Give Me A Place To Stand
Give me a place on which to stand, and I will move the Earth.
History is littered with individuals making outside the box statements on the edge of what their contemporaries considered rational.
Personally, my first thought process is always where are they coming from to make such statements, the know-how build up and developed confidence to speak with that kind of certainty.
Bold statements without a foundation are just noise. When someone has done the deep work, followed the logic all the way to its most extreme conclusion and still found it holds, that's a different thing entirely.
There's a long line of the same type of statements that have now proven to be incorrect, though at that time folks believe it was the truth. For example, Earth located at the center of the universe and the flatness of the world beyond the horizon. People didn't believe these things out of stupidity, the available framework at the time made them reasonable.
Good update thanks to the forceful hand of change. Can you imagine still believing that we are at the center of the universe around which everything moves? It seems laughable now, but that belief directed entire civilizations.
And now, I wonder what ideas we believe now to be true that future generations will look back on with the same disbelief we reserve for flat earth maps.
Physics of leverage
Unchanging principles that have existed for centuries are intriguing for me to look closely as a way for building more foundational knowledge of the world. Ideas that survive that long have been tested by time, stress, contradiction, revolution etc. and something in them held. There's strong comfort in knowing that beneath the noise of trends and disruption, certain structures of reality stay put.
Leverage is one of those words that is subjectively popular to me nowadays. A good tool to know how to use across different domains against the backdrop of a world where traditional effort is getting more divorced from expected outcome proportional to effort.
The statement on the top is from Archimedes, a ancient Greek mathematician and inventor born around 287 BC, said about mechanical advantage, which I think is a subset of leverage at large.
Mechanical advantage is basically the mathematics behind why a lever works. On a given rigid bar pivoting around a fixed support, the same effort produces vastly different results depending on its position, so what matters really isn't just the force you apply, but where you apply it relative to the fulcrum, which is that fixed support point or the thing that stays still so everything else can move.
For example, a small weight placed far enough from the fulcrum balances a much heavier weight sitting close to it. The product of weight and distance is what nature responds to, i.e double the distance, halve the force required. Extend the distance far enough, and theoretically, no load is too great to lift.
Hence, the saying I will move the Earth when given a place on which to stand. However, in terms of executing that in practice, the only missing variable is a long enough lever and somewhere outside the Earth to stand and pull it off.
Surrounded by levers
On a serious note, it goes back to how one can look at effort, specifically to restructure how the work is expressed.
We are surrounded by levers, many of which we don't fully recognize as such or have the know how to actively utilise. Capital is a lever. Money, deployed well, compounds and produces returns that no equivalent hours of labor could generate.
Knowledge is another lever. Having understanding of a domain deeply enough means one insight can unlock decisions worth far more than the time it took to acquire it. Coupled with the right relationship, in the right context, can open doors that years of direct effort couldn't.
The sort of superficial first reaction conclusion is having a shortcut to fast track much of the boring needful work from point A to Z. This may work in the short term, but mid to long term, one will inevitably revert back to
baseline without sufficient understanding of the underlying principles.
I think in some sense, the shift happening in the world right now is essentially a shift in which levers are available and how accessible they are.
Effort is not THE variable
Coming back to traditional effort, i.e showing up, working hard, putting in hours, etc. used to be the primary mechanism of advancement. It still matters as a foundational work, but it is increasingly insufficient on its own.
The people moving disproportionate weight are not necessarily working harder. They have found better fulcrums(pivot positions) and understand that the insight is where you are standing when you apply force as opposed to how much force you can generate.
Archimedes didn't need to move the Earth. He just had to understand the principle well enough to know that he could. That confidence coming from following logic to its conclusion is itself a form of leverage.
One will still have to do the work first, and then apply the lever.
Now, I need to continue with finding where I ought to stand in order to move my own Earth.
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