innovation

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.

But then I read Imre Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations . It is not, at first glance, a book about writing. It is a book of mathematical philosophy. By a Hungarian Stalinist, no less. But it is, if you read it sideways, a profound exploration of the act of writing. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Mathematics is, after all, a subset of writing—it is a w... See more

It is the kind of building that when entered can make you feel infused with the opportunity of a world very different from the one you used to know. This is the essence of a futurist architecture. It is the ethic to make a building that convinces people they are living in the future.

The architecture of a civilization is always in communion with its technology. Its effects are deeper than just the immediate appearance of buildings: the process of technology colors everything about how a culture interacts with the world. In the early 20th century, the mathematical rationalism of inventors and engineers intermixed with the wealth... See more

Everyone knows that tech needs to figure out how to fix the city and fix America. Take, for example, the young entrepreneur in my story above. Or the next one three weeks later. Or the dozens of other friends who have compressed their political ambitions into the shape of business projects. All of them want to see the ecosystem of tech entrepreneur... See more

The only value of cultural ideas is their ability to inform action in this true world. And because mass communication about complex new ideas is impossible, whatever ideas you have can only directly affect your own actions and those of your collaborators. This is the discipline of materialism. If you want anything of true excellence done, don’t bot... See more

Peter Drucker saidthat “business has only two functions — marketing and innovation .” Marketing and innovation have one thing in common – satisfying the unmet needs of the customer. The customer, thus, is at the heart of ecosystem thinking. And the customer lies outside the business.

Take a coniferous forest. The hierarchy in scale of pine needle, tree crown, patch, stand, whole forest, and biome is also a time hierarchy. The needle changes within a year, the crown over several years, the patch over many decades, the stand over a couple of centuries, the forest over a thousand years, and the biome over ten thousand years. The r... See more

In other words, “vibes” are similar to the approximations that machine learning systems use, and the two feed off of each other synergistically. The situation is precisely encapsulated by Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”