innovation culture

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?

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

A small amount of compromise is possible, and it is even needed with great funders. But there's no question that Parc would have failed if Bob Taylor hadn't forced Xerox to sign a legal agreement that they had to keep their hands completely off -- in all ways -- whatever we decided to do for the first 5 years.

This was the right ploy because -- as... See more

“A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

―

William F. Buckley

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

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

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.

But the choice of a main programming language is the most important signaling behavior that a technology company can engage in. Tell me that you program in Java, and I believe you to be either serious or boring. In Ruby, and you are interested in building things quickly. In Clojure, and I think you are smart but wonder if you ship. In Python, and I... See more