What You Can Expect: Introspecting a Contrarian's Life
Find an edge and beat the doxa.
Often, I feel something widely believed is not well understood, if not totally wrong.
Typically, in fields I’m interested in such as software, learning fast, civilization building, the notion of truth & reality, self-awareness, AI, quantum physics.
And the very topic of thinking against the consensus itself. Which I guess is both an art and a science.
Seizing the opportunity and seeing it materialize requires some discipline, humility, and thinking about what you’re doing.
Let’s start.
Most CEOs are pain-in-the-ass contrarians
Imagine you want to find the fastest road to go from one place to another place. You look at the map, and you identify that there are three roads: A, B, and C.
It’s clear that A is going to be faster.
BUT, here is the problem:
Road A is filled with traffic, and everyone else is already rushing to road A, which will make road C actually faster.
You’re thinking: that’s why I’m using Waze.
You’re right. But most people aren’t using any kind of Waze in their thinking.
Let’s take an example: you’re competing in a specific industry. You see that a smart move is to develop a new product in a space A that you’ll be able to cross-sell to your customers.
Chances are, if you’re right, all the competition is thinking the same way and space A is going to be competitive too, and you’ll have no differentiation.
So while in theory space A is better, in practice developing a new product in space C will get bigger faster results. And you’ll be able to own space A too, just later.
Static vs dynamic thinking: what are others going to do is always part of the equation. If they’re right, they’re wrong.
Static thinkers always go down road A. Dynamic thinkers at least consider C.
All ex-consultants, operators, PEs, and VCs fail at thinking dynamically because it not only requires you to know the space, the competitors, the customers and all the data, but also then to develop an intuition of what others are going to do and use it to fuel a desire to do something else.
That’s why you’ll notice CEOs are often contrarians who love to say “let’s look at C,” when everyone is rightfully telling them to do A.
But does that necessarily mean CEOs are all great dynamic thinkers, and are thinking rationally from first principles while ignoring FOMO and their rationale board members because they see all the dynamic of road A vs C? It does not.
They also think based on what the crowd says, but something in them is in reverse and instead of following the crowd, they go in the opposite direction. Their Waze is broken.
Or, in other words, they’re just contrarians.
And that makes them successful because it often replicates the benefits of dynamic thinking.
While CEOs who constantly push for road C do it out of being a contrarian, doing so gives them an edge over everyone else.
They are operating based on anti-FOMO and FOMO is so powerfully stupid that operating on anti-FOMO creates winners.
It’s not just CEOs who can be contrarians, of course. But when contrarians operate within a group or organization, more often than not they are mocked, punished and banned.
Conclusion: contrarians end up killed or CEO.
Being a CEO is one of the few situations when they can experiment -because they are in charge. And then, they can leverage their broken in-reverse rationale to chose road C, and be right only because road A while shorter is crowded and in the end, slower.
-1 x -1 = +1
Road C chosen for a wrong reason will often lead contrarian CEOs to find success.
It’s not just that road A is crowded, it’s even more powerful than that
Of course, there are many other reasons why road A looks to be the best, but isn’t.
For instance, if you don’t believe that (in quantum theory) the wave function just collapses like that, for no reasons that any maths can explain, you might be wrong or you might be right.
If you’re wrong, it won’t change anything. If you’re right, you might have an edge on understanding reality better than most and build stuff no one could even have imagined.
Think different. Apple’s slogan is not fully understood: the economics of thinking differently are an incredibly favorable opportunity. What’s the catch?
It’s just that you might end up socially awkward, but no wait that’s actually fine and even good, it’ll keep people away, a feature more than a bug.
No the real downside is that you might lose your ability to execute if you take too many contrarian bets at once. Go down road C, but don’t test going by teleportation through time simultaneously or you won’t know what failed.
A contrarian with a clear strategy knows exactly what bet they are taking, and adopts the market practice for everything else related to that bet. But who said you can make only one bet? Of course. You also need some strong conviction: taking these bets shouldn’t be random. Remember that your long game is to develop a very accurate “I can feel that they are all wrong about this” 6th sense.
The other reason for the arbitrage of going down road C is that human nature is to imitate others, by design. I’ll comment on that one day, but it’s a feature that enables the emergence of intelligence after millions of generations through what that I’d call socially reinforced learning. At shorter time scale, it creates a bias that too many people will chose road A. You can think of it that way: in a stable state if there should be 70 people on road A and 30 on road C, there will be most often 90 on road A and 10 on road C. Because of the imitation factor. And that’s the reason for the arbitrage.
Just think different.
Unfortunately, this is also why CEOs are so painful to interact with: they are all contrarians. Me too, unfortunately.
These posts will hopefully be about road B
Let’s just say I hope I’m not just blindly pushing for road C for the sake of it, but I have a real edge in topics such as:
Current dynamics in AI infra, OS, and apps
The long list of things most people get wrong about company building like for instance why company values set up company culture for failure
Why homeschooling your kids and/or start a homeschooling startup are good ideas right now
What quantum physicists are missing and what could enable quantum computing if they were looking differently
The inherent nature of free will and consciousness and how we might achieve conscious AI (and how)
The inner nature of reality and the simulation question
How to build a society in the post-truth, post-democracy world, that maximizes the quality of life, wealth, individual freedom and ability to make a ton of money and yet even equity too
I have a couple of ideas for some gigantic infrastructure projects that would change our society, and that I’d like to build in public maybe here
How all of these are actually one same question
I do have all the answers, but writing in English takes me so much time and I’m always very frustrated when reading my own posts. Anyway, I’ll try to overcome this and find the time to write more posts with the answers to these questions while building the related technologies, one company at a time, but I have more fun building than writing unfortunately.