Daily Balajisms - Optimalism vs Maximalism

From Logos to Lego

Take Tesla. Its cars can be safer than Volvo, faster than Porsche, and cheaper than Volkswagen. Startups with new technology can produce Pareto-improvements, where others would make trade-offs.

Maximizing the size of a bumper will not make the safest car. Driving somewhere at 300 kilometers an hour is not the fastest way to get there.    

Balaji Srinivasan’s optimalism is an idea that combines the optimism of tech-progressivism with optimising an objective function. Balaji uses optimalism as an alternative to trans-humanism, which sometimes gets bad rep for its varieties that are promoted in places like the World Economic Forum.

To illustrate the notion of maximalism (or extremism), Balaji talks about metaphorical Westists who just want to go West. Once they arrive in California and reach the Pacific Ocean, the maximalists among them want to still continue going West: “What are you some Eastist cuck, that you want to give up right now?”

There is a whole body of engineering knowledge around optimization. Theory of constrains looks for the bottleneck or the weakest link in the chain of a process. For example, if you want to improve a revenue of a café, buying better chairs won’t bring any results, if there are already lots of customers lining up, but the bottleneck is the slow cash register. A need for comfier chairs is not the main issue. Once the bottleneck of a slow cash register is removed, you can rinse-and-repeat the process and search for other bottlenecks.  

Balaji Srinivasan came up with the Nakamoto coefficient that measures the decentralization of various sub-systems (miners, developers, owners…) of blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin. It shows the weakest link – a sub-system that is the least decentralized and has the least entities that need to be compromised in order to gain 51% control of that sub-system.

Balaji sees two underrated ideologies that will shape the world – anarchoprimitivism and bitcoin maximalism. Anarchoprimitivism is a de-growth ideology that wants to reduce population and return to nature. Its opposite is trans-humanism, a desire for longevity and space travel. All ideologies can lead to extremes and fundamentalism.

Optimalism is similar to the notion of protopia (opposed to both dystopia and utopia). Optimalists are protopians. They believe in gradual change. Every year can get a bit better thanks to conscious hard work of engineers and gradual improvements of technology, as well as some phase shifts and step functions.     

Dystopians are primarily focused on a subject (e.g. their suffering) and are too pessimistic, utopians are mainly focused on an object (singularity) and are too optimistic. Protopians are mainly builders focused on a project – how to get from A to B.    

Balaji talks about three main power attractors – CCP, NYT and BTC. CCP today is the center of hard power, NYT is center of soft power and BTC/web3 is the center of smart power. Maximalism, or excessive tribalism, can be seen as a stupid power.

While loyalty and tribalism are important, maximalism leads to toxicity and an absorbing one-dimensional universalism – the multiplicity of complex identities collapses into one and only identity.  

Optimalists engage in projects that contribute towards longevity and extension of healthy lifespan. They are builders bootstrapping a desired future. Building it with Lego bricks of tech innovations. From Logos to Lego.