More short takes
Perhaps I should take up Twitter, but I already have this blog, and even my short takes tend to go a bit over 140 characters. So here goes: * The most important professions in the modern world may be...
View ArticlePascal's scams
Beware of what I call Pascal's scams: movements or belief systems that ask you to hope for or worry about very improbable outcomes that could have very large positive or negative consequences. (The...
View ArticlePascal's scams (ii)
Besides the robot apocalypse, there are many other, and often more important, examples of Pascal scams. The following may be or may have been such poorly evidenced but widely feared or hoped-for...
View ArticleThree philosophical essays
From Algorithmic Information Theory: Charles Bennett has discovered an objective measurement for sophistication. An example of sophistication is the structure of an airplane. We couldn't just throw...
View ArticleProxy measures, sunk costs, and Chesterton's fence
G.K. Chesterton ponders a fence: In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There...
View ArticleAuthority and ad hominem
Argument from authority ("I'm the expert") goes hand-in-hand with the ad hominem ("you're not"). Each may be rebutted by the other, and the average quality as evidence of arguments from authority are...
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Dead reckoning and the exploration explosion
Navigation is the art or science of combining information and reducing error to keep oneself on, or return oneself to, a route that will get you where you want to go. Note what I did not say here....
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Dead reckoning, maps, and errors
In my last post I introduced dead reckoning as used during the exploration explosion. In this post I will describe the errors these explorers (Dias, Columbus, da Gama, etc.) typically encountered in...
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A very underrated invention
Perhaps the most underrated invention in history is the humble hourglass. Invented in Europe during the late 13th or early 14th century, the sand glass complemented a nearly simultaneous invention,...
View ArticlePolitical relationships
In most political theories and ideologies, there is a preposterous oversimplification about what kinds of political relationships are desirable, common, or even possible. Given the irreduceable...
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European-Asian divergence predates the industrial revolution
Stephen Broadberry describes new estimates of per capita GDP which say that the economic divergence between Western Europe and other civilized parts of the world predates the industrial revolution....
View ArticleTransportation, divergence, and the industrial revolution
After about 1000 AD northwestern Europe started a gradual switch from using oxen to using horses for farm traction and transportation. This trend culminated in an eighteenth-century explosion in roads...
View ArticleThe dawn of trustworthy computing
When we currently use a smart phone or a laptop on a cell network or the Internet, the other end of these interactions typically run on other solo computers, such as web servers. Practically all of...
View ArticleSmall-game fallacies
A small-game fallacy occurs when game theorists, economists, or others trying to apply game-theoretic or microeconomic techniques to real-world problems, posit a simple, and thus cognizable,...
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The Greek financial mess; and some ways Bitcoin might help
Many years of government debt buildup in Greece has ultimately resulted, in the last few days, in a political and financial maelstrom. The political maelstrom includes demonstrations in the run up to...
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Estimating and minimizing consumer worry
The process of selling in general, and web commerce in particular, is often described or charted as a funnel. Prospective customers are poured in at one end, and a fewer number of paying customers come...
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Two Malthusian scares
Carter lectures the U.S. on energy, 1978 In 1798. the Reverend Thomas Malthus wrote his influential essay on population, arguing that population grows exponentially while the supply of food, energy,...
View ArticleThe trouble with books
The Chinese invented printing, but their writing system required a large number of typefaces, which made for very high up-front capital costs to print even a single short book. Centuries after the...
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Artifacts of wealth: patterns in the evolution of collectibles and money
Introduction This is the first of at least two posts on the evolution of collectibles and money. The goal is to explore the evolutionary and economic functions of the “ornamental” or “ceremonial”...
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