The Almanack of John Carmack
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John Carmack (on the right of the cover photo here) is best known for creating Doom and Quake video games. He later moved to co-create Oculus VR headsets, Armadillo Aerospace rocket company, and now he is pursuing his own AI endeavor.
He is also quite a practical philosopher. Despite (or maybe thanks to) his engineering grounding, he has impressed me with his non-engineering takes, so I decided to go through a few interviews and collect them. This collection is a little short to call it an Almanack, but I just couldn’t resist the wordplay.
I highly recommend picking up a copy of Masters of Doom to learn the full story. All quotes by John Carmack:
Tales to inspire, not tales to condemn
My Twitter bio starts with "Tales to Inspire, not tales to condemn“. I first saw the sentence in John Carmack’s Twitter thread about science fiction. We continue to produce dystopian sci-fi “as a warning” and wonder why it keeps being turned into reality. Focus has a power to make things happen.
People want to be inspired. Optimistic futures, optimistic goals, and optimistic ideas get people fired up and productive instead of depressed and worried. You will see in the world what you focus on.
I am an optimist on almost all fronts. Throughout history, there have always been those that argue that the world is going to hell, yet here we are, better off than any previous generation.1 — John Carmack
Engineers generally like to build things, but you need to have them inspiring future to build. John lists Star Trek and Robert Heinlein (particularly The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) as inspiration, along with the whole genre of 1950-1960s sci-fi stories with “Competent Vibe”. That is the future John and other engineers want and will build:
I like building things, I like creating things and making forward progress. This sense of in some small way I’m helping build the future. I’m proud of the work that I do. — John Carmack
The reality is like the world will get changed by single engineer anyway. So if whether inside Google or inside a startup, it doesn’t matter. — John Carmack
Only a true optimist sees an “infinite to-do list” as a good thing:2
Making good progress it’s like an infinite to-do list you can just look around the world and see all of these things that can be improved by some vigorous application of engineering and innovation. — John Carmack
The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke3 to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers. — John Carmack
Instead of work-life balance, it’s your life’s work.
There’s work-life balance is fine but there are a lot of benefits to obsession. — John Carmack
Making anything worthwhile in the world takes a lot of effort, and some people are up for it. In fact, everything we celebrate now was built by someone with conviction and faith. John Collison, cofounder of Stripe, best describes it as “The world is a museum of passion projects.”
The Passion does not clock in during 9-5. It is obsessive and works on its own schedule. Furthermore, in knowledge work, keeping teams small reduces the communication overhead4. To compensate for the size, it’s most effective to have that small team work longer hours.5
Total net productivity per worker, discounting for any increases in errors and negative side effects, continues increasing well past 40 hours per week. There are a great many tasks where inefficiency grows significantly with additional workers involved; the Mythical Man Month problem is real. — John Carmack
At the end of 8-hour shift:
And yet, this is frowned upon as disrupting “Work-life balance”.
If we were fighting an existential threat, say an asteroid that would hit the earth in a year, would you really tell everyone involved in the project that they should go home after 35 hours a week, because they are harming the project if they work longer?
I captured more of my own reflections about Work-Life balance in “Farmers always Worked From Home”.
领英推荐
Farming ideas
Enjoy invalidating your ideas cheaply. — John Carmack
The concept is very similar to falsification in the scientific method, as coined by Popper: Once you get an idea/hypothesis, confirmation bias will make you try to pick and choose facts that fit that idea. Instead of trying to confirm it, you should focus your conscious efforts on refuting it. Otherwise, you’ll become attached to it, and it will be harder and harder to treat it objectively.
there’s that hazard again there where if I get something that I think is a good idea and I don’t get to beat on it soon enough it starts perhaps solidifying into a pet idea in some way where I maybe won’t be as harsh on it when I do finally get around. — John Carmack
I’m still happy to get that lightbulb initially but then I immediately get a very adversarial stance against my own idea it’s become almost like a puzzle game. — John Carmack
A key to treating your ideas objectively is to be less precious with them. You need to inhabit a sort of “post scarcity world of ideas” where they can be predictably “farmed”. There is even a mechanistic process to get them:
You get the ideas by being down in the mud working on the problems that it’s the hard work that leads you to the insights. — John Carmack
Weaponize your curiosity
So that would probably be the most important thing to encourage to people is that you can like weaponized curiosity you can deploy your curiosity to find to kind of like make things useful. — John Carmack
You can get more ideas by staying curious, updating your tools, and following new developments. The world and others’ constant innovation provide tools that can be applied to old problems to “crack them open.” But you need to stay curious.
The here and now
Everything that we’re doing really should flow from user value. — John Carmack
I love how grounded and focused on user value John is. People love to kick into higher abstraction levels where they can theorize, even though (or maybe precisely because) it makes it harder to falsify their pet ideas.
I don’t know what it is about discussions of consciousness, but I check out as well, even though I have a degree in Psychology!
The arguments when as soon as people start talking about quality and consciousness and Chinese rooms and things, it’s like, I just check out. — John Carmack
It’s been my experience that people that focus on that don’t focus on the here and now right in front of them tend to be less effective. — John Carmack
He does not spare even the metaverse – which he was arguably trying to build at Meta/Oculus:
The idea of the metaverse, Carmack says, can be “a honeypot trap for ‘architecture astronauts.'” Those are the programmers and designers who “want to only look at things from the very highest levels,” he said, while skipping the “nuts and bolts details” of how these things actually work. — John Carmack
Building pure infrastructure and focusing on the “future-proofing and planning for broad generalizations of things,” on the other hand, risks “making it harder to do the things that you’re trying to do today in the name of things you hope to do tomorrow, and [then] it’s not actually there or doesn’t actually work right when you get around to wanting to do that,” he said. — John Carmack
Instead of dreaming of potential, you need to take stock of what you got and what you can do with it:
Engineering is figuring out how to do what you want with what you’ve actually got. — John Carmack
Sources
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