The technology companies that have come to dominate our lives were in many cases small nations, built around a set of ideals that many young people craved: freedom to build, ownership of their success, and a commitment above all to results. The Sunnyvales, Palo Altos, and Mountain Views of the world were company towns and city-states, walled off

At present, the principal features of American society that are shared are not civic or political, but rather cohere around entertainment, sports, celebrity, and fashion. This is not the result of some unbridgeable political division. The interpersonal tether that makes possible a form of imagined intimacy among strangers within groups of a

The work of Singer, who was born in Melbourne, Australia, and taught at Princeton for more than two decades, was attractive because it seemed to have solved the puzzle: well-being, whether of humans or sea otters, was all that mattered. But this approach provided cover for a generation to avoid more thorny questions about what constitutes a life

He found that an investment approach that purchased shares solely in companies run by founders would have earned an excess annual return of 10.7 percent, or 4.4 percent more per year than a portfolio that included all companies, founder-run and otherwise, even when controlling for various other factors including industry and the age of the

The outperformance of founder-led companies, for which there is a growing body of evidence, is the result of this privileging of an aesthetic point of view, of space to pronounce and decide.

Founders have an aesthetic point of view. Their métier might not be nineteenth-century sculpture or Italian frescoes, but they found a space in the Valley that permitted them to exercise what is essentially an artistic form of judgment, and to create in a world where normative claims about good and bad, and narrative arcs of triumph and defeat,

Our shift away, as a culture, from this type of thinking, from veneration of leaders, is both a symptom and a cause of our current condition. We have grown weary and skeptical of leadership itself; the heroic has for most gone the way of the mythological—relics of a past that we tell ourselves are irredeemably rooted in a history of domination and

We tell ourselves that politicians should seek office for more noble reasons, those other than renumeration, only to pay them a fraction of what some of them could earn in the private sector. But we decline to confront the consequence of this approach, which is that we essentially incentivize candidates for public service to become wealthy before

As Tetlock explained, the human mind was bested by the animal in the maze study “because we are, deep down, deterministic thinkers with an aversion to probabilistic strategies that accept the inevitability of error.” The search for grand theories, for underlying systems and mechanisms of action in the world, in any other number of domains, from