Ideas

By devin, 2 March, 2014

I just saw a documentary about a sushi maker. You might think I was focussed on the sushi, but what really struck me was some of the ways Japanese culture works, and the universality of dominance with humans. We defer to leaders, time and again. I'm going to reflect on that, but the focus in my mind is not this particular sushi chef. The focus is dominant leaders and their followers.

By devin, 24 February, 2014

(I have lots more to say on this topic - even more so than other topics. But I'm going to sleep now and can't finish this :( )

1) There are a lot of crappy startups right now.

2) People are bad at choosing which businesses will take off, but think they are good. Accelerators could easily turn into a big circle jerk, but more insidiously, a place where startups that make the bosses happy get resources. Often innovative startups are frowned upon because new ideas are hard to understand; 

By devin, 22 February, 2014

I'm watching Ender's Game right now. Spoiler alert!

The book/movie plays with an interesting moral situation. The Formics come and kill a whole bunch of humans; morally reprehensible. But then from their perspective, killing little mindless ants is like cutting off fingers from the one actual mind at the centre of the Formic fleet. From ours, it's awful.

Then Mazer Rackham killed the one live Formic in the fleet - murder! Reprehensible! At least, reprehensible to the Formics. Of course, in reality the humans killed one mind, and the Formics killed thousands.