Interesting personal narrative by Nabeel Qureshia, a very ambitious young man who went to work for Palantir. (I was able to access this via Marginal Revolution.) He makes it seem cool, people working extreme hours partly because they find what they are doing fascinating and important. "These were seriously intense, competitive people who wanted to win, true believers; weird, fascinating people who read philosophy in their spare time, went on weird diets, and did 100-mile bike rides for fun." One of the people who interviewed him had the temperature in his office set to 60 degrees and constantly chewed ice, because of some theory that this improves cognitive function.
The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It’s still hard to find today, in fact – many people have copied the ‘hardcore’ working culture and the ‘this is the Marines’ vibe, but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas. This is hard to LARP – your founders and early employees have to be genuinely interesting intellectual thinkers. The main companies that come to mind which have nailed this combination today are OpenAI and Anthropic. It’s no surprise they’re talent magnets. . . .
The overall ‘vibe’ of the company was more of a messianic cult than a normal software company. But importantly, it seemed that criticism was highly tolerated and welcomed – one person showed me an email chain where an entry-level software engineer was having an open, contentious argument with a Director of the company with the entire company (around a thousand people) cc’d. As a rationalist-brained philosophy graduate, this particular point was deeply important to me – I wasn’t interested in joining an uncritical cult. But a cult of skeptical people who cared deeply and wanted to argue about where the world was going and how software fit into it – existentially – that was interesting to me.
I am fascinated by the kind of intellect represented here. On the one hand, these people are really smart, and they get rich by building cool things. But I always come away thinking that something is lacking. Here is another insight that feeds into my disquiet:
One of my favorite insights from Tyler Cowen’s book Talent is that the most talented people tend to develop their own vocabularies and memes, and these serve as entry points to a whole intellectual world constructed by that person. Tyler himself is of course a great example of this. Any MR reader can name 10+ Tylerisms instantly - ‘model this’, ‘context is that which is scarce’, ‘solve for the equilibrium’, ‘the great stagnation’ are all examples. You can find others who are great at this. Thiel is one. Elon is another (“multiplanetary species”, “preserving the light of consciousness”, etc. are all memes). Trump, Yudkowsky, gwern, SSC, Paul Graham, all of them regularly coin memes. It turns out that this is a good proxy for impact.
Maybe that's true. Mulling over some other major thinkers, it seems to me that Jesus and Confucius both had this talent for generating impressive "memes." So did Karl Marx and Thomas Jefferson. But is it enough?
Enough for what?
Enough for human flourishing.
I have mentioned here several times that brilliant scientists have a terrible record when it comes to politics. Elon Musk's public self-humiliation seems to me only the latest example of what happens when a person who is brilliant in some technical ways tries to pontificate about something really complex and important, e.g., free speech, or politics. And I don't just mean because he supports Trump, I mean his descent into utter incoherence. To maintain a political position that has ideological content but also deals with reality is, it seems, very difficult, and being smart is not enough to get your there.
But there is more to the rationalist tech-bro thing that one might worry about. For example, the weakness for dumb fads in diet and medicine; the constant search for nootropic drugs that would make them smarter or harder working; the insistence on condensing a thinker like Nietzsche into a meme like "good things are good."
Sometimes, being smart is enough; sometimes great knowledge of the past can be an impediment rather than an advantage. Mathematicians and poets often do their best work before they turn 30.
But in other circumstances shallow brilliance is at best inadequate and perhaps destructive. Sometimes a mind racing forward in a nootropic haze leaves behind all that vague stuff that goes by names like roots and meaning and connection. Hi tech success may be all that some people want or need, but I see the world differently and want a different kind of life.
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