- "The habits that prevent us from starting for fear of making something lame ... are not very deeply rooted."
- "In the past we didn't need customs for dealing with new ideas, because there were very few new ideas."
On being dismissed by others
- "We don't have enough experience with early versions of ambitious projects to know how to respond to them".
- People dismiss new ideas because of zero-sum status psychology - "They worry that if you succeed, it will put you above them."
- The right way to deal with new ideas is to switch polarity, from listing the reasons they won't work to trying to think of ways it could."
- Silicon Valley is the exception in this regard - people have learned how dangerous it is to dismiss something that looks like a toy.
- In the Valley, the psychology was closer to "A rising tide lifts all boats.", and has since become a force of habit.
- "Silicon Valley shows that dismissing new ideas is not so deeply rooted that it can't be unlearnt."
On dismissing your own ideas
- Judging your own work too harshly will kill it too. Learning how to ignore that is a key skill.
- Some strategies for this:
- Being overconfident, even temporarily, can allow you to reach escape velocity - "if you look at something that's 20% of the way to a goal worth 100 and conclude that it's 10% of the way to a goal worth 200, your estimate of its expected value is correct even though both components are wrong."
- Surrounding yourself with the right people. - "The people best able to do this are those working on similar projects of their own, which is why university departments and research labs work so well."
- Discipline may work, but is the least reliable.
- "Focus less on where you are and more on the rate of change."
- Change the frame of a new project - "Start a new piece of software saying that it's just a quick hack"
- Use your curiosity - tell yourself you're trying things "just to see how they'll turn out".
- Study the history of people who've done great work.
Other quotes
- Realize that our attitudes toward early work are themselves early work.
- This is smart and unintuitive -> "in a field where the new ideas are risky those who dismiss them are more likely to be right. Just not when their predictions are weighted by outcome."
- I like this -> "Good work is not done by "humble" men. It is one of the first duties of a professor to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his importance in it."
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over 3 years ago
- Not an article about blockchain or cryptocurrencies, but its central point makes a strong argument in favour of both. While blockchain detractors point out its non-suitability for doing old things better, they miss the new things blockchains can unlock.
- New technologies enable activities that fall into one of two categories:
- 1) Doing things you could already do but can now do better because they are faster, cheaper, easier, higher quality, etc.
- 2) Doing brand new things that you simply couldn’t do before
- "The early electrical grid delivered light better than gas and candles. It took decades before we got an electricity “app store” — a rich ecosystem of appliances that connected to the grid"
- "When evaluating the potential of blockchains, people sometimes focus on things like cheaper and faster global payments" - these are in the "doing old things better" category. They don't consider the crypto-native category, such as "services that are owned and operated by their users", among others.
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- "We’ve spent 40 years wandering in the desert, and we think that it’s an enchanted forest. If we’re to find a way out of this desert and into the future, the first step is to see that we’ve been in a desert."
- We've had this narrow cone of progress around the world of bits—around software & IT — but not atoms.
- Economic growth is the only thing sustaining the planet. Without it, we go into a malthusian war.
- Since the 1970s, the rate of economic growth has declined. Thiel's arguement: too much horizontal progress, at the expense of true innovation, or vertical progress
- Horizontal progress: Taking the typewriter and copying it all over the world. Vertical progress: turning the typewriter into a word processor (Zero to One).
- Thiel thinks 1. Over Regulation in the world of atoms, and 2. Culture are to blame.
- 3 Possible frontiers to innovate: Cyberspace, Outerspace, Seasteading.
- Asides/Other Signals
- Tech portrayed as dystopian in pretty much all movies.
- People are making money betting against progress. For example, Warren Buffet’s single best investment is in the railroad industry
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over 3 years ago