Notes on Puzzles | Nabeel Qureshi 

“The most effective people seem to be good at accepting the dissonance and going forward with things anyway (after thinking rigorously about them!), knowing that you can always find reasons why a thing won’t work.”

1. Very few people try to falsify their own ideas—it’s very difficult and very useful. (Think of the “crazy club experiment”: pick your side, argue as hard as you can, then switch sides!)
2. If you spend enough time trying to falsify an idea, you will.
3. An idea, then, is only a starting point, but that doesn’t mean “ideas doesn’t matter.” Ideas determines what maze you’re exploring. (similar to Naval Ravikant’s point on what game you choose to play and Sam Altman’s what you work on is much more important than how hard you work).

There’s this notion of “scientist-brain” (skepticism / falsification is supremely useful) vs. “founder-brain” (moving quickly off less data).

1. But founders still need to be able to quickly recognize + admit when something isn’t working. More cycles → more chance of success.

A crucial part of solving puzzles is having conviction that an answer even exists.

1. Puzzle books are forgiving problem-solving environments because they imply a solution exists.

2. In this sense,

   Founders and scientists as courageous in precisely the same way: they are driven by a faith that there’s a findable answer there.

3. Newton wondered profusely about literally everything.

   1. Reminds me of Claude Shannon asking seemingly absurd questions—out of courage.

      Courage is one of the things that Shannon had supremely. You have only to think of his major theorem. He wants to create a method of coding, but he doesn't know what to do so he makes a random code. Then he is stuck. And then he asks the impossible question, ``What would the average random code do?'' He then proves that the average code is arbitrarily good, and that therefore there must be at least one good code. Who but a man of infinite courage could have dared to think those thoughts?

      ​- Richard Hamming, You and Your Research

Another crucial part is really wanting to know the answer.

What stops you, I think, is a combination of not really believing you’ll get it and not really caring. Is that too harsh – or is it somewhere close to the truth?

1. Anti-complacency here can also be bad (e.g., put scientist in CEO role): going down rabbit-holes, not handling boring work with care, moving too slowly.

Some people are just different. They can be on an entire different class than you at a specific skill/sub-skill. “Still: lean into what you’re good at, practice, and you can always get better!”

1. I feel this way when upskilling in technical areas with certain mentors (e.g., Dhruv for research).