The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.
Starting a company is a life-altering pursuit with a famously high failure rate. Whatever reason sent you down that path, it was once compelling enough to rearrange your whole life around and recruit others to do the same. Founder communications work because people care about and root for other humans, not entities or widgets.
1mo ago
The demand that I must not think what I think has never, in the whole of history, made a man think differently. It has only made him pretend to.
1mo ago
The human mind is not, as philosophers would have you think, a debater, but a dreamer. The function of the intellect is not to distinguish truth from falsehood, but to make whichever it chooses more vivid and persuasive than it could otherwise be.
Audience capture is rapidly becoming the default approach of the largest companies in the world. So its potential for abuse must be a matter of concern for all of us. This would have been unthinkable a half century ago.
To give a person an opinion you must first judge well whether that person is of the disposition to receive it or not. You must become close with them and earn their trust. Approaching subjects that are dear to them, seek the best way to speak and to be well understood.
Our experiment involves 1,500 participants in 30 decision environments spanning core domains in economics and the social sciences…[W]e find that AI advice depolarizes choices on average, moving participants away from their initial leanings. This depolarization arises despite the LLM being measurably sycophantic: it disproportionately offers considerations that support users' initial leanings and uses agreeable and flattering language.
CEO Daniel Ek (now Executive Chairman of the company) sold relentlessly—to a degree I've never seen before from a corporate leader.
2mo ago
We accept the verdict of the past until the need of the present voices a demand to the contrary. But when a considerable number of people shall say they do not believe in the verdict of the past, we have reached a time of change.
Automation is a lie. We will read way more AI-generated writing and we will like it.
3mo ago
The paradox of teaching is that to teach it well you have to want to do something else. Any man who takes teaching seriously has always to resist the temptation to prophesy and to preach.
Even if you think you have no interest in those topics, it's hard not to be drawn in by Em's super smart writing and analysis, which regularly broadens out to examine wider cultural and societal issues.
Judges check page length before reading a word. • Long brief? We read faster and with less attention. • Short brief? We slow down and pay closer attention. Brevity signals confidence.
Conversations shift from "Should we staff a designer on this project?" to "Here's the actual work; let's discuss how to make it better." PMs can now unblock themselves, test ideas with users earlier, and advocate for design resources with real prototypes instead of abstract arguments.
He wins access by going deeper than anyone else, mastering the material and speaking the insiders' language. That proximity gives him real influence, shaping how the industry talks about its own future.
She wants to identify how he chooses and places words with the intention of producing material effects on the reader's body. How, exactly, does he make hearts beat faster, stomachs lurch and palms prickle with sweat?
5mo ago
The mind is so rarely modified by facts; it is modified by feeling, and feeling is modified by art.
6mo ago
The mind is so rarely modified by facts; it is modified by feeling, and feeling comes from the association of ideas.
