Shea Balish

“Moral victories are for losers”

One of the greatest scientists of all time has left us.

@packyM Space data centers do make sense!! (We’re talking about all that space in northern alberta where it’s cold and gas is free, right?)

the sports betting markets (they're not "prediction" markets) have to be banned. there is no other way.

Daniel Dennett: "If I gave a prize to the best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin." Not Newton. Not Einstein. Darwin. In a 2015 documentary, philosopher Daniel Dennett makes a striking case for why Darwin's idea of natural selection is the single greatest intellectual achievement in human history. His reasoning isn't just about biology. Dennett argues that what makes Darwin's idea so extraordinary is what it unifies. Before Darwin, the world was split into two seemingly incompatible realms: the physical world of cause and matter, and the world of meaning, purpose, and consciousness. These felt like they belonged to different categories entirely. One explained by science, the other by something else. Darwin's idea, Dennett says, is the backbone that bridges them: "The Darwinian idea of natural selection unifies the world. It unifies the world of cause and matter and physics with the world of meaning and purpose consciousness. The whole spectrum of life depends on uniting the living with the non-living, the meaning with the non-meaning, the purposeful with the merely mechanical and merely physical." That's not a small claim. It's a philosophical revolution disguised as a biology paper. What Dennett is pointing to is that natural selection gives us a mechanism: a purely physical, purposeless process that generates purpose. Organisms don't need a designer to have goals. The appearance of design, the reality of meaning, emerges from the bottom up. The best idea anyone ever had. No prize for second place.

"as a society, we are making an enormously risky bet: that we can reap the rewards of a runaway gambling industry without paying any price; that the litany of social ills long associated with this vice can, this time, be kept in check" theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/…

Karl Popper sucks. Imre Lakatos is the GOAT philosopher of science.

If you don’t sacrifice for your dreams, then the dreams are the sacrifice

"Trivers writes simply, but the arguments are often so deep -- so close to the complexities of truly understanding human mentality -- that the effort to grasp it (all and completely) is almost frightening." -RD Alexander

RIP Robert Trivers (1943–2026), one of the boldest and most influential thinkers in evolutionary biology. A giant in the field—whose ideas reshaped how we understand cooperation, conflict, and human nature.

RIP Robert Trivers - the Einstein of evolutionary biology and one the greatest thinkers of our age. Among other things, Trivers came up with parental investment theory, reciprocal altruism theory, and parent-offspring conflict theory.

@kimmaicutler people who advice founders that startups are marathons not sprints have never looked up what a solid marathoner runs per mile on average.

@nachkari NFLD tech is hot. Kraken, Spellbook, Colab.

"our species has undergone more genetic change over the past ten thousand years than over the previous million"

Great profile of @tylercowen, the man who wants to know everything, in The Economist! economist.com/1843/2025/02/2…

"Yes, human evolution did accelerate, and it did so primarily to meet the challenges of culture rather than nature." aporiamagazine.com/p/human-evolut…

One of the most common pieces of feedback I've given over 8 years as CEO is: "I think you are attracted to this idea because it's super legible, and that's a bad reason to do it. This is the kind of thing that sounds really good on slides but doesn't tend to work." The problem in large orgs is that "legible ideas that sound good on slides" take over.

In my latest post, I defend @robinhanson’s seemingly crazy view that 90% of human behavior is signaling. Or at least, that it’s not as crazy as it sounds. Link below.

💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯

We underestimate how much "abstract" thought is just repurposed sensorimotor control circuitry. A lot of reasoning is essentially about moving through idea-space the way we move through physical space.

@JonHaidt ftw