<Governance>

Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out—that is, for life, health, and the economy to return roughly to normal....

Today, OpenAI released a new result. We used PPO (Proximal Policy Optimization), a general reinforcement learning algorithm invented by OpenAI, to train a team of 5 agents to play Dota and beat semi-pros....

I am pretty sure cryptocurrency is here to stay in some form (at least as a store of value, which is the only use case we have seen work at scale so far). There was possibly a time when governments could have totally stopped it, but it feels like that’s in the rearview mirror....

I made a point in this post inelegantly in a way that was easy to misunderstand, so I’d like to clarify it. I didn’t mean that we need to tolerate brilliant homophobic jerks in the lab so that we can have scientific progress....

Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel completely comfortable—this was China, after all—just more comfortable than at home....

I’d like feedback on the following idea. I think that every adult US citizen should get an annual share of the US GDP. I believe that owning something like a share in America would align all of us in making the country as successful as possible—the better the...

After the election, I decided to talk to 100 Trump voters from around the country. I went to the middle of the country, the middle of the state, and talked to many online. This was a surprisingly interesting and helpful experience—I highly recommend it....

I am endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. I've never endorsed a presidential candidate before, but I'm making an exception this year, because this election is exceptional....

A lot of us complain about how the government is not very good at technology. The U.S. Digital Service is actually trying to do something about it, by applying the way startups build products to make government services work better for veterans, immigrants, st...

I think a lot about how important cheap, safe, and abundant energy is to our future. A lot of problems—economic, environmental, war, poverty, food and water availability, bad side effects of globalization, etc.—are deeply related to the energy problem....

Some of these are probably apocryphal, but making predictions about the limits of technology is really hard: Space travel is utter bilge. - Popular Mechanics, 1949 X-rays are a hoax. - Lord Kelvin, ca....

This is part two of a a two-part post—the first part is here. THE NEED FOR REGULATION Although there has been a lot of discussion about the dangers of machine intelligence recently, there hasn’t been much discussion about what we should try to do to mitigate the threat....

I get asked fairly often now by people in the US government what policy changes I would make to “fix innovation and drive economic growth” [1][2] (for some reason, it’s almost always that exact phrase)....

When there is a structural reason consumers don’t have freedom of choice, and the free market can’t work, consumers need minimal protection from the government so that they don’t get abused. We need protection from the cable companies to keep the Internet fair and open....

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago in which I said macroeconomic collapse “may happen” and a few friends asked me why. To be clear, I don’t think it’s the likely outcome—I think we’ll find a way to address our challenges. But here is what some of the challenges are....

The price of bitcoin keeps trending down. [1] This causes a lot of people to declare the end of bitcoin. It’s important to understand that the default price pressure of the bitcoin ecosystem is down. There are a lot of reasons for this, so I’ll just give a few examples....

Startup employees often do not get treated very well when it comes to stock compensation. New ideas float around occasionally, but lawyers are usually averse to trying new things, and investors don’t feel that they have enough incentive to try something new for employees....

Nearly 5 years ago, Paul Graham first proposed the founder visa. There has been a lot of discussion since, but nothing has happened. Maybe he was too ambitious in asking for 10,000 startup visas per year....

Thanks to technology, people can create more wealth now than ever before, and in twenty years they’ll be able to create more wealth than they can today. Even though this leads to more total wealth, it skews it toward fewer people....

TL;DR Without economic growth, democracy doesn’t work because voters occupy a zero-sum system. The first piece of startup wisdom I heard was “increasing your sales will fix all problems”....