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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)...

http://www.vimeo.com/8194089 I just saw the most important talk I have seen in 300+ TED, Pop!Tech, etc talks that I’ve watched.  And at the risk of hyperbole, I will say that the worst case scenario is that Daniel Nocera simply wins a Nobel Prize (and yes, I’m willing to bet at even odds that it...

Ever wish you could reinvent the entire systems of government you live under without starting a costly war, revolution or having to win an election?  No?  Well, Patri Friedman has (wondered, that is).  And so has a growing number of seasteaders, ordinary folks (and the occasional PayPal billionaire).  Or...

Biologically,modern humans first appeared 160,000 to 200,000 years ago. But the transition to complex human societies, with art, music, advanced tools, occurred a good deal more recently, and moreover, occured at different times in different parts of the world. An article in June’s Science magazine...

Via the indispensable Tyler Cowen, a new paper from Johnson and Fowler explores whether overconfidence is, in fact, adaptive. They show that it it is under some very reasonable assumptions.  They model competition for resources as a two-player game and then analyze the evolutionary dynamics of populations...

Whether it is general resources after the implementation of a universal health care scheme or specific resources such as flu vaccine in the early stages of a pandemic,  there will always be instances of scarcity.  Who gets the resources?  Youngest first? Sickest first?  First in?  Lottery winners?...

If you had a billion dollars to make the world a better place, how would you spend...

Barbara Ehrenreich had an excellent article in yesterday’s New York Times on the many ways that being poor can land you in trouble with the law. One striking example: ...

Some of you may recall my post Organic Farming Harms the Environment. As I wrote, one of the things that bugs me about organic proponents is that they act as if there are no tradeoffs.  I don’t understand much about farming, but I do understand something about how economic activity works.  I presume...

From Monday’s Washington Post: The District, New York and Los Angeles are on track for fewer killings this year than in any other year in at least four decades. Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis and other cities are also seeing notable reductions in homicides. Full article is here, in which more...

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...

What’s fascinating to me about this is not that it works so well and or that there might actually be support in the Obama administration for doing it on a national scale, but rather that there has not been a backlash against it yet.  What are the odds that something like this will actually get...

A few short months ago, Hillary Clinton declared an end to the “war on terror.” Now, it appears as though the “war on drugs” is ending as well, or is it? ...

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...

A few articles on the economy that were sent my way recently. The Good: After Capitalism (Geoff Mulgan) “The era of transition that we are entering will be disruptive—but it may bring a world where markets are servants, not masters.”  I urge you to read this entire article, and leave your...

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...

Dan Ariely had an interesting idea on NPR’s Marketplace today.  Here’s the audio of the segment.  The idea is to get tax payers thinking about how their tax dollars should be spent, thus getting them more civilly engaged.  His research and that of others suggests that such activity would...

I don’t like the Republican or Libertarian parties. But I’m also no fan of the Democratic party. In fact, I dislike all political parties and think they should be done away with.  And while I’m not naive enough to think that this will happen, it makes me glad to see that the “post...

Steven Gjerstad and Vernon Smith have published a really nice article that starts out with bubbles in general and goes on to explain why the bursting of this particular bubble hurt the economy so much.  It echoes a lot of themes that I’ve covered before, but is obviously much more soundly though...

One of things I object to about mainstream environmentalists is that they act as if there are no tradeoffs.  For example, they simultaneously promote organic farming, argue for biodiversity , and lobby for more open space. Personally, I think the second and third are very important.  In my value system,...

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...

As I mentioned in this post, one of the three primary planks of my worldview is that, “…the human brain is a woefully inadequate decision making substrate.” I started adopting this posture in graduate school and have refined it with constant input from the cognitive psychology and...

As you’ve probably figured out by now, I prefer to base decisions on statistically significant evidence.  However, in order to gather such evidence, you must have hypotheses in the form of testable models.  If the models you try to test are divorced from reality on the ground, your results will be...

When I was an undergraduate studying macroeconomics, I came to the conclusion that it was pretty much total bullshit.  Because I was in a co-terminal masters program, I was also studying graduate level decision theory, game theory, microeconomics, behavioral economics, and dynamic systems. In comparison, it...