Juan Orbea

"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."

I'm a firm believer that founders are the people who can predict the future. --> "The best way to predict the future is to build it".

Big, life-altering decisions matter so much more than the decisions we make every day, and they're also the most difficult: where to live, whom to marry, what to believe, whether to start a company, how to end a war. There's no one-size-fits-all approach for addressing these kinds of conundrums.

This is also an important factor to consider when choosing a company to work at! Dig into what a company values and ensure it aligns with your intended personal growth.

A classic problem in computer science is hill climbing. Imagine you are dropped at a random spot on a hilly terrain, where you can only see a few feet in each direction (assume it’s foggy or something). The goal is to get to the highest hill.

Our model instincts are just not attuned to that at all, they are not sensitive to the sheer scale of what an individual is able to achieve if he or she is trying to make a really positive difference in the world.

Team BTC (meaning, both actual Bitcoin maximalists and US rightists in general) has some positive values, but their outright hostility to collective action and order means that they are incapable of building anything. 

But pretty soon, Balaji's examples do start to point to some particular themes: