I wrote a new book! It's called ANTIMEMETICS: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, and it's about ideas that don't want to be shared or remembered, despite their importance.
Now available for pre-order: darkforest.metalabel.com/antimemetics
A funny thing about this is that by definition, this sort of authenticity can't be faked or exploited - people eventually figure out who's who. It's in some ways the easiest hack, but requires you to actually be a good person
Another takeaway after three years of building a company is that the returns to just "being a good person", and not acting transactionally, are higher than I expected.
There are so many transactional, boring, and at times immoral people in the tech industry that if you act with
I've come to believe that it's a lack of self-reflection, not being conniving or manipulative, that makes someone a bad person.
Everyone engages in occasional behavior that is harmful. A "good person" takes that feedback to heart, takes responsibility for their actions, and
We’re on the cover of New York Magazine today! Asterisk teamed up with NYMag to interview recently-departed frontier lab employees about their decisions to leave. It’s a privilege to bring a piece of Bay Area culture to a national audience, and I’m proud of my colleagues
On September 8, Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old Anthropic employee, posted a resignation statement on X that ricocheted around the internet. He quit in protest of what he saw as the company’s suicidally reckless pursuit of artificial general intelligence. To the AI community, an
I enjoyed how Jesse breaks down the status hierarchies of blue-collar work in this piece. Why doesn't every blue collar worker just become an electrician? Because that's the equivalent of making partner at McKinsey, whereas the median blue collar job is more like working as an
Skilled trades are frequently thought of as a route out of poverty. But trades workers tell a different story.
@JesseTayRiver, a contractor who works in home remodeling, explains: