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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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What is your ideobit on Thiel? I think there *is* one, but most get this wrong. IMO it's the "everything stagnant since 1970s. However we can shake stuff up to get back to True Frontier behavior dominates anything else"
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