Notoriously Curious, Data Science Nerd & Entrepreneurship Advocate
Author of CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter with hand picked recommendations for your information diet
Transportation equity is not a discrete problem. It poses a barrier to accessing everything that constitutes a good quality of life; healthcare, fresh food, public Wi-Fi, friends, education, jobs, and voting. If everything is brought within a 15 minute radius, not only does car ownership become widely unnecessary, prompting the provision of a criti... See more
The most impressive people I know care a lot about what people think, even people whose opinions they really shouldn’t value (a surprising numbers of them do something like keeping a folder of screenshots of tweets from haters). But what makes them unusual is that they generally care about other people’s opinions on a very long time horizon—as long... See more
“Bursts of high-impact works [are] remarkably universal across diverse domains,” he and his co-authors wrote. Just about everybody has a period in their life when they produce at their best, even if, unlike Aretha, they aren’t pumping out some of the greatest work of the 20th century.
Instead of reading mid-wit pop-sci books which just offer vague metaphors or irrelevant anecdotes, read books that are either pure fun (fantasy, sci-fi, manga, etc), or actual hardcore science (textbooks and review papers).
I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up wanting the latter.
But basic jobs are going to be selecting primarily from the very poor demographic and they’re going to get hit with the same problem as the poorest public schools – a need for people to behave, combined with inability to credibly disincentivize misbehavior.Basic income avoids this problem. It provides money to everyone, good employees and bad emplo... See more
For hunter-gatherers, chiefs and shamans could, and did, moonlight as foragers and hunters. Overlapping duties preserved a strong sense of community, reinforced by customs and religions that obscured individual differences in strength, skill, and ambition. Shared labor meant shared values.But in industrial economies, lawyers don’t tag in for brain ... See more
Work in ProgressAmerica’s Most Important Economic Storyteller Is ConfusedAn old economy is dying, and a new economy is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monstrously confusing data.By Derek ThompsonAn illustration of the dollar-bill portrait of George Washington shrugging in confusionThe Atlantic; GettyJune 17, 2022About the author: Derek Th... See more