This is a branch of the writing from the Phronesis Fund and the inaugural entry on the pursuit of practical wisdom.
Wisdom is competence with regard to the complex realities of life. — Gerhard von Rad
Turn and face the strange
We’ve created a Star Wars civilization with stone age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. — E.O. Wilson
What a great setup. And true. Only recently did I realize that the microwave was a nascent luxury when my parents were my age (I was born in the 80’s). Now look where we are.
Which brings us to the topic of change. Read this quote slowly; it’s a gem:
Society is always changing, but the rate of change has been accelerating through history. Change is cumulative. The very changes you make, make it easier to make further changes.
It was only with the coming of the Industrial Revolution that the rate of change became fast enough to be visible in a single lifetime. That was when science fiction came into being. People knew they would die before they could see the changes in the next century, so it would be nice to imagine what they would be.
It becomes more and more important to adjust what you do today with the fact of change in the future. It's ridiculous to make your plans now on the assumption that things will continue as they are now. You have to assume that if something you're doing is going to reach fruition in ten years, that in those ten years changes may take place and perhaps what you do will have no meaning then.
Science fiction is important because it fights the natural notion that there’s something permanent about things the way they are right now. — Isaac Asimov
Asimov wrote the above in 1988. How prescient. How true.
Impermanence is an uncomfortable notion, but also one full of immense excitement.
The world is changing at a rapid rate, and the rate of change of the rate of change is changing at a rapid rate. The combined effect is exponential: change that happens faster, gets bigger, and goes further.
What is one to do?
Destroying one’s ego is a great start. Insist that one knows less, but can know much more. Make everything an experiment.
If I was to isolate kind of a uniform trait [of successful people], it's the ability to see the entire landscape as accurately as they possibly can at a single moment in time. To probabilistically work out what all the outcomes are, and then to dynamically adjust those probabilities as new information comes in. That's exactly the trait of Phil Tetlock's superforecasters that destroy expert predictions on everything. Because what they're doing is they're effectively destroying their ego every 15 seconds, because everything's a hypothesis to be tested. — Tom Morgan
Practical Wisdom
More broadly, enormous change calls for an enormous amount practical wisdom.
Wisdom is competence with regard to the complex realities of life. — Gerhard von Rad
As defined by von Rad, if we are to develop competence we must understand the complex realities of life — how the world really works — and then align our actions to this reality.
Most people don’t want accurate information, they want validating information. Growth requires you to be open to unlearning ideas that previously served you. — James Clear
How do we get practical wisdom? This writing is an attempt.
What this is
Writing is the antidote to confusion. This is an outlet to fight confusion.
Make everyone’s best ideas your baseline. This is an outlet to write about and wrestle with great ideas.
Just be in the tail of distributions. This is an outlet to pursue (positive) tails.
Success is iterative (so iterate!). This is an outlet to iterate thinking.
Trying to be smarter than other people is very hard and doesn’t work very often. Trying to have insights that you get because you sit in a different information flow just seems exponentially easier. This is an outlet to share information flow.
Wisdom is competence with regard to the realities of life. This is an outlet to grow in wisdom.
Thanks to James Clear for those first two thoughts, Patrick O’Shaughnessy for the third one, Charlie Songhurst for the fifth one, and Gerhard von Rad for the sixth one. I’ll claim the fourth one. Plenty of people have made that observation though few follow it.
What this is not
This is not just about investing. I write about that here. This newsletter is much broader, and it is not investing advice.
This will not be linear, tightly crafted narratives. I favor fewer, better things in most areas of life — writing included. I am ignoring that maxim here. Feel free to jump around each entry.
This will not always be canonical wisdom. This is learning in public to improve myself + connect with + help others. You will find mistakes. You will see me change my mind. That’s the point.
This is not going to feel like work. Education is not the filling of buckets but the lighting of fires. This is not about sweat from buckets; it’s sweat from heat.
Thanks W.B. Yeats for that last thought.
Here we go
Expect regular entries that revolve around recently encountered compelling information and compelling thoughts.
Much will follow from my information flow which I craft with intent and publish here.
The world will continue to get exponentially crazier. — Packy McCormick
What a world we’re in. I look forward to this journey.