SpaceXponential

 "I believe," he writes, "that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, new friends."  The point is that a cappella harnesses the creative intelligence of a whole group. By contrast, says Eno, high art is about separating geniuses from foot soldiers. "A cappella subverts that: it's highly composed music but there's no... See more

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, distinguishes two kinds of cryptoeconomic systems: objective and subjective. In an objective system, the protocol’s operation and consensus can be maintained at all times using solely nodes, knowing nothing but the rules of the protocol itself. Subjective systems, on the other hand, require more additional... See more

The serendipitous ingredients for scenius are hard to control. ...  What Camp 4 illustrated is that the best you can do is NOT KILL IT. When it pops up, don’t crush it. When it starts rolling, don’t formalize it. When it sparks, fan it. But don’t move the scenius to better quarters. Try to keep accountants and architects and police and do-gooders... See more

Political risks aside, whatever the blockchain of facts could discover about consensus has already been thoroughly demonstrated by Trump Tweets. Trump Tweets have shown us that access to, obviousness of, and even universal agreement on the facts often achieves nothing for public discourse. Everyone agrees on the exact words he said, but their

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Technology, however, is creating trust between the unlikeliest of characters, even in the nefarious world of the “Darknet” – an encrypted network of secret websites that allows the exchange of illegal assets such as drugs, stolen financial data, and firearms (Reiff, 2020). The great oxymoron is that it is populated by hundreds of thousands of... See more

One of the most pleasurable parts of learning a new domain for me is developing the language that accompanies the development of taste. This is this sort of chocolate, and I like that more because xyz, this sort of music. There is a delight in finally discovering the exact right label for one’s felt experience. Language facilitates higher levels of... See more

Del.icio.us made us realize the importance of archiving casual web (and other) research. That process has a lot of positive effects that are hard to explain until you’ve built a habit out of it. For one, there’s a self-discovery that happens when you revisit things you’ve accumulated over a period of time. You look back and begin to recognize... See more

The many analysts, including me, who had argued that Trump could not win the general election were relying on pre-Babel intuitions, which said that scandals such as the Access Hollywood tape (in which Trump boasted about committing sexual assault) are fatal to a presidential campaign. But after Babel, nothing really means anything anymore––at least... See more

There are a lot of benefits to being good at that narration. Describe your “calling” convincingly and you've defined a new game that others want to watch and play. But it’s a catch-22: if you spend all your time constantly sketching (probably quickly outdated) pictures of your thinking on the bigger questions we’ve all been tasked with answering,... See more