PRINCIPLES - A SET OF IDEAS AND OBSERVATIONS

Principles are a set of rules and mental models that govern the thought process, decision making , habit formation and other general actions of an individual.It has always been curious and interesting for me to understand how the world works using such ideas and observations.

The below are few of them that have influenced me a lot. I have observed, learned and borrowed all of them from the world.These are my guiding principles and the light of my intellectual life. All of them will help you think better, and I hope they inspire curiosity.

1. Inversion: Avoiding stupidity is easier than trying to be brilliant. Instead of asking, “How can I help my company?” you should ask, “What’s hurting my company the most and how can I avoid it?” Identify obvious failure points, and steer clear of them.

2. Doublespeak: People often say the opposite of what they mean, especially in political language. It allows people to lie while looking like they’re telling the truth. As George Orwell famously wrote in 1984, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." 

3. Theory of Constraints: A system is only as strong as its weakest point. Focus on the bottleneck. Counter intuitively, if you break down the entire system and optimize each component individually, you’ll lower the effectiveness of the system. Optimize the entire system instead.

4. Preference Falsification: People lie about their true opinions and conform to socially acceptable preferences instead. In private they’ll say one thing. In public, they’ll say another. 

5. Faustian Bargain: A man once sold his soul to a demon in exchange for knowledge. At first, it seemed like a smart trade. But the man lost in the long-run. Tragically, what the man lost was more valuable than what he earned. In short, he won the battle but lost the war. 

6. Mimetic Theory of Desire: Humans are like sheep. We don’t know what we want, so we imitate each other. Instead of creating our own desires, we desire the same things as other people. The entire advertising industry built on this idea. 

7. Mimetic Theory of Conflict: People who are similar are more likely to fight than people who are different. That’s why civil wars and family feuds create the worst conflicts. The closer two people are and the more equality between them, the greater the potential for conflict.

8. Talent vs. Genius: Society is good at training talent but terrible at cultivating genius. Talented people are good at hitting targets others can’t hit, but geniuses find targets others can’t see. They are opposite modes of excellence. Talent is predictable, genius is unpredictable. 

9. Secrets are Hidden in Plain Sight: Most people think of secrets as Easter eggs or some kind of treasure. They assume that if a secret is important, it’s necessarily going to be hard to find. The best ideas can come from things that are so well-known that they aren’t well-seen. 

10. Opportunity Cost: By reading this article, you are choosing not to read something else. Everything we do is like this. Doing one thing requires giving up another. Whenever you explicitly choose to do one thing, you implicitly choose not to do another thing. 

11. Planck’s Principle: Science doesn’t progress because people change their views. Rather, each new generation of scientists has different views. As old generations pass away, new ideas are accepted and the scientific consensus changes.

12. Bike-Shed Effect: A group of people working on a project will fight over the most trivial ideas. They’ll ignore what’s complicated. They’ll focus too much on easy-to-understand ideas at the expense of important, but hard to talk about ideas. For example, instead of approving plans for a complicated spaceship, the team would argue over the color of the astronaut's uniforms.

13. Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. One hospital took too long to admit patients so a penalty was given for 4+ hour wait times. In response, ambulance drivers were asked to slow down so they could shorten wait times. 

14. Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

15. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available. People don’t want to look like they’re lazy, so they find extra tasks to tackle, even if they’re trivial. If you have six months to complete a project, it will take six months to complete. Set deadlines accordingly.  

16. The Second Law of Thermodynamics: The world tends towards disorder. That’s why your room becomes messier and messier over time. It’s also why an engine converts only ~35% of its energy into useful work. Time moves towards increasing one direction: increasing entropy. 

17. Occam's Razor: If there are multiple explanations for why something happened and they are equally persuasive, assume the simplest one is true. In the search for truth, remove unnecessary assumptions. Trust the lowest-complexity answer. 

18. Hickam’s Dictum: The opposite of Occam’s Razor. In a complex system, problems usually have more than one cause. For example, in medicine, people can have many diseases at the same time.

19. Hormesis: A low dose of something can have the opposite effect of a high dose. A little bit of stress wakes you up, but a lot of stress is bad for you. Lifting weights for 30 minutes per day is good for you, but lifting weights for 6 hours per day will destroy your muscles. Stress yourself, but not too much.

20. Horseshoe Theory: Consider a Horseshoe, extreme opposites tend to look the same. For example, a far-right movement and a far-left movement can be equally violent or desire a similar outcome. People on both sides are more similar to each other than they are to people in the center. 

21. Base Rate: The average outcome for an event over time. They're like batting averages for life, and they work best with big sample sizes. For example, if you’re starting a business, avoid the restaurant business where margins are low and competition is high.

22. Circle of Competence: Define the limits of your knowledge. Hint: the limits are smaller than you think. That’s because being an expert in one area doesn’t make you an expert in anything else. Be clear about what you know and don’t know. 

23. Convexity: If you want to be lucky, look for opportunities with big upsides and low downsides. In addition to increased optionality, your errors will benefit you more than they harm you. Convex payoffs let you tinker your way to success and innovation. 

24.Via Negativa: When we have a problem, our natural instinct is to add a new habit or purchase a fix. But sometimes, you can improve your life by taking things away. For example, the foods you avoid are more important than the foods you eat.

25.Table Selection: This idea comes from poker, where you’re advised to choose your opponents carefully. That means you shouldn’t compete against the best people. You don’t need to get good at doing difficult things if you get good at avoiding difficult things. If you want to win, pick an easy table and nail your execution.