NOTE: I am resuming publishing excerpts from my draft book World After Capital. Today’s section continues the discussion of why attention is scarce. Since it has been five weeks, I recommend first rereading the prior section which introduces attention scarcity.Collective Attention ScarcityAt the same time our collective attention is also scarce. How so? Humanity as a whole is not devoting nearly enough attention towards moving knowledge forward with regard to a variety of threats and opportun...

NOTE: I am resuming publishing excerpts from my draft book World After Capital. Today’s section continues the discussion of why attention is scarce. Since it has been five weeks, I recommend first rereading the prior section which introduces attention scarcity.Collective Attention ScarcityAt the same time our collective attention is also scarce. How so? Humanity as a whole is not devoting nearly enough attention towards moving knowledge forward with regard to a variety of threats and opportun...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital is about attention. It argues why attention is scarce in the sense of scarcity introduced earlier in the book. This section sets up the demands on attention and then talks about scarcity of attention for the individual (next time will look at scarcity of attention for society as a whole).AttentionThere is a limited amount of human attention in the world. We have 24 hours in the day and we need to spend some of that time eating and sleeping. For m...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital is about attention. It argues why attention is scarce in the sense of scarcity introduced earlier in the book. This section sets up the demands on attention and then talks about scarcity of attention for the individual (next time will look at scarcity of attention for society as a whole).AttentionThere is a limited amount of human attention in the world. We have 24 hours in the day and we need to spend some of that time eating and sleeping. For m...

It’s been six weeks since the last Uncertainty Wednesday, so I strongly suggest you go back first and read that post which provides an introduction to the idea of updating. Take your time, this new post won’t go away! The distribution that we will use for modeling our coin is the Beta distribution. Why choose that one? Because the beta distribution when combined with likelihood function for a coin toss gives us another beta distribution. This is known technically as a so-called conjugate prio...

It’s been six weeks since the last Uncertainty Wednesday, so I strongly suggest you go back first and read that post which provides an introduction to the idea of updating. Take your time, this new post won’t go away! The distribution that we will use for modeling our coin is the Beta distribution. Why choose that one? Because the beta distribution when combined with likelihood function for a coin toss gives us another beta distribution. This is known technically as a so-called conjugate prio...

After nearly four weeks of not posting due to shoulder surgery I am almost back. I am saying almost because even though I can type very well again, I am spending a fair bit of time every day on physical therapy. That is time I would have spent writing and, well, something has got to give. So for now I am planning on one post per week instead of the usual three, but let’s see where it goes. In the meantime though I want to thank everyone who kindly reached out, inquired how things were going, ...

After nearly four weeks of not posting due to shoulder surgery I am almost back. I am saying almost because even though I can type very well again, I am spending a fair bit of time every day on physical therapy. That is time I would have spent writing and, well, something has got to give. So for now I am planning on one post per week instead of the usual three, but let’s see where it goes. In the meantime though I want to thank everyone who kindly reached out, inquired how things were going, ...

No Uncertainty Wednesday today. I had shoulder surgery yesterday to repair a rotator cuff injury. That means I won’t be able to type for quite a few days. I am creating this post using Voice on my Android phone. Impressively I did not have to correct a single word.

No Uncertainty Wednesday today. I had shoulder surgery yesterday to repair a rotator cuff injury. That means I won’t be able to type for quite a few days. I am creating this post using Voice on my Android phone. Impressively I did not have to correct a single word.

Now that we have spent the last few Uncertainty Wednesdays on modeling beliefs as probability distributions, we can now get to the topic of updating. Updating is what we are supposed to do with our beliefs when we have new observations. We first encountered a similar idea in the extensive example of a cancer test which we used to derive Bayes’ theorem. In that post I wrote that “[Bayes’ theorem] relates the probability of the world being in state B *before* we have observed a signal to the pr...

Now that we have spent the last few Uncertainty Wednesdays on modeling beliefs as probability distributions, we can now get to the topic of updating. Updating is what we are supposed to do with our beliefs when we have new observations. We first encountered a similar idea in the extensive example of a cancer test which we used to derive Bayes’ theorem. In that post I wrote that “[Bayes’ theorem] relates the probability of the world being in state B *before* we have observed a signal to the pr...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from my book World After Capital deals with how we have achieved the sufficiency of physical capital. This is capitalisms greatest accomplishment, but also means that we are now facing a new scarcity: attention.CapitalThe title of the book is World after Capital. One of my fundamental claims is that capital is no longer scarce. There is enough capital in the world to meet everyone’s basic needs. That means meeting the individual needs of 7 billion or more people, the col...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from my book World After Capital deals with how we have achieved the sufficiency of physical capital. This is capitalisms greatest accomplishment, but also means that we are now facing a new scarcity: attention.CapitalThe title of the book is World after Capital. One of my fundamental claims is that capital is no longer scarce. There is enough capital in the world to meet everyone’s basic needs. That means meeting the individual needs of 7 billion or more people, the col...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital is about labor. In it I describe what I call the “job loop” and how it has become central to both the economy and sadly also our view of human dignity.LaborBefore we can get to attention, though, we need to discuss the changing role of labor in the economy. Thinking about labor is hard because of an odd interweaving of cultural beliefs with economic history that I will try to disentangle. Over the last couple hundred years we have convinced ourse...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital is about labor. In it I describe what I call the “job loop” and how it has become central to both the economy and sadly also our view of human dignity.LaborBefore we can get to attention, though, we need to discuss the changing role of labor in the economy. Thinking about labor is hard because of an odd interweaving of cultural beliefs with economic history that I will try to disentangle. Over the last couple hundred years we have convinced ourse...

Personal Responsibility in the Age of TrumpYesterday, I tweeted that I considered Sarah Sanders tweet about being asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant an abuse of government power. Since I got quite a few questions on Twitter about that I want to elaborate the argument in a blog post. Sarah Sanders is currently the White House Press Secretary. This is a role that she has chosen voluntarily. In this role she has time and again repeated and defended the many lies of President Trump, most recen...

Personal Responsibility in the Age of TrumpYesterday, I tweeted that I considered Sarah Sanders tweet about being asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant an abuse of government power. Since I got quite a few questions on Twitter about that I want to elaborate the argument in a blog post. Sarah Sanders is currently the White House Press Secretary. This is a role that she has chosen voluntarily. In this role she has time and again repeated and defended the many lies of President Trump, most recen...

Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday is a quick wrap up to the formalization of beliefs as probability distributions. Let’s first start with a simple question. What probability distribution reflects the least knowledge about a coin? How do you express “I don’t know, the coin could be anything from only heads to only tails to anything in between”? The answer is a uniform distribution as shown here:The horizontal axis is the probability of the coin coming up heads – ranging from 0 to 1 and the vertica...

Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday is a quick wrap up to the formalization of beliefs as probability distributions. Let’s first start with a simple question. What probability distribution reflects the least knowledge about a coin? How do you express “I don’t know, the coin could be anything from only heads to only tails to anything in between”? The answer is a uniform distribution as shown here:The horizontal axis is the probability of the coin coming up heads – ranging from 0 to 1 and the vertica...