Juan Orbea

The Law of Accelerating Returns

We all have a finite amount of time to live, and within that mortal countdown we devote some fraction towards our work. Even for the most career-focused, your life will be filled by many things beyond work. This is the sign of a rich life, but one side-effect is that time to do your work will become increasingly scarce as you get deeper into your... See more

Given that a purist "private property rights only" libertarianism inevitably runs into large problems like its inability to fund public goods, any successful pro-freedom program in the 21st century has to be a hybrid containing at least one Big Compromise Idea that solves at least 80% of the problems, so that independent individual initiative can... See more

Sam thinks we will still really care about interaction with other people. We’ll still have fun, and the reward systems of our brain are still going to work the same way. Star Trek is pretty good, honestly. I like all of the ones that are where we turn our focus to exploring and understanding the universe as much as we can.

Feral Type – its niche is narrative and society. Narrative becomes reality. This gives rise to 2 failure conditions: 1) delusion (which is an identification with an ideology that takes the story as actually being reality) and 2) deception (the perception of society being first and foremost a hierarchy/conflict between domesticated people).

Until 1998 BH run a levered operation by having more invested assets in the insurance operation than BH itself had in book value.

Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades also occurred in the 1850s. Anyone who thinks that wild-ass high tech venture capitalism is a late-20th-century California phenomenon needs to read about the maniacs who built the first transatlantic cable projects. The only things that have changed since then are that the... See more

Third — and here I can only describe what I am observing across the industry — marketing seems to be substituting for real, hard science in the presentation of these startups.

A more sophisticated version of this algorithm adds some randomness into your walk. This gives you a better chance of meandering near the bigger hill before you start your focused, non-random climb.