Joey DeBruin

After many years of building and tens of millions of users, Notion now describes itself this way: “Every department’s work. In one tool.”  You can almost feel their internal struggle with language—the search for the right words. How can you describe something that is genuinely novel? What happens when something is so fundamentally different that it... See more

Much of this knowledge is highly specific, and isn't captured in the literature. We can call this 'tacit' knowledge. To this end, science isn't really the literature - the literature is a partial representation of what we know. The full range of what we know lives inside the minds of researchers.

The fact that there is a newthing has come to feel like a certainty, even as we cannot fully perceive it. This will spark a search for underlying structures, analogs, and ways of being that feel natural to this newthing.

Does the newthing exist in this context or some other one?

Is it a newthing that’s meant to run all the time or is it more seasonal... See more

The reality is that there have been successful ARPA programs all over the spectrum. JCR Licklider “just” spelled out an extraordinary vision, found people who were aligned with it, and gave them resources. Only a few years later, Lawrence Roberts ran the ARPAnet program almost like a CEO: giving different people and groups parts of a broader... See more

We are biased to believe that the interim steps resemble the final goal, and use objectives to reach stepping stones that appear to lead to the final destination. However, without knowing the nature of the territory, those objectives may well lead us to get stuck.

the problem is with the interface of scientific literature. We cannot expect the wider population to be scientifically literate if they are not given the capability of understanding the artifacts we use to communicate about new scientific developments.

This is what people don’t understand about visionaries: They don’t need to predict the future. They learn to snatch it out of the folds of time and wear it around their bodies like a flowing cloak