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The political right sees a war between barbarous foreigners and a civilized America. The left sees a war between economic classes, or among a multitude of identity groups fighting to oppress each other.

Our economy is based on companies competing with each other in the marketplace. But if you think that employees in the same company will cooperate for the good of the organization then you haven’t been paying attention to this very blog: organizations merely set the stage for a Darwinian contest in which sociopaths possessing the will to win oppress the clueless and exploit the losers

If you don’t spend your time thinking of ways to exploit people you’re probably a loser too

The two ways of being similar reinforce each other. When people go after the same prizes, they will develop similar skills in the pursuit. When people’s skills don’t set them apart, the will try to stand out by competing ever more desperately for the common prizes.

Game theory distinguishes between zero-sum games which are purely adversarial and positive-sum games which allow for cooperation. “Zero-sum” means that any gain for one player means a loss for the other players. In a zero-sum game there are no win-win possibilities and thus no point in trying to cooperate.

a positive-sum game involves a collaborative effort to which many players can contribute. Players bake a bigger pie by cooperating. In positive-sum games, the entrance of new participants is either bad or good for the incumbents, depending on the situation.

strong players have more room to cooperate, while weaker players are forced to compete with each other.

Competing against stronger students can have demoralizing effects that persist long after school is over. This isn’t the case for the student who is much smarter than her peers. She welcomes stronger classmates. They improve her learning opportunities and increase the overall prestige of the university, without being a threat.

But for avoiding competition, having unique skills isn’t half as important as having unique desires. The philosopher René Girard described the mimetic contagion of desire: people instinctively imitate the desires of those around them, which leads to everyone chasing the same prizes.

Once people enter college, they get socialized into group environments that usually continue to operate in zero-sum competitive dynamics. These include orchestras and sport teams; fraternities and sororities; and many types of clubs. The biggest source of mimetic pressures are the classes. Everyone starts out by taking the same intro classes; those seeking distinction throw themselves into the hardest classes, or seek tutelage from star professors, and try to earn the highest grades

software gives you its own set of abstractions and basic vocabulary with which to understand every experience. It sort of smells like mathematics in some ways. But software’s way of looking at the world is more about abstractions modeling underlying complexities in systems; signal vs. noise; scale and orders of magnitude; and information — how much there is, what we can do it with, how we can learn from it and model it. Software’s interpretation of reality is particularly important because software drives the world now, and the people who write the software that runs it see the world through this kind of “software’s worldview” — scaling laws, information theory, abstractions and complexity. I think over time I’ve come to believe that understanding this worldview is more interesting than learning to wield programming tools.

. Perhaps you see the liberal-arts idyll, removed from the pressures of the broader world and filled with tweedy creatures reading on quadrangle lawns. This is the redoubt of the idealized figure of the English major, sensitive and sweatered, moving from “Pale Fire” to “The Fire Next Time” and scaling the heights of “Ulysses” for the view. The goal of such an education isn’t direct career training but cultivation of the min

Or perhaps you think of the university as the research colony, filled with laboratories and conferences and peer-reviewed papers written for audiences of specialists. This is a place that thumps with the energy of a thousand gophers turning over knowledge. It’s the small-bore university of campus comedy—of “Lucky Jim” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”—but also the quarry of deconstruction, quantum electrodynamics, and value theory. It produces new knowledge and ways of understanding that wouldn’t have an opportunity to emerge anywhere else.

English professors find the turn particularly baffling now: a moment when, by most appearances, the appetite for public contemplation of language, identity, historiography, and other longtime concerns of the seminar table is at a peak.

“Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!” Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall.

In a quantitative society for which optimization—getting the most output from your input—has become a self-evident good, universities prize actions that shift numbers, and pre-professionalism lends itself to traceable change

One literature professor and critic at Harvard—not old or white or male—noticed that it had become more publicly rewarding for students to critique something as “problematic” than to grapple with what the problems might be; they seemed to have found that merely naming concerns had more value, in today’s cultural marketplace, than curiosity about what underlay them

I'm sure this has been said time and time again, but I'll repeat it just in case: be yourself and don't think too hard about it. In the design community, share what you're working on, genuinely participate in discussions about it or about others' work, and focus on making connections by doing and posting what you like to do. This essentially eliminates the "work" from building an audience — it's probably not going to feel great if you build up a presence by putting on a facade or doing growth hack-y things.

DAOs are effectively owned and governed by people who hold a sufficient number of a DAO’s native token, which functions like a type of cryptocurrency. For example, $FWB is the native token of popular social DAO called Friends With Benefits, and people can buy, earn, or trade it.

Contributors will be able to use their DAO’s native tokens to vote on key decisions. You can get a glimpse into the kinds of decisions DAO members are already voting on at Snapshot, which is essentially a decentralized voting system. Having said this, existing voting mechanisms have been criticized by the likes of Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, the open-source blockchain that acts as a foundational layer for the majority of Web3 applications. So, this type of voting is likely to evolve over time.

Lots of Marvel fans were very angry with me because I’m an older millennial that engages in fandom as a way to critique and discuss topics that interest me, instead of how Gen Z engages with fandom, which is more of a mildly-fascist personality cult you pledge hysterical allegiance to as a way to push it further up a digital leaderboard within the greater online attention economy

Master morality is appealing to leaders — that’s why powerful people tend to be more right wing or Master Morality oriented — because of course people at the top of the hierarchy are going to believe in hierarchy.

Women and marginalized people who change jobs: Flakey and incapable. Unable to handle a job. Something must be wrong. Clearly a sign of caution to be taken as a reason not to work with them.Men who change jobs: literally articles inventing new vernacular stemming from the mental gymnastics required to justify the hypocrisy — men aren’t incapable because they change jobs — they are prodigy — men aren’t untrustworthy for changing jobs — they are taking nonlinear career paths because of the uncertainty in the market

valuesHonestyAuthenticityCuriosityAccessibility

A couple themes emerged: Thing 1: Professional GROWTH has become a source of stress. I used to love reading work related books and listening to work related podcasts, and now those things stress me out. I used to feel like “these are great ideas and I’m excited to try them and talk about them at work.” And now it feels more like “these are great ideas that I should have been doing already and therefore I’m failing.” So I’ve been avoiding it. I’ve read mostly fiction and listened to mostly non-work podcasts for a long time now.

Thing 2: Professional JOY has become based on how others view me. I find joy in significance. I like knowing that I’m making an impact. And in the absence of any clear metric of my performance, I’ve started using “does everyone think I’m awesome?” as a basic proxy for “am I doing a good job?” And the problem is that it’s unknowable. My brain is always able to list people who may not think I’m awesome, or reasons why I may not be seen as awesome, or things other people who are more awesome would be doing better than me in my position.

Is there anything that I value for its own sake, rather than for the social capital it gets me?

The focus of this role will be on brand, brand strategy, storytelling, video storytelling, and art direction of content. The type of work we expect to engage this Creative Director in is less about physical (hardware) and digital (software) product design and more on helping clients and teams with the ambiguity of understanding their brand, using that perspective to inform their product strategy or messaging, and delivering that message through compelling content and assets. Personality-wise, you’re a dynamic presenter with engaging charisma and you’re endowed with the diplomatic and interpersonal skills of a head of state, adept at working effectively with a diverse range of co-workers and clients to produce superlative results; and possess a nimble, solution-oriented mindset. You are a gifted storyteller with strong writing and communication skills. You understand how to clarify and amplify a client’s brand through clear messaging, a compelling user experience or journey, and how to tell that story through copy, messaging, renderings, animation, and video mediums. You have exceptional presentation skills and treat presentations as a performance.

In some ways this aesthetic is the 'kids version' of Frasurbane, with an emphasis on scholastic endeavors, 'edutainment', and an 'end-of-history' approach to learning. It uses the same classical and 'timeless' typography and imagery with Frasurbane, adding in the aesthetic of 'stock photography collage' depicting the most basic and identifiable depictions of forms and concepts for quick comprehension. This reliance on this style of collage is predicated on two factors in the era; the proliferation of stock photography collections, and the development of desktop publishing & graphics-editing software in the 1980s.

I think when you're starting a company, it's really useful to ask the question, why now? And this is like, pretty cliche for startup stuff, so if you've heard of it already, apologies, but I do think it's a really useful framework. And that question of why now? Can be societal. Maybe there's some new cultural trend, perhaps it's regulatory. Some law has been passed or appealed. I like the technological version. And for us we saw drones in 2012 and WebGL as few technologies that were happening where because these technologies were happening, new possibilities were suddenly there.

But we're like, why would you do anything in photo editing if you're not on the phone? And so we felt like we were kind of building the wrong place and then eventually sort of shifted our attention to design, which I had been a design internet flipboard and that helped kind of help me realize what would be possible there.

And I would just say don't just go for an idea because it's kind of working. Go for an idea that you really care about because even if it doesn't work, you'll still learn from it and you'll still have one.

those most likely to become entrepreneurs are well-rounded. A 2005 study from Edward Lazear suggests that the self-employed tend to be generalists, not specialists.