On writing a book:
Writing is an art form, books are art, but they exist in a system that relies on readers to exchange money for goods. That money pays a publisher’s rent and electric bill, and the salaries of the often hundreds if not thousands of people they employ to make the books readers buy. And if a book doesn’t make money, it’s very hard to pay those salaries. Publishers take a financial risk on a book, because no one knows how a book is going to sell until it’s on shelves, and very successful authors (your JK Rowlings and James Pattersons) help pay the bills for the less successful books. Publishers certainly publish books they know are not going to make a lot (or any) money, and they do this for the sake of art or history or prestige, or a dozen other reasons. But they can’t do it that often. So, you may have an amazing story, but if there isn’t sufficient evidence that readers will flock to it, you’re not likely to be published. No one deserves to be published just because they completed a book. It’s not “if you write it, they will come.”
On a man who turned into a woman - and of course on AI:
“The only reason he talks about this stuff is because it prevents financial analysts from asking tough questions on quarterly calls.” What we really need to worry about is AI-related labour market disruption, not just for factory workers, but for brain workers too. “I think the global professional middle class is about to be blindsided. She cites a recent competition at Columbia University between human lawyers and their artificial counterparts, in which both read a series of non-disclosure agreements with loopholes in them. “The AI found 95 per cent of them, and the humans 88 per cent,” she says. “But the human took 90 minutes to read them. The AI took 22 seconds.” Game, set and match to the robots.
On supply chains:
Leonardo Bonanni is the founder and CEO of a company called Sourcemap, which aims to help companies map their own supply chains. Bonanni suspects that companies’ inability to visualize their own supply chain is partly a function of SAP’s architecture itself. “It’s funny, because the DNA of software really speaks through,” said Bonanni. “If you look at SAP, the database is still actually written in German. The relations in it are all one-link. They never intended for supply chains to involve so many people, and to be interesting to so many parts of the company.”
This software, however imperfect, is crucial because supply chains are phenomenally complex, even for low-tech goods. A company may have a handle on the factories that manufacture finished products, but what about their suppliers? What about the suppliers’ suppliers? And what about the raw materials?
Supply chains are highly modular by design. Think of the shipping container. It wasn’t revolutionary because it was a box; it was revolutionary because it was a standardized, interchangeable box that could be locked in and transported. It makes globalization possible—it makes global scale possible—because of what it obscures. One doesn’t need to know what’s in the box, just where it needs to go.
This software, however imperfect, is crucial because supply chains are phenomenally complex, even for low-tech goods. A company may have a handle on the factories that manufacture finished products, but what about their suppliers? What about the suppliers’ suppliers? And what about the raw materials?
Supply chains are highly modular by design. Think of the shipping container. It wasn’t revolutionary because it was a box; it was revolutionary because it was a standardized, interchangeable box that could be locked in and transported. It makes globalization possible—it makes global scale possible—because of what it obscures. One doesn’t need to know what’s in the box, just where it needs to go.
Masa son:
Son capitalized on the rise of personal computing in the 1980s and bet so heavily on the dot-com boom of the 1990s that he is said to have at one point owned 25% of the Internet. He lost billions in the dot-com bust, but sinking $20 million into Alibaba in 2000 helped revive his fortune. Son is now worth about $15 billion -- and, remarkably, maintains his tremendous appetite for risk and long-term thinking. At a time when most CEOs look no further ahead than the next quarter, Son forges ahead with a 300-year plan for his company.
At the heart of his plan lies the Vision Fund, a $93 billion pool of money that Son intends to use to shape the future for centuries to come.
At the heart of his plan lies the Vision Fund, a $93 billion pool of money that Son intends to use to shape the future for centuries to come.
An interview with Peter Thiel:
The big question is: Will the future of the computer age be decentralized or centralized? Back in the 60s, you had this Star Trek idea of an IBM computer running a planet for thousands of years, where people were happy but unfree. Today, again we are thinking that it is going to be centralized: Big companies, big governments, surveillance states like China. When we started Paypal in 1999, it was exactly the opposite: This vision of a libertarian, anarchistic internet. History tells me that the pendulum has swung back and forth. So, today I would bet on decentralization and on more privacy. I don’t think we are at the end of history and it’s just going to end in the world surveillance state.
You have always been very critical of herd-like behavior. Back in 1995, you wrote a book about the “diversity myth” at universities: People are selected in order to look different, but educated to think in the same way.
Yes, diversity should be more than a group of people that look different and think alike. Intellectual diversity is the kind of diversity we should really value, not just this superficial diversity with some extras such as seen in the Space Canteen in Star Wars.
The advanced technological civilization of the early 21st century is a complicated world where it is not possible for anybody to think through everything for themselves. You cannot be a polymath in quite the way people were in the 18th century enlightenments. You cannot be like Goethe. So there is some need to listen to experts, to defer to other people. And then, there is always the danger of that going too far and people not thinking critically. This happens in spades in Silicon Valley. There is certainly something about it that made it very prone to the dotcom bubble in the nineties or to the cleantech bubble in the last decade.
You were on Donald Trump’s transition team. In which respect is he different than everybody else you’ve met before?
I think it is his extraordinary ability to understand people. If he interviewed you for a job, he would right go to the essence. In the Western world, we are behind layers and layers and layers of political correctness, where we cannot say things, we cannot make judgements about people, we cannot evaluate people, we can’t say this person is better than this person because this or this reason. If you can just cut through this political correctness, that is tremendously valuable and it is hard to understate how much it distorts things.
You have always been very critical of herd-like behavior. Back in 1995, you wrote a book about the “diversity myth” at universities: People are selected in order to look different, but educated to think in the same way.
Yes, diversity should be more than a group of people that look different and think alike. Intellectual diversity is the kind of diversity we should really value, not just this superficial diversity with some extras such as seen in the Space Canteen in Star Wars.
The advanced technological civilization of the early 21st century is a complicated world where it is not possible for anybody to think through everything for themselves. You cannot be a polymath in quite the way people were in the 18th century enlightenments. You cannot be like Goethe. So there is some need to listen to experts, to defer to other people. And then, there is always the danger of that going too far and people not thinking critically. This happens in spades in Silicon Valley. There is certainly something about it that made it very prone to the dotcom bubble in the nineties or to the cleantech bubble in the last decade.
You were on Donald Trump’s transition team. In which respect is he different than everybody else you’ve met before?
I think it is his extraordinary ability to understand people. If he interviewed you for a job, he would right go to the essence. In the Western world, we are behind layers and layers and layers of political correctness, where we cannot say things, we cannot make judgements about people, we cannot evaluate people, we can’t say this person is better than this person because this or this reason. If you can just cut through this political correctness, that is tremendously valuable and it is hard to understate how much it distorts things.
The story of cassava and konzo should not alarm global connoisseurs of tapioca pudding, bamboo shoots, and sweet almonds. It demonstrates that well-nourished, well-educated, and wealthy people generally have very little to fear from eating potentially cyanide-containing food plants. Only a sustained period of consumption of large amounts of inadequately prepared bitter cassava—which only occurs in conjunction with a collection of other disagreeable social and environmental circumstances—causes the disease. In short: only poor people suffer the curse of konzo.
https://www.damninteresting.com/the-curse-of-konzo/
CML altered my world. The past five months have been the hardest time in my life by far. Each day, one foot at a time, I’m rebuilding my life. Each day I’m getting better at living with cancer. Despite the circumstances I still feel blessed to be where I am today. I feel lucky because it could be so much worse. But I also feel so incredibly bummed out sometimes. I’ve been FEELING a lot for the last few months. Talking about our feelings is a touchy, almost taboo subject. It’s extremely difficult to speak up about how we’re feeling.
Telling people “you’ll be alright” simply isn’t enough. You have to make them believe it. What patients and clients ask of their doctor or advisor will change over time. The relationship is fluid. It’s important for the doctor/advisor to realize this and be able to change with the client. Sometimes the client/patient will want a 30,000 foot view of the situation just to reassure them they’ll be alright. Sometimes the client/patient will want to break down the minutiae.
https://mullooly.net/tims-top-links-8-9-18/13264
Sobering convocation words:
So: What do I regret? Being poor from time to time? Not really. Working terrible jobs, like “knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse?” (And don’t even ASK what that entails.) No. I don’t regret that. Skinny-dipping in a river in Sumatra, a little buzzed, and looking up and seeing like 300 monkeys sitting on a pipeline, pooping down into the river, the river in which I was swimming, with my mouth open, naked? And getting deathly ill afterwards, and staying sick for the next seven months? Not so much. Do I regret the occasional humiliation? Like once, playing hockey in front of a big crowd, including this girl I really liked, I somehow managed, while falling and emitting this weird whooping noise, to score on my own goalie, while also sending my stick flying into the crowd, nearly hitting that girl? No. I don’t even regret that.
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded ... sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.
Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth?
Those who were kindest to you, I bet.http://thecollege.syr.edu/news/2013/george_saunders_convocation.html
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded ... sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.
Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth?
Those who were kindest to you, I bet.http://thecollege.syr.edu/news/2013/george_saunders_convocation.html
Indeed. Before reading Carreyrou’s book, I had the vague idea that Theranos had some high-tech ideas that didn’t work out, and that they’d covered up their failures in a fraudulent way. The “fraudulent” part seems about right, but it seems that they didn’t have any high-tech ideas at all!
