“The point is, of course, that a lot of our moral tendencies are not things that we arrive at by reasoning and logic – ’cause that’s often the philosophers. They think that way. They think we reason ourselves through moral principles. But underneath there are very strong emotions. And that’s what you see on display with these monkeys. And it’s these emotions that drive the process of us formulating moral principles.”

The attributes of “superpredictors”

“Meet Dao Nguyen. She helped BuzzFeed quintuple traffic in two years.”

“It’s such a great picture that I have to enter the gallery and look at this photographer’s other work. And that is when it becomes interesting because although the place is full of the person’s other work, all of it is mediocre crap. Bad calendar art, the many pictures are all a hundred miles away from the excellence of that one photograph in the window.”

“Much of the stress I felt during this is from the amount of access to me that I grant to the public. A few months ago, Howard Stern pulled back from Twitter for this reason, after being flamed ruthlessly whenever he said anything, and raised a great question on his show: Why do we give people such access to us? Why do we read what every random asshole says two seconds after we post anything? We allow people access to us 24/7. We’re always in public, constantly checking an anonymous comment box, trying to explain ourselves to everyone, and trying to win unwinnable arguments with strangers who don’t matter in our lives at all.”

“Social choice theory is beset by scenarios—the “prisoner’s dilemma”, the “stag hunt”, the “tragedy of the commons”, and so on—in which a group of individuals each choosing for themselves are all too likely to miss the result that they want most. Team reasoning avoids these problems.”

“Christopher Alexander made a great diagram, a spectrum of privacy: street to sidewalk to porch to living room to bedroom. I think for many of us Twitter started as the porch—our space, our friends, with the occassional neighborhood passer-by. As the service grew and we gained follwers, we slid across the spectrum of privacy into the street.”