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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Oct 2018
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      How long things take has little relation to how much they matter. Swallowing an optional vitamin and a life-saving pill take the same few seconds. Fixing a minor corner case bug and a system-crashing major one might take the same time. This is why pure reactivity is bad. THREAD!

      3 replies 23 retweets 137 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Oct 2018
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      Reacting is easier than acting on your initiative. It takes less imagination or judgement. Somebody has made a neat little to-do for you. When you react, your attention/energy allocation is determined largely by how long things take. Greasing squeaky wheel, sweating small stuff.

      1 reply 1 retweet 22 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Oct 2018
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      By contrast, when you act instead of react, you have more control. You can outsource and automate more easily. You aren’t as locked into time commitments determined by others’ plans because you can tweak the plan itself, deciding what requires care and what can be neglected.

      1 reply 0 retweets 15 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Oct 2018
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      You can’t entirely escape time. Execution is after all just a set of reactions to the consequences of your own intentions. And the mere fact of volition doesn’t make popping a pill or driving a mile take less time. The difference is, it’s leveraged time. What do I mean by that?

      1 reply 0 retweets 10 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Oct 2018
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      It means you capture more of the positive, designed consequences of your own actions and escape more of the negative ones. You've used logic (whether agile experimental or fragile Rube Goldbergian) to shape causation in your favor. Rationality is time/attention/energy leverage.

      1 reply 0 retweets 15 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Oct 2018
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      You can’t “manage” time. You can’t even “manage” attention or energy outside of a fairly narrow band. All you can do is limit the number of things you choose to react to. Create more room for YOUR logic to work, over that of others.

      1 reply 7 retweets 37 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Oct 2018
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      Even the most benevolent person cannot always structure the logic of action to benefit you. The logic of their own needs will ALWAYS contaminate the reactivity pattern they impose on you, and there is ALWAYS a limit to how deeply they can grok the hidden logic of your needs.

      1 reply 0 retweets 16 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Oct 2018
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      Parents, spouses, teachers, priests, bodhisattvas, social workers, doctors, AIs that read your emails, Google, coaches, therapists... nobody can set up your actions to be purely shaped by the logic of your own needs. Self-interest cannot be truly outsourced.

      1 reply 2 retweets 17 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Oct 2018
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      Only YOU have access to all the information, conscious, unconscious, and subconscious, to act with self interest. Only YOU are uniquely firewalled off from others’ interests allowing actions based on that particular set of information. Self-Interest is a responsibility.

      1 reply 1 retweet 30 likes
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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Oct 2018
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      Acting on self-interest sets up conflict with others acting on self-interest of course, but you’re not doing others any favors by curtailing it. Your self-interested actions are the peer review of the logic of my self-interested actions.

      2 replies 0 retweets 19 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Oct 2018
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      Your refusal to react as I want reshapes my attempt at leveraged action. It forces me to contemplate the use of power and coercion to get my way. If I choose to use those, I’m being selfish rather than self-interested. Your self-interest is what helps me detect my selfishness.

      12:05 PM - 21 Oct 2018
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      • Bart Denny Eddie Dempsey Steven Sinofsky stupid twitt account Timothy #masks4all Roy 👸🏼
      1 reply 0 retweets 14 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Oct 2018
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          Anxiety is, in a way, conflict-aversion debt. When you consciously curtail self-interest, you let conflict debt accumulate in relationships. Your subconscious recognizes this and mints AnxietyCoin in your head to represent deferred conflict debt.

          1 reply 5 retweets 44 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Oct 2018
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          Anxiety is a very poor way to process improperly expressed self-interest, since it does not carry the logic of leveraged time/action. So it just sloshes around screwing up all behavior somewhat randomly. Problems inappropriately expand to occupy anxiety available. Inflation.

          1 reply 3 retweets 18 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Oct 2018
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          Anxiety particular leaks into reactions, because cues to react trigger our subconscious awareness of our insufficient self-interest. Yes, you read that right. There’s not enough self-interest in the world.

          2 replies 3 retweets 11 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Oct 2018
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          Not enough people have the skill, self-awareness, and most importantly *courage* to fulfill their responsibility to be self-interested. Self-interest is not a natural and automated intuition. It’s a learned skill and an expression of nerve.

          2 replies 6 retweets 30 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Oct 2018
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          The opposite of self-interest is not altruism but anxiety and unchecked excesses on the part of those who *need* your self-interest to recognize their selfishness and be forced to face the coercion and power they’re deploying.

          1 reply 3 retweets 31 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Oct 2018
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          What they do with that is their moral dilemma. They may choose to change or not. Your job is to create that moral dilemma. That’s ultimately the stakes riding on your reactivity. Be self-interested, or be part of the problem.

          1 reply 1 retweet 28 likes
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        8. End of conversation

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