Tyler Cowen links to his conversation with Peter Thiel. I listened to the YouTube version.
If there is one constant theme, it is Thiel’s support for nonconformity or contrarianism. If you start a business, try to make it so original that it is a monopoly. If you want to start a non-profit, make it for an unpopular cause. Try to value substance over status, meaning you worry about being true to yourself, not about obtaining broad approval and support. The independent truth-seeking scientist is the opposite of the popular truth-bending politician.
Still, he wants contrarians, not misanthropes. Contrarians who can work in teams. I would add, and I imagine he would agree, that contrarians need to be particularly selective about who they team up with.
I really enjoyed Cowen’s interview with Peter. Tyler seems to be the one guy on the right who has widespread acceptance as a legitimate intellectual so I think the possibilities are pretty significant for his interviews to have a broad impact.
As for Thiel himself, I think his advice of trying to find one thing you can do that’s 10x better than anyone else as the way to start a business has been the most useful for me.
It’s hard to take seriously the idea of a contrarian non-conformist who hobnobs with venture capitalists.
Why?
Because non-conformists are weirdos, rejects and dropouts. Not buttoned up types swimming in money.
Using common wisdom stereotypes while being wrong is not in the desirable quadrant of the punnet square, particularly when the whole argument is that the best venture capitalists would be contrarians.
Contrarianism can be dangerous, as PT’s hedge fund investors learned. Maybe his next book will be about his hedge fund experience. “One to Zero” might be a good title.
I tend to think of being right determining the sign and the contraryanness determining the magnitude.
Thiel is so provocative and upsetting to the status quo that he led this “gathering of 150 global leaders to discuss how to change the world”: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2015/03/dialog-2015.html
Not to simply bash Thiel, but the leftists snarking on so-called “disruptive” libertarian types who are simply global capitalism boosters – i.e. advocates of the status quo – has some merit.
Nobody cares about leftists much less what they could possibly think they could snark about.
Well I’m certain you don’t, anyway.
I do WAY more than the average bear.
Give me anyones political “Turing test”against anyone you could get to show up. I’d bet on me If I were you.
His comments about globalization and Japan were the most interesting, or perhaps surprising – I wasnt expecting that from him. The religious metaphor stuff was interesting though ultimately seemed hollow in that TC kind of way. He didnt have an answer for ZMP workers, he is human after all, but it would have been pretty cool if he simply uttered the magic words. I am fighting the urge to say something cynical about non profits….The candidate idea for most likely wrong would probably be regulation as primary cause of the innovation gap between atoms and bits. I am sure he knows something I dont but given that humans have been innovating in one space for several orders of magnitude longer I think it would require extraordinary evidence to reject the low hanging fruit hypo.
Your last point seems plausible…except that manipulation of atoms also benefits from miniaturization and electricity and electronics have also been around for a while. So the low hanging fruit balance may not be quite so tilted.
He gives the example of “innovator flow” from nuclear engineering to software engineering. This example can be used both ways of course, but nuclear power is pretty low hanging (particularly in the sense that there is no feasible alternative for energy sources and no possible alternative for energy needs) basically regulated out of existence.
Let me give an example. In my line of work (~medical devices), if something is FDA approved, you start an innovation with that thing even if it is clearly not the best choice. Software doesn’t have this constraint, and it isn’t really because medicine requires marginal improvement for actual engineering conservatism because superior non-FDA approved products are widely known.