Chris Dixon: evaluation

Transcript context

…No. I highly recommend him. He’s got a 50-part video, [laughs] 50, 5–0. You’d like him. He’s a philosopher of cognitive science, really smart guy, and he’s got a 50-part video called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I’ve watched 30 of them or something. The idea is that in the modern world, we lost religion and lost philosophy, and now people are seeking meaning in their lives, and they’re finding it through drugs and I don’t know what, video games and whatever, and we should go back and look at all the great thinkers and see, how do we find meaning. It’s his mission of it. He’s very sophisticated in the philosophy stuff. He goes through the 50 parts. It’s like Aristotle, Plato, Buddha, Jesus. It’s literally every great thinker, and how they think about how you find meaning in life. Very interesting. A big part of his thinking is, there’re many different ways of knowing. One of the things that we’ve done in the modern world is we’ve forgotten that there’s more than just propositional knowledge, more than just knowing that. There’s knowing how. Religious traditions are very good at embracing multiple kinds of knowledge. It’s the mistake that the redditor makes about analyzing Christianity. They look at it as a set of propositions when, in fact, it’s a form of life. It’s about a community, a community co-development and meaning, rituals. I think the Heidegger stuff is very interesting on those topics of different kinds of knowledge. We all, you and I, I’m sure, have this default naturalistic, physicalist, scientific worldview. I’m interested in sophisticated thinkers who have a different worldview and trying to understand it. John von Neumann had this great phrase. Someone asked him about set theory. He said, “You never understand set theory. You just get used to it.” I think that’s true of a lot of these other alternative philosophies. It’s not like it’s going to be one argument you’re going to read in Heidegger, and you’re going to be like, “Oh, my God, my worldview changed.” You just have to submerge yourself in it. That’s what I’m trying to do. You just keep seeing it from different angles, and then hopefully, you eventually get a Gestalt switch, and you start to see the world maybe through a different lens. If you had to say not what you like in philosophy as philosophy, but what in philosophy has stuck with you when you make venture capital decisions, what would you cite?…

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