Patrick Collison: prediction

Transcript context

…What I like about this and what I admire about you is that you have this sense of contrarianism – the way you often challenge what people are expecting to hear from you in a given moment. You just really want to tell them the opposite. When EA was a little more popular, you were talking about the important problems, and when it was down in its depths, you were like: "Hey guys, pay attention." But on this particular piece of advice… Michael Nielsen says that every field in science has way too many adherents or way too few. The market is almost never in the right equilibrium and I think something like that might be the case for EA. I think reflexive contrarianism for the sake of it is also tired. If you're just contrarian to the prevailing mood, then you're following the prevailing mood but with a sign bit inversion. I don't endorse that either. The herd is a really powerful phenomenon. One of the learnings of my adult life has been something, that everyone knows and says or frequently hears, that you should be very wary of following the prevailing tides and moods and whims and everything. But it's freaking hard to do in practice. So what practically does that look like to hone your craft in any of these disciplines that take a long time? You've spoken and tweeted about some of the problems with modern universities. Is that still the de facto path if you want to be the great biologist at Arc or something?…

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