Chapter Two of Peter Thiel's New Book

Re:Chapter Two of Peter Thiel's New Book by cubetime on Monday September 15, 2014 @06:45PM (#8322013)

I model people's motivations (and systems made out of their motivations, to a lesser extent) as tangly, illegible, time-varying weighted directed graphs of weighted goals, where none of the nodes seems to actually persistently have indegree == 0 or outdegree == 0. The use of "terminal" and "instrumental" here isn't very clear to me. [http://lesswrong.com/lw/l3/thou_art_godshatter/]

But, to me, "company" usually means something like "an organization with higher-level goals that include selling things to customers and making money for its other stakeholders". When that's not the case, I think of words like "charity", "non-profit", and "club".

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Re:Chapter Two of Peter Thiel's New Book by Anderkent on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @03:42PM (#8331973)

Well, "non-profit" is just shorthand for "non-profit company", right? At least that's what I'm used to, though googling now seems to bring up "non-profit organisation" as the more popular term...

Regarding 'terminal' and 'instrumental', perhaps the better descriptors would be 'direct' and... uh, not sure, let's take indirect by symmetry.

The direct goals of a company is to make money. The reason we want to have organisations that focus on making money is because .. (we believe that organisations with larger positive impact are better posed to make more money, we want to harness the self-interest to improve efficiency, etc etc). The point is just having a company that makes a lot of money but doesn't improve the world is counterproductive.

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