Saved by Keely Adler
Social vs. Science Experiments
Many concepts that sound good on paper are infeasible to implement, or simply don’t produce the expected results. It’s frustrating when that happens, of course, but the pace of experimentation and learning at a startup is unparalleled. I think this is an especially important form of rigor for theorycels like me. Building product forces a different... See more
Jasmine Sun • exit interview
Over the years, plenty of responsible experimenters – think of the more pragmatic elements among the back-to-the-landers, kibbutzim, Tolstoyan farmers and so on – have managed to demonstrate that new societies can form successfully at modest scales. The best among them also managed to establish a productive and beneficial relationship with the... See more
Matt Prewitt • Secret Societies, Network States, Burning Man, Zuzalu, and More: Thoughts on New Political Communities
The spectacle of “building" describes systems that optimize for whatever can be ritualized, narrated, and scaled. The argument isn’t that spectacle alone is negative. Quite the opposite. Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber, in their recent book Boom, make the persuasive case that bubbles aren't merely collective irrationality; they’re crucial for... See more
Indeed, what is a lab experiment but the attempt to create a reality precisely like this one but where one key thing is changed such that it changes everything else around it? Such is the process of science: you attempt to fix all known variables so that you can understand the cause and effect of changing just one.
Matt Wallaert • Start at the End: How to Build Products That Create Change
If it is true that the era of collective experimentation online was short lived, then the next interesting question is why. One hypothesis that I’m intrigued with is rooted less in technological changes and more in social ones. Shirky’s dictum that revolutions start from behavioral change rather than from technological change helps us also explain... See more