Ben Cuan

Listening is a neglected social skill. But I know that an even more neglected social skill is candor.

For this, we turn to pattern languages, an organized and coherent set of patterns , each describing a problem and the core of a solution, illustrated with examples . The term was coined by Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein, and Sara Ishikawa in their 1977 book, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction which contains hundreds of... See more

I suspect the situation is not unlike with humans, who are raised with a set of fundamental values (“Don’t harm another person”): many of them follow those values, but in any human there is some probability that something goes wrong, due to a mixture of inherent properties such as brain architecture (e.g., psychopaths), traumatic experiences or... See more

This could also lead to a world of “geographic inequality,” where an increasing fraction of the world’s wealth is concentrated in Silicon Valley, which becomes its own economy running at a different speed than the rest of the world and leaving it behind.