Funny how the red/blue/gray… black/clear pill metaphor never evolved to subsume the older, unrelated poison pill metaphor.
I think poison pills are actually the only thing I take seriously. I tend to stay a couple of degrees away from anything I consider poison-pilled
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Poison pills are interesting. It’s usually people rather than ideas for me. Ideas can be innocent or not depending on context and intent. You can give ideas the benefit of doubt. But people tend to exhibit compounding patterns over time that you ignore at your peril.
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Past age 25, either a coherent pattern of investment in ideas develops and reveals who you are, or it doesn’t and reveals that you’re clueless (someone holding ideologically incoherent ideas is either an idiot or a genius, and idiots are 10000x higher incidence)
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So for me a memeplex gets poison-pilled when certain people sign on, and thus us way more true of social/cultural ideas than technological. Technologies, if they succeed, rapidly acquire a life of their own and outgrow parental DNA. Social/cultural ideas rarely do.
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Somebody like Trump is pretty much a universal poison pill since he has no tech side and everything he touches is social
Someone like Thiel is a mixed bag, anything purely social/cultural/political he touches is much poison-pilled for me, but his tech investments are unknowns
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Some like ethereum are technologies with chaotic-neutral potential where Thiel factor is irrelevant, some are hybrids — tech loaded with political commitments like urbit for eg, where Thiel factor is a signal, and some like “AI risk” are religions pretending to be tech concerns
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My heuristic is… if it’s an obviously purely social thing, politely stay away, if it’s tech, take it case by case…the idea may or may not be good enough to overcome the poison pill in birth environment
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Xi is slowly becoming almost a poison pill for Chinese-origin ideas/tech for me
MbS is a poison pill (though SoftBank is almost enough to neutralize it as an intermediary) though early on I thought he might be different from the typical middle-eastern despot
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This looks like tribal thinking, but the difference is it focuses on individuals… tribes are amplification mechanisms
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It’s a tradeoff… if you process at key-individual level, you can afford to be more discriminating with random tribal rank-and-file.
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This is like a bozobit, but for philosophically/ideologically suspect people rather than bozos. Maybe ideobit? If you’re willing the ideobits on key people, it’s easier to keep an open mind about everyone else. You ideobit people whose ideas have a systematic grain you distrust
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Thiel is obviously not a bozo. Clearly a smart guy in some ways. But i flipped the ideobit on him maybe ~2014
Taleb is interesting. Annoying *and* thought-provoking, but I’ve never been tempted to flip the ideobit on him.
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I used to be much more coy about this stuff and save it for private channels. Increasingly I think that’s counterproductive. Life is easier when you are open about which powerful people you’ve flipped the ideobit on.
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Most people aren’t influential enough or independent enough to even have an ideobit. You need both. For eg I don’t feel the need to assign ideobits to Joe Rogan or Fox hosts. They’re influential but not independent enough.
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Assigning someone an ideobit is a mark of grudging adversarial respect I suppose. Someone you see as enough of a free human to take a position with or against.
Most prominent ideologues and polemcists are really just attack dogs. No independent ideobits.
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