NOTE: This is part of a series of excerpts from my book World After Capital. Today’s post continues on the idea from last week that privacy is not compatible with technological progress (if you would rather watch a talk, you can find some of the same material in my Blockstack Berlin presentation). —- So why do I keep asserting the impossibility of assuring privacy? Don’t we have encryption? Encryption is great for securing information in transit and at rest, but there are problems that encryp...

NOTE: This is part of a series of excerpts from my book World After Capital. Today’s post continues on the idea from last week that privacy is not compatible with technological progress (if you would rather watch a talk, you can find some of the same material in my Blockstack Berlin presentation). —- So why do I keep asserting the impossibility of assuring privacy? Don’t we have encryption? Encryption is great for securing information in transit and at rest, but there are problems that encryp...

The question of “How Much is Enough?” isn’t just the title of an excellent book by Edward and Robert Skidelsky, but has come to be at the forefront of political debate. We are finally discussing such topics as a wealth tax and openly questioning whether there should be billionaires altogether. At the same time we are being treated to the spectacle of one billionaire flirting with a run as an independent candidate for the US presidency and another taking to Medium to fight extortion by a publi...

The question of “How Much is Enough?” isn’t just the title of an excellent book by Edward and Robert Skidelsky, but has come to be at the forefront of political debate. We are finally discussing such topics as a wealth tax and openly questioning whether there should be billionaires altogether. At the same time we are being treated to the spectacle of one billionaire flirting with a run as an independent candidate for the US presidency and another taking to Medium to fight extortion by a publi...

NOTE: This is part of a series of excerpts from my book World After Capital. Today’s post wraps up the prior discussion of why as part of increasing informational freedom we should embrace a post privacy world. —- So we can’t really protect privacy without handing control of technology into the hands of a few and conversely decentralized innovation requires reduced privacy. What should we do? The answer, I think, is to embrace a post-privacy world. We should work to protect people and their f...

NOTE: This is part of a series of excerpts from my book World After Capital. Today’s post wraps up the prior discussion of why as part of increasing informational freedom we should embrace a post privacy world. —- So we can’t really protect privacy without handing control of technology into the hands of a few and conversely decentralized innovation requires reduced privacy. What should we do? The answer, I think, is to embrace a post-privacy world. We should work to protect people and their f...

In sports some people believe that there is a Sports Illustrated cover jinx: teams or individual athletes featured on the cover for outstanding performance, subsequently have a bad season. One explanation for this phenomenon is regression to the mean. The prior year’s performance, which earned the cover spot, is based on a combination of skill and luck. The skill persists to the next period but the luck does not (and in fact is just as likely to turn into “bad luck”). So being featured on the...

In sports some people believe that there is a Sports Illustrated cover jinx: teams or individual athletes featured on the cover for outstanding performance, subsequently have a bad season. One explanation for this phenomenon is regression to the mean. The prior year’s performance, which earned the cover spot, is based on a combination of skill and luck. The skill persists to the next period but the luck does not (and in fact is just as likely to turn into “bad luck”). So being featured on the...

In Uncertainty Wednesday I have talked a lot about the danger of doing statistics without a model. Another big danger is ignoring dynamic processes and conducting static analyses instead. That is you may have an explanation, such as “a person’s height is influenced by their genes” and you will wind up drawing very different conclusions if you take a static perspective. Here is a great chart from Our World in Data on the average height in three countries over time (a dynamic version available ...

In Uncertainty Wednesday I have talked a lot about the danger of doing statistics without a model. Another big danger is ignoring dynamic processes and conducting static analyses instead. That is you may have an explanation, such as “a person’s height is influenced by their genes” and you will wind up drawing very different conclusions if you take a static perspective. Here is a great chart from Our World in Data on the average height in three countries over time (a dynamic version available ...

After an excursion for the last few Uncertainty Wednesdays into the topic of intelligence, I want to return to how to think about risk. In a post about a decade ago I wrote that it is possible for a startup to be too innovative by trying too many new things at one. Here is the key line from that post:If you innovate along too many dimensions at once you are multiplying risk (as startup risk is multiplicative, not additive). So what does it mean for startup risk to be multiplicative and not ad...

After an excursion for the last few Uncertainty Wednesdays into the topic of intelligence, I want to return to how to think about risk. In a post about a decade ago I wrote that it is possible for a startup to be too innovative by trying too many new things at one. Here is the key line from that post:If you innovate along too many dimensions at once you are multiplying risk (as startup risk is multiplicative, not additive). So what does it mean for startup risk to be multiplicative and not ad...

No matter whether you think Amazon HQ2 in New York was a good or a bad idea, it is worth considering how terrible the execution of the whole affair has been. It all started with the way Amazon conducted the search for the new location. Making a bunch of cities compete in a secret bidding contest may strike some people as brilliant but was always a terrible idea. Didn’t anyone at Amazon think: “Hey we are one of the world’s most valuable companies, run by the world’s richest person and so aski...

No matter whether you think Amazon HQ2 in New York was a good or a bad idea, it is worth considering how terrible the execution of the whole affair has been. It all started with the way Amazon conducted the search for the new location. Making a bunch of cities compete in a secret bidding contest may strike some people as brilliant but was always a terrible idea. Didn’t anyone at Amazon think: “Hey we are one of the world’s most valuable companies, run by the world’s richest person and so aski...

In the last few days Apple suspended the enterprise certificates for first Facebook and then Google, rendering internal iOS apps instantly useless. Apple did so in response to revelations that both companies had used the enterprise certificates to distribute VPN apps to teenagers in order to better understand phone usage. This is apparently in violation of the enterprise certificate license. Some people have cheered Apple’s actions as not only justified but appropriate sanctions on Facebook a...

In the last few days Apple suspended the enterprise certificates for first Facebook and then Google, rendering internal iOS apps instantly useless. Apple did so in response to revelations that both companies had used the enterprise certificates to distribute VPN apps to teenagers in order to better understand phone usage. This is apparently in violation of the enterprise certificate license. Some people have cheered Apple’s actions as not only justified but appropriate sanctions on Facebook a...

NOTE: This is part of a series of excerpts from my book World After Capital. Today’s section introduces the idea that privacy is a strategy for freedom that has real downsides if we want to enter the Knowledge Age. In case you missed it, I posted a talk last week that summarizes my case for getting over privacy.Getting Over PrivacyCopyrights and patents aren’t the only legal limitations slowing down the Digital Knowledge Loop. We are actively creating new restrictions in the form of well-inte...

NOTE: This is part of a series of excerpts from my book World After Capital. Today’s section introduces the idea that privacy is a strategy for freedom that has real downsides if we want to enter the Knowledge Age. In case you missed it, I posted a talk last week that summarizes my case for getting over privacy.Getting Over PrivacyCopyrights and patents aren’t the only legal limitations slowing down the Digital Knowledge Loop. We are actively creating new restrictions in the form of well-inte...

Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday will be the last post for a while about matters related to intelligence following my posts on the problems of sample correlation under fat tails and on dynamic versus static models. Now might be a good time to state that I firmly believe we should be researching human intelligence including its genetic component. This should not be off limits to science, especially at a time when we are actively building artificial intelligence and making major progress in neuros...

Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday will be the last post for a while about matters related to intelligence following my posts on the problems of sample correlation under fat tails and on dynamic versus static models. Now might be a good time to state that I firmly believe we should be researching human intelligence including its genetic component. This should not be off limits to science, especially at a time when we are actively building artificial intelligence and making major progress in neuros...