
The Experimentation Layer

A yearning for innovation requires real exploration. It requires a persistent search to try (and fail) to move your understanding forward with a new tool, a new technique, a new insight. Sadly, the first innovation often isn’t even all that helpful, but may well provide a path to ones that are. This is an idea that Steven Johnson of Where Good... See more
Sam Hinkie • Letter of Resignation from Sam Hinkie
- Embrace failure as discovery, foster insatiable curiosity, and iterate relentlessly
- The core principle: break things, test repeatedly, and view each failure as eliminating one wrong approach
- If you can dream it, you can build it through iterative experimentation.
Naive Optimism + Strategic Execution
- Turn ideas into action by combining an optimistic
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By driving the price of experimentation toward zero, AI makes failure cheap, fast, and informative. This decouples discovery from institutional risk aversion. We can shift the architecture from a linear, hypothesis-driven model (reliant on human intuition about where to look, while punishing boldness in those bets) to a parallel, machine-speed,... See more
🔮 Exponential View #551: New frontiers for R&D; American open-source; Gemini 3 & Google's pull; breaking the ther…
“iteration frees people to experiment, as Edison did with such success. “I need the freedom to just try a bunch of crap out. And a lot of times it doesn’t work,” Docter told me. With this process, that’s fine. He can try again. And again. Until he gets something that burns bright and clear, like Edison’s lightbulb. “If I knew I have to do this
... See moreBent Flyvbjerg • How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between
Innovation is hard and fraught with failure. The upside is that when you
find a new, better way that no one else has done, you lead the world.
Risks must be taken. Failures endured. New ways found.
-Hiut Denim ‘No-Growth’ Model