NOTE: I am continuing to publish revised sections from my book World After Capital. Today’s section provides a technological definition of scarcity (instead of an economic one) and provides a brief history of how scarcity has shifted over time from food to land to capital and is now shifting to attention. Scarcity In this book I will be arguing that capital is no longer scarce but that attention now is. Furthermore this constitutes the third major shift in scarcity in the history of humanity....

NOTE: I am continuing to publish revised sections from my book World After Capital. Today’s section provides a technological definition of scarcity (instead of an economic one) and provides a brief history of how scarcity has shifted over time from food to land to capital and is now shifting to attention. Scarcity In this book I will be arguing that capital is no longer scarce but that attention now is. Furthermore this constitutes the third major shift in scarcity in the history of humanity....

NOTE: I am continuing to publish revised sections from my book World After Capital. Today’s section contains a central idea of the book, which is that the existence of knowledge provides an objective basis for humanism and establishes critical inquiry as its central value. Humanism What then are the values that I am basing all of this on? Where do those come from? In his book Sapiens, historian Yuval Harari claims that all value systems are simply narratives that are equally valid. He specifi...

NOTE: I am continuing to publish revised sections from my book World After Capital. Today’s section contains a central idea of the book, which is that the existence of knowledge provides an objective basis for humanism and establishes critical inquiry as its central value. Humanism What then are the values that I am basing all of this on? Where do those come from? In his book Sapiens, historian Yuval Harari claims that all value systems are simply narratives that are equally valid. He specifi...

The Zuckerberg hearings were predictably pretty weak. First, the format does not lend itself to a deeper inquiry on a complex topic. Whenever someone seemed close to getting somewhere, the next questioner would take it somewhere else (or weirdly start over). Second, the politicians asking the questions appeared for the most part not to have a super deep understanding themselves which means they stick to the questions prepared by their staff even when an answer provides a small opening that th...

The Zuckerberg hearings were predictably pretty weak. First, the format does not lend itself to a deeper inquiry on a complex topic. Whenever someone seemed close to getting somewhere, the next questioner would take it somewhere else (or weirdly start over). Second, the politicians asking the questions appeared for the most part not to have a super deep understanding themselves which means they stick to the questions prepared by their staff even when an answer provides a small opening that th...

When #DeleteUber was a trending hashtag it was relatively easy for people to take action in those cities where Lyft, MyTaxi or some other service was available. Even if you didn’t delete the Uber app outright, you could move it a screen back or so and default to another provider. Such is the power of competition. The brief #DeleteFacebook run was a different story. There is no obvious other place to go (and please don’t say WhatsApp, as that’s Facebook also). The network effect in social is m...

When #DeleteUber was a trending hashtag it was relatively easy for people to take action in those cities where Lyft, MyTaxi or some other service was available. Even if you didn’t delete the Uber app outright, you could move it a screen back or so and default to another provider. Such is the power of competition. The brief #DeleteFacebook run was a different story. There is no obvious other place to go (and please don’t say WhatsApp, as that’s Facebook also). The network effect in social is m...

Last Uncertainty Wednesday, I introduced the concept of p-values. We looked at the example of a null hypothesis (explanation) that a coin is fair, observing heads (H) or tails (T) six times in a row and rejecting that the coin is fair because the probability of that happening with a fair coin is only 0.03125 which is less than 0.05 (a commonly used cutoff). I ended the post by asking readers to consider the following scenario:You are a researcher who gets paid only if you reject the explanati...

Last Uncertainty Wednesday, I introduced the concept of p-values. We looked at the example of a null hypothesis (explanation) that a coin is fair, observing heads (H) or tails (T) six times in a row and rejecting that the coin is fair because the probability of that happening with a fair coin is only 0.03125 which is less than 0.05 (a commonly used cutoff). I ended the post by asking readers to consider the following scenario:You are a researcher who gets paid only if you reject the explanati...

As promised for some time, today in Uncertainty Wednesday, I will talk about p-values and what makes them so problematic. We will once again look at a super simple example by going back to considering a coin flip. As before we will consider the highest uncertainty explanation which is that the mechanism producing the coin flip produces heads (H) and tails (T) each with probability 0.5 and that each flip is independent. Now the idea behind p-values is to attempt an argument of reductio ad absu...

As promised for some time, today in Uncertainty Wednesday, I will talk about p-values and what makes them so problematic. We will once again look at a super simple example by going back to considering a coin flip. As before we will consider the highest uncertainty explanation which is that the mechanism producing the coin flip produces heads (H) and tails (T) each with probability 0.5 and that each flip is independent. Now the idea behind p-values is to attempt an argument of reductio ad absu...

NOTE: I am continuing to publish revised sections from my book World After Capital here. These sections on Regulation and Self-Regulation follow the one on Optimism to make clear my belief that technology will not automatically makes things better but that we have to work at that.RegulationThere are many people who work in technology and investing who are optimists and believe in progress. Among those there is a subset, myself included, who also believe in the need for regulation. There is an...

NOTE: I am continuing to publish revised sections from my book World After Capital here. These sections on Regulation and Self-Regulation follow the one on Optimism to make clear my belief that technology will not automatically makes things better but that we have to work at that.RegulationThere are many people who work in technology and investing who are optimists and believe in progress. Among those there is a subset, myself included, who also believe in the need for regulation. There is an...

Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday continues our exploration into p-values and why they are problematic. Last Wednesday we saw that if you have incentives to reject a null hypothesis, it takes less work than you would initially think to find data that gets you there. I ended that post suggesting that the problem is even bigger than that. How so? We now live in the age of “big data” – researchers in many fields have access to massive data sets. This lends itself to an approach that has become known...

Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday continues our exploration into p-values and why they are problematic. Last Wednesday we saw that if you have incentives to reject a null hypothesis, it takes less work than you would initially think to find data that gets you there. I ended that post suggesting that the problem is even bigger than that. How so? We now live in the age of “big data” – researchers in many fields have access to massive data sets. This lends itself to an approach that has become known...

Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday will be the concluding post in my mini-series on the problem with p-values. We have already seen that it is much easier than expected to reject a null hypothesis if you have incentives to do so. We also saw that the ability to work backwards and generate hypotheses from the data is a big issue. Today we will consider a more foundational, epistemological problem with p-values: what is it that we are really learning when we are rejecting a null hypothesis? Let’s on...

Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday will be the concluding post in my mini-series on the problem with p-values. We have already seen that it is much easier than expected to reject a null hypothesis if you have incentives to do so. We also saw that the ability to work backwards and generate hypotheses from the data is a big issue. Today we will consider a more foundational, epistemological problem with p-values: what is it that we are really learning when we are rejecting a null hypothesis? Let’s on...

Earlier this week Rebecca posted the latest evolution of the USV thesis. It includes the words “trusted brands” which led some people to ask how an early stage company could already be that. I provided the answer in a tweet in which I wrote that “trusted brands” — have incentives that are aligned with your customers/endusers so you can build trust over the longtermI want to explain that further today and put it in the larger context of Internet business models. During the Dotcom Bubble, there...

Earlier this week Rebecca posted the latest evolution of the USV thesis. It includes the words “trusted brands” which led some people to ask how an early stage company could already be that. I provided the answer in a tweet in which I wrote that “trusted brands” — have incentives that are aligned with your customers/endusers so you can build trust over the longtermI want to explain that further today and put it in the larger context of Internet business models. During the Dotcom Bubble, there...