Humans In The Loop

Every. Single. One. of the startups that I've worked with have some

co-founder (or early team) dynamic that implicitly shapes their lasting culture.

These practices may be well-known and honored, or they may be hard-coded yet unspoken (like the pie in my story above). Either way, they are a part of the company’s DNA — its nature.

As an Ops Leader,... See more

If you have time to consume, you have time to create.

Agreeableness is not the same as agreeing. In fact, they have little in common. Finding someone who’s only job is to agree with everything that is said is easy. On the other hand, agreeableness is the skill of having a contrary position and being pleasant about it. It’s the hard work of bringing professional work to people who expected something... See more

For now, at least, innovation is a uniquely human ability—one that would be critical to a system that could recursively imagine and create better versions of itself.

What I call temporal curiosity is the practice of actively directing our curiosity across time – past, present, future – to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves, others, and the world around us.

Past curiosity. Directing our curiosity towards the past can help us understand our origins and learn from history. By exploring past experiences from... See more

You see it don’t you.

• “artificial” intelligence


• “imitation” crab

They put it right in the title and so we believed them and now we’re acting as if these dumb autocomplete fuckdongs are the next stevie hawkings.

Real crab still exists. People still eat it.

And if that’s true, then real intelligence exists too. People still have it. Let us use it

First-principles thinking, or thinking from first principles, sounds a lot more complicated than it is. It’s simply a technique for approaching problems with a beginner’s mind. Instead of working within assumptions and what people around you “know” to be true, you do the hard work of figuring out what’s actually true and, thus, what’s truly... See more