Juan Orbea

I'm generally in the first camp; I am concerned about the prospect of both the West and China settling into a kind of low-growth conservatism, I love how imperfect coordination between nation states limits the enforceability of things like global copyright law, and I'm concerned about the possibility that, with future surveillance technology, the... See more

The Ochs-Sulzberger family, which owns The New York Times Company, owned slaves but didn't report that fact in their 1619 coverage.

- Why highly thoughtful cold emails can be surprisingly effective, but average cold emails do little.

Presumably, parents in the past cared as much about their kids' safety as parents today do. But they took far fewer precautions than parents today, and exerted far fewer controls over kids' behavior. Perhaps they thought it was important that children learn to take risks in order to develop courage. Or perhaps they thought that getting into scrapes... See more

However, most people in first world countries are in this situation of opportunity to do extreme good in exchange for a relatively small sacrifice, but most don't do it, mainly due to ignorance of a tractable way in which to do it.

What’s fascinating is that this is because of math. Nodes that are “ahead” get picked more often by the other nodes because they are ahead and thus offer the nodes choosing them less friction and more benefit. When this gets repeated many times, it systematically directs more resources to the nodes that already have relatively more.

Also, their discipline of walking away from insurance business when it was badly priced was key to their success.