Know Your Values

Most decisions aren’t hard because the options are unclear. They’re hard because you don’t know what you actually value.

I wrote a personal constitution to fix that. It’s a document that captures how I want to operate. The values I want to make decisions from, written down precisely enough to be useful. Not an inspiration poster. A reference.

The practical version: when I’m working through a hard choice, I can check my reasoning against it. When I’m prompting an LLM to pressure-test a position, I give it the constitution as context. The model knows what I’m optimizing for. I know when its output conflicts with something I actually care about.

Writing forces clarity that thinking doesn’t. A value you can’t articulate isn’t a value. It’s a vague preference. The act of writing the constitution showed me which of my beliefs were solid and which were soft. That’s the real return on the exercise.

I update it when something changes. The values didn’t solidify on their own. Writing them down is what made them real.