Juan Orbea

Synthetic biology is the ability to engineer the substrates that makes us. We live in a big ball of biology floating in space and we have very limited ways to work with this stuff.

Their excitement is viewed as excessive, their high energy as hyperactivity, their persistence as nagging, their imagination as not paying attention, their passion as being disruptive, their strong emotions and sensitivity as immaturity, and their creativity and self-directedness as oppositional. 

There are these people that are powerful mediators to other people. And if you can identify who those people are and how they’re operating, you’ve just identified sort of one of the root causes of problems, or just one of sort of the root players in this system. And identifying those mediators is sort of really key.

But blockchains are the only infrastructure system that at least attempts to do ultimate dispute resolution at the non-state level (either through on-chain smart contract logic or through the freedom to fork). This makes them an ideal base infrastructure for network states.

Whatever it is, things that simply won’t happen if you don’t do them are your biggest opportunity to work on something that matters, and it’s a category that will get both narrower and deeper the further you get into your career.

I believe all employees in a startup are on a spectrum between two poles:

Traditional philosophy has been going on almost three thousand years; machine goal alignment has until the advent of superintelligence, a nebulous event which may be anywhere from a decades to centuries away. If the control problem doesn’t get adequately addressed by then, we are likely to see poorly controlled superintelligences that are... See more