innovation culture

Ideas have this amazing property. Thomas Jefferson said "He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself, without lessening mine. As he who lights his candle at mine receives light without darkening me."

04. The Illusion of Progress : Action Bias leads us to believe that doing something – anything – is better than doing nothing , even when the action doesn’t actually move us forward. We equate busyness with productivity, mistaking motion for progress, and perceive novelty as innately valuable.

The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It’s still hard to find today, in fact - many people have copied the ‘hardcore’ working culture and the ‘this is the Marines’ vibe, but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas . This is hard to LARP - your... See more

Data management is the problem that programming is supposed to solve. But of course now that we have computers everywhere, we keep generating more data, which requires more programming, and so forth. It’s a hell of a problem with no end in sight. This is why people in technology make so much money. Not only do they sell infinitely reproducible... See more

Painting and sculpture are now free, inasmuch as anyone may produce any sort of creation and subsequently display it. In architecture, however, this fundamental freedom, which must be regarded as a precondition for any art, does not exist, for a person must first have a diploma in order to build. Why?

Everyone should be able to build, and as long as... See more

When it comes to business and careers, the more interesting people will succeed and capture more upside than ever before.

Because the uninteresting ones will get commoditized (hello 🤖).

And by interesting I mean being capable of analyzing, deciding, and executing in a way few others can.

Generating more unique ideas, understanding complex things

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Two parables:

First, Ezra Pound’s parable of Agassiz, from his “ABC of Reading” (incidentally one of the most underrated books about literature). I’ve preserved his quirky formatting:

No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish:

A post-graduate student equipped with honours and diplomas went to

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By the time those ideas’ productivity was realized, they were relatively old ideas. As Perplexity concluded, “In conclusion, while the 1950s and 1960s saw remarkable TFP growth, this ‘golden age’ was largely built on technological innovations and research from earlier decades, particularly the 1930s and 1940s.” There was a two decade lag.

So given... See more