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Speech and Power
Albert Wenger – Aug 11, 2018
There is a healthy debate going on now about the role of Twitter, Facebook, and others (Google, Apple, …) with regard to moderating speech on their platforms. Rather than writing something entirely new, I decided to go back and look [...] Read more
Browser, Wallet or Something New? Looking for Crypto Ease of Use
Albert Wenger – Aug 3, 2018
The internet was around for about two decades before the arrival of the web supercharged its growth. The ease of using a web browser made broad consumer adoption possible. Mobile payments were around for at least a decade before they [...] Read more
Blogging Hiatus: Reading More
Albert Wenger – Aug 1, 2018
Despite making progress on the recovery from my shoulder surgery, I have not been blogging and today will be another missed Uncertainty Wednesday. I have been spending the last few weeks of summer reading more which has been enjoyable. I [...] Read more
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