If you believe in the former, you try to build crazy ambitious things and maybe you succeed, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you believe in the latter, you go into finance and manage a portfolio and maybe you succeed, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Thiel doesn’t argue that one is correct and the other is wrong. He just points out that, “look, the way we think about luck and determinism has changed”.
Ok and then he says “fuck indeterminism” so I guess he has a stance here.
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But his main point is that believing in deterministic optimism is a net good thing for society, and we should encourage more of it.
Of course, you could say he has a biased view, since he is a VC, but then he DID used to run a global macro hedge fund, and he stopped.
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Like I said, this argument can haunt you, once you let it get into your head. 🤷♂️
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Replying to @dineshraju
The core of Thiel's argument, the bit that's so haunting to me, is his implicit argument that a) yes, reality may be probabilistic but b) if you want to build crazy ambitious things, it's not useful to believe that it is — because you won't try as hard to make things succeed.
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Success in poker doesn’t come from relentless execution and extreme resourcefulness in the face of failure. Thiel’s argument implies that isn’t really doable if you believe in hedging and taking multiple bets.
(Whether it really is is something I’m not sure about).
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I’ve read the book, and Thiel’s argument still stands. Duke hasn’t really accomplished anything in a hard domain.
And yes, while Thiel today can take multiple bets, he lived it in PayPal, where they nearly died multiple times.
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To couch this in the language of probability theory, in business (and in hard projects like going to the moon, say) there may be a 30% chance of success but preconditioned on you being all in. If you don’t have conviction and think in bets, the probability becomes 1%
How Thiel implements this in his VC practice is that he uses probabilistic thinking as a filter for his investments.
I feel uncomfortable with this contrarian stance, but I’m not an investor so I’ll reserve judgment.
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You misunderstand “thinking in bets” not to include going all-in. It absolutely does, and what’s more, it tells you how to find conviction and when to go all in
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Ok then let me couch this in Thinking in Bets language: in poker the way to win is to not go all in on a low probability bet.
In the real world you should go all in on low probability bets, otherwise nothing genuinely new or innovative will ever get done.
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