
Peter Thiel - You are Not a Lottery Ticket [video] - beniaminmincu
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/29931127
======
confluence
Says the guy who won the lottery. I'm frankly more interested in the guy who
blew up during the dot com boom and who is currently some random employee at
some random company, with a past filled with mistakes - frankly you'd learn
more from his actual failures, than from Thiel's failure masking success.

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kami8845
Why learn from the guy who made the mistakes when you can learn from the guy
who didn't?

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michaelochurch
It's not either/or. You generally need to learn from both.

The problem is social stratification. If you're a normal person, you end up
mostly around people who didn't succeed and get only half the story. If you
have a break-out success (or just luck) you end up in a world where everyone
_has_ , and there's a lot of self-congratulatory just-worlding. Either way,
you get a biased account.

I think it's most adaptive to learn from both sides while playing the
_attitude_ of the successful, to make yourself seem like a high-status person.
You always want to _seem_ (except to true friends whom you'd actually like to
help, with accurate information) like you've had an unbroken chain of
successes and can't imagine anything else; you just don't want that to bleed
into self-deception. Maybe the reason why psychopaths do so well in life is
that they're most resistant against cognitive dissonance. It's easy for them
to maintain a successful front without falling into self-deception or
delusion. For everyone else, there's nonzero cognitive load in doing that.

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vixus
> psychopaths do so well in life

Do they?

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mindcrime
I don't know if there's been a lot of rigorous academic research on the topic
or not, but there have been a handful of articles in the pop business press,
talking about the connection between being "CEO material" and displaying the
traits of a psychopath. For example:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/why-
som...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/why-some-
psychopaths-make-great-ceos/)

~~~
michaelochurch
Psychopaths are genetically built to be extreme r-strategists (see:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-strategist> ). What seem like stupid social
behaviors are actually practice so that, when they are in a high-stakes social
situation, they can win it. Most people find the psychopaths around them to be
petty and stupid and think, "How could that guy ever succeed?" Well, the
psychopath has decided that you're not of primary importance to the game he is
trying to play, so he's using you for practice.

By the time they're adults, psychopaths have a wealth of social experience and
knowledge, often gained from high-pressure social situations _they created_ at
a rate exceeding what most people would ever encounter. When they want
something, they're very good at playing to win.

The prehistoric context was that developing an outsized social ability enabled
someone to have an above-normal number of sexual encounters. The lack of
emotional attachment and compassion, likewise, keeps them from pair-bonding
and slows down their proliferation.

In the work context, organizations are also r- or K-selective (quantity vs.
quality) in how they replicate process. Get-big-or-die companies are
r-strategists, while "lifestyle businesses" tend to be K-strategic. As the
business world becomes increasingly r-strategic, so does the character of
people running it.

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codemac
Just watched this talk.. absolutely great material. I wish he was a slightly
better/more confident speaker, but I got over it.

For someone who is the farthest thing from libertarian, is there any more
literature on the idea of big planning, deterministic optimism, etc in a
libertarian framework? His examples of the US as optimistic and deterministic
were all "centrally planned", and done through government, not individuals or
groups of individuals (corps, ngos, etc). Or at least that's how I perceived
it.

~~~
scottjad
Maybe look at Mises on entrepreneurship or John Mackey (of Whole Foods) in
Conscious Capitalism for deterministic optimism in libertarian framework.

Perhaps "Atlas Shrugged" contrasts both indeterminite pessimism (the failing
state and despair-filled question "Who's John Galt?") and the determinite
optimism of engineers/makers and Galt's Gultch.

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calinet6
I'm usually not a fan of Peter Thiel's ideas—always seemed quite a bit on the
extreme side of the spectrum to me—but this talk is fantastic. I have a new
respect for his viewpoints, and a renewed zeal to work harder.

I still think he discounts the effect that random chance has in your ability
to succeed, on many counts, but he at least seems to understand it extremely
well and speaks about it in a way which seems to indicate he respects the
complexities involved. Quite good and thought-provoking to watch regardless of
how you think of success.

~~~
sjg007
luck favors the prepared.

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adamgravitis
This organizes a lot of thoughts I've had regarding the economic history of
the 20th century. It seemed that something really changed in patterns of
invention and investment somewhere in the late 70s, whereby - as Peter notes -
big ideas and making plans became considerably less fashionable.

I hadn't made the connection to the surge of effort in law and finance, but
it's a convincing argument.

The real question, then, is: Can we return the western economies to an
optimistic-deterministic point of view? It would require really reframing a
lot of public debate - or perhaps taking discourse elsewhere from regulated
airwaves where the established players seem to worship an utterly
indeterminate world view, as evidenced by continuous coverage of
uncontrollable events.

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shn
Lecture notes from his CS183 Startup class was about similar subjects. If you
found the talk interesting you'll like the notes as well.

<http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup>

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pesenti
One reason the western world is appearing more indeterminate and becoming less
optimistic is because of the diminishing returns of progress. That's the main
problem in Europe. A hundred years ago, most people had difficult lives and
technical progress offered a clear path to better lives. Now most people there
have a pretty good life and understandably don't want it to change.

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dcuthbertson
The OP's link didn't work for me. Here's one with sound only, no video, no
slides, no transcript. <http://schedule.sxsw.com/2013/events/event_IAP15892>

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Connaissance
Thanks for that, original link was blocked for me as well.

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mh_
According to the Googles, you can grab the .mp3 of the talk here:
[http://mp3yeah.com/download.php?id=83442458&t=Peter%20Th...](http://mp3yeah.com/download.php?id=83442458&t=Peter%20Thiel:%20You%20Are%20Not%20A%20Lottery%20Ticket%20-%20SXSW%20Interactive%202013)

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fizx
transcript?

~~~
smalter
Looks like the same talk as was transcribed here:
[http://blakemasters.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-
cs183-...](http://blakemasters.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-
cs183-startup-class-13-notes-essay)

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nashadelic
All of a sudden this video is password protected. Anyone has the password?

