Google formed and then within a week dissolved an AI Ethics board, in the corporate equivalent of many celebrity weddings: ill conceived, but quickly ended. The calls for ethics in AI have been strong and understandable. AI is powerful technology that can and already has gone terribly wrong, as in the advertising and recommendation algorithms used by Facebook and Youtube. Now some of this stuff is obvious and there has been no lack of people pointing out the problems. If you train an algorith...

I got the idea for today’s Uncertainty Wednesday from seeing quite a few tweets in my timeline to the effect that startups don’t really have meaningful upside for employees. Tracing these tweets back, led me to this post titled “working for a startups makes increasingly less sense” which has the following quote in itThat startup sold for 200 million dollars and, as the 10th engineer, I made … 15000 dollars from that exit.First, let me do some math here: 0.015 / 200 = 0.000075 which is 0.0075%...

Google formed and then within a week dissolved an AI Ethics board, in the corporate equivalent of many celebrity weddings: ill conceived, but quickly ended. The calls for ethics in AI have been strong and understandable. AI is powerful technology that can and already has gone terribly wrong, as in the advertising and recommendation algorithms used by Facebook and Youtube. Now some of this stuff is obvious and there has been no lack of people pointing out the problems. If you train an algorith...

I got the idea for today’s Uncertainty Wednesday from seeing quite a few tweets in my timeline to the effect that startups don’t really have meaningful upside for employees. Tracing these tweets back, led me to this post titled “working for a startups makes increasingly less sense” which has the following quote in itThat startup sold for 200 million dollars and, as the 10th engineer, I made … 15000 dollars from that exit.First, let me do some math here: 0.015 / 200 = 0.000075 which is 0.0075%...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from my book World After Capital continues the chapter on psychological freedom. After the prior excerpts on freedom to learn and create, today is about the freedom to share. Freedom to ShareEven after we have created something, many of us are afraid to share it. We fear that someone will call our painting ugly, or our code incompetent, or our proposal naive. Given the state of much online commentary and “trolling” those fears are well founded. But at the same time, they...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from my book World After Capital continues the chapter on psychological freedom. After the prior excerpts on freedom to learn and create, today is about the freedom to share. Freedom to ShareEven after we have created something, many of us are afraid to share it. We fear that someone will call our painting ugly, or our code incompetent, or our proposal naive. Given the state of much online commentary and “trolling” those fears are well founded. But at the same time, they...

In the last few Uncertainty Wednesdays, we have been looking at various fallacies arising from our lack of appreciation of uncertainty, such as imperfect correlation (narrative fallacy) and the baserate fallacy. Today we will look at hindsight bias, for which the Mueller Report provides as perfect example. Hindsight bias is the tendency after an event occurs to conclude that we knew the event would occur all along. It is an ex-post reduction of the uncertainty that actually existed prior to t...

In the last few Uncertainty Wednesdays, we have been looking at various fallacies arising from our lack of appreciation of uncertainty, such as imperfect correlation (narrative fallacy) and the baserate fallacy. Today we will look at hindsight bias, for which the Mueller Report provides as perfect example. Hindsight bias is the tendency after an event occurs to conclude that we knew the event would occur all along. It is an ex-post reduction of the uncertainty that actually existed prior to t...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from my book World After Capital continues the chapter on psychological freedom.Freedom to CreateThe next step in the Knowledge Loop after learning is creating. Here too we need to work on our freedom. Picasso once said: “we all start out as artists, the challenge is to remain one.” My personal experience bears that out. I created many paintings growing up (some thankfully kept by my mother) that I doubt I would be able to create today. As adults we self-censor, inhibiti...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from my book World After Capital continues the chapter on psychological freedom.Freedom to CreateThe next step in the Knowledge Loop after learning is creating. Here too we need to work on our freedom. Picasso once said: “we all start out as artists, the challenge is to remain one.” My personal experience bears that out. I created many paintings growing up (some thankfully kept by my mother) that I doubt I would be able to create today. As adults we self-censor, inhibiti...

Last Friday I wrote about the power and danger of the meme of suppressed truth. In the post, I suggested that one form of countering negative memes is through positive ones. Since creating memes is definitely not my strength, please don’t expect any novel GIFs in this post. But let me start with an example of what I have in mind via GIPHY Yes, Captain Picard! Star Trek is a great source of positive memes. The show in its various incarnations is one of the only sustained narratives of a divers...

Last Friday I wrote about the power and danger of the meme of suppressed truth. In the post, I suggested that one form of countering negative memes is through positive ones. Since creating memes is definitely not my strength, please don’t expect any novel GIFs in this post. But let me start with an example of what I have in mind via GIPHY Yes, Captain Picard! Star Trek is a great source of positive memes. The show in its various incarnations is one of the only sustained narratives of a divers...

Last week’s Uncertainty Wednesday was titled “Fooled by Small Numbers” and discussed why drawing conclusions from small samples is dangerous. A reader asked how that relates to grounding the Boeing 737 Max 8 airplane after two crashes? Isn’t that also drawing a conclusion from a small sample? No. Because here we are actually looking not at a sample but at the population of all flights. Globally there are nearly 40 million commercial flights annually. That is over 100,000 flights every day! Ea...

Last week’s Uncertainty Wednesday was titled “Fooled by Small Numbers” and discussed why drawing conclusions from small samples is dangerous. A reader asked how that relates to grounding the Boeing 737 Max 8 airplane after two crashes? Isn’t that also drawing a conclusion from a small sample? No. Because here we are actually looking not at a sample but at the population of all flights. Globally there are nearly 40 million commercial flights annually. That is over 100,000 flights every day! Ea...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from my book World After Capital continues the discussion of Psychological Freedom by examining how we can make ourselves free to learn.Freedom to LearnYoung kids ask upwards of three hundred questions a day. [122] Humans are naturally curious, and it’s precisely this curiosity that has driven so much of our progress. At the same time, our curiosity in some ways didn’t match well with the Industrial Age. If you want to employ people in a factory job that has them perform...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from my book World After Capital continues the discussion of Psychological Freedom by examining how we can make ourselves free to learn.Freedom to LearnYoung kids ask upwards of three hundred questions a day. [122] Humans are naturally curious, and it’s precisely this curiosity that has driven so much of our progress. At the same time, our curiosity in some ways didn’t match well with the Industrial Age. If you want to employ people in a factory job that has them perform...

At dinner last night a friend in his mid 50s asked, quite genuinely: so what exactly is a meme? Our teenage son laughed about this apparent ignorance but the confusion is well founded given that many people today use the word to mean a short lived fad on the internet, as compared to the original usage as a unit of meaning that is culturally transmitted and self-replicating (hence the coinage which is based on “gene”). The two usages are obviously related and yet also different. In particular,...

At dinner last night a friend in his mid 50s asked, quite genuinely: so what exactly is a meme? Our teenage son laughed about this apparent ignorance but the confusion is well founded given that many people today use the word to mean a short lived fad on the internet, as compared to the original usage as a unit of meaning that is culturally transmitted and self-replicating (hence the coinage which is based on “gene”). The two usages are obviously related and yet also different. In particular,...

The last couple of Uncertainty Wednesdays examined fallacies based on statistical phenomena such as imperfect correlation and the base rate. Another one of these has to do with small numbers. A famous example of this fallacy occurred when a study showed that among the best performing schools in the country there was a high percentage of small schools. This resulted in a push for making schools smaller. A lot of money and effort was expended on this push for smaller schools. That is, until som...

The last couple of Uncertainty Wednesdays examined fallacies based on statistical phenomena such as imperfect correlation and the base rate. Another one of these has to do with small numbers. A famous example of this fallacy occurred when a study showed that among the best performing schools in the country there was a high percentage of small schools. This resulted in a push for making schools smaller. A lot of money and effort was expended on this push for smaller schools. That is, until som...