Monday, March 21, 2022

News: March 21



Keeping It Simple . Investing is humbling. At 60, with 35 years of venture investing experience, I still get most things wrong. ........ how I bumped into Rikki Tahta walking through the garment district in NYC in the spring of 2011 and Rikki told me he was working on a Bitcoin startup. I replied, “a what coin startup?”. And Rikki told me to read the Bitcoin White Paper. I did and I was hooked. ........ I didn’t even understand parts of the white paper. ....... I understand how important permissionless servers and applications (web 1.0) turned out to be and so I understood how important permissionless money was going to be. ......... I bought Bitcoin and went about finding a Bitcoin investment to make.

That was Coinbase.

........ I met Mena Trott at a Nick Denton party in NYC in 2003 and she explained blogging to me. I was struck by the idea that anyone could be a publisher. ........ That led me to Twitter a few years later when I saw that most people would prefer to write a text message to the world over a long-form blog post. ........... aha moments come around every so often and you just need to let them grab you and take you a foundational investment. You don’t need to do much due diligence on these. I did none on Twitter, Coinbase, or Dapper. What I did do is use the products, get in the game, feel the power, and get conviction. .



How to Think about the "Current Thing" Deciding in which direction you want people to be sheep ........ Let’s say you’re an intelligent person who in late February knew nothing about Russia, Ukraine, or American foreign policy. Which websites should you read to become informed? You notice that many sources seem to always take the “current thing” perspective, while others have the opposite bias. There are only so many hours in a day, and the judgment calls one must make in researching an issue are too numerous to list. Are those whose first instinct is to trust and promulgate the dominant narrative the most or least reliable sources of information? Given enough familiarity with an issue, an individual should be able to calibrate his views on it, but priors have a role in telling him where to start, and can determine which conclusions he reaches in situations where there isn’t enough time to thoroughly study a topic. .......

The current current thing is of course the war in Ukraine.

........ COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine are pretty important. But terrorism, white supremacy, and police shootings of black men are such tiny problems in modern America that if we were a logical society we would all but ignore them. Something like the process of aging, a major tragedy every human is experiencing every moment of their life, isn’t even considered a problem that policy should try to solve. ........ Parents who never thought twice about the flu but are worried about their healthy toddlers dropping dead of COVID are now able to find one another, along with credentialed influencers who appeal to their worst fears. Politicians, journalists, and others that are part of the discourse are radicalized by and responsive to such influences.

Those that never thought about Yemen want to start a nuclear war over Ukraine.

Emotions are getting more extreme, and the more an issue happens to engage a disproportionate share of the attention of neurotics the less we are able to approach it in a rational way. .......... If your model of the world says that modern society has a strong tendency to overreact to the issue of the day, you might prefer your leaders to have purely reactive instincts if such figures are the only alternative to the side associated with the establishment that decides what the current thing is in the first place through what is clearly an extremely flawed process. I’m not saying this is the high-IQ case for Trumpism, but it does point in the direction of what it might look like. .

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