Joey DeBruin

Because foundations can exist into perpetuity [4], they can even be usurped and weaponized towards other goals.

As early as 2017, executives at the ride-sharing platform Uber reportedly met with US Securities and Exchange Commission officials about granting company stock to their independent-contractor drivers.

By February 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that, with their initial public offerings approaching, Uber and its competitor Lyft found a way to... See more

There is no heaven for newthings. There is no Hall of Fame. There is only memory and change. Nothing (the opposite of newthing) and no one are immune.

The goal of newthing is to live as long as possible while staying true. The longer it does this, the stronger and more itself it will become.

Scientific literature is the meeting place between people and ideas at the frontiers of human knowledge. It acts as the interface for science, enabling interaction between people and the shared record of knowledge.

the real world is one place, and the online world many, but what I didn’t appreciate even as recently as two years ago was that the online world as I knew it then was subject to more constraints than I realized; it is only as those constraints disappear that the idea of the Internet as a place of refuge seems ever more dubious

And so we arrive at the crux of the argument. DAOs are novelty search engines which can more efficiently explore a search space by enabling many cooperating teams to collect and integrate stepping stones.

The downside of lead generation businesses is that they can be a race to the bottom if they're in a crowded and competitive market. The barriers to entry are essentially aggregating supply (i.e. buyers of leads or businesses willing to pay for new customers) so there is little in the way of defensibility. The other downside is that they are very... See more

I expect that effective altruism will always be an example of what I’ve called “club” communities elsewhere: high retention of existing members, but limited acquisition of new members, like a hobbyist club. EA will continue to grow, but it will never become the dominant narrative because it’s so morally opinionated. I don’t think that’s a problem,... See more