On thinkers and doers (2022)
strangeloopcanon.com
strangeloopcanon.com
“Some think, Some do, Some both, But few”.
Got that from a lecturer.
In the US the so called "free market" was intended to be a way for people to achieve financial independence in spite of any persecution. Unfortunately regulatory capture has made it exceedingly difficult.
The opposite makes sense too, a vector with magnitude but no direction isn't super useful on its own either.
The two 2-hour hard thinking hours chart was the most useful takeaway for me.
There’s loads of great content on YouTube for example, with channels doing genuine and interesting science and experimentation in public. Channels like Breaking Taps, Journey to the Microcosmos, The Thought Emporium, all come to mind, for me. I’m sure you can think of others.
More hackernews-coded, perhaps, there’s also lots of cool small blogs positing some pretty neat ideas… although, sites like YouTube might arguably provide easier access to finance for sustaining these people!
Then progress exploded! Quality of life massively expanded.
Now: a slowdown. Stuff still gets made yet we feel disenchanted.
It never stopped being a good time to planting more idea-seeds.
Tenure sounds a lot like basic income. Maybe it’s a coincidence.
Thank you for this soundbite. I'm going to use it.
(In favor of UBI.)
But then they couldn’t sell my data.
What works for me on iOS is to first scroll down until the "subscribe" splash, close it, and then reject the cookies.
Sometimes I still need to click some combination of "only necessary" and "reject" a few more times
> Built an EV car company, operating at scale
He bought into a pre-existing company.
> Produced batteries for those cars at scale
How is the 4680 going? And is BYD eating its lunch yet? Last I looked they losing court cases over a particular dry cathode patent.
And well, BYD's new fast charging tech is far more performant than Tesla superchargers, multiple car makers (including Tesla!) are using their batteries not the 4680, so...
> Launched brand new self-made rockets to space, at scale, including catching them on a ship when they fell back from the sky!
That is indeed pretty cool, but did Elon actually do that? Also, how's Starship looking? Can it take more payload to orbit than a Falcon Heavy yet? Is it exploding less often?
> Bored tunnels cheaply
[citations really needed] If they can do this, the Boring Company isn't capitalising on it, I see a lot of cancelled projects, and only one where the public actually uses it (in Las Vegas).
But hey, Elon's definitely a doer, just you know, sometimes he's doing things that are very bad for the companies involved.
If he could stop trying to micromanage his companies, and just trust the very very very smart people who work there, and maybe I dunno, turn back time and not get radicalised on the Internet because his child transitioned, and avoid getting involved in politics in the absolute worst way possible, he'd accomplish so much more.
Someone once told me that Tesla and SpaceX largely succeeded in spite of Elon, and it rings true.
But I feel mean-spirited commenting this on a 3 year old post, that feels like an eternity ago in the Muskverse.
I’m ambivalent about the dude on a lot of points but I wish people would stop parroting that point as if it means anything.
Didn't understand why that whole part about Elon was in the essay, though (except revealing a bizarre fascination for the guy, as he's far from the single typical example of his kind in history). It does not bring any value or demonstration to the main points that are in the two final parts.
He is very vocally against giving resources to thinkers and letting them slow cook.
Like, it is true that capital is responsible for the charging networks being deployed across america. But it's this same deployment of resources that is also responsible for my needing a damn car to do anything in life, and it has zero plan on doing anything about that.
I find the analysis of this without addressing what should people be doing do be a nearly useless view of humanity. What can be gleaned from this aside from seeing that the people with the greatest impact care the least about their impact?
It really would fundamentally change my life and my relationship to power structures if I didn’t have to bend my whole life around living “in the system”.
Alternatively, Elon could just disable my life if I post something he doesn’t like online so maybe we’re not there yet…
Completely agree about neuralink and tesla
"A lucky fool doesn't know they're lucky."
At some levels there is no line anymore.
Also I’ve heard comments to the effect that hyper loop and similar companies are basically performative art, a sort of protest against the heavy regulation required in order to do any real work in some states. The point is that we have technology to be great and do great things, but we don’t do them.
The real gist is in IV/V and you can easily skip directly to it. Or something still evades me.
Except slop prompters, no one needs those except the AI priests.
It's only when your start doing that you find out the things you never would have thought about.
Do things before you've made up your mind so you don't have time to regret it.
However, "no plan survives contact with [the enemy]/[reality]/[stakeholders]/[users]/[etc.]"
You have to start doing things at some point, and revise your plans continuously. It's a delicate, interdependent dance.
The worst working situations I've been in almost all had to do with either lack of planning or refusal to abandon a clearly flawed plan. It's exhausting how many people fail to recognize when they need to change their behavior in one area or the other. It's not one or the other, it's both.