Chapter 4 of the JBP series. Unless noted otherwise quotes are from Jordan B. Peterson. The series continues. If you’ve not yet read parts one through three, you can find them here. The fourth chapter of Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life” is titled, “Compare Yourself To Who You Were Yesterday, Not To Who Someone Else Is Today.” The basic premise is that life is not easy and in order to find contentment and fulfillment, one must make progress. Comparing oneself to others, particularly in a globally interconnected world, may not be the healthiest way to do so because you are always stacking the deck against yourself. It makes internal, self-negotiation more difficult and as such, you are inclined to make poorer decisions. Peterson makes clear that value judgments are at the center of all decision-making and that what we aim at, how we negotiate with ourselves and the degree to which we value the future are all critical to the quality of life we ultimately live. I highly recommend reading the entire book of course, and this chapter in particular, if you’re working on yourself. So… how is this related to Bitcoin? The answer in this essay might seem trite, but when I read this chapter, two ideas that came to mind right away: 1. “Bitcoin is self-love.” 2. Bitcoin makes you a better person. A few people have discussed variations of these, including AmericanHODL, and they’re themes I’d like to explore in this two-part chapter of the series, alongside: Time preference. Self-respect. Excellence. Value judgements/evaluation. Behavior. Personality. Maturity. Human action. As usual, we’ll do this by pulling threads and ideas from JBP’s book and expanding on them through a Bitcoin lens, and we’ll likewise take Bitcoin-centric ideas and explore those through a JBP lens. Let’s begin. VALUE, DECISIONS AND ACTION All action is preceded consciously or subconsciously by a series of value judgements. In order to act better, and to forge yourself into a better human you must continually make more accurate and realistic value judgements. You receive feedback from the system you’re impacting or the environment you’re operating within and you then adjust or adapt (i.e., make new value judgements) before you then take subsequent action. Rinse and repeat. All systems, micro or macro, work like this. Those that are stable and effective have high-fidelity information transmission media embedded within them. Those that fail or disintegrate do so because information either cannot flow, has all become noise or the feedback loops are short-circuited. Standards of better or worse are not illusory or unnecessary. If you hadn’t decided that what you are doing right now was better than the alternatives, you wouldn’t be doing it. The idea of a value-free choice is a contradiction in terms. Value judgments are a precondition for action. How we treat the feedback from the system and what we do with that information, whether from perceived failure or success, can over time become a standard. A standard is an abstract rule or Lindy-compatible guideline that emerges through experimentation and iteration. Good standards will enhance feedback loops and make a system more efficient, but there is a price (failure/correction). Poor or no standards might feel more inclusive, but over time means entropy and dissolution. Macro obsolescence is a higher price to pay than micro failures and corrections. Failure is the price we pay for standards and, because mediocrity has consequences both real and harsh, standards are necessary. We are not equal in ability or outcome, and never will be. In a world infected by fiat, where notions of correction, feedback and truth are daily being stripped away, where the scorecard of life is a series of meaningless digits conjured up by bureaucrats and standards are “oppressions of the patriarchy,” how is the individual capable of calculating their own worth, whether relative to themselves yesterday or their peers on a regular basis? While it’s not impossible (yet), relative value and worth are certainly difficult to measure and extraordinarily inaccurate. Not only are we wrong, but we are wrong about what we’re wrong about, so we find it hard to correct. Correction is important because as the word implies, it is the process of making “correct” that which is currently not, whether that be a judgment of value, a behavior or action. This requires honesty and a recognition of error! How can you actually know if you’re making better decisions if you either refuse to admit error or are fundamentally unable to? How can you correct something when your measuring stick is broken? You might think what you’re doing is aligned with your highest good, but in reality you’re likely doing damage. Modernity abounds with blind men building structures with broken tools. In fact, the best way to think about the difference between a Bitcoin standard and a fiat standard is the following analogy: “The Blind Man discovers sight: A fiat economy is like a series of blind men building a house with an elastic tape measure, and broken tools. Bitcoin is like eyesight and a fixed, high-quality tape measure was given to the men building that house. The two houses are a universe apart in structural integrity, practicality, resource usage and beauty.” — Bitcoin Fable by Svetski Fiat blinds, and absolute fiat blinds absolutely. Not only is the value we ascribe to things all wrong, but the structures that emerge and the incentives that support them are all distorted and deformed. What starts out blurry one day (if not kept in check) becomes blind. RELATIVE VALUE All value is relative, of course. The Austrians, and in fact praxeological evidence and observation of humans of all walks of life, have proven without a doubt that the subjective theory of value is not just a “theory.” It’s applicable not only to how we value the things and stuff around us, but to how we value ourselves, our actions, our status in the world and all of the same in relation to other human beings. These