Alex Wittenberg

The common feature in the work of these emerging thinkers is the centrality of lore, as in folklore, the lore of a fictional extended universe, or more pertinently, the water-cooler lore of an organization, in the framing of the traditional concerns of management and organizational theory. Lore, you might say is the feedstock of both stories and... See more

Back in the 1980s, the Oxford psychologists Michael Argyle and Monika Henderson wrote a seminal paper titled “The Rules of Friendship.” Its six takeaways are obvious, but what the hell, they’re worth restating: In the most stable friendships, people tend to stand up for each other in each other’s absence; trust and confide in each other; support... See more

Attention is a bit like the air we breathe. It’s vital but largely invisible, and thus we don’t think about it very much unless, of course, it becomes scarce. If that’s the case — to extend a tortured metaphor — it feels as if our attention has become polluted. We subsist on it, but the quality has been diminished. 

Most other resources on which we rely as individuals—such as food, money, and electricity—are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay... See more

My theory about these things is to make a language which panders not to the computers but to the humans, and try to make a language where the language is, as much as possible, able to take what the humans think of and convert it into some form that the computers can understand. 

On phones today, the foundational element is an app, right? That’s the organizing principle for kind of your phone and how you navigate it.

How can protocols diversify their treasuries?The simplest method to diversify is to sell some of the protocol's tokens to buy other assets (e.g. ETH, DAI, etc.). Treasuries can’t be diversified overnight. But plans can be made to reach a steady-state allocation over several years.

The great irony of all our efforts to avoid facing finitude—to carry on believing that it might be possible not to have to choose between mutually exclusive options—is that when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result. We’ll do almost anything to avoid burning our bridges, to keep alive... See more

But the jobs themselves are crappier than before, because AI and automation introduced ruthless efficiencies that put the humans on a miserable hamster-wheel.