@patrickc "How Melville himself felt about the industry is not made clear"...maybe some clues in his earlier book, 'White Jacket', which is a somewhat novelized narrative of his experiences as a crewman aboard a US sailing warship. His immediate superior, the captain of the foretop, was a

@patrickc Great take and totally agree. From personal experience - the relentless pursuit of “glory” often blinds those to their reality seemingly into madness/reality distortion fields, so celebrated by the fans of the winners. Leaders need to remember they’re the authors, not just

@patrickc Bacon from the 17th century has some, uh, strong feelings abt Man’s relation to Nature: “I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave.” It seems to me that in those times, Man (read: gender neutral)

@patrickc And more on VC, "Owners? Owners. you are always prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as though the owners were my conscience."

@patrickc A great complement to Moby Dick is In the Heart of the Sea, the true story of the whale ship Essex, which inspired Herman Melville. https://a.co/d/eS5kHE0

@patrickc I’ve been thinking a lot about analogies and how one area is illuminated by another. Sometimes one topic lends itself to understanding another topic much more deeply. This heuristic is useful for choosing what to read. Whaler to VC is good. But sometimes I feel like

@patrickc Check out the original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick https://lithub.com/check-out-t...

@patrickc the way to abolish vcs (end whaling) is if we find a better alternative to get startups funding. what is the equivalent to discovering oil underground? bootstrapping?

@patrickc Yeah, and this ties into a part of the book that many complain about - the lengthy sections on whale behavior and biology. The narrator in those passages is trying to demystify whales using tools of science and math, parallel to those same tools becoming dominant in the economy.

@patrickc Just want to say. I actually read the whole thing and it was thought provoking. It’s been a decade since I thought about Walt Whitman, I guess the memory of it made him seem like an environmentalist more than he actually was.

@patrickc If you’re starting from a position of complete neutrality and asking where to go, away from whaling makes sense: it’s cruel. With fishing, people need protein, but with whales, without luxury oil - so what? Chemical engineering needed to grow and that was as good a time as any.

@patrickc TL;DR from ChatGPT: Melville’s Moby Dick turns Shakespearean tragedy into an industrial-age story about obsession, ambition, and capitalism. Ahab is like a startup founder whose drive destroys everything. The 19th century’s grandeur and brutality were two sides of the same coin.

@patrickc I think the art and the violence were connected but that's not as much the case anymore since the information networks we're all in are so fast. we're more productive and enriched by every sense of the words now and have far less violence now compared to 19th century

@patrickc What'd you think of Moby Dick? It's a lot more than a big fish tale.

@patrickc The Diamond Age is a wild take on some parts on what Victorian means

@patrickc Similar to whaling is the story of fur industry and almost complete extermination of sea otters off the US and Canada Pacific West Coast. It is a miracle they survived and are now slowly recovering, thanks to efforts of @MontereyAq, @AlaskaSeaLife etc.

@patrickc Humans are myopic especially around nature-time scaled events, we need natural security to have natural security. Laws that protect natural security should be equally as important as those that protect national security

@patrickc Who’s your ghostwriter? S/he is good but tries a tad too hard for intelligence over clarity

@patrickc @tylercowen Not to kiss your ass but these tweets are genuinely inspiring.

@patrickc Albaola Maritime Culture Factory has great histories of the Basque whaling industry, sailing to Canada before Columbus reached the Caribbean, their whale oil lighting the wealthy homes of Europe, the trade with Bruges, the source of Basque wealth...

@patrickc Melville wrote Moby-Dick, flopped hard, and took a $4 a day job on the docks. Even legends had to pay rent while the world caught u

@patrickc Great post. Your writing style on this feels like a conscious imitation of 19th century authors, which is very clever

@patrickc Don Quixote predates Melville. Hamlet is a more applicable example.

@patrickc Check out the Old Man and the Sea by Hemmingway

@patrickc I found it much easier to build grand structures in Minecraft when I wasn’t concerned about demolishing a conveniently close but beautiful hill for raw materials.

@patrickc Patrick has yet to read Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways

@patrickc @readwise save

@patrickc Fantastic. Breakdown.

@patrickc Did you read as much early startup days?

@patrickc Are you letting the staff run the company? It's too early to be retired.

@patrickc “Apothegm” over “aphorism”, interesting if intentional since the differences are so subtle

@patrickc This is good.

@patrickc ain't reading all that bro

@patrickc @grok can you summarize the tweet

@patrickc 👏👏👏👏

@patrickc I am too dumb to understand this tweet.