Update on Game-Based High School
Yes, You Can Save the World with Startups
Dave Lambert pointed me to this new Kauffman Foundation paper by Tim Kane about job creation in the US. Then Will Ambrosini pointed to this Growthology post which reproduces the money diagram from page 5 :
Look carefully. Then think about this statement about US job creation:
The only firms that create jobs on average are brand new ones.
So yes, you can save the world with...
Metaphysics
What fundamental truths exist in the universe?
This question, perhaps above all, is the basis for scientific inquiry. Yet we rarely ask it in this way and we rarely step back to the very basic assumptions we hold about the possible form of answer we might expect. For instance, is matter fundamental? Meaning, if we could not talk about particles and mass, could we understand the universe as well (or better) than we currently do?
Einstein showed that there is an equivalence between matter and energy (E=mc^2), but what does that really mean? Personally, I’m kinda stumped when it comes to understanding energy, and I suspect that many other people are too if they think about it. Then...
The Currency Crisis Is In Your Head
What in the world do I mean by that? Of course I think the dollar and euro are broken, but what’s the alternative? Gold? Maybe, but it won’t last. Tyler Cowen partially touches on information classification in his book, but does he make the link to currencies in their traditional sense? Before I get to why the crisis is in your head, make sure you get what a “currency” really is:
“We are in the lazy habit of thinking that the flow of the currency in a transaction is the one that matters instead of the actual flow of goods, services, resources, knowledge or participation which flows COUNTER to an exchange currency.
Those real-world currents shaped and...
Complex Adaptive Systems: Resilience, Robustness, and Evolvability
Annual 2010 AAAI CAS Symposium: November 11-13, Arlington, VA, USA
Covering Natural, Physical, and Social sciences, the symposium should be a good opportunity for interdisciplinary learning and sharing of ideas.
One week left to submit a...
Quantum Reality and the Measurement Paradox
I may be primarily an evolutionary theorist nowadays, but I have many interests, and this summer is proving to be a good time to explore some areas not directly connected to my need to publish. Lately I’ve been doing some reading on quantum mechanics, and what it tells us about reality.
QM is astonishing in both its mathematical elegance and its fundamental counter-intuitiveness. Unfortunately, I think many (including mathematicians) are discouraged from learning about quantum because it is typically presented assuming a deep knowledge of classical mechanics. But in my view, QM isn’t just a theory about physics. It’s a theory about reality and truth, and many of its...
The Long Tail of Innovation in an Information Economy
Once an innovation ecosystem has successfully created the structure to consistently tackle the big billion dollar opportunities, the system possesses the energy to begin evolving greater complexity, and squeezing out more efficiency. This efficiency will be realized by evolving the ecosystem to support the long tail of opportunities, which is exactly what the startup ecosystem is doing now.
Information age innovation ecosystems start by optimizing to hit the home run and can tolerate extremely high failure rates because the opportunity is so big. This is where venture money operates. Then the industry matures and seed and angel capital becomes more prevalent to support hitting multimillion...
Why Maximizing the Efficiency of the Startup Ecosystem Is Essential for Society’s Transition to an Information Economy
Right now the tech industry is the most innovative industry on the planet. Its success is in large part due to it being the first information age innovation ecosystem, which has implications for the future of the world, as we transition to an information economy.
This emerging information age is just the latest epochal shift of organized society as we have already progressed through tribal, agrarian and industrial societies. Now, on the cusp of this transition, the tech industry is pioneering the movement forward. (For more on this transition see Arthur Brock’s fantastic Prezi). Many of the methodologies and organizational structures that enhance a startup’s success will be...
Maximizing the Efficiency of the Startup Ecosystem
Over the last 3 decades the technology entrepreneurship sector has been the primary sector driving economic growth. The sector initiated the information economy and has given life to thousands of innovative companies, four of which are ten of the biggest companies in the United States, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and IBM. By any metric the sector has been wildly successful, but it’s possible to make the ecosystem even more efficient and realize an even greater number of opportunities.
Currently, projects that succeed are squeezing through a very tight bottle neck, and only the right combination of personality, skill and luck can breakthrough. Better infrastructure widens that...
The Safety Net
The following story is true, I’ve just changed the names and told it in parable form. The material numbers and circumstances are roughly accurate, and Alice is a friend of mine who may tell the story herself on video here soon…
A True Story
Alice was feeling particularly poor at a certain time in her life and because of this she was under a lot of stress. Her friend, Bob, was a billionaire many times over and he disliked seeing his friend in pain and so he wrote her a blank check and said, “Alice, whatever amount you cash this for, it will relieve me of the burden of figuring out what to do with it. Will you do me the favor of accepting this gift?” Alice was...
The Myth of Time
Once again, Japanese “lost decades” or massive exodus into virtual worlds? Here’s the conclusion, but I highly recommend the entire post (it may be clear as mud, but you’re gonna get dirty down the rabbit hole):
“Whereas we think we are talking to each other, we are all simply connecting our bodies into a massive network, creating a massive DNA calculator, with hosts and endpoints consisting of carbon and flesh. The human species in the post-information society is a Turing state- machine capable of either turning on or off the screen. Communication on the macro scale becomes the number of screens transmitting light at any given time. It is a modality of code...
The Future of Evolutionary Theory?
Well… it’s been quite a month. This April I (a) successfully defended my PhD thesis, and (b) won a Templeton Foundation fellowship to work with Martin Nowak at Harvard for two years. For those who don’t know him, Nowak is one of the world’s top researchers in abstract evolutionary theory. Working with him will be a tremendous challenge and opportunity.
So how to respond to this challenge? My vision for the next two years is to begin laying out a new mathematical approach to the study of evolution. Allow me to explain.
...
Simulating Angel Investment: Kevin’s Remix
Jeff Miller has done a couple of nice posts on “A Simulation of Angel Investing” here and here. I think it’s terrific that Jeff actually asked the question and tried to answer it with simulation. However, his answer of 20 is way too low because of two key oversimplifications. Using a more sophisticated methodology, I’ll show that a better answer is 100 to 150.
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