I have been thinking about the value implications of embracing knowledge. Maybe I am being overly reductionist here but there are three values that seem to me to be intimately connected with the knowledge loop of learning, creating and sharing. Put differently I don’t see how a society based on knowledge would work well or be sustained if any one of these is removed. Now other than the first one you may not recognize these as values and it is not even that easy to define what “values” are in ...

I have been thinking about the value implications of embracing knowledge. Maybe I am being overly reductionist here but there are three values that seem to me to be intimately connected with the knowledge loop of learning, creating and sharing. Put differently I don’t see how a society based on knowledge would work well or be sustained if any one of these is removed. Now other than the first one you may not recognize these as values and it is not even that easy to define what “values” are in ...

I took last week off from blogging for family reasons which means I sat out a big wave of posts about Uber. Don’t worry, I am not going to rehash that particular discussion. Instead, I want to point out what I believe the big questions are that should be asked of all companies in this sector which includes two USV investments (Hailo and Sidecar). Here are two questions: 1. Are drivers genuinely independent contractors? A legitimate concern here should be that the level of control that comes f...

I took last week off from blogging for family reasons which means I sat out a big wave of posts about Uber. Don’t worry, I am not going to rehash that particular discussion. Instead, I want to point out what I believe the big questions are that should be asked of all companies in this sector which includes two USV investments (Hailo and Sidecar). Here are two questions: 1. Are drivers genuinely independent contractors? A legitimate concern here should be that the level of control that comes f...

GamerGate has laid bare a fundamental fault line for online discourse. A. Words matter. Anyone dismissing tweets threatening violence along the lines of “sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never harm me” is trivializing the power of words. We all know that words can cause immediate emotional harm. And beyond that immediate effect, words lead to thoughts and thoughts (can) lead to actions. I am not claiming some deterministic causality between a specific tweet and a specific a...

GamerGate has laid bare a fundamental fault line for online discourse. A. Words matter. Anyone dismissing tweets threatening violence along the lines of “sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never harm me” is trivializing the power of words. We all know that words can cause immediate emotional harm. And beyond that immediate effect, words lead to thoughts and thoughts (can) lead to actions. I am not claiming some deterministic causality between a specific tweet and a specific a...