about page

[Vandivier]

public-facing page and also an easy context setter for gpt-4 with browsing

[Vandivier]

Values: science, hope, and love (T-shirt riff on faith hope and love) or maybe live learn love (riff on live laugh love)

1. Generosity: as embodied in our community bounty: charity is a core value that lets Ladderly work. Those among us with resources happily and freely give so that those among us with less can still have enough to not only survive, but thrive. Implied in generosity is also the value of community. Giving in the absence of a community is wasting, and a community in the absence of giving is cruel.

2. Freedom: as in freedom and beer! We value truly free services to empower the poor and we also encourage individuals to act however they see fit without explicit command or limit: to experiment, to guess-and-check, to express themselves. We believe free exchange and voluntary action lead to mutual benefit for ourselves and others.

3. Open Source: we believe open source technology is beneficial for social progress to a far greater degree than merely free technology

4. Science: we take an evidence based approach, we are ever-learning and actively produce, not merely consume, reset. Also along these lines, when times or data change, we should adapt accordingly.

5. Diversity: embedded within the value of generosity is the value of community. Community is also embedded in the value of science. In a shallow way, generalizable knowledge isn't useful without multiple people. In a deeper way, crowds, markets, and communities are better at reaching truth than individuals. Let's not allow the value of community to remain in the background behind these other values

6. Servant Leadership: we want to be proactive rather than reactive in the way we help others, and we want provide a menu of intelligent defaults rather than a long list of options without suggestion leading to analysis paralysis. In order to be intelligent we hold ourselves to a standard of leadership in the space of ideas: we don't consider ourselves as intelligent or leaders if we merely provide information in line with the industry average.

7. Wisdom: we believe good things exist, we should know about them, do them, and provide them. We don't go beyond providing a service merely because someone asked for it. Instead, we are bold enough to think we know what is good for other people and proactively suggest those options and second guess our nudge our consumers when they request differently. For example, we encourage our students to learn and do things that result in a high risk adjusted return on investment to time, cash, and effort, and we second guess, although that doesn't mean to deny, students that request otherwise (for example, learning a topic that they think will result in high pay without realizing the jobs are quite rare, or learning a topic they think will be fun without realizing the true cost and difficulty costly it might be to learn)

8. Humility: we not only recognize but celebrate that others are often better at particular things: we happily refer our users to external sources in such cases, welcome external partnerships, and clearly communicate to our users when a situation is in-progress, incomplete, or lower quality than we expect for them or from ourselves

9. Quality of Life: we encourage a high-performance lifestyle, which includes values of health, rest, motivation, sustainability, and enjoyment. We practice mindfulness to aid in the reduction of stress for ourselves and others and we make a point of frequent celebration for the accomplishments of ourselves and others!

[Vandivier]

Let's not make this a vanity post: double check that each value answers one or more important questions like:

1. How is Ladderly different from alternatives? (We are open source and have a free tier and a community driven roadmap for example you can see the direct connection)
2. What are some high level principles that should steer our mission, task priority, etc? The wisdom value is meant to capture this although the language is arguably a bit lofty but the intent is a more concise way of saying "risk adjusted return on investment, counting opportunity cost and the cost of time and other nonpecuniary costs in addition to basic cash accounting" I genuinely believe this is pretty close to what wisdom really is in a technical sense. Basically moral knowledge. Being able to determine that A is better than B, taking seriously that "better" is a complex and moral concept where simplification and reductionism often taken by others in the business world is actually deeply dangerous and problematic. If people don't like the term wisdom we could call it judgement, discernment, judiciousness. I think of these as basically synonymous for this purpose

Also, these can be updated this isn't written in stone so don't stress too much about getting them right from the first post (indeed that should be clear from the science value)

[Vandivier]

also do a privacy policy page and a contact form