innovation culture

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

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?

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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Note that the key phenomena are not movements. They are not collective efforts to build social capital around any particular idea or aesthetic or value. Nor are they forms of propaganda or prestige. The real core activities of culture are disciplines of craft aimed at actually achieving something great, regardless of what everyone else thinks. They... See more

I think there is a similar fallacy for how we consider engineering organizations. Many of today’s “best practices” have been drawn from long-established internet companies like Google. However, the problem with copying their current practices on the basis of their success is that most of those companies found near-invincible business models that... See more

Startups, he argues, can be engineered in the same way. “Startups excel when they put all their energy into one main thing ,” he says. “If you want to hit escape velocity, your startup should be designed to focus on that. In other words, it better taste good. But if your startup is designed to have several teams all equal in size, where’s your... See more

Once front-running other participants in financial markets or cultural production becomes a common strategy, trends become inefficiencies – temporary blips of difference or spikes in value that are bound for correction. Being early as a meta is replaced by catching people offsides. Betting on the return to the mean.

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

What would it look like if, in a McLuhan-esque, medium is the message sort of way, our tools said to us:

It’s gonna take you a while.

It’s normal to take a while.

It’d be weird if you made something beautiful so quickly.

The problem isn’t that you’re not working fast enough.

The problem is your expectations are not realistic.

Our AI helps you slow the... See more