Taha Ashtiani

Searching for EV in the tails.

About me

I am an engineer and founder living in Toronto.
Current interests are Jiu Jitsu, meta-rationality, and LLMs

Principles and Intuition

Execution

Ship and deliver in small increments and with tight feedback loops.
Do things fast. Slow allows for fake work to creep in.
Momentum gets people excited.
Excitment is scarce.
You need systems as scaffolding to get things done.
Pick up slack wherever you can – small improvements add up.
Don’t build something your users don’t care about.
Memos over meetings.

Simple is hard

Simple is better than complex.
And complex is better than complicated.
Practicality beats purity.
Deleting code is hard – delete as much as you can.
Naming variables is an art.

Mistakes are good

You’ll never have all the answers.
So you have to f*** around and find out.
Seek upside risk.
But avoid risk of ruin. Keep enough chips left to bet again.
Run low cost and quick experiments.
Optimize for expected value of sample information.
Don’t overcommit. When you make a mistake cut the losses and try again.

Favorite Blogs

gwern.net: ai, psychology and statistics - meticulously researched writups
meaningness.com: on how meaning functions
the Last Psychiatrist: strong anti-memes
metarationality.com: in the cells of eggplant, on meta-rationality
betterwithout.ai: ai risk
meltingasphalt.com/: prickles and goo
mindingourway.com: dark arts of rationality, replacing guilt series
neelnanda.io: systems, Mech Interp, rationality
vividness.live: buddihsm
vajrayananow.com: Vajrayana, Kegan and more
Replacing fear series: similar themes of replacing guilt series

Friends

hardfloppy.com: Follow Mike for terse one-liners, all things retro, and ai art

Book shelf

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