QUANTIFYING UNIQUENESS
In “Zero to One”, Peter Thiel popularized the idea that every great startup is predicated on a secret. Since the technology industry is an efficient marketplace of ideas, secrets upon which great companies are built are hard to unravel. The most effective practices disseminate rapidly across individuals and firms, making it rather difficult to build a moat and produce an alpha. The process bears a close resemblance to a Red Queen’s race, where participants must constantly adapt in order to survive while pitted against ever-evolving opposing organisms in a constantly changing environment.
As a result, one must cultivate an aversion to ideological bundling and instead employ reasoning from first principles. At the same time, one must acknowledge that the great majority of heretical thinkers are wrong and naively treating contrarianism as a litmus test for analytical rigor is intellectual indolence. Rejection of popular opinion is, in itself, a poor substitute for original thought. The question is not whether one holds a contrary position against the majority, but whether they exercise independent thinking as opposed to acquiring their opinions in bulk. In “The Two Kinds of Moderate”, Paul Graham describes the two distinct ways to be politically moderate: on purpose and by accident.
Intentional moderates are trimmers, deliberately choosing a position mid-way between the extremes of right and left. Accidental moderates end up in the middle, on average, because they make up their own minds about each question, and the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong.
It can be useful to have the ability to assess how idiosyncratic one’s set of beliefs is. While original thought cannot serve as a proxy for truth, it could serve as a proxy for intellectual rigor. In this post, I propose the uniqueness quotient, a metric that can be used to evaluate the uniqueness of a set of beliefs.
What does “unique” mean?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “unique” as “being the only one of its kind; unlike anything else.” While it is impossible to probe into the minds of every living person to conclude whether a belief system is singular, one can certainly measure the ideological distance between a set of beliefs in a particular domain and prominent schools of thought in that domain. In other words, the more closely one’s opinions resemble the perspective of a group of people who share common characteristics of opinion, the less unique their set of beliefs is. For example, if one’s opinion on abortions can be inferred from their opinions on taxation and firearms laws, their opinions are, in a sense, not their own. However, if their opinions do not cleanly follow political party lines, they are, in a sense, more unique.
Uniqueness Quotient
The uniqueness quotient of a set of beliefs is the least number of bits necessary to describe that set. The less unique one’s opinions are, the easier it is to express them succinctly. To return to the example of an individual whose opinions exclusively follow political party lines, one can express their set of beliefs with a single bit: party affiliation. However, if one’s set of beliefs does not closely resemble the opinions of a social group, be it defined in terms of geography, age, ethnicity, religion, or socioeconomic status, then one can only express their set of beliefs using several bits. For example, if one advocates for high taxes, lenient gun sales laws, and universal basic income, their set of beliefs cannot be expressed using a single bit indicating membership of a typical social group. Taken to the logical extreme, a belief system expressing the highest degree of intellectual independence would be one where a set of “n” beliefs must be represented using “n” distinct bits. However, one must note that such a set might not manifest in the real world, for it is more likely to be laden with contradictions without any regard for tradeoffs.