Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think of Europe as less egalitarian. I think they have bad cultural norms for innovation. They're culturally so non-egalitarian. Again, it depends where but Paris would be the extreme. There, everyone is classified right? By status, and how you need to wear your sweater the right way, and this and that. Now, how innovative is Paris? Actually, maybe more than people think. But I still think they have too few dimensions of status competition. That's a general problem in most of Europe–– too few dimensions of status competition, not enough room for the proverbial village idiot. Interesting. You say in the book, that questions tend to degrade over time if you don't replace them. I find it interesting that Y Combinator has kept the same questions since they were started in 2005. And of course, your co-author was a partner at Y Combinator. Do you think that works for Y Combinator or do you think they're probably making a mistake? I genuinely don't know. There are people who will tell you that Y Combinator, while still successful, has become more like a scalable business school and less like attracting all the top weirdos who do amazing things. Again, I'd want to see data before asserting that myself, but you certainly hear it a lot. So it could be that Y Combinator is a bit stale. But still in a good sense. Like Harvard is stale, right? It dates from the 17th century. But it's still amazing. MIT is stale. Maybe Y Combinator has become more like those groups.…

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