Aishwarya Goel

t’s harder to give up my agent when it learns my email style over time. If Granola, meanwhile, improved over time based on my feedback—how I like to take notes, which takeaways are important to me—the product also becomes harder to give up. And same for a NSFW chatbot—if I build a romantic relationship with shared history, that’s tough to say... See more

A few thoughts follow below. Let's begin with a few of the more important principles, plus a few miscellanea that don't really belong later in the essay. Some of this is repeated later in the essay.

• The purpose of the site is to help me think well1. This purpose is in opposition to many widely-used norms in online writing. I suspect that the

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One framework for understanding the success of the internet is to view it through the lens of coordination. Fundamentally, we can reduce the success of the most valuable internet applications to their ability to more granularly coordinate human intents. Amazon coordinates commercial intents. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter coordinate social... See more

The other thing: your shticks have to be visible, else they might as well not exist. And if you don’t define them yourself, the world will do it for you. When attention is currency and visibility is constant, your shticks are your anchors.

AI seems to be in its single-player era. I expect we see more networks form, and products should get more social and collaborative over time.

Finishing a paragraph or section gives people a micro-burst of accomplishment and reward. It helps them chunk the basic insight together and remember it for later. You want people to be going – “okay, insight, good, another insight, good, another insight, good” and then eventually you can tie all of the insights together into a high-level insight.... See more

The decentralization of physical infrastructure networks offers an opportunity to leapfrog atrophying incumbent monopolies and create networks that are more robust, easier to invest in, and more transparent.