Ian Vanagas

If you’re familiar with the “Great Filter”; this is our great filter. If we go inward, we will never find that intelligent life beyond, or won’t be around for that intelligent life to find us.

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

The amount that Twitter omits is breathtaking; more than any other social platform, it is indifferent to huge swaths of human experience and endeavor. I invite you to imagine this omitted content as a vast, bustling city. Scratching at your timeline, you are huddled in a single small tavern with the journalists, the nihilists, and the chaotic neutr... See more

By thinking about a ML problem first as a set of inputs and desired outputs, you can reason whether the input is even sufficient to predict the output. 

Games have 1. variable outcomes, 2. frequency, and 3. sense of control. These create addiction, not flow.

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.

Framing matters a lot. Spending for the benefit of the group feels a lot better than spending solely for yourself. People ideally want both.

We are on a trend “inward”, where capital, our proxy for GDP, is better served deployed into things that generate more capital, instead of things that generate production.

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.