Ben Casnocha
About
Cowen's friend associated with the idea of life hacks
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Claims by Ben Casnocha (10)
Cognitive Enhancement Drugs Will Drive Inequality
Easy-to-obtain focus-and-wakefulness drugs like modafinil are 'Chapter One' of a long era of brain-hacking; driven, ambitious people will pay any monetary price and accept unknown side effects to think faster and sleep less, raising profound ethical and inequality questions if only those who can spend large sums gain cognitive advantages.
Silicon Valley Walls Are Porous to Intelligence
The walls between a company and its peers are far more porous than commonly assumed; intelligence flows actively from alumni back to companies and between employees of competing firms, and Valley culture and policies are structured to maximize this flow because rapid adaptation depends on it—accepting some risk in exchange.
Meaning and Work Are Not a Dichotomy
The notion that pursuing a career means you must stop reflecting on identity and deeper questions is misguided; such reflection is often more productive when pursued in concert with real-world work, so meaning and vocation are mutually enriching rather than mutually exclusive.
Home Ownership Locks Workers in Place
Home ownership, romanticized as an ideal, often locks people into a location and prevents them from relocating to where their skills are in demand—a downside of US housing policy that critics overlook, since a house is just an asset and frequently a bad and expensive one.
Companies Shifted From Family to Free Agency
For most of the 20th century American companies thought of themselves as families offering lifetime employment in exchange for loyalty, but globalization and technology made that unaffordable—as captured by GE going from 'employee job security is a prime objective' (1963) to Jack Welch's 'if you want loyalty, get a dog'—shifting to a minimalist free-agency model.
Free Agency Destroys the Trust Needed for Investment
The minimalist, laissez-faire free-agent employment relationship fails to build the trust that lets employees do their best work and lets both sides invest over the long term, and it is precisely that long-term investment that creates the innovation and adaptation companies need to compete.
Specific Missions and Dual-Mission Alignment
Great companies have specific missions that distinguish them from competitors, and defining what you are not lets employees visualize and buy in; but the Alliance reframes this as dual-mission alignment—the company simultaneously seeks to understand each employee's personal mission and aims only for sufficient alignment for a specific tour of duty, rather than demanding the employee subsume themselves into the corporate mission.
Trust Enables Long-Term Human Capital Investment
Companies can only invest over the medium and long term—launching projects, training, putting people on long-term work—if they have some predictability that employees will remain; an open, trust-based Alliance lets both sides commit incrementally to successive tours of duty, so the employer dares to invest and the employee ensures a smooth transition if they must leave early.
Companies Can Cooperate and Compete Simultaneously
Companies can cooperate on some dimensions while competing on others—exemplified by Netflix running its entire streaming infrastructure on Amazon AWS servers even as Amazon launches a competing video service—a powerful but complicated idea that many people miss, and worry over employees joining competitors reflects this misunderstanding.
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