9 ms·

Scott Alexander Reviews Thiel's Zero to One

169 points by jger15 8y ago

AceJohnny2 8y ago
> Google X wants to be the modern version of [Bell Labs and PARC], though I don’t know how much success they’ve had so far. Google X is a startup incubator, not blue-sky research[1] in the way we imagine Bell Labs and PARC to be. [1] yes, Loon, I get it. Har har
dvt 8y ago
This might be an unpopular opinion, but the Amazon example is bad. Bezos didn't get "richer than God" by making a bookstore -- this is just grossly misleading. AWS and Prime (both criticized upon release; Prime lost money for years) are the two main reasons Amazon took over the world. Amazon is a master class in pivoting and trial and error. Sometimes it loses (Fire Phone), but when it wins, it wins big.
- hammock 8y ago
  Just as "make a bookstore" isn't the key to success, I don't believe you can say "pivot a lot" or "trial and error" is the key to success either. Plenty of startups pivot and run out of runway. So what then is the secret sauce?
  - dvt 8y ago
    True, this is a good point. The key to startup success is probably the same as the key to winning at Poker: win more than you lose :) Although I guess my point was just that I don't think Bezos thought that being a book salesman would make him a billionaire (as the article implies).
  - eykanspelgud 8y ago
    Money. Lots of it.
  - joshmarlow 8y ago
    My current thinking is that a big piece of success is taking risks and being able to absorb the losses. Generally big payouts don't come from a sure thing; you have to take multiple risks that could potentially have big payouts and survive long enough for one or more of them to pan-out. Edit: for formatting
  - kbenson 8y ago
    Ruthlessly identify and pursue existing capabilities that are profitable or that capitalize on or provide unique or rare market capabilities (which you can later try to turn into profitable areas), and always been experimenting to find more.
  - stareatgoats 8y ago
    >So what then is the secret sauce? Right time and place, luck, skill and money in varying relative quantities. People focus on the skills, not unimportant by all means, but it is not the secret sauce.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ykevinator 8y ago
  And diversification
- Barrin92 8y ago
  also Thiel (at least as represented in the review here) seems to systemically understate the role of luck and environment. One contribution to Amazon's success was also the great culling of (potential) competitors after the dotcom burst. They were really lucky to rake in a 700 million investment barely a month before the crash, and most competitors afterwards had a hard time raising serious money. Now sure you can argue that there's strategies you can pick that maximise your chances of abusing these crashes, but they're very hard to predict and if they don't come you might lose out, and I don't think Bezos ever anticipated the dotcom bubble. So chance and timing really play a gigantic role in creating successful businesses, there are not always secrets or geniuses behind successful enterprise.
notyourloops 8y ago
He has a very interesting weekly discussion thread about the Culture War: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/akk8nc/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_28/ https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/akk8nc/cult...
- natalyarostova 8y ago
  I like /r/slatestarcodex, and I like the culture war thread. But it's worth emphasizing Scott doesn't participate in that thread, and he doesn't necessarily like it either. In fact, from what I can tell he's not a huge fan of lots of the conversations that go on there, and the topics discussed. If anyone were to judge him on comments, please only do it based on the curated comments on his website, where he deletes and bans people who are uncivil.
  - notyourloops 8y ago
    Ahh, ok. I recently came across his blog and the subreddit, and based on the huge activity in that thread I figured that was a prominent creation of his. Thanks for the clarification.
  - CWuestefeld 8y ago
    From the latest thread: ---- As I'm sure everyone has noticed, the culture war thread has essentially grown to devour all of /r/SlateStarCodex. Also, we talk about really weird stuff here. That's intended, and it's something I like about this community; however, given the weirdness, Scott Alexander no longer wants it on /r/SlateStarCodex. We're moving this thread to another subreddit, and after some internal discussion, we've realized that only a subset of our moderators want to be responsible for the new culture-war-specific subreddit. ---- So it's definitely not Scott's discussion.
    - notyourloops 8y ago
      So, basically an attempt at image clean-up. His audience created a regular discussion based on the terminology of his original content, but he's trying to become more popular to a broader audience. If people new to him were to search, he'd be able to put some distance, should this separation be effective. That's the gist of what I'm getting from reading the latest discussion.
jim-greer 8y ago
> You can still visit the Bay Model in that Sausalito warehouse, but today it’s just a tourist attraction: big plans for the future have become archaic curiosities. The Bay Model is well worth visiting. While the Reber Plan to dam up the bay would have been an environmental disaster, the model is really cool. It was actually used for many years after the plan was abandoned. It was only the rise of fluid dynamics simulators that made it obsolete.
HarryHirsch 8y ago
The Amazon example is interesting. Amazon gained a monopoly on books in the US and exploited that to become a monopoly in everything. Meanwhile in 1980s Germany you could order books through your local bookseller of choice who would go through one of two wholesellers who had most books in stock for next-day delivery. But neither Libri nor KNV chose to exploit their position to become Amazon before Amazon. That, or time wasn't yet ready.
- dsr_ 8y ago
  Some additional factors: Ordering via a web catalog. Visiting a local bookseller takes a bigger commitment than opening a web browser. Price competition. Amazon typically had a better price on any given book (and later, on most items) than any local store. Delivery to home or office. Now you need to schedule a second visit to your local bookstore.
  - devonkim 8y ago
    Amazon was pretty clearly trying to drastically expand its markets early on and should have been a warning bell to incumbents in other industries. For example, they bought local Seattle area Egghead Software and used that as a beachhead into the supply chain for retail boxed software. They bought all kinds of stores going out of business. For a while, you could even see other brands sell their stuff using Amazon as their main portal. Target did similar buying Mervyns for access to certain brands that it didn’t have for so long. Funny enough, Target used to use Amazon as it’s e-commerce storefront.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    And a US-specific aspect of your second item: the weird way US sales tax is set up meant that Amazon didn’t have to pay any for a long time, giving it an automatic ~5% price advantage in most states.
  - eurg 8y ago
    1 and 3 are very important points. 2, Price competition likely was less important; in Austria (and I think, Germany) there exists the "Buchpreisbindung", the price of books is mandated, no seller must offer a lower price; also, tax was always included, from day one. They still won big, very early, very fast. I remember that an employee of a (now defunct) bookstore told me "please order via Amazon, you'll get the book faster, and I cannot offer any added value".
throwaway5752 8y ago
Asking honestly - who is Scott Alexander? I read the about page on the submission, and it's even more confusing why he's reviewing this book.
- mjfl 8y ago
  He is a psychiatrist who blogs pretty good long form articles on issues that nerds find interesting.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- the_jeremy 8y ago
  He's a California based psychiatrist who also happens to write rational fiction (reddit.com/r/rational) and has interesting blog posts. I don't think he has any special qualifications or status that would make his review any more authoritative than anyone else's, but I really enjoy his writing style.
  - throwaway5752 8y ago
    Thanks, the reddit link is useful. Appreciate it.
- leesec 8y ago
  Prominent pseudonymous psychiatrist/internet intellectual who writes interesting sometimes quite in depth articles on a variety of topics.
- Tuna-Fish 8y ago
  He is a pseudonymous blogger who has been described as one of the most influential bloggers by more than a few other very influential bloggers. If you wish to know more, I'd nominate "Who by very slow decay" [1] as his one work that everyone should read, because more people knowing it would make the world a better place. (edit: content warning: hospitals and death. It's not a pleasant read, but I think it's a necessary one.) [1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay...
Reedx 8y ago
"Zero To One might be the first best-selling business book based on a Tumblr. Stanford student Blake Masters took Peter Thiel’s class on startups. He posted his notes on Tumblr after each lecture. They became a minor sensation. Thiel asked if he wanted to make them into a book together. He did." That's an interesting origin story. I was curious to see the notes in question. Found them here, for anyone else interested: http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup
40acres 8y ago
Zero to One is my favorite "startup" book, Thiel has a lot of interesting insights and I wish he was a bit more public with his thoughts. Trying to search for Thiel talks online that don't take place during his book tour has been tough for me.
- infiniteseeker 8y ago
  If he was more public with his thoughts, I’m guessing he would be much maligned by the radical leftist outrage culture.
- genericone 8y ago
  I'm actually glad he isn't going on a self-congratulatory speaking tour, gives me the impression he does indeed have important things to think about and work on.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
lukasm 8y ago
> Nowadays people get told that if they think they’ve figured out something about gravity, they’re probably a crackpot. Instead, they should wait for very large government-funded programs full of well-credentialled people to make incremental advances. Maybe we approach limit of human cognitive abilities and another Newton is not possible for current problems? Maybe to find a cure for cancer you need to spend 10k hours studying biology, 10k studying chemistry, 10k studying machine learning and then spend 100k hours on the problem, which it's not possible for a human being.
- ctoth 8y ago
  This short story, by the same author, speaks to this idea: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
  - yhoiseth 8y ago
    What an amazing story. Thanks for sharing!
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Possibly. But then, we've always been good in solving problems with tools. Could we reduce the necessary "10k" learning by building better tools for accessing knowledge? Right now, scientific papers are a shitshow, and even refined and systematized knowledge in textbooks isn't as accessible as it could be in the digital age. Could we encode knowledge in more powerful tools allowing us to explore through free-form simulations? The goal here would be to make discovery of promising solutions more time- and effort-efficient. Related, I feel we need to figure out a way to systematize information in scientific papers to make mining them for cross-cutting insights possible. I suspect there are lots of discoveries hiding in plain sight, if one knew which particular papers from which disciplines touch on the same underlying phenomenon or concept.
  - lukasm 8y ago
    > always been good in solving problems with tools sure, but if AI would do 80% of the job then we can't really compare it to another Newton.
jseliger 8y ago
Zero to One is a great book: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/09/24/zero-to-one-peter-thiel-and-blake-masters/ https://jakeseliger.com/2014/09/24/zero-to-one-peter-thiel-a... and you should read it if you've not already.
gradstudentcs 8y ago
as a graduate student in CS (ML and theory) all these comments about people not believing in their own ability to invent things via their own reasoning runs 100% opposite to my own experience. weird. maybe i've just found a good local optimum in my life choices and starting place (birth/white privilege etc).

169 points by jger15 8y ago

> Google X wants to be the modern version of [Bell Labs and PARC], though I don’t know how much success they’ve had so far. Google X is a startup incubator, not blue-sky research[1] in the way we imagine Bell Labs and PARC to be. [1] yes, Loon, I get it. Har har

dvt 8y ago

This might be an unpopular opinion, but the Amazon example is bad. Bezos didn't get "richer than God" by making a bookstore -- this is just grossly misleading. AWS and Prime (both criticized upon release; Prime lost money for years) are the two main reasons Amazon took over the world. Amazon is a master class in pivoting and trial and error. Sometimes it loses (Fire Phone), but when it wins, it wins big.

hammock 8y ago
Just as "make a bookstore" isn't the key to success, I don't believe you can say "pivot a lot" or "trial and error" is the key to success either. Plenty of startups pivot and run out of runway. So what then is the secret sauce?
- dvt 8y ago
  True, this is a good point. The key to startup success is probably the same as the key to winning at Poker: win more than you lose :) Although I guess my point was just that I don't think Bezos thought that being a book salesman would make him a billionaire (as the article implies).
- eykanspelgud 8y ago
  Money. Lots of it.
- joshmarlow 8y ago
  My current thinking is that a big piece of success is taking risks and being able to absorb the losses. Generally big payouts don't come from a sure thing; you have to take multiple risks that could potentially have big payouts and survive long enough for one or more of them to pan-out. Edit: for formatting
- kbenson 8y ago
  Ruthlessly identify and pursue existing capabilities that are profitable or that capitalize on or provide unique or rare market capabilities (which you can later try to turn into profitable areas), and always been experimenting to find more.
- stareatgoats 8y ago
  >So what then is the secret sauce? Right time and place, luck, skill and money in varying relative quantities. People focus on the skills, not unimportant by all means, but it is not the secret sauce.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ykevinator 8y ago
And diversification
Barrin92 8y ago
also Thiel (at least as represented in the review here) seems to systemically understate the role of luck and environment. One contribution to Amazon's success was also the great culling of (potential) competitors after the dotcom burst. They were really lucky to rake in a 700 million investment barely a month before the crash, and most competitors afterwards had a hard time raising serious money. Now sure you can argue that there's strategies you can pick that maximise your chances of abusing these crashes, but they're very hard to predict and if they don't come you might lose out, and I don't think Bezos ever anticipated the dotcom bubble. So chance and timing really play a gigantic role in creating successful businesses, there are not always secrets or geniuses behind successful enterprise.

notyourloops 8y ago

He has a very interesting weekly discussion thread about the Culture War: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/akk8nc/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_28/ https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/akk8nc/cult...

natalyarostova 8y ago
I like /r/slatestarcodex, and I like the culture war thread. But it's worth emphasizing Scott doesn't participate in that thread, and he doesn't necessarily like it either. In fact, from what I can tell he's not a huge fan of lots of the conversations that go on there, and the topics discussed. If anyone were to judge him on comments, please only do it based on the curated comments on his website, where he deletes and bans people who are uncivil.
- notyourloops 8y ago
  Ahh, ok. I recently came across his blog and the subreddit, and based on the huge activity in that thread I figured that was a prominent creation of his. Thanks for the clarification.
- CWuestefeld 8y ago
  From the latest thread: ---- As I'm sure everyone has noticed, the culture war thread has essentially grown to devour all of /r/SlateStarCodex. Also, we talk about really weird stuff here. That's intended, and it's something I like about this community; however, given the weirdness, Scott Alexander no longer wants it on /r/SlateStarCodex. We're moving this thread to another subreddit, and after some internal discussion, we've realized that only a subset of our moderators want to be responsible for the new culture-war-specific subreddit. ---- So it's definitely not Scott's discussion.
  - notyourloops 8y ago
    So, basically an attempt at image clean-up. His audience created a regular discussion based on the terminology of his original content, but he's trying to become more popular to a broader audience. If people new to him were to search, he'd be able to put some distance, should this separation be effective. That's the gist of what I'm getting from reading the latest discussion.

jim-greer 8y ago

> You can still visit the Bay Model in that Sausalito warehouse, but today it’s just a tourist attraction: big plans for the future have become archaic curiosities. The Bay Model is well worth visiting. While the Reber Plan to dam up the bay would have been an environmental disaster, the model is really cool. It was actually used for many years after the plan was abandoned. It was only the rise of fluid dynamics simulators that made it obsolete.

HarryHirsch 8y ago

The Amazon example is interesting. Amazon gained a monopoly on books in the US and exploited that to become a monopoly in everything. Meanwhile in 1980s Germany you could order books through your local bookseller of choice who would go through one of two wholesellers who had most books in stock for next-day delivery. But neither Libri nor KNV chose to exploit their position to become Amazon before Amazon. That, or time wasn't yet ready.

dsr_ 8y ago
Some additional factors: Ordering via a web catalog. Visiting a local bookseller takes a bigger commitment than opening a web browser. Price competition. Amazon typically had a better price on any given book (and later, on most items) than any local store. Delivery to home or office. Now you need to schedule a second visit to your local bookstore.
- devonkim 8y ago
  Amazon was pretty clearly trying to drastically expand its markets early on and should have been a warning bell to incumbents in other industries. For example, they bought local Seattle area Egghead Software and used that as a beachhead into the supply chain for retail boxed software. They bought all kinds of stores going out of business. For a while, you could even see other brands sell their stuff using Amazon as their main portal. Target did similar buying Mervyns for access to certain brands that it didn’t have for so long. Funny enough, Target used to use Amazon as it’s e-commerce storefront.
- mikeash 8y ago
  And a US-specific aspect of your second item: the weird way US sales tax is set up meant that Amazon didn’t have to pay any for a long time, giving it an automatic ~5% price advantage in most states.
- eurg 8y ago
  1 and 3 are very important points. 2, Price competition likely was less important; in Austria (and I think, Germany) there exists the "Buchpreisbindung", the price of books is mandated, no seller must offer a lower price; also, tax was always included, from day one. They still won big, very early, very fast. I remember that an employee of a (now defunct) bookstore told me "please order via Amazon, you'll get the book faster, and I cannot offer any added value".

throwaway5752 8y ago

Asking honestly - who is Scott Alexander? I read the about page on the submission, and it's even more confusing why he's reviewing this book.

mjfl 8y ago
He is a psychiatrist who blogs pretty good long form articles on issues that nerds find interesting.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
the_jeremy 8y ago
He's a California based psychiatrist who also happens to write rational fiction (reddit.com/r/rational) and has interesting blog posts. I don't think he has any special qualifications or status that would make his review any more authoritative than anyone else's, but I really enjoy his writing style.
- throwaway5752 8y ago
  Thanks, the reddit link is useful. Appreciate it.
leesec 8y ago
Prominent pseudonymous psychiatrist/internet intellectual who writes interesting sometimes quite in depth articles on a variety of topics.
Tuna-Fish 8y ago
He is a pseudonymous blogger who has been described as one of the most influential bloggers by more than a few other very influential bloggers. If you wish to know more, I'd nominate "Who by very slow decay" [1] as his one work that everyone should read, because more people knowing it would make the world a better place. (edit: content warning: hospitals and death. It's not a pleasant read, but I think it's a necessary one.) [1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay...

Reedx 8y ago

"Zero To One might be the first best-selling business book based on a Tumblr. Stanford student Blake Masters took Peter Thiel’s class on startups. He posted his notes on Tumblr after each lecture. They became a minor sensation. Thiel asked if he wanted to make them into a book together. He did." That's an interesting origin story. I was curious to see the notes in question. Found them here, for anyone else interested: http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup

40acres 8y ago

Zero to One is my favorite "startup" book, Thiel has a lot of interesting insights and I wish he was a bit more public with his thoughts. Trying to search for Thiel talks online that don't take place during his book tour has been tough for me.

infiniteseeker 8y ago
If he was more public with his thoughts, I’m guessing he would be much maligned by the radical leftist outrage culture.
genericone 8y ago
I'm actually glad he isn't going on a self-congratulatory speaking tour, gives me the impression he does indeed have important things to think about and work on.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

lukasm 8y ago

> Nowadays people get told that if they think they’ve figured out something about gravity, they’re probably a crackpot. Instead, they should wait for very large government-funded programs full of well-credentialled people to make incremental advances. Maybe we approach limit of human cognitive abilities and another Newton is not possible for current problems? Maybe to find a cure for cancer you need to spend 10k hours studying biology, 10k studying chemistry, 10k studying machine learning and then spend 100k hours on the problem, which it's not possible for a human being.

ctoth 8y ago
This short story, by the same author, speaks to this idea: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
- yhoiseth 8y ago
  What an amazing story. Thanks for sharing!
TeMPOraL 8y ago
Possibly. But then, we've always been good in solving problems with tools. Could we reduce the necessary "10k" learning by building better tools for accessing knowledge? Right now, scientific papers are a shitshow, and even refined and systematized knowledge in textbooks isn't as accessible as it could be in the digital age. Could we encode knowledge in more powerful tools allowing us to explore through free-form simulations? The goal here would be to make discovery of promising solutions more time- and effort-efficient. Related, I feel we need to figure out a way to systematize information in scientific papers to make mining them for cross-cutting insights possible. I suspect there are lots of discoveries hiding in plain sight, if one knew which particular papers from which disciplines touch on the same underlying phenomenon or concept.
- lukasm 8y ago
  > always been good in solving problems with tools sure, but if AI would do 80% of the job then we can't really compare it to another Newton.

jseliger 8y ago

Zero to One is a great book: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/09/24/zero-to-one-peter-thiel-and-blake-masters/ https://jakeseliger.com/2014/09/24/zero-to-one-peter-thiel-a... and you should read it if you've not already.

gradstudentcs 8y ago

as a graduate student in CS (ML and theory) all these comments about people not believing in their own ability to invent things via their own reasoning runs 100% opposite to my own experience. weird. maybe i've just found a good local optimum in my life choices and starting place (birth/white privilege etc).