[2025-01-14]
Author of the great The Diff newsletter wrote a book with a cheeky idea - bubbles are a significant force behind progress, even had to pre-order that one.
It argues that excessive hype, drive, and optimism all have quite a bright side to it, while also having a consistent understanding that positive irrationality will eventually subside.
There’s a certain tendency of people working in Tech or with Tech to cluster around certain sets of ideas - metascience, progress studies, effective altruism, etc.
From that angle, which I’d not shy away from being interested in, is the new book. It reads as a narrative around the big/impactful developments mostly of the 20th century and argues that ‘hype’ is a good thing to have in a society. With the caveat of synonymity of ‘hype’ in that regard bein not only ‘extreme popularity’, but also urgency/determinance and laser focus on the required outcome.
On that topic, there’s a notion, quite frequent to the works on developmental economics and/or metascience: the battle between ‘rational investment’ and ‘breakthroughs’.
The author’s perspective here would be obvious per the initial stand: embracing the paradox that the only rational way to get breakthroughs is to get an irrational/chaotic/maniacal approach to it.
Positively - it took many forms in the past, however, it’d be much easier to outline negative ones.
When something is created by committee, with processes establishing/prioritizing/relying on bureaucratization, and ironically - risk control and rationalization, breakthroughs won’t happen, won’t fire up the hype narratives, won’t motivate the thousands of tinkerers and won’t change the world for the better.
The slightly downbeat part is that one might not necessarily learn a lot of new things:
All in all: these are interesting, broad, and well-built arguments.