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Uncertainty Wednesday: Updating (Conclusion)
Albert Wenger – Jul 18, 2018
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 [...] Read more
World After Capital: Limits of Capitalism (Self-Conservation)
Albert Wenger – Jul 16, 2018
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 [...] Read more
Principles (Introduction)
Albert Wenger – Jul 13, 2018
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, [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Updating (Beta Distribution 2)
Albert Wenger – Jul 11, 2018
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 [...] Read more
World After Capital: Limits of Capitalism (Power Laws)
Albert Wenger – Jul 9, 2018
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 [...] Read more
Happy 4th of July: Climate Edition
Albert Wenger – Jul 4, 2018
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 [...] Read more
World After Capital: Limits of Capitalism (Intro & Missing Prices)
Albert Wenger – Jul 2, 2018
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. Capitalism has been extraordinarily successful. So much so that even communist countries [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Updating (Beta Distribution)
Albert Wenger – Jun 27, 2018
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 [...] Read more
Personal Responsibility in the Age of Trump
Albert Wenger – Jun 24, 2018
Yesterday, 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 [...] Read more