found an old email from high school when I emailed the airbnb founders to see if they were down to pay for me and two friends to travel around the world using airbnb before it was well known
they were interested and asked for our itinerary! But decided we weren't cool enough :(
to be clear, by experienced traveller we mean a random high school kid who had been to a few countries. At the time I'd never left America, so having travelled a few times sounded very experienced to me
David and I spent about an hour nervously checking every detail of that email to make sure it was perfect and we didn't obviously sound like naive teenagers. Yet called it "iternary"
I lost that email account but IIRC Joe responded in like 3 minutes with a detailed response
the thing that struck me most about this email is how unfriendly it is
We were purposefully being unfriendly to be "professional" and hide that we were noobs, but reading the email now I see the tone and think "wow they're noobs"
roughly how I'd do it now:
Hey! We're three high schoolers who love Airbnb and want to travel with it for three months while writing about it. But we're low on cash. Would you be willing to subsidize us 30%, like usual monthly rate discounts (~30-50%), but over multiple places?
funny enough, he actually offered us the option of discounts on places with not that many reviews. Which is exactly what we wanted — discounts to stay at weird places
But since it didn’t *sound* like sponsorship™ we said no thanks, to.. play hardball? 🤪 we were beyond clueless
anyway, thank you for talking to us fools @jgebbia, and congratulations on Airbnb’s success! I’ve been living in Airbnbs for months and I’m very grateful for what you’ve built
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honestly hard to imagine how anyone thinks any idea is out there when general relativity, the delayed-choice quantum eraser, black holes, evolution somehow discovering consciousness, and 5-MeO-DMT all uncontroversially exist
if we set the delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment at 10 on the out-there scale, your agi timeline, quirky theory of mind, or prediction of a strange political outcome is like max a 2/10 to me
you think leaving facebook to join a startup is sooo crazy yet you've been literally BENDING TIME every second of your life and have never even thought about it
Current feeling on meta-science: I’m not sure anyone — authors, readers, etc — actually likes papers. What if we just got rid of them?
What could we replace them with?
conjecture: papers are weak and unopinionated
want to communicate an idea? do a vlog -- most communication is about inexplicit vibes
want to release a reproducible protocol? Record you in colab doing it, release for one click reproducibility
want to debate your side of an idea against another side? Do an adversarial collaboration with someone who disagrees with you slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/24/adv…
want real peer review? Record podcast with a bunch of peers for a couple hours. Less time, higher bandwidth than normal review
i’m often told people love half of what i write and hate the other half (to a surprising degree)
the second costs followers every time but it feels better to aim for honesty than status. I'm helped by the few who engage with the hated ones, and i don't think they know 1/
i’d encourage anyone in a similar position for others to do it more. First, they'll love you if you engage with the stuff others don’t, either riffing off in agreement or providing thoughtful criticism. But the reason to do it isn’t to be loved 2/
but because you’re helping cultivate the courage to write what is true to them, which is surprisingly hard. And by helping them write you're helping them think. Their best stuff hides in the intersection of hated and true, and you're helping them search this area for treasure
“The most counterintuitive secret about startups is it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one.” - Sam Altman
I think there’s a similar secret in psych. It’s sometimes easier to become happier than anyone you’ve ever met than it is to just cure low mood
one reason is that with the ambitious path you’ll need powerful tools and tons of self introspection to understand how you work and why you’re not 10/10 already
Whereas if you aim for marginal gains you may try symptomatic treatments that end up doing nothing at all
another is that in my experience most people only have one or two core things (part of identity, a trauma, etc) blocking them, often that they’re unaware of
Without reverse engineering and healing them it’s hard to have any progress, but if you do process can be shocking
Current worldview: most everyone deeply believes things that would cause them to lose status that they wished others believed too, but aren’t willing to actually make that trade
Please prove me wrong
I’ve lost ~100 followers on you deserve newborn love and I will continue to climb the empty office buildings and shout it from the rooftops