Hey! I'm Jo.
I lead growth and partnerships at Anthropic.
Below is a curated list of readings that is weighted highly in my neural net.
Richard A. Friedman
A captivating exploration of how we perceive time as a series of distinct episodes. Why did time feel so drawn out in our youth? And why does it seem to race past as we age? As children, every day brought new learnings and discoveries, making each moment stand out. As adults, we tend to focus more on execution than exploration, and our memories start to segment into blocks like projects or seasons. When your days are filled with repetitive experiences, they begin to blend together, indistinguishable from one another.
Patrick J. Deneen
"Liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history." - Patrick J Deneen. Among the three main ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only liberalism still persists, leading its advocates to mistakenly see it as the final phase of political development, not just another ideology. This misconception could be risky, as liberalism does not always address the diminishing sense of meaning and community in our democratic societies.
"Optionality is the state of enjoying possibilities without being on the hook to do anything.” - Mirhir A Desai. A great read and cautionary warning against the human tendency to treat optionality as the ultimate goal - collecting potential opportunities without ever committing to a single path. I appreciate Desai's emphasis on the value of committing to meaningful projects over merely keeping options open.
Nick Szabo
"Metcalfe's Law states that a value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its nodes. In an area where good soils, mines, and forests are randomly distributed, the number of nodes valuable to an industrial economy is proportional to the area encompassed." - Nick Szabo. In his insightful essays, Szabo argues that the Industrial Revolution's economic surge is directly attributed to the creation of steam engines and railroads as critical wealth-creation points since the number of such nodes (mines, forests) that can be economically accessed is an inverse square of the cost per mile of transportation.
Charlie Munger
"My second prescription for misery is to learn everything you possibly can from your own experience, minimizing what you learn vicariously from the good and bad experiences of others, living and dead. This prescription is a sure-shot producer of misery and second-rate achievement." - Charles Munger. The wit and wisdom of Charlie Munger is second to none - what he preaches is to understand the big ideas in all the big disciplines, instead of becoming yet another "(wo)man with a hammer". I've spent hours and hours deep in Wikipedia rabbit holes from interesting references he's made in this speech.