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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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I feel like poker is the counterexample here

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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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Something similar in Hard Thing About Hard Things:

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You should check out Annie Duke’s thinking in bets for a counter argument

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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%

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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.

2:47 AM · Jul 25, 2022Twitter Web App

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Thiel’s talk is basically an argument that says, sure, this might not work for an individual, but it’s probably better for society as a whole that we believe this. Because otherwise, a society that thinks in bets will just never commit to anything that even appears low prob.

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This is why it’s so haunting to me, mostly because I DO believe in thinking probabilistically, and I totally buy Duke’s arguments. And yet “we don’t invest in folk who think like that because they won’t have the conviction to stick to it when the going gets tough” is logical.

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PayPal was not a low probability bet. It wasn’t even a low probability bet at the time, since we all wanted to pay for things on eBay. A low probability bet is your cousin telling you he’s heard you can make big money betting on penny stocks, or from this Nigerian prince

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It wasn’t a high probability bet either, that was like starting a construction company, but the universe of bad bets is as big as the universe of high-card hands