Michael Gibson - Paper Belt on Fire

Dear Hiveans	Liebe Hiver	Queridos Hiveanos
Today I'd like to share my favourite excerpts from the book "Paper Belt on Fire" (goodreads) by Michael Gibson (Co-founder and General Partner at 1517) who was vice president for grants at the Thiel Foundation and a principal at Thiel Capital. He contributed research to Peter’s global macro hedge fund and serves on the board of the Seasteading Institute (1517_fund).	Heute meine Lieblingsauszüge aus dem Buch "Paper Belt on Fire" (goodreads) von Michael Gibson (Mitbegründer und General Partner bei 1517), der Vizepräsident für Grants bei der Thiel Foundation und Direktor bei Thiel Capital war. Er trug zu Peters Global-Macro-Hedgefonds bei und ist Mitglied des Vorstands des Seasteading Institute (1517_fund).	Hoy me gustaría compartir mis extractos favoritos del libro "Paper Belt on Fire" (goodreads) de Michael Gibson (cofundador y socio general de 1517), que fue vicepresidente de subvenciones de la Fundación Thiel y director de Thiel Capital. Contribuyó a la investigación del fondo de cobertura macroeconómica global de Peter y forma parte del consejo del Seasteading Institute (1517_fund).

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Like Peter, I felt that the modern world was becoming increasingly hostile to innovation. I’d been writing about this on a blog called “Let a Thousand Nations Bloom.” I’d set myself the task of answering a question that would never get raised in the philosophy department on Merton Street in Oxford: what if there were no new countries? Then, as now, there were 193 countries recognized by the United Nations. In 2050, should there be more or fewer than that? Different answers to that question imply different visions of the future. The science writer Robert Wright, for instance, in his book Non-Zero, argues the number should be one: all the nations of the world united under a one-world government, the better to handle global existential issues like bioterror or climate change. To the contrary, I thought that would be a total catastrophe. My answer was that the future would be worse and worse the lower the total number of countries sank below 193. History suggests that fragmented governance, as well as new nations with new laws, are a good thing. Without them, social, technological, and scientific stagnation tend to follow. The big question for me was why.
Era by era, innovation has been concentrated geographically, like a hive. Since the First World War, America has been the leader, the Bay Area in particular in the latter half of the 20th century. But before that, Victorian Britain led the way, and before that, it may have been the Netherlands, and then earlier, Renaissance Italy, and before that Fujian China, Rome, and Athens. The historical record shows all creative clusters, businesses, and institutions age and then eventually collapse, unless they are renewed by the dynamics of competition and new entry. In my writing, I argued there’s no reason to suppose this decline won’t happen to laws, social policy, and even the spirit of a culture, as vested interests poison the sources of creativity and thicken the barriers to entry.

The founding vision of PayPal wasn’t to argue with the Federal Reserve about the correct rate of inflation. That was for the readers of Econometrica. In the 1990s, Peter and the other PayPal founders—Max Levchin, Elon Musk, Luke Nosek, and others—dreamt of escaping that turgid debate by creating a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution. This would be nothing short of the end of monetary sovereignty. Bitcoin before Bitcoin. In the end, they didn’t get there, but they did invent a payment system worth billions in the process. For Peter, new technologies and scientific discoveries were primal, fundamental forces shaping human history. 7 billion mouths to feed. 120 people dying per minute. Human destiny was perpetually in sudden death overtime and the fate of our world could depend on the efforts of a few friends building the future in a lab or a garage on the hinge of history.
He then launched into a short dissertation on the failure of libertarians to understand that groups, crowds, tribes, and nations all had lives of their own and behaved in distinctive ways. The discipline of economics and the theory of efficient markets were on shaky foundations because they relied on the assumption of methodological individualism, meaning that in building models of social phenomena, economists took preferences as given, and that any differences or changes in behavior could be explained solely by differences in prices or incomes. This assumption could not explain the madness of crowds, however. Nor, according to Peter, could it explain bubbles.

I've written before about Peter Thiel. I think - especially compared to Elon Musk (who appears more often in public) - he is underrated.	Ich habe schon früher über Peter Thiel geschrieben. Ich denke, dass er - insbesondere im Vergleich zu Elon Musk (der häufiger in der Öffentlichkeit auftritt) - unterschätzt wird.	Ya he escrito antes sobre Peter Thiel. Creo -especialmente en comparación con Elon Musk (que aparece más a menudo en público)- que está infravalorado.

The next day Jim O’Neill called me. He said they’d like to offer me a job as an analyst at the hedge fund. Starting salary at $75,000. I took an hour or two to mull it over and talk to my mom. I called Jim back. Like Lucretius, I wanted to be a poet-philosopher. But unlike him I was suddenly trying to work at a hedge fund. “I accept.” He laughed again. “I’m going to pretend you made a counteroffer. We can give you 80’000.”

• That's how job interviews should be.

As we walked, Jim talked: “On the plane ride back from New York last night, we came up with the idea of paying people to work on stuff outside of school. For now, we’re calling it the ‘anti-Rhodes Scholarship.’” I loved the name. The Rhodes Scholarship was a program at Oxford first established in 1902 and dedicated to the idea of empire. l But along the way the empire vanished. And its founder, an impassioned imperialist, became a moral disgrace. Nevertheless, in one of the more surprising episodes in the intellectual history of colonialism, the Rhodes Scholarship became the premiere trophy in the English-speaking education of the polished, credentialed elite. As an American at Oxford, I found the U.S. Rhodies insufferable, always toadying their way to greater prestige. Imagine the very best of the second-rate who contemplate nothing but looking good in the eyes of a committee. Naturally, the most famous of them became politicians or media stars: Bill Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, Rachel Maddow, George Stephanopoulos. I stayed away from them all. […]
Though America has always had vast inequalities in wealth, and an appalling past of slavery, Americans have never lived under a hereditary aristocratic class system with titles and orders of nobility. Nevertheless, in recent decades, higher education has begun to create something close to it, as divisions have hardened into a status pyramid with hundreds of gradations, from the Rhodes to the Fulbright to the Marshall Scholarships, to the Ivy League, and so on downwards. Like any aristocratic society, with their obsessive interest in lengthy family trees, the mind of educated America has become dominated by endless conceits of pedigree. The new social pyramid isn’t as sharp and steep as the old European aristocracies, but it does appear to be dividing Americans into two broad social classes: those who have a college degree and those who do not. William Deresiewicz, a professor at Yale, confessed in a popular 2008 essay that he “never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.” Which was a rather surprising statement, since as a professor of English literature, he could have started with William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway, or James Baldwin. Deresiewicz, however, was speaking candidly to the situation today. Put simply, college graduates earn more income on average than those who only have a high school diploma. Since about 1971, the college degree— and particularly an Ivy League college degree—has become a badge of social and economic rank, impervious to change and worthy of life-long respect. In the eyes of the labor market, if someone didn’t go to college, it was as if they had to wear a hat with a D for dunce on it for the rest of their lives.

Back in the green room at the Fox Business studio, the producers hadn’t come in yet. Jim, Peter, and I were discussing potential answers if he was asked about The Social Network. Peter hit it: the Facebook movie is actually an accurate portrayal of how Hollywood works. Hollywood feeds upon narcissism, sycophancy, fragile egos, stolen ideas, and vendettas. Today, its chief emblem is Harvey Weinstein’s heavy-jowled plutocratic sneer. Hollywood is all about fame, a zero-sum game, where the more famous you get, the more people try to destroy you. That’s not how Silicon Valley works. Silicon Valley is about positive-sum games—employees, investors, and customers all win. There is no limit to discovery and invention, which cannot be faked or handed out to favorites.

It’s a myth that the elite students of today are all the leaders of tomorrow. The future was built in garages. Jobs and Woz. Gates. Zuckerberg. Hell, let’s add Shakespeare. Barely 3 years of college between them all. Our theory was that these people weren’t merely outliers but, with Zuckerberg, the start of something new. Peter had spent the previous year investigating how to start a new university. But somewhere along the way, he learned that competition is for losers, as he’d say many years later. The standard view about competition is that it’s the crucible of excellence from which flows all progress and prosperity. The paradoxical thing, however, is that whenever we compete against others very intensely, we get better only at the dimension we’re competing on. AP exams, SATs, GPAs, diplomas—what does this system do to children and teenagers? What does it do to society? We’ve been competing on these dimensions for so long that we forgot to ask whether they were worth pursuing at all. And here we come to the worst consequence of the whole tournament for prestige: if progress had stalled for 40 years, then the so-called meritocratic elite were actually failures. The cultivated class had made a mess of things for a generation. So how to avoid this destructive competition altogether? As Emerson wrote in “Self-Reliance,” “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.” Invent your own game.

A very important point. I found it helpful to avoid competition. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.	Ein sehr wichtiger Punkt. Ich finde die Empfehlung hilfreich, Wettbewerb zu vermeiden. "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes."	Un punto muy importante. Me resultó útil evitar la competencia. Jugar a juegos estúpidos, ganar premios estúpidos.

That Peter ran an unusual fund became very clear one time in the first couple of years I worked there, when a portfolio manager formerly of George Soros’s office tried to get a job on the Thiel desk. The Soros guy—let’s call him Captain Gascan, because he loved oil—knew that Peter has an enormous appetite for risk. In trading, there’s a metric called VAR, short for “value-at-risk.” Most hedge funds will limit a portfolio manager’s VAR to below one or one-point-five, meaning that if a trader is managing $100 million, based on the historical movements of the assets held, the daily profit or loss swings would be expected to fall within $1 to $1.5 million dollars in any day. Go over your VAR limit, then expect that fund’s version of Fitz to show up at your desk in a tie. Now, with respect to VAR, Peter pushed the envelope. His attitude was that if you have conviction, don’t come talk to me about it until you have a VAR of 4. This was insane to the staid traders in New York City. [...]
In truth, Peter didn’t just hire libertarians. He hired scapegoats who’d survived a mob. People who felt comfortable being a minority of one. There were some libertarians, certainly more than the average office. But what Peter prized most about them was that they were used to being the only people in a room to believe in something and defend it. There were also monarchists and conservative anarchists like me. (I believe in the most irrational form of romantic anarchism.) There were a lot of oddballs, but the last thing Thiel wanted was to be around someone who was in awe of him. His most famous interview question is, “What’s something you believe to be true that the rest of the world thinks is false?” It isn’t: “tell me something we both agree on.” Peter loathes sycophants and obsequious cronies.

• Very contrarian

“Many of the people who want to be like Steve [Jobs] have the asshole part down,” Bill Gates said once. “What they’re missing is the genius.”

In short, we had to (1) find innovators before they invented anything, and (2) look for this person while restricting ourselves to people who could barely vote and who couldn’t legally order a beer at a bar. If we failed, we would be a laughingstock of the press and the establishment. Larry Summers, the irascible former president of Harvard and erstwhile Treasury Secretary of the United States, came out punching in a 2013 interview. He scoffed at our program, saying it was “meretricious in its impact” and—my favorite—the “single most misdirected philanthropy of the decade.” He continued, “if any significant number of intellectually able people, of the kind that would have the opportunity to attend top schools are dropping out, I think it’s tragic.” […]
The credentialist impulse to keep every talented young person in a classroom for 17 years is holding our society back. The looming threat of open-ended stagnation is difficult to convey in feeling. Imagine life under Covid lockdowns, but for decades—the shortages, the loneliness, the narrowness of activity, the sameness of our days, the worst in us exposed by our desperation. But perhaps I can be more direct about its appearance: if in the near future, in fifteen or twenty years, Harvard still sits at the apex of all opportunity and learning, if all of our Supreme Court Justices, Cabinet members, and Presidents come only from the Ivy League, as they almost all do now, if the markets continue to skew freakishly towards the same few gargantuan companies, then the bogus, delusional elite will have won, our institutions will have failed, and we will be left ruminating upon our keenly felt regret in front of the fading fires of a lost civilization. If you think that political polarization is bad now, wait till we have twenty more years of shrinking budgets, stagnant wages, higher debts, and greater catastrophes. There really isn’t time to be polite or patient with figures like Larry Summers and his theories about what young people should do.

“The shorter the period that innovators spend innovating,” Jones writes, “the less their output as individuals over their lifetime. If innovation is central to technological progress, then forces that reduce the length of active innovative careers will reduce the rate of technological progress. This effect will be particularly strong if innovators do their best work when they are young.” [...]
Education pays. Even useless education pays. We have never denied that. Those who have a college degree make on average about 70% more than those who only have a high school diploma. The question is why. The clock tower offers an explanation. A college degree signals information about its holder, but not what most people think. It doesn’t say all that much about the skills they acquired or what they learned. Instead, it’s telling employers information about a graduate’s ability to keep the promises of time, the willingness to sacrifice 4 years in the pursuit of a grueling, even if useless, series of tasks and projects. It should be said that only university bell tower clocks have this magical property. A hopeful student cannot study on his own in the vicinity of Big Ben and expect the same result. No one would take his word for it. The sacrifice of time must be made by students before trusted authorities and towards a socially approved goal. […] Employers rarely pay graduates for what they studied over 4 years. No, what employers pay for are the preexisting traits students reveal by sacrificing the time and showing they can master the—oftentimes—useless coursework.

• Couldn't agree more.

Institutions are fuzzy concepts. Marriage is an institution. Baseball is too. But so is a gargantuan administrative body like the Federal Reserve. One researcher on the subject lists twenty-one different definitions for institutions drawing examples from economics, sociology, anthropology, and other redoubts of obscure scholarship. Each has a different emphasis, but a general feature of institutions is that they are the durable forms of our common life, to borrow a phrase from the political scientist Yuval Levin. Institutions structure what we do together in the pursuit of social goals. To see the far-reaching implications underlying crypto, it’s important to see that Bitcoin and Ethereum are not just computer networks, and certainly not startups, but whole new institutions meant to surpass the performance of decaying old ones. They are tools for structuring what we do together in the pursuit of common goals. They do this through an intricate set of incentives and rules, which display a workmanship, precision, and interlocking machinery so unbreakable, so startling in ingenuity, that even the greatest of Swiss horologists would be astonished.

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If the Rust Belt has come to define the hollowed-out industries of the Midwest, in the next 10 years the Paper Belt will come to define the paper-based industries from Washington, D.C., to Boston. In D.C., they print money, visas, and laws on paper. In Delaware, companies incorporate on paper. In NYC, they print media on paper. And in Boston, Harvard, and MIT print diplomas on paper. I am dedicated to lighting the Paper Belt on fire.

Every region has its style of rejection. In Moscow, they say “Nyet!” In Madrid, “mañana.” In London, “Sorry luv.” For the Berliners, it’s “Nein!” And in Los Angeles, they say “You’re amazing.”

“Would you rather have a Princeton diploma without a Princeton education or a Princeton education without a Princeton diploma? If you pause to answer, you must think signaling is pretty important.”

There can be no safety without dangerous ideas.

John James Cowperthwaite was born in Scotland in 1915 but spent most of his life as the financial secretary in Hong Kong for the British government, laying the foundations for what became its economic miracle. He is one of the 20th century’s unsung heroes, on par with Norman Borlaug of the Green Revolution in agriculture. Having lifted tens of millions out of poverty, his ideas continue to ripple outward. And he is the only reason no official data on Hong Kong’s economy was ever compiled from 1961 to 1971. Cowperthwaite batted away request after request. As he explained it to the economist Milton Friedman, he was convinced that “once the data was published there would be pressure to use them for government intervention in the economy.” Another time, once asked what the most important thing poor countries could do to develop their economy, Cowperthwaite quipped, “They should abolish the office of national statistics.” Sometimes, it seems, no data is better than big data.

• Seems like a good approach...

Single World Government

I had always understood the danger in terms of Cardwell’s Law and stagnation. Progress has enemies. Within any country, political resistance to progress grows stronger over time as more interest groups form to protect the status quo. What was once a fervent, dynamic economy ossifies into a rusting collection of former winners wielding political power to protect their stagnant empires. At that point, the Orwellian paradoxes in a nation begin to pile up: scientists opposed to science, teachers against learning, academics silencing speech, publishers censoring knowledge. This is the road we are on today. But competition among different nations can at least weaken the influence of any factional interest group within a nation. Provided that there are many competing sovereignties, there will be enough political support to turn institutions toward increasing the rate of progress, instead of letting them get captured for political ends. Countries must face penalties for not innovating.
But were a single world government to emerge, then progress would grind to a halt. There would be no safety valve, nowhere to flee to, nowhere to innovate. The same dynamic that captures any one country would seize the entire world. But today, 10 years after our first conversation, Peter was wrestling with this problem from a theological direction and with a greater concern for existential risk. The most dangerous political development to avoid is a single world government. If such a thing were to emerge, it would, of course, begin peacefully and democratically through treaties and international communities.
The attendees of the World Economic Forum in Davos tend to be nice and polite. But once a democratic world government came into being—as Polybius would predict—there is a small but non-negligible probability it would degenerate into a totalitarian OneState. Since the main check on any totalitarian government in the past has been the existence of many other non-totalitarian governments, the transformation, in this case, would be irreversible. There would be no refuge for freedom. Dissent would be impossible.

To accelerate progress, we need young people working at the frontiers of knowledge sooner than they have in the past. They also need greater freedom. What that means is institutions that trust them to take risks and demonstrate some edge control with their research. We must hold it as a fairly predictable law of creativity that the unknown must always pass through the strange before we can understand it.
Universities have served this research function in the past and will continue to do so. But they are plagued by 4 realities. The first is the slow speed of a formal, credential-based education. It takes 4 years to earn a bachelor’s degree and then another 7 or 8 to earn a Ph.D. Second, universities have become hives of groupthink. Third, grant-giving is driven by prestige, credibility, and a cover-your-ass mentality. Fourth, the incentives of academic institutions reward shrewd political calculation, incrementalism, short-term horizons, and a status hierarchy in which demonstrating loyalty earns more reward than advancing knowledge. Our institutions of learning simply don’t trust younger people to do great work. They must spend all of their twenties gaining credibility through diplomas, recommendations, and grant approvals. Only then might they get the permission and funding to investigate something new. We must break this
subservience to power.
1517 is an alternative to the university system that is capable of finding, funding, and supporting young people who could go on to produce Nobel Prize caliber work between the ages of 24 and 36. To this end, we’ve started what we’re calling the Invisible College, after the underground scientific community of the 17th century, which was a forerunner to the creation of the Royal Society and helped spark the Scientific Revolution. The original Invisible College was an informal group of natural philosophers, centered around Robert Boyle, who exchanged ideas by letters and encouraged each other as they established the methods of discovery we all take for granted today. They had to keep the society secret because they feared the church, government, and other authorities of the period. The authorities of our own era seem ripe for subversion or end-arounds.
If I could mandate one thing for all universities, labs, startups, and research organizations, it would be that they all must list the top 5 unsolved problems in their respective field. It is essential that we find solutions to the top unsolved problems in the following fields: energy creation, transportation, health, education, computation, freshwater abundance, increasing crop yields for less, cleaning the air, and, lastly, the problem of human flourishing. There are other concerns besides these, undoubtedly, but I have started here given their importance.

There are at least seven potential sources of clean energy—fusion, nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and wave—but all of them involve outstanding problems requiring solutions.

Fusion

Fusion energy is a dense, zero-carbon, clean source of power, involving no risk of meltdowns, no threat of it being used as a weapon, and, unlike most current renewables, is a viable replacement for always-on baseload power sources. It is no understatement to say that whoever achieves the first self-sustaining, energy-positive controlled fusion reaction will have dramatically changed human history.
TEAMS TO WATCH: Commonwealth Fusion Systems, General Fusion, Zap Energy, First Light Fusion, Cortex Fusion, TAE Technologies, Tokamak Energy, Helion Energy, General Atomics, Princeton Fusion Systems, the ITER project in France.

Fission

As safe as the old models already are, next-generation nuclear reactors aim to solve waste, safety, and proliferation issues. We can still make improvements on all three dimensions, and we can lower the costs. Given the considerable amounts of energy nuclear produces while only using small amounts of fuel, and with reactors taking up only a few acres of land, it’s imperative that we continue to build them. Truly, there is no greener energy policy. For perverse stupidity look no further than states like New York and California, and countries like Germany, that claim to be leaders on climate issues, but that have arranged to shut down their last remaining reactors in the next year or so. The confused are always with us, alas.
TEAMS TO WATCH: Terrestrial Energy, TerraPower, NuScale, Oklo, Deep Isolation, Kairos Power, X-energy.

"Stupidity" and "Germany" in one sentence - I can think of many more topics where that would be appropriate 😮	"Dummheit" und "Deutschland" in einem Satz - mir fallen noch viele weitere Themen ein, bei denen das angebracht wäre 😮	"Estupidez" y "Alemania" en una frase, se me ocurren muchos más temas en los que eso sería apropiado 😮.

Geothermal

Despite these challenges, the potential is tantalizing. The Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group, claims that “the amount of heat within 10,000 meters of Earth’s surface contains 50,000 times more energy than all the oil and natural gas resources in the world.”
TEAMS TO WATCH: Quaise, Fervo, Sage Geosystems.

Education

We are in the Dark Ages when it comes to teaching and learning—the bloodletting and leeches phase of our educational history. I make this harsh assessment based on how little progress there has been in the last 50 years. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. government spent $752.3 billion on its public schools in 2019. That’s close to triple the spending per pupil since 1971, even adjusting for inflation. All the same, there are zero studies that find student outcomes are 3 times better than they were then. Not even close. Our schools fail to teach the basics: 23.1% of Californians over the age of 15 are illiterate; more than half of all U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level.
We can broadly define learning as improving performance. There are many challenges in this field, but the 6 that stand out to me as the most important are the following: (1) figuring out how to spark curiosity and motivate students; (2) improving the rate at which students learn; (3) making sure students retain for years what they’ve learned; (4) teaching students how to transfer what they’ve learned in one domain to a new domain they’ve never encountered before; (5) cultivating creativity; and (6) doing all of these things at a decreasing cost and increasing scale. Progress in education would mean making advances on all these dimensions.

One-to-one tutoring far surpasses any other style of teaching when it comes to improving student performance. Bloom found tutored students performed two standard deviations better than those who are taught using conventional methods. That is an enormous statistical difference. Truly staggering. But the big unsolved problem is figuring out how to scale Bloom’s findings. Imagine a tutor for every child. There are fifty million students in America’s public schools. The costs of employing 50 million tutors for each of them would be astronomical, and we don’t have enough teachers. It would require employing a sixth of the entire U.S. population. (Though, remember, we’ve been told repeatedly that the robots are taking all of our jobs.) To make matters worse, there is also a strong cultural resistance to the idea of tutoring as the primary mode of education. Many egalitarian intellectuals have denounced one-to-one tutoring as aristocratic and harmful to democracy. Nevertheless, Bloom’s study offers hope. Alexander the Great was tutored by Aristotle. Now imagine an Aristotle for every child, helping her to develop her unique strengths, and to cultivate the self-discipline to improve upon those strengths. The future of education will look more like the past. But first we must break free from the Dark Age.

Sectors and startups/companies to watch

Sector	Teams to watch
Supersonic jets	Boom Supersonic, Exosonic, Spike Aerospace, NASA’s X- 59 program
Flying cars	Joby Aviation, Kitty Hawk, Whisper Aero, Lilium, Archer, Vertical Aerospace
Autonomous vehicles	Luminar, Tesla, Aurora, Cruise, Waymo
Computing	Rigetti, IBM, Honeywell, Google, IonQ, Xanadu, ColdQuanta, Atom Computing
Water, soil, air	IDE Technologies, Veolia, Hutchison Water
Weather modification and rain-cloud seeding	North American Weather Consultants (NAWC), the Desert Research Institute, Weather Modification Incorporated (WMI), Ice Crystal Engineering
Irrigation	Netafim Irrigation, CropX, N-Drip
Air	Chart/SES Innovation, Running Tide, Clime-works AG, Ebb Carbon, Sustaera, Mission Zero

Stoicism had secured its place as the ethos of choice for the continent-jumping, (self-proclaimed) industry-disrupting, CrossFit Millennial; self-help for the young TED Man, for sensitive people with the desire to do something great, but whose idea of greatness is a TechCrunch article and a keynote at South by Southwest for the janissaries of the Internet revolution. The popular cult of Stoicism had managed to whittle the philosophy down from withstanding the iniquity of Roman tyrants to the task of managing disappointment and 10'000 unread emails. Inbox zero hero. […]
The rise of Stoicism™ is a sign of a civilization in decline. There is something decadent about a society trying to escape its own loss through a sour-grapes philosophy. Let us face reality. The answer isn’t the self-induced trance of a yogi withstanding the flames or learning how to dream of the tropics while freezing in a snowstorm. Is how we feel on the inside the only important thing in life? Is it even a priority? Or can something be bad, no matter how we feel about it?

I enjoyed reading this book, and I think that most contrarian-minded people would. Gibson has an entertaining writing style, enriched with crumbs of his classical education.	Ich habe dieses Buch mit Vergnügen gelesen, und ich denke, dass die meisten Contrarians das auch tun würden. Gibson hat einen unterhaltsamen Schreibstil, angereichert mit einigen Krümeln seiner klassischen Bildung.	He disfrutado leyendo este libro, y creo que la mayoría de las personas de mentalidad contraria lo harían. Gibson tiene un estilo de escritura entretenido, enriquecido con migajas de su educación clásica.

Have a great day,
zuerich