First Philosophy, Then Build

Why should you undertake this? (We cannot evade this question.)

Source: Sarbajit Sen

Every builder’s first duty is philosophical: to decide what they should build for.
This duty has largely been forgotten.
—Cosmos Institute

“What if we set aside all of the philosophy and just looked at government as an industry?” said investor Patri Friedman in a talk to a group of innovators. This had come on the heels of my having given a talk rife with philosophical priors.

I get the analysis, though.

Ventures—even governance experiments like SEZs—must operate with a view to performance. Politicians tend to be wastrels. And philosophers tend not to be builders at all, so they too often dream up impracticable theories. (The Chief and the Priest are distinct archetypes, after all.)

Yet pointing this out doesn’t mean builders should abandon any philosophical North Star. Successful ventures and societies have philosophical priors that animate them.

That should be factored into the analysis.

As the

Cosmos Institute

writes,

Silicon Valley once understood it—Jobs and Wozniak asked what kind of creative life personal computers should enable; ARPANET's pioneers envisioned what kind of connected society networks should foster. They translated their philosophies into code.

But as tech matured from impact into industry, as venture capital transformed from a “machine for manufacturing courage” into a machine for manufacturing unicorns, builders have increasingly outsourced this duty to metrics, markets, and momentum.

In short, technology's success has severed it from philosophy: the inquiry about the human good and how to achieve it.

Amen.

I have always held that the inordinately left-brained Bitcoin Whitepaper is a moral document, which means it’s dripping with philosophical assumptions.

Why Should You Build?

We cannot evade this question. Yet it is a moral question.

Even builders who operate in a philosophical null set are bundling in a set of priors.

Without philosophical reflection, builders adopt the default answers of their social circles. Or they defer to what’s easy or promises riches: Customer surveys, tribal consensus, or existing technical frameworks that subtly shape their worldviews.

By falling in line behind the latest fashions, they outsource the important bases of principled entrepreneurship. They treat the age-old question of how we are to live as a “computational problem, Bayesianism as a theory of everything, and thermodynamics as destiny,” writes the Cosmos Institute.

“Each framework glosses over reflection on the human good. Technologists rarely ask whether they’re steering us toward futures worth wanting.”

So, Patri Friedman is not wrong. But profit motive and performance analysis only take us so far. We must never set aside our deeper purpose.

Then, and only then…