Juan Orbea

Girard's point o departure is what he calles "mimesis," the conflict that arises when human rivals compete to differentiate themselves from each other, yet succeed only in becoming more and more alike. At certain points in the life of a society, according to Girard, this mimetic conflict erupts into a crisis in which all difference dissolves in... See more

For the modern world, questions about the nature of humanity would be viewed on par with the struggle among the Lilliputians about the correct way to cut open an egg. Hobbes, the first truly modern philosopher, boasted of how he deserted and ran away from fighting in a religious war; a cowardly life had become preferable to a heroic but meaningless... See more

Not to mention people's capacity to study more as an attempt to improve how "smart" they were was virtually futile.

[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. 

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.

Two quiet revolutions: reading/writing DNA. The ability to read DNA has greatly exceeded Moore's Law. Your genome can now be sequenced for $100 (which used to cost billions only 25 years ago).

Most people like to think of themselves as good people. Most people in first world countries have the opportunity to have a tremendous impact on other people's lives. If you earn more than $35k per year, you are in the top 1% of earners worldwide. This puts you in a great position to do good.

The New Polymath is an enterprise which has learned to amalgamate 3, 5, 10 strands of technology-infotech, cleantech, healthtech, nanotech, biotech-to create compound new products and to innovate internal processes.