Hello,
Here’s your caffeine jolt ⚡ of not just inspiration but also some tactical advice you can use.
Let’s scroll…
Peter Thiel on Progress and Stagnation
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”Peter Thiel is one of the most exciting and original thinkers of our era, but many of his opinions are scattered across a range of talks and articles.”
An organised presentation of his views on progress and stagnation, in his own words. The full document, which is a little over 100 pages.
Notable
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There’s this very strange aspect in Silicon Valley where so many of the very successful entrepreneurs and innovators seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger’s or something like this. I always wonder whether this needs to be turned around into a critique of our society where if you don’t suffer Asperger’s, you get too distracted by the people around you. They tell you things, you listen to them, and somehow the wisdom of crowds is generally wrong.
Competition makes us better at that which we're competing on, but it narrows our focus to beating the people around us. It distracts us from things that are more valuable or more important or more meaningful.
I don’t like the word education because it is such an extraordinary abstraction. I’m very much in favor of learning. I’m much more skeptical of credentialing or the abstraction called education. So there are all of these granular questions like what is it that we’re learning? Why are you learning it? Are you going to college because it’s a four year party? Is it a consumption decision? Is it an investment decision where you’re investing in your future? Is it insurance? Or is it a tournament where you’re just beating other people?
Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular. A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one. This is not what young people do today, because everyone around them has long since lost faith in a definite world. No one gets into Stanford by excelling at just one thing, unless that thing happens to involve throwing or catching a leather ball.
Making Outlines ✔️
Complice is one of my favorite apps for making outlines of what I want to do today. This assists my quick recovery from unintentionally going down rabbit holes. Maybe one should start thinking about installing a second monitor that always shows a Complice window with the task that you are currently working on. Or do that using an old tablet.
The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant 🔥
link………
Our attitude around aging and longevity is broken. Generally speaking. This is a great piece by Nick Bostrom, a Swedish-born philosopher and polymath with a background in theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, logic, and artificial intelligence, as well as philosophy and a Professor at Oxford University. Just because we're used to sacrificing individuals to the dragon despot doesn't mean we have to keep doing it.
Teaser
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”The argument is not in favor or life-span extension per se. Adding extra years of sickness and debility at the end of life would be pointless. The argument is in favor of extending, as far as possible, the human health-span. By slowing or halting the aging process, the healthy human life span would be extended. Individuals would be able to remain healthy, vigorous, and productive at ages at which they would otherwise be dead.”
How to finish a side project ⌨️
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A very simple way of thinking. I think it was Seth Godin who recommended having a separate laptop for a side project like writing a book.
Keep your stuff for life 📰
Perkeep lets you permanently keep your stuff, for life. This is a set of open source formats, protocols, and software for modeling, storing, searching, sharing and synchronizing data in the post-PC era. Data may be files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos, and you can access it via a phone, browser or FUSE filesystem.
Rapid fire links 🔥
Tweet for life
In case you missed it
That’s it! 👋
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That said, how’re you and yours doing this week? Any major changes to your status quo, or are things fairly locked-in and predictable at the moment?
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Have a great day ahead!
Robert