innovation culture

at an institution, you can’t just do what is best, you also have to build trust and coordinate with others so you are on the same page. This, however, doesn’t mean that you should abdicate your judgment and get in line.

I like the approach Sholto Douglas expressed in his interview with Dwarkesh Patel:

If I’m trying to write some code and something

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But it's also true that right now is a great time to do something ambitious. Robin Hanson calls the present "the dreamtime", following a concept in Aboriginal myths: the time when the future world order and its values are still liquid, not yet set in stone.

Every young person (and plenty of non-young people), trying to strike gold and solve problems, is architecting themselves after a dominant personality of our field.

These archetypes equally modeled themselves off of someone else that inspired them. Steve was obsessed with Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. He would even take the “intersection of... See more

The default outcome?

Let's grant the assumptions at the start of this post and the above analysis. Then, the post-labour-replacing-AI world involves:

• Money will be able to buy results in the real world better than ever.


• People's labour gives them less leverage than ever before.


• Achieving outlier success through your labour in most or all areas is now

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Instead, such cultural intelligence should be

leading

R&D, innovation and executive strategy.

We’re spending millions

too late

.

We’ve reversed the figure and the ground: We’re spending more time, energy and money on the attempted harmonization of an offering and culture, than we are ensuring whatever’s being produced is

even desired

and produced... See more

An ethic of pure progress will accelerate equally toward shitcoins, space, and solar energy. For the diversified investor class, this may be just as well, but the rest of us must live in the world that VC built. AI friends, sports gambling, protein synthesis, killer drones—are all these inventions equally good?

Why is data integration so hard? The data is often in different formats that aren’t easily analyzed by computers – PDFs, notebooks, Excel files (my god, so many Excel files) and so on. But often what really gets in the way is organizational politics: a team, or group, controls a key data source, the reason for their existence is that they are the... See more

One of the lessons that TMitTB has tried to get across to you, the big message that matters most to him, is that code is never done; after shipping the new platform (no longer a website, this is a platform), with all its interlocking components, he and his team will continue to work on it forever. There will always be new bugs, new features, new... See more

First is the observation I’ve made throughout: that people are building companies based on ideas from the 1950s and 1960s.

This is a very real thing. Earlier this week, I met with Tyler Hayes at Atom Limbs to see the robotic prosthetic he and his team are building. After he slipped the cuff on my arm and as we were waiting for the system to boot... See more