The search for Truth aims to find a universal perspective. The ultimate context to separate right and wrong. In physics, we call this an…
Original thread: https://twitter.com/das_connor/status/1365284228699746304 Every year, @bruces and @jonl analyze the state of the world…
No one designed the current world order. As much as some men try to shape it, history is the textbook definition of a chaotic system. It's…
Why do we do the things we do? Often, the answer is that's the way we've done them before. When we explicity acknowledge this, we call it…
Don't ask if tech companies will build new cities. Ask when. When they do, we must demand qualities that reinvigorate our relationships with…
From Sidewalk Labs to Nevada's tech governments, companies are the next frontier of city building. Although intended to be innovation hubs…
Cities need to change. Despite some pandemic adaptations, local governments have not been up to the task. We need bigger changes than…
Original thread: https://twitter.com/das_connor/status/1357696989266382849 I spent January learning to write online. Step 1: Write every day…
Humans have an incredible ability to run on autopilot. With sufficient skill, you can perform any activity with almost zero active attention…
There's a difference between taking a selfie and shooting a portrait. Both are forms of photography, but one exudes craft while the other…
Where are society's best ideas found? We fetishize the intellectual weight of colossal academic texts, but few of us actually like to read…
When I got serious about improving my cooking, I knew I needed to improve my palate. I needed to be both discerning and well read in the…
Centralized exchanges have shown their true face. Retail investors are not their customers, they are the product. After Robinhood took the…
Can society form consensus around multiple conflicting narratives? On the individual level, this seems to be possible. When you cheer for…
America has always prided itself with its protection of free expression and its promotion of individualism, but that has come at a cost…
There are two types of truth: observational truth and reputational truth. Observational truths are measurements of the genuine state of…
A glitch in the matrix manifests when reality fights back against our understanding of it. A piece of common sense or previously…
The endgame of online communities is the formation of digital nation-states, complete with their own totally online governments. Overlay…
Overlay communities define our lives and our identities, but these communities lack edges. What does it mean to be a member? Who qualifies…
Remote work has forever changed where we'll live, but even before the pandemic, we started losing touch with our geographic communities…
After years of continual public misinformation campaigns, it's only a matter of time before our social media timelines are littered with…
We currently live in the Post-Truth Era, but the Pre-Post-Truth Era was not the Truth Era. Consensus came before. As the clock struck 201…
In crypto, all of our identities are tied to strings of random numbers. Reputation is how we infer meanings about the personalities and…
While most of the security discussion around blockchains focuses on either the soundness of smart contracts or the integrity of their…
DeFi is blockchain's killer app for finance, but what is its killer app for privacy? The answer seems to be pseudonymous identities, but we…
Decentralized smart contracts are starting to rely on a centralized software stack. We've long known that rolling your own cryptography is a…
As legacy blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum buckle and groan under the weight of their popularity, an entirely new ecosystem of…
The founding principles of evolution seem to state that man, like all animals, is selfish. Only through the power of competition, can we…
Humans exist in the real world, but our cognitions are composed of stories. Those stories may or may not align with reality, so which is…
How can we introduce oversight into social media content moderation without unduly restricting free speech? We need to create systems of…
Groups across political divides don't seem to even live in the same universe. Fact-checking cannot fix this. Humans live in reality, but…
Our lives are governed by both reality and mythology. Humans think in stories and contain multiple identity and world stories, but no one…
Can a tolerant society tolerate intolerance? According to the philosopher Karl Popper, the Paradox of Tolerance implies the answer is no…
The Power of Stories may be a mental model, but is there any empirical evidence demonstrating its effectiveness? It turns out, yes…
How can one live a meaningful life? The answer lies in stories. To live meaningfully is to believe a world story that you play an…
Humans don't just think in stories, humans are stories. Our personal identity is the collective sum of all the stories we tell about…
Humans don't think in terms of numbers and strings. Humans think in stories. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari argues that what makes humans…
Hello internet! Longtime lurker, first time caller here... I've shot off the occasional tweet over the last couple of years, but I've…
About a month ago, I came across the work of Maggie Appleton and Andy Matuschak and decided to totally revitalize my note taking workflow…
I'm bored of .com. I’m tired of searching through Namecheap trying to find the perfect new brand name and realizing everything .com is taken…
In Microsoft Flight Simulator (MFS), you can fly literally anywhere in the world. Using data from Bing Maps, the development team created an…