Labor Day: AI & Labor
We are finding ourselves in a strange place this Labor Day: the impact of AI is simultaneously being overestimated and underestimated. There is still massive hype surrounding self driving cars, which will almost certainly take much longer to arrive than [...] Read more
Speech and Power
There is a healthy debate going on now about the role of Twitter, Facebook, and others (Google, Apple, …) with regard to moderating speech on their platforms. Rather than writing something entirely new, I decided to go back and look [...] Read more
Browser, Wallet or Something New? Looking for Crypto Ease of Use
The internet was around for about two decades before the arrival of the web supercharged its growth. The ease of using a web browser made broad consumer adoption possible. Mobile payments were around for at least a decade before they [...] Read more
Blogging Hiatus: Reading More
Despite making progress on the recovery from my shoulder surgery, I have not been blogging and today will be another missed Uncertainty Wednesday. I have been spending the last few weeks of summer reading more which has been enjoyable. I [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Updating (Conclusion)
The last few Uncertainty Wednesdays had us look at how to model beliefs using probability distributions and then update those with a specific example of using the beta distribution. You may have noticed something odd about the way we updated [...] Read more
World After Capital: Limits of Capitalism (Self-Conservation)
NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital rounds out the section on limits of capitalism. We already saw the issue of missing prices, the problem of power laws and today talks about how the self-conservation of capitalism through the political [...] Read more
Principles (Introduction)
While I am working on my book World After Capital, I am also collecting ideas for an important project that I want to tackle afterwards: a compendium of principles. Before you think, oh Albert is going full on Ray Dalio, [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Updating (Beta Distribution 2)
Last Uncertainty Wednesday, I introduced the beta distribution to model our prior belief about the probability of Heads in a coin toss. We saw that for the parameters α = β = 1 the beta distribution gives us a uniform [...] Read more
World After Capital: Limits of Capitalism (Power Laws)
NOTE: Last week’s excerpt from World After Capital described how prices cannot exist for many of our most important attention allocation decisions. Today I describe how production functions with network effects result in power law distributions that have bad social [...] Read more