Applying the Lessons of History
The difference between a religious and secular society is the latter is predicated on scientific fact. The similarity is, most people in both societies rely on authorities rather than personally discovering scientific facts.
What is a link? What is a citation? What is a reference? A reference is reinforcements. A reference means it’s not just you thinking this.
Here is a claim, and here are all of these people who reviewed this piece of paper, and that’s actually 50 people I’m bringing with me to support this claim. By the way, they’re all research mathematicians, which actually represents 50,000 people’s work.
Arguing from references is summoning reinforcements to any discussion. Why do you learn history? To win arguments. Why do you argue from references? Again to win arguments. Because it’s not just your claim, it’s you and this army of scholars.
History is the entire record of everything humanity has done. It’s a very rich data structure that we have only begun to even think of as a data structure.
One way to think about history is a set of expensive experiments. People made certain choices which seemed reasonable at the time, and often ended up with calamitous outcomes.
History is most interesting backwards. You go to Berlin, for example, why is the city the way it is? Well, let me tell you about something called the Cold War and the Berlin Wall. How did that happen? Okay, well then here’s World War II. How did that happen? History is most interesting backwards because you can understand how people got ensconced in the positions they are today, and then it’s relevant. You have a contemporary hook.
You have some aspect of life experience in which to stick new knowledge, right? I hook everything I learn to a purpose. For example, how best to run an organization.
Well, the philosophy of the ancients actually does have something to say about managing people. Aspects of human nature have not changed in thousands of years, and it’s worth knowing what the great classic liberal arts curriculum has to say about that. From a very pragmatic perspective, you get to apply philosophy.
Consider the founders of the United States. They had to learn all this philosophy and history because they were actually building a political system. They learned from hundreds of millions of humans who lived before them, and all those lessons went into the design of this legal system. They knew to include the first amendment, because they saw the result when previous governments restricted speech. They saw this failure mode happen many times before. That’s applied history.
On a small scale that’s what building a company is. You’re building a set of rules that scale the CEO and other executives. Those rules are like laws, but internal to the company. There are penalties for breaking them and rewards for following them. This is like running a small city or even a large city depending on how big the company gets.
*Note: This is a bonus section from The Anthology of Balaji, which was edited out of the final published version. Enjoy this section and join the email list for updates, new material, and upcoming products.
