In the beginning of the pandemic I wrote a blogpost in Swedish, inspired by Tyler Cowen, arguing that we owe it to ourselves to predict a number of fatalities that we believe would within what we expect to reach - because without this we just recede into a position of referenceless criticism. The key I… Continue reading Talking about numbers – evaluating pandemic responses (In Swedish)
It is fair to say that playing video games have a number of positive cognitive and attentional effects (see this metastudy of 116 different papers), but one thing that is rarely highlighted is the fact that video games in some cases offer mental models that can be applied cross domains and used to think through… Continue reading 10 questions for thinking in games (Mental Models VII)
This paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is an interesting signal for determining what happens to the economy post-pandemic. It shows a sharp recovery in the starting of new businesses - and when compared to the Great recession this really is evidence of resilience - but! - and this may be a marker… Continue reading What will the pandemic mean for the composition of our economy?
In what has become the accepted wisdom, income does not increase your happiness over some level - usually at around 75000 USD / year. But in a recent paper on PNAS that claim was shown to be false...or was it? The debate that has been raging about the paper since it came out has been… Continue reading Can money buy you happiness? On comfort science.
This article discusses a subject that increasingly has caught my interest: what is a good explanation? This is an old question in philosophy - and deciding that something is an explanation of some fact or phenomenon is not as straightforward as it seems. Explanations can operate at different levels and we may decide that different… Continue reading What kind of explainer are you? (Mental Models VI)
The stagnation hypothesis, the idea that we have seen steady decline across science and technology over the last 50 years or so is increasingly gaining ground and becoming mainstream: Thiel, along with economists such as Tyler Cowen (The Great Stagnation) and Robert Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth), promotes a “stagnation hypothesis”: that… Continue reading Exploring the Stagnation Hypothesis
This time, Richard Allan discusses the Arab Spring, what we have learned as a society and how the Arab Spring might play out today. It is an interesting discussion, and Richard was close to the whole thing in a way that makes it really worthwhile to hear him think through the issues and challenges. All… Continue reading Regulate Tech #2: The Arab Spring Revisited
Looking for new perspectives? Here are a few articles to check out. "The New National American Elite" by Michael Lind. In this article, Lind suggests that the US has first now established a national elite - and risen from the fragmented state aristocracies that used to compete with each-other nationally: "In short, a historical narrative… Continue reading Three pieces – Friday reading & links
As President Joe Biden now takes on the presidency he is facing a lot of substantive challenges, but he also faces an interesting stylistic one - and that is how he communicates. We seem to be back to press-briefings and less of the tweeting that the former president excelled in until his account was banned.… Continue reading President Biden and the attention-deficit
Wikipedia celebrates its 20th birthday and there are a lot of interesting articles out there about the wonderful and weird phenomenon that wikipedians have created and are curating. Here are a few of the perhaps less well-known "No Rest for the Wiki: The free encyclopedia is one of the last vestiges of an earlier internet"… Continue reading Wikipedia and the future of the Internet