I met José at an Emergent Ventures meetup. It took me ~30 seconds to realize he had one of the sharpest minds I’ve ever come across. He can process information faster than just about anybody I’ve ever met. His posts are long, but if you find one that interests you, I can almost guarantee that it’s one of the best introductions to the subject online. If you’re interested in education, I recommend this primer on Bloom’s Two-Sigma Problem. And if you’re interested in cities, I recommend his post on rising construction costs.

I met José at an Emergent Ventures meetup. It took me ~30 seconds to realize he had one of the sharpest minds I’ve ever come across. He can process information faster than just about anybody I’ve ever met. His posts are long, but if you find one that interests you, I can almost guarantee that it’s one of the best introductions to the subject online. If you’re interested in education, I recommend this primer on Bloom’s Two-Sigma Problem. And if you’re interested in cities, I recommend his post on rising construction costs.

Reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody was one of those moments where I realized how transformative the Internet could become. This speech is a good place to start. He compares modern sitcoms to gin during the Industrial Revolution. People didn’t know what to do with their lives, so they drank and drank and drank. Now, they watch and watch and watch. Only later did society wake up to new ways of living, made possible by the Industrial Revolution. Shirky argues that something similar has happened since World War II. But this time, the social lubricant wasn’t liquor but sitcoms. We spent most of our free time watching TV. Now, with the Internet, we have a giant cognitive surplus. Americans watch 200 billion hours of television every year. Meanwhile, the whole Wikipedia project — every page, every edit, every line of code, and every translation — represents the result of roughly 100 million hours of human thought. Every year, we therefore devote ~2,000 Wikipedia projects to watching television. What if we could transfer some of that energy into something more generative?

Where did all the geniuses go? They were killed by the concept of intelligence. The author argues that our obsession with intelligence discourages people to work on ambitious problems because people talk themselves out of pursuing them.

C.S Lewis gave this speech in 1947 and the ideas are as relevant today as they were back then. My favorite concept is that there are two systems of influence in any organization: the official one and the unofficial one. There are explicit org charts and implicit ones. Train yourself to make sense of the implicit ones, where the true dynamics of power lie. Also, if you’re a C.S. Lewis fan, you’ll like my essay: Why You’re Christian (Essay).