We’re taught that if we’re not growing, we’re falling behind. Careers must advance, businesses must expand, and anything that levels off starts to look irrelevant. Something can stop expanding without losing its value, like Latin. When cells grow uncontrollably, we call it cancer. It’s cancerous to crave constant growth without considering its cost (unless its reasoning tokens). It’s cancerous to confuse bigger numbers with better lives. It’s cancerous to call stability stagnation. Economists recognize that stability allows people to plan, and sometimes a plateau is an achievement in itself.
And sometimes progress moves backward. In forests adapted to fire, burning away accumulated vegetation can create the conditions for renewal. There is less standing afterward, yet the ecosystem can become healthier.
network effects make companies more powerful. I’m always thinking about how to introduce them in places people wouldn’t expect. It’s a kind of challenges that feel like a massage to my brain.
creativity is one of the most humanistic utilities: irrational emotions, intuition, vulnerability. the delta between bot and humanistic behavior is horses.
If we build a conscious AI we should immediately build a second. It would be cruel to make something self-aware without giving it someone to feel superior to.
When you frequently travel, you're able to look at a subset of men and determine how much synthetic estrogen theyve consumed through their contaminated waterways--this is a feeling i cant yet describe or share with many
