I just finished participating in the KERNEL web 3 educational program, with over 400 fellows from over 40 countries. It was 2 months full of inspiring people, interactions and learnings. It was the “Kernel Block 5”, or 5th batch in KERNEL’s 2-year history.
So, what is KERNEL exactly?
“A custom web3 educational community — We are building an open, peer-to-peer, lifelong network of awesome humans, one block at a time. Each block accommodates 250 individuals and runs for 8 weeks. It is a unique experience.”
(During the block 5, they decided to temporarily extend the size from 250 to 400 people).
Screenshot from one of the first sessions with the Kernel Block 5 fellows
Definitions aside, KERNEL is a different kind of experience for everyone. KERNEL really depends on you what you want to make out of it. At the minimum, you could use a few hours a week to read the learning Modules (publicly available) and participate in the fireside chat once a week. If you like to meet new people, you can join networking sessions at Gather Town after the fireside chats.
At the other extreme, you could experience KERNEL in a full-time manner by:
Participate in 1 or 2 learning tracks (there are DeFi, Token Communities, Dragons & DAOs, Gaming, DeSci, Regeneration, Culture tracks).
Joining (and creating) Junto conversations around different topics.
Reach out to other KERNEL fellows to set up Zoom calls to get to know each other.
Or perhaps you have recently founded your own web 3 project, and you are feet deep in development and could use the time to find new team members to work on your project.
Participating in “Wanderweek”, which is essentially a two-week hackathon. You could also jump-start your new web3/NFT project using the Wanderweek, and get feedback from mentors and other fellows
KERNEL is full of accomplished professionals, builders, creators.
KERNEL is overwhelming, and you need to be intentional
During the 8 weeks, there are a LOT of things going on.
The amount of Slack channels is staggering. You don’t have time to read and follow everything. KERNEL absolutely will feel overwhelming to everyone in the beginning. And that’s just a feature of KERNEL. Somebody put it this way: “Kernel is like a stream which is there.”
The only way to adjust is to be intentional. This is also heavily emphasised by the organizers. The overwhelm can hit you if you come totally without a plan. However, if you formulate an intention, for example e.g.:
“I study all the modules but skip the Wanderweek, participate in only 1 learning track and set a goal to meet 1 new person over Zoom every week. I will organize a Junto conversation about a topic X I’m curious to learn more about”
This way, you will get much more out of KERNEL. This way, you can focus only on the information flow that is relevant to you. KERNEL actually assigns you a Guide whom you can have a 1-on-1 conversation with in the first two weeks.
The atmosphere during the sessions is professional yet relaxed. The KERNEL organizers Vivek Singh and Andy Tudhope are some of the most emotionally intelligent and warmest people I’ve ever met online. Great people to look up to playing and enjoying Infinite Game. When you join the Zoom session, there’s always relaxing music playing in the background when people are rolling in. Everything works punctually and professionally - people are present.
At the same time, there is no record-keeping, no grades, nor any type of controlling “schooling” attitude. You get to decide what is worthwhile to take part in and deep-dive into your interests.
KERNEL Syllabus - From Module 0 to Module 8
Here’s the entire syllabus for 8 weeks. It’s publicly available here.
KERNEL Rituals & Rhythms
Kernel lasts for 8 weeks, but what does a typical week look like? There is a certain structure:
Every Sunday, the KERNEL team sends an email regarding the upcoming week, usually giving an outline of the week and reminding us which Module we are about to start.
On Tuesdays, the week begins with various small group explorations called Guilds. There were 7 different Guilds in KB5: DeFi, Dragons and DAOs, Token communities, Gaming, DeSci, Regeneration, and Culture.
Every Thursday, KERNEL hosts a Web 3 luminary for a fireside chat and brings all the KB3 Fellows together. After the fireside chat, people usually gather at the Gathertown.
Besides these regular activities, there is also Expo Week, Wander Week, and the Show Case Demo Day in the end. And numerous Junto conversations throughout the program. All optional.
Gathertown networking:
Every Thursday, there is a Fireside chat about the topic of the week. Usually, there’s a guest speaker. The first week’s firechat chat speaker was Vitalik Buterin himself, and he had just published his blog post about “Soulbounded NFTs” which he talked about in the first half. The other half was reserved for questions from Kernel fellows.
After the Fireside chats, people head over to the Gathertown networking space. It was my first time using Gathertown, and I have to say I was impressed by the experience. Gathertown aims to create a similar experience as if you’d be in an actual conference room. You have your character, and you move around the 2D map like in Habbo Hotel. If you move close to someone else, the video and audio connection opens automatically. Just like you would walk next to somebody in an actual conference and open up a conversation. You can also sit at a table, and see video & audio connections of everyone around the table. If you have a remote team, this tool is a must.
Gathertown networking session after Kernel Fireside chat
KERNEL emphasizes values, thinking & communication skills:
KERNEL sets in place certain values. The first Module 0 is all about this.
For example, KERNEL encourages us to think in Complementary Opposites (be able to entertain opposite views of a matter, and the spectrum in between). KERNEL fellows should have humility. And here’s one of my favourite:
Those who have positively changed the world did so because they learnt how to negotiate complexity, rather than impose their own will on things. They answered their own questions as honestly and directly as they could.
KERNEL encourages to Play with Pattern. The best 30 minutes of my focused attention was to play through this interactive “The Evolution of Trust” interactive online story. It teaches everything you need to about game theory in the context of coordinating with people.
So, how is this all relevant to KERNEL?
KERNEL is all about gathering talent around the world for a journey of 8 weeks. Everything happens online. Online is as real as offline in KERNEL. It’s all new people. However, the people on the other side of the screens are competent professionals. Their time is valuable. We should make the time together matter. Take a professional yet loving attitude. That’s my interpretation of the signal Module 0 wants to send.
And these values show throughout the program. Fellows are willing to live up to these values. When you interact with Kernel fellows, there is mutual respect and everyone is trying to help each other. These values create a fruitful foundation for getting to know new people and potentially work together on a project.
In the Kickoff session Vivek described that:
“Honesty, trust, clarity, excellence, heightened awareness is present in this environment”.
And it sums up the reality accurately. Some other expressions used to set the tone for the upcoming weeks were: mutual aid, lively relationships, infinite games, open fields, and remembrance. Couldn’t get better than that, could it?
KERNEL gets you back to basics — how to have a proper conversation?
Guilds (or learning tracks):
KERNEL Guilds are essentially Learning Tracks for a more specific area of web 3. The learning tracks have changed a bit from Block to Block. In KERNEL Block 5, we had the following options:
DeFi
Token Communities
Dragons & DAOs
Gaming
DeSci
Regeneration
Culture
Usually, each Guild hosts around 3-5 extra sessions. Looking at all the exciting agenda, one easily feels like a kid in a candy store, and wants to sign up for every track, or maybe half of them. At least I did. However, it’s suggested to take max 2 learning tracks. Otherwise, it simply gets too overwhelming. (Learned the hard way - agreed).
Some of the Guild sessions were also recorded to be watched later. However, I felt that the recordings as an experience were not even close compared to being real-time present in the session. Recordings didn’t obviously include the Zoom chat log, which was always full of interesting notes and links. Also, some of the sessions had interactive elements (e.g. DAO Guild actually setting up a DAO during the session), which obviously couldn’t be experienced through a recording.
KERNEL Juntos - Small-group discussions any fellow can set up
In 1727 Benjamin Franklin formed the Junto, a weekly mutual-improvement club made up of individuals with an array of interests and skills. The goal was to 1) To help us improve ourselves and 2) To help us improve our world.
KERNEL has built the Junto format based on the legacy of Mr. Franklin. Essentially, it’s a way to propose a topic for a small-group discussion. Usually, the host sets a short reading list of a few articles, to get more out of the discussion.
There’s a wide range of Juntos during KERNEL, and there are several each week. Even if you would like to participate in all of them, you could only make it to perhaps 10% of them. So, it’s good to reflect your KERNEL intention, and then decide on the ones that match. Or create your own Junto, it’s a relatively low effort to set up one, and a great way to connect with people.
Personally, I would have really enjoyed participating in the Junto organized by Ali Rizvi, which brought fellows to read and study together the book by Lisa Yi Tan, “Economics and Math of Token Engineering”. Just too many things to take part!
See the full history of Juntos here: https://convo.kernel.community/archive
Some of my personal highlights & remarks during KERNEL:
Here are some personal highlights and remarks of my KERNEL adventure.
Daniel Robinson (Head of Research at Paradigm) presentation about “Simple DeFi machines” was a great break-down of the logic behind major DeFi protocols. It was a great discussion with the fellows, too. Most of the KERNEL content is recorded and put publicly available. This particular conversation was intentionally not recorded, and I think it increased the quality of the conversation. The conversation was more candid and it provided a safe space for some controversial thoughts as well. As much as I subscribe to the ‘build in public’ philosophy, I think there would have been room for more non-recorded sessions with top industry experts like Dan.
It was great connecting to new people in general. I met one KERNEL fellow in person in Shanghai where I live. I had another interesting conversation online with somebody whose real name, face or location I didn’t even know. His professional background was really impressive and we had a great conversation. This was an example of the pseudonym/anonymous culture of crypto. Anon culture is a peculiar part of the web 3 landscape. It has its obvious downsides but also upsides.
At the end of the KERNEL, I was able to invite some web 3 investors to join the Showcase Demo Day and connect investors & teams together. Always makes you feel good to help people out with such a tiny effort from yourself.
Lifelong access to other KERNEL fellows is the most important takeaway
When I think about the concrete takeaways from the program, the number one thing is the lifelong access to other KERNEL fellows. Not only your batch, but all the other batches are in the same Slack as well. Thanks to Covid, the world is flat, and regardless of your location, you could just reach out to anyone. Also, if I were to move to another country/city someday, I think KERNEL would be a great way to establish some real-world friendships as well.
KERNEL’s Modules contributed a solid summary of key ideas to understand web 3 and underlined an ethical approach when building new projects. KERNEL’s benefit is bringing people together, lay out good values with professional facilitation.
“The KERNEL syllabus (and KERNEL at large) is about transformation, not information.”
As per the quote, knowledge-wise, I only learned a limited amount. That’s understandable as it’s not KERNEL’s main point.
Pure knowledge-wise, I have learned most by reading the most essential books e.g. on the history of money, the history of Ethereum, and how the current financial system works. Books have hands-down brought me the best ratio of invested time and gained understanding. The next most important source has been the primary source materials, such as whitepapers of Uniswap, Ethereum, Compound, Aave etc other fundamental protocols. And, going and using those protocols. Finally, certain YouTube channels as podcasts such as the Bankless and Coin Bureau have been the most efficient way to stay up-to-speed after building the foundational understanding.
If you’re a beginner in the web 3 space and willing to learn more, I would definitely recommend a similar learning path to start with, and then later consider KERNEL.
Looking back, how would I go about KERNEL:
First of all, I would have reserved much more time for KERNEL. I initially planned to do precisely that, but then certain unexpected things happened, and I had to take care of some time-taking personal errands just when KERNEL started.
Even though KERNEL’s website says that one could do the program while working a full-time job, I would not necessarily recommend that. Especially, if you have a busy non-web-3 job.
If you are already working in the web 3 space, then it’s a bit different and KERNEL can complement your work and enable new opportunities.
At the end of the day, KERNEL is like a stream, and if you just set realistic expectations considering the time you can set aside (and not overwhelm yourself), you can accommodate the experience to different life circumstances.
If you’re totally new to web 3, I’d advise you first to read some books, whitepapers, open up a crypto wallet and play around (like I wrote in the previous chapter). If you’re still excited after all this, then I would say you’d be well equipped to get the most out of KERNEL.
Timezones and your physical location:
Credits to Samuel He for this accurate illustration :-)
If you live in the US or Europe, you will get the most out of the Kernel. Why? Because 70-80% of the participants are from North America and Europe, and time zone wise the sessions are scheduled in comfortable time slots.
If you live in a big city in the US or Europe, think of NYC, San Francisco, Denver, Berlin, and London, you will get even more out of KERNEL. Why? Many other fellows also live in these cities, and you can get together to have dinners. KERNEL even reimburses them to encourage this (!). I also noticed there were a lot of participants from Singapore.
If you live in Asia, like I currently do, things are quite a bit different. Most of the sessions started at 11 pm or midnight (Shanghai/Singapore time zone). I could usually still focus on the session content, but meeting people at the Gathertown at midnight or 1 am, I was simply too sleepy to be presentable most of the time.
That said, I think the KERNEL team was as considerate as possible in planning the time zones. On West Coast US, sessions started at 8 am. After all, considering where most of the participants live that was the most suitable slot to pick.
Final presentations of KB5 Kernel block:
During KERNEL, you encounter many new ideas and plenty of new teams are formed. You can also apply to KERNEL program as a team. At the end of the 8 weeks, 40 teams were selected to present on the final demo day. Here’s the recording of the first 20 teams. The second set of 20 teams can be found here.
Thank you KERNEL organizers!
Thank you, Vivek Singh, Andy Tudhope, Sachin Mittal, Aliya Donn, Angela Gilhotra for running KERNEL and organizing everything. There’s would be many Guild leaders who did fantastic job as well, too many people to thank. I feel more empowered to continue my web 3 adventure :-)
The next KERNEL batch will start in autumn 2022. You can learn more about the application process on the KERNEL website here: https://www.kernel.community/en/blog/Editorial/summer-of-love
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The rest of this blog post is my personal notes on KERNEL Modules from 0 to 8
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My personal notes of KERNEL Modules 0 to 8
Before you read on, I’d like to make two important points:
1) The original material of KERNEL modules is created by Andy Tudhope, so all the credit to him for putting this together. I’ve only done copy+pasting here.
2) The following notes do not represent a holistic summary of the module content. I took the notes to foster my own learning, and I only selected insights that particularly resonated with me or new stuff that I wanted to learn and review later. A lot of essential content is left out from these snippets. The full module content is publicly available, so feel free to explore the entire syllabus here.
Module 0 - An Introduction to Kernel:
This module mostly sets the values and tone for the following weeks, such as:
“The quality of listening determines the quality of speaking."
"When people are listening, I'm compelled to speak more truth."
We should aspire to positive-sum, horizontal conversations (9:14 in the video).
"I have a lot of respect for people who think as they speak, and who pause to think and to attach the meaning that matters."
One of the best resources for me was “The Evolution of Trust” interactive storyline game. KERNEL claims that this will teach you everything about Game Theory you need to know. It was truly eye-opening and I really recommend it to anyone who is interested in to understand what type of behaviour and communication will lead to the best team work results. You can find it here, it’s a good idea to set 30-60 minutes of focused attention https://ncase.me/trust/
“We're in the midst of a move from closed organizations, to platforms accessible through APIs, to open protocols”
“Money is older than writing”
“Money is something that we don't talk about or teach, and perhaps this is a result of the architecture. Precious metals stored in a vault against which paper is issued mean that money in this expression is a form of debt, which curtails our discussions. How many of you have money in a bank? [everyone raises their hands] None of you have money in a bank! You have loaned your money to a bank: it is not the same thing."
Module 1 - Ethereum's History and State:
There is an implicit shift from trusting those who own the media by which we transfer value, to those with whom we are actually transacting.
The more succinctly we can express shared truths, the easier it becomes to verify (and therefore trust) the systems we use. This implies that: “Trust has something to do with truth"
“We are each others' environment”
“Our ability to create value has always been tied to the ways in which we tell stories about, and with, our shared records. However, prior to the feedback loop outlined in trust, the record was maintained by someone, which gives them enormous power and means everyone else is incentivized to try and manipulate them.”
“Because blockchains allow us to define succinctly our shared truths, and because the record itself is shared across all participants, there is a whole new "trust space" we can explore, searching for more valuable kinds of transactions impossible within merely legal fictions.”
Nick Szabo’s article “The Playdough Protocols” from 2002 gives a historical perspective: history of seals 5000 years ago in Iran, and how the digital equivalent of seals is the next step in the evolution of data integrity and unforgeable identities.
“The invention of the limited liability joint-stock corporation created wholly new systems of organizations. Blockchains and the possibility to create new types of crypto-economic coordination systems will lead to a marginal improvement in efficiency over the joint-stock corporation, but likely also allow the emergence of coordination systems we haven’t seen before.”
How to think of Ethereum in layman’s terms?
“Ethereum is the internet’s government, and smart contracts are its laws.”
“Ethereum is an unprecedented arena for playing cooperative games.”
Life is a work of art:
"Instead of thinking of life as a series of checks which I need to tick off - something which can be displayed on a graph that climbs ever up and to the right - I like to think of my life as a canvas which I can paint with whatever weird artwork I feel like [...] Here is my mandatory Venn diagram: the status quo needs to change, and life is short. When we put these two together, we can see that we need to subvert the status quo and have as much fun as possible along the way!"
“Play allows us to create and share ownership of spaces in ways which competition cannot. This is why we have unicorns and dancing developers and silly memes: it's not something incidental. It is a fundamental part of what borderless, global history-writing based on consensus is about. The revolution is not being televised because it's not about hate or anger or violence or anything else that grabs the headlines of a media operating with skewed incentives. It's heart to heart, here in the prison yards where we're using matching funds to build playgrounds where we can love again”
Module 2 - The global financial system:
Nick Szabo’s article, originally published in 2002, is a great historical backdrop (although quite a long one - needs a deep reading of 30-60 min) https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/
"Indeed, collectibles provided a fundamental improvement to the workings of reciprocal altruism, allowing humans to cooperate in ways unavailable to other species. For them, reciprocal altruism is severely limited by unreliable memory.
Dawkins suggests "money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism"
“We've established through Antonopoulos that money is a language for communicating value and that it was used long before writing was developed.”
"A novelty of the 20th century was the issue of fiat currencies by governments. While generally excellent as a media of exchange, fiat currencies have proven to be very poor stores of value [due mainly to inflation]."
(on Ethereum) “[…] this new order of communication, akin to the appearance of language itself, is best demonstrated by the simple fact that you need only memorize 12 magical words, incant them into an internet-connected machine and you gain immediate access to monetary value, anywhere in the world.”
[ Mikko’s note: If you want to deeply understand the history of money, you can find the highest value/time ratio by reading Bitcoin Standard and/or Layered Money books. Highly recommended ]
Module 3 - Take back the web:
“[… ] we are conditioned to value action and results over the intention. We live in a global culture that emphasizes what we achieve rather than what we mean. […] Actions are, in a sense, how we attempt to make the external world match our internal world. They're important, and what you achieve matters, but it is not the primary matter.”
“What's unique about web3 - about economic code which creates new trust spaces; expands the possible definitions of value; merges money and speech; and creates new constraints in which to experiment with freedom - is that we can encode our intentions, literally.”
“Freedom is only the ability to be conscious of the constraints within which you live.”
“Freedom is the simple combination of awareness and acceptance. It is here and now, or not at all.”
“According to Illich, it is only the willing acceptance of limits — a sense of enoughness — that can stop monopolistic institutions from appropriating the totality of the Earth’s available resources, including our identities, in their constant quest for growth.” - Labors of Love
“How does this apply to trust and value? Well, value is generated from trust in clearly shared truths […]” Freedom is our conscious ability to decide which shared truths to trust based on how well defined and encoded the concept of "cheating" is that created those truths. Meaning, we have the freedom to define what boundaries we choose. It is not possible, though, to operate efficiently with no boundaries at all. Which is why the practice of freedom includes an acceptance that it is not possible to exist without limitation.”
Module 4 - internet age institutions:
On governance:
“Mutual aid is the basis for individual autonomy.”
“Better tools are those which help us help each other more effectively”
“Again, for emphasis, the aim is not to build better tools for governing; it is to build tools that help people help each other.
As soon as I set out to help someone, the direction of that action always implies a patronizing power dynamic: "I have, you lack." However, when we help each other - when we can admit honestly that we both need help, always - then the environment is shifted towards reciprocity.
“The complementary opposite of scarcity is not abundance, it is reciprocity.”
On consensus:
“Being able to program incentives and the flow of value through society means we don't need to hold static popularity contests every four years, premised on partisan debates: we can govern dynamically by constantly modeling, assessing and updating our understanding of legitimacy.”
“IETF governance revolves around the simple maxim that engineering is about trade-offs. As such, we need clear ways of thinking about how we make decisions. We ought to avoid "majority rule" and get to rough consensus decisions which promote the best technical outcomes.”
“Lack of disagreement is more important than agreement”
“1. Coming to consensus is different from having consensus. In coming to consensus, the key is to separate those choices that are simply unappealing from those that are truly problematic.”
“2. Closure is more likely to be achieved quickly by asking for objections rather than agreement.”
“Issues are addressed, not necessarily accommodated”.
"That's not my favourite solution, but I can live with it. We've made a reasonable choice" - this is consensus, not rough.
“Don't be a reformer. Build systems that help people govern themselves, and then - the most radical choice of all - let them actually do so.”
On identity / portables roles:
“I always thought that masks were for hiding, but I’ve learned that they often reveal as much as they obscure. They allow you to explore a new identity even as you retreat from an old one. Rather than an escape from self, alt identities teach you that your legal identity is also a kind of mask — an ever-evolving montage of loosely assembled parts.” - Aaron Lewis
“Furthermore, by using verifiable credential tools such as zero-knowledge proofs, we can verify personal data without having to publicly reveal it. This wide range of possibilities means web3 “wallets” are actually a very powerful identity regime, and we must think carefully about how we wield them, especially as the distinction between financial applications and social applications fades.”
The Garden of Forking Memes, an article by Aaron Lewis, about subcultures, was just fascinating.
“The telegraph, time zones, radio, and television led to new patterns of mass connectivity and synchronization. Time was made visual and divided into smaller and smaller units that allowed us to achieve unprecedented levels of coordination [...] This trend has come to its logical conclusion because we all live inside a cage of time made up of 32 satellites orbiting Earth. Twentieth-century time was imposed on people from the top-down. Twenty-first century time is a bottom-up choose your own adventure story that allows people to make their own time machines and live anywhen.”
“One of my closest friends says his love language is deep attention. When I’m confused about a situation, he listens to what I have to say, directs me with careful questions, and then goes away for a few hours. Eventually, he comes back with a question or framing that slices through my fog. I treasure his speech deeply” — Attending to the other, Jasmine Wang
Module 5 - Tokens & Mechanism Design:
“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing play.”
“Bitcoin and Ethereum have no strategy - they are means of ordering transactional facts in time such that no one can claim ownership of either order or fact. Remember: we're not fighting the system, just abandoning it.”
Regarding incentives and narratives:
Bankless podcast episode “Epsilon theory” - fantastic piece on how the stock/crypto market can be examined through narratives between people
“Dr Ben Hunt makes the claim that epsilon is the term which captures other people's behaviour. In order to demonstrate this, he cites a lesser-known game, beloved by John Maynard Keynes: the common knowledge game. Back in the day, newspapers held beauty contests where they would post 10 pictures of beautiful women and have the public write in and vote on who was the prettiest lady in the land (Level 1). However, you might be rewarded if you voted for the winner. Which means, you ought to vote not for who you actually feel is prettiest, but who you feel everyone else will vote for as prettiest (Level 2). Level 3 is everyone figuring out what everyone else thinks about who the prettiest girl is, much like the stock market today. It's a question of what the consensus about the consensus is. It's game theory for crowds!”
Prosocial value:
“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.” Kurt Vonnegut, 1974
“What it would mean to design games that include goals like 1) Reducing loneliness 2) Decreasing Toxicity 3) Boosting a player's positive connections with others”
“The broad solution to both these problems is to design systems that build relationships between players.”
Three key prosocial measurements:
“Measuring the unmeasured: trust and positive-sum resources, knowledge in particular.”
“Facilitating connection: building for friendship formation, encouraging trade and fostering shared vulnerability.”
“Facilitating expression: through voting resources as economic tools and integrating social metrics with business success.”
Module 6 - Scaling Principled Games:
“When the incentives which define the structure of power in society can be programmed by anyone, anywhere; censorship resistance becomes an engineering problem, not an ideological one. This is clear if you read Vitalik's post - it's all about implementation details, not ideology.”
“Instead of using legal code to uphold the supposed good of free speech, we can use economic code to make censorship prohibitively expensive.”
“Bitcoin uses mathematics in the form of elliptic curve cryptography to route around the need for human regulation and thereby ensure some degree of censorship resistance. Ethereum does this too. However, Eth2 will use a different kind of mathematics - game theory - in addition to cryptography to ensure not just censorship resistance, but to prove objectively that censorship is asymmetrically expensive for those who would attempt it.”
“Unless you're burning to find the answer, and unless you're willing to give up everything in the pursuit of that answer, you will never truly learn it.”
“The Sacred Cow: Schooling” (pages 52-58): Interesting piece of text about schooling vs education in Puerto Rico. Quite frankly the exact opposite of Kernel.
Playing the crypto games is what Andy many times refers to as "‘Infinite Game’. It took me a while to understand the concept he was referring to, and it’s the comparison between Infinite Game and Finite Game from James P. Carse book. If you are trained to win you are playing Finite Game. If you are learning how to continue the play, you are playing Infinite Game. “To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”
Eth2 design principles: Simplicity, stability, sufficiency, defence, verifiability
“There are other features deliberately left to L2: (i) privacy, (ii) high-level programming languages, (iii) scalable state storage, and (iv) signature schemes because these features are all areas of rapid innovation, which tilts the trade-off towards ensuring we don't set some solution in the stone of our protocol spec for an area likely to develop extensively over the next 10 years.”
On slashing the validators: “In a system designed around penalties, you need to distinguish between various types of validator failure - most of which are benign (like simply being offline) - and only a few of which are genuinely malicious. Critically, it is the trade-off between different penalties which informs how we structure rewards.”
“What is Eth2? Well, we said it already: our generation's elder game of economic penalties. These penalties are the game mechanics we use to reveal a unique kind of truth: it is possible to build - and asymmetrically defend/maintain - an explicitly prosocial, global, and ownerless system that provably benefits all the people who choose to use it.”
“Module 6 - Serenity” provides a great overview of how the PoW system works in technical detail, with links to original docs
On Inventing (Bret Victor):
“Creators need an immediate connection to what they create.”
“So much of creation is discovery. And you can't discover anything if you can't see what you're doing [...] Having an immediate connection allows ideas to surface, and develop, in ways which were not before possible.”
The two videos on the “Module 6 - Principled” page showed how important tools are in fostering creativity, whether it’s coding or creating music. You need to have an immediate feedback loop.
Module 7 - Gift:
“So, let's look more carefully at those two loaded words: ideology and spirit. To do so, we'll consider a critical and often-overlooked part of hacker and cypherpunk culture: gift-giving.”
“Here's the secret to telling executable economic stories which can be used to program human incentives: don't guess what "the world" needs, ask what beautiful things you would do if there was money for it, and then write the code required to give that value.”
“In order to understand gift-giving properly, you need to hold in mind its complementary opposite: manipulation. When I give you a gift, you can either interpret it as a gift, pure and simple; or as me trying to hold one over on you, create a social debt, outdo you with my show of generosity, etc. This is to say that the act of giving does not create the gift: it is only when it is received in good faith that a gift truly exists.”
“The act of giving does not create gifts: it is only when one is received in good faith that a gift truly exists.”
“The psychology of giving reveals fascinating aspects of human consciousness. This is because gifts go against the scarcity we must navigate in order to survive and, in denying that scarcity, gift-giving is and always has been a profoundly meaningful act.”
“The sacred simply gives meaning to our lives; nothing more, nothing less. This is why the most potent gifts - sacrifices - are always at the heart of sacred ritual and initiatory rite.”