As much as I like to scientifically validate my drug dependency, is the EEG work here really that much more rigorous than a polygraph?
I see a lot of domain specific terms like "FOOOF algorithm", filtering signal spectra etc. and the geist of my schooling asks me whether the elephant is wiggling its trunk.
I can understand his distaste for the indefinite, but does he actually make a strong case for the opposite?
To me this reads as claiming "making fragile choices is good", which outside of very niche situations I'd say is bad advice: like telling a college basketball player to not waste time outside of practice and later watching him go undrafted in the pros.
You also have to look at who is giving the advice. For him it is great if more people take huge risks and burn their youth on moon shot start-ups since, as a VC, he makes all his money off of those people. A world where everybody is a well rounded liberal arts graduate, working a steady job, with comfortable middle class lifestyle and great work life balance would be terrible for him. If you ruin your life following this advice it has zero impact on his life.
He's giving this advice to make his life better, not necessarily to make your life better.
You should read his book. Here is a brief excerpt from the chapter "you are not a lottery ticket"
> THE MOST CONTENTIOUS question in business is whether success comes from luck or skill.
What do successful people say? Malcolm Gladwell, a successful author who writes about
successful people, declares in Outliers that success results from a “patchwork of lucky breaks and
arbitrary advantages.” Warren Buffett famously considers himself a “member of the lucky sperm
club” and a winner of the “ovarian lottery.” Jeff Bezos attributes Amazon’s success to an “incredible
planetary alignment” and jokes that it was “half luck, half good timing, and the rest brains.” Bill Gates
even goes so far as to claim that he “was lucky to be born with certain skills,” though it’s not clear
whether that’s actually possible.
> Perhaps these guys are being strategically humble. However, the phenomenon of serial
entrepreneurship would seem to call into question our tendency to explain success as the product of
chance. Hundreds of people have started multiple multimillion-dollar businesses. A few, like Steve
Jobs, Jack Dorsey, and Elon Musk, have created several multibillion-dollar companies. If success
were mostly a matter of luck, these kinds of serial entrepreneurs probably wouldn’t exist.
> In January 2013, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square, tweeted to his 2 million followers:
“Success is never accidental.”
>Most of the replies were unambiguously negative. Referencing the tweet in The Atlantic, reporter
Alexis Madrigal wrote that his instinct was to reply: “ ‘Success is never accidental,’ said all
multimillionaire white men.” It’s true that already successful people have an easier time doing new
things, whether due to their networks, wealth, or experience. But perhaps we’ve become too quick to
dismiss anyone who claims to have succeeded according to plan.
> Is there a way to settle this debate objectively? Unfortunately not, because companies are not
experiments. To get a scientific answer about Facebook, for example, we’d have to rewind to 2004,
create 1,000 copies of the world, and start Facebook in each copy to see how many times it would
succeed. But that experiment is impossible. Every company starts in unique circumstances, and every
company starts only once. Statistics doesn’t work when the sample size is one.
> From the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the mid-20th century, luck was something to be
mastered, dominated, and controlled; everyone agreed that you should do what you could, not focus
on what you couldn’t. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this ethos when he wrote: “Shallow men
believe in luck, believe in circumstances.… Strong men believe in cause and effect.” In 1912, after he
became the first explorer to reach the South Pole, Roald Amundsen wrote: “Victory awaits him who
has everything in order—luck, people call it.” No one pretended that misfortune didn’t exist, but prior
generations believed in making their own luck by working hard.
> If you believe your life is mainly a matter of chance, why read this book? Learning about startups is
worthless if you’re just reading stories about people who won the lottery. Slot Machines for
Dummies can purport to tell you which kind of rabbit’s foot to rub or how to tell which machines are
“hot,” but it can’t tell you how to win.
> Did Bill Gates simply win the intelligence lottery? Was Sheryl Sandberg born with a silver spoon,
or did she “lean in”? When we debate historical questions like these, luck is in the past tense. Far
more important are questions about the future: is it a matter of chance or design?
This does make me wonder what kinds of secrets can and can't be kept; on the face of it, that a critical bit of insider information would be kept for oral transmission at particular times (something like a mystery cult) leads me to think that keeping such a secret is at least possible.
At the same time, people love gossip.
Of course, the only secrets we know from the past were by definition not exactly well-kept.
They'd also have to paint without anyone seeing them paint. The fact that Vermeer stood out for being so secretive about his process says something here. Even a no-lens camera obscura would be pretty hard to hide given that it would require to be painting in a darkened room next to the person being painted.
But your question is an interesting one, for sure. Revealed secrets come in different flavors - fully known ones, but also "known unknown" types of secrets, like the exact "recipes" a painter might have used for their paints being a mystery. However, when it comes to "unknown unknowns" hiddeo secrets I think it's very hard to keep those when dealing with more than a handful of individuals.
Thank you for this; surprised I haven't heard much about him prior, since I've been digging into political economy lately.
Specifically, his notes on consumption / full employment are refreshing - it never sits right with me that the goal of economic policy at a high level is so often at odds with doing things in a "smart" way (measuring projects in jobs created, for example).
Is it worth the effort for any individual poster though?
The unreachable segment (read only, doesn't comment) which already makes up the vast majority of audience is practically un-engageable.
Among commenters, there's the blend of low-effort 'this'-type posts, soliloquizers (though possible therapeutic for the poster), and lizardman-constant/flame type reactions.
It seems that in most venues, the effort to read through all comments and find anything valuable to engage with has a low social ROI.
Reminds me vaguely of the end of brave new world in that living there would be to some a prison and to others paradise, and I'm not quite sure which bucket I'm in (or how to find out)
My least favorite taxes right now are those that apply based on location.
In theory, my tax return requires about 4 extra states and a few cities, and a bunch of state registrations, and my payroll provider doesn't support the operations; so the net result is a Helleresque fever dream.
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