Juan Orbea

Going back to the job candidate, he has the benefit of having a less foggy view of his terrain. He knows (or at least believes) he wants to end up at the top of a different hill than he is presently climbing. He can see that higher hill from where he stands.

Yet another manifestation of the law of accelerating returns as it rushes toward the Singularity can be found in the world of economics, a world vital to both the genesis of the law of accelerating returns, and to its implications. Pharmaceutical drugs are increasingly effective. The statistical methods underlying the productivity measurements tend... See more

Incrementally improving an explanation of a technical idea might take a single author weeks to do, but could go on to save a day for thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of students, if it becomes the best option available.

"We help companies build, survive, and scale, but one of the main components of my job is understanding how and when the world is going to change. Our portfolio is a collage of various futures that we believe in, and our capital and expertise are assets to hopefully pull these futures forward."

Berkshire is what it is due to its Insurance operation (float).

We also cover some of Chris’ personal passions over the years, including his attempts to reduce what he calls ‘research debt’ by starting a new academic journal called Distill, focused just on explaining existing results unusually clearly.

[2] is exciting because it fixes a major problem in politics: unlike startups, where the early stage of the process looks somewhat like a mini version of the later stage, in politics the early stage is a public discourse game that often selects for very different things than what actually work in practice. 

"I'm a big believer that the only real driver of human progress and economic growth over the long term is the societal structure that enables scientific progress, and then scientific progress itself."