SpaceXponential

Mountain climbers educated in the Alps discovered the vertical walls of granite in Yosemite in the 1930s and began to scale these monoliths. By 1941 climbers occupied a new permanent camp set up in the north side of Yosemite Valley, Camp 4. ... the geography of this scenius is unremarkable. Camp 4 is a nondescript, bland, dusty campground. Bui... 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 patte... See more

 "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 th... See more

The solution isn’t better truths. It’s better listening. How do you get people to listen? You reward those who do, and punish those who don’t. Bring investment due diligence to public narratives.

We are unable to act ethically towards that which we have not first attended to; this includes other humans, but also the non-human other. The art of attention requires, among other things, an openness to being moved and transformed, the development of language, and the resistance of algorithmic life.

The metaphor of risk management creates good-faith discourse.

In a market, everybody knows their ideological opponents are making an honest effort to understand — or, l iterally paying for the luxury of not making that effort.

A market is a mechanism for establishing cross-ideological trust.

Note that Wall Street bulls never characterize bears as “in

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In a world of perpetual data overload, [curation] implies information design and selectivity: the channeling, filtering, and organization into intelligible and usable information; the digging up of new or long ignored cultural corpora. Most of these corpora are simply sitting in storage: less than 1% of the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent colle... See more

We want a platform where we can swim in curiosity, where we can feel like our contributions amount to more and more over time, where we are encouraged to seek out the most arcane pieces of information and to juxtapose those pieces of information with current events in order to re-orient ourselves.

Above all, we want to be able to  play  wi

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Immutability, as it turns out, is not always well defined. In the case of blockchain, it does not mean that the records can never be changed or rolled back. Blockchain trust is immutable not in a binary sense, but in a probabilistic sense. Distinguishing untrustworthy chains from the consensus is not an all-or-nothing decision. The more subsequent ... See more