A kid born in the year 10,000 is a stranger to me. Sure, people can feel concerned about his fate, just as people can feel concerned about a stranger in a forei

A kid born in the year 10,000 is a stranger to me. Sure, people can feel concerned about his fate, just as people can feel concerned about a stranger in a foreign country, but most people just don't. We're all selfish bastards. There is quite a bit of mental variation. One of the rarest qualities I have found in people is the ability to connect abstractions to feelings. I once dated a woman who would sometimes get angry at me because she was mistaken. That is fine, as we are all human, sometimes one makes mistakes. However, she would stay angry at me even when I exonerated myself factually. I should've taken that as an early sign and bailed out of that relationship much sooner! When hiring someone for a startup or choosing a co-founder, I would recommend that one look for this quality. This is related to something I heard on "Fresh Air." The author of this book had a "bad boss" character who kept on calling things a "dog whistle." As far as he was concerned, a phenomenon he couldn't directly perceive might as well not exist. Such an idea strikes me as a degree of idiocy that makes me angry. The physical phenomenon of sound waves at higher than 20 kHz is a physical fact! Denying the truth of an objective fact because of a shortsighted prioritization of one's limited subjective point of view -- this is exactly the kind of thing that can get one in trouble, if one is doing substantive knowledge work!