David Perell

I think you are right. David Perell has a great article titled "Peter Thiel's Religion" (https://perell.com/essay/peter-thiel/) which doesn't even mention the word "Catholic". This would seem unlikely if he identified as such.

He has at least one seminal article that I know of: https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on Previously discussed with 220 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19413852 The first few paragraphs are not good and may be difficult to read through. But after that, things start falling into place and the rest of the article is absolutely great. But I agree that the other articles by the author may not have the same level of quality.

This might be helpful. https://www.perell.com/blog/my-writing-syllabus Follow David Perell for writing inspiration. https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1213894632943296516

In the beginning of 2019, I felt overwhelmed with information overload across Twitter, HN, and the dozen or so newsletters I subscribed to. I ended up unsubscribing from just about everything and now follow a handful of great curators instead. It's probably the best thing I did last year to find more signal online. My favorite is Stew's Letter: https://stewfortier.com/subscribe It's a short email that comes out every week or so and includes a funny/entertaining collection of ideas across a broad range of topics (AI, communication skills, evolutionary biology, etc.). David Perell sends out a similar email that I also enjoy: https://www.perell.com/newsletter

Kevin Kwok offers a few recommendations in Perell's podcast. Curious if HN has any others you'd throw out there. http://www.perell.com/podcast/kevin-kwok

Disclaimer: AB + BC may be longer than AC It's the opposite ! The triangle inequality doesn't always hold when it comes to learning (unless you meant longer = you learn more, here I meant longer = you spend more time / efforts on it) This begs the question, when we learn new knowledge “efficiently” and “quickly”. How much knowledge did we really acquire? Good question. Sometimes a real breakthrough can also happen without working really hard, it's just not very common. And some of the knowledge you got can be useful quite quickly in your daily life or profession, so there are definitely /some/ benefits in learning efficiently. Ee'll always need to simplify some past discoveries / knowledge and focus our time / energy on more complex problems. Our children will get access to much more knowledge than us anyway, it's all about explicitly deciding where our efforts should be focused on. Some people might loose, some might win. I think it's related to your last link https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/ in abundance, the ultra smart will rise, the median people will fall behind. For now, I would like to produce more high quality learning material. But if I had to mentor someone to learn stuff, I wouldn't always recommend to constantly look for a ready-made answer online for example.

Boeing has "culture" problems like a mangy stray dog has a flea problem. The dog and Boeing also have in common that both are blissfully unaware of their problems. However unlike Boeing, the dog does not blame imaginary ghosts of the past for its fleas. There is a notion that Boeing is (was) a company with an insanely great engineering culture. Their engineers lived in an idyllic culture of building amazing products while always putting public safety first. This great culture suffered under the merger with McDonnell Douglas [1], [2], [3]. This narrative further says that McDonnell had a mercenary profits at all cost management culture which infected the management of the combined entity. However Boeing's engineers tried to preserve their engineering ethos while living under this oppressive regime and continued building great and safe products. This argument is frequently put forth by ex-Boeing engineers. This is a naked apologia for Boeing's behavior which killed 346 people and endangered the lives of 1000s more and destroyed jobs/wealth around the world. So strong is the apologists conviction in the purity of Boeing's engineering culture that they ignore the fact that thousands of engineers worked on the 737 Max. Not a single engineer raised issues with the engineering of the aircraft. Not a single engineer wrote a blistering memo calling out its failing or quit in protest. They were all held in thrall, paralyzed and forced to go against their ethics, professionalism,…

I personally do not care about Problem 1. I mostly use Twitter in a passive way -- following people that are experts on the topics that I'm interested in. I assume if you want to get a reasonable following you need to put quite the effort in it. Problem 2 appears but I've noticed that muting works well enough to avoid it. Problem 3 does not seem to be Twitter-specific but again blocking and muting seems to work for me as well. My personal take is that something brings value to you or not depending on how you use it. Here is a quote from (https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/) that resonates with me: "The Explore Tab on Twitter is the most important newspaper in the world. It’s littered with celebrity gossip and exaggerated political drama — both of which yield a wide reach but incentivize empty content. And yet, as the Paradox of Abundance predicts, Twitter is also one of the world’s top intellectual communities. It’s the bedrock of my social and intellectual life. It’s a place to make friends, raise your ambitions, and connect directly with people at the top of their fields. And yet, most people use Twitter to consume information with no nutritional value."

I found David Perell's podcast interview with Robert Cottrell a fascinating discussion of the economics of journalism: https://www.perell.com/podcast/robert-cottrell On a different topic, why don't I subscribe? Lots of reasons, I suppose, including other priorities for my income combined with a horrible value/dollar ratio. But that's not really it. Before I'd even consider paying for journalism, I'd need to trust that I'm learning things that are true. A couple of recent examples of sloppiness that make it not worth subscribing, from my area of expertise (chosen to avoid anything controversial). There was an article in the NY Times about problems in the economics profession, focused on academic economists and similar non-academics like Fed economists. To make their point, the authors tossed in a comment by Larry Kudlow that was widely viewed as horrible. Why is that sloppy? Because Larry Kudlow is not an economist and has no connection to the economics profession. He got an undergrad degree in history, worked on Wall Street, worked in politics, and got a job as a TV commentator. Less than a minute of research would have found this. What are you paying for if they don't even do the easy fact checking? A second example occurred in the aftermath of the first labor market report after the pandemic hit in the US. Economists were trying to resolve the numbers on the unemployment report with the unemployment claims data. A prominent individual from CNN was quick to question the…

> This leads to a fracturing of consensus. But is it necessarily a bad thing? I think whether the outcomes are good or bad is going to be highly subjective and debated ad infinitum. I, for one, welcome our new Internet overlord. There are two interesting articles on this topic, I strongly recommend everyone to read them. Gwern's article has interesting observations about politics, subculture, Unicode, and programming languages. David Perell examines the effect of the Internet in a bigger framework of world's politics, education, and commerce. * The Melancholy of Subculture Society, by gwern https://www.gwern.net/The-Melancholy-of-Subculture-Society * What the Hell is Going On?, by David Perell (has a playful foreword, if it annoys you, ignore it and continue reading). https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on -- My perspective of the issue is, under the previous centralized system, the entire nation is subject to the identical propaganda. The effect of the system can already be seen from the extensive propaganda during Mexican–American War of the 1840s - nearly 200 years ago. > You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war. And during the World War II, and later the Cold War, the power of state propaganda reached its height, and I'd say this system is responsible for the massive thought manipulation and greatest violence in the human history. But there are good sides as well - information authority, good writings, and strong consensus. > We have…

Just read an interesting article on here which states: energy, education, housing, healthcare, and transportation src: https://perell.com/essay/what-should-you-work-on/

Here is quite well explained: https://perell.com/essay/peter-thiel/ I remember I needed a few hours to read it, as he is quite a deep thinker and there are references to philosophy and religion. A wrong way to summarize it would be to build heaven on earth through capitalism.

I definitely agree that this kind of curriculum should be widely offered. I'm much more doubtful about the scope of the positive impact it would have. I think it's roughly the idea that lack of culture is caused by a distribution problem. I think internet more than showed that improving distribution works only up to a limit. There is a theory - the paradox of abundance - that paradoxally after you reach this limit you actually decrease access to the ones that need it the most. https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/

Reminds me of this site that was linked here a while ago: think it was https://perell.com/essay/coolest-things-2018/. Curated content can be better than aggregators like HN. That said, there's a lot of low effort curated content as well, think buzzfeed and the like.

Hi, I come across a lot of blogs when I curate for my newsletter Interesting Things [1]. Just looking through the links that have been curated in the past month or so, I would suggest: Tech - https://wasteofserver.com/ - https://tonsky.me/ - https://brianschrader.com/ - https://blog.thea.codes/ - https://fasterthanli.me/ - https://jvns.ca/ - https://blog.royalsloth.eu/ Non-tech - https://www.drorpoleg.com/ - About work and society - https://staysaasy.com/ - About tech work - https://www.nateliason.com/ - About life in general - https://andymatuschak.org/ - https://craigmod.com/ - https://perell.com/ And, of course, shameless plug: https://bengtan.com ---- [1] https://bengtan.com/interesting-things

This essay from David Perell touches on a similar concept: https://perell.com/note/lateral-thinking-with-withered-ideas/ > It led to the 20th century’s most successful game console: the Game Boy. One day, a gaming engineer named Gunpei Yokoi was commuting home on the train when he saw a man playing with an LCD calculator next to him. Unfortunately, Nintendo didn’t have the budget to push the technological frontier at the time, so they used old technology to innovate. So long as the gameplay was engaging, Yokoi believed that players didn’t care about technical details like colors or screen resolutions. Compared to its contemporaries, the Game Boy was durable and affordable, which removed barriers to entry for users and developers. People would play for hours because it used AA batteries that were cheap and easy to find. Today, the Game Boy has sold more than 118 million units.

Robert Cottrell of 'The Browser' newsletter gave a really good interview [1] on the North Star podcast about the emergence of newsletters and the future of journalism. Interestingly, of course it's partly about seeking out writers whose work you value - when of course the Economist does not identify its writers on each piece. Also, The Browser started on Substack but has now moved to Ghost - presumably to lower their costs and get more control - a good example of a major risk to the Substack model. https://perell.com/podcast/robert-cottrell/

Sure but I’m not talking about just the CEO. I’m talking engineering managers all the way down. And I guess I’m not really talking about specific college degrees either, but a culture and mindset of engineering. Here’s an interesting article about how engineers lost influence in Boeing: https://perell.com/essay/boeing-737-max/

Related, podcast with the author, touches on some of the topics here: https://www.perell.com/podcast/andy-matuschak

https://www.perell.com/newsletter Good essays and interesting Friday finds section.

https://www.perell.com/blog/boeing-737-max also HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21304277 Engineers seem to have lost control of the company.

This article covers the culture problem exhaustively https://www.perell.com/blog/boeing-737-max

Link to David's long essay on Peter Thiel, if this sounds interesting - https://www.perell.com/blog/peter-thiel

Goes good with https://perell.com/essay/serendipity/

I have been writing a daily diary (journal) since 11 years, and also I take lots of notes, almost about everything I learn. I've been thinking to start writing a blog since 10 years. I think that the primary idea in my head is to find a way to convert my experiences, lessons from life into a blog. For that, I have to dig through old journals, and it makes me feel dreaded to start it. I also think on writing about what's happening in my life, but then I feel who is going to care about it. So I do not start. Also I read lot of books. Of lately, I started taking notes, and have been thinking to start writing book reviews - at least. My most of notes are in handwritten form, and I used to convert my analog stuff manually typing to digital form. The thought of making a visual summary of books along with traditional text format (digital) deviates me to search yet another tool, or excuse of not putting time to create book summaries. Basically, what to write about (with a bit of "how"), is the question stopping me from starting. I found this quite helpful though: https://perell.com/essay/the-ultimate-guide-to-writing-online/

>>This is far from universally true, and to the small degree that it is true, it is an aberration from the vast majority of human history. I think you're interpreting my statement to suggest that people generally prioritize the public interest over their personal interest. I'm not. I'm only claiming that people, ceteris paribus, generally would prefer that society at large prosper. But they would not at their own expense. >>What also comes to mind is the sociological study where they present two people with $100 to split between them. This is very true. Thiel famously believes in Rene Girard's theory that jealousy emerges from the mimetic instinct, and that religious admoninations against it are a social innovation to constrain the dark side of mimesis: https://perell.com/essay/peter-thiel/ >>It makes their job a lot easier to do if people really are getting an unfair split. Yes of course, but the presence of inequality does not suggest unfairness as such demagogues usually imply.

I think this is the effect of various companies trying to capture as much of our attention as possible because it makes sense for their bottom line. We are all victims of recency bias, so it makes sense for companies to prioritize more recent content. If it wasn't the case, the various social media apps wouldn't be as addictive as they are. I am not aware of a social media app feed that puts quality above recency (not counting the plugins that enable that, like Twemex [1]). Instead they keep us in what David Perell calls "Never-Ending Now" [2]. We endlessly consume temporary, short-lived content and we are mostly blind to the past. Google search is not social media, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google ranked more recent content higher, given how they have changed the Youtube algorithm. 1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twemex-sidebar-for-twitte/am… 2: https://perell.com/essay/never-ending-now/

"The outspoken investor likened environmental, social and governance policies to the Chinese Communist Party" Interesting choice "Chinese communist party". I mean really? How does [ESG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social_and_corporate_gove… what on earth has that to do with the communist party. Well known for their social and corporate governance? Also from Thiel * His vindictive taking down of [Gawker](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/hogan-thiel-gawke… * Billionaire Republican donor Peter Thiel is bankrolling election conspiracists and primary challengers against Republicans [more](https://www.salon.com/2021/10/15/peter-thiel-bets-on-the-far-right-tec… * [Funding Trump](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/technology/republican-trump-peter-t… * Leaving Facebook to concentrate on [Trump support/funding](https://newrepublic.com/article/165404/peter-thiel-china-midterms-2022… * Some more about leaving [meta](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-07/peter-thiel-to-leav… * An article about his ['philosophy'](https://perell.com/essay/peter-thiel/) I mean it doesn't even make any sense for a gay man. Hasn't he noticed Trumps, and more recent GOP LGBTQ take? Is it the ends justify the means? Is it, it only applies to the small people? Who knows. Thiel is a 'libertarian'…