Juan Orbea

The same can be said of markets. Understanding how big a market really is can be difficult. But the act of attempted futurism can have a clarifying effect on your perspective.

Now a new set of organizations is building on the Ball Foundation work, often with the help of artificial intelligence, to design assessments that they claim are highly effective at pinpointing people’s aptitudes and matching them to potential careers. Most are focused on employers, offering assessments that can be given to applicants to see if... See more

Socrates isn’t giving many graduation addresses these days. Yet this wisdom is at the heart of a new generation of aptitude assessments intended to help individuals, including middle- and high-school students, understand themselves better.

Which acquaintance is most likely to know a lot of people that you’re compatible with? Not all people have equally large networks, and some people you know may be “hubs” that have a large number of connections. If you can find someone like this, they are usually quite helpful in meeting new people. “Hubs” frequently have weak ties to a lot of... See more

Germany sponsored Vladimir Lenin, and bankers in New York funded Leon Trotsky to foment the Russian Revolution. Both Wall Street and propagandistic reporting from Americans like John Reed aided Lenin and Trotsky in their revolution. Indeed, Reed was so useful to the Soviets — and so misleading as to the nature of the revolution — that he was buried... See more

I absolutely think that choosing in an intentional way the people that we’re closest to is the most important thing that we can do to affect what we want.

On Tubules and Quantum Computing

How can smart, ambitious people stay working in an area where they have no long term ambitions? I think a good analogy for the mistake they are making can be found in computer science.

When the niche shifts from being just nature, to being consciousness and culture itself, wild type groups start to have a conflict. What emerges from this transition is the Domesticated type.