Kelsey Chen

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on the atlas — 5

highlights — 35

Their solution was to invent the modern corporation: vast, vertically integrated bureaucracies with multi-level, managerial hierarchies. These structures shifted decision-making power away from the decentralized marketplace and into the hands of salaried technicians and middle managers, creating a template that would define American business—and American power—for the next century.
The Making of a Techno-Nationalist Elite - American Affairs Journal
The Civil War both elevated a new generation of elites into public life and served as the crucible that defined their worldview; they would carry this worldview with them through the rest of their public careers, which often stretched well into the twentieth century.
The Making of a Techno-Nationalist Elite - American Affairs Journal
The wealthiest elite groups of the antebellum era thus resembled Karp’s picture of the contemporary tech elite: they were suspicious of executive power, distrustful of American nationalism, insulated from the American public, and focused their investments in whatever field promised the highest returns, regardless of the political consequences for doing so.
The Making of a Techno-Nationalist Elite - American Affairs Journal
The techno-nationalist sees technology and nationhood as two intertwined goods. As technology advances, so does national power. Only a powerful state can unite a populous nation around a common identity and protect it from both external enemies and centrifugal forces.
The Making of a Techno-Nationalist Elite - American Affairs Journal
Karp and Zamiska’s sermonizing is not sufficient to make patriots out of a generation of engineers who have never been trained to think of themselves as stewards of a state. Elevating Silicon Valley’s engineering elite into a governing class would require much more: institutions, alliances, and traditions that root the wealth and expertise of our technologists in service to the nation.
The Making of a Techno-Nationalist Elite - American Affairs Journal
The most persistent of these themes is a critique of Silicon Valley’s “engineering elite.” Karp and Zamiska insist that the fortunes and fame of this elite were not created ex nihilo. This class is, in fact, deeply indebted to the civilization that made their firms possible, one that most of them feel no kinship with or obligation to
The Making of a Techno-Nationalist Elite - American Affairs Journal
The Second Industrial Revolution unfolded as American industrialists built the corporate and financial machinery needed for industrial-scale production. Out of this crucible came not only new machines but new forms of management, bureaucracy, and social organization that, over the course of a century, would be imitated, adapted, and imposed across nearly every society on Earth. The United States was the birthplace of the technological republic.
The Making of a Techno-Nationalist Elite - American Affairs Journal
anyone who thinks they fit in nowhere probably has an unrealistic view of how fitting in feels.
There's a place for everyone - by Adam Mastroianni
When people fail to find their niche, and when we fail to help them find it, we don’t just suffer from their absence. We also suffer from their presence in the wrong place. People often end up doing awful things because they never figured out what else to do. Nobody is born with a hankering to build prisons or raid pensions or market vapes to kids—their Plinko chips got jammed in an evil slot because they never landed in a good one.
There's a place for everyone - by Adam Mastroianni
If you’re trying to figure out which car to buy, which person to date, or which taco place to try, there’s are whole industries waiting to assist you. But if you want to figure out where you fit in, you’re on your own. The education system won’t let you leave until you can add, subtract, read, and write, but they’ll give you a diploma even if you have no clue who you are or what you want.
There's a place for everyone - by Adam Mastroianni
The globalization of attention is a damn shame for many reasons, and the biggest is that it leaves lots of local niches neglected.
There's a place for everyone - by Adam Mastroianni
most niches are local, and that isn’t where people look.
There's a place for everyone - by Adam Mastroianni
if human minds differ from each other in even 100 ways—which is not that many!—and those differences are normally distributed, then 99% of people are extreme in at least one way. Which is to say: statistically, everyone is special.
There's a place for everyone - by Adam Mastroianni
This is, I think, the unspoken fault line that divides all ideologies. If you trace arguments about marginal tax rates or soybean tariffs or whatever back to their origin, you will usually find a disagreement about whether our ideal world contains all of the inhabitants of our current world, or whether reaching Utopia will require us to toss some folks overboard. We don’t talk much about this, because if the people on Team Overboard were honest about who they plan to purge, none of their intended victims would be friends with them, let alone vote for them.
There's a place for everyone - by Adam Mastroianni
What I’m saying is this: You are born with this weird interiority that no one else can see. You can’t see it either at first. But if you run enough experiments you get a sense of how that inner space behaves. In particular, you can figure out which types of people can fuse with your interiority and expand it. You will not be able to explain how this fusion works. So don’t do it. But when the interiorities do fuse: notice how things are set in motion.
Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
When you talk about people you like, or rather when you talk about that thing that happens between you—you have to transform a highly complex impression into a string of words. Some relationships can easily be compressed into a compelling string of words. This is usually because they conform to some sort of trope of how romance should look. In my experience, great relationships are harder to compress into a sensible string of words.
Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
I tend to find that almost everyone is captivating and loveable when I manage to talk like this. But when I do it with Johanna—especially in the first few years—it was like my entire mental landscape broke apart and all was possibility and flux.
Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
The type of person I’m assuming we’re looking for here is 1) someone that you will find fascinating to talk to after you’ve talked for 20,000 hours, 2) you feel comfortable with them talking through the hardest and most painful decisions you will face in your life, and 3) the conversation is wildly generative for both of you, in that it brings you out, helps you become.
Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
But I do think it is a good idea, generally, and one that I have used—to speedrun relationships by jumping directly to the strange parts. There is really no point in going to a café to talk safely (if you can avoid it). You want to rapidly extract as much information as possible, so you can figure out what you like and so that you can pattern match, and you want to communicate as much as possible, too, so you can filter people who wouldn’t fit you anyway (which is why keeping a blog is good).
Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
There is a trope in romance that when you meet the person you are supposed to be with, you can talk about anything. You can apparently inverse that too: if you talk about anything that pops into your mind, you can tell if you're supposed to be with the person by judging their reaction.
Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
show the inside of your head in public, so people can see if they would like to live in there.
Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
So what do you do? You go talk to a thousand people (increasingly less randomly sampled) and see if there are any patterns in who makes you feel excited and alive and true and heard. And then you start hanging out with people like that.
Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
hose who predictably date the wrong people tend to think more categorically. A relationship goes up in flames. But instead of thinking that was a mean girl, update the neural net to avoid traits A, B, and C, they go, oh, you know . . . girls. Or, they do the same to themselves: I have a weakness for that type.
Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
“I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.”
The paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, I change
I feel that other kind of joy—the one that tells me that she is a path towards life), then I don’t want to talk about it. My friends ask about her, they are curious, but I avoid the subject. I get defensive. What Johanna and I have is too private. I’m afraid that they will misunderstand our relationship or reduce her to one of their stereotypes. So I hide myself from them.
The paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, I change
when that happens I get excited in a sharp-edged and feverish way. This happiness I have to share. I want to force it upon people.
The paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, I change
So I notice two kinds of happiness in the diary: a soft joy, which makes me ease up and feel more like myself, and a hard one that again and again leads me into shame.
The paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, I change
The happiness there feels entirely different, much softer. There is none of that jaggedness and intensity that characterize the joy I felt when I thought that people were attracted to me, or when I was on stage in a bar reciting poems, or when I drank. The joy of reading and travel was more like a cocoon. I hid and changed.
The paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, I change
And every time I’m miserable in the diary, I know what will happen on the next page: I will throw myself into some activity that can distract me from myself. It is like clockwork. As soon as I feel bad, I get busy, I seek out social situations where I feel high status (the literary world), I go to parties, get drunk, and/or flirt with people. A wave of euphoria breaks over me, and the anxiety disappears—and then I overstep my own boundaries and do things that fill me with shame. I’m back where I started. The loop starts over.
The paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, I change
It’s like when you zoom in on a graph, you mostly see the small daily fluctuations, while when you zoom out, you see the trend.
The paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, I change
now some people believe that science itself has everything figured out. We've done all the easy stuff, this line of thinking goes, and so it's only the hardest discoveries that remain. Oh, how I hate this idea! It's just the illusion of explanatory depth dressed in a lab coat.
On the importance of staring directly into the sun
But math, perhaps more so than any other intellectual pursuit, emits very strongly what we might call ignorance signals, signs that there's something you don't know.
On the importance of staring directly into the sun
thanks to the illusion of explanatory depth, it often goes the opposite way: we discover the least obvious things first, because those are things that we realize we don't understand.
On the importance of staring directly into the sun
You can't live your life if you're always getting stuck on mysteries like this. You'd get so mesmerized by the inexplicability of your porridge falling into your bowl and bubbles rising in your water that you'd forget to eat or drink and you'd die. That's why we need the illusion of explanatory depth: most things have to feel like they make sense, even if they don't, so that we can get on with the business of living.
On the importance of staring directly into the sun
Psychologists have a name for this tendency to think we understand things better than we do: the “illusion of explanatory depth.”
On the importance of staring directly into the sun