My List of Mental Models “When I see a problem, it’s becoming more and more of a reflex to immediately open my mental toolkit of models (otherwise called frameworks) to both dissect, understand, and solve the problem.”

When does science finally take ‘no’ for an answer? “The improved calculation of Mercury’s orbit was, in fact, a crucial first test of Einstein’s new theory. What moral to draw, then, of the non-existence of Vulcan and the subsequent triumph of general relativity? At the least this: science is unique among human ways of knowing […]

In Sweden, a Cash-Free Future Nears – The New York Times “Bills and coins now represent just 2 percent of Sweden’s economy, compared with 7.7 percent in the United States and 10 percent in the euro area. This year, only about 20 percent of all consumer payments in Sweden have been made in cash, compared […]

Democracy’s Destabilizer: TMI “We are in the very early days of what he calls the Fifth Wave. Institutions that developed in the age of industrialized, top-down mass media are losing legitimacy while new arrangements have yet to evolve. The challenge is to manage the hazardous transition to a new stage without falling into nihilistic chaos […]

Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Aren’t Certain — The Guesstimate Blog — Medium “This is why I’ve made Guesstimate, a spreadsheet that’s as easy to use as existing spreadsheets, but works for uncertain values. For any cell you can enter confidence intervals (lower and upper bounds) that can represent full probability distributions. 5000 […]