A beautiful, balanced, optimistic look at the past decade of Silicon Valley tech, by . medium.com/@m0nologuer/on
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I should add: my memory of the 2013 period was that I was hanging out with a bunch of interns at Palantir, scraped my knee on the way to their (all-expenses-paid) hotel, and then cleaned the wound with Grey Goose vodka that someone had pilfered from the Palantir stash. Wild.
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It boggles my mind (not anymore tbh) that despite all the INSANE progress we have had as a species (tech in particular but in all areas), there are still a good number of people believing in pessmisitic futures. It also turns out that even during bad times, we have people who..1/
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.. also believe in pessmisitic futures. Point is, pessmissim is a natural state for some regardless of how good or bad the world is. Those people can't be swayed by facts and numbers.
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Optimism/Pessimism is (as with most things) partially genetic in nature. It’s probably healthy for humanity that we have a mix of both!
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Meant to link to this, but then this probably wouldn’t surprise you: tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108
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Thanks for link. Fundamentally disagree about genetic link. All children are born hyper optimistic. That's how they learn to walk (very challenging), talk (incredible neurological challenge) and eveurbtknf else. So the default natural OS is 'fanatical' optimisim (in a good way)
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Later in life, parents and society kick in. This is where I think the genetic link does hold weight. Some people are genetically more resistant to outside influence and thus the OS gets less "corrupted", while others aren't.
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I don't believe that it is healthy to have a mix but humanity has been thriving with such a mix so likely it is valuable to have this. A crazy idea I want to implement is to found a space colony where only optimists live and see how much farther it will advance compared to rest
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I can imagine writing a novel about this.
“Hey Joe, I think we’re leaking gas.”
“Nah, don’t worry about it! It’s Christmas! It can wait!”
“Ahh, yeah, you’re probably right.”
<6 hours later>
BOOM💥
(And then the reverse scenario, a colony filled with pessimists, eventually gets nothing done and lives a hardscrabble life of peanuts and cardboard).
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