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
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
There are oddly few modern examples of individuals funding individuals, despite it being a far more decentralised and human-scale version of patronage that's easily achievable by large groups of people.
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.
Great ideas tend to come from a single mind and leadership is a requirement for effective human collaboration. Hierarchies are well-optimised to enable strong leaders to achieve strong outcomes. DAOs do not get around this fact. Hierarchies work because they enable leaders to synthesise the contributions of a group.
In this future, mainstream media no longer interprets scientific information. Instead, they draw directly from the source. In fact, all scientific communication and learning, including every textbook, lecture and online course draws from the same, original, primary artifacts accessible through the same interface. Expert scientists, lay readers and... See more
Fully open, easily accessible data, together with open debate and version control, enables much greater scrutiny over results, which should lead to more accurate knowledge.
Early-stage venture capital investments take a long time to come to fruition. These or other YC companies from after Graham’s tenure may yet prove to be economically and culturally important like their forerunners. The evidence so far, however, suggests that their impact is well below that of earlier YC companies of similar age, in spite of their... See more