Listen 🎧🎼: Dialectic Ep. 13: Nabeel Qureshi - The Will to Care
Nabeel S. Qureshi, like many Dialectic guests, contains multitudes. He spent 8 years at Palantir, but based on his unbelievable cultural literacy and viral writing you’d think he’d spent the last decade as a scholar or public intellectual. He recently started a new (unannounced) company, but I am please to have caught him when I did because much of his thinking on learning, creativity, media, philosophy, work, art, and government could not be more relevant than they are today.
The conversation is anchored on a discussion inspired by Nabeel’s recent thread: “The Opposite of Slop is Care.”
What is “slop,” and what is its opposite? What types of content, art, work, design—have meaning, and why do we care about what we care about? If technology is getting better and better at frictionlessly helping us create more of the same, should we look for more strangeness? More unpredictability?
We recorded the conversation a few days before it launched, but after the latest ChatGPT image generation update, this conversation feels especially relevant.
We also spent a lot of time discussing ideas related to Nabeel’s excellent How to Understand Things—and specifically William Shockley’s “will to think.”
How to learn, push past the basic or surface level answer, continuously updating your thinking, and so on. We also cover Palantir, government bureaucracy and DOGE, power and tech, art and why it matters, Tyler Cowen and other influences, and lots more.
I really hope you enjoy it, and I hope you’re challenged to spend more of your attention, time, work, and life on the things you really care about. We only get so many things...
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