Juan Orbea

No phrase better encapsulates science investing today than the challenge of “condensing fact from the vapor of nuance.”

Experts predict that solar and wind can meet ~70% of the world’s energy demands, but what energy sources will take up which shares of the remaining pie? The remaining must be covered by some combination of other low-carbon sources like hydro, biomass, geothermal, gas/oil with carbon sequestration, and, of course, nuclear.

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.

Rushkoff unpacks parts of his new book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, on the need to collectively break away from a top-down mindset to embrace circularity and resiliency. 

The underlying mechanism for Zipf’s law is not yet agreed on but the main hypothesis is that it’s an outgrowth of the Principle of Least Effort. In short, systems that survive and operate at steady state optimize for efficiency. When they do, things tend to look like Zipf distributions.

So if you are choosing between colleges, or know someone who is, consider the following questions: