Good principles to stand by

Collaboration. I think that collaboration and sharing are important things. I want to share a lot of things I came up with with everyone. I feel collaboration may be one of the principles relevant to my purpose on life.

Iteration. Instead of attempting to get something perfect, I'd prefer to iterate over it.  Note that iteration is not equivalent to incrementalism – I'm not claiming that every iteration will necessarily add a certain amount of value. Such a thing would imply a greedy approach and not every problem can be solved with a greedy approach.  Instead, I want to come up with something that adds value given the information I have now and given an appropriate (not large) amount of effort, and then decide whether to gather more information, put more effort, or do nothing depending on the cost and the benefits of either option.

Logic. I think we can derive a lot in our lives simply by using logic.  A logic-based approach also forces us to clearly separate our process (the rules by which we come up with conclusions) and our axioms (the fundamental concepts we believe in, which we use to build our world view, and which we can't derive from other conclusions we've come up with).

Respect for mankindThis one is tricky.  I'll need to elaborate on it soon.  In the meantime, we have to define "mankind" (we can do this by identifying what's unique to mankind... is "the sense of purpose" unique to mankind?), "respect" and the reason why it's an important thing to respect it.

EfficiencyIt's important not to confuse efficiency with being in a hurry: a lot of people rush to do things (I do as well, incidentally), but still do them inefficiently (the difference is not how much output you produce, but how much output you produce relative to your input). I get excited when I manage to plan things out so that they all fall in lockstep; one thing happens after another, like the mechanism that makes a clock tick (or a less linear version of a Rube Goldberg machine).