Emilie Kormienko

 C. THI NGUYEN: So the basic thing that I keep thinking about is that point systems are really narrow, and really clear, and really simple. And in games— in real games— when the point systems aren’t attached to— I don’t know— the political life of our nation, that’s great. It’s beautiful. And we can talk about why that enables all these kinds of... See more

EZRA KLEIN: One thing I like about analytics is that outside of the context of simply argue about the flaws of analytics, not having them allows you to bullshit yourself a lot. Allows you to bullshit yourself about whether or not people are reading you, what you’re really doing here, are you serving an audience. But then having them allows you to... See more

Not only does TikTok capture very clean signals of sentiment from its users, it also gathers a tremendous volume of them per session. Videos on TikTok are so short that even in a brief session, TikTok can gather a lot of feedback on your tastes.

False beliefs can be useful in a social sense even if they are not useful in a factual sense. For lack of a better phrase, we might call this approach “factually false, but socially accurate.” When we have to choose between the two, people often select friends and family over facts.

The internet was created in 1989 with the intention that it would be completely decentralized. This means it would be owned by the people who used it. It’s a good idea in theory, but in practice, it created a poor consumer experience. You had to be highly technical to use the internet. It was largely read-only. We can call this version of the... See more

C. THI NGUYEN: So the essential insight that I got from Suits is that in so many games, the target isn’t the point. The point is this rich experience along the way. And I think a lot of the mistakes we make with games is we get into these things and we forget about these larger purposes. The fact that they can be fun. The fact that they can be... See more

Blockchains are special computers that anyone can access but no one owns.