I was mostly offline last week skiing in the Alps. I love skiing for many reasons: I find it a great way to experience flow state and it combines being outdoors with vigorous exercise (especially when skinning or bootpacking up the mountain carrying a bunch of gear). The mountains are also a great reminder of how inhospitable and formidable nature can be. Here is a picture I took from the top of Mont Fort in VerbierNext week Monday I will resume posting excerpts from World After Capital but w...

After a short break of a few weeks, Uncertainty Wednesday is back! My last post had been the third part in a series on “Spurious Correlation” which ended with “Interestingly, this takes me to the edge of my own knowledge and so I have asked an expert in Bayesian estimation to help me. Stay tuned!” Well, that expert is Eric Novik from Generable. Generable is a company that uses Stan, the world’s leading Bayesian estimation too, to help companies make better decisions. Eric took on my challenge...

I was mostly offline last week skiing in the Alps. I love skiing for many reasons: I find it a great way to experience flow state and it combines being outdoors with vigorous exercise (especially when skinning or bootpacking up the mountain carrying a bunch of gear). The mountains are also a great reminder of how inhospitable and formidable nature can be. Here is a picture I took from the top of Mont Fort in VerbierNext week Monday I will resume posting excerpts from World After Capital but w...

After a short break of a few weeks, Uncertainty Wednesday is back! My last post had been the third part in a series on “Spurious Correlation” which ended with “Interestingly, this takes me to the edge of my own knowledge and so I have asked an expert in Bayesian estimation to help me. Stay tuned!” Well, that expert is Eric Novik from Generable. Generable is a company that uses Stan, the world’s leading Bayesian estimation too, to help companies make better decisions. Eric took on my challenge...

During the initial growth of the Internet, the United States enacted a variety of Safe Harbors, such as the DMCA, that allowed new innovation to unfold. We now need a similar approach to crypto tokens in order to help build the blockchain infrastructure. Blockchains allow the creation of data stores and applications that have network effects but are not controlled by a central player. This helps address the key issue of centralization and monopoly like positions currently observed in the digi...

During the initial growth of the Internet, the United States enacted a variety of Safe Harbors, such as the DMCA, that allowed new innovation to unfold. We now need a similar approach to crypto tokens in order to help build the blockchain infrastructure. Blockchains allow the creation of data stores and applications that have network effects but are not controlled by a central player. This helps address the key issue of centralization and monopoly like positions currently observed in the digi...

On Friday afternoon I met with a class of architecture students who are researching the relationship between architecture and basic income. This strikes me as a super important issue to work on. One of my contentions in World After Capital is that with basic income the current trend towards everyone living in cities will be broken. As we are starting to need less land for agriculture (through improved yields and vertical farming), land outside of cities can be quite affordable. The trick will...

On Friday afternoon I met with a class of architecture students who are researching the relationship between architecture and basic income. This strikes me as a super important issue to work on. One of my contentions in World After Capital is that with basic income the current trend towards everyone living in cities will be broken. As we are starting to need less land for agriculture (through improved yields and vertical farming), land outside of cities can be quite affordable. The trick will...

NOTE: Today I am continuing with publishing revisions to my book World After Capital. This is the second half of the chapter on the incredibly properties of digital technology. If you missed it, the first half of the chapter is on zero marginal cost.Universality of ComputationZero marginal cost is only the first property of digital technology that dramatically expands the space of the possible. The second property is in some ways even more amazing. Computers are universal machines. I mean thi...

NOTE: Today I am continuing with publishing revisions to my book World After Capital. This is the second half of the chapter on the incredibly properties of digital technology. If you missed it, the first half of the chapter is on zero marginal cost.Universality of ComputationZero marginal cost is only the first property of digital technology that dramatically expands the space of the possible. The second property is in some ways even more amazing. Computers are universal machines. I mean thi...

Yesterday I did a fireside chat at our portfolio company Shippo and someone asked the question how a company can continue to be successful and grow over a long period of time. My answer was: continue to innovate. A company that wonderfully represents that spirit is MongoDB. Eliot Horowitz, the co-founder and CTO of MongoDB, just announced in a blog post that MongoDB 4.0 will support multi-document transactions. You should go read the post as it is great, including the epic title “MongoDB Drop...

Yesterday I did a fireside chat at our portfolio company Shippo and someone asked the question how a company can continue to be successful and grow over a long period of time. My answer was: continue to innovate. A company that wonderfully represents that spirit is MongoDB. Eliot Horowitz, the co-founder and CTO of MongoDB, just announced in a blog post that MongoDB 4.0 will support multi-document transactions. You should go read the post as it is great, including the epic title “MongoDB Drop...

So the last two Uncertainty Wednesday posts have been about spurious correlation. Today, I want to give an example of easy it is to observe spurious correlation. To that end I wrote a little Python program which I will show below that rolls two independent dice. Each is rolled 10 times to give us two data series of 10 points each. This mimics the 10 data point series from last week’s example. The program runs some number of these and each times calculates and outputs the coefficient of correl...

So the last two Uncertainty Wednesday posts have been about spurious correlation. Today, I want to give an example of easy it is to observe spurious correlation. To that end I wrote a little Python program which I will show below that rolls two independent dice. Each is rolled 10 times to give us two data series of 10 points each. This mimics the 10 data point series from last week’s example. The program runs some number of these and each times calculates and outputs the coefficient of correl...

NOTE: Last week’s blog post was the current introduction to my book World After Capital. Today’s post covers the first half of the chapter on Digital Technology, which discusses how zero marginal cost is unlike anything found in the analog world. Digital Technology The invention of agriculture expanded the space of the possible by dramatically increasing the food density of land. This allowed humanity to have surplus food, which provided the basis for increased population density and hierarch...

NOTE: Last week’s blog post was the current introduction to my book World After Capital. Today’s post covers the first half of the chapter on Digital Technology, which discusses how zero marginal cost is unlike anything found in the analog world. Digital Technology The invention of agriculture expanded the space of the possible by dramatically increasing the food density of land. This allowed humanity to have surplus food, which provided the basis for increased population density and hierarch...

NOTE: This is the current state of the introduction for World After Capital. It provides an overview of the key ideas from the book. In case you missed it, last week’s blog post has the work in progress note and the preface. Introduction Humanity is unique, at least for now, in having developed knowledge. Knowledge in turn has enabled us to create increasingly powerful technology. The effect of technological advances is to broaden the “space of the possible.”With the Internet we can give ever...

NOTE: This is the current state of the introduction for World After Capital. It provides an overview of the key ideas from the book. In case you missed it, last week’s blog post has the work in progress note and the preface. Introduction Humanity is unique, at least for now, in having developed knowledge. Knowledge in turn has enabled us to create increasingly powerful technology. The effect of technological advances is to broaden the “space of the possible.”With the Internet we can give ever...

Last Uncertainty Wednesday, I introduced the topic of spurious correlation. Since then I have discovered a site that gives some fantastic examples of (potentially) spurious correlations. Here is one:The coefficient of correlation is 0.9926, i.e. almost 1 (which would be perfectly correlated). Let’s remind ourselves what finding correlation in a sample of data means. It is simply a numerical measure that can be computed for any paired data. The formula produces a result that has nothing to wit...

Last Uncertainty Wednesday, I introduced the topic of spurious correlation. Since then I have discovered a site that gives some fantastic examples of (potentially) spurious correlations. Here is one:The coefficient of correlation is 0.9926, i.e. almost 1 (which would be perfectly correlated). Let’s remind ourselves what finding correlation in a sample of data means. It is simply a numerical measure that can be computed for any paired data. The formula produces a result that has nothing to wit...