Rick Bookstaber, author of “A Demon of Our Own Design” and Senior Policy Adviser at the SEC has hit the nail on the head as far as the bank reform goes – Breaking the Banks (via Infectious Greed): “It is not the case that the largest banks are the same as other banks, just bigger“ “The largest...

Please watch the Zeitgeist Addendum, and RIP: Remix Manifesto Kafka gave us The Metamorphosis.  We have the power to realize our own humility.  Being wrong is irrelevant if you learn from your mistakes and prevent systemic risk from such errors.  How can we be so content with our wisdom if we continually...

I guess we already have the  “machine” built.  Its intelligence increases proportionally to # of people and time.  Next year we will celebrate it’s birthday :)  Time to get plugged in and kick out human politicians and decision makers.  Of course Rafe and Kevin have already asked the...

PROBLEMS Our economic system hasn’t been self correcting through arbitrage, because markets have stayed irrational longer than one could stay solvent.  Our legal system has not been just because precedents have been bluffed into existence using legal costs instead of legal arguments.  Our...

-”Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Churchill (from a House of Commons speech on Nov. 11, 1947)  I’ve been meaning to do a post on the Bayesian Truth Serum (Prelec), but Tyler Cowen’s post on Range...

The debate over vaccination is raging (c.f. Wired article) and it smacks of one of those conundrums that is unlikely to get resolved by scientific inquiry.  I offer the following hypothesis and a way out of the dilemma. Hypothesis: Vaccination is something that is good at the societal level but bad at the...

Mendeley.com is doubling every 10 weeks and is on track to surpass the biggest academic databases in the world next year.  What I find fascinating is that it is based on the Last.fm music algorithm/idea, which is now crossing disciplines into science of all things:  “How does it work? At the basic...

Everyone seems to have an opinion on the future prospects of Facebook and Twitter. Some of us even feel strongly enough to want to bet on it. Unfortunately, the companies are privately held, and unavailable to be bet on in the traditional way, via the stock market. It is not just household names like...

In “Game Theory: Can a Round of Poker Solve Afghanistan’s Problems?” Major Richard J.H. Gash creates a simple two player game to show how game theory can be used to influence military planning. Gash’s game involves two villages in Afghanistan with the choice to either support the...

In a March 2009 Wired article, Daniel Roth calls for radical transparency in financial reporting as the path to recovery and a more secure financial system.  He argues that the reporting requirements today allow companies to obscure what’s going on and that the way to fix things is as follows.  ...

We talk about how we are all one, more similar than we are different.  And of course it’s true, but… Our lives are so different.  And the gap is widening all the time.  The diversity of experience increases, as the world becomes more complex, as we create new ways of existing, physically,...

Back in June, I suggested that public voting records would be healthy for our democracy if the populace were comfortable revealing their voting records.  There is now a movement* and new web site for this called Who Voted? though they are not going as far as I am in advocating for revealing your actual...

An eye-opening graphic from Wired’s cover this month on “Peak Water“: ...

Daniel Horowitz just forwarded me an interesting article in which Steve Pinker is debating and defending the merits of exploring dangerous ideas even though they may threaten our core values and deeply offend our sensibilities. What struck me most interesting (and laudable) was Pinker’s willingness to...