How ergodicity reimagines economics for the benefit of us all “Expected utility theory has become so familiar to experts in economics, finance and risk-management in general that most see it as the obvious method of reasoning. Many see no alternatives. But that’s a mistake. This inspired LML efforts to rewrite the foundations of economic theory, […]
Book Review: Secular Cycles “If history is just “one damn thing after another”, there’s no framework for figuring out what matters, what’s worth learning, what follows what else. The secular cycle idea creates a structure that everything fits into neatly. I know that the Plantagenet Dynasty lasted from 1154 – 1485, because it had to, […]
A New Clue to How Life Originated “It means that two of the essential components of life, a protocell’s membrane and its proteins, provided the conditions for each other to exist. By sticking to the fatty acids, the amino acids gave them stability. In turn, the fatty acids concentrated the amino acids, perhaps encouraging them […]
Peter Thiel’s Religion “Moreover, cathedrals can only be built with scientific knowledge and communal support. They require scientists, mathematicians, engineers, craftsmen, and artists. And all of them need a long time horizon. Long time horizons aren’t just psychological. They’re cultural. Modern society suffers from temporal exhaustion. Or as, sociologist Elise Boulding once said: “If one […]
Notes from a nameless conference “The industrial elites have lost their way. In every major profession and institution, they once commanded vast, widely-admired projects that filled their lives with meaning and endowed the entire class with an unconquerable confidence. But the twentieth century couldn’t be preserved forever, like a bug in amber. The elites now […]
Book Review: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test “Everyone had a movie. The cops had a cop movie, businessmen had a businessman movie, trauma victims had trauma victim movies. Everyone was just reading their script, doing what was expected of them. But with enough enlightenment (realistically: drugs), you could break out of other people’s movies – […]
The Economist Who Would Fix the American Dream “Hearing stories of the American dream as a boy in New Delhi, Chetty adopted the faith. When he became a scientist, he discerned the truth. What remains is contradiction: We must believe in the dream and we must accept that it is false—then, perhaps, we will be […]
In Defense of Nationalism: Notes on Yoram Hazony and His Critics “Hazony wants to shift our attention from questions about the conditions of legitimacy for a political order, which have dominated Western debates since Locke, to the conditions for sustaining a political order, the conditions that ensure that individuals see themselves as part of a […]
Coffee, Magic and the ineffable joy of Hunter Pence ($) ““I can’t really control what others think of me, I can only offer love,” Pence says. “I can only control what I offer to others, and what I offer to the game. So I have a mindset that like I always offer love, regardless of […]
What the Burnaby Mountain Gondola Teaches us about Loss “The working theory amongst city builders whenever a group of NIMBYs pipe up about any given development in an urban environment is that people simply don’t like change. That’s nonsense. People love change. If you get a sought-after job, a new girlfriend/boyfriend, a first car or […]
Whose advice should you take? “Rather than seeking out the general wisdom of our elders and superiors about the way things are, we should have a view of things that is probabilistic, about the way things are right now. We should evaluate it fairly constantly, and keep updating it. Finance advice is simple and fairly […]
Moral intuition vs. tradition “Moral intuition is largely grounded in sub-Dunbar society. Our intuition tells us what is fair and just in a small tribe doing simple tasks. Tradition is how we were able to achieve cooperation at scale and complexity. We gradually evolved cultural norms and institutions that allow millions of people to cooperate […]
Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success “To start the ritual, the shoulder blade was heated over hot coals in a way that caused patterns of cracks and burnt spots to form. This patterning was then read as a kind of map, which was held in a pre-specified orientation. The cracking patterns were (probably) essentially […]
Social Status: Down the Rabbit Hole “The beginning of wisdom about social status is learning to distinguish its two (and only two) primary forms: dominance and prestige. These are, as one research paper puts it, the “two ways to the top.” If dominance is the kind of status we get from intimidating others, prestige is […]
Strong Towns: Do You Want to Know What Works? “The building of cities shifted from being a co-creation of the people who lived there to a technical undertaking by professionals. The method of change shifted from a painstaking craft to more of an assembly line. The mature city was assembled incrementally on a continuum of […]
Why Are the Prices So Damn High? “The price of services relative to goods has been rising because productivity in services has increased more slowly than productivity in goods. At the same time, the services sector has been growing as a share of the economy. […] Because society is moving more resources into lower-productivity sectors, […]
The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet “Imagine a dark forest at night. It’s deathly quiet. Nothing moves. Nothing stirs. This could lead one to assume that the forest is devoid of life. But of course, it’s not. The dark forest is full of life. It’s quiet because night is when the predators come out. […]
Clemens on minimum wage “But let me express a doubt. Why do we discuss minimum wages so much? I think they irritate free-market economists because they are such a clear, simple, and paradigmatic stupid idea. The first insight of your Econ 101 class is that price controls destroy markets: We see it over and over […]
Civilisational collapse has a bright past – but a dark future “Finally, it’s significant that the world has become more networked and complex. This enhances our capabilities, but makes systemic failures more likely. A mathematical-systems study in Nature in 2010 found that interconnected networks are more prone to random failure than isolated ones. Similarly, while […]
Rules for wrongdoers “On the one hand, Cicero says we can organize our interactions with words; and on the other, we can organize them through force. The Kantian thought is that this distinction from Cicero gives us the resources not only to see the difference between war and peace, but to see how both the […]