Dominos: How To Create A Golden Age for Humanity

My friend @liminal_warmth asked me: “If you wanted to 100x your ability to find truly talented people with world changing potential, how would you deploy resources to do it most effectively?” This doc is my attempt at answering this question. Show more ▸

The 50 year plan

• Become the most loving and curious version of yourself.²
• Seek out other people who are like this. Introduce the best of such people to each other.³
• Work to be prolific in your output.⁴

The first domino: Love and curiosity

The first domino is love + curiosity, directed both inwards and outwards. This is critically important because if you approach the process with neediness — a need to prove yourself, assert yourself, anxiety, fear, etc — it'll leak out and sabotage things. This is a lot of what my 2nd book INTROSPECT is about: being kind to yourself, gently curious with yourself, the most heroic thing you can do is to refuse to hate yourself, and instead earn your own self-respect by living in accordance with your values.

In my experience, that’s the sort of vibe you need from people in the scenes. Abundance mindset, growth mindset, being happy about each other’s successes, having healthy personal boundaries. If we have this, then there’s more growth, more nurturance, high-trust, win-win outcomes, a positive spiral.

If there isn’t enough of this, the scenes become jealous, hostile, zero-sum, generally unpleasant places to be. People start competing for each other’s slices of the pie instead of trying to expand the pie, and things get unpleasant. Then the best people leave, and everything gets worse. So we have to be quite firm about seeking out the right people to begin with. It’s always difficult to explicitly ask people to leave, which is why it helps so much to (1) be oblique to begin with, and (2) to keep things informal. A friend’s father said of a very successful decades-long intentional community: make it really hard for people to join, and make it really easy for people to leave. A lot of grifty bullshit and cults-gone-bad do the opposite: they make it easy to join, and hard to leave. Be mindful of this.

So this is what we start with. Become a loving and curious person. Seek out other people who are like this. Introduce the best of such people to each other.

The second domino: Friendly ambitious nerds (FANs)

The second domino is “friendly ambitious nerds”⁠⁵⁶. That's what my first book (FAN) was about. It's broadly an articulation of the way I live my life, communitarian, public-commons-minded, encouraging, inviting, etc.

After I published the book I started keeping an eye out in history… and I found to my delight — it’s not surprising, but still — that there have been friendly ambitious nerds throughout history who devoted large amounts of their life to cultivating scenes around them. Erasmus is currently my go-to example. Mersenne. Coleridge was another. Max Planck. Gertrude Stein.⁷

What is a friendly ambitious nerd (FAN)?

Friendly: When I say friendly, I don’t just mean, nice, pleasant, amiable — though those are of course good-to-haves. I don’t just mean charismatic or charming either, though that too is pretty useful. a good host, kind, supportive, encouraging, non-coercive. Seeks shared understanding. Maybe it would be more intuitive to frame it as “super-friendly” or something of that sort: people who make deliberate efforts to organize meetups, to introduce people to each other, who are superconnectors.

Ambitious: I’m not talking about prestige-seeking (awards, accolades) but about wanting to embody one’s values at the highest possible level, whatever that means for the person. Gives a shit. Wants to keep giving a shit, and to and to continually give more of a shit over an extended period of time, perhaps an entire lifetime. There are a couple of important things I think ambitious people should have: a high volume of correspondence/interaction with other people (the word “ambition” originally meant something like “to walk around meeting people and asking for votes”), and prolific output.

Nerd: curious, allows their curiosity to direct their behavior. At the extreme cases I’m talking about the kind of people who uproot their lives to go to the Amazon rainforest to study obscure butterflies. Not just talking about idle passing curiosities, which are pleasant, sure, but I’m talking about people who feel a compulsion. Take Kathleen Martinez’s lifelong obsession with Cleopatra.⁸

Let’s solve the Losev problem

Born in 1903, Oleg Vladimirovich Losev invented LEDs decades before everybody else (in the 1920s). "Unknown and uncelebrated, this should've been the beginning of the photonic telecommunications revolution.” But nobody cared. He was a lonely self-taught nerd with no co-authors. He wrote to Einstein but didn't get a reply. He died of starvation at the siege of Leningrad.

Let’s create an accessible, informal, global nerd network that makes it easy for nerds like Losev to reach out to someone and get rerouted to wherever they need to go. If there's a 1% shot of finding someone who advances some domain by 20 years, that's a gift to humanity, and that's worth doing.

Ramanujan got lucky. He shouldn’t have had to.

The third domino: High-trust and high-openness scenes

The third domino is a high-trust + high-openness scene of exploration. What is a scene? A scene is a group of people who do interesting work publicly, around each other, who challenge and support each other (even implicitly!) to be bolder, more ambitious, do better.

Some people get a little tedious in discussing this, trying to articulate precise nuances. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But I think the important questions are, what are people doing here? Are they doing it well? Are they open and inviting to new people to come along and do things well? Are there positive and eusocial interactions? What is the output of the scene?

Here’s another fun way of thinking about scenes: a scene is a group of people who unblock each other at an accelerating rate.

Scenes throughout history

A running list of scenes from across history, pulled from my ongoing research and far from exhaustive. See the WIP list on Roam for the latest.

1. Plato’s Academy (Athens, c. 387 BCE to 529 CE): The original philosophical school, founded by Plato in a grove sacred to Athena, where teaching by dialogue produced Aristotle among many others. It ran in various forms for nearly nine centuries, until the emperor Justinian closed the pagan schools in 529.
2. The House of Wisdom (Baghdad, 8th to 13th c.): The great Abbasid center of translation and scholarship, where Greek, Persian, and Indian works were rendered into Arabic and pushed forward by mathematicians and astronomers like al-Khwarizmi. It ended brutally with the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258.
3. Erasmus and Aldus Manutius (c. 1500): The partnership of the era’s foremost humanist scholar and the Venetian printer who put his work into circulation. It is a clean early model of how a great thinker and a great publisher amplify each other.
4. Shakespeare’s London (1558 to 1642): The English Renaissance theatre scene, where fierce competition and constant collaboration among playwrights, players, and rival playhouses produced an extraordinary concentration of dramatic genius in a single generation.
5. Mersenne’s circle (Paris, 1620s to 1640s): The friar Marin Mersenne earned the nickname “the postbox of Europe” by relaying letters and ideas between Descartes, Galileo, Fermat, and Pascal. In an age before scientific journals, his convent became a clearinghouse where a discovery shared with him rippled across the continent.
6. The Republic of Letters (c. 1600s to 1700s): The sprawling, long-distance community of intellectuals who corresponded across borders and languages, building a shared culture of inquiry that helped power the Enlightenment well before any formal institutions existed.
7. Benjamin Franklin’s Junto (Philadelphia, founded 1727): Also called the Leather Apron Club, a small group of tradesmen and artisans who met to debate morals, politics, and natural philosophy and to improve themselves and their businesses. It went on to seed a subscription library, a fire company, and more.
8. The Bluestockings (England, 1750s): An informal women’s social and educational movement led by Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Vesey, who hosted literary salons as a deliberate alternative to the card parties otherwise expected of women of their class.
9. Berlin and Konigsberg (1750s to 1780s): The Prussian Enlightenment scene, anchored by Immanuel Kant in Konigsberg and by Berlin’s salons and academy, where philosophers and writers argued out the questions that would define modern thought.
10. The Lunar Society of Birmingham (1765 to 1813): A circle of industrialists, scientists, and inventors, including Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt, and Joseph Priestley, who jokingly called themselves “lunaticks” because they met near the full moon to light their way home. Together they helped drive the Industrial Revolution.
11. Classical composer clusters (Europe, 1750 to 1899): Across this era prominent composers gathered in a few cities, above all Vienna, home in turn to Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, and Paris. The economist Karol Borowiecki found the effect was causal: composers were roughly a third more productive while clustered near other composers, writing about one extra influential work for every three years spent in a cluster, and those who migrated to Paris benefited most.
12. The Headstrong Club (Lewes, 1780s): A debating society meeting in an upstairs room of the White Hart inn, whose members included a young Thomas Paine before he sailed for America and helped spark a revolution.
13. The Weimar and Jena Romantics (1780s to 1810): The vibrant cluster of poets, philosophers, and writers around the German towns of Weimar and Jena who gave birth to Romanticism, celebrating individual experience, imagination, and the unity of nature and spirit against Enlightenment rationalism.
14. The Lake Poets (c. 1790s to 1830s): Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey and their circle in England’s Lake District, whose shared experiments helped launch English Romanticism. The name was originally a jibe from hostile critics.
15. The Clapham Sect (England, 1790s to 1830s): The network of evangelical reformers around William Wilberforce who, against the firm conventional wisdom that abolition was impossible, organized and campaigned for decades until slavery was outlawed across the British Empire.
16. The Cambridge Apostles (1820s to present): A secret discussion society that ran from Tennyson in the Victorian era through Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and Keynes in its early twentieth-century golden age. It later became notorious for the Soviet spies it also produced.
17. The X Club (London, 1864 to 1880): Thomas Huxley’s nine-man dining club of scientists and allies who championed Darwinism and worked to free science from clerical control, wielding outsized influence over Victorian scientific institutions.
18. The Wicht Club (Boston, 1903 to 1911): A group of young Harvard lecturers who met at a restaurant rather than in stifling academic rooms, kept no records of their freewheeling monthly talks, and counted William James among their occasional guests.
19. New Orleans jazz (early 1900s): The birthplace of jazz, where brass bands, dance halls, and a uniquely mixed musical culture produced Louis Armstrong and a sound that would remake twentieth-century music.
20. Telluride House (Cornell, founded 1910): A self-governing residence for students of unusual promise, with Richard Feynman among its alumni, built on the idea that talented young people thrive when given freedom and responsibility together.
21. Gertrude Stein’s salons (Paris, 1900s to 1930s): The Saturday evenings at 27 rue de Fleurus where Stein gathered Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. It was a hinge point for both modern art and modern literature.
22. The Bloomsbury Group (1907 to 1930): The London circle of writers, economists, and artists, including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey, bound together by friendship, candor, and a shared revolt against Victorian convention.
23. The Algonquin Round Table (New York, 1919 to 1929): The daily lunch gathering of writers, critics, actors, and wits, including Dorothy Parker and New Yorker founder Harold Ross, who called themselves the “Vicious Circle” and traded the barbs that shaped American humor.
24. The Vienna Circle (1924 to 1936): The philosophers and scientists around Moritz Schlick who developed logical empiricism in regular meetings at the University of Vienna, until the rise of fascism scattered them to Britain and the United States.
25. The Martians (early to mid 1900s): The cluster of Hungarian-born scientists, including John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, and Theodore von Karman, who emerged from Budapest’s elite gimnazium schools, fled fascism, and went on to reshape physics and computing in America.
26. The Inklings (Oxford, 1930s to 1949): The informal literary club where Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and friends read drafts aloud in Lewis’s college rooms and at the Eagle and Child pub. The Hobbit and Narnia both grew out of their mutual encouragement.
27. Alcove No. 1 (City College of New York, 1930s): The lunchroom corner where a generation of brilliant, argumentative students, future New York Intellectuals like Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell, fought out politics and ideas through the Depression.
28. The New York Intellectuals (1930s to 1960s): The loose circle of writers and critics around magazines like Partisan Review who argued out modernism, Marxism, and anti-Stalinism, setting the terms of American intellectual life for a generation.
29. The Manhattan Project (1939 to 1946): The wartime effort that concentrated thousands of scientists at Los Alamos and elsewhere to build the atomic bomb. It is a stark illustration of how much a focused, lavishly funded scene can accomplish at speed.
30. MIT Building 20 (1943 to 1998): The cheap, supposedly temporary plywood structure thrown up for wartime radar work that became a fabled incubator. Its reconfigurable spaces and oddly mixed tenants produced advances from linguistics to electronics, and at one point more than twenty percent of US physicists had worked there.
31. The Paris Existentialists (1940s to 1950s): The Left Bank scene around Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, who worked out their philosophy as much in cafes like the Flore and Les Deux Magots as on the page.
32. Bell Labs (mid 20th c.): The corporate research lab later dubbed “the idea factory,” where the transistor, the laser, information theory, and the Unix operating system all emerged from a culture of long time horizons and relentless cross-disciplinary mixing.
33. The Beat Generation (1950s to 1960s): The loose literary movement of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs that rejected conformity in favor of spontaneity, jazz, and raw self-expression, and seeded the counterculture that followed.
34. Singapore’s founders (c. 1965): The small, intensely capable team around Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Keng Swee, and S. Rajaratnam who built a stable, prosperous nation out of a newly independent city with almost no natural resources.
35. The Apollo Program (1961 to 1972): The NASA effort that put humans on the Moon, marshalling roughly four hundred thousand people toward a single audacious deadline and proving what tightly coordinated ambition can do.
36. Andy Warhol’s Factory (New York, 1962 to 1984): Warhol’s studio and social hub, a gathering place for artists, musicians, drag queens, socialites, and hangers-on that doubled as a literal art factory and a scene unto itself.
37. Camp 4 (Yosemite, 1960s to 1970s): The dusty climbers’ campground where a band of dropouts and dirtbags invented most of modern rock climbing. Kevin Kelly cites it as proof that scenius cannot be commanded into being, only protected once it appears.
38. Reggae in Jamaica (1970s to 1980s): The Kingston music scene of tight-knit studios, sound systems, and rival singers out of which Bob Marley and many others carried a local style to the whole world.
39. CBGB and New York punk (1970s): The scruffy Bowery club where the Ramones, Television, Blondie, and Talking Heads found an audience and each other, launching punk and new wave in the process.
40. Hip-hop in the Bronx (1970s): The block-party scene where DJs like Kool Herc, along with MCs, breakdancers, and graffiti writers, built a whole new culture out of turntables and spare parts that would become a global art form.
41. The Homebrew Computer Club (Menlo Park, 1975 to 1986): The hobbyist group where early microcomputer enthusiasts, Steve Wozniak among them, swapped parts and schematics. It helped ignite the personal computer industry and, with it, much of modern Silicon Valley.
42. The Cacophony Society (1986 to 2014): A loose network of San Francisco pranksters and free spirits, descended from the older Suicide Club, who staged elaborate experiences and went on to organize the first Burning Man. One member, Chuck Palahniuk, used it as the model for Project Mayhem in Fight Club.
43. Madchester (Manchester, late 1980s): The scene around the Hacienda club and bands like the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays that fused indie guitars with dance music and ecstasy culture.
44. Grunge in Seattle (late 1980s to 1990s): The Pacific Northwest scene of small clubs and the Sub Pop label that produced Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, and briefly made a rainy corner of America the center of rock.
45. The Disney Renaissance (1989 to 1999): The run of films from The Little Mermaid to Tarzan that revived Disney animation, powered above all by the partnership of composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman inside a reinvigorated studio.
46. General Magic (1990s): The Apple spinoff often called “the most important dead company in Silicon Valley.” Its failed attempt to build the smartphone a decade too early scattered alumni who went on to help create the iPhone, eBay, Android, and more.
47. id Software (early 1990s): The small Texas studio that, as chronicled in Masters of Doom, invented the modern first-person shooter with Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake, while John Carmack’s engines reshaped both games and real-time 3D graphics.
48. The PayPal Mafia (2000s): The cohort of PayPal founders and early employees, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman, who scattered after the eBay sale to found or fund Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, and Palantir.
49. Topos House (Bay Area, 2010s): A group house founded by Laura Deming, Nate Sauder, and Seb Zany that concentrated heterodox young researchers and founders from the Thiel Fellow and longevity-science worlds under one roof.
50. Thought Catalog (c. 2013 to 2015): The online publishing scene of young writers experimenting with confessional, internet-native essays, an early proving ground for a cohort of digital-era authors.
51. The TikTok Hype House (2019 to 2020): The Los Angeles mansion where a group of young TikTok creators lived and collaborated on videos, a very online, very modern restatement of the old idea of the scene as a shared house.

Scene seeds and scene-inducing friendships

A few scene-inducing friendships, where a couple of people creating in public seed a scene for others to plug into. Many more of these; I’m also assembling a list on the WIP list on Roam to capture more examples.

1. John Lennon & Paul McCartney: the teenage Liverpool friendship that became the most productive songwriting partnership in pop history. They wrote most of the Beatles catalogue by pushing each other, half collaboration and half rivalry, and the band they anchored became the gravitational center of 1960s music.
2. Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak: the complementary pair behind Apple, with Wozniak the gifted engineer and Jobs the relentless visionary. They met through the Bay Area hobbyist scene, and Woz’s homemade computer plus Jobs’s drive to sell it helped launch the personal computer industry.
3. Bob Marley and the Wailers: the Trench Town friendship of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer, who came up together in Kingston and turned a local Jamaican sound into a global movement, carrying reggae and its politics to the world.
4. The Homebrew Computer Club: the Menlo Park hobbyist group where early microcomputer enthusiasts traded parts, schematics, and bravado. Less a single friendship than a seedbed, it was where Wozniak first showed off the Apple I, and the cross-pollination there helped spark Silicon Valley’s personal-computer boom.
5. Vlogbrothers (Hank and John Green): the sibling YouTube channel the Green brothers started in 2007 by filming video messages to each other. It grew into the “Nerdfighter” community and a small empire of its own, from VidCon to educational channels like Crash Course, a modern case of two people creating in public and pulling a scene into being.

What is a minimum viable scene?

I define a minimum viable scene as:

At least two people who are producing public-facing work, directed at each other, creating powerful vectors in the process.

I would also add that these people encourage and unblock each other… bunch of other details. See, even before we get to the next domino (meta-scenes, i.e., the modern equivalent of cities), there’s a TON OF WORK TO DO!

How to create a scene

1. Create powerful vectors: Find and connect 1,000 Erasmuses

Desiderius Erasmus was one of the greatest scholars of the northern Renaissance. He corresponded with literally hundreds of people in the 1500s. He was born out of wedlock in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Both of his parents died in a plague.⁹ He urged internal reform of the Catholic Church, was good friends with Thomas More (Utopia), was lauded as “Prince of the Humanists”, famously argued with Martin Luther on the subject of free will, traveled widely across Europe, and died of dysentery at 69. The man wrote thousands of letters, getting replies from Pope Adrian VI, Pope Leo X, Henry VIII… all this from a bastard child who was orphaned at 17!

How do we mint 1000 Erasmuses?¹⁰ My take: We start by encouraging 100 people to do 100 things — podcasts, vlogs, blogposts. Scene-mindedly. So yeah, honestly I don't really care too much about the bigger dominos until I have ~500 mutuals who are producing prolific amounts of work with smart, thoughtful, curious audiences internationally. We will be asking different questions at that stage. I have no doubt that I will find these 500 people and earn their respect, loyalty, trust. I ask nothing of them other than that they do their best work and support and challenge each other.

Question: who were Erasmus's mentors and tutors?

2. The importance of house parties and scene managers

When you go looking for them you’ll find several examples of house parties or home gatherings of some kind that fueled new scenes. You need people who can host parties and introduce people to each other to bootstrap a scene¹¹. The first that come to mind for me are:

• Aspasia, lover of Pericles, hosted house parties that Socrates would attend.
• William Wordsworth hosted hundreds of visitors and popularized the Lake District (sort of like the mayor of Miami but appealing to poets and artists). He went on to become Poet Laureate of the UK. Wordsworth is even more important and significant than I realized — his poetry was a beacon of hope and joy amidst much despairing utilitarianism.
• Max Planck and his wife, hosted parties attended by Einstein and friends. "The Planck home became a social and cultural center. Numerous well-known scientists — Einstein, Hahn, Meitner were frequent visitors". They'd play music together. And advance the frontiers of science for all of humanity.
• Gertrude Stein, hosted parties in Paris attended by Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclar Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse. The gatherings in the Stein home "brought together confluences of talent and thinking that would help define modernism in literature and art".  (Thread)
• Andy Warhol’s Factory: Andy Warhol arguably bootstrapped a scene "by himself" — I mean, lots of people showed up at his Factory, but it was *his* Factory. Somebody needs to play host to all the weirdos. The Factory was Andy Warhol's NYC studio, which had three locations between 1962 and 1984. It "became a well-known gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy patrons."

3. Scene-mindedness: outgrow old (broadcast) media models of thinking

The big mistake (I.M.H.O!!!) that public intellectuals have been making for the past 10 years or so is that they are still operating with old media models of thinking. Most of them, as far as I can tell, seem to prefer an audience of 1 million fans over 500 truly great co-creators. I get that I'm probably overlooking a bunch of nuance, that's part of what I call the Times Square problem, it's the glitziest, loudest voices that get most attention. The Internet is not just Times Square, there's all sorts of interesting shit going on but we have to look for it.

I see all kinds of really silly (to me) failure modes. For example, what was that, "Pursuit Of Truth University"? Absolutely unhinged. It was never gonna work. If you want real scholarship it's going to come from the fringes. I see so many people waste so much effort every year. The unit economics are all wrong. Before you start some grand initiative you have to ask yourself how you're going to sustain it when you run out of money. And the way to do that is to be scrappy as hell and to tie it to your personal being. The big lesson of survivor bias is that you should optimize for being a survivor.

4. Informalize: keep things informal

This is why I will most likely never launch an organization, unless for some reason people are throwing so much money at me that I need to find some way to spend it meaningfully. I believe the world needs a better public commons and the way to do that is with volunteers.¹²

It's always interesting to me how often people try to "formalize" certain things that you can actually just do "informally". I'm personally generally of the opinion that things should be kept "informal" up to the edge of chaos. Jane Jacobs talks about the value of this. Here’s a thread about it.

I don't mean to discourage or put down anybody who's excited about some idea of, y'know, making an app, starting a club, registering a business, etc. Those are all broadly good, creative things and I want to be supportive!

For example, like say, starting a Discord book club for your Twitter friends, when you're all on Twitter anyway, and you can just do book threads, and QT each other's book threads and so on. My point is that you can often do the same thing with less overhead — which makes it likelier that your enterprise will survive. There ARE some benefits to doing a book club Discord over just tweeting, but for people who are always on Twitter already, cognitive overhead.

I'm sort of like a slightly weary elder who's witnessed far too many projects get formalized prematurely and fail from all the overhead. If you can sell your tshirts on Instagram without registering a business, you should do that first, in my experience.

I do think sometimes it helps to conceive of things in a formal way — around 2013 I wrote a lengthy blogpost about how productivity apps are all wrong, and how they should invite us to light fires rather than fill buckets. I since realized I don't actually even need an app. I was using the concept of a productivity app as a *prosthetic*, as scaffolding to help me conceiving of a different state of being. But once I could properly conceive of that state of being, I found that I didn't need the scaffolding, I could just *be* the flame myself.

So... sketch plans for your perfect life, all the tools that would be in it, all the clubs you would be a part of, the businesses you would start — and then discard that plan and ask what if you just lived as if all of that were in you all along.

If you wanna do stuff it definitely helps to have a rough plan so it's not just pure chaos. Just... be careful that you don't like, spend too much buying a false sense of certainty (eg paying for office space you don't need).

And there might be some personal/emotional stuff to dig into there, like do you feel like you're not a real business owner unless you've hired a team/staff? I've heard from/about founders who over-hired because it made them feel important, which ultimately tanked the business.

If your undertaking is good, valuable, important, then you owe it to yourself (and the enterprise) to do what it takes to ensure its survival.¹³

5. Play long games

IMO you have to be willing to earn people's attention slowly over 10+ years so that the people who choose to work with you deeply know your values and are serious and so on. I'm not in a mad rush here. In fact I gently reject anybody who's too excited because I’ve consistently found, over and over again, that overexcited people burn out.

I've been here a long time! I was a child raised by libraries and the internet. I intend to tend to it and contribute to it as best as I can until I die, and leave my own efforts in good hands.¹⁴ For the love of it. Helping the next kid is all the reward I need.

Nobody has any idea what 50 years of compounded friendly-ambitious-nerd switchboarding + modern media tools can look like. It's never been done. Montaigne and Emerson were better FANs than I'll ever be, but they didn't have Twitter. I see it as my duty to uphold their tradition.

What are the limiting catalysts that stop scenes from emerging?

1. Not enough money

Rent’s too high, economic opportunity.

I don’t think people who want to produce amazing scenes necessarily want to get fabulously rich financially¹⁵, but they do need to be free enough to do the interesting work they want to do.

2. Not enough imagination

A narrative and playfulness deficit.

Part of the problem is economic opportunity to some degree, part of it is narrative. To answer: what is narrative, exactly? What is imagination, exactly? What is playfulness, exactly? Why are these things that I bring up here? Why is it so lacking in the world?¹⁶

3. Not enough good people

Too many prestige-seekers and mooches.

The challenge here is to focus on what we want to see more of. Find friendly ambitious nerds, encourage them, inspire them to help others in turn.

4. Symmetry-breaking and coordination difficulties

Sometimes the only thing in the way is that no one has committed to a spot yet.

From John Hines: Cities sometimes grow at fords in a river. If the dynamics are such that a city, once established, does grow, then probably the city could have grown organically around anything - it was the symmetry that was the problem. The early-mover advantage (that whoever invests in the city early harvests outsized value from the city’s growth) might act as a “predator” or “filter” on very small city-seeds becoming medium-sized? Maybe pre-committing to burn any early-mover advantage (such as visakanv rejecting the idea of establishing an organization or nonprofit) is a cooperative thing to do?

Why do scenes die?

My instinct is that too many posers show up, money-grabbers, low-effort prestige-seekers.¹⁷ The iron law of bureaucracy probably applies here:

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

The fourth domino: Nourishing and supportive meta-scenes

The fourth domino is nourishing and supportive meta-scenes. What is a meta-scene? A meta-scene is simply a context in which multiple scenes exist, and ideally co-exist. Historically, you'd call this a "city", but the future doesn't necessarily need to look like that, much like how Spotify/YouTube don't look like record stores.

I’m not too concerned about this right now, because ultimately everything is just made up of relationships between people, or to be less anthropocentric, relationships between thoughts, ideas, work. The people are just the vessels and conduits. 

We can start thinking about this once we have the happy problem of having more productive people and relationships than we can keep track of — lots of cross-pollination.

On cultural institutions

The tricky thing about the phrase “cultural institution” is that it has the word “institution” in it. Some people immediately assume that this means we’re talking about non-profits, charitable organizations, government organizations, something formal and official.

I mean something quite a bit different than that. Often a place, but really an idea, a kind of church. Long-running comedy clubs, bookstores, public libraries, places that embody an ideal.¹⁸ Theoretically, a Twitter or Instagram account can be “a cultural institution”. I don’t think a cultural institution necessarily needs to be a physical venue, particularly in the age of the internet — but it certainly helps.

A cultural institution is often a venue that has been around for a long time, like an old library, comedy club, or theatre. For long-term survivability, it’s a good sign if it’s survived a leadership transition, or several. Such institutions acquire a certain quality of sacredness — they are “above” or “beyond” regular politics, or at least, they could be, or are supposed to be. Religious buildings are obvious cultural institutions, in many parts of the world they also function the central organs of a city or community. They are bigger than any individual’s career or ambitions, any politician. They are the “keepers of the flame” of the spirit of a community.

Vincent Li asked, “how to solve the ‘free rider’ problem (including prestige-seekers) without high standards? Or, how to create an anti-fragile space that can hold them?” I think the answer is in a thing I’ve noticed: people who run effective cultural institutions often seem to be quite disagreeable and fierce. They have high standards and they insist on upholding them. A silly-but-earnest thought I’ve had is, maybe would-be dictators and authoritarians should really just be running cafes and music venues and so on.

Scene restauranteur Elaine Kaufman would physically fight people and chase away paparazzi from harassing her clientele.

On Catherine Scorsese's Wikipedia page, under "Career" it simply says "Often she cooked meals for cast and crew members of her son's films." She was almost certainly much more involved than that.

How to actually help

Enough theory. So how do you actually go about this? Here’s the practical stuff: how to find great people, how I’d fund them, how to help them go independent and build a little wealth, and how to talk about all of it.

How to find great people doing great work?

Current thinking: the most important thing to look out for is output. It’s easy to get swept up by things like charisma and pedigree, but the thing I believe we really want to see and encourage is the work. What is this person doing?

People sometimes get torn up about this question because they go too extreme too early, ie “how do I find the absolute best smartest person in the world”. I wouldn’t worry about that because you’re probably not going to find them right at the start. Instead, the question I’d ask is, who are the coolest, smartest, kindest, most interesting people in your existing social graph? Are you already talking with them regularly? When I ask people about this, a lot of people admit that they know who these people are and yet don’t really talk to them all that much. Usually because they feel somewhat intimidated by them, or feel like they don’t have anything to offer them, and so on.¹⁹

These feelings are good, actually, because they demonstrate that you care about not wasting people’s time. Great. But it’s just a starting point, you don’t have to allow these feelings to keep you from being tremendously useful. You just have to do the work of figuring out how to be helpful, then be helpful, introduce those people to each other.

Once you do the first round of this, and you become more deliberate about associating with the best people you know, you can then repeat this process by asking them about the best people they know. You may actually have to support, challenge and encourage them to do the same thing you did, because the most impressive people in their graphs might be way more busy, important, or weird, than anybody in your own.

How would I spend $50,000 in service of this vision?

 Well for starters I can tell you what I’m doing with $2,000 — I’m doing a thing I call the FAN grant, where I literally pay authors, vloggers, etc to produce public-facing work that I think seems compelling. I don’t have any interest in owning the work myself, I just want it to exist. I will make copies of it, I will share it with people, encourage conversations about the stuff. I will share my findings/learnings as I go and then I will look to invest more and more $$ microfunding people.

I think I could eventually spend $50k just investing in content and then use that content as scaffolding to build what I consider “long media”. Essays that are meant to be interesting now, yes, but also revisited and re-referenced 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 50 years from now. Long game stuff. I wouldn’t rush this, I think there are things I wanna learn from doing it at a smaller scale first.

Encourage feral free agents: Mint 100 Erasmuses

1. Encourage people to do 100 things: Build a portfolio of work and start different projects.²⁰
2. Encourage people to have things (e.g., ebooks) for sale.
3. Encourage people to do consulting work for whatever it is that they’re good at.²¹
4. Encourage people to raise their prices.²²
5. Encourage people to send cold emails and DMs.²³

Help each other become wealthier

• Get better at identifying precisely what is the value that you create
• Articulate it clearly
• Get better at positioning and communicating with other people
• Solve for distribution

Honestly a lot of this just boils down to marketing.²⁴ But I chose to get into marketing because it became apparent to me that the difference between success and failure for people with good ideas… is marketing!

Lots of people think of marketing as “putting on a fake shitty salesy veneer on top of things”. That’s actually bad, smarmy, ineffective marketing. Embarrassing.

Good marketing is actually going into people’s stuff, noticing that they have amazing material that’s buried on page 3 of their blog, and putting it on the front page instead. Boom, sales go up. This feels like cheating, but people pay me to help them along with it because I do have a lot of experience walking people through this process. Also if I don’t think I can help you I will gently/cheerfully decline to take you on as a client, I only want to work with people who I am convinced I can help. Wait, why am I doing my marketing consultant spiel in the middle of my golden age doc? I’m sleepy. Stranger things have happened.

If we select for great, ambitious, driven, relentless, resourceful people to begin with, all we have to do to increase their wealth is to give them a little support, a little encouragement, unblocking. The hardest part is finding the right people, but if we produce the right media then the right people will come find us.

Considerations and concerns

Everything is a remix²⁵

Trying to be “original” is a trap, every idea has predecessors. Even if you somehow come up with something nobody’s ever thought of before, people will still interpret it through the lens they already have, and find a way to define it in terms of things they already know. So instead try to remix things as artfully as possible, be prolific, keep coming up with fresh and interesting mixes.

Jane Jacobs’ idea that wealth is created via import replacement (thread/conversation with Alex Yao). The Beatles started as a cover band. Sony started as a radio repair shop. Everything is a remix.

Keep things informal

I believe that one of the ways attempts to create scenes fail is that people are too quick to try and formalize things into club memberships and businesses and so on. Scenes have to be a little chaotic and disordered to function well. Things have to feel kinda sketchy, like imperfect drafts, works-in-progress, things that invite people to tinker and fiddle and mess around. Think less “pristine art gallery” and more “messy artist’s studio” with paint spilling everywhere.

Jane Jacobs again has a relevant idea here — you can’t formalize or institutionalize the informal obligations that citizens have to each other. Scenes run on the kindness of strangers. You can’t exactly hire people to do that. You can hire someone to be an encouraging person in the commons, but ultimately scenes depend on strangers and volunteers.

The importance of being oblique

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

We have to be a bit oblique about this whole endeavor, because being too on-the-nose has a way of inviting poseurs and wannabes (aka mops), people who want the social pleasure of being in and around the scene(s), but don’t really care for any of the work. This isn’t intrinsically or entirely a bad thing, some of these people are good to have, but a scene can only carry so many mops before it “collapses under its own weight”. So, again, it’s important to always be focusing on the people who are doing the work, and to identify and encourage new people who are doing the work.⁠²⁶

Big part of this is being very patient and being willing to play long games. Being willing to take 10, 20, 50 years to succeed. This gets the impatient players out of the way.

Community management

Even if we do a good job of selecting good people, communities do still tend to fail over time. This is kind of inevitable, but we can stave it off somewhat with better education on how to be good community members, good moderators, good bystanders, and so on.

But also we should always assume that every community will eventually fail, and the important thing for each individual is to build personal relationships with other good people. Empires rise and fall, cities tend to remain. It’s good to plan ahead, with the knowledge that configurations don’t persist indefinitely.

Culty bullshit

Look up a list of “how you know when you’re in a cult”, and let’s try to subvert and do the inverse of every one of those things. Encourage people to do their own thing, be with their own friends and family, question everything. No pedestals, no Supreme Leaders. You must be an independent spirit to play, and we must encourage each other to be more independent still. Everybody should fuck off from time to time to go do their own thing away from everybody else. I repeat, it is of critical importance that people respect other people’s sovereignty, agency, autonomy.

Random advice

• Don’t rush into buying high-capital stuff as a group.
• There’s a lot of stuff you can do in between that approximate a lot of what you want, without getting messed up by what you don’t want.
• Avoid “institution-brain”:
  • Overformalizing
  • Overly respecting authority
  • Obsessing about prestige
  • Being needy for approval
  • Disrespecting unknowns and unpredictability
  • Narrow utilitarianism

Talking points and open questions

Talking points

1. Encourage everybody to be prolific. Not everybody will want to do it, that’s fine, no pressure. But people being prolific in public is how we win. People build bodies of work that can be shared, quoted, referenced. It helps people make friends, find jobs.

2. Demonstrate and teach good reply game. Being good at talking with people is something that is powerful, generative. It creates social spaces where people can show up, be supported and encouraged. (thread)

3. There is tremendous potential wealth in the relationships between people who do not yet know each other. Introduce good people to each other. Make this a priority.

There is more intelligence outside your head than inside of it.

4. Real social media has not been tried. Social media creates tremendous network-building opportunities that hardly anybody realizes, and hardly anybody is doing anything about. People’s intuitions are still calibrated for old media. (why I tweet like a maniac, thread)

5. People continue to undervalue and underestimate hyperlinks. This might not seem immediately relevant but it’s a magic technology that our predecessors would’ve done anything to have.

6. People underestimate compounding and long games. When people think “that’s not possible”, “you can’t do that”, “that won’t work”, it’s often because they’re imagining something like 5 years, 10 years. Things get very different when you have 50 year plans.

7. I am trying to weave webs of gift economies, which is hard to talk about because everybody is mostly used to dealing with transactional economies. (thread)

8. Unblock each other. I got this phrasing from @__drewface: a flourishing scene is a context where people unblock each other at a tremendous rate.

Open questions

Why aren't there 1000s of indie scholars?

Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak)

Why aren’t there 1000s of indie scholars?

Some great replies:

• @amyhoy: Housing costs, temperament, ignorance. I teach people to start businesses, and many who succeed still quit eventually because they’re not suited to that level of open-endedness (!!!).
• @jennymikac: People depend on a job psychologically, for identity and purpose — “what do you DO all day?” (e.g. stay-at-home moms).
• @ConradBastable: Rare? Institutionalization of scholarship? Work is mentally costly — not enough brain cycles (vv: eh.), or maybe they just get lost blogging and uploading YouTube videos into the void (vv: I do think we should investigate this).
• @patio11: Social circumstances. One is unlikely to hear of someone who’s done this, and someone who has is unlikely to describe it that way — e.g. “I’m an angel investor” vs. “I’m wealthy and don’t work.”
• @fulligin: A lot of us just retire… scholarship is kind of cool, but very demanding.
• @daiyitastic: Strangely, all the gentleperson scholars I know tend to be on the impoverished side. Is lifestyle creep just hard to avoid?
• @DRMacIver: I’ve really struggled with this myself, and I’m still struggling roughly five years in. I think I’m mostly on top of it now, but it really needs a support network that I don’t currently have to be sustainable — and most others lack that too. I suspect a lot of us burn out on the lifestyle because independent, self-directed research is really hard; if you’re not careful it turns into a drifty malaise that draws you back to a more structured work life.
• @alicemazzy: Because a lot of those people weren’t planning for it. They wound up there by doing what they were supposed to well enough, so they keep going until they burn out and quit in disgust to “find themselves.” I’d wager there are at least an order of magnitude more people who go FAANG → aimless meaning-making (drugs, meditation, travel, etc.) than FAANG → literatus.
• @Meaningness: I’ve been thinking for years about offering semi-structured support for tech early-retirees to find enjoyable, useful, challenging projects. Lots of near misses in this space.
• @impactology: Very true — and it’s also hard to condense and communicate your self-directed research learnings to other people.
• @krishnanrohit: A product of: (1) wanting to do it, (2) knowing what you’d do, (3) not being self-conscious about the choice, and (4) not having gone to established places like academia. That’s a tiny, tiny pool of people! In fact, the number of people who go into coaching, writing books, or blogging hints at who might’ve been citizen scholars otherwise; Substack has turned some of them into self-sustaining lifestyles. But broadly it’s a game of nerves: peer pressure to keep up with the Joneses pushes you toward either money or prominence, and both are harder when you’re not in some established position.

---

On the role of the church (thread)

X (Twitter)

Elias@reconfigurthing

so ppl say churches are important social hubs, bring societal cohesion etc etc - but isnt the main reason for this just the fact that its a clearly defined schelling point for congregation and ritualized collective activity?

Jan 6, 2022 · View on X ↗

Holden Karnofsky: where's today's Beethoven?

Cold TakesWhere's Today's Beethoven?

• Where’s today’s Darwin, Ramanujan, Shakespeare? (me: were any of those people properly appreciated during their lifetime?)
• Pericles’ Athens included Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, Plato… despite a tiny population… can we replicate?
• “Past was better” hypothesis, “bad taste” hypothesis (Beethoven wasn’t that great), “innovation as mining” hypothesis — it gets harder, we’ve tapped out the main things?

Works in Progress — a magazine about progress

worksinprogress.coWorks in Progress Magazine

Samo Burja on why civilizations collapse

thesideview.coWhy Civilizations Collapse

Samo article about YouTube golden age

X (Twitter)

Kei Watanabe@KeiWatanabe17

YouTube unlocked a form of mass-scale tacit knowledge transmission which is historically unprecedented, facilitating the preservation and spread of knowledge that might otherwise have been lost. A good read by @SamoBurja. Here are my learnings.

Jan 22, 2022 · View on X ↗

Michael Nielsen on the Metaphysical Club

X (Twitter)

Michael Nielsen@michael_nielsen

(via @timhwang)

Jan 25, 2022 · View on X ↗

• Informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes…

Saku: “In “Creative Circles”, a study of creative groups through history, the author makes the case that the standard pattern for artists, intellectuals etc is that being part of a scene is really important early career, but irrelevant after that.”

Noah Smith on a coming dark age

X (Twitter)

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼@Noahpinion

Until I read this post, I didn't realize how global the Dark Age was. Apparently the years ~200-800 AD represented a global slowing of technological progress:

Jan 22, 2022 · View on X ↗

“Reclaim the dreaming spires”

X (Twitter)

Zack Grafman | ☧/acc@theofuturist

"When you feel that you've lost the age of your heroes, it’s time to find out what they did to become heroic."

Jan 10, 2022 · View on X ↗

Jonathan Mulholland on the power of the small group

James MulhollandJames Mulholland

Eric Lortie asks: “Should we build a social media platform to enable this?” I don’t actually think this is a particularly good idea. The lesson from Samuel Johnson is — make dictionaries, make the work of greats more accessible.

Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (Wikipedia)

WikipediaA Dictionary of the English Language

If you feel like helping (no obligation!)

• Leave comments, ask questions
• Share this doc with your friends
• Introduce your smartest, kindest friends to each other and be a switchboard (follow @FANswitchboard and the people RT’d on it)
• Support my Patreon: patreon.com/visakanv
• Subscribe to my YouTube channel: youtube.com/visakanv and my Substack VOLTAIC VERSES, practice good reply game in the comments with one another
• Buy my ebooks FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD (gum.co/FANbook) and INTROSPECT (gum.co/introspect)

Appendix

Relevant reading

On mentorship, by Raemon (LessWrong)

LessWrongMentorship, Management, and Mysterious Old Wizards

Visa’s Organizing Genius reading-group notes

Google DocsOrganizing Genius reading group

A 50-year plan for a global nerd network (Miro board)

miro.com50 yr plan to build a global nerd network

How do poor countries get rich? — four theories

thegoodblog.substack.comHow do poor countries get rich?

Gift economies among the !Kung

X (Twitter)

go to the elephant site @rechelon@mastodon.social@rechelon

"Debt trade network" generates a lot fewer misconceptions than "gift economy" and helps situate most actually existing gift economies as merely one configuration or constrained subset of market forms. To grasp this let's do a thread about the !Kung San hunter-gatherers:

Oct 7, 2021 · View on X ↗

Michael Nielsen's tweet on curiosity

X (Twitter)

Michael Nielsen@michael_nielsen

Lovely essay explaining research not as some mysterious process, but as an extension of what happens when you get curious enough.

Oct 18, 2021 · View on X ↗

Kanjun Qiu: research as understanding

kanjun.meResearch as Understanding

Erik Hoel: why we stopped making Einsteins

erikhoel.substack.comWhy we stopped making Einsteins

Erik Hoel on tutoring future geniuses

X (Twitter)

Erik Hoel@erikphoel

Are there any figures today who obviously belong to the pantheon of historical geniuses? If the list seems slim, why?

Mar 16, 2022 · View on X ↗

A slime-mold follow-up

X (Twitter)

SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD@mold_time

We think @erikphoel is right that historical tutoring was better than education today. But we don’t think being aristocratic is what made it better. So here are three other angles on the same idea:

Mar 20, 2022 · View on X ↗

Emma Griffin's Liberty's Dawn (Industrial Revolution)

The GuardianLiberty's Dawn by Emma Griffin — review

Marc Andreessen: It’s Time to Build

Andreessen HorowitzIt's Time to Build

Marc Andreessen on exceptional founders

X (Twitter)

Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸@pmarca

@thogge I think this is one of the most important questions in the world. I currently believe the answer is 'not enough exceptional founders', but I'm not highly confident. This also begs the question, what creates exceptional founders?

Feb 15, 2022 · View on X ↗

Ada Palmer on the Black Death and the Renaissance

exurbe.comBlack Death, COVID, and Why We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages — Ex Urbe

Dwarkesh Patel on Einstein’s miracle year

X (Twitter)

Dwarkesh Patel@dwarkesh_sp

Great scientists like Einstein, Newton, and Darwin had a single year in which they made multiple career defining discoveries. Was it their youth? Their lack of obligations? The right problem at the right time? I explore the mystery of the miracle year:

Apr 13, 2022 · View on X ↗

Tyler Cowen on DARPA & funding science

Marginal RevolutionScience as a public good

Visa's tweet on Marshall McLuhan's dream

X (Twitter)

Visa is doing marketing consults (see pinned!)@visakanv

Here is Marshall McLuhan dreaming to Ezra Pound of bringing 10 Erasmuses, 10 Emersons, 10 Montaignes together. Unfortunately for them, they did not have Twitter. Fortunately for us, we do. We will honor our predecessors by fulfilling their dreams.

Dec 13, 2021 · View on X ↗

Visa’s thread on Gertrude Stein’s salons

X (Twitter)

Visa is doing marketing consults (see pinned!)@visakanv

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was born to a wealthy family, raised in Oakland CA. Both her parents died by the time she was 17. At Radcliffe College, she was a student of William James, who called her brilliant and encouraged her to go to med school. She got bored and flunked out

Feb 25, 2021 · View on X ↗

The House of Wisdom, Baghdad (Wikipedia)

WikipediaHouse of Wisdom

Visa’s essay: Athens in the age of Pericles

@visakanv's blogPericles - @visakanv's blog

The Medici of Florence (Wikipedia)

WikipediaHouse of Medici

Elizabethan England — the age of Shakespeare (Wikipedia)

WikipediaElizabethan era

Visa's thread on the four kinds of luck (inspired by James Austin)

X (Twitter)

Visa is doing marketing consults (see pinned!)@visakanv

here is a bit of my summary of @pmarca's 2007 blogpost about James Austin's 4 kinds of luck, from his 1978 book Chase, Chance and Creativity 1. blind luck 2. add variability through tinkering 3. add discernment 3. add unique frame of reference

Apr 24, 2020 · View on X ↗

Nadia Asparouhova on idea machines

Nadia AsparouhovaIdea machines

Nadia Asparouhova on finding top talent

Nadia AsparouhovaExplaining tech’s notion of talent scarcity

BFI on the Disney Renaissance (90s)

bfi.org.ukThe many merry eras of Disney

On progress studies

X (Twitter)

Nick Whitaker 🇺🇸@ns_whit

I wrote my first blog post on the relationship between the Progress Community and EA

Nov 27, 2021 · View on X ↗

His blog post: the Progress community and EA

highmodernism.comThe Crux: Action

Reminded by mengwong: Paul Graham’s essays on conditions for startups³¹

Paul Graham on what makes America great for startups

paulgraham.comWhy Startups Condense in America

Rich’s microsolidarity.cc ↗ is pretty great — emotional intimacy, diff group sizes, domination vs partnerships, crew/congregation distinction, good things inside good contexts, leadership as hospitality, if you grew up weird you’re steeped in thousands of years of domination-based society,

Microsolidarity — Richard D. Bartlett

microsolidarity.ccMicrosolidarity

SMBC: a comic on liberal education

smbc-comics.comSaturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Liberal Education

Revisiting Gladwell's The Tipping Point

blogs.ntu.edu.sgReview & summary: The Tipping Point

David MacIver on staying a healthy genius

notebook.drmaciver.comHow can we create healthy geniuses?

Richard Hamming — You and Your Research (1986)

cs.virginia.eduYou and Your Research

Malcolm Ocean's open letter on consent & culture

Malcolm OceanOpen letter: Convening an Ontario meta-protocol jam • Malcolm Ocean