Chronicles of DanK

This question is predicated on a big assumption: that the goals of furthering humanity and pursuing a buck exist in diametric opposition on the moral scale.

That is perhaps a flawed assumption. While it’s certainly true that VCs as a near rule have at least one eye on the proverbial buck at all times (it is their fiduciary duty), it’s also true that a great many of them relish the sense that they are part of the magnificent force pushing technology ever upward and forward.

Think about the people you’ve met in your life. What percentage of them do you suspect have thought to themselves (or said to you): “I want to dedicate my entire life’s work to cranking on the dolla-bill machine?” Yes, there are people like this roaming the streets, but no, they do not come near composing the majority. They also generally work at hedge funds, not in venture capital.

Most VCs are like most other humans with significant ambition: they are driven by a mixed range of emotional and rational forces that they compile into the narrative that forms the bases of their identities. Very few people want to tell themselves the story that their natures revolve around the hunt for cash. (The exceptions, as I said above, can be found in hedge funds.)

When you listen to prominent VCs talk or read their writing, doesn’t it seem clear that they are legitimately excited by factors that extend beyond the Benjamins? Yes, being close to big dollar amounts and having the power to push them around triggers sensations that appeal to nearly all humankind. But if you pay attention to the words of, say, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Peter Thiel, John Doerr, Steve Jurveston, Mark Suster or Fred Wilson, isn’t it obvious that their goals and visions extend way beyond merely making dolla dolla bills accrue in their coffers?

These guys love to be part of the action of the startups and entrepreneurs. They love to connect with and occasionally put cash behind a diverse range of extraordinary technology and business minds and ideas. They treasure the notion that their insights and bets might disrupt and readjust the world and yes, even push humanity forward. They also love it when the world rewards their insights and bets with the cold metric of cash money, y’all.

But that’s mostly because the cash just proves their insights and bets were right.

Cross-posted from Quora: Do Venture Capitalists further humanity through high-technology investment or are they just out to make a buck?

The next major step in the evolution of the human species will be the creation of a new, more cognitively advanced species.

For the majority of humanity’s existence, the forces affecting to the sophistication of our cognition have been primarily external to our bodies. In other words, our technologies and cultures have been the implements making the human population “smarter,” not major physiological changes to our brains, themselves. 

The big exception to this “rule” was the development of language, which may have happened in part as a result of sudden and dramatic downward pressure on the human population some 50,000-70,000 years ago. Whatever caused it, the development of language radically altered the cognitive destiny of homo sapiens sapiens. Trading systems, significantly more sophisticated tools and rich cultural practices all descended from our new ability to talk. It was literally the dawn of our species in its modern form.

My guess is that in our lifetimes or our children’s lifetimes (much more if global civilization collapses first), humanity will start to see the beginnings of another shift that will be as profound as that one – a literal evolution of our internal cognitive capacities. I suspect that this shift will arise from the merging of computers + the internet with our brains.

The seeds of this massive overhaul are already being planted (implanted?) in monkeys and cognitively crippled humans. There are (very rudimentary) implantable brain-computer interfaces that allow people who can’t speak to type out simple messages with the power of their thoughts alone. If you extrapolate that technology along a large enough horizon, you get to brains that can talk to the internet and an internet that can talk back to brains.

If the world’s mad scientists figure out how to safely and effectively implement internet-enabled brains, it’s safe to say that the resulting animals wouldn’t qualify as Homo sapiens sapiens anymore.

Indeed, the differences between us and them would be as stark as those between pre-humans and humans. They would be post-human in every sense of the term.

Cross-posted from Quora: What will be the next major step in the evolution of the human species?

My guess is brain/computer interfaces. It will take a generation or two, but that’s the big step change that could happen if we don’t detonate our civilization first:

For something to be truly as revolutionary as the internet, it has to have the potential to disrupt/re-order society in a dramatic way. As Robert Wright argues in the amazing book, Nonzero, every so often, there are dramatic technological advances that create the potential for larger and more complicated nonzero-sum games on a societal level. Society either then succeeds or fails to reorganize itself to realize the positive sums. 

Most of the massive changes driving human history have been communications revolutions. I mean this in the sense that they enable more and more brains to be in close proximity to one another — creating, spreading and iterating ideas/technologies more rapidly than was previously imaginable.

There are a few major communications revolutions in human history that qualify.

1. The development of language
2. The domestication of plants (aka agriculture)
3. Writing
4. Roads and the wheel
5. Printing Press
6. Internet/Mobile phones

So what will be the next?  Well, if you buy the argument that the big revolutions are those that bring more and more brains into proximity of each other, then the next big change will be the merging of the internet with our brains. 

Right now, the main things keeping our brains from being literally connected to the internet are technological limitations and ethical considerations. The brain is still a big mystery to even the smartest neuroscientists. And implanting devices into it for purposes of neuro-enhancement is, by and large, an ethical no-no.  

But things change.

My guess is that the technology that enables our brains to communicate with the internet will start with the treatment of major neurological disabilities. 
Scientists are already working on brain implants that help people with speech-impairing neurological conditions communicate with the outside world. Currently, these brain-computer interfaces are rudimentary. For someone with the current brain-computer interface technology, it takes tremendous concentration and effort to type out a short message on a computer screen. And the computer is not explicitly talking back to the brain. But it doesn’t take too much imagination to extrapolate what the seed of this technology will sprout in 20-40 years.

The therapeutic use cases could very easily evolve into enhancement. Human enhancement of this nature raises a massive host of ethical issues. 

But again, things change.

I don’t know if this will lead to the Singularity that people like Ray Kurzweil talk about. But barring some civilizational collapse or some major international agreement never to go there, the merging of biology and internet technology seems almost inevitable.

Cross-posted from Quora: What will be the next truly revolutionary technological development?

Now that Google has officially put a bullet in Aardvark’s brain, here’s the short answer: a Product Marketing Manager couldn’t have done shit.

Longer answer:

Aardvark’s life ended violently in a Googleplex alley not because of faulty messaging, bad positioning or incorrect segmenting of the market. If those things had been at the root of Aardvark’s murder, a great PMM might have been able to do something.

But no, Aardvark got itself shot dead because its product designer(s) got it wrong.

Theirs wasn’t a conceptual error, per se: the concept of creating direct, real-time links between questions and the people most qualified to answer them is a killer idea. Aardvark, unfortunately for its future existence, didn’t do this right.

To illustrate what I mean, I’ll compare and contrast Aardvark and a product that does do it right – the product you are using right now, Quora.

• Aardvark’s 1:1 mechanic failed to incentivize quality. Aardvark’s 1:1 dynamic – whereby an answer basically disappeared into the void after being written – offered approximately zero incentive to the answerer. While, human beings are occasionally altruistic, the fact remains that the majority of serious writers write because they crave an audience.
• Contrast this with Quora, which offers a positive feedback loop to people who publish high-quality questions and answers. Quora’s one-to-many follower model and “real-identity” requirements create a means forintelligent, articulate and well-informed answerers to show off their skillz and publicly get credit for them. Sure, some people answer anonymously, but for them, it still feels damn good to see their answer upvoted.
• Aardvark’s notifications always felt intrusive. Pushing questions at people when they are not in the mood to answer a question from a random person (i.e. most of the time) is rude social behavior and is straight-up annoying. Yet this is how Aardvark worked.
• Contrast this with Quora, which pushes questions to people when they are browsing the site, looking for questions to answer. The major exception to this rule is the “Ask to Answer” feature. My guess is that Quora added credits to “Ask to Answer” both to offset the intrusiveness of the feature and give answerers greater incentive to pay attention to direct questions from strangers.

So yeah, the issue with Aardvark wasn’t bad marketing. It was poor product design. The only thing that could have saved Aardvark from its bloody end was a fundamental reconstruction of its core mechanics. Product Marketing Managers don’t hold those reins.

Cross-posted from Quora: In hindsight, what should a Product Marketing Manager for Aardvark have done to make the product at least 5x more widely used?

Like everything related to the mechanics of human behavior, a lot of this can be explained with Evolutionary Psychology.

The short answer: Because social status has always played a large role in sexual selection, humans are programmed by evolution to care deeply about their social status. As the meaning of the word “embarrassing” suggests, publicly expressing your terrible and embarrassing musical tastes can exert downward pressure on your rank among peers and supply status-lowering ammunition to your competitors for mates, be they best friends, bitter adversaries or both.

The longer answer: Human beings are amazing creatures. We are simultaneously conscious, thinking entities with what may be called souls and mindless animals with blood on our teeth and claws. We and our brains evolved in an ancestral environment in which differences in social status could mean the difference between plentiful access to mates or a life of celibacy. Your genes (yes, yours) survived and replicated over millions of years of proto-humanity because they produced brains that could maneuver fierce and often mortal competition for food, status and sex.

Because of ancestral (and ongoing) social dynamics, people whose biologically-rooted tendencies push them towards status-promoting or status-protecting behavior are everywhere. In fact, they are likely you. Embarrassing yourself is the antithesis of status-conscious behavior. Therefore, most people hate embarrassing themselves, even slightly. (The major exception seems to be clowns. I am scared of clowns.)

So where does music come in? For reasons that may be evolutionary or may be cultural, many humans consider their musical tastes to be a fundamental projection of their identities. This obviously varies in degree: some people have a much deeper emotional stake in being considered musically or culturally hip than others. It is these people who have the most to lose from having their love of Britney Spears splattered across the ticker: Their peers in the high echelon of musical taste will judge and demean them.

However, we all have something to lose. How much you have to lose (and how much you care about losing it) depends on your other sources of status and confidence. For those with a raft of accomplishments, lots of wealth or other bright markers of high rank, it’s not a very big deal if the world knows that you are the Urkel of musical taste. For those who are still struggling their way up the social ladder, it’s a different story.



Cross posted from Quora: Why are some people so embarrassed about what songs they listen to?

By my definition, apocalypse is synonymous with the collapse of a civilization or total destruction of a way of life. It doesn’t have to be the end of existence for everyone everywhere to fall into the “apocalypse” category. It just has to be an epically disastrous end to life as it was previously known to the people and/or life forms who experience it.

For the sake of this argument, I’ll stick with the human population, since we care most about it. In the history of humanity, there have historically been not four but five horsemen of the apocalypse. They generally ride together and in the next 20-50 years, we’re facing all of them. They are:

Climate Change. The most extreme example from human history was the climate change that precipitated the last major Ice Age. There is evidence that this change in Earth’s climate reduced the existing human population from 500K-1M to around 20K total humans alive. In the intervening scores of thousands of years, there have been other climate events that have put catastrophic pressures on various segments of humanity and caused apocalyptic collapses here and there. The ruins of the Mayan civilization, which seems to have rapidly imploded during a sudden, prolonged drought in the 10th Century CE shows what can happen when the rain suddenly turns off.

The modern climate picture: Many climate projections suggest that the the most tumultuous areas of the world (read: Africa, South Asia and the Middle East) are also those most likely to experience prolonged droughts as the Earth’s climate warms. Meanwhile, should the warm water & air currents that keep Northwestern Europe fertile shut off (as they last did in a period called the Younger Dryas), Northwestern Europe would, in a matter of 5-10 years, see its climate transform into Syberia’s, with predictably apocalyptic consequences.

Famine. This horseman often rides with climate change, but can also be called out of the stable by incompetent governance. Throughout history, many human societies have vanished, descended into cannibalism and/or made the worst kind of war on their neighbors as a result of food supply collapses.

Modern famine: Should the consequences of global warming precipitate large scale famines for a large enough segment of the human population, expect history to repeat itself here, except on a global scale.

Migration. Usually rides with Famine. For most of human history, humanity’s developed “cores” (aka civilizations) were periodically sent into collapse by mass migrations from the steppe. Think: The End of Rome, the Mongol Conquest, etc.

Modern Migration: As global temperatures rise and the oceans rise with them, a fairly significant percentage of the worlds’ population will be displaced. Starving and homeless, the world’s most desperate people will flock to the developed nations by the tens or hundreds of millions. Barring miracles, that likely leads to game over for global civilization.

Disease. Often seen riding with migration. When the black plague reached Europe, it killed at least 1/3 of its population. When it, smallpox and other diseases reached the Americas, they wiped out 80-90% of the natives and mostly rendered their cultures and empires to the dustbin of history.

Modern disease: Could come in a lot of forms. In a single year, the Spanish Flu of 1918 killed almost as many people as World War I. A novel virus from some factory farm in China or Mexico could infect and kill hundreds of millions of people, sending the world into a tailspin. Even more devastating would be a masterfully bioengineered and weaponized pathogen, against which we’d be utterly defenseless. Given our globally interconnected world, a bioengineered pathogen would rapidly touch every corner of the globe. Depending on its mortality rate, it could kill 500M-1B people.

State Failure. Usually rides after the other 4 have taken their toll. After the Western Roman Empire fell, it took the West ~1000 years to reach a level of development equivalent to the height of Rome.

Modern state failure: States (Mexico, Somalia, Afghanistan, even Libya, Tunisia and Egypt) are already failing, but without apocalyptic effects. However, facing the right kind and degree of pressure, not even the states of Europe, Asia or the US are immune. Europe has collapsed into total war twice in the last 100 years. A US-China war would pretty much spell the end of both nations. While I think the latter is relatively unlikely, most of Europe, circa 1913, thought their continent was way too interconnected to implode into combat. We all know how that prediction turned out.

Cross-posted from Quora: If an apocalyptic event were to occur over the next 10-20 years, what shape is it most likely to take?

The clash between feminists and evolutionary psychologists goes back to the late 1960s, when evolutionary psychology was known as “sociobiology” and E.O. Wilson was the field’s pioneer. Among other things that on their own made a lot more sense, the feminist movement was at the time arguing that women were not in any significant way different from men, and that the major differences between men and women were rooted not in biology but in social constructs.

I might go so far as to say that this notion was and is at the core of much of the feminist argument for improving the position of women in society: if all apparent differences between men and women were the product of culture, then the unjustly inferior position of women could be addressed by demolishing and rebuilding the culture itself.

In this light, it is no surprise that a lot of feminists would hate sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, which argue that there are actually innate, biological differences between the sexes, and that these differences are rooted in the logic of evolution. This theory seems to threaten a pillar of the feminist argument. Indeed, it is much harder to overturn biology than it is to overturn culture. Thus, the hate.

This hatred has been amplified by the fact that the logic of evolutionary psychology attracted a lot of idiots, who deploy it to justify a wide range of highly questionable positions, from cheating on spouses to oppressing the entire female sex. This was not E.O. Wilson’s intent, nor is it the intent of most of the field’s best thinkers, from Richard Dawkins to Robert Wright to Stephen Pinker. Their goals, as far as I can tell, were primarily to explain the logic at the core of human behavior, not excuse its excesses.

However, instead of adjusting their positions to the challenge, feminists (in fact, much of the intellectual left) have chosen to dismiss the field entirely, using straw men and rhetoric to do so. This is actually pretty tragic, as the best parts of evolutionary psychology do a fantastic job explaining the roots of our emotions and a lot of our behavior, and could be harnessed for a lot of left-leaning arguments. The more we understand our nature, the better we can fend off the worst parts of it.

Cross-posted from Quora: Why do some feminists hate evolutionary psychology?

I think a good answer to this question comes from evolutionary psychology. In reduced form: fame is one of the most socially visible markers of high status. Since humans are — on an innate, biological level — status-seeking creatures, the pursuit of fame makes evolutionary sense.  The drive that makes an entrepreneur want to be like Steve Jobs or Sergey Brin is the same drive that makes a human baby grow into a reality TV star.

Less (but still somewhat) reduced:

Our bodies and brains evolved in a social environment in which competition for mates translated into competition for social status. When social position can mean the difference between reproducing/getting laid or not, it makes sense that an innate drive to maximize one’s social position would evolve and become quite strong. In the most primitive societies, social status accrued to the most adept hunters. Hunters who routinely brought home the bacon (or buffalo) would become the toast of their clan. They would be famous. More importantly, they’d get preferential access to mates. All the boys would dream of growing up to be just like them. 
 
The pursuit of Reality TV stardom, then, is just the distillation of the desire to be like the best hunters, manifested in a fairly unfortunate form. But to be fair, a lot of people with ambition don’t have the talent, looks or luck to become a famous entertainer, athlete or rich businessperson. To certain types, reality TV looks like the path of least resistance (the only path?) up the social pyramid.

Like the hunters in human tribes, celebrities are our society’s most vividly high status individuals: While there are may be a handful of ways to climb to the top of this world’s social ladder, becoming a celebrity is probably the most obvious. 

Cross-posted from Quora: Why do some people want to be famous?

The motivations behind both footbinding and high-heels involve altering a woman’s natural appearance to conform to a culturally-imbued beauty standard. In this case, this goal is centered on the feet, and both mechanisms are physically harmful.

But the similarities end there. As June Lin points out in the comments on this question, footbinding was forced on girls and crippled them for life. While Western culture certainly imposes a beauty standard on women, the element of choice remains intact. In other words, culture may insist “you should look taller,” but the choice to do so by wearing high heels remains in women’s hands. 

Furthermore, in the age of footbinding, the female foot was a highly sexualized object. The foot fetish was a national standard. These days, men with foot fetishes exist, but they are on the margins. By and large, heterosexual men will notice that a woman in high heels looks taller or slimmer or whatever, but they will not usually register the shoes or feet, themselves.

Lastly, it seems to be true across cultures that an increase in height correlates with an increase in perceived status, intelligence and/or power. As a result, high heels can literally make the woman wearing them more powerful. Footbinding, on the other hand, makes them weaker and more reliant on others.

As perverse as it may seem, high heels may actually be a tool of empowerment.

Cross-posted from Quora: How different are the motivations behind high heels and foot-binding?