THREAD: 15 of the most useful razors and rules I've found.

Rules of thumb that simplify decisions.

Bezos' Razors:

• If unsure what action to take, let your 80-year-old self make it.

• If unsure who to work with, pick the person that has the best chances of breaking you out of a 3rd world prison.
Skinner's Law:

• If procrastinating on an item, you only have 2 options:

1. Make the pain of not doing it greater than the pain of doing it.

2. Make the pleasure of doing it greater than the pleasure of not doing it.
Luck Razor:

• If stuck with 2 equal options, pick the one that feels like it will produce the most luck later down the line.

I used this razor to go for drinks with a stranger rather than watch Netflix.

In hindsight, it was the highest ROI decision I've ever made.
Bragging Razor:

• If someone brags about their success or happiness, assume it’s half what they claim.

• If someone downplays their success or happiness, assume it’s double what they claim.

The map is not the terrain.
Hofstadter’s Law: 

• It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Every project costs 2x as much and takes 3x as long - even when you factor this into your projections.
Elon's Law:

• If you have a project, combat Hofstader's Law by setting a ridiculously ambitious deadline.

Even if it takes 3x longer than the deadline, you're ahead of everyone else.

Elon Musk missing his super human deadlines is a feature rather than a bug.
Naval's Razors:

• If you have 2 choices to make and it's 50/50, take the path that’s more painful in the short term.

• If a task is worth less than your ambitious hourly rate - outsource it, automate it or delete it.

H/T - @naval
Munger's Law:

• Never allow yourself to have an opinion on a subject unless you can state the opposing argument better than the opposition can.

Steelman Arguments > Strawman Arguments
Hitchen's Razor:

• What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Newton's Flaming Laser Sword:

• If something can be settled by experiment or observation, then it is not worthy of debate.

UFC 1 >>> Decade long debates on the best martial arts
Joe Rogan's Razors:

• If unsure what action to take - ask what the hero in the movie would do.

• If you're intensely passionate about something and nobody around you is interested in it - assume the scale of the internet might help you find them.
Taleb's Surgeon:

• If presented with two seemingly equal candidates for a role, pick the one with the least amount of charisma.

The uncharismatic one has got there despite their lack of charisma.

The charismatic one has got there with the aid of their charisma.
Discomfort Razor:

• The more uncomfortable the activity, the more likely it will lead to growth.

• The more comfortable the activity, the more likely it will lead to stagnation.

1000 uncomfortable hours > 10,000 comfortable hours
Checkhov's Gun:

• When telling a story, if it's non-essential - don't include it.

"If you say in the 1st chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the 2nd or 3rd chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."
Occam's Razor:

• Simple assumptions are more likely to be correct than complex assumptions.

Avoid Occam's Duct Tape:

• Someone who approaches a problem with a ridiculously large number of assumptions.
Walt Disney's Rule:

• If struggling to think clearly about a subject, draw it out.

Here's Walt Disney's drawing he made in 1957 of the Media Empire he wanted to build.

It's iconic.
Schwarzeneggers' Rule:

• Never need to monetize your artistic pursuits. You won't have to sacrifice your inner joy and vision for a payday.

Arnold made millions from property and D2C bodybuilding guides so he never had to say yes to acting gigs he didn't like.
I occasionally send out a newsletter of new ideas I'm exploring.

100% high signal. 0% spam.

Check it out 👉 https://t.co/gZLFoqxVV0

More from George Mack

I get DM's from founders with the same specific problems.

Here's a public list of marketing tools I recommend:



1. Twemex

Twitter Advanced search on steroids.

Whenever you visit someone's account, see their most popular Tweets of all time in order.

H/T @Julian for this

https://t.co/8P2YJ3Jrf0


2. Good UI

Historical log of successful and failed A/B tests from the likes of Amazon, Netflix, Google

3. Blisk

See how your website looks across every device.

Got an Android user complaining how your website looks but you only have an iPhone? Use Blisk.

4. Really Good Emails

Struggling with email ideas?

Library of thousands of quality emails to get inspo from.

More from All

How can we use language supervision to learn better visual representations for robotics?

Introducing Voltron: Language-Driven Representation Learning for Robotics!

Paper: https://t.co/gIsRPtSjKz
Models: https://t.co/NOB3cpATYG
Evaluation: https://t.co/aOzQu95J8z

🧵👇(1 / 12)


Videos of humans performing everyday tasks (Something-Something-v2, Ego4D) offer a rich and diverse resource for learning representations for robotic manipulation.

Yet, an underused part of these datasets are the rich, natural language annotations accompanying each video. (2/12)

The Voltron framework offers a simple way to use language supervision to shape representation learning, building off of prior work in representations for robotics like MVP (
https://t.co/Pb0mk9hb4i) and R3M (https://t.co/o2Fkc3fP0e).

The secret is *balance* (3/12)

Starting with a masked autoencoder over frames from these video clips, make a choice:

1) Condition on language and improve our ability to reconstruct the scene.

2) Generate language given the visual representation and improve our ability to describe what's happening. (4/12)

By trading off *conditioning* and *generation* we show that we can learn 1) better representations than prior methods, and 2) explicitly shape the balance of low and high-level features captured.

Why is the ability to shape this balance important? (5/12)

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You can add code in these cells and add as many cells as you want

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Imports are pretty standard, with a few exceptions.
For the most part, you can import your libraries by running the import.
Type this in the first cell you see. You need not worry about what each of these does, we will understand it later.
The YouTube algorithm that I helped build in 2011 still recommends the flat earth theory by the *hundreds of millions*. This investigation by @RawStory shows some of the real-life consequences of this badly designed AI.


This spring at SxSW, @SusanWojcicki promised "Wikipedia snippets" on debated videos. But they didn't put them on flat earth videos, and instead @YouTube is promoting merchandising such as "NASA lies - Never Trust a Snake". 2/


A few example of flat earth videos that were promoted by YouTube #today:
https://t.co/TumQiX2tlj 3/

https://t.co/uAORIJ5BYX 4/

https://t.co/yOGZ0pLfHG 5/