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Venkatesh Rao ☀️

@vgr

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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
A basic issue with SV is its full of genuine team players who hate operating alone and are happiest in 2-pizza teams. This means when they must choose between two terrible teams, they’ll pick one with some sort of lesser-of-two-evils logic, and do so with worked-up passion, not half-heartedly. It’s a hell-yeah-or-nah mentality even when all options are between hell-nah and meh. They won’t just kick back and do something solo for a while. If SV had decided to go Full Team Woke (not an improbable counterfactual around a Bernie fork) we’d be in a different sort of hellscape now. I need to put a hell-yeah spin on my mediocrity philosophy.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I liked the “it’s time to build” pmarca essay when it came out, in a very different era, but now I think the underlying idea is incoherent. Builder, unlike destroyer, is an aptitude, not a role anyone can play. And since building is a “creative destructive” process that you might naively assume can be unbundled into pure “creation” and pure “destruction” what general calls for a society-wide period of building do in the best case is try to elevate builders in status, but in the worst case simply unleash a wave of pure destruction much larger than any wave of building. And the building itself ends up being mostly naive “pure creation.” Ie doomed first-principles Xanadu projects. What’s the alternative? Recognize that “building” is just one aptitude and personality among many. The real challenge is recognizing that a finite game is ending and figuring out how to continue the infinite game by improvising a new finite game. And that comes from play-testing, not slogan-led missions.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
SoP 2025 program is announced! Highlights: 1. Curriculum development grants for faculty who want to develop courses about protocol science/studies/entrepreneurship — $500k pool — deadline April 1 2. Protocol science fiction story contest, $5k in prizes; AI-assisted stories not just accepted but encouraged — deadline April 14 3. A distributed AI x blockchains workshop in Bangkok April 21-25; regional travel support available — deadline to register March 21 Plus a lot more. Please share with any educators and SF writers you know https://open.substack.com/pub/protocolized/p/sop-2025-accelerating-order?r=1cjha&utm_medium=ios
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Yes! Mediocrity ftw :D
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Ok this idea is growing on me and is upgraded from minor to major. The options vs crypto example is peripheral. This is a way to view something much more fundamental — the explore-exploit tradeoff. For a fully certain value commodity, in a perfect competition market with instantaneous price discovery, the frontier collapses to a point at (1,1). A perfectly unbelievable fantasy collapses to (0, 0). The 45 degree ray is the fantasy-to-reality turnpike. As you learn more and the thing becomes more real, the frontier initially expands then contracts, with end points on the unit square perimeter. The (1,0) - (0,1) line is the explore-exploit transition frontier. When the frontier crosses that, you’re in fully convergent exploit mode. At that point you can start thinking about “IPO” or “exiting” the idea in some way, since either correlatedness and liquidity can be maxed out. The whole finance metaphor can be ditched. I’m calling it modal information theory — ie how possible worlds become real.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Theory: By the time there’s trust in a product, there’s no need for trust in the token. If the token doesn’t enable actually clever mechanics (eigenlayer is a good example maybe?) it is superfluous perhaps
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Industrial era societal capacity: Dinosaurs Trumpism & friends: Asteroid Protocols: Mammals
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Just came up with a principle that may already have a name: Correlation-Liquidity Tradeoff (CLTO): The correlatedness of a speculative asset to an underlying value thesis and its liquidity form a tradeoff curve. Private startup stock has high correlation low liquidity. Crypto tokens have low correlatedness high liquidity. Former requires IRR fictions. Latter can experience wild excursions based on factors having nothing to do with the thesis. Between them is a Pareto frontier Came up with this idea from a weird angle. I was actually thinking about how reward schedule tempo is slower than decision tempo, causing problems in reinforcement learning. Eg you are a novelist who writes 1000 words everyday but the reward schedule is every 40k words when you finish and ship a novel and get market feedback. Or a robot trying sequences of actions to accomplish a task. It only actually gets a reward when it finds a satisficing sequence. Agile iteration can increase feedback rate but not necessarily reward rate.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
A video chat where @timber and I riff on all things protocol, and provide some sneak previews of SoP 2025 programming (to be announced on Friday) https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/video-recording-protocols-preview
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Don’t drink and delve
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
delve or delve not, there is no prompt
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Substack note du jour https://substack.com/profile/2264734-venkatesh-rao/note/c-99998954
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
The rice must flow 😂 https://open.substack.com/pub/thecontrapuntal/p/ricedao?r=1cjha&utm_medium=ios
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
No mattter what the new media tech thing is, there will be a group of people saying “now it will be all about curation, curation will be very important.”
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
“Melissa Chavin, a US immigration lawyer based in London, said Ms Burke could be released either through voluntary departure or expedited removal, but the process of appearing in front of a judge as part of voluntary departure could be delayed because several dozen of the approximately 700 immigration judges had resigned or been fired by the Trump administration.” This is so dumb. This woman *wants* to leave and can access the means to do so. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c80y3yx1jdyo
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
The right mental model for getting people into crypto is not “adoption” but “immigration” Crypto needs a Statue of Liberty, an Ellis island, and an Emma Lazarus type poem
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I have joined the Slop Revolution! https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-history-and-future-of-memeing
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Are warps being retired?
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
It’s surprising that the X-files is so rewatchable, given that 2025 is overrun by real conspiracy theorists who are generally toxic and unpleasant people who should logically have ruined the show for us by now. I think it’s because the conspiracy theorists on X files all the way up to Mulder are charming and relatable and want to believe and know awesome things that would be wild if true. Sadly the real-life ones of today are less interested in UFOs and telekinesis and more interested in finding ways to believe the worst possible things about people or groups they dislike, which would be awful if true, and require no magic or alien science . A realistic Mulder today would be a partisan hack and hate the smoking man for being appointed by the other party. He would be obsessed with vaccines, birth certificates etc. Instead of being banished to the basement he’d be running a high-powered inquisition. The lone gunmen would be spreading rumors about people being pedophiles. Sculley would be an influencer.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
It’s honestly hard to like hacker news people 😐
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