We’ve all seen the pictures of the Raptor engine for the SpaceX rockets, and if you look at the various iterations, they go from easy-to-vary to hard-to-vary. Because the most recent version just doesn’t have that many parts that you can fool around with. The earlier versions have a million different parts where you could change the thickness of it, the width of it, the material, and so on. More

I think reading Deutsch across all the different disciplines is very useful. Even when he talks about memes and meme theory—that comes from evolution, but crosses over straight into epistemology, conjecture, and criticism. And it reaches far beyond his definition of wealth: the set of physical transformations that you can effect. More

For the state of the art on the philosophy of knowledge, which people call epistemology, you can basically skip everything and jump straight to David Deutsch. I think that’s right. If you just want to know epistemology, read David Deutsch—full stop. That said, for some people it helps to know the history, the counterarguments, where he’s coming from. More

Unlike Schopenhauer, you are an industrial philosopher. Like an industrial designer, your philosophy is designed for the masses. People suggest you read the great books—Aristotle and Wittgenstein and all the supposedly great philosophers. I’ve read almost all that stuff, and I’ve gotten very little value from it. More

You have to take responsibility for everything bad that happens to you—and this is a mindset. Maybe it’s a little fake, but it’s very self-serving. And in fact, if you can go the extra mile and just attribute everything good that happens to you to luck, that might be helpful too. More

Let’s talk about one more tweet which I liked when I first saw it, or I might have retweeted it. I think people retweet things when they see something that they haven’t figured out how to say yet, but they knew in their head, but it’s just implicit—it hadn’t been made explicit. More