Nadia Asparouhova: belief

Transcript context

…It is funny. A lot of prophets have this property where you're not really sure what they believed in so people with different temperaments can project their own preferences onto him. Take somebody like Jesus. You can be a super left winger and believe Jesus stood for everything you believe in and you can be a super right winger and believe the same. I think there's value in writing cryptically. Curtis Yarvin has done a really good job of this, intentionally or not, where his writing is so cryptic and long winded. It's like the Bible where you can just kind of pour over endlessly — What does this mean? What does this mean? You're always told to write very clearly, you're told to write succinctly, but in a weird way, you can be much more effective by being very long-winded and not obvious in what you're saying. Yes, that actually raises an interesting question that I've been wondering about. There have been movements that have been focused on “community building” in an explicit way, effective altruism is a good example of that. And then there's other movements where they have a charismatic founder who doesn't really try to recruit people. I'm thinking of somebody like Peter Thiel. Once every year or two, he'll go on a podcast and have this really cryptic back and forth. And then just kind of go away into a hole for a few months or a few years. I'm curious, which one do you think is more effective? Given the fact that you're not really competing for votes and the absolute number of people is not what you care about. It's not clear what you care about but you do want to have more influence among the elites who matter in politics and tech as well. What are your thoughts on those kinds of strategies? Explicitly trying to community build versus just kind of projecting out there in a cryptic way.…

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