tl;dr

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Intro

People get frustrated when they ask me about my opinion about something because the majority of the time, I don’t have an opinion to share.

Do you think Canada’s immigration policy is too lenient? What year do you think we’ll achieve AGI? Who do you think is better, Lebron or Kobe? Is the dress blue and black, or white and gold? (I guess I do have an opinion here: white and gold)…

Most of the time, my answer is, “I don’t know”. Well actually, I respond with questions. I’m under-informed about a vast array of topics so I ask questions to learn. Because I’m very curious in general. But whether its about speculating on current political issues, the impact of emerging technologies, or pop culture debates, I keep my opinions and beliefs to a minimum.

Between our ears sits a biological neural network with 80-90 billion parameters, a number that’s relatively stable for each of us throughout our lives. Connections between neurons are fluid but for the most part, our cognitive capacity is constant. So I carefully curate the information I allow into my network, and what eventually gets stored. Otherwise, I suffer from cognitive and emotional dysfunction from caring about too many things. To put it bluntly, I have a limited budget for how many fucks I can give, so I try to allocate my fucks to what matters most (to me).

With this piece, I’m going to explain the design choices underlying my belief architecture: How I select things that matter, and form beliefs about them. It’s based on a philosophy of minimalism that has helped me control my information intake, reduce mental clutter, and cultivate focus.

Belief selection

Picking what matters to me enough to form an opinion is based on two criteria: (1) does it impact people I value and (2) can I have an impact. When something rises to the level where it satisfies both, then it warrants my time to develop an understanding and perspective. These mechanisms give me a way to focus and prioritize thoughts effectively, but I’ll admit, its incredibly imperfect. It takes continual practice and discipline. And I’ve regularly failed. Nevertheless, its been an invaluable framework.