This week's newsletter was about injecting noise, and the use of divination as a mental tool for shaking and breaking our framing of the world. The idea that divination and fortune telling can have a use in rational thinking is not that radical, but I still think it is a powerful reminder that the human… Continue reading Committing to noise
Pseudo-fossils
One of the things we are looking for on Mars are signs that the red planet might at some point in time have housed life. Fossils would be a telltale sign - and finding fossils would certainly be the scientific find of the century, or of all time. But how do we know that we… Continue reading Pseudo-fossils
The long shadow of the Gulag
In a remarkable, recent paper, two researchers can show that in and around the camps where there were more "enemies of the people" - highly educated academics and artists - growth today is higher and creativity is flourishing. It is both a testament to the resilience of human beings and how creative people bring value… Continue reading The long shadow of the Gulag
Utopias
I attended an interesting seminar on utopias a few days back. The seminar has stuck with me for a couple of reasons. One is that I do not think Utopias matter much to us anymore in the West, we have converged on a single scenario for the future that does not really graduate to a… Continue reading Utopias
Pandemic periodicity
We have written before about the question of how often we should expect pandemics -- the simple model we applied then was this: is Covid-19 an example of a Spanish flu like event and so likely 1/100 years or should we consider it a sars-virus spill over event, of which we roughly have 1/10 year… Continue reading Pandemic periodicity
Folk prediction
What kind of data sets can be helpful for predictions? One category of data that often are ignored are the data that you can get by simply asking people - or, as it is sometimes called, "walking about". In a recent article about predicting unemployment, the authors note that this kind of often qualitative data… Continue reading Folk prediction
Ten year horizons – a methodological note
How can we deal with ten year forecasting and planning in an interesting way? The naive approach would be to simply guess what state of the world will be probable in ten years, and then describe that as well as we can. This is akin to a kind of science fiction writing, and can add… Continue reading Ten year horizons – a methodological note
Complementarity (Mental Models XVII)
Niels Bohr proposed that one fundamental insight of quantum physics was that some phenomena or systems could be described in two or more mutually exclusive ways and that it would be a mistake to pick one description as the "right one" - both could be accurate. This violates the logical dictum of the excluded middle,… Continue reading Complementarity (Mental Models XVII)
Capability forecasting
A lot of work has gone into what is sometimes called "technology forecasting" - attempting to understand how semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, proteomics etc will evolve over the coming years. Such research is valuable and interesting - and can be interestingly contrasted with something we could call "capability forecasting". Capability forecasting is focusing not… Continue reading Capability forecasting
Thinking in indices (Mental Models XVI)
The idea of an index in economy is simple: find a way to measure a change in an ensemble of values in a single value, and then track that single value over time. The challenges are many: how do you pick the values in your basket, and do you weight them differently? Do you update… Continue reading Thinking in indices (Mental Models XVI)