, comically low.
And I think there’s some value to having a linear increase in the amount of currency that is generated. So, because some amount of the currency, if a currency is too deflationary or like, or should say if, if a currency is expected to increase in value over time, there’s reluctance to spend it. Cause you’re like, “Oh, if I, I’ll just hold it and not spend it because its scarcity is increasing with time, so if I spend it now, then I will regret spending it. So I will just, you know, hoard all it.” But if there’s some dilution of the currency occurring over time, that’s more of an incentive to use that as a currency. So Dogecoin just somewhat randomly has just a fixed a number of sort of coins or hash strings that are generated every year. So there’s some inflation, but it’s not a percentage at base. It’s a fixed number, so the percentage of inflation will necessarily decline over time. I’m not saying that it’s like the ideal system for a currency, but I think it actually is just fundamentally better than anything else I’ve seen, just by accident.
01:53:56 History 漫长历史中，大多数人都在为温饱挣扎，摆脱饥饿只是近代而已
Yeah, I mean, life was really tough for most of history. I mean, probably for most of human history, a good year would be one where not that many people in your village died of the plague, starvation, freezing to death, or being killed by a neighboring village. It’s like, “Well, it wasn’t that bad, you know, we lost 5% this year. It was a good year.” That would be par for the course. Just not starving to death would have been the primary goal of most people throughout history. Just making sure we’ll have enough food to last through the winter and not get, freeze or whatever. Now food is plentiful. We have an obesity problem.
01:58:02 National Competition 政府行动迟缓，适度的良性竞争有助于保持政府活力
Governments are slow and the only thing slower than one government is a collection of governments.
2:18:20 Advice to young 做一个有用的人，一个对社会的回馈大于消耗的人
Try to be useful, contributing more than you consume, try to have a positive net contribution to society. If you’re living a useful life, that is a good life, a life worth having lived.
2:19:50 Recommendation for education
I encourage people to read a lot of books, just read, basically try to ingest as much information as you can, and try to also just develop a good general knowledge. So you at least have a rough lay of the land of the knowledge landscape, try to learn a little about a lot of things. Cause you might not know what you’re really interested. How would you know what you’re really interested in if you at least aren’t like doing it? Peripheral exploration broadly of the knowledge landscape. And talk to people from different walks of life and different industries, and professions, and skills, and occupations, like just try. Learn as much as possible. Man search for meaning….. One important thing was as a kid I read through the encyclopedia. That was pretty helpful. And, there was all sorts of things I didn’t even know existed, well lots, obviously. Maybe read through like the condensed version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, I’d recommend that. You can always like skip subjects, so you read a few paragraphs and you know you’re not interested, just jump to the next one. So, read the encyclopedia, or skim through it.
I put a lotta stock and certainly have a lot of respect for someone who puts in an honest day’s work to do useful things. And just generally to have a, not a zero sum mindset, or have more of a grow the pie mindset. When I see people like, perhaps, including some very smart people, kind of taking an attitude of, I like doing things that seem like morally questionable. It’s often because they have, at a base sort of axiomatic level, a zero sum mindset. And they, without realizing it, they don’t realize to have a zero sum mindset, or at least they don’t realize it consciously. And so, if you have a zero sum mindset, then the only way to get ahead is by taking things from others. If the pie is fixed, then the only way to have more pie is to take someone else’s pie. But this is false. Obviously the pie has grown dramatically over time, the economic pie. In reality, you can have, overuse this analogy, we can have a lot of, there’s a lot of pie. My pie is not fixed. So, you really wanna make sure you’re not operating, without realizing it, from a zero sum mindset. Where the only way to get ahead is to take things from others, then that’s gonna result in you trying to take things from others, which is not good. It’s much better to work on adding to the economic pie. Like I said, creating more than you consume. Doing more than you, yeah. So that’s a big deal. I think there’s a fair number of people in finance that do have a bit of a zero-sum mindset.