J
ust a short post for Day 2, as we did applied rationality training which I will write about as a whole after we have completed all of the sessions on Thursday. (Spoiler alert…IT'S AWESOME.)
In the evening, we had Peter Thiel visit and deliver a talk. Peter is an entrepreneur whose net worth is over $1 billion and he has funded some of the groups at the summit. The theory he presented was that the world today needs more technological progress than globalization – that is to say, we will get more value from inventing new useful technologies than we will from replicating existing useful technologies. He spoke about moving "from 0 to 1" rather than "from 1 to many" a lot. I asked him why technological progress is a good thing at all (I happen to think that it probably is, but it is plausible that it is not because, for example, technological progress has led to an unprecedented number of nonhuman animals suffering in factory farms). Interestingly, he said that moving resources from globalization to technology would be good for everyone, including for the developing world. What do you think?
(Another lesson learnt: I need more than three hours sleep a night, even alongside three cups of coffee.)
