Ian Vanagas

DOOM was extremely humane software. It let you play with your friends, even in the shareware version. And along with the game itself, id released tools which allowed anyone to easily modify the game’s levels and assets, and then share them for others to use. This created a thriving ecosystem that exists to this day.

Gamifying of apps means companies can't make products look better, so they are tapping into your human biology and psychology.

Ideally digital experiences would be created where people are  communicating more, building bonds, and undergoing emotions like excitement, anxiousness, and disappointment. Ultimately, it provides the environment to create memorable moments and develop relationships with friends beyond what could happen in group chats.  

Literal access: Either you have access to what is behind the NFT or not. Psychological access: a signal of crypto interest, creates opportunities, ingroup.

Thinking about inputs and outputs to the system in a method-agnostic way lets you take a step back from the algorithmic jargon and consider whether other fields have developed methods that might work here using different terminology.

The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem... See more

When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares. The press doesn’t care, your investors don’t care, your board doesn’t care, your employees don’t care, even your mama doesn’t care. Nobody cares.

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

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.