Alex Komoroske: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I love your caveat at the beginning that continues to resonate in my head as you say this. You're not cynical about, "This sucks." It's more, "Here's what I'm observing. We need to think about ways to get around this." Yeah. Because I think so much pain and misery is caused by us being not acknowledging these fundamental, inescapable things. It's almost impossible. Entropy is one of those things. Entropy emerges because there's more ways to go away from a point than towards a point. It fundamentally must be true in really any universe you can possibly imagine. And so if you're going to fight entropy, you're going to lose at a certain point. It's like if you are aware of these things, you can find subsets of ideas that do work despite these challenges. And that's some of the stuff, the tactics I advise are often things that look playful. They look unserious. They look like, "Oh, you're saying you don't know the answer? " No, I'm admitting I don't know the answer. And I'm saying it doesn't matter if I don't know the answer because this thing, this very small seed I am planting is so cheap that yes, I can't tell you for sure this will work, but I could tell you there is a chance that it'll work. And the downside of this is basically the opportunity cost of planting the seed in this one moment, and the person who's planting it enjoys planting it so that an opportunity cost really isn't that much because they get energy from doing it. So who cares? Plant a bunch of these suckers. If one of these grows into an oak tree, that's great. Don't try to analyze beforehand which seed is going to turn into an oak tree. If it's super simple to plant the seeds, then plant the seeds. And if it starts growing, then keep watering it. That's it. That's the thing. And people sometimes will see this as like, I've been called in my list before because they said, "Well, you're saying that you don't know the answer to the thing." It's like no, I'm saying I don't have to know the answer to the thing. If on a systemic basis I let these ideas and then you respond to the ones that are working that are viable, it doesn't really matter if you didn't know ahead of time which ones were going to work. It's a great segue to talking about this core idea that again informs a lot of the way you think, which is this idea of building versus gardening, the magic of acorns. Talk about this general idea and then I want to follow some threads.…

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