This article is on the dot. This is especially true with Thiel-ean “secrets”. The most important secrets stay secret for a long time because most people are bli

This article is on the dot. This is especially true with Thiel-ean “secrets”. The most important secrets stay secret for a long time because most people are blind to them — they cannot even be communicated, because they would sound like gibberish/wrong to most listeners (cue: blub paradox). This is why Planck said that science progresses from funeral to funeral. The other thing about lists is that all the items are roughly equally weighted. In real life, the value is almost never distributed that way — a couple of items absorbed well will often contribute immense value. But we water that down with lists (to make the source sound authoritative), and worse, bury the best stuff down the list for SEO & clicks & “engagement” metrics. It’s interesting to imagine that as a corollary, this brushes aside almost all punditry, and a lot of context-free college education. Here’s the thing... a good mental model is worth its weight in gold to a practitioner. There’s something magical about the deep intermingling of theory and practice, with each piggy-backing on the other. To have any shot at that, it is very important to be situated in a context, getting useful feedback from reality. If you think about it, the fields with the best theory also have the best experiments & feedback. Failing that, excessive theorizing is akin to the insanity of a dream world.