"E.g. Lawyers are more concerned with society having a fair process or procedure for doing things, than its advancement."

And I allways thought most lawyers are more concerned with winning their case and making money than "fair process". I know exceptions though, but heard and read horrible things about the average.

At least similar to being diverted from a focus on primary reinforcement, to a focus on sources of secondary reinforcement.

But the future is undeterministic? Its a tree with lots of branches- of which one of those with variations will become reality.

To assume one knows the exact path, might be a helpfull tool for a small group working towards a goal, but from the eagle perspective, that is what all these companies are. Exploring branches of a tree of propabilites.

Thiel basically argues for not having his view as a large scale investor. But that is bogus, if you want to be a succesfull CEO you might have to pivot, pivoting essentially means giving up your branch- and navigate to another branch of the scenario tree, whos succes-propability is closely related to your tech. Which is why you should think about what is possible with the stuff you develop, not about one product.

This of course is demoralizing for the individual coder. If you write code that is product-bound, that code could go to the bin at any second. That is why they usually do not get told. At some level- there is only one product, on mission, one group against all others.

But at project management level, one should realize there might even within the same companys, several projects clustering around the same core-tech, trying to use what is possible for diffrent approaches.