Summary: The Silicon Valley intellectual culture values action and big ideas, prioritizing intelligence and knowledge as tools for innovation. Unlike the political elites in Washington, who focus on authority and expertise, Silicon Valley thinkers are drawn to interesting and novel insights. A vague canon of influential books shapes their mindset, emphasizing biographies and histories that reflect a “great man” theory of progress.
In one passage of The Politics, Aristotle suggests that it is the provision of a common paıdeía—and nothing else—that turns a multitude into a unit and constitutes it as a pólıs (View Highlight)
in San Francisco reading books, and talking about what you have read, is a matter of high prestige. Not so in Washington DC. In Washington people never read books—they just write them. (View Highlight)
Out of humanity’s many billions there are only a handful of individuals who know their chosen domain as well as they do. They have mastered their mountain: they know its every crag, they have walked its every gully. But it is a small mountain. At its summit their field of view is limited to the narrow range of their own expertise. (View Highlight)
One is strongly encouraged to write books (or reports, which are simply books made less sexy by having an “executive summary” tacked up front) but again, the books one writes will be read only by the elect few climbing your mountain. (View Highlight)
The technologist knows he is smart—and in terms of raw intelligence, he is in fact often smarter than any random small-mountain subject expert he might encounter. But intelligence is only one of the two altars worshiped in Silicon Valley. The other is action. (View Highlight)
This is a culture where insight, intelligence, and knowledge are treasured—but treasured as tools of action, not goods in and of themselves. (View Highlight)
The expectation that anyone sufficiently intelligent can grasp, and perhaps master, any conceivable subject incentivizes technologists to become conversant in as many subjects as possible (View Highlight)
It is also a good breeding ground for books. Not for writing books—being men of action, most Silicon Valley sorts do not have time to write books. But they make time to read books—or barring that, time to read the number of book reviews or podcast interviews needed to fool other people into thinking they have read a book (View Highlight)