LSANKAR

I grew up around achievers.

I went to a prep school in NY, followed by a well regarded technology university and spent my early career drifting in and out of (what many would consider) 'tech elite' social and professional circles in San Francisco (nowadays I consider myself more an inhabitant of the 'crypto' world than the 'tech' world).

Within these highly competitive, ambitious environments, I've found people to mostly be driven by one of two things: curiosity and legibility to others.

Let's call those achievers that are focused on legibility legis and those that focused on curiosity curis.

Legis

legis act on the desire that their choices and successes are legible to others. They pursue excellence that is easy to understand. They like brand names and strict categorization of the parts of their lives. Life may be distributed among (for example): work, family, leisure, and philanthropy, with appropriate brand name companies/schools/vacation-destinations/nonprofits involved in each. legis will place effort in making sure it's easy and impressive to describe the shape of their life at a cocktail party.

Seeking legibility is a great strategy for success because a legible life grants status in professional and social groups. The more broadly acceptable your 'success' is, the easier it is to become a dominant player in a new group.

The downside of being a legi is lack of depth. The person who seeks to be legible is disincentivized from going to places that noone else has been before (and are thus hard to describe). They're unlikely to make new connections or discoveries. They'll seem 'great' at the things they pursue, but never 'visionary'.

In the terminology of Thomas Kuhn, legis reinforce paradigms.

legis strive to make career choices that 'make sense'. They want to be sure that the path that they're taking is easy to parse and reason about by others. If a legi has done A and B in the past and is considering an option C, he or she will place more weight on candidates for C that clearly combine the outputs of A and B as would be perceived by others.

legis sometimes live in contradictions. A legi I know of gets genuinely excited to speak about his philanthropic efforts at social gatherings but is known in private relationships to be discompassionate and cruel. There would seem to be a contradiction there: how can one be passionate about compassion in one area while being completely discompassionate in another? One is legible and the other is not. I suspect that the contradiction hasn't even entered this person's mind.

Curis

curis are driven by internal desires. They want to be smarter, to understand the world better, or to change the world to align with their principles. Often, the life and career of a curi is hard to parse; 'legi categories' like work, family, leisure, and philanthropy may be served by an intersecting set of activities and initiatives. For example, parts of a curi's work might also be play and other parts may be philanthropic. Furthermore, because curis don't necessarily spend effort on being legible, their careers may look flighty or fickle to a legi. A connection discovered by a curi might not appear as such to the rest of society yet.

The downside of being a curi is a lower average rate of societal success. Because curis may remain completely illegible, their discoveries may remain undiscovered by others. They may also end up devoting time to things that no one else will ever care about. curis thus run a higher risk of dying poor.

Furthermore, because they're frequently not legible, many curis don't get to join the elitist groups where the successful legis hang out. This is a real downside. From personal experience, if I hadn't been lucky to be legible enough to attend great schools as a child, I likely wouldn't have had access to all of the ideas and people that make my life today so fulfilling and interesting.

Of course, there's also massive upside- curis are the ones who end up visionaries. The ones who find connections that conventional wisdom skims over and dig more deeply into ideas than is required by society. Re-invoking Thomas Kuhn, they have the potential discover and promote new paradigms. Frequently they're the early adopters of the next big thing because they're willing to look past the fact that it's not universally legible.

Even if they don't do anything that legis would agree is 'great', curis tend to live lives of considerably more personal harmony. Because they aren't as affected by tribal desires to increase legibility, they are free to act in accordance with their own selves.

Generally, curis live with more singularity of purpose.

When a legi meets a curi

You might say that it's not entirely fair to split all achievers down the middle like this. Surely there are many who exist on a more nuanced point on the legibility<--->curiosity spectrum.

In reality, I think the most 'elite' groups really do consist of just legis and curis. legis end up there because being a part of that elite group is what they'd been driving towards all along. They get there by choice. curis, on the other hand, end up there more by chance. Because they dig where no one else is digging, they sometimes find shortcuts to massive success (as ordained by legis).

It's hard to end up in the 'best' communities unless you're either focused on getting there or your curiosity has lead you somewhere completely novel.

The legis enjoy spending time with each other. Generally, their conversation is about people and events. They like to talk about things that happened to them that can raise their relative status among other legis. Time spent with a famous person or the details of a meal at a fancy restaurant. They also use their time together to search for what legible thing they should be spending time on next. Which politician to publicly support or which group to join. Ultimately, conversation is focused on demonstrating legible success and discovering what other legis care about. There's a connection between legi conversation and the posturetalk of the clueless in Venkatesh Rao's 'The Gervais Principle'.

The curis enjoy spending time with each other as well. They're usually more interested in discussing ideas than people or events. They like investigating the 'cool', the 'weird', and the futuristic. Sometimes their conversations can be self-indulgent and divorced from reality. curis are the power-posters in niche subreddits. The things they're passionate about often seem pointless.

Sometimes legis enjoy spending time with curis. If a curi has achieved legible success, legis will want in on the magic. They'll want to know how they can reproduce the curi's path. curi paths sometimes lead them through a Third Door and legis will want to know how to harness the same shortcuts.

On the other hand, curis don't usually enjoy spending time with legis. Sometimes the power legis have can be leveraged for a curi's wants, but normal legi conversation doesn't interest curis. curis would rather push on ideas than engage in posture talk. Status games are boring to curis.

So what?

Sadly, I don't have a pithy conclusion to make here. I just find the language of legis and curis to be particularly apt at describing many of the people in my life. Maybe, if you have a similar life to mine, it'll be apt for you too.

I started writing this essay to better examine why a recent conversation with an old legi friend was so boring to me. As you may have guessed, I lean curi.