Ian Vanagas

David Friedman points out that people only do things for other people for three reasons – love, money, or force. Love doesn’t scale, so the economy can only run on money or force. The force experiment has been run and found wanting. Let’s stick with money.

In any civilization, an age can be measured by whether or not the best and brightest are applying their talent and wealth to make that civilization work better, to inculcate patriotism, to build and improve institutions, and improve the lives of their fellow citizens.

Travis Kalanick started Uber as a hack to split a few private cars with his friends. Thefacebook.com was just a student directory written in PHP. Even Elon Musk started SpaceX with the goal of merely increasing NASA’s budget by pulling a PR stunt.

One thing that sets these intensely creative individuals apart, as far as I can tell, is that when sitting with their thoughts they are uncommonly willing to linger in confusion.To be curious about that which confuses.

It is as if there existed, for what seems like millennia, tracing back to the very origins of mathematics and of other arts and sciences, a sort of “conspiracy of silence” surrounding [the] “unspeakable labors” which precede the birth of each new idea, both big and small[.]

Given these realities, I find the furthest extreme of the free and open source philosophy not only unethical in its own right in that it incentivizes wide-scale consumption over production and thus impoverishes the software world, but divorced from reality in that it misunderstands the economic forces responsible for the production of software (and... See more

A person with this perspective is one who witnessed the more orderly society functioning, yet did not witness the building of the more orderly society , and thus does not understand the mechanics of the more orderly society. In other words, this person has a distinctive blind spot —he knows what could be reaped from a more orderly society, yet not ... See more

The ballet is a stylized parade of myths from the distant past, but for Bangalter the project also has a kind of post-apocalyptic, back-to-basics optimism: “After everything, the violin will remain.”

I strongly suspect a much deeper challenge has just presented itself to humanity. It increasingly feels like there is a deep conceptual and technical connection between the two domains that calls for careful research. It feels like AI and crypto are mathematical evil twins of sorts; that each is somehow deeply incomplete without the other. The mild... See more