I'm sorry I didn't see this response until now - thank you for the detailed answer!
I'm guessing your concern feels similar to ones you've articulated in the past around... "heart"/"grounded" rationality, or a concern about "disabling pieces of the epistemic immune system".
I'm curious if 8 mo's later you feel you can better speak to what you see as the crucial misunderstanding?
Out of curiosity what's one of your more substantive disagreements with Thiel?
I'd be quite interested in reading that guide!
Forecast - 25 mins
Thanks for posting this. I recently reread the Fountainhead, which I similarly enjoyed and got more out of than did my teenage self - it was like a narrative, emotional portrayal of the ideals in Marc Andreessen's It's Time to Build essay.
I interpreted your section on The Conflict as the choice between voice and exit.
The larger scientific question was related to Factored Cognition, and getting a sense of the difficulty of solving problems through this type of "collaborative crowdsourcing". The hope was running this experiment would lead to insights that could then inform the direction of future experiments, in the way that you might fingertip feel your way around an unknown space to get a handle on where to go next. For example if it turned out to be easy for groups to execute this type of problem solving, we might push ahead with competitions between teams to develop the best strategies for context-free problem solving.
In that regard it didn't turn out to be particularly informative, because it wasn't easy for the groups to solve the math problems, and it's unclear if that's because of the problems selected, the team compositions, the software, etc. So re: the larger scientific question I don't think there's much to conclude.
But personally I felt that by watching relay participants I gained a lot of UX intuitions around what type of software design and strategy design is necessary for factored strategies - what I broadly think of as problem solving strategies that rely upon decomposition - to work. Two that immediately come to mind:
These ideas are helpful because - I posit - we're faced with Relay Game like problems all the time. When I work on a project, leave it for a week, and come back, I think I'm engaging in a relay between past Ben, present Ben, and future Ben. Some of these ideas informed my design of templates for collaborative group forecasting.
Thanks, rewrote and tried to clarify. In essence the researchers were testing transmission of "strategies" for using a tool, where an individual was limited in what they could transmit to the next user, akin to this relay experiment.
In fact they found that trying to convey causal theories could undermine the next person's performance; they speculate that it reduced experimentation prematurely.
... my god...
hah yes - seeing that great post from johnwentsworth inspired me to review my own thinking on RadVac. Ultimately I placed a lower estimate on RadVac being effective - or at least effective enough to get me to change my quarantine behavior - such that the price wasn't worth it, but I think I get a rationality demerit for not investing more in the collaborative model building (and collaborative purchasing) part of the process.