Rob Ennals

We sometimes wonder why important things fall apart, whether it’s human bodies being destroyed by aging, social movements succumbing to infighting, or software code bases accumulating cruft. A better question to ask is why do some things last as long as they do. Everything rots. Everything complex gradually accumulates errors...

If you want to build a product that people will use, find something that people already do and make it less painful. People are notoriously bad at knowing what they want. If you ask someone what they want then they will typically tell you what they think a socially virtuous...

Everyone agrees that online platforms have a problem with free speech. They just can't agree on whether we need more of it or less of it. But maybe Free Speech is the wrong way to think about the problems that online platforms have, and the real problem that speech needs...

We have a tendency to judge past societies more harshly than our own. That is partly because we tend to focus on the evils of past societies that many people at the time either weren’t aware of, or didn’t spend much time thinking about. Most Germans claimed to be unaware...

One hot topic of conversation right now is “What are all the humans going to do when AI plus humanoid robotics becomes better at everything?”. As William Gibson famously said “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”. So it’s worth looking at what activities are...

People love to create political compasses. The most famous one has left vs right on one dimension, and authoritarian vs libertarian on the other. Another popular one has political vs social liberal/conservative. Broadly speaking, the goal seems to be to come up with a set of dimensions that puts your...

One side effect of the current college system in the US is that it gives us a ruling class that has spent most of their formative years cut off from the real world, living in educational institutions (k-12 school, college, grad school) that teach them to think in a certain...