bassel ojjeh

It was great fun to chat all things AI at the Citi Disruptech conference in London alongside @EclipseVc and Soros Fund Management. Thanks for having me @Citi!

Great to meet @kevinhartz and hangout with @cory with some of the brightest and most ambitious friends from Stanford. Glad we managed to organize this together!

We must differentiate between innovations and inventions, for they require fundamentally different approaches. Both can yield billion-dollar success, though one does more than the other, due to the profundity of its disruption in comparison. An innovation is an incremental improvement in some real-world product, and is therefore derived through empirical observation. An invention, on the other hand, has a fundamentally disruptive quality: it overturns the philosophical and ethical premises by which our institutions function, moving us towards a future based on the philosophical premises of the inventor. An invention is the miracle of birth; it is a brand new device that serves as an empirical vehicle through which individuals can voluntarily adopt (by behaving in line with, by using the product) the inventor’s philosophical premises. If products carry philosophies within them through the behavior they encourage and the ethical system implied within those behaviors, then an invention is the introduction of a new philosophical angle — a new way of life, through a new kind of action, that consumers can choose to adopt through the vehicle of purchase. Inventions, therefore, must be derived from strictly philosophical premises — if not stumbled upon. The inventor must analyze the basic principles by which his society operates, deduce a flaw within them on purely logical grounds, and design a product that encourages behavior aligned with the principles he inverse-deduces as the solution. If an invented product is adopted by the market — and a rational market would adopt a product based on a more rational (that is, more logically cohesive and noncontradictory) way of living — the inventor will have altered the premises by which society behaves in favor of his philosophy and argument. Inventions that fail to be adopted are thus based in less logically cohesive grounds than those that already exist. Capitalism, therefore, tends towards a purely rational society. No one could create social media in the same way they could create a different-colored basketball. Zero-to-one invention requires a completely different, strictly philosophical approach. Thiel’s secret truths are not discovered — they are deduced.

Stanford forbids any student who does not pledge allegiance to DEI from sitting on the Board of Trustees Committees. stanfordreview.org/open-letter-to…

@jonchu Glad I could help

x.com/jonchu/status/… Vindicated

There is a common saying on Stanford's campus: it is easier to get into Y Combinator than to get a real job. stanfordreview.org/is-yc-for-cowa…

Stanford Review Logo Redesign: Art Deco Futurism

3 Major Misconceptions About Iran, According to the Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford.

Read more: stanfordreview.org/interview-with…

The Collapse of Western Power in Francophone Africa. Read more below: stanfordreview.org/the-collapse-o…