About me

Hi, I'm Thibault.

Welcome to my personal website where I share my ideas and projects.

Some things about me

• I don't like to talk about myself.
• I'm 28. I work in management consulting. And I live in Paris, France.
• But one day, I would like to build my own startup.
• My interests include: the philosophy of David Deutsch, entrepreneurship, technology, longevity, MMA, books, leadership.
• Here's a list of my favorite things and personal heroes.

Some things I know

• The most common, harmful, and false idea is that humans are not special.
  • No, we are not the reason the planet is in bad shape. Sustainability is backwards, we are actually the reason it is in such a good shape.
  • No, the world is not going to end due to our hubris.
  • Yes, we are cosmically significant. But it is not due to God...
• Humans are special because they have a secret superpower: knowledge creation (I know this sounds lame, but it is not)
  • Evolution gave us a special capacity called "creativity", which makes us able to guess how the world works (i.e., create knowledge) and thus solve our problems.
  • Through science, we improve those guesses by criticizing them and eliminating the bad ones.
  • Technology uses this science to solve our problems (like how to move faster) with tools (like cars).
  • And markets give us a way to match efficiently people with problems and people with the most useful solutions.
• Humans have had this superpower for a long time but it was only harnessed recently.
  • The Enlightenment produced something incredible: an uninterrupted period of progress lasting until now.
  • Before that, 99% of people who ever lived never saw any progress during their lifetime. They lived in static societies that eventually died.
  • The Enlightenment combined the development of science with institutions that protects people's right to criticize (and thus improve) ideas.
  • Continuous criticism makes knowledge into an evolutionary process. It compounds like a snowball. It weeds out the bad ideas and keep the good ones. And it does that over and over.
  • We live in that snowball: a dynamic society, in which you see progress in all areas of life in your lifetime.
• But the West is still in transition from a static society to a dynamic society. We must be careful to finish that change.
  • The Enlightenment kickstarted the transition from a static society (in which progress is not visible in a lifetime) to a dynamic society. But it is not finished.
  • A static society values stability, blind adherence to traditions, safety over freedom, and most of all it forbids criticism of authorities.
  • A dynamic society values change, independant truth-seeking, and protects everyone's right to criticize and debate.
  • My best guess is that a dynamic society will win out in the end. Why? Because it functions better than its alternative.
  • People want medicine and houses and cars that work. And that can only happen over a long time in a society that values criticism and freedom.
• The present is much better than the past. And the future is much brighter than the present.
  • People idealize the past way too much and don't realize that our ancestors were not living, but barely surviving. Nature has no mercy. It weeds out the weak and the sick.
  • The good old days are not in the past... but in the future.
  • Deep optimism is too rare these days. Pessimistic prophecies dominate our culture. One day it's the climate. Then it's inflation. Another it's AI. If you listen, disasters always awaits us at the next corner.
• But the truth is that the world is slowly getting better. Progress is gradual. Because it results from knowledge creation, which is often a continuous work of trial and error. So we don't perceive it as much.
• Problems are inevitable. Problems are soluble. Infinite progress.
  • Problems are inevitable. Why? Because each step of progress reveals new problems. It's only after we invented cars, that we had the problem of how to protect people from car accidents.
  • But problems are soluble. A fundamental fact about the Universe is that there is nothing beyond our reach, as long as we create knowledge. We can solve all our problems: death, poverty, climate change, etc.
  • Note that this is not a guarantee that we will solve those problems. People still have to work on them and create knowledge and make the right choices.
  • This means that we will always have problems and have the capacity (but not the guarantee) to solve them: infinite progress!
  • That's also true for your own personal life.