Underneath that high-level hand-waving there’s still a pretty simple concept. If I buy T—Bonds, I bloody well expect them to be cashed at maturity. Otherwise, who’d buy them? And I am under no obligation to buy goods and services from the US for the dollars received.
Yes, exactly. The gender-driven questions have been replaced by a general (and imho more important) question of how to be a good person. That question, however, is also much more abstract (I can measure my body fat, how do I measure “good”?) and, logically, people will struggle more to find answers. Particularly if they lack good humanitarian education which should, fundamentally, provide a deep insight into all of the accumulated thoughts on the human condition. Given men tend to gravitate towards STEM and the ideologization of humanities, the situation kinda makes sense.
What Thiel is describing is a feedback loop: more people of x in a region means more people of x in a region simply because they will feel more comfortable among like people. These sorts of mechanisms certainly exist (Forrester on city planning), but with dynamic systems it’s always more complex than it would seem. Landlords definitely benefit from whatever feedback is making cities grow and are definitely interested in it continuing (thus probably investing in it), but its unlikely they are the ones behind the structure.
Let’s see what the classics say about this. Mr Conway says, that an organization creates a system in its image. Thus, if the system needs to be very distributed, so does the organization. So unless there is a singular monolithic thing built by a focused local team, a singular monolithic team makes no sense. And a team that’s not like that benefits little from their physical location, as a large chunk of their work is non-physical communication anyway. Even when the other team sits in the same building, who’s going to spend 10 minutes going to another floor when they can just message?
Office architecture is seen as ideologically driven. People like open offices so we do those. People like working from home (or office), so we do that. But office structure is as much part of the architecture of your enterprise as is database or microservice structure. It should aid progress toward a particular goal of the organization and not be subject to any hype in any direction.
Ah, the old shaman argument. The dude living in an essentially black-and-white wasteland up north with months of darkness. He strongly believes in the need to go consult the ancestors, moves in a hypnotic fashion, beats a monotone rythm on the drum for hours staring into a fire. And thus needs a minuscule plant-based push to have a profound experience. And still the old stories always have the element of being very careful and struggling to return from the other side. And then there’s a modern everyday flashing-lights-and-technicolor life kind of dude just looking to have some fun. The context is too different for “they did it thus it’s natural” argument to work.
I don't think you understand my argument - and I certainly don't understand yours.
My argument is wholly secular and realistic. It's summed up as 'exploration/play of mental states', which applies even to your flashing-lights-and-technicolor straw-man.
It doesn't rely on 'hypnotic movements' or 'rhythmic drumming'; or a monomyth, or cultural surroundings, or 'they did it thus it's natural'. Or flashing lights, or wastelands, or ancestral visions, etc.
Perhaps you could read my comment again, with a little more care and a lot less caricature.
In this context they're functionally equivalent, in that anyone making statements is also communicating information. Could you explain the difference that I did not grasp?
People consistently fail to properly assess the system architecture aspects of things. Iphone is not a standalone device but part of a complex system including hardware, software, organizational processes working on the app store etc. The device can be copied and improved upon with ease. The entire architecture of how these thousands of elements supporting the device fit together is much harder to copy. Consider Russia. They are, to an extent, capable of copying US technological devices from cruise missiles to aircraft. But they have, since 02.22, consistently failed to demonstrate their ability to make all the parts work together like the US has been able to. This despite US being their biggest strategic adversary and the considerable material and intellectual resources available.
