innovation culture

When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it accessible. This is a left over from mass media. Words addressed to a large and diverse set of people need to be simple and clear and free of jargon. It is valuable to write clearly of course, to a degree. Clear writing is clear thinking. But to make the content accessible? To

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Rewire your patterns

The most empowering thing I’ve heard is that there is a gap between stimulus and response, and that the key to both our growth and happiness is how we use and expand that space.

Our responses typically come from patterns and scripts handed down from our parents and our pasts. We are not hostage to those patterns, we can update... 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

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

The technocracy has evolved radically. Technical knowledge based on science has replaced military and theological knowledge as the source of power, but the distance is not as large as you might think. In modern technocratic power, the distinction between hard-edged scientific knowledge and softer ideological paradigm knowledge is blurry. We have... See more

If you read Influence by Robert Cialdini, what you realize is that many things are successfully sold by opposites. Everybody has one of these, so it must be good. Or: not many people have one of these, so it must be good. You can achieve the same emotional effect with opposite messages. There are two great ways to check into a hotel. One of them is... See more

The “Tech Right” is just one faction in a rising alliance of thinkers, policymakers, and industrialists that spans the political spectrum, united by their focus on accelerating American innovation to drive growth and global primacy. I’ll refer to this blob as the “progress coalition.”3 They are the most dynamic and interesting policy machine on the... See more

The first is procedural environmental laws . Instead of just making laws that say “don’t build things that encroach on endangered species”, like the developed nations of Europe and Asia do, America also makes laws that allow anyone and everyone to sue developers to force them to prove in court that they’re following all the relevant substantive... See more

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