In economics, theorists will tell you “public goods” like lighthouses can’t ever be supplied by private, profit-seeking ventures. Meanwhile, right outside their window there are private lighthouses, provided in ways too varied and ingenious for the academic mind to comprehend, and too skin-in-the-game trial-and-error intuitive for the entrepreneur to even know how to explicitly describe.
Author: Isaac Morehouse
Isaac Morehouse is the founder and CEO of Praxis, an awesome startup apprenticeship program. He is dedicated to the relentless pursuit of freedom. He’s written some books, done some podcasting, and is always experimenting with self-directed living and learning. When he’s not with his wife and kids or building his company, he can be found smoking cigars, playing guitars, singing, reading, writing, getting angry watching sports teams from his home state of Michigan, or enjoying the beach.
The Beauty of Starting from Scratch
I try not to cling to my past ideas tightly. If I work through them fully, get them out, and treat them with respect in the present, the parts that matter most tend to get embedded and carry forward silently until needed in the future.
Taking the “Digital” out of “Digital Gold”
The idea of digital gold is to take all the amazing attributes of gold and add the one thing it’s missing: portability. That’s what the “digital” part means. The magic of bitcoin is that it found a way to maintain all the very best properties of money found in gold and add to them the greatest portability of any money in existence with instant, near free global transactions.
The Best Reason to Drink Coffee
My coworker Chuck told me he drinks two cups of coffee a day. I asked how he came to that decision. He said he chose to because he likes the way it makes him feel. I can’t think of a better reason.
When You Do Everything Backwards
I was talking to my wife over the weekend about the stage in life we’re in. We have four kids, ages 11 months to 13 years, and now, for the first time, we finally feel like this parenting thing is super fun and rewarding!
A Degree is a Signal, But Not the Kind You Think
The signaling theory of higher ed is correct, except it’s not a career signal, it’s a social signal. You can build a better professional signal and better career in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost outside college conveyor belt.
Righteousness vs. Church; Education vs. School
Church attendance may or may not aid in the cause of becoming more righteous. Similarly, school may or may not aid in the cause of education. There is ample evidence that it hampers the process far more than it helps. But even school optimists will concede that learning and schooling are two separate things.
Forget the Data, College is a Religion
The psychological benefit of going along with the dominant belief, gaining the prestige it entails, and not risking being seen as a non-believer motivate all kinds of actions detrimental to a person’s individual goals and aspirations. Attending college is the most pervasive religious act today.
A Call for Counterfactuals
Great actions are motivated by imagination. Grounded in logic, yes. But beyond the provable alone. If we can’t explore what might have been, and what might be, we have no reason to change.
Many Crappy Studies = One Good Study
“One study, which didn’t directly examine this topic, but was following a sort of similar thing 20 years ago, although controversial and some say non-reproducible, might not have had the proper data collecting methods and didn’t control for X,Y, and Z, but seemed to show a relationship like this, and that kind of seems to imply this other relationship I’m talking about. Of course it’s not definitive so take it with a grain of salt, but even if just roughly, directionally true, it at least doesn’t disprove my theory.”