The continued importance of heretics
It is, I suspect, much easier (and maybe even fun) to be the lone voice of contradiction these days. Almost any outlier view can now attract a thousand true fans. This white paper on the fallacies of human reasoning gives a useful summary of just how human reasoning can get skewed to one side or another.
Last week Joe Rogan (bear with me for a minute) hosted a showdown between ancient history heretic Graham Hancock and conventional archaeology flag-bearer, Flint Dibble. Hancock is mostly known for his theories on pre-Ice Age civilizations (see the Ancient Apocalypse Netflix series). Dibble is an archaeologist whose career has (mostly) been based on ancient Greece. His father was archaeologist Harold Dibble, who worked on many Neanderthal and ancient human sites.
It’s really cool to think about an ancient lost civilization (or several)! Why is that? Maybe because we like the idea of secrets. Maybe because it tackles some kind of genetic cognitive dissonance. Maybe because it’s just far more interesting than the history we’ve been taught.
There are a whole bunch of Reddit threads on who won this 4.5hr debate (the biggest surprise was how good Joe Rogan is as a moderator). It’s worth your time watching (although I recommend 1.5x speed). In a world where the cost of heresy is the time it takes to set up a Tiktok account, Hancock has spent years of his life traipsing around the world actually looking at these sites1.
There is a distinction, I think, between heretical views (a complete rejection of the status quo) and simply unpopular views (unpleasant or annoying). Neither are comfortable things to tolerate but investment opportunities can come from both, with the latter being slightly easier to analyse (the classic outsourcing/garbage collection metaphor) but the former having the obvious asymmetric return possibilities (sub-prime consumer credit will go bad as a category, not individually). I’m writing this on a longish flight so just mulling a few vaguely heretical views that I still hold (or at least haven’t disproven satisfactorily). Feedback welcome:
The growth of LLMs will significantly increase the presence of advertising/attention economy mechanics in our lives
Most successful founders don’t realise they have been successful because they picked the right markets and did a lot of basic things right, rather than being outlier human beings
The economics of population shrinkage (in the west) will be a bigger problem than the economics of climate change
Angel investing will be labeled as ‘gambling’ by at least one major country within ten years2
It’s still possible for large technology shifts to be based on novelty rather than real productivity
To his credit, Dibble was well researched and arguably much better prepared.
Yes I realise this is technically a prediction rather than an opinion per se, but still