Robin Good

High agency is such an important idea because the more agency an individual or society has -- the more problems they can solve.

High agency can be a confusing idea to understand because it’s not just one idea. It’s a combination of three distinct skills rarely found together:

1. Clear thinking


2. Bias to action


3. Disagreeability

The more our world becomes measurable and quantifiable, the more we need spaces that preserve what can't be measured—the hunches we can't explain, the patterns we feel but can't prove.

Give users of all platforms the right to customize or opt out of algorithms—choosing chronological or geographical or genre-based filtering or even human curation.

Taste manifests as a combination of history, design, user experience, and embedded values that creates emotional resonance — that defines how a product connects with people as individuals and aligns with their identity. None of the tactical things alone are taste; they’re mere artifacts or effects of expressing one’s taste. At a minimum, taste... See more

The shift

So what I am proposing is a need for a radical reframe of trustworthy AI in terms of virtue ethics, i.e. to focus on the ways that AI practitioners can cultivate trustworthiness and embody that character in their work. This, I suggest, will ripple out into improved trustworthiness and greater trust in the AI products being built (not just... See more

One of my (many) contrarian beliefs is that we do not have strong enough preferences. We often blame social media or the speed of information as the reason why we’re easily distracted, but the real reason behind our inability to focus has less to do with the sheer quantity of media and more to do with our laziness when it comes to distinguishing... See more

Curation is an act of illuminating [something that is not us].

Writing on methods for gathering ideas, Seneca, the great stoic, suggests that authors should imitate the bees. Like a bee flying among the flowers, we ought to vary our reading and extract useful material from various sources.