Johanna

If you don't hire originals, you run the risk of people disagreeing but not voicing their dissent. You want people who choose to follow because they genuinely believe in ideas, not because they’re afraid to be punished if they don’t. For startups, there's so much pivoting that’s required that if you have a bunch of sheep, you’re in bad shape.

This is the big one. If you’re conducting blue sky imagineering improv meetings on a regular basis, that’s very tough to pull off remotely. There’s something about the physical presence of people in a room, seeing their faces, hearing their voices, watching their body language, that is far more conducive to quickly bouncing ideas around and... See more

A lot of extraordinary things in life are the result of things that are first-order negative, second order positive. So just because things look like they have no immediate payoff, doesn’t mean that’s the case. All it means is that you’ll have less competition if the second and third order consequences are positive because everyone who thinks at... See more

Yang isn’t proposing a tax on automation (yet), but he needs to stop using fear of automation as a way to sell UBI. Besides the fact that the evidence is against it and it encourages bad policies, the “rise of the robots” narrative calls for a UBI that’s much bigger than anything Yang — or anyone — can possibly muster. If automation makes humans... 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.

All of these lines of evidence lead me to the same conclusion: constant growth rates in response to exponentially increasing inputs is the null hypothesis. If it wasn’t, we should be expecting 50% year-on-year GDP growth, easily-discovered-immortality, and the like.

Choose a threshold of radiation deemed safe; enforce that limit and nothing more. Further, these limits should balance risk vs. benefit, recognizing that nuclear is an alternative to other modes of power, including fossil fuels, that have their own health impacts.