Peter Thiel and the Motivation Problem

Why v/s how

Thiel’s interview with Joe Rogan makes for an interesting watch. At one point, they have this debate about the different perspectives for thinking about the puzzle of the pyramids -

Joe Rogan: When you look at the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza, there’s 2.3 million stones in it. The whole thing points due north, south, east, west, it’s an incredible achievement. The stones, some of them were moved from a quarry 500 miles away, through the mountains. The biggest stones inside the king’s chamber weighed ~80 tons. It’s crazy, the whole thing’s crazy, like how did they do that?

Peter Thiel: I’m not sure I would anchor on the technological part, but I think the piece that is very hard for us to comprehend is, what motivated them culturally? Why did they do it?

Joe Rogan: Well, how did they do it physically? Why but also how. How is a big one, because it’s really difficult to solve. There’s no traditional conventional explanations for the construction, the movement of the stones, the amount of time it would take - if you moved 10 stones a day it would take 664 years to make one of those pyramids, so how many people were involved, how long did it take, how’d they get them there, how did they figure out how to do it, how come the shittier pyramids seem to be dated later?

Peter Thiel: I’ll trust you that it’s really hard, but I think the real mystery is why were they motivated? Because you can’t live in a pyramid, it’s just the afterlife of the pharaoh.

Joe Rogan: Well, there’s some debate around that … the old established theory in archaeology is that it was a tomb for the pharaoh, but new archaeologists are coming up with new theories…

Peter Thiel: I don’t know if this is an alternate history, but I’m always into the James Frazer, Golden Bough, Rene Girard, violence, sacred history...

Joe Rogan: That’s interesting but it still doesn’t solve the engineering puzzle. The engineering puzzle is the biggest one, like how did they do that?

Peter Thiel: What I’m focusing on is the motivational puzzle.

Joe Rogan: Yeah but if you have all the motivation in the world to build a structure that’s insane to build today, and you’re doing it 4,500 years ago, we’re dealing with a massive puzzle.

Peter Thiel: I think the motivational part is the harder one to solve. If you figure out the motivation, you’ll figure out a way to organise the whole society, and if you get the whole society working on it, you can probably do it.

The linguistic framing on this is that ‘can you do it?’ is subordinate to ‘do you want to do it?’ Whether or not you can do something matters only if you want to do it in the first place.

If you believe that ‘where there is a will there is a way’ (as a definite optimist would), then it becomes obvious that the important question to focus on — the constraint, the bottleneck — is not ‘what is the way?’ (engineering) but ‘what is your will?’ (motivation).

Motivating why we are learning or doing a certain thing is a piece that formal education often misses, I think. For example, physics courses on waves shove linear algebra down your throat — eigenvalues, eigenvectors, and that sort of thing. They teach you how to solve the characteristic equation

\((M - \lambda I) \vec{v} = 0.\)

but why do we want to find the eigenvalues of a matrix? Why do we care about this equation in the first place? That’s what I asked my professor at office hours, and here’s what I discovered.

Suppose you have the differential equations

\(x'' + x - y = 0 \text{ and } y'' + 2x - 3y =0\)

where x'' indicates the second derivative with respect to time. Note that x'' depends not only on x but also on y. We would like to decouple these equations, such that x'' depends only on x, and y'' depends only on y. This is the crux of the motivation. This is the why behind eigenvalues. Note that you can combine these equations to write, in matrix form,

\(\begin{pmatrix} x \\ y \end{pmatrix}'' + \begin{pmatrix} 1 & -1\\ 2 & -3 \end{pmatrix} \begin{pmatrix} x \\ y \end{pmatrix} = 0. \)

Finding the eigenvalues allows you to re-write this as

\(\begin{pmatrix} x \\ y \end{pmatrix}'' + \begin{pmatrix} \lambda & 0\\ 0 & \lambda \end{pmatrix} \begin{pmatrix} x \\ y \end{pmatrix} = 0 \)

thus decoupling the equations. This sort of explanation for the why, I think, is at least as important as learning how to compute the eigenvalues.

Motivation > engineering. Why > how. The contrarian version of Edison’s popular quote may well be 99% inspiration and 1% perspiration.