One needs an order of magnitude more than that over a lifetime to be secure while not compromising one’s interactions with society.
I’m confused by this. Isn’t compromising one’s interactions with society the point?
That is, suppose most costs are rent-seeking. If you want your startup to do something in the Bay, you have to pay Bay Area landlords about half of your investment capital (through rent and increased salaries). But why does your startup have to do something in the Bay? Because marketing, both to customers and future investors, and employees who want to be able to jump between companies, and various other things.
If you instead want to deliberately avoid marketing / mazes, why not do it in rural Pennsylvania? The rents are low, there.
Like, it seems to me the thing you’re suggesting is something like an Amish community, but with something more healthy than God at the center. And that suggests you should do something more like what the Amish do, and less like staying in NYC, where if you don’t have ~$10M in the bank or in expected future compensation you’re not going to be financially secure while purchasing all the markers of being in the professional class. Like, why pay more for a house in a ‘good’ school district when you’re just going to unschool your kids anyway?
Freeing a select group to do things without regard to such concerns, and people knowing they have the option to join this group, would be a major cultural change. Ideally this would then become the ‘city on a hill’ that shows what is possible, and gets emulated elsewhere.
I think the history of the Thiel Fellowship should be interesting, in this regard. My sense is that it tried to do this, couldn’t find the people for it, and then pivoted to just be another way to perform well in the broader maze.
The point is to compromise one’s interactions with society in the sense that you want to change what they are. But in this frame, the idea is that your interactions were previously being compromised by the worry that some day you may need to extract money from society / mazes, and this seeks to prevent that.
Consider the Thiel fellowship. Yes, it helps people get their start, but their orders are to go out into the world and start a normal business and raise money the normal way. It’s better than letting those people go to college, so yay fellowship, but it’s totally not this thing. It was a way to let kids who knew that college was a trap skip college. Or at least, that’s my understanding.
Thiel literally proposed funding me in the full stack way at a meeting—not personally for life, but for a proposed company, which was going to be biotech-related so it was much closer to normal procedure. He got the logic. But when he came back to his social situation he couldn’t follow through. Biotech has to work this way for companies because of hold-up problems and dependencies, you agree on the later rounds in advance with criteria for unlocking them. It’s not the full full stack, but it’s the core idea that you need to be secure from concerns that would bury the real operation if you had to worry about them.
Creating a new entire community in a new location makes perfect sense, and is one good way to consider implementation.
I’m confused by this. Isn’t compromising one’s interactions with society the point?
That is, suppose most costs are rent-seeking. If you want your startup to do something in the Bay, you have to pay Bay Area landlords about half of your investment capital (through rent and increased salaries). But why does your startup have to do something in the Bay? Because marketing, both to customers and future investors, and employees who want to be able to jump between companies, and various other things.
If you instead want to deliberately avoid marketing / mazes, why not do it in rural Pennsylvania? The rents are low, there.
Like, it seems to me the thing you’re suggesting is something like an Amish community, but with something more healthy than God at the center. And that suggests you should do something more like what the Amish do, and less like staying in NYC, where if you don’t have ~$10M in the bank or in expected future compensation you’re not going to be financially secure while purchasing all the markers of being in the professional class. Like, why pay more for a house in a ‘good’ school district when you’re just going to unschool your kids anyway?
I think the history of the Thiel Fellowship should be interesting, in this regard. My sense is that it tried to do this, couldn’t find the people for it, and then pivoted to just be another way to perform well in the broader maze.
The point is to compromise one’s interactions with society in the sense that you want to change what they are. But in this frame, the idea is that your interactions were previously being compromised by the worry that some day you may need to extract money from society / mazes, and this seeks to prevent that.
Consider the Thiel fellowship. Yes, it helps people get their start, but their orders are to go out into the world and start a normal business and raise money the normal way. It’s better than letting those people go to college, so yay fellowship, but it’s totally not this thing. It was a way to let kids who knew that college was a trap skip college. Or at least, that’s my understanding.
Thiel literally proposed funding me in the full stack way at a meeting—not personally for life, but for a proposed company, which was going to be biotech-related so it was much closer to normal procedure. He got the logic. But when he came back to his social situation he couldn’t follow through. Biotech has to work this way for companies because of hold-up problems and dependencies, you agree on the later rounds in advance with criteria for unlocking them. It’s not the full full stack, but it’s the core idea that you need to be secure from concerns that would bury the real operation if you had to worry about them.
Creating a new entire community in a new location makes perfect sense, and is one good way to consider implementation.