persistence

Things change.

Without change, there would be no difference between states. Without difference, nothing meaningfully exists. Time itself is just another word for difference - each moment is distinct from the last.

When things change, some persist and others don’t.

A rock endures through many states; a soap bubble vanishes. This persistence creates what Bennett calls the “cosmic ought” - the universe inherently selects for self-preserving structures. This foundational normativity cascades upward through all levels of organization.

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The Cosmic Ought

The universe preserves things that preserve themselves. This isn’t conscious selection - it’s simply that things that don’t preserve themselves aren’t around anymore. This creates a fundamental normativity: some things ought to exist (because they persist), others don’t.

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Peristance / Obstinacy as a personality trait (TLDR of https://paulgraham.com/persistence.html)

Persistent people: Like boats with unstoppable engines but steerable rudders - they’re attached to the goal, not specific methods; listen to criticism with predatory intensity.
Obstinate people: Like boats with stuck rudders - they’re attached to their (often initial) ideas about how to reach goals; eyes glaze over when you point out problems; they respond like ideologues defending doctrine.

[Persistence] seems a bit like obstinacy in the sense that it causes you not to give up. But the way you don’t give up is completely different. Instead of merely resisting change, you’re driven toward a goal by energy and resilience, through paths discovered by imagination and optimized by judgement. You’ll give way on any point low down in the decision tree, if its expected value drops sufficiently, but energy and resilience keep pushing you toward whatever you chose higher up.

Why does obstinacy exist? It’s a primitive, reflexive resistance to change. It works for simple problems but fails as complexity increases.

This is not identical with stupidity, but they’re closely related. A reflexive resistance to changing one’s ideas becomes a sort of induced stupidity as contrary evidence mounts. And obstinacy is a form of not giving up that’s easily practiced by the stupid. You don’t have to consider complicated tradeoffs; you just dig in your heels. It even works, up to a point.
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The optimal amount of obstinacy is not zero. It can be good if your initial reaction to a setback is an unthinking “I won’t give up,” because this helps prevent panic. But unthinking only gets you so far. The further someone is toward the obstinate end of the continuum, the less likely they are to succeed in solving hard problems.

Considering what it’s made of, it’s not surprising that the right kind of stubbornness is so much rarer than the wrong kind, or that it gets so much better results. Anyone can do obstinacy. Indeed, kids and drunks and fools are best at it. Whereas very few people have enough of all five of the qualities that produce the right kind of stubbornness, but when they do the results are magical.