Abie Cohen

laughter

I’ve been doing improv comedy for the last twelve years. Over that time I’ve realized there are at least two types of laughter you hear from the audience. One is a response to something clever or smart, like ‘ha ha I see what you did there, very nice.’ It’s a shallow sort of laugh and one that comes mainly from the mind. 

The other - my... See more

He thought about space the way he thought about mathematics or analytic philosophy or the Torah or Mozart’s twentieth piano concerto, which he sometimes played at night when my sister and I were going to bed. It was beautiful and complex and infinite, and how could you not want to explore that, know where it came from, know where we came from?

“The greatest trick the devil ever played was making you believe that the pessimists are the good guys.” – Packy McCormick

What Jerry is talking about is not adverse selection. It’s the second way of increasing convexity: funding the far-out-there-ideas, the Big If True ones. It’s one of the reasons I love the general venture zeitgeist around deep tech right now. If crazy bets like underwater energy storage, transformer-specialised chips, or tiny semi fabs succeed,... See more

Cosmic optimism changes this by encouraging truly interdisciplinary approaches that blend hard sciences with philosophy, arts, and contemplative practices. It grows its deeply felt optimism about human potential and technological progress, but redefines the current understanding of what is ‘progress’. Rather than limiting progress to mean the... See more