Epistemic Status: Tentative I’m fairly anti-hierarchical, as things go, but the big challenge to all anti-hierarchical ideologies is “how feasible is this in real life? We don’t s…| Otium
Compliance Costs Governance is about setting policies; rules for what people can do, who has authority to make decisions, what procedures must be used for decisionmaking. Governance encompasses bot…| Otium
A question that used to puzzle me is “Why can people be so much better at doing a thing for fun, or to help their friends and family, than they are at doing the exact same thing as a job?R…| Otium
Economist Alex Tabarrok has recently come out with a short book, “Why are the prices so Damn High”, available in full PDF here. Since the 1950’s, the inflation-adjusted cost of ph…| Otium
I may be reinventing a known thing in child development or psychology here, but bear with me. The simplest games I see babies play — games simple enough that cats and dogs can play them too &…| Otium
It was recently pointed out to me that humans are weird, compared to other social animals, in that we conflate the pecking order with the group decision-making process. The pecking order, for insta…| Otium
Something I’ve been thinking about for a while is the dual relationship between optimization and indifference, and the relationship between both of them and the idea of freedom. Optimization:…| Otium
I was part of the founding team at MetaMed, a personalized medicine startup. We went out of business back in 2015. We made a lot of mistakes due to inexperience, some of which I deeply regret. I&…| Otium
Suppose you value some virtue V and you want to encourage people to be better at it. Suppose also you are something of a “thought leader” or “public intellectual” — y…| Otium
Recently, OpenAI came out with a new language model that automatically synthesizes text, called GPT-2. It’s disturbingly good. You can see some examples (cherry-picked, by their own admissio…| Otium
