Ian Vanagas

Ideas are alien life forms with an agency and intelligence independent of any mind or substrate which they inhabit.

Create something, anything—write a line of poetry, doodle an image, hum a melody, take some objects near you and arrange them into a sculpture, do a dance move. Now destroy what you created, physically if you can, but also mentally. Forget it completely. The world is changed. You are changed. The idea will return in one form or another, in your... See more

The perceived mediocrity of her content, and its subsequent success despite that, was dubbed the "Victoria Paris Effect" by the Embedded Substack. She's had advantages others don't: her college education, pandemic timing, and the fact that "so  many  massive creators are thin and white," she says. "That is never something that's not always working... See more

Choice architecture (described as “Libertarian Paternalism” by its advocates) seems to merely dress up authoritarian high-modernism with a thin coat of caution and empirical experimentation. The basic and dangerous “I am more scientific/rational than thou” paternalism is still the central dogma.

The next time you are attending a formal presentation at a conference, ask yourself these questions: Is this better than all of those Zoom calls I am turning down? Is this better than the next best YouTube clip I might be watching? For most people, the answers are obvious. Conference organizers need to be willing to pull the trigger and usher the... See more

Thiel blamed the "gerontocrats" for Bitcoin's failure to reach $100,000 pinning blame on Warren Buffett, whom he called a “sociopathic grandpa,” as well as Dimon, the 66-year-old chief executive officer of JPMorgan who called bitcoin a "fraud" on multiple occasions, and BlackRock's Larry Fink, 69, who recently ran the Fed's direct corporate bond... See more

Many people think of onboarding only when a member first joins a community, but onboarding happens every time a member re-enters a community space. Communities should always be onboarding. Onboarding is the process of providing members with the context necessary to function in the community. It is needed because context changes constantly.