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Block the Academics
In Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s recent podcast w/ Balaji Srinivasan called “Optimizing Your Inputs” among several interesting thought chains on a concept called the information diet, Balaji talks about blockchain in such a spirited way it is practically contagious. His idea of moving academia on chain to improve visibility and accountability and ultimately streamline the exponentially growing…
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Book Review: The Meritocracy Trap
Markovits’ The Meritocracy Trap is a thrilling and exhaustive examination of the conceit of merit that dominates the worldview of so many, and leaves me wondering if dismantling it is the only way to prevent the global order from crumbling, be it war, revolution, collapse, or plague.
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Approximate Prescience & Design Loops
I’ve spent much of the past semester studying for an aerospace engineering degree primarily practicing building models. Engineers are behooved by the physical world to devise ways of modeling phenomena such as to understand and take advantage of them. The reality of the situation is, of course, that every model must approximate reality. Thus, we…
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Some Asymmetries
The world is brimming with symmetries. This is, in part, because humans love to observe symmetries in things. Many evolutionary biologists theorize that at some point, we (as living creatures) evolved to associate this phenomena with health. We ate plants with symmetrical leaves and berries, we admired the symmetries in others faces, we survived for…
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Blockchain and the Mess We Make
Individuals are quick to forget that other people around them exist. I cannot think of a claim on human nature less difficult to defend. Just yesterday, a person on the trail I was cycling on suddenly moved into my path in an effort to pet a cute dog on the other side of the path.…
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When Selection Sours
One of the main traits that separates professional investors from the retail, I believe, is narrative tracking. Watching the quality of ones investment vehicles over time takes time and resources, access to data, and the ability to digest and act upon it. But knowing who the winners are in your portfolio and having the conviction…
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On an Exodus
A great read by @micsolana on tech & the bay, got me thinking about the recipients of the “tech exodus” and how cities like Austin can play their cards to extract maximum value from the supposedly impending influx. One of the key points made in the post was that tech workers have not been the…
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Moon Tracking
Why does the moon appear where it does in the sky? Why can we see it during the daytime sometime? When my mother asked me these questions while on a walk, with the daytime moon clearly looming some 400,000 kilometers away, I was frustrated by my lack of complete understanding of the path that the…
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An Introduction
“Constantly think about how you could be doing things better and keep questioning yourself.” When Elon Musk said that on November 30, 2016, he called it the single best piece of advice. He’s probably said that about lots of advice before and since then, but I think this one works pretty well for the intro post for this…
To Be Determined 