When the web first emerged I remember vividly the excitement that I and many others felt about the potential for decentralized and permissionless publishing. Want to put some content out there? Register a domain, run a web server and publish. No newspaper, journal, book publishers and editors to ask for permission. A massive shift of power to the people. Fast forward to 2016 and we have an internet where much of the activity is dominated by a few super large players with centralized platforms...

When the web first emerged I remember vividly the excitement that I and many others felt about the potential for decentralized and permissionless publishing. Want to put some content out there? Register a domain, run a web server and publish. No newspaper, journal, book publishers and editors to ask for permission. A massive shift of power to the people. Fast forward to 2016 and we have an internet where much of the activity is dominated by a few super large players with centralized platforms...

School is supposed to help children learn how to form good habits. Since we are homeschooling that raises a bunch of questions. What are habits supposed to be good for to begin with? How do you form them? Or get rid of bad ones for that matter? And what, if anything, is the relationship between habits and willpower? To dig into this we all decided to read a bunch of books on this topic including some famous ones, such as Steven Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Walter Mi...

School is supposed to help children learn how to form good habits. Since we are homeschooling that raises a bunch of questions. What are habits supposed to be good for to begin with? How do you form them? Or get rid of bad ones for that matter? And what, if anything, is the relationship between habits and willpower? To dig into this we all decided to read a bunch of books on this topic including some famous ones, such as Steven Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Walter Mi...

At startups events I am often asked about important qualities in the character of founders. Persistence strikes me as crucial. Startups have many setbacks along the way and possibly even near death experiences. Only someone with persistence will be able to come back from those and keep plugging away. A great story in our portfolio in this regard is the team at Soundcloud. Yesterday, Soundcloud launched their premium service Soundcloud Go, which combines an offline ad-free experience, the cata...

At startups events I am often asked about important qualities in the character of founders. Persistence strikes me as crucial. Startups have many setbacks along the way and possibly even near death experiences. Only someone with persistence will be able to come back from those and keep plugging away. A great story in our portfolio in this regard is the team at Soundcloud. Yesterday, Soundcloud launched their premium service Soundcloud Go, which combines an offline ad-free experience, the cata...

In an earlier post in my mini series on insurance fundamentals I explained the concept of moral hazard, which refers to an information asymmetry as having insurance changes unobserved behavior which increases the risk or severity of loss. There is another information asymmetry in insurance that occurs before the insurance contract is entered based on the fact that the insurance buyer knows more about their circumstances than the insurance company. Let’s take car insurance as an example. Suppo...

In an earlier post in my mini series on insurance fundamentals I explained the concept of moral hazard, which refers to an information asymmetry as having insurance changes unobserved behavior which increases the risk or severity of loss. There is another information asymmetry in insurance that occurs before the insurance contract is entered based on the fact that the insurance buyer knows more about their circumstances than the insurance company. Let’s take car insurance as an example. Suppo...

Having recently started to read “Willpower” by Roy Baumeister, I am fascinated with the controversy over the reproducibility of his experiments on ego depletion. This is just the latest example in a longstanding historic problem with reproducibility that impacts the progress of science in many fields including medicine. This is an area where blockchain technology may be able to help. How so? We need to switch the academic standard for publishing to include raw data from experiments. Often thi...

Having recently started to read “Willpower” by Roy Baumeister, I am fascinated with the controversy over the reproducibility of his experiments on ego depletion. This is just the latest example in a longstanding historic problem with reproducibility that impacts the progress of science in many fields including medicine. This is an area where blockchain technology may be able to help. How so? We need to switch the academic standard for publishing to include raw data from experiments. Often thi...

So in one of my earlier posts on insurance fundamentals, I included an “exercise for the reader.” The question was to figure out how much money it would cost for the hypothetical insurance scheme in the example to buy re-insurance for those cases where they had not collected enough in premiums to cover the losses that actually occurred. I was thrilled that three people actually took the time to work through this. Andrew Parker answered in a comment, Gabriel Weinberg and Eddie Wharton sent ema...

So in one of my earlier posts on insurance fundamentals, I included an “exercise for the reader.” The question was to figure out how much money it would cost for the hypothetical insurance scheme in the example to buy re-insurance for those cases where they had not collected enough in premiums to cover the losses that actually occurred. I was thrilled that three people actually took the time to work through this. Andrew Parker answered in a comment, Gabriel Weinberg and Eddie Wharton sent ema...

In the previous post in my mini-series on insurance fundamentals I provided a numerical example that has a 1 in 100 probability of a loss of $50. I explained how the fair rate to insure this would be 50 cents, because that’s the amount at which the expected financial loss equals the premium payment. I then walked through how even at a significantly higher premium some amount of reinsurance was still required to keep this scheme solvent (so far nobody has taken me up on the homework assignment...

In the previous post in my mini-series on insurance fundamentals I provided a numerical example that has a 1 in 100 probability of a loss of $50. I explained how the fair rate to insure this would be 50 cents, because that’s the amount at which the expected financial loss equals the premium payment. I then walked through how even at a significantly higher premium some amount of reinsurance was still required to keep this scheme solvent (so far nobody has taken me up on the homework assignment...

AlphaGo has won its series in the game Go against grandmaster Lee Sedol 4-1. I wrote an initial post about AlphaGo after its first victory against a lesser ranked player. Humans have very big brains compared to the neural networks used by the program which shows that humans are unlikely to be able to use much of their brain for any one specific task. This, combined with the ability to run machine networks fast and against a lot of training data will make this technology formidable for many ta...

AlphaGo has won its series in the game Go against grandmaster Lee Sedol 4-1. I wrote an initial post about AlphaGo after its first victory against a lesser ranked player. Humans have very big brains compared to the neural networks used by the program which shows that humans are unlikely to be able to use much of their brain for any one specific task. This, combined with the ability to run machine networks fast and against a lot of training data will make this technology formidable for many ta...

I have written a few blog posts arguing that we need to strengthen democracy. One of my key takeaways from the current US Presidential election is that the primary election system must be reformed. I am surprised by how many people don’t know this today but the nationwide adoption of a binding primary system for the presidential election happened only after the 1968 Democratic Convention. So it is a relatively new thing and an example that not all innovations are good. What would be a better ...

I have written a few blog posts arguing that we need to strengthen democracy. One of my key takeaways from the current US Presidential election is that the primary election system must be reformed. I am surprised by how many people don’t know this today but the nationwide adoption of a binding primary system for the presidential election happened only after the 1968 Democratic Convention. So it is a relatively new thing and an example that not all innovations are good. What would be a better ...

In the two previous posts on insurance fundamentals, I introduced a fundamental inequality relating payouts to premiums and the concept of risk aversion. Today we will look at this through a bit of a numerical example. We will look at a risk that has a 1 in 100 chance of occurring and when it does happen the damage it causes is $50. A fair premium rate for this would be 50 cents (1/100 * $50), where fair means that your expected loss is equal to your expected premium payment. Now as we saw du...

In the two previous posts on insurance fundamentals, I introduced a fundamental inequality relating payouts to premiums and the concept of risk aversion. Today we will look at this through a bit of a numerical example. We will look at a risk that has a 1 in 100 chance of occurring and when it does happen the damage it causes is $50. A fair premium rate for this would be 50 cents (1/100 * $50), where fair means that your expected loss is equal to your expected premium payment. Now as we saw du...