Monthly Rewind: March & April 2024
Creativity, curiosity & complex adaptivity
News & Updates 🗞️
OSV Book Club
Come join us at the OSV book club! On the agenda this month are two books featured on the Infinite Loops Canon - Ursula K. Le Guin’s sci-fi masterpiece The Lathe of Heaven (April 26th at 5 pm ET) and the inimitable Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (April 27th at 11.30 am ET).
To join (for free), head on over to our Discord using this link.
Open-sourcing the Quantum Revolution | Interintellect Salon with William Zeng
“Quantum Computing holds the promise to revolutionize the world someday. However, the challenge of controlling matter at the quantum scale is formidable and requires a collective effort. What if anyone had open access to top-tier quantum software and hardware tools, similar to how anyone with Internet access can build an app?”
On Monday, May 6th, O’Shaughnessy Fellow William Zeng will join quantum researcher Asier Piñeiro Orioli for an Interintellect Salon dedicated to William’s efforts to fund and develop open-source quantum software and hardware.
William has been at the frontier of quantum computing research for over a decade, including being named to Forbes 30 under 30 in the Science category in 2018. He is using his Fellowship to study how emerging quantum technologies can explore foundational questions in quantum mechanics and to continue developing the quantum ecosystem to benefit the most people.
Join William and Asier for a deep dive into William’s Fellowship experience, the role of open-source in quantum computing, the state of the quantum ecosystem and more!
For more info and to book tickets, just follow this link.
OSV Quarterly
The second issue of our OSV Quarterly magazine launched last week and is available (for free) here. Featured articles include a deep dive into the future of work, a masterclass from Jim on transforming ideas into execution, a guest essay from friend-of-the-show Luke Burgis, and much more!
The Future of Work | The Great Reshuffle Ep. 3
Our Great Reshuffle YouTube series is dedicated to providing YOU with the information you need to capitalize on the unlimited opportunities presented by our rapidly changing world. In our latest episode, Jim covers how changing work patterns will transform cities, the tools required to thrive in the new working landscape, the importance of fostering an “owner mentality,” the rise of the passion path, and more—all in under 20 minutes! Check out the full video here.
Our First 2024 Fellowship
In March, we awarded our first 2024 fellowship to Jack Connor, a linguist, programmer, and author who will use his $100,000 fellowship grant to save dying languages by using AI. To learn more about Jack and his project, just follow this link.
Fellowship applications remain OPEN until and including April 30th 2024. Wherever you are, whatever you do, if you have a game-changing idea, a simple application can be the only thing standing between you and your dream future. Apply here.
Thoughts 💭
“History is always the interpretation of the present.”
- George Herbert Mead
"Man is never truly himself except when he is actively creating something."
- Dorothy L. Sayers
“The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.”
- Stephen McCranie
"A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books."
- Andrei Tarkovsky
"It takes a clever man to turn cynic and a wise man to be clever enough not to."
- Fannie Hurst
Explore our Two Thoughts series: doses of wisdom delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday. Warning: may trigger incurable curiosity.
Conversations 🗣️
Devon Eriksen — Theft of Fire
How to create compelling science-fiction
“I'm saying believe in your artistic vision, in your vision, your complete whole vision of a thing that's not written by a committee that you think will be good and worthwhile, and try that because you're the only one who can do it. Nobody else can create what you see in your head. Either you're going to do it or it's not going to get done.”
Cedric Chin — Accelerating Business Expertise
Practical excellence
“And once you're good at something, it's easy to say, ‘Yeah, it's just a tiny mistake.’ You have to remember that greatness comes from looking at and examining, ‘Could I have done better here? Is there a tiny thing that I can change? And if I change my belief about this, what else does it affect?’”
Alex Komoroske — Complex Adaptivity All The Way Down
A masterclass in complex adaptive systems
“So many people, I think, are driven by this insecurity of, ‘People will know I'm dumb or will know I don't know what I'm doing.’ And there's something so liberating in saying, ‘Yeah, I have no idea what I'm doing.’ I don't think any of us do really. We're just doing the best we can and we're trying to learn from it and take actions that over time, we get smarter and we understand and we develop an intuition about what kinds of ripple effects will likely come out of a certain thing.”
Brendan McCord — AI and the Philosophy of Technology
Philosophy for the Information Age
“What are the questions that Plato and Aristotle dealt with 2,500 years ago? How did they treat those questions? What answers did they stumble upon, and what errors did they identify? This thread of constant question-asking for things that don't really admit of hypothesis testing fundamentally — questions that we're still going to be debating 10 years from now, a hundred years from now, probably a thousand — That's the realm of philosophy.”
Visakan Veerasamy — Expanding Our Possibility-Space
Spontaneously combining curiosity
“I think one of my stranger beliefs is that a lot of what people think are the problems with the present day are problems with language. Just the words that we use and the way that we read or don't read. Again, this goes back to possibility space again. It's like we are constrained by our lack of imagination, and our imagination is constrained by our language. And if you're only using the same few words, then we only think the same few thoughts. And then we don't see different possibilities.”
Anna Gát — We Digress
A conversation about… well… pretty much everything!
“[T]he outside world is more interesting than you are and you should spend the majority of your time exploring it, and making life beautiful for other people is more important than making it beautiful for yourself. You should devote yourself to it and hope that others will make yours beautiful too.”
Eddy Elfenbein — On Crossing Wall Street
Hard-earned investing lessons from an OG finance blogger & fintwit legend
“There's no such thing as the market. There's just people. The stocks don't know you own them. And even if they did know, they still wouldn't care.”
For root access to your humanOS, dig into our back catalogue of 212 episodes (and counting).
Words ✍️
Are You Ready for the Great Reshuffle? | “Faced with such seismic change, legacy institutions are choosing to stick their head in the sand. Even as the old models collapse, the knee-jerk deference to the default way of doing things is a powerful impulse. With their reticence comes YOUR opportunity. The gatekeepers are losing their grip. As time, space, and geography collapse, the vast expanse of the internet is becoming a playground in which anyone, anywhere, can unleash their potential.”
Abracadabra! What Being a Professional Magician Taught Me About HumanOS | “In retrospect, I can see that this childhood obsession with magic was likely the catalyst for my lifelong fascination with human perception and how it could be fooled by misdirection and brazen showmanship.”
Batman Was Wrong | “We’ve all seen heroism in the workplace. It’s the kind of adrenaline-pumping, fire-fighting, chest-thumping, muscle-flexing chaotic energy we unleash when, facing a tyranny of tiny problems, we spray half-arsed solutions from the hip like we’re Tony Montana.”
Reopen Your Eyes | “Like much of what it explores, this extraordinary book is difficult to categorize. By fusing symbols, images, and language, author/illustrator Nick Sousanis liberates us from “Flatland,” the linear constraints of our language and perception.”
The Complex Adaptivity of Infinite Loops | “Even a cursory glance over our episodes shows that, like any complex system worth its salt, an order has emerged from the chaos. Over the years, several groups of implicitly linked episodes have materialized — as if by design.”
So much going on! Super excited!