Kevin Simler

“making no unconventional decisions” go to sleep, venkat, you’re clearly drunk

you’re one of the people i had in mind when asking this question!

Ok partly kidding, but it’s really being consistently path of least resistance. Sometimes it takes self-awareness to notice when conventional path is high-energy for somebody else’s benefit and do easier thing for your own. Being sufficiently low energy can look like strategy.

This sounds right to me! And yeah, I wasn’t thinking about it, but “low vs. high resistance” is an interesting axis here. Seems like low-resistance unconventionality is driven by weirdness + self-awareness. Wonder what drives the high-resistance version... ambition?

Narcissistic wounds I’d guess. Deep-seated ones. But even that’s really least resistance in disguise: looking inward and processing trauma is too hard intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. So you take easier path of busting through the world.

Did you ever write about this? It pattern-matches to “dent in the universe” but I’m not sure I actually read that one (just familiar with the title)

I think I had a version of the argument long ago in Be Slightly Evil as commentary on Boyd and also a version in Calculus of Grit. It’s gotten highly simplified since them to the self belief “my superpower is sheer laziness”

The narcissistic wound stuff I think I’ve mentioned in passing in a few breaking smart issues. It’s sort of a gestalt theme with me, but not a very original one.