(Replying to lionhearted, who previously asked what parts felt insightful to me personally.)
Some thoughts:
The part on excitement vs nihilism is the part that I’ve come back to the mosts, in the context of false narratives about growth. It helps me focus on moving things forward rather spending time on than local political disputes. I’ve brought this up to other people when I feel like the political action they’re taking is trying to beat people over the head with a sign that says “actually, things are bad”, when I know that they have the skills and taste to be working directly on making good things (but aren’t doing so).
The stories about academia, and the sections from stories about education about conformity and malthus, felt like someone else re-deriving the same theorems as me, and it was exciting to see how they did it.
The specific story that says growth stopped in 1973, and that our dysfunction comes from that plus lying about that, is interesting and one I want to think about more for myself. I don’t know what I think about it yet. The focus on violence as the key force being balanced felt like a potential deep insight.
I really like the name ‘distraction theory’, it helps me notice large classes of things that are optimised to take up my time and attention and make me avoid looking at the real things.
The bit describing the shock of being a libertarian and then realising you’re so radically imitative and copy everyone around you, then trying to balance those two ideas, is really interesting, and I’ll probably think about that a lot more.
The section about whether scientific progress can be a motivating story for society felt a bit like a punch to the gut. I don’t think it’s as bad news as it felt like when I read it, but it definitely shocked me to consider the idea that scientific progress can only be a strong social narrative when it’s being used to crush your enemies.
I also feel like I absorbed some hard-to-describe social tools for thinking for yourself, even while you feel your narrative is being silenced in a great deal of public discourse.
The main reason I made the transcript was not any one of the specific points above, I was just surprised to find lots of new parts of Thiel’s worldview that I’ve not heard before, and felt it would be better if it could be engaged by in the public discourse, so that any valuable ideas can be mined. Rule Thinkers In, Not Out, etc.
(Replying to lionhearted, who previously asked what parts felt insightful to me personally.)
Some thoughts:
The part on excitement vs nihilism is the part that I’ve come back to the mosts, in the context of false narratives about growth. It helps me focus on moving things forward rather spending time on than local political disputes. I’ve brought this up to other people when I feel like the political action they’re taking is trying to beat people over the head with a sign that says “actually, things are bad”, when I know that they have the skills and taste to be working directly on making good things (but aren’t doing so).
The stories about academia, and the sections from stories about education about conformity and malthus, felt like someone else re-deriving the same theorems as me, and it was exciting to see how they did it.
The specific story that says growth stopped in 1973, and that our dysfunction comes from that plus lying about that, is interesting and one I want to think about more for myself. I don’t know what I think about it yet. The focus on violence as the key force being balanced felt like a potential deep insight.
I really like the name ‘distraction theory’, it helps me notice large classes of things that are optimised to take up my time and attention and make me avoid looking at the real things.
The bit describing the shock of being a libertarian and then realising you’re so radically imitative and copy everyone around you, then trying to balance those two ideas, is really interesting, and I’ll probably think about that a lot more.
The section about whether scientific progress can be a motivating story for society felt a bit like a punch to the gut. I don’t think it’s as bad news as it felt like when I read it, but it definitely shocked me to consider the idea that scientific progress can only be a strong social narrative when it’s being used to crush your enemies.
I also feel like I absorbed some hard-to-describe social tools for thinking for yourself, even while you feel your narrative is being silenced in a great deal of public discourse.
The main reason I made the transcript was not any one of the specific points above, I was just surprised to find lots of new parts of Thiel’s worldview that I’ve not heard before, and felt it would be better if it could be engaged by in the public discourse, so that any valuable ideas can be mined. Rule Thinkers In, Not Out, etc.