The sun is setting over Camden. A new work week is coming up, and we are not sure who we are - or who we will be. Most of us are becoming. I met a man in the street today, walking down to buy some groceries, who walked slowly, elegantly dressed and speaking to a… Continue reading Evening thoughts
Dimensionality
"What is the right dimensionality of this problem?" This question - deceptively simple - is a good way to avoid defaulting into the dimensionalities that are most available to us - 2 or 3 dimensions to a problem, and, frankly, mostly two. Often when we describe a problem we somehow come back to the simple… Continue reading Dimensionality
Agents or victims
The New Yorker recently published an essay asking how bad social media is for democracy. It is a thoughtful text, looking at two different perspectives and suggesting that the real picture is, well, complex. The simplest statement of the hypothesis would look something like this: (I) Social media is eroding democracy The article notes, not… Continue reading Agents or victims
Energy and innovation (Questions)
It seems clear that the ability we have as a civilization to capture energy is directly related to the space of possible inventions we can unlock. If we wanted to do a classical technology tree, we would find, at the joints, the ability to capture energy in different ways. Som inventions are much more likely,… Continue reading Energy and innovation (Questions)
Webs of knowledge – an afterthought
In this week's Unpredictable Patterns I explored the idea of how trust, truth and knowledge relate to each-other. After having written that I came upon this article by Brian Leiter on epistemic authorities and the regulation of speech -- which is another kind of take on the same issue. Leiter suggests that empiricism increasingly is… Continue reading Webs of knowledge – an afterthought
Committing to noise
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