Economist Thomas Schelling made an important observation in his Nobel prize talk in 2005 when he said: "The most spectacular event of the past half century is one that did not occur.We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger."Thomas Schelling Nobel Prize Talk. This observation is no less true today, but we… Continue reading Deterrence and memory – is it dangerous to forget nuclear weapons?
Month: April 2021
Magic and miracles (Mental Models XIV)
One key problem for the church in medieval times was to explain why raising the dead, defying the elements and conjuring things was not magic. The challenge here was that Jesus did all of those things, and if they were interpreted as magic, then Jesus would be a wizard or sorcerer, not the son of… Continue reading Magic and miracles (Mental Models XIV)
Red queen evolution and industrialization / informatization
A simple model to think through (for flaws as well as merits): industrialization was a process with efficiency as the core competitive dimension, informatization is a process with learning as the core competitive dimension -- in a coarse grained model this would almost correspond to the different dimensions in evolution; the first adaptation to the… Continue reading Red queen evolution and industrialization / informatization
New episode of Regulate Tech – on Lessig’s code!
Speciation and diversity
In Ernst Mayr’s essay ”What is Darwinism”, there is a section on multiplication of species, in which Mayr notes that there still is a lot that we do not understand about speciation and how it occurs. This is interesting for a number of different reasons, but one small thing stood out to me in the… Continue reading Speciation and diversity
The US Supreme Court, ENA and institutional reform
It is probably correct to say that there has never been as much pressure to reform the US Supreme Court as right now. President Biden has proposed a commission to report in 6 months on court reform, and today a number of democrats presented a bill that would lead to expanding the number of justices… Continue reading The US Supreme Court, ENA and institutional reform