I don't believe in free will. An organism's actions can be attributed to its genes, experience, and environmental state. The more we learn about humans, the more this seems to be true. I developed an implicit understanding of this in elementary school.

In fifth grade, I randomly got the desire to get a PS4. This wasn't out of some internal desire to play games—or even play with my friends—but because my friends got one and I was jealous. They wanted one and got one, so I wanted one and got one (after a lot of begging).

In high school, my mimesis became self-evident. I did Boy Scouts, Taekwondo, piano, robotics, (typical stuff for someone of my background: Indian, Fremont, CA., upper-middle class) and was pretty good with minimal effort. COVID-19 hit midway into freshman year and my environment went from a large group of friends I hung out with since elementary school to one friend. To spend the time, we'd go on long runs and 25-mile bike rides from Woodside to Fremont. We'd have nothing to do but talk to each other/play on a Minecraft server and we quickly started questioning everything we were doing. Before that, I had never questioned why I was doing those things.

I quit all—Boy Scouts at the Life Scout rank, Taekwondo after getting my second-degree black belt, piano after getting halfway through ABRSM, and both robotics teams I was in even after getting to the world championships. Only that one friend quit with me. The Bay Area-CS pipeline went unquestioned and I was confused why most of my old friends were participating when it was obvious they didn't like to code. It felt like most of the lives of the high schoolers around me were predetermined.

Un(fortunately | surprisingly), that was true at Cornell too. I remember asking people in freshman year why they were majoring in X and there were three main reasons it came down to: (1) "my parents", (2) "everyone around me is doing X", and (3) "the money". I asked CS majors for their GitHub, since I expected cool side projects. "What's GitHub?" was a common response. Many pre-meds I met freshman year are now aspiring consultants. I wonder why. The vast majority of students spent more time questioning whether they would hit up Sig Nu or Phi Tau on a Friday night or what project team/club they would apply to than what degree/job they would dedicate most of their life to. And when they did question it, they would ask their parents, friends, and teachers what to do. Students that get rejected from consulting/finance clubs sometimes start their own copies and pipe into the best ones, which explains why we have millions of these clubs on campus. This hasn't changed from the 1920s, when Cornell senior literary societies saw junior/sophomore societies pop up, starting a pipeline. At least those clubs were designed to question the status quo (I think). The percent of people that genuinely think from first-principles, rounded to the nearest whole number, seems to be 0.

The truths I derived from this were:

1. Environment drives action
2. Cults (high-density talent environments) are good but rare
3. Current environments (clubs) on campus have not questioned their mission

Also:

1. The best talent at college is driven to produce nothing since working on marginal problems (e.g. search engine optimization, ad targeting, DoorDash for dogs, exchanging capital from the buy-side to the sell-side, shaving milliseconds on commodity trades, etc.) is the (perceived) highest-signal and most lucrative. Often most lucrative == (perceived) highest-signal, since "making money makes something morally right in America" as Alex Karp prophets. Risk minimization is everywhere (unsurprisingly) even though it is irrational when you write it out. But even the best econ students who learned it in freshman year would find it hard to write it down, which I would largely attribute to their environment. If all your friends are recruiting for banking, it's very hard to suddenly start reselling products on Alibaba.
2. No environment exists to brainwash the best talent to add value
3. The true "shipping" crowd at Cornell—students of any major that actually produce projects out of the joy of learning—is too sparse to have any mimetic impact. The best builders are stuck in their dorms at 1 AM coding or recording videos.
4. The entrepreneurial environments on campus are full of the usual signal-seeking crowd. Business and CS majors looking to add another line to their resume or cosplay as Zuck in The Social Network. Builders come initially and then tend to be driven away by the usual resume/VC LARP.

That was the founding ideology of Armada. Simon, Ronald, Rahul and I got together at the end of freshman winter to build something, initially just starting with us.

• Socratic Circle → Plato’s Academy → Aristotle’s Lyceum were schools that produced a lot of new thought. They were founded for discussion, questioning implicit "truths", and leveraged the dialectic.
• Niels Bohr’s Institute (1920s–30s) was small but high-density (Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, Born, Schrödinger). Everyone stayed in the same boarding houses, ate together, argued late into the night.
• Einstein's Olympia Academy was just three guys (Einstein, Michele Besso, Conrad Habicht) who read books in cafés after work in Bern and had weekly discussion sessions, arguing over the works of great philosopher-scientists.
• 1920s Paris (Joyce, Surrealists, Gertrude Stein’s salon) -- Hemingway, Picasso, Joyce, Stein, Breton, Pound, etc. ran into each other all the time and would read drafts of unpublished work, argue art movements into existence, and drink until dawn
• American Founding Fathers (Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson) were a few dozen men in rooms drafting documents, often in secret, over months in Philadelphia. There was constant personal contact and extreme debate during constitutional conventions and via the press.
• MIT Tech Model Railroad Club (1950s, 60s) had around a dozen hardcore members who hung out obsessively in the same room. They developed slang (“hack,” “foo”), and passed lore orally, leading to early computer/hacker culture.

We wanted to replicate a few distinct patterns:

1. Compressed space (cafés, taverns, clubrooms, campuses)
2. Recurring ritual (salon readings, lodge initiations, show-and-tell, shared jargon)
3. Shared raison d'être (modernism, new nation, hacker ethic, democratization, corporate idealism)
4. Output (institutions, technologies, aesthetics that reshaped history)

None of Armada was planned at this degree—I'm just piecing it together in retrospect. But the grounding philosophy and inspiration was an absolute motivator.

The compressed space was easy since we're all on campus and see each other constantly in/out of class. Our weekly build sessions have a set format with building + demos at the end and we're trying to use naval metaphors from "shipping" to "sinking." Our raison d'être is that shipping things and solving hard problems trumps yapping/dreaming about things. And our output is our individual work—from Instagram reels talking about human psychology to finding a renting tenant by just sending a text.

We didn't innovate a new niche or anything. Smart people will always come together in any environment. We are just the only ones in our spacetime (Cornell 2023-2027) to do it. Rather than advertise on Instagram or put up posters, we just invited our smartest friends that built stuff. "Game knows game" ... "builders know builders." Our friends would invite their friends, etc. We quickly hit a stable equilibrium of 30 people. Too small and you lose the best talent. Too big and yap:ship ratio explodes and nodes are not fully interconnected, leading to dislocation of the club from within.

The issue is cults degrade after their prophets die (unless eternal salvation is promised), or after their leaders graduate. At best, the ideology lives on, like Socrates' questioning and Galileo's empiricism, but the core group never stays alive. Some of the oldest (influential) clubs at Cornell are less than 30 years old even though the university was founded just after the Civil War. The oldest secret societies are shells of what they used to be. Vision entropy kills every organization with enough time.

That's why we want to murder Armada. It'll be one of the most successful four-year experiments at Cornell and never exist again. A similar organization will probably pop up a few years later by someone much smarter, but the difference is the leader would have founded it. That's the only way the spirit of Armada will survive. Sam Altman said something similar when he became the president of Y Combinator: "organizations can only survive in the long-term if each new leader re-founds the organization," essentially from scratch.

Rather than letting Armada exponentially decay and administering CPR as it dies, I'd rather kill it and fund the next person that identifies the value of this social phenomenon. Maybe we should draft an Armada code and bury it under the Arts Quad. But—unlike a religion with a distinct text that could never be replicated—the ideology that drives Armada will be painfully obvious to anyone as long as humanity survives.