Here are some things I used to believe: The power of the free market comes from competition If you are nice to someone, you will be rewarded commensurately A penny saved is a penny earned The more scarce something is the more valuable it is I no longer believe these statements to be true.  To understand...

[NOTE: I updated this post with more detailed examples] Background: part 3, part 2 and part 1. In the interview with Jon Gunn in Part 3, I mention that I’ve been thinking of what “version 2″ of the Personal Investment Contract might look like.  Here’s the model: Investment Amount...

Are you someone who has been given (and accepted) responsibility for someone else’s well-being?  Maybe you are an elected official?  A board member? A parent?  A friend?  If so, you may resonate with the following realization I just had about my own successes and failures in the role of...

On Tuesday I went on Annie Duke’s internet TV show to talk with her and Jason Calacanis about Wikileaks and what the implications are for the future of privacy.  I made some radical claims: Privacy is dead: it’s only a matter of time now before we all have to face this eventuality. In a...

A new paper hit the internet today. “The Evolution of Eusociality” by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita, and E.O. Wilson re-frames an old evolutionary question and strikes a blow in an increasingly heated debate. Eusociality is when individual organisms act as a collective reproducing unit. The...

Today, Rafe and I launched new angel fund aimed at for-profit social entrepreneurs. It’s called Presumed Abundance and it’s going to make people think about what it really means to invest in people. Have a look. Let us know what you...

Stuart Kauffman has a concept called the Adjacent Possible which I find incredibly useful in understanding the world.  Simply put, if you think of the space of possibilities from the present moment forward and just concentrate on those that are achievable today — adjacent to the present moment...

Imagine a multiverse, infinitely infinite.  There’s just infinity.  Or if you prefer, nothing.   There’s no space, no time, no matter, no energy.  There’s no structure whatsoever, and nothing “in” any of the universes that make up the multiverse.  it’s not even clear...

As careful readers of this blog will note, I’ve been obsessed with Alex Ryan’s visualization of the way new levels of organization come into being (e.g. atoms –> molecules –> cells, etc).  In an attempt to complement and extend his model, here’s a visualization of how I...

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...

As a mathematical evolutionary theorist, I use abstract methods to investigate how the structure of an evolutionary process determines whether social behaviors like cooperation can be successful. So I was excited to learn over the holidays (from David Carballo, archaeologist and family friend of my partner)...

That’s the title and conclusion of this paper by Jeffrery Goldstein et al which was presented at  this talk at the Skoll Foundation International Social Innovation Conference 2009.  Here’s a slide from that talk that I like: If you like the theme of “Social Entrepreneurship, Systems...

As readers of my blog posts know, I talk a lot about evolutionary systems, the formal structure of cooperation, the role of both in emergence of new levels of complexity, and I sometimes use cellular automata to make points about all these things and the reification of useful models (here’s a summary...

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...

The old philosophical theory says that reason is conscious, can fit the world directly, is universal (we all think the same way), is dispassionate (emotions get in the way of reason), is literal (no metaphor or framing in reason), works by logic, is abstract (not physical) and functions to serve our...

We all know the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  TED Prize Wish winner, Karen Armstrong, even laudably proposed that a Charter for Compassion based on the observation that all three Abrahamic traditions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) have the Golden Rule at their core. I...

Who wants to pay for email? You just might. Many people have suggested that adding a nominal cost to e-mail would serve to fight spam by rendering it largely unprofitable. With Centmail, some Yahoo researchers propose adding a penny postage stamp to each e-mail, representing a penny donation to charity....

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...

Despite hundreds of billions of dollars appropriated for cancer research, as well as the efforts of thousands of the world’s best minds, progress in preventing or curing cancer has been almost non-existent. I find this unacceptable. We should be doing better. We need to be doing better. So what’s...

Yesterday, from the Director of the National Cancer Institute, addressing one of the two largest cancer research conferences of the year: NCI commenced a series of workshops that began to bring aspects of the physical sciences to the problem of cancer. We discussed how physical laws governing short-range and...

First, let me say how honored I am to be contributing to this blog and to the complex systems web community in general. A New York Times Magazine article raises an issue I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. If you are, as I am, a scientist concerned about global climate change, you may find yourself...

Kevin started an interesting discussion that included a thoughtful proposal for the problem of major medical care costs risk mitigation.  You should read that here before reading my proposal below. Part 1: Major Medical Annuities. Federally mandated/funded (similar to SSI/Medicare), with a specific initial...

It’s not hard these days to find vignettes like this one (starting at minute 1:45) that describe a microeconomic chain of events that give you a glimpse into the recessionary dynamic.  I think it’s a good starting point to explain my personal theory of why asymmetry is the root of all value...

The import of this talk goes way beyond the specific and stunning work that Bassler and her team have done on quorum sensing.  In my mind, this is the prototype for good biological...

Tribes are hot. Kevin has referred more than once to the famous Dunbar number for limits on optimal human tribe size. One of my favorite books recently is Seth Godin’s book on leadership, called — you guessed it — Tribes. Yesterday I heard a great talk by David Logan, co-author of Tribal...