Economics
Power generation, engineering and use
Miscellaneous links on the magical terrible process of keeping the lights on
2021-05-04
– 2023-09-25Moloch, slack and hyperselection
Weak selection versus goodharting, 内卷, involution
2021-12-25
– 2023-09-25Degrowth
Yurtopia
2019-10-29
– 2023-09-23Ecomodernism
A tomorrow worth retiring to
2019-10-29
– 2023-09-23Exit/voice dilemmas
Fix this one or build another?
2018-12-18
– 2023-09-18Sufficiently good hedonism
Trade-offs between limited time and limited cash and limited imagination for the most happiness
2020-06-23
– 2023-09-18Whom to live amongst
Designing housesholds, bash’es, families, villages
2021-09-25
– 2023-09-18Cohousing in Australia
Plus other low-cost, low-tedium options for secure habitation
2021-09-25
– 2023-09-15Designing social movements
Synthetic biology for utopian egregores
2021-05-01
– 2023-09-12Where next Sydney freaks?
2021-04-11
– 2023-09-11Akrasia
Description to come later
2017-06-18
– 2023-09-09Incentive alignment problems
What is your loss function?
2014-09-22
– 2023-09-08Fediverse
Mastodon et al
2019-08-12
– 2023-08-30Remix and copyright
2014-10-29
– 2023-08-22Status
The original karma system
2019-10-25
– 2023-08-21Misrule, punks and ravers
Peasantpunk, expressive incompetence, contrarianism on a budget, metis farming, the feast of fools in suburbia, crusty rituals for the churchless, oxytocin fixes
2018-03-26
– 2023-08-11Community
Engineering, maintaining, organizing…
2020-02-02
– 2023-08-09Nostr
Social media for the stroppy
2023-08-08
– 2023-08-09Secure Scuttlebutt et al
Social media for off-the-grid
2020-11-18
– 2023-08-08Doing it yourself
Peasantpunk, artisanal poverty, hobbyism in the open, handicraft fandoms
2018-03-26
– 2023-08-08Doing complicated things the obvious way
and not researching alternatives when the obvious way turns out to be wrong
2022-04-04
– 2023-08-07Modern conspiracy theorising
Someone paid me to write this
2020-08-16
– 2023-08-07Science; Institution design for
“Scientist, falsify thyself”. Peer review, academic incentives, credentials, evidence and funding…
2020-05-17
– 2023-08-07Snowmobile or bicycle?
Complement or substitute?
2023-03-23
– 2023-08-07Economics of large language models
2023-03-23
– 2023-08-07Real estate economics
Passive-aggressive income
2022-01-24
– 2023-08-06Community governance
Coordinating human beings by collective application of social force
2020-02-02
– 2023-08-06The social brain
Rubber-duck-typing
2011-12-09
– 2023-08-02Gradient steps to an ecology of mind
The best as enemy of the good
2011-11-27
– 2023-08-02Technological singularities
Incorporating hard AI take-offs, game-over high scores, the technium, deus-ex-machina, deus-ex-nube, nerd raptures and so forth
2016-12-01
– 2023-08-02Algorithmic mechanism design
Designing markets and games to achieve what we collectively want from what we individually want
2014-09-22
– 2023-08-01Noise pollution
2021-05-26
– 2023-07-31Bio marker tracking
We are probably not going to optimize ourselves out of mortality, but it feels good to try nonetheless
2022-01-11
– 2023-07-18The returns on hierarchy in group coordination
Optimising egalitarianism
2019-10-25
– 2023-07-07Journalism, normative
Sensors for the superorganism
2020-01-26
– 2023-06-23Teamwork
2020-01-26
– 2023-06-22Bureaucracy
Iron Laws and Moral Mazes
2020-02-02
– 2023-06-15Multi-objective optimisation
2021-07-14
– 2023-05-04Academic publishing
2015-07-07
– 2023-05-01Scientific institutions and mechanisms
Descriptive and normative
2021-08-24
– 2023-04-28Dynamics of recommender systems and other AI social interventions at societal scale
Variational approximations to high modernism
2023-07-03
– 2023-04-26Generative AI workflows and hacks
2023-03-23
– 2023-04-26Quantified self
Instrumentation and analytics for body and soul. Punk DIY precision medicine.
2022-01-11
– 2023-04-24Agent-based models
Science as Grand Theft Auto
2011-07-28
– 2023-04-19Performance indicators, Measurement, analytics
Street fighting statistics
2014-09-22
– 2023-04-13The property market is pollution
Or: hunting endangered big game in dwindling habitat. Or: Investing in Boomer Bitcoin
2021-05-26
– 2023-04-13Cheap talk
Sapir-Whorf politeness, virtue signalling etc
2020-02-01
– 2023-04-11Fashion
Theory and practice of hip garments
2020-07-10
– 2023-03-27Contemporary neo-feudalism & endimming
2017-02-04
– 2023-03-27Diffusion of innovations
Epidemiology of widgets
2020-01-30
– 2023-02-09When to argue ad hominem
Skin in the game, vested interests, overt and covert prejudices, lived experience, Dunning-Kruger outgroup effects, genealogy of knowledge, aetiology, donatism, genealogy of knowledge
2020-02-01
– 2023-01-28Bounded rationality at large
It is as if we knew what we were doing
2012-01-13
– 2023-01-15Weaponizing social media
Trolls, bots, lulz, infowars and other moods of the modern networked ape
2019-10-21
– 2023-01-15Goodhart’s Law
2019-12-22
– 2023-01-11Economic development
2014-10-29
– 2022-12-20Open Source (mostly software)
On published schematics for cheap objects
2017-03-31
– 2022-12-12Cooperation in evolutionary context
‘Cui bono’ for selfishness
2020-04-27
– 2022-11-08But what can I do?
Recommended behaviour to make society better is to think, then act
2020-02-06
– 2022-11-06Personalized medicine
Precision medicine
2022-01-25
– 2022-11-06How to communicate
with humans
2019-04-02
– 2022-11-06Ethical consumption
Socialism as a Service
2020-02-06
– 2022-11-04Emancipating my tribe
Inclusivism and exclusivism in sacred and secular subcultures. Or, scaling up the in-group.
2021-12-20
– 2022-11-01Pluralism, multiculturalism, politics
2020-02-01
– 2022-10-29Social organisation of knowledge
Descriptive and normative
2021-08-24
– 2022-10-07Intellectual property
especially in science and technology.
2014-12-30
– 2022-10-06Squads
Small scale collectives
2022-06-25
– 2022-09-25Physical infrastructure
2022-09-24Innovation
Side order of progress studies now I guess
2014-07-27
– 2022-09-24Multi-agent self
2022-09-11Effective altruism
First world trolley problems
2017-06-06
– 2022-09-06Soft methodology of science
2012-01-13
– 2022-09-06Managing people
Making piece with the fact that I cannot do everything myself
2020-07-19
– 2022-08-30Project management
With special attention to speculative and innovative projects
2021-03-23
– 2022-08-28Urbanism
Stuff about cities
2014-12-25
– 2022-08-06Futurism
Useful ways of imaginatively forecasting
2014-12-31
– 2022-08-06Economic inequality
Return to capital versus return to labour versus return to state of nature
2014-10-29
– 2022-08-06Mechanism design for reputation systems
Karma, credit scores, pagerank, optimised ad hominem reasoning…
2014-08-05
– 2022-08-02Scenius
2020-01-26
– 2022-07-28Microstressors
Asymmetric interactions in aggregate, microinequity, microaggressions
2020-02-01
– 2022-07-28Diversity in teams
Multiculturalism, pluralism and eccentricity at small scale
2020-05-27
– 2022-07-28Models of human cultural evolution
Egregores, superorganisms, memeplexes
2018-12-18
– 2022-07-26Subculture dynamics
Coalitions, scenes, fandoms, subcultures, normies, hipsters, sects, and tribes at scale
2018-12-18
– 2022-07-26Conflict theorist models of coordination
2022-07-20
– 2022-07-24Red queen social signal dynamics
Arms races in memetic selection on graphs is how I make my fashion choices
2018-12-18
– 2022-07-24Iterated and evolutionary game theory
2016-10-13
– 2022-07-09Performance indicators, measurement, analytics
Street fighting statistics
2014-09-22
– 2022-07-09Being stroppy
For malcontents too perverse to be contrarian like everyone else
2022-03-04
– 2022-07-06Dilemmas of collective action
2014-11-25
– 2022-07-05Rituals and beliefs that bind
2021-05-01
– 2022-07-05Astroturf and artificial reefs
On the sometimes-fungibility of status and cash in the realm of cultural cachet
2016-01-13
– 2022-07-03Moral attribution and diffusion
On institutions for siphoning blame
2020-04-27
– 2022-06-30Moral wetware
What ethical operating systems can be executed on our neurosocial substrate?
2020-04-27
– 2022-06-30Soft incentive mechanism design
Markets, cakes, karma, and reverse game theory, applied to humans
2014-09-22
– 2022-06-29Invasive arguments
Inflammatory topics, toxplasmic incidents. Weeds in public discourse
2021-12-20
– 2022-06-25Tokenism or table stakes?
“The least you can do” is the minimum unviable product
2021-12-20
– 2022-06-23Workhacks
How to succeed in business (with or without trying)
2020-07-19
– 2022-06-14Political axes, political correlations
Dimensionality reduction for the Great Society
2021-03-01
– 2022-06-12Designing less toxic social media
2020-07-12
– 2022-06-11Institutions
Stable orbits in human systems
2014-10-29
– 2022-06-10Institutions and governance for, and using, mass conversation
Discourse red in tooth and claw versus the sovereign
2020-02-01
– 2022-05-30Funerals and other end-of-life stuff
Services, enduring guardianships, wills, burials cremations, esp in New South Wales
2022-05-21Crowd-sourced science
2015-08-10
– 2022-05-17Memetics
Taste dynamics, opinion dynamics, sincerely-held-belief dynamics etc
2020-01-30
– 2022-05-14Farming and husbandry of black swans and dragon kings
Heavy tailed and Knightian uncertainties for fun and profit
2020-09-22
– 2022-04-30Utopian governance
Hedonistic mechanism design
2020-05-04
– 2022-04-22Groupthink and the wisdom of crowds
Information cascades
2019-09-22
– 2022-04-22Voting Systems
Mathematics and economics of ballots
2014-09-22
– 2022-04-21Social norms
2019-10-07
– 2022-04-13This is a simulation
Can the automaton learn to play the game of life?
2017-04-04
– 2022-04-09The levels of simulacra
2018-12-18
– 2022-04-07Attention economy
2012-01-13
– 2022-04-03The language game
Coevolution of words and meanings
2014-12-29
– 2022-04-01Race, politics of
Ethnicity too
2021-12-20
– 2022-03-04Opinion dynamics 1: Social contagion moves hearts and minds
How to win elections and influence people
2020-08-30
– 2022-03-03OODA loops
2021-05-01
– 2022-02-28Symbolic and substantive insurrections
Sovereign citizens, LARPing insurgency, institution building
2022-02-20
– 2022-02-27Diversity in society
Pluralism, multiculturalism, tolerance, ghettoisation, xenophobic panic
2017-02-19
– 2022-02-13Sexual ethics and institutions
2020-06-07
– 2022-02-07Outsourcing, applied
2021-02-27
– 2022-02-05Sociology and politics of information
Epistemic democracy, cognitive democracy, the great society
2022-01-09
– 2022-02-02Prepping for the end of (my access to) the (industrialised) world
2016-06-19
– 2022-01-24Bounded rationality
Plus miscellaneous rationality postulates restricting von Neumann-Morgenstern
2012-01-13
– 2022-01-15Social psychology
Which of those NPR-friendly studies actually replicated?
2017-02-20
– 2022-01-14Standards hell
Lock-in, QWERTY, coordination problems etc
2015-01-05
– 2022-01-11Group size
Scaling dynamics and network effects in social coordination
2011-12-09
– 2022-01-02Diversity as an end in itself
On a rich and vibrant ecosystem of culture and thought
2021-12-13Financing utopia
Hedonistic mechanism design
2015-02-16
– 2021-11-12Cooperation amongst humans
2014-11-04
– 2021-11-12Better homes and societies
On destinations
2017-11-01
– 2021-10-27Trousers
2020-09-05
– 2021-10-27Economics on networks
2020-05-17
– 2021-10-16Planning under uncertainty
Transcending planning-though-hope-and-haruspicy
2020-04-23
– 2021-10-10Science for policy
Using evidence and reason to govern ourselves
2011-08-07
– 2021-09-22Economics of automation
When to the robots come for my job?
2021-09-20Clickbait bandit problems
On using computers to program humans
2017-05-18
– 2021-09-16DIY social networks and groupware
V. cypherpunk! much 733+!
2019-08-12
– 2021-09-05Governance of the commons
On the mysterious fact that most people get on with most of their neighbours most of the time
2014-10-29
– 2021-09-02Science
History, sociology and philosophy thereof
2017-07-08
– 2021-07-21Media virality
Strategic modelling for content creators
2016-08-30
– 2021-07-15Monetizing my music
2015-05-03
– 2021-07-07Moral philosophy
2014-08-04
– 2021-07-01Distributed sensing, swarm sensing, adaptive social learning
2014-10-13
– 2021-06-28What is your Sydney housing endgame?
2021-04-11
– 2021-05-26Decoupling the economy from energy
2021-05-21Complexity of markets
Computation in economic mechanisms
2021-02-20
– 2021-05-13The simplest thing
Minimum viable whatever, worse is better, PC-losering, Postel chaos, Burkean engineering
2020-02-03
– 2021-04-27ML benchmarks and their pitfalls
On marginal efficiency gain in paperclip manufacture
2020-08-16
– 2021-04-13Assorted laws and paradoxes
Mostly-eponymous laws I would confound without this note
2019-12-22
– 2021-03-18Quantitative risk measurement
Mathematics of actuarial and financial disaster
2015-04-30
– 2020-09-22Bookkeeping
2019-03-14
– 2020-08-20Financial markets
Descriptive engagement with reality of
2015-03-14
– 2020-07-02Economics of insurgence
2015-02-02
– 2020-07-01Firms: What is WITH you?
2014-10-15
– 2020-06-16Deep fakery
2020-06-15Productivity schemes
If you can tell me why this placeholder post from 2014 is still consistently in my top 10 most popular posts I would be grateful
2014-10-09
– 2020-06-05Link rot, mitigating
2020-05-27The money laundry, ownership and control
Paypal for the 1%
2020-05-13Waste, and the late capitalist industrial metabolism
2017-05-11
– 2020-04-22Internet for the occasionally online
Intermittency in your bandwidth not in your sanity
2017-04-09
– 2020-04-01DIY internet infrastructure
2019-10-27
– 2020-03-17Capitalism’s end game
What money wants
2014-12-31
– 2020-03-17Selling uncertainty
On the marginal price of ignorance
2016-05-25
– 2020-02-18Learning in adaptive systems
On staring into scopophilic abysses
2019-10-19
– 2020-01-22Sharing / gig economy
Turking your ride
2015-03-22
– 2019-11-21Smartypants cities
2014-12-25
– 2019-11-05Sneakernets
Intermittent connectivity, mesh networks and the Honda protocol
2015-10-03
– 2019-09-09Go bag, Sydney edition
2019-08-26Game complexity
2019-06-07Low impact fashion
Suiting australia
2019-04-18Hollow states
Skim government when fat cats drank the cream
2019-03-13Evidential decision theory
I know that you know what I think you know about what we all know about people who write about strong AI online.
2018-10-24Behavioural economics
2011-04-15
– 2017-09-17Sustainability
Anthropocene not heard
2011-04-15
– 2017-05-16Financial stability
When does volatility become a crash?
2019-10-21
– 2017-05-15Game theory
2016-10-13
– 2017-04-24Justice
2017-04-01Material basis of the economy
2011-10-17
– 2016-08-01Statistical mechanics
2015-11-14Altruism
2014-08-05
– 2015-06-18Normal accidents
2015-06-03Disruptive technology
2014-10-09Macroeconomics
2011-10-17Configuration space of the economy
2011-09-07Econophysics
2011-04-13Honours thesis
2010-12-16