★ We have different kinds of challenges on the government side. One is a little more philosophical in nature: We tend to think the future is indeterminate. But it used to be seen as a much more determinate thing and subject to rational planning. If it’s fundamentally unknowable, it doesn’t make sense to say anything about it…
…”To put it in mathematical terms, we’ve had a shift from thinking of the world in terms of calculus to statistics. So, where we once tracked the motions of the heavenly bodies and could send Voyager to Jupiter over a multiyear trajectory, now we tend to think nature is fundamentally driven by the random movements of atoms or the Black-Scholes mathematical model of financial markets—the random walk down Wall Street.
You can’t know where things are going; you only know they’re going to be random. I think some things are true about this statistical view of the future, but it’s extremely toxic for any kind of rational planning. It’s probably linked in part to the failure of state communist central planning, though I would argue that there is something to be said for some planning over no planning. We should debate whether it should be decentralized or centralized, but what the United States has today is an extremely big government, a quasi-socialist government, but without a five-year plan, with no plan whatsoever.”
-A Conversation with Peter Thiel, via cdixon
Source: cdixon
6 Notes
-
courtneybolton liked this
-
mattlehrer liked this
-
christmasgorilla liked this
-
bryc3 liked this
-
joeconyers liked this
-
courtneybolton reblogged this from cdixon and added:
…”To put it in mathematical terms, we’ve had a shift from thinking of the world in terms of calculus to statistics. So,...
-
cdixon posted this
