Kevin Simler

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.

There’s a related thing about recognizing what’s valuable about things that are generally valued, “the important thing about important things” so to speak. Often the valuable part is cheap and all the cost is attached to low-value parts for signaling reasons.