Charlie Gedeon

I used to value myself based on how fast I was learning and the breadth of the ground I was covering. This was a way to escape my own perfectionism — which caught up to me as soon as I started focusing on only one thing. I’m learning it’s a skill to sit with your mistakes, ask for help, and move slower and more deliberately.

If you’ve ever felt that you can’t focus on a task when you’re hungry — or that all you can think about is food — the neural evidence backs you up. Work from a few years ago confirmed that short-term hunger can change neural processing and bias our attention in ways that may help us find food faster.

If you go too far off the beaten path of algorithmic consistency, you risk never being heard. You may never get enough cultural momentum to exist in any meaningful way. That is a real problem. But if you're too good at algorithmic optimization, you risk building a large audience without saying anything particularly original or important. Not to... See more

When you try to make something that solves everything, you obsess over questions of power: how to make something that is omnipotent and everlasting. But when you make something that does one thing well, the questions are much more personal: does it solve my problem? and for how long? and who for? and where will it push the space around it? I want... See more

Being a cozy futurist is being aware that even when indubitably science & technology are cool, we can't forget about the lives of the users of said technology; the goal is a nice future, not just a technically advanced future.

“I don’t know anything about business,” Ive demurs, but he abhors the current fascination with disruption. “I’m not interested in breaking things,” he says. “We have made a virtue out of destroying everything of value,” he says. “It’s associated with being successful and selling a company for money. But it’s too easy—in three weeks we could break... See more