How we define “problems” also defines what we “understand” as a “solution,” and if our definition is circular, it’s delusional. Readers kindly point out I don’t understand either AI or human nature. I readily confess to having an imperfect understanding of AI and human nature, along with everything else. One thing […]
Only then do we realize that by optimizing profit and efficiency, we’ve also optimized systemic failure. In my essay AI, Money, Human Nature and the Problem with Problems, I refer to boundary conditions but didn’t offer a thorough explanation of the role this concept plays in understanding not just how the world works but more […]
Maybe focusing on next quarter’s profits and reaping short-term gains from financializing everything under the sun with debt weren’t such great ideas after all. Traditionally, the two taboo subjects are sex and money. Perhaps we should add demographics, as sex and money determine demographics which then determine the trajectory of the economy […]
The self-liquidating nature of the mercantilist model cannot be reversed, it can only be managed as stagnation. Everyone is an expert now on China. Which to say, everyone has an opinion about China, and the majority of those opinions fall into simplistic Bull or Bear camps. As someone who has been […]
When we can no longer tell the truth because the cost is so high that it threatens our reward for compliance, we’re unimaginably impoverished. Truth has an intrinsic, irreplaceable value. There’s the truth, and then there’s everything else. Truth has value, and so it has a cost. Whatever has the highest value […]
College grads, it may be time for different approach, not just in getting a job but in life. If we scrape away the hype and the humbug, this is the corporate economy in a nutshell. Sorry about the bluntness, but alas, there’s no way to sugarcoat calling Ultra-Processed Life what it really is. […]
A system that comes to depend on synthetic signaling for its “information” is doomed to Model Collapse, as its signaling has completely detached from the real world. That we inhabit a post-truth world seems to accepted wisdom. But that’s only half of it. We also live in a post-trust world. In a post-truth world, everything […]
Cloaking a fake “market” with artifice to maintain its asymmetrical distribution of wealth and income also cloaks its detachment from the real world. I often refer to the dynamics of self-correction and self-liquidation. Systems that use feedback to rebalance extremes are self-correcting: rather than accelerate as they approach a cliff, they […]
To claim that jostling for the biggest share of federal power and largesse–in a word, greed–magically serves the common good is a convenient cover for an oligarchy masquerading as a “democracy.” Is a “democracy” that’s for sale still a democracy, or is it something else? The question arises from the nature […]
In the Realm of the Banality of Evil, saying yes is always easy. The hard part is saying no, for reasons that have nothing to do with getting ahead. The Epstein files have unleashed a flood tide of bleatings of innocence and accusations of guilt by association. This is just what we’d […]