jbackus

How much of Zero to One was an organization of your thoughts from CS183 and how much was new content?

You have said many times that you like donating to unpopular causes. Have you ever considered donating money to groups that want to fund research and audits for hardening cryptographic security?

The best example would be the Open Crypto Audit Project which is composed of some of the top crypto researchers and was ecstatic to just raise $50k to audit one of the most popular pieces of crypto software (TrueCrypt) that exists.

These causes are very important for the sake of privacy, but they mainly go unfunded because cryptography is dense, cryptographic security is esoteric to everyone except privacy activists and security researchers, and the difference to the end user is practically invisible until it is too late.

A lot of Zero to One focuses on the value of being contrarian and right. This, by itself, is an interesting contrarian take on how to approach beliefs.

How do you balance being rational with being contrarian? Put another way, how do you optimize for contrarian beliefs without developing a massive set of consistency biases?