The internet was around for about two decades before the arrival of the web supercharged its growth. The ease of using a web browser made broad consumer adoption possible. Mobile payments were around for at least a decade before they started to take off. Again the key factor to adoption was ease of use – this time in the form of wallets that are actually integrated with in-app payments and widely accepted at the point of sale such as Google and Apple Pay (in other parts of the world adoption ...

The internet was around for about two decades before the arrival of the web supercharged its growth. The ease of using a web browser made broad consumer adoption possible. Mobile payments were around for at least a decade before they started to take off. Again the key factor to adoption was ease of use – this time in the form of wallets that are actually integrated with in-app payments and widely accepted at the point of sale such as Google and Apple Pay (in other parts of the world adoption ...

Despite making progress on the recovery from my shoulder surgery, I have not been blogging and today will be another missed Uncertainty Wednesday. I have been spending the last few weeks of summer reading more which has been enjoyable. I am learning about Zero Knowledge Proofs from various blogs, including Vitalik Buterin’s excellent posts on the topic. I am also nearly finished with Michael Pollan’s “How to Change your Mind” about psychedelic drugs. And I am halfway into Judea Pearl’s “The B...

Despite making progress on the recovery from my shoulder surgery, I have not been blogging and today will be another missed Uncertainty Wednesday. I have been spending the last few weeks of summer reading more which has been enjoyable. I am learning about Zero Knowledge Proofs from various blogs, including Vitalik Buterin’s excellent posts on the topic. I am also nearly finished with Michael Pollan’s “How to Change your Mind” about psychedelic drugs. And I am halfway into Judea Pearl’s “The B...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital rounds out the section on limits of capitalism. We already saw the issue of missing prices, the problem of power laws and today talks about how the self-conservation of capitalism through the political system keeps attention trapped in the job loop.Self-ConservationToward the end of the Agrarian Age, when land was scarce, the political elites came from land ownership. Their influence really wasn’t substantially diminished until after World War II...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital rounds out the section on limits of capitalism. We already saw the issue of missing prices, the problem of power laws and today talks about how the self-conservation of capitalism through the political system keeps attention trapped in the job loop.Self-ConservationToward the end of the Agrarian Age, when land was scarce, the political elites came from land ownership. Their influence really wasn’t substantially diminished until after World War II...

The last few Uncertainty Wednesdays had us look at how to model beliefs using probability distributions and then update those with a specific example of using the beta distribution. You may have noticed something odd about the way we updated the parameters of the beta distribution: add 1 to α when we observe heads and add 1 to β when we observe tails. This wipes out any and all ordering information. So let’s say you have a total of 100 observations. With this update rule the only thing that m...

The last few Uncertainty Wednesdays had us look at how to model beliefs using probability distributions and then update those with a specific example of using the beta distribution. You may have noticed something odd about the way we updated the parameters of the beta distribution: add 1 to α when we observe heads and add 1 to β when we observe tails. This wipes out any and all ordering information. So let’s say you have a total of 100 observations. With this update rule the only thing that m...

Last Uncertainty Wednesday, I introduced the beta distribution to model our prior belief about the probability of Heads in a coin toss. We saw that for the parameters α = β = 1 the beta distribution gives us a uniform prior, which expresses the highest degree of uncertainty (you may want to revisit the earlier post on entropy for that). Now I will toss an actual coin while writing this post. Wait. It came up tails (i.e. not heads). What should our new values be for α and β? As it turns out th...

Last Uncertainty Wednesday, I introduced the beta distribution to model our prior belief about the probability of Heads in a coin toss. We saw that for the parameters α = β = 1 the beta distribution gives us a uniform prior, which expresses the highest degree of uncertainty (you may want to revisit the earlier post on entropy for that). Now I will toss an actual coin while writing this post. Wait. It came up tails (i.e. not heads). What should our new values be for α and β? As it turns out th...

NOTE: Last week’s excerpt from World After Capital described how prices cannot exist for many of our most important attention allocation decisions. Today I describe how production functions with network effects result in power law distributions that have bad social and economic implications.Power LawsEconomics is not normative when it comes to the distribution of income and wealth. Many different outcomes are possible and what is realized depends a lot on the underlying production functions. ...

NOTE: Last week’s excerpt from World After Capital described how prices cannot exist for many of our most important attention allocation decisions. Today I describe how production functions with network effects result in power law distributions that have bad social and economic implications.Power LawsEconomics is not normative when it comes to the distribution of income and wealth. Many different outcomes are possible and what is realized depends a lot on the underlying production functions. ...

While I am working on my book World After Capital, I am also collecting ideas for an important project that I want to tackle afterwards: a compendium of principles. Before you think, oh Albert is going full on Ray Dalio, let me provide the definition of “principle” the Oxford Dictionary: (1) A fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behaviour or for a chain of reasoning. (2) A general scientific theorem or law that has numerous special applicat...

While I am working on my book World After Capital, I am also collecting ideas for an important project that I want to tackle afterwards: a compendium of principles. Before you think, oh Albert is going full on Ray Dalio, let me provide the definition of “principle” the Oxford Dictionary: (1) A fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behaviour or for a chain of reasoning. (2) A general scientific theorem or law that has numerous special applicat...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital starts to explain why capitalism cannot solve the problem of allocating attention which is scarce at the individual and collective levels.Limits Of CapitalismCapitalism has been extraordinarily successful. So much so that even communist countries like China, that had long sought a different path, have embraced it. But capitalism cannot solve the scarcity of attention without significant changes in regulation and self-regulation. That’s due to thr...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital starts to explain why capitalism cannot solve the problem of allocating attention which is scarce at the individual and collective levels.Limits Of CapitalismCapitalism has been extraordinarily successful. So much so that even communist countries like China, that had long sought a different path, have embraced it. But capitalism cannot solve the scarcity of attention without significant changes in regulation and self-regulation. That’s due to thr...

Facebook is in the unique position today to face both the problems of centralization and decentralization. On its centralized core platform it is confronted with making content decisions, while on WhatsApp it struggles with slowing down the spread of rumors and calls for violence. Just to be clear, I have no sympathy for Facebook which has been arrogant about these issues and has put growth above anything else. Nonetheless everyone who is building new decentralized platforms would do well to ...

Facebook is in the unique position today to face both the problems of centralization and decentralization. On its centralized core platform it is confronted with making content decisions, while on WhatsApp it struggles with slowing down the spread of rumors and calls for violence. Just to be clear, I have no sympathy for Facebook which has been arrogant about these issues and has put growth above anything else. Nonetheless everyone who is building new decentralized platforms would do well to ...

Independence Day is a cheesy summer action blockbuster. And yet, after watching it one can’t help but feel good about humanity defeating an existential threat using courage, technology and science (and doing so under American leadership). The irony today is that we face such a species level threat. It just happens to be invisible and slow moving. I am talking about the greenhouse gases that are slowly but steadily warming up our planet (in particular our oceans) and our atmosphere. Climate ch...

Independence Day is a cheesy summer action blockbuster. And yet, after watching it one can’t help but feel good about humanity defeating an existential threat using courage, technology and science (and doing so under American leadership). The irony today is that we face such a species level threat. It just happens to be invisible and slow moving. I am talking about the greenhouse gases that are slowly but steadily warming up our planet (in particular our oceans) and our atmosphere. Climate ch...