Collaboration. I think that collaboration and sharing are important things. I want to share a lot of things I came up with with everyone (this is the premise behind the “no-copyright” note at the bottom of this page). I feel collaboration may be one of the principles relevant to my purpose on life.

Iteration. I mentioned this briefly but instead of attempting to get something perfect, I’d prefer to iterate over it. Note that iteration is not equivalent to incrementalism — I’m not claiming that every iteration will necessarily add a certain amount of value. Such a thing would imply a greedy approach and not every problem can be solved with a greedy approach. Instead, I want to come up with something that adds value given the information I have now and given an appropriate (not large) amount of effort, and then decide whether to gather more information, put more effort, or do nothing depending on the cost and the benefits of either option.

Logic. I think we can derive a lot in our lives simply by using logic. A logic-based approach also forces us to clearly separate our process (the rules by which we come up with conclusions) and our axioms (the fundamental concepts we believe in, which we use to build our world view, and which we can’t derive from other conclusions we’ve come up with).

Respect for mankind. This one is tricky. I’ll need to elaborate on it soon. In the meantime, we have to define “mankind” (we can do this by identifying what’s unique to mankind… is “the sense of purpose” unique to makind?), “respect” and the reason why it’s an important thing to respect it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 15:39 and is filed under principles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.