Brennan's Conversations

Politics, religion, education, oh my!

Check him out

• Saurav: https://twitter.com/sauravpahadia

Things & people mentioned

1. Ben Laufer, who lies about having blog posts for people to give feedback on to force himself to actually write https://twitter.com/benjlaufer/status/1356025529879515139 
2. the Amazon Affiliate Program, which I use for money and analytics when I link to products in these descriptions https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/
3. "The Founder," a Netflix documentary/movie about the founding and scaling of McDonald's https://www.netflix.com/title/80101899
4. Hack Club, a network of high school coding clubs https://hackclub.com
5. TKS, a "training ground for future innovators" https://tks.world
6. Future Engineers Camp, a startup Saurav made https://futureengineerscamp.com
7. Teacherly, another startup Saurav made https://teacher.ly
8. In-N-Out, a burger chain renowned for quality and (not scale) https://www.in-n-out.com
9. Supreme, a brand that limits scale to imply quality https://supremenewyork.com

Check them out:

• Saurav: https://twitter.com/sauravpahadia
• Will: https://vimeo.com/willhoppin

Things mentioned:

1. FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc
2. Future Engineers Camp, a startup Saurav made https://futureengineerscamp.com
3. the iPad Pro, which I used for high school & sold many of https://amzn.to/3diIt3A
4. Teacherly, another startup Saurav made https://teacher.ly
5. Stripe, a fantastic payments API https://stripe.com
6. personal.website, a side project of mine https://personal.website
7. Mystery Books, a product Saurav built
8. "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie https://amzn.to/3bdRckV
9. Madrona Venture Labs, where we both worked https://www.madronavl.com
10. AI2 Incubator, where Saurav now works https://www.ai2incubator.com
11. UW Seattle, where we both went to school https://uw.edu
12. Parkinson's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law
13. Edyfi, the community house we live in https://edyfi.co
14. multi.vote, a ranked-choice voting system I built https://multi.vote
15. Tesla Today, a Tesla-related news aggregator I revamped https://teslatoday.com
16. "The Art of Negotiation" by Michael Wheeler https://amzn.to/3bfAq4W
17. WEEKDAYS, where I'm winding down a job https://joinweekdays.com
18. Synthesis, where I'm winding up a job https://synthesis.is
19. Pay 4 Hate, a potential project for inoculating against rejection (note: we didn't actually end up building this, it IS a bad idea upon sober reflection) https://pay4hate.com
20. Product Hunt, a place to launch projects https://www.producthunt.com
21. Google Domains, my preferred domain registrar https://domains.google.com
22. Mechanical Turk, an API for repetitive human work https://www.mturk.com
23. Samson's post about the "sync gap" https://www.samsonzhang.com/2021/01/13/the-sync-gap-a-framework-for-good-conversation-writing-learning-and-all-other-creative-dialogues-internal-and-external.html

Technological progress as along a tech tree; cheap energy as the next frontier; labor isn’t free; don’t optimize things non-mission-critical things that you can outsource; there’s no such thing as infinite resources; everything is an optimization problem; people can’t perceive reality, just your marketing of it; fundraising is a marketing problem; delegation is not a magic wand; leadership is marketing and decision making; startups have to solve their problems, not just get funded; the easiest way to market something is to be telling the truth; my vague discomfort with Davide’s priorities; the dangers of getting funding through sheer marketing (via Theranos); Holmes had to lie, or she’d get shut down; make sure you’re actually right, instead of getting a vision funded through brute force; blindly believing something doesn’t make it true; first lay out a path forward, then make sure it will work; will perfectly simulating a cell cure aging?; jumping dozens of orders of magnitude fundamentally changes the problem; Amazon is basically just a scaling problem; software complexity does not scale linearly; we can’t “train” a cell model because we don’t know anything about a cell for sure; accuracy of models depends on calibration; results of models still need to be tested in base reality; it is critically important that leaders and modelers know what they’re talking about; how do you know when you know enough; “origins of life” simulation wouldn’t replicate historical evolution; overview existing research on the origins of life (from Mattea, a biologist); evolution is random, so you can’t simulate it forwards and get the exact life we have today; if you constrain an evolutionary simulation to have a certain result, it’s no longer random or accurate; the history of science is realizing that our models are crap; you can’t find novel ground truths through models; I haven’t made a high school because I don’t have an answer yet; sometimes you should start before you have a plan, because it’s hard to validate a plan before you start; always optimize for simplicity; I’m bad at optimizing for simplicity; always keep the end in mind, and look for easy hacks; always be doubting your premises; if you can simulate a human, there’s a ton of non-aging potential; the biggest value-add to fixing big problems is often unsexy; unhelpful fame and glory vs anonymous bigger impact; results count, not labor; my failure to launch a high school; we live at 20-30% overall efficiency; how can you work at 90% of potential?; fully-committed failure is scary; quantifying wasted time.

Check Davide out: https://daviderad.com

Check Mattea out: https://personal.website/matteaholtcolberg

Publishing raw conversations for integrity; dependence → independence → interdependence; unifying people with ambitious goals; "build the schools of 2050"; explaining the road to Damascus; Davide's reflections on high school; overcoming introversion by focusing on others; nobody cares about your awkward moments; education as more urgent than longevity; improving education as a leverage play; education as an intractable social problem; early education as OS-level software; all the rules are fake; the potential non-universalizability of entrepreneurship; worrying about consequences before doing things; the politics of a cure for aging (via Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" series); social realization that it's possible to cure aging; aging will be cured probabilistically; simulating a cell to cure aging; longevity escape velocity; medicine saves most life at young ages (via Taleb's "Antifragile"); keeping additional life probability constant; technologists should make time for philosophy; death as a good thing; philosophy paralysis; education as philosophy; Khan Academy as the highest form of curriculum; does math require curriculum; whether Davide should take a gap year; the importance of structure; shame as a tool for accountability.

Check Davide out: https://daviderad.com