innovation culture

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

The historian and biographer extends this backwards in time. Now youth find models of honor not only among the living but among dead. To study the great men of a community’s past is to study what greatness means in that community. That I think is half the purpose of these biographies of Roosevelt and Rockefeller, Feynman and Oppenheimer, Licklider... See more

Repairing this ethic is a task that defies any straightforward approach. Solving it is not a matter of devising elegant theories or highly specified plans, but instead observing what stirs within when you encounter a piece of architecture.

In my first week, diving into the Linear UI redesign, I realized how powerful this focused environment could be. Without the constant need to over-communicate or ‘prove’ productivity, I could pour all my energy into the craft itself. Over time, this environment has allowed me to work with a sense of calm and purpose, even when tackling high-stakes... See more

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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In Part III, they continue to work through the ideas of philosophers Martin Heidegger and René Girard, exploring the metaphysics of both technology and desire. “For both thinkers, salvation doesn’t come from technology itself but from a transcendent outside,” they posit. They then cite Nick Land, the father of accelerationism, whose ideas have... See more

Their methods are a bit unorthodox, but Dyevre (2024) uses more standard methods and obtains broadly similar results:

Using a novel firm-level dataset...covering 70 years (1950-2020), I estimate the impact of the decline in public R&D in the US on long-run productivity growth. I use two instrumental variable strategies...to estimate the impact of

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Here is how Plutarch, classical biographer par excellence, described his attraction to the stories of great men:

We may say, then, that achievements of this kind, which do not arouse the spirit of emulation or create any passionate desire to imitate them, are of no great benefit to the spectator. On the other hand virtue in action immediately takes

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