Perhaps I should take up Twitter, but I already have this blog, and even my short takes tend to go a bit over 140 characters. So here goes: ...| unenumerated.blogspot.com
The central bank of the United States, the Federal Reserve, has put out “educational material” on Bitcoin for teachers and students (including a quiz!). The Bitcoin parts are odd enough, but this and a subsequent blog post will focus on the following statement: “traditionally, currency is produced by a nation's government.“ Is that a fair representation of monetary traditions? At the very least it is quite incomplete. This two-part series will proceed back in time, showing some of the...| Unenumerated
Millions of millennia ago, in our own Milky Way galaxy, but far upstream of where we are today, two neutron stars spiraled around each other, each embodying the mass of a sun but smaller and faster than a speeding planet. Each of these tiny gigaworlds, millions of times denser than our sun, had been produced, not by a mere exploding star, but by a far more powerful supernova. Each supernova, burning a nuclear fire with a far greater power density than a normal star such as our sun, had besid...| Unenumerated
Until about| Unenumerated
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The Chinese invented printing, but their writing system required a large number of typefaces, which made for very high up-front capital costs to print even a single short book. Centuries after the slow dawn of Chinese printing Gutenberg in Germany, | Unenumerated
Carter lectures the U.S. | Unenumerated
The process of selling in general, and web commerce in particular, is often described or charted as a funnel. Prospective customers are poured in at one end, and a fewer number of paying customers come out at the other. The other prospects spill out through other holes or over the side of the funnel and don't bring you any revenue. The fraction of customers left, converted from prospects to customers, is called the conversion rate. As prospects proceed from initial interest to final sale, fro...| Unenumerated
Many years of government debt buildup in Greece has ultimately resulted, in the last few days, in a political and financial maelstrom. The political maelstrom includes demonstrations in the run up to a referendum on obscure debt-restructuring provisions to be held this Sunday (July 5th). This article focuses on financial problems and some potential practical steps that can be taken to mitigate them. The imposition of capital controls is a disaster for a modern trade-driven economy, a cata...| Unenumerated
A small-game fallacy occurs when game theorists, economists, or others trying to apply game-theoretic or microeconomic techniques to real-world problems, posit a simple, and thus cognizable, interaction, under a very limited and precise set of rules, whereas real-world analogous situations take place within longer-term and vastly more complicated games with many more players: "the games of life". Interactions between small games and large games infect most works of game theory, and much of ...| Unenumerated
When we currently use a smart phone or a laptop on a cell network or the Internet, the other end of these interactions typically run on other solo computers, such as web servers. Practically all of these machines have architectures that were designed to be controlled by a single person or a hierarchy of people who know and trust each other. From the point of view of a remote web or app user, these architectures are based on full trust in an unknown "root" administrator, who can control everyt...| Unenumerated
After about 1000 AD northwestern Europe started a gradual switch from using oxen to using horses for farm traction and transportation. This trend culminated in an eighteenth-century explosion in roads carrying horse-drawn carriages and wagons, as well as in canals, and works greatly extending the navigability of rivers, both carrying horse-drawn barges. This reflected a great rise in the use of cultivated fodder, a hallmark of the novel agricultural system that was evolving in northwestern ...| Unenumerated
https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4| Unenumerated
Stephen Broadberry describes new estimates of per capita GDP which say that the economic divergence between Western Europe and other civilized parts of the world predates the industrial revolution. (H/T Marginal Revolution). This is more consistent with my own theories (linked below) than the idea that the Great Divergence magically appears from nowhere around the year 1800. Nevertheless I feel compelled to point out shortcomings in these kinds of estimates, on any side of such debates.| Unenumerated
In most political theories and ideologies, there is a preposterous oversimplification about what kinds of political relationships are desirable, common, or even possible. Given the irreduceable complexity of society, any summary of real-world political relationships is by necessity going to be greatly oversimplified, but most such movements neglect even very broad and common kinds of political relationships. So herein, based on my extensive study of the legal relationships between political...| Unenumerated
Perhaps the most underrated invention in history is the humble hourglass. Invented in Europe during the late 13th or early 14th century, the sand glass complemented a nearly simultaneous invention, the mechanical clock. The mechanical clock with its bell was a centralized way of broadcasting the hours day and night; the sand glass was a portable way of measuring shorter periods of time. These clocks were made using very different and independent techniques, but their complementarity fun...| Unenumerated
In my last post I introduced dead reckoning as used during the exploration explosion. In this post I will describe the errors these explorers (Dias, Columbus, da Gama, etc.) typically encountered in dead reckoning (DR) when sailing on the oceans, and why dead reckoning could be usefully accurate despite the fact that trying to map those dead reckoning directions onto a normal map would be very inaccurate.| Unenumerated
Navigation is the art or science of combining information| Unenumerated
Argument from authority ("I'm the expert") goes hand-in-hand with the ad hominem ("you're not"). Each may be rebutted by the other, and the average quality as evidence of arguments from authority are about the same as the average quality as evidence of ad hominem. By necessity, these two kinds of evidence are the dominant forms of evidence that lead each of us as individuals to believe what we believe, since little important of what you believe comes from your own direct observation. Authorit...| Unenumerated
G.K. Chesterton ponders a fence:| Unenumerated
From Algorithmic Information Theory: | Unenumerated
Besides the robot apocalypse, there are many other, and often more important, examples of Pascal scams. The following may be or may have been such poorly evidenced but widely feared or hoped-for extreme consequences (these days the fears seem to predominate):| Unenumerated
Beware of what I call Pascal's scams: movements or belief systems that ask you to hope for or worry about very improbable outcomes that could have very large positive or negative consequences. (The name comes of course from the infinite-reward Wager proposed by Pascal: these days the large-but-finite versions are far more pernicious). Naive expected value reasoning implies that they are worth the effort: if the odds are 1 in 1,000 that I could win $1 billion, and I am risk and time neutra...| Unenumerated