One thing that really bothered me as a young founder: at some point I was told it was impolite to give “seasoned executives” brainteasers in interviews. It was made to seem impolite, even offensive. It was made to seem as if they provided no signal on a candidate. It was made to seem as if, if a brainteaser was administered, that would somehow determine the entire outcome of the interview.

Excellent 2021 piece from @vgr on how AIs, when measured in normal human learning years, can be 100s or 1000s of years old.

studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/superhistory… “These AIs have already read vastly more text than I could in a thousand years and digested it into minds… that are effectively Ancient Ones.”

One thing most people don't fully grasp: it takes years, often decades, to go from a new infrastructure-level technology breakthrough (like crypto) to a vibrant ecosystem of mainstream applications. This is because most people have little reason to pay attention to new technologies before the mainstream application breakthroughs. Almost no one paid attention to the early infrastructure period of the internet 1969-1994.

Crypto has become a huge part of top US universities. Of the top 10:
- 4 have dedicated crypto centers (Stanford, MIT, Columbia, Princeton)
- Almost all have dedicated classes, which in some cases are the most popular at the school
- Almost all have dedicated student groups Crypto becoming entrenched in US higher education means a consistent pipeline of top talent which will fuel the crypto ecosystem for years to come.

Virgil Abloh was a pioneer in music, art, and fashion. Most people don't know he was also ahead of the curve on Web3.

Shared with permission from his team, here is an early iteration of a DAO he envisioned.
dropbox.com/s/sgrtgh3zbhid… Virgil saw Web3, in his own words, as an opportunity to “inch us a little closer toward a utopia for creativity.”

When @brian_armstrong and I started @coinbase in 2012, a #bitcoin was worth $6 and only known by a few nerds on the internet. #bitcoin was the crazy idea that the world could have a digital money for everyone.

@coinbase had one mission: to make crypto easy to use. Beginnings were not glamorous. @coinbase launched out of a two bedroom apartment we shared with another company.

NFTs fundamentally rearchitect internet applications. NFTs create a single, open media database any developer can build from.

Psychologist Robert Kegan's work on stages of adult development has been one of the most influential on me in the last year (thanks @GrahamDuncanNYC)

In short, Kegan believes development is the ability to make object what was once subject, unlocking higher level systems thinking Very useful as a framework for improving as a manager, in relationships, and in thinking broadly.

Good Stanford Psychology summary here: tomprof.stanford.edu/posting/1110

Availability Cascades: how to spread an idea through a large population

chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewconten… Why is it important to understand availability cascades?
They determine which ideas spread in the world and which do not. How much an idea spreads is often independent of merit/truth if it gains sufficient momentum.

An abundance of high quality and cheap digital entertainment = a lot less young men working. Excellent piece by Andrew Cortina.
kortina.nyc/essays/kinky-l… The optimistic view: this is a rapidly growing new frontier offering lots of opportunity, it just happens to be digital rather than physical (ex: space).

1/ Token curation markets use economic incentives to create crowd curated information feeds/lists on any topic. Feels like what will become an important crypto primitive: medium.com/@simondlr/intr… 2/ Core idea: the token holders of the feed have an incentive to create the best feed possible to attract as much attention as possible. More attention --> more valuable feed tokens because of their value to others who want their content in the feed.

The spectrum of funding blockchain development: 1/ No direct funding. Rely on the incentives of existing token holders and good will of the community to develop public infrastructure.

1/ People seem to increasingly be comparing Bitcoin to religion. A rundown of the framework: 2/ Prophet: Satoshi. He is no longer here and thus impossible to question, making him plausibly infallible.

1/ Blockchains are the substrate for AI life 2/ Since AIs are just code, they can live on the blockchain in smart contracts

1/ The most powerful ideas in technology paradigm shifts are uniquely enabled by the new paradigm, not shoehorned in from old ones. 2/ Of the top 50 sites on the internet today, only 2 are from companies which predate the internet (MSN and Microsoft.com)