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visakan veerasamy's avatar

it's so cool that you still remember + reference that talk, I'm gonna reupload it to my own youtube channel now! thanks Kyle

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David Wilkens's avatar

Great piece. Pressure and necessity force the best and most creative to focus their minds on big problems: Manhattan project, Space race, Covid and Ukraine War to name a few. I think an issue is the misallocation of human capital. It's a matter of where the smart/creative people are motivated to spend their time. For example, before the GFC physicists were building financial models that arguably created negative value for the world. While we may have needed the 140 characters before we got the flying cars, was allocating all of those human resources to build better ads and social apps efficient, reasonable and necessary and did it move us forward to a better place? Incentives are everything.

Look at how efficient the Israelis are at building startups relative to their population and what they focus on. I highly recommend a book called Scarcity by Shafir.

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