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
Conversation
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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Like trying to understand someone's generating function.
And FWIW, I think his position is still largely underrated, if perhaps a tad bit monocausal.
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The point of an ideobit is you flip it on people not ideas so you don’t need that clarity. It doesn’t have to be a legible function of their thought.
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You get to flipping it by investigating the thoughts tho. Was just talking about the pre-flipping proof-of-work
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Not investigating: pattern matching. More deep learning than deductions
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I hope few-shot learning techniques have insights for human learning too, since most everything important in life we have to few-shot.

