21 June 2020
1504
After some vacillation, I think I’ve concluded that writing publicly is a good way to enforce self-accountability, clarity of thought, and codify my ideas and experience in a relatively concrete, and hopefully useful, way.
I feel like an incredible amount of knowledge is mobilised purely in order to signal virtue or status at cocktail parties or relatively meaningless social gatherings, and I think I now want to measure and incentivise the utility of things I’ve learnt in practice.
Dominic Cummings makes here the point that the ready availability of strong and intense feedback is critical to the ability to filter out signalling from merit, and so it is probably wise to first expend conscious thought in the development of suitable measures of feedback.
A major reason why Ray Dalio, for instance, is able to implement his idea-meritocracy at Bridgewater is because most ideas come with an unambiguous PnL attached.
Once you have some sense of how to evaluate progress or development, you can then try to recognise the extent to which you’re simply signalling, by first making forecasts of expected progress and then evaluating the difference between ex-ante forecasted progress and ex-post realised progress. This web-site is one place I can do this transparently and publically.
Another good measure of self-accountability is to make explicit commitments to members of your network. There is a skill and an art to doing this; it is irresponsible to overpromise, but equally negligent to underreach.
In the coming few posts, I’d like to think of the most artful way to do this.
i.e. hold myself accountable.
Post-Script
14 July 2020
0154
Ultimately, the motivation to hold oneself accountable comes down to maintaining future self-continuity. Jordan Peterson wisely discusses the notion of treating your future self as somebody you’re trying to help, that you ought to protect, and nurture but also somebody you ought to discipline, and challenge.