Juan Orbea

None of this bodes well for many of the new VC entrants who have suddenly become enamored by the capital return potential of science. We have a view that real advances in science are relatively rare, that they are hard to produce, and they tend to be signaled by clear research evidence years if not decades in advance. Venture capital is not a fit... See more

People early in their career should learn from computer science: meander some in your walk (especially early on), randomly drop yourself into new parts of the terrain, and when you find the highest hill, don’t waste any more time on the current hill no matter how much better the next step up might appear .

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

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.

The author never met anybody who would trade our social order for theirs, who wants to go back to that old Princeton world. And yet ... and yet there are disturbing ghosts around the campus. The old order haunts this one, and whispers that maybe something was lost as well as gained when we sacrificed all for the sake of high achievement, safety,... 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

Details 11 building blocks these Polymaths are utilizing - from cloud computing, to sustainability, to social networks.