"Here is an essay version of my class notes from Class 6 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are my own. Credit for good stuff is Peter’s entirely. This class was kind of a crash course in VC financing."

"This year, I’ve had another big load on my time: I’m writing my first book! Thus far it’s called Outsmart: The Future of Thought in the Age of Machines — a title possessed of such purple, sci-fi bombast that even though I wrote it myself, I still crack up every time I say it out loud. As you might imagine, coming from me, the book is a generally optimistic assessment of how digital tools are generating new ways for us to learn things, muse over them, and act on them. But the point is that it’s another time hog: Researching and writing a book has required such nose-to-the-grindstone work — to say nothing of nose-to-the-grindstone procrastination — that it has crowded out whatever time I might have had for blogging. Authors frequently describe the process of book-writing as similar to giving birth to a child, a metaphor I always found faintly icky; but, hey, maybe they were right. I’ve got three kids now, and no blog.

Yet as I’ve worked away on the book, I’ve increasingly begun to feel intellectually claustrophic. It’s hard to describe, but it’s like a cabin fever of the mind. The symptoms: I’ll get obsessed with a particular line of research, chewing away at it for days or weeks, only to realize it’s a) kind of half-baked or b) super interesting but not at all useful to my work. Or I’ll read a fascinating white paper, write a bunch of notes on it, but never crystallize a solid analysis.

I now think the problem is I’m not doing enough thinking in public."

"The rhetoric of social mobility helps to legitimize  class hierarchies, by maintaining the pretence that  management is a technical skills. In fact, bosses' power derives from other sources.And what's worst of all is that such hierarchies might not be needed anyway. In many firms, "management" is either a redundant function - because good companies run themselves - or it's worse than useless."

"Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity."

"Critical pedagogy, for Freire, meant imagining literacy as not simply the mastering of specific skills, but also as a mode of intervention, a way of learning about and reading the word as a basis for intervening in the world."

“Nobody’s original,” Cope says. “We are what we eat, and in music, we are what we hear. What we do is look through history and listen to music. Everybody copies from everybody. The skill is in how large a fragment you choose to copy and how elegantly you can put them together.”

"I strongly suspect these patterns are driven mostly by customers, i.e., that more accurate professionals would be less successful in inspiring confidence by others in them. If you are a successful professional, that is probably in part because of your unjustified arrogance."

"This would seem to argue that some old patterns endure, and that’s true. But think of the twists suggested by this new premium on human basics. Suppose you decided that you could get all the face-to-face you needed two days a week. Would that influence where you lived? Would the mountains or the shore start looking good to you? Suppose you decided that you could get all the face-to-face you needed three days a month. Would the Caribbean start looking good to you?"

"We've all heard it: according to Hal Varian, statistics is the next sexy job. Five years ago, in What is Web 2.0, Tim O'Reilly said that "data is the next Intel Inside." But what does that statement mean? Why do we suddenly care about statistics and about data?

In this post, I examine the many sides of data science -- the technologies, the companies and the unique skill sets."

"Many 401(k) investors last year bailed out of stocks, often the day after big market drops, Hewitt found, with nearly 20 percent of investors switching their assets -- all getting out of stocks. This means they locked in losses, selling low after buying high during the run-up of previous years."

"And I worry that the idea that learning in relation to history can easily be kept within some type of bounds implies, to a degree, that the importance of history is its factual content. Generations of captive history students, face-down and drooling on their desks, indicate that approaches of this nature are not only unfortunately limited, but also a fatal blow to any intrinsic interest in examining historical/cultural change."

"In recent research experiments, Derek Rucker and Adam Galinsky, found that people who felt powerless were willing to pay more money for luxury or status items than people who’d been conditioned to feel more powerful and in control."

"Religion was also the main issue in the events leading up to Murray's break with the Randians: although Murray was an agnostic, his wife, JoAnn, was (and is) a Presbyterian. Apprised of this, Rand grilled Joey on the reasons for her religious faith and suggested that she read a pamphlet put out by the Randians that "disproved" the existence of God.

When Joey refused to recant her heresy, Murray was told that he had better find himself a more "rational" mate. That was enough for Murray. The break was finalized by his formal "trial" held by the Randian Senior Collective, which Murray declined to attend."

'The Facebook self-portrait is a product of network culture that reveals how we construct our identities today. It satisfies the version of Andy Warhol's rule as modified by Momus: "In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people," except that it's not the future anymore (in fairness the article is 15 years old) and it's not 15 but rather 150 or 300 people, a typical number in a circle of friends on a social network site.'

"Deep Capture is a work of investigative journalism examining the growing threat to our financial system posed by illegal naked short selling, stock manipulation, and the destruction of public companies."