Matthew Mandel

I’m an investor at Union Square Ventures in NYC. I write about the things I’m most excited about like technology, philosophy, business, and culture. If you’re interested in following my writing, you can subscribe below:

  • On Shamelessness

    In the aftermath of Hamas’ brutal atrocities this weekend, I found myself greeted by throngs of people celebrating outside of my apartment. They were chanting “Intifada! Intifada! Intifada!”, expressing pride in what Hamas had done, and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, expressing their hope that Hamas will finish the job…

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  • Friday Links

    “I think that ironic detachment, from a religious perspective, is my weakness. You don’t read about a lot of saints who have ironic detachment.”

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  • Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning

    This is a cool paper from Anthropic. They trained a model to take the (hard-to-interpret) activations of a neural net and decompose them into distinct features. The goal of this approach is to build a set of features that are causally related to the original model and each uniquely correlate with some human-recognizable concept to…

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  • Rawls’ Theology and *The Devil Wears Prada*

    I liked this tweet from Zohar Atkins the other day. What Anne Hathaway’s character missed is how her world, the water she swims in, is downstream of the deliberate creations of artists, which are in turn the result of ideas from others that influenced those artists and so on. I used to be pretty suspicious…

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  • The Economics of Whaling Excursions

    I recently picked up Moby-Dick for the first time and have been enjoying learning about the economics of whaling excursions. For example, apparently retired ship captains would provide financing for a portfolio of ships, getting a stake for annuitants who weren’t involved with the day-to-day of investing, and would add value by helping with functions…

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