Welcome to Issue 01
Remembering the Silk Road: Can Innovation Foster Moral Consciousness?
Before you skip through to the links and clips at the end of this issue, start by watching a clip of Jacob Bronowski discussing the parallel processes through which humans create meaning. Although I recommend watching the entire video, this clip will adequately set the stage for the following discussion:
and, while a longer essay on the epistemological origins of innovation are cooking, here’s the skim:
A celebration of our curiosity and relentless pursuit of knowledge is timelessly embodied in the historical artifact known to us as the Silk Road. The enduring human quest to comprehend ourselves, our world, our era, and our potential can make singling out an epoch or moment appear a Herculean feat, but given my recent foray into extraordinary history that created the world exquisitely narrated by Peter Frankopan in his Silk Road series, I am well convinced that the Silk Road stands out as a vibrant metaphor for gaining insight into this technosphere that looms in and through modern consciousness. It may seem odd, when entangled in the ceaseless pursuit of progress, to look to a vaguely interpretable past for clues on how to speak sense into what eludes us today. But it is precisely the ceaselessness that puts us at risk of overshadowing an inborn ability to transcend entrenched paradigms of self and society. To innovate in a globalized world-complicated by the creep of automaticity, centralizing powers, unpredictable pricing mechanics and cultural divergences-is as much a pursuit of the imaginal as it is of the factual. No amount of writing could usefully generalize the material aspect of building new things in the world, so I’ll put this space to a better use. Let us imagine here what it is to pause, to draw upon the wisdom that rests in and through the dusty maps and ink-blotted scrolls of a historical memory, to find ourselves, illuminated by insight.
The imaginal journey begins as all do: with a step. Walk with me in the shoes of those Silk Road merchants, who, one might reasonably argue, did not need, as we do, to cultivate a sense of limits to foster the motivating virtue of hope. Faced with a deluge of risks - harsh geographies, taxes and tariffs, raiders and lethal diseases - existential dangers once a rule of life, are today so radically altered or severed, at least in the marketplace, that we don’t often consider the variation of meanings when we claim we are taking on risks in market dynamics. What drove these people to endure the gravitas of existential risk? Without the obfuscating lines we draw these days between the immediate and the remote, the corporeal and the ethereal, the primacy of individual autonomy as the exclusive conduit to truth, they found guidance in a rich tapestry of philosophy, faith, and culture—a tapestry we now too often dismiss as merely 'religious'—which illuminated the stark reality of life's brevity and severity. For those who have chosen not to submit to ignorance of those forces that operate on us, the merit of a world or self model is not evaluated merely by the quality of its psychic comforts but by how it emboldened the nerves upon which existence itself depends.
In a longer, forthcoming essay I will argue that the priests and monks who partnered with Silk Road merchants were more than companions of trade. If one is willing to place one’s life on the line in a territory that is foreign, dangerous and largely unknowable, a technique that merits coherence between material and immaterial becomes a critical component of a technological assemblage from which novel forms of agency emerge. Note that I write in present tense, because it is an insight that operates on us today as much as it did centuries ago. And yet, in a nation that prides itself on a liberation from the stronghold of top down religious models, we don’t view religion as a domain in which to inaugurate our techno-cartographic skills. But this where a fundamental cultural delusion has evaded material concern. As digital technology weaves its way into the systems that bind collective identity, the survivability of all technology has become so closely coupled with the business of technology that no business can yet survive without considering its relational footing. While ethics may be rooted in the very religious worldview sweeping economic promises claim to liberate us from, it is rendered vulnerable to the progressive arrows launched against ideological claims on objective moral truth. But understood as guiding questions, ethics in my view has merely mutated in conjunction with secularization of everyday language. The economic gospels we are all accustomed to, which espouse the need for virtuous problem solving in the nexus of individual greatness, minority empowerment, social justice and more only obfuscate what Bronowski reveals is an unceasing, omnipresent feature of human knowledge: faith.
The kind of agency which emerged when existential conditions placed real constraints on the minds of explorers, merchants, and travelers, whose insights were designed to contend with the obdurate materialism of ancient problems, was informed by religious principles. And even today, ethics is still best understood as a set of practices which titrates the agency of becoming between the tangible present and the possible ideal, between life now and life beyond death. Innovators - of the material or of the mind - who push the boundaries of possibility in pursuit of realizable value have never been meaningfully bound to a materialist worldview because the map which claims to be the territory is inherently inadequate. To adapt one’s ontological position, to enact a sense of love for life, to be in relationship with both matter and spirit, is to deeply understand the use value of ethical or dare I say, religious, techniques for optimizing this experience we know as life.
At the frontier of integrating abstract values with actionable techniques are those who move towards vexing problems with creative ethics. To find economically viable consensus in this problem solving method (which stands distinct from the extractive, or exploitative methods used by most institutional or regulatory solutions), entrepreneurs today must exhibit preparedness to adapt to evolving market dynamics, technological breakthroughs, and customer predilections with many character traits - not least amongst them: agility, openness, rationality, humility and courage. We almost never address the character required to take on challenges without saying something about quality. And this is where ethics creeps in and reveals its omnipresent usefulness. When we notice quality, we are leaning into the very same cognitive affordances which help us reconcile life's vicissitudes in a cohesive, pacifying, and coherent salience landscape. Much of this perspective I borrow from Buddhist epistemology, which is also going to play a significant role in forthcoming essays, views and opinions I will share here.
Though we line our shelves with biographies of greats who came before us, and wonder at the myths and legends of heroic figures, a great peril lurks in the shadows of our relentless pursuit of advancement. In our fervor to automate and mechanize, we risk, as Pirsig so memorably reminds us from the back of his motorcycle, losing touch with the essence of our endeavors. To innovate with a sense for present and yet sometimes unintelligible wonder demands a leap beyond the self, a foray into a novel realm of movements and methodologies that resonate with the dynamics of a world once perceived as imperceptible or merely theoretical. As humans have always done, we too need to embody our methodologies, not merely theorize about them. Only in keeping with the limitations of lives lived in bodies can we infuse vitality into our work, imbue it with wholly human essence, and craft enduring value for ourselves and generations who will follow.
We are not simply traversing from present to future, from point A to point B. To live, to create, to innovate, is to engage in a dancing minuet of ideas, perspectives, and principles. To innovate is not to merely vend goods; but to disseminate narratives, experiences, and worldviews. No human is solely a user, or a buyer, but also an observer, a learner, and a connector. In this process of merging the imaginal with the real, we are shaping the world, one innovative insight at a time.
To remain receptive to the mysteries of the world necessitates a new kind of welcome for disruption, and an emergence of incessant interrogation of our comprehension of reality. Let us recall that our quest for innovation is not solely about engendering value in the world but also about discovering our niche within it. Lastly, let us remember that roads are not roads because they hep us reach a destination, but because we can use them comprehend the very real and yet ephemeral fact that a path is more than possible.
Quote Worth Exploring
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important questions which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle - they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. - Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics
Startup Highlights
Pebble
The Pebble Flow, outfitted with advanced robotics and EV technology, is the world's first self-propelled travel trailer. The company claims that the trailer affords off-grid living for up to 7 days. Is this the future of camping?
Thyself
Thyself says it’s meeting people in the middle of the road between self-help media on one end and 1:1 counseling on the other. Are voice companions the way forward for democratizing access to emotional resolution skills?
Noor
Noor describes itself as “a team collaboration and chat application designed for a balance between uninterrupted deep work and intense bursts of collaboration”.
Ought's goal is to improve thinking using machine learning (ML). Though ML is great for tasks with clear goals and plenty of data, it's not so good at helping with complex thinking. It does well in simple, clear tasks, but finds it hard to cope with the complicated and unclear nature of human thought. Despite these issues, bettering our thinking is important for solving problems, resolving conflicts in society, and planning for the future. This makes it worthwhile to work on technology that can help with this.
Folk
You know how tough it can be to remember all those tiny details about the people in your network? Those little things that can make a big difference in your business relationships? That's where a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool comes in real handy. And that's why folk wants to be your new best friend.
Firstday Health
What happens after infants are discharged from a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU)? These infants are still in a precarious and vulnerable condition that requires ongoing medical attention. Firstday put together a remote care technology stack that helps parents navigate this precarious transition.
Hey Calendar
The design integrates journaling, productivity, and habit tracking to tackle the enduring issue of time tracking and planning. While I'm generally doubtful about the value of minor enhancements to the calendar warranting the hassle of adopting a new tool, this one appears quite compelling.
Autio aims to draw your attention to the places, people, and events you observe outside your window. It's less about educational content and more oriented towards entertainment.
Founder Resources
Being both non-consensus and right gives you the best shot at a breakthrough. But it's a tougher road, emotionally speaking. You've got to break free from the herd and fight the urge to be like others. When your insight doesn't fit the mold, it requires you to acknowledge that most people won’t like your insight at first. After all, if too many people like your insight too soon, it's probably not far off from what they already think. That means it might not be much of an insight at all.
Finding product-market fit is the primary goal for early-stage startups, with different approaches to understanding and achieving this crucial milestone. The framework presented during the company-building immersion program, Arc, outlines three distinct archetypes of product-market fit to help founders assess their product's market positioning and operational strategy. These archetypes - Hair on Fire, Hard Fact, and Future Vision - represent different customer-product relationship dynamics based on the urgency of the problem being solved and the level of innovation required to address it effectively.
The art of creating spaces that connect
Hosting meetings is an essential skill for founders. It's especially challenging for remote teams to create generative spaces. This article provides guidance on creating environments that encourage honesty, vulnerability, and the presence of the whole self to foster a deep sense of connection. These are important considerations to keep in mind as you practice the vital skill of conducting meetings.
On Walt Disney’s Suprarational Insight:
He had absolute faith in himself. Belief comes before ability.
On Ethics in an Economic Arms Race:
“a lot of the people who have been concerned about ethics at major corporations - like Google’s Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell - have been fired. There's interest in ethics until it threatens the business model. These types of difficult questions require a slower form of development. But these companies are all in the middle of an AI arms race and nobody can really afford to get behind right now. So ethics has become some sort of afterthought for them.”
Listening and Watching
Peter Frankopan on the Silk Roads
“Religion is fundamentally important to us. Religions have a very important role in trying to show who's up and who's down and above all in trying to see where wealth is and who is interested in exchanging ideas and if you’re not interested in exchanging because you resist how do you deal with it? Do you deal with it through arms and violence, or can you deal with it, as can happen, through the grace of geography?”
Toward an Evolutionary Ecology of the Noosphere
“…this analogical act ..is about imagination. It's about seeing what is as what could be …what this has to do with is the relationship between the actual world and the possible world…this land of nowhere this space of possibilities this I think is really where the noosphere resides - a mental space that we're able to visit together where some parts of that mental space stand in particular relation to our world thus enabling us to understand and manipulate that world…”
The Healing of Philosophy
Popular in culture today is a myth regarding the unlocked potential of human beings; a potential that’s thought to lie in the sphere of the intellect. The fact that there’s vigorous effort being expended on artificial intelligence but nothing’s ever heard of ‘artificial intuition’, evinces humanity’s bias for the controlled, volitional aspect of its mind.
Reid Hoffman on How AI is Answering Our Biggest Questions
“One of the reasons why … people frequently don't think enough about how technology … helps us change what is the definition of a human because we have this kind of imagination you know like the Descartian imagination that we are this kind of this pure thinking creature and you're like well if we learned anything that's not really the way it works right …that doesn't mean that we don't think that way to have abstractions to generate logic and theories of the world and all the rest but … put your philosopher on some LSD and you'll get some different outputs.”
Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology: Or, how to make sense of techno-optimist manifestos, the Open Ai/Altman affair, EA/e-acc movements, and the general sense of cultural stagnation
“When secularization comes for the religion of technology, you may also expect to see the rise of reformers calling for changes within the parameters of the religion. When technologists find themselves repenting of their previous work and calling for more ethical technology, you are dealing with a reform movement within the tradition. For what it’s worth, Andreessen’s sermon may also be characterized as a counter-reformation tract.
The secularization of the religion of technology as a relatively coherent civil religion with an assured place in the social order also creates a context for the proliferation of sects within the religion, none of them compelling wide adherence and all of them now appearing to the general public as curious, possibly disturbing oddities.”
Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism: A Conversation with Will MacAskill
“You don't need to think about future generations at all even if you just care about the 8 billion people alive today, imposing the size of risks that we are imposing on them via this technology is more than enough for this to become one of the top problems that the world should face today..”
Our tools shape our selves
“…the more ubiquitous that digital technologies become in our lives, the easier it is to forget that these tools are social products that have been constructed by our fellow humans. How we consume music, the paths we take to get from point A to point B, how we share ourselves with others, all of these aspects of daily life have been reshaped by new technologies and the humans that produce them. Yet we rarely stop to reflect on what this means for us. Stiegler believed this act of forgetting creates a deep crisis for all facets of human experience. By forgetting, we lose our all-important capacity to imagine alternative ways of living. The future appears limited, even predetermined, by new technology.”
Peter Thiel on Political Theology Watch→
What people have told me is that they think within three to five years, the AI models will be able to solve all the US Math Olympiad problems. That would shift things quite a bit. There’s a longer history I always have on the math versus verbal riff. If you ask, “When did our society bias to testing people more for math ability?” I believe it was during the French Revolution because it was believed that verbal ability ran in families. Math ability was distributed in this idiot savant way throughout the population.
If we prioritized math ability, it had this meritocratic but also egalitarian effect on society. Then, I think, by the time you get to the Soviet Union, Soviet Communism in the 20th century, where you give a number theorist or chess grandmaster a medal — …maybe it’s actually just a control mechanism, where the math people are singularly clueless. They don’t understand anything, but if we put them on a pedestal, and we tell everyone else you need to be like the math person, then it’s actually a way to control. Or the chess grandmaster doesn’t understand anything about the world. That’s a way to really control things.
Economics vs Philosophy with Tyler Cowen
“…the core of economics attempts to be value free economists themselves are awful they moralize all the time they don't understand ethics they don't understand the normative they don't understand even at a naive level meta ethics they've hardly read any ethics they will moralize on twitter they will moralize when they speak to governments they think the economic model has some moral significance which in my view it actually doesn't or like it might if you argued for it with a lot of work in some cases but it doesn't per se have any automaticity to it in the moral sense so people who as a set of people who understand their own moral biases economists are among the very worst groups in the world and this is just a terrible fact about us and it's true for more than 90% of economists it's probably more true for more powerful economists…”
Morality is a Coordination Game - Coordination Part IV
“Descriptive fieldwork on a worldwide scale … has of course demonstrated that moral judgments are ubiquitous in human groups.”…“moral judgments around the world are also felt,” likening these feelings to “aesthetic and emotional reactions”. Morality, he’s saying, is a universal human sense.”
Who rules the global economic roost?
These are the countries likely to contribute most to the expansion of the global economy:
- China is set to lead, contributing a whopping 25% to global growth over the next five years according to forecasts from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). While this is gigantic, note that it is considerably less than the approximately one-third contribution that China generated over the past decade.
- India is set to zoom into second place, with 16% of the total.
- The U.S. slips to third, with 9.5% of the total.
- Indonesia rounds out the top four.
Overall, emerging-market economies make up more than 80% of the total anticipated growth in the global economy
The marketplace of good and bad ideas
“There is a paradox at the heart of a marketplace of ideas. If I learn something from you, I am not in a position to know whether the relevant idea is true or false. If I were in such a position, I would not need to acquire the idea from you to begin with. This is why the advice “Trust, but verify” is typically incoherent. If you are in a position to verify, you do not need to trust. Likewise, if those “buying” ideas are in a position to verify the ideas, they do not need to buy them. But then how do buyers evaluate ideas?”
The Deaths of Effective Altruism
“After all the media, the biographies, the trial, and the sentencing, people have different reads on Sam Bankman-Fried. Is he a selfish villain or an unlucky saint? Was he really aiming at maximum value-for the-universe? Or maximum value-for-Sam?
I suspect that, in his mind, the two aims converged. If you’re earning-to-give, you should maximize your wealth. And if you think each moment should be optimized for profit, you’ll never choose to spend resources on boring grown-up things like auditors and a chief financial officer. For SBF, good-for-me-now and good-for-everyone-always started to merge into one.”
There’s No Easy Answer to Chinese EVs
“There are few things that would decarbonize the U.S. faster than $20,000 EVs. But there is probably nothing that would kill the U.S. auto industry faster, either.”
Visual Attention Software: A New Tool for Understanding the “Subliminal” Experience of the Built Environment
The 3M Visual Attention Software (VAS) is an AI application that uses eye-tracking technology to predict viewer responses to images. Scientists have used it to analyze images of buildings and patterns, revealing points of fixation and design coherence. The results, when related to Christopher Alexander's geometric order theory, showed varied attention distribution. This suggests new opportunities for calm technology.
Drivers and AI and Responsibility (Part 2)
Read→
“More meaningful reform in trucking would require a ground-up rethinking of how the industry is structured economically, in order to make trucking a decent job once more. So long as trucking is treated as a job that churns through workers, these problems won’t be solved…”
Hydrogen trains could revolutionize how Americans get around
But in a country that has invested little in passenger rail over the past century, new technology can only do so much, Taraszkiewicz cautions. America’s railroads all too often lack passing tracks, grade-separated road crossings, and modern signaling systems. The main impediment to faster, more frequent passenger service “is not the train technology,” he says. “It’s everything else.”
Art and Culture
10th century, Five Dynasties or Northern Song Dynasty, wearing a hat, holding a fan and accompanied by a tiger, ink and colors on paper, from Cave 17, Mogao, near Dunhuang, Gansu province, China
On the greatness of craftsmanship:
I feel he's always in search I feel like, he's looking ahead he's in the he's looking off to the horizon he's looking at what else can I do how far can I push, it what will satiate this creative fire…
Bookmarked
Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter
Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence
A Problem Worth Pondering
The Last-Mile Problem
…we’re not very good at getting our ideas into the hands of the people who need them …we have little idea about how to get from here to there – from academic journals, which are often obscure, unreadable, and behind paywalls, to the people who can use them to live better lives or to make the world more just, free, and equal, or whatever. We just don’t know how to overcome the last-mile problem. (Teaching may be an exception, depending.) There’s an obvious explanation. Academics like myself have little training in solving the last-mile problem. It may not be in our job description. And even if we turn out to be good at it, there’s little recognition to be had that way.
Learning & Connection Opportunities
Embodied Ethics Course at the Wise Innovation School | Currently running but you can still sign up.
Students are joining together from the heart of Silicon Valley to the far edges of the cultural wilderness. Safety, alignment, ethics, founders, engineers, designers, and investors are engaging with educators, philosophers, artists, storytellers, healers, and elders to cultivate a shared knowledge of what ethics looks like from an embodiment-informed worldview.
*If you’re in Los Angeles: I’ll be coordinating a local meetup for course participants. So, even if you’re not enrolled, reach out and let me know if you’d like to attend a meetup with us.
House of Beautiful Business: Between the Two of Us | May 2, 2024
“The Network for the Life-Centered Economy” inspires and equips organizations and individuals to shape more purposeful, inclusive, sustainable futures through projects, content, and experiences. In Tangier, the city “between the two,” meet to write a new story at the poetic juncture of different worlds. Uniting more than 50 speakers and performers with 500 business leaders, scientists, artists, policy-makers, activists, and educators from across the globe, for four days of immersion, inspiration, and ideation.
Hidden Discipline Meditation Course | Starts May 15, 2024
Most founders I talk to aspire to meditate daily but find it challenging to stay personally accountable to the practice. Until I launch my forthcoming meditation for philosophical entrepreneurs course, this might be a great place to jump start building your meditation habit.
The Great Turning: Towards an Ecological Civilization Aiming at the Common Good of Humanity and Nature | May 24-25, 2024
The Claremont Eco Forum (International Forum on Ecological Civilization) is a leading platform for promoting ecological civilization, run by the Institute for Postmodern Development of China (IPDC). It's the first and most impactful U.S. international ecological forum, co-hosted by IPDC, the Center for Process Studies, Pitzer College, Claremont Graduate University, and their partners since 2006. Attracting thousands of innovative academics, activists, non-profit leaders, and officials yearly, it aims at advancing an ecological civilization.
Deconstructing Yourself Costa Rica Retreat at Blue Spirit Costa Rica | August 3 – 10, 2024
If you're an experienced meditator, you might be familiar with Michael Taft and the Deconstructing Yourself sangha. He's planning to spend a week teaching nondual meditation and embodiment on Costa Rica's Pacific coast. If you haven't encountered his teachings before, consider checking out The Berkeley Alembic on YouTube or his podcast, Deconstructing Yourself. His insights are truly special. This retreat, geared towards those with experience in nondual, Vajrayana, or Hindu tantric meditation, promises to be rich with valuable teachings. I appreciate their hybrid approach to the silent vs. non-silent ethic.
Kernel Block 9 P2P Co-Learning | July-September 2024.
Kernel is a peer-to-peer learning community committed to the pursuit of truth in our work, our relationships, and our inner selves. The Learn Track is an eight-week program designed to offer a comprehensive understanding of Web 3 — its principles, history, and current state.
Jacques Ellul & the 21st Century Technological Society Conference | July 11-13, 2024
The International Jacques Ellul Society invites not only critical scholars but thoughtful technology creators, managers, and users to a three-day gathering to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Ellul’s most famous and influential book, to probe its insights and continuing relevance, and to explore the contemporary meaning and challenge of technology. Our purpose is not just to look backward but to move forward in a search for insight, understanding, and response to our technological world.
Words of Wisdom
“….philosophy, whether it was in India, whether it was in Greece was never understood as a kind of academic discipline…that idea is a completely modern one and its very much at odds with the idea of philosophy being a way of life. And this is very clear in the Buddhist idea of how your vision informs your decisions and your thoughts which inform your speech which inform your actions which inform your livelihood. There’s no separation. There’s not different departments of your life….the whole idea is one of trying to live an integrated life in which separations don’t play a role.”
-Stephen Batchelor
Enjoyed this issue? Let me know! I’d genuinely love to hear from you.
Come to Mind is written in sunny Los Angeles, California.
Published by:
Christina Fedor / Consorvia
