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%
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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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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.
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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I come at this from the perspective of right now basically being all-in on my own consulting business which if I fuck up badly enough could bankrupt me
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