The Anti-Straussian Ceiling
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Every so often, I come across an insightful, anti-Straussian piece of content:
- Julian Sanchez's The Straussian Case Against Gay Marriage
- Richard Hanania on why attractive women are still high status
- Any Bryan Caplan book, blog post, or podcast
Oftentimes, I learn that the author has a largely anti-Straussian reputation.
Rarely, I come across an anti-Straussian moment from an individual with a Straussian reputation:
- Chamath speaking to Stanford GSB students, stating that the world is run by only a handful of men, and that it is your moral imperative to make money to impart your worldview on the world.
- Thiel's The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, which he later softened and reframed.
- Sam Altman on his blog and his advice to YC founders that contradict the effective mechanics of building durable companies.
In this post, I explore the reasons why there is little insightful anti-Straussian content and the forces that shift people toward Straussianism.
Why is anti-Straussian content so rare?
The following are possible explanations, in no particular order.
- You can have more impact by being Straussian and applying insights to real world activities.
Those able to generate insights rationally opt to apply them to the real world to capture the upside instead of writing about it.
- A consultant who uses their knowledge of interpersonal dynamics to increase efficiency across a wide array of companies
- A VC who uses their insights into talent formation to invest in the next outlier founder.
- A founder who starts a company based on some key insight.
- There aren't many people who can generate these insights.
Most people aren't interested in generating insights about the world. Most impactful insights require a rare combination of life experience, hard skills, and curiosity.
- The number of people willing to say truly unpopular things is near zero.
While this may seem like an easy "arbitrage", going against the social order is one of the most difficult things to do, especially because the costs are often permanent.
The Straussian Equilibrium
While technology has enabled faster feedback loops and makes it easier for the long tail to publish Straussian ideas, the social dynamics that underpin human behavior have not changed.
People typically first cultivate their reputation by generating anti-Straussian content. This operates much like a credential, and serves as an initial filtering mechanism. Today, this manifests in relationships that begin online and transition offline. This enables people to accrue offline social capital and generate high eigenvector centrality in certain networks.
These high-variance individuals are quickly subsumed by institutions that instill Straussian behavior (elite media, VC firms, academia). For the institution, this serves as a selection mechanism to determine who is most suited to continue its legacy. For the individual, this grants them a ticket into the in-group and, more importantly, an everlasting omniscient entity.
Additionally, Straussian content creates a call option on any future interpretation. Done correctly, social capital is bestowed on the creator, as they are viewed as extremely interesting and multidimensional to outsiders. There is nothing more bullish than a person being able to regularly generate downstream cultural impact based on their Straussian content.
Options
- Become a practitioner
- Go anon, a la the Founding Fathers
- Be anti-Straussian
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