Transcultural truths and how to find them
the quest for universal truth in the age of misinformation
The philosophy of the West
The West (Western culture) is a child of Enlightenment. The center of this philosophy which shapes our modern institutions is ‘your sovereignty of reason’ informed by your ability to perceive reality. The constitution protects the individual via inalienable rights so that nothing interferes with their ability to perceive reality, capitalism proposes that you know your needs and wants best, and the scientific method is based on testing hypothesis against reality. There is no expert, no media publication, and certainty no government bureau that can feed you a fake reality although most will try to convince you of your own ignorance so you obey them with blind deference. Anything that interferes with the individuals ability to reason or perceive reality must be tarred, feathered, and run out of town. This has lead to the support and advancement of ideals like liberty, progress, tolerance, fraternity, government as an agent and the people as the principle, and separation of church and state. A man’s ability to reason with his mind is the sacred and must be protected from coercion. From here the mission of humanity has been to discover the truth of the universe via exploration with the mind. This is reflected in our study of great western works like Shakespeare, Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Socrates, Lincoln, Adam Smith, and Jesus. Questions like what is the nature of man, how do you organize a society, what is the best system of governance, how do you foster innovation, what does justice look like, and what is moral. These are questions that each culture grapples with and questions the Great Authors have tried to answer throughout history. While the ancients may not explicitly give answers, there are many of these transcultural truths or secrets hidden in their works out of fear of being put to the sword by oppressive governments. In the more physical realm which we place higher value on: we study of physics, chemistry, biology, and math. Parents of these fields being Hooke, Newton, Nikola Tesla, Da Vinci, and many more. We value that knowledge because it allows us to manipulate our reality, the value provided by them is objective for all to see. The cultural, societal, and governance questions are more abstract, require a breadth of historical knowledge, and intense study of the humanities to begin to understand and answer with less objective results to observe making for heated debates. Philosophers are taught the language or immaterial reality, Mathematicians study the nature of reality, and physics gives us the most objective results in material reality. The common thread is there are fundamental truths which one can discover by observing reality and thinking. Since its inception, mankind has been to increasing its collective consciousness by acquiring more knowledge to better answers to these fundamental questions that span time and cultures.
How to do scientific research & invest in such a complex world
Now to concretely apply this. Modern society is so specialized and you’re highly dependent on others (potentially millions) for survival. The amount of coordination and complexity that goes into making packaged cereal is insane, phrased again, it’s the combination of the decentralized actions of many. Your job or field of research is so specialized to a certain degree because as the collective knowledge of mankind increases or the size of a company grows, to make an advancement in any specific area requires a high bar of base knowledge. This leds us to ignore the lessons of a generalist and the lessons of our ancients searching for transcultural truths (the OG generalists). However, how do we coordinate investments across sectors, find interesting area to research and fund, share ideas, or help drive a general culture of progress? Answers to these questions involve a generalist, said differently is a person trying to find trans-industry truths around innovation. Jeff Bezos got his idea to stimulate demand for AWS servers from Insull strategy around pricing electricity. The McDonald’s brothers first store was not unlike a model-T assembly line for food. The Venture Capital industry based their financing model off how whaling trips in Japan were funded. Steve Job’s design philosophy has inspired a host of fintech products whose selling points are nice UIs, simplicity, and speed. These trans-industry ideas or secrets about how the world works exist.
ARK invest has there own version. Their universal truth is that across industries companies can ride declining cost curves with disruptive innovation to attack incumbents from niche markets and eventually experience exponential growth. [1] ARK invest has identified these innovation platforms and technologies impact all industries besides the one they were original designed for. Today all cloud computing applies to all businesses. They have found the universal or trans-industry truth. However, to invest in these companies you have to understand the general trend of disruptive innovation platforms and how to apply them to specific companies in industry verticals. Enter the specialist. A specialist provides industry specific knowledge within the general framework so that they can affect progress in that specific industry in a direction that relates to a bigger picture goal.
The reason ‘non-experts’ often come up with the most novel or innovative ideas in business and scientific research is they draw on principles from their other work and try to apply them to a new area. They are iterating their way to a universal truth, while an incumbent or specialist (‘expert’) is so entrenched in his way of thinking, that he’s unable to consider other possibilities.
Aligning Knowledge and Power
True knowledge is being able to repackage and rework the same piece of information into many different scenarios and fields. If you can only use your ‘knowledge’ when conditions are right or within the box it was taught in, you likely don’t understand it very well. This is the problem with specialization; people are terrible systems engineers, they optimize one part of the problem without considering the 50 other parts they are not specialized in.
Until recently financial markets have had the power of the purse while having close to zero knowledge of the companies they are investing in. Largely why the technical founder trope has become so popular. Back in 2008, the knowledge of the financial instruments was largely unknown to the people writing the checks and selling the mortgages, but well known to the mathematicians who created these CDOs and related derivatives around mortgages. This misalignment of knowledge and power lead to the world economy imploding as the bankers (lets generously say most were blissfully ignorant) sold these mortgages without knowing the underlying risks involved. The mathematicians who knew, either didn’t care or didn’t have the power to change the selling practices, but probably a combination of both. Another example is the switch from software being purchase top down by CTOs who don’t use the software versus today where individual development teams are buying their own software products. This has completely changed a companies set of tools since they actually have to appeal to working developers versus look nice in a powerpoint demo to a CTO. Ideally, knowledge and power should be aligned. ARK Invest has the general knowledge of trans-industry trends and a lot of financial firepower and will align themselves with highly technical people in each vertical (Healthcare, SaaS, education, etc) and empower each of them to make decisions within the overall ARK framework. Venture Capitalists try to do this, but most fail as they take highly centralized approaches to betting on companies. Most VC firms rely on the gut of a couple partners in the same location and add lots of parameters to their criteria (companies that have 50mm ARR, are in SF, and in consumer tech). They randomly select sectors and geographies, which they often have incomplete information about. Innovation happens decentrally, but they take a very centralized approach to investing. This is why capitalism works so well, it is a decentralized approach that aligns the power of the purchaser and the knowledge of their needs on the buy side and a similar alignment happens on the sell side.
DeFi is the most radical innovation that will help align knowledge and power in society or at least in terms of business creation and lending. DeFi is giving people at the fringes with all the knowledge of a highly technical space to act as sources of capital rather than relying on a centralized Goldman Sachs in NY. The decentralized bank is like crowd sourcing power around distributed knowledge centers. No longer will the 20 year old founder be seeking money from Warren Buffet to build technology (slight exaggeration, but you get the point).
WallstreetBets, twitter, and substack has decentralized the monopoly these institutions held over the knowledge and distribution contained in industry research reports, which consumers often bought to inform the power of their investing decisions. Colleges who hold a monopoly on the power to credential people for jobs is largely being disrupted (Cosign, Lambda school, etc).
Decentralization aligns knowledge and power and usually results in the optimal outcomes, empowers individuals, and prevents large scale societal collapsing bubbles. At worst you may have micro bubbles limited to select groups. Not to say that you can’t invest, write about, or work in a field without being highly technical, but this will at least require you to be knowledgable about something if you hope to have power or influence in it.
Finding Secrets
Here is the power of connecting ideas across fields. The basis of our education system does us a disservice by siloing knowledge in different classes and subjects. It is all connected. There are secrets or universal truths to discover in this world. The best way to find them is to be curious and explore your interests across a wide array of subjects and go deep in a few areas you find the most interesting. You may find a secret or two that can be applied to your research, how to allocate capital, and how to organize society. And remember the best ideas are the ones that are true, but people either deny or don’t know, and those ideas happen to also be the most dangerous, hence the only ones worth knowing.
-Bobby Lee
[1] heavily influenced by Clayton Christensen book, the Innovator’s Dilemma
Ideas and inspiration drawn from:
[2] https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/decentralizing-venture-capital
[3] ark invest research
[4] The diversity myth - sacks and Thiel