provocations

As a practical matter, I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly. Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees something and thinks,

I could do better than that.

I know that the people who will make you feel warm and fuzzy when you’re sad, and the people who will give you brutally honest feedback, are usually different people. Ideally you want to have relationships with both kinds, and reward them for their strengths, rather than getting mad at them for failing to do what they’re bad at.

Silence is not just the absence of noise but the presence of truth.

it matters whom we put on the stages of our world, whom we adore. Our collective love has been wildly misappropriated, particularly in Silicon Valley, but also all over the place.

Normal behavior is forgotten. Only weird behavior survives.

Nobody tells stories of when you did the expected — they only tell stories when you did the unexpected.

Normal behavior costs nothing in the short term — but it disappears into the abyss.

Unconventional behavior costs a social price in the short term — but the actions live on as story assets ... See more

One of the questions I ask my SF friends is what the entrepreneurial 20-year-olds are doing these days. Are they starting a billion-dollar company, or are they more interested in becoming a memelord who is trying to incite a movement on the Internet? I’m not sure we’re seeing a surge of exciting startup creation, but we sure are seeing a lot more o... See more

It’s almost impossible to safely drive a car while only looking in the rear view mirror. Only seeing where you’ve been is a terrible way to figure out where to go.

But it’s really unsafe to go forward with no idea of what came before.

Ideally, the future of humanity is about capturing the upside of emotion while minimizing the downsides. AI is a perfect instrument to help us achieve this balance.