Map of Stewartsville, NJ . I grew up in a rural part of northern New Jersey in a small town named Stewartsville. In my elementary and middle school there were about twenty kids per grade. We had teachers who called water “wooder.” My house was up in the woods, on the side of a mountain road. We had about an acre of property. Behind our woods was a cornfield. Behind the cornfield was a river. And…
Honey, no one ever paid to see under the top. – Joel Schumacher. I gave a talk at MIT back in August. Reactions varied. A Curious Student: “Do you consider yourself more of a HOPEFUL romantic or a HOPELESS romantic?” A Confused Student: “Do you think you would be a happier person if you had NOT studied philosophy?” A Concerned Student: “Are you OK?” I guess it went OK, because it’s only September…
I like to listen to the way people talk in the wild. On the street. In bars. At the bodega. How people talk when they’re not performing. People who haven’t had media training. People who haven’t learned the art of saying nothing in a way that makes it sound like they said something. Job site in DUMBO. A few weeks ago, I was walking past a job site, and I heard this one guy say hi to another guy.…
The Dying Achilles, Ernst Herter When Odysseus visits the kingdom of the dead in Book 11 of The Odyssey, he comes upon Achilles, greatest of all the Greek warriors who fought in the Trojan War, and he congratulates the hero: Time was, when you were alive, we Argives honored you as a god, and now down here, I see, you lord it over the dead in all your power. So grieve no more at dying, great…
The Beach Bum, 2019 My senior year of college, I was supposed to go to Key West for spring break with some friends. The night before we were supposed to leave, I lost all my money in a poker game – like 800 bucks. A friend loaned me enough cash to pay for a bus to get down there, but not back. When I got there, I found a job on a lobster boat – setting traps – and I made enough money to pay for…
One good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain So hit me with music, hit me with music – Bob Marley Listen to *Moto Perpetuo* playlist on youtube or spotify . When Chick Corea died, several friends texted me to offer condolences. We’re not related by blood, Chick and I. He isn’t even one of my all time favorites – like Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, Angelique Kidjo. But Chick Corea is…
Life Magazine / Society of the Spectacle. The 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma raises a number of legitimate concerns about the negative impacts of social media technology on our society, but it somehow fails to connect the dots from its critique of social media to a far broader set of problems. The danger of this narrow view is that it leaves the audience thinking the problems are specific to…
One of the striking and sad things about the pandemic for me has been a disconnect between my own relatively uninterrupted experience and what I see as the broader, more traumatic experience. One of the key drivers of the more dramatic disparity is the technology that is being deployed in response to the pandemic. In this essay, I will suggest a framework for teasing out the distribution of…
Rob , Nam , and I made this for the RadicalxChange 2020 Conference . About Decades of communications technology innovation, marketing science, and optimization of algorithms that operate on vast sets of behavioral data now enable humans to use information to influence behavior with unprecedented scale and accuracy. The best of this knowledge has largely been deployed for political or commercial…
This is part iii of Accounts and Accountability . i. I, Backpack ii. The Infinite Frontier as American Capitalism’s Response to the Malthusian Trap iii. Advertising, IP Law, and the Invisible Hand Drawing Hands, MC Escher . But wait, you’ll say, reducing the working week would reduce the incentive to innovate, it would distort the market and lead to misallocation of production effort. We actually…
This is part ii of Accounts and Accountability . i. I, Backpack ii. The Infinite Frontier as American Capitalism’s Response to the Malthusian Trap iii. Advertising, IP Law, and the Invisible Hand Asteroid mining, via . I was talking to someone just the other day who argued that instead of worrying about material waste or fossil fuel consumption, we should focus on (i) figuring out how to mine…
⥂ tldr; This is a lengthy set of musings, so I broke it up into 3 parts. It starts with a backpack repair, which got me thinking about some of the ‘features’ and efficiencies of the mass production + consumption economy that we will need to think about if we want to transition to a ‘greener’ economy. This led me on a meandering tour of some the economic policy, corporate law, and business practice…
For many years, I have been using Google Docs was the primary repository for all of my notes, drafts, and journals. Over the past few months, I’ve (1) heard lots of great reviews of new note-taking apps and (2) I have personally been using VS Code a lot more for writing code. I recently evaluated all of the alternatives and landed on using a suped up VS Code as my primary notebook. This post…
Five Principles for Radical Tax Reform and a Universal Dividend Interactive model for designing your own tax regime. One of the key criticisms of the tax on the exercise of power that I recently proposed was that while in principle it made a lot of sense, practically it would be difficult if not impossible to pull off (perhaps requiring a constitutional amendment). In this essay, I want to discuss…
Update: see also my follow-up to this post, Principles for Radical Tax Reform . In Kinky Labor Supply and the Attention Tax , Namrata and I explored why a state might levy a tax on the sale of human attention to stimulate economic productivity. Here, I’ll explore how a tax on the purchase of human attention might resolve one of the key issues at stake in the ongoing debate about how the government…
This is a lengthy discussion, so I’ll begin with a summary. The basic idea in this post is to consider capitalism as a highly efficient objective function (or “AI”) with its parameters optimized for the satisfaction of our short term desires rather than our long term interests. Paranoia about runaway feedback loops – in consumer capitalism, artificial intelligence, mass media, ‘ Wrestlemania…
This essay was co-authored by Andrew Kortina and Namrata Patel . In the media, you’ll often hear cursory references to “the 1%,” basic income, and “ taxing the rich ” without any specific measurements quantifying the broader impacts or side-by-side comparisons of alternatives. One exercise that can be useful when evaluating the major levers on a business is a “napkin math” sensitivity analysis –…
Escher, Relativity. Notes for the 2019 MIT IAP Seminar. See the syllabus here . Rob also prepared notes which provide some important background context on our motivations for this topic. i. Notes on the definition and history of narrative As background for our discussion of the current landscape of narrative and the future of narrative, I think it’s useful to first examine some of the functions of…
A talk prepared for UC Berkeley’s Build the Future speaker series in Oct 2018. The Cruel Tutelage of Pai Mei. Thank you all for coming this evening. I want to preface this talk by warning you that it’s quite possible you’ll interpret much of this talk as cynicism. It is not my intention to be cynical. My goal is to treat you with respect by speaking to you honestly, without any grand illusions. I…
This essay was co-authored by Andrew Kortina and Namrata Patel . Kinky (S 1 ) vs classical (S 0 ) labor supply curve. Over the past few decades, labor force participation has sharply dropped for men ages 20-34. Theories about the root cause range from indolence, to a lack of skills and training, to offshoring, to (perhaps most interestingly) the increasing attractiveness and availability of…
Chaos dream parade, Paprika . In Consciousness as Computation , I discussed how you can build up succinct explanations for some of the “most human” behavioral phenomena (like creativity) from the premise that consciousness is just a computational process. Since then, I’ve read more research that uses a similar computational view of consciousness to explain various psychological disorders as…
Papers Please . A stagnant job market with declining prospects for the working class has brought labor politics back to the center of the American consciousness. There’s talk of immigration policy as a way to limit domestic labor supply and protect jobs and wages in existing industries. There’s concern that waves of mass automation enabled by robotics and machine learning will decimate entire…
Constructing the mind, Ghost in the Shell . When I think about artificial intelligence as a consumer product, what comes to mind is a computer that understands when I ask it something and then does the right thing – sort of like Samantha from Her or HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey . The closest thing we have to this sort of experience today is Siri / Alexa / Google Assistant. These products are on…
The evolution of dignity in a world of mass automation. All the hype advertising recent advancements in deep learning and robotics as ‘AI’ has renewed public discourse about the job displacement that accompanies technological revolutions. Those concerned that a significant percentage of the population will soon not be skilled enough to compete for jobs (eg, with autonomous vehicles) are exploring…
Numbers. This post started with my frustration at seeing a lot of smart, well intentioned people getting trapped. It originally bore the sensational headline “Capitalism Makes Us All Slaves to Efficiency,” but there were enough reasonable ideas in here that I decided to tone it down a bit ;) A framework I’ve been using to diagnose patterns of failure I have observed across a variety of domains and…
This is a tour of some curiosities I unearthed and collected from the internet. Prepared for a Fin Engineering Lunch + Learn, presented on 14 Apr 2017. → Exhibit W This lunch + learn is dedicated to the only book on programming I have ever fully read. Here is a sample. Let's say you run an orphanage. And yet... Amen. → Exhibit - You’ll often hear me ranting about how “the internet is broken.” →…
Magnum Opus. From a series of talks given at various colleges during Fin's World Tour 2016. Pretty much every Silicon Valley tech company you hear from is going to sell you this idea of ‘impact.’ The narrative is essentially that your work should be a source of meaning in your life because the ratio of number of users of your service to employees at your company is a very large multiple. This is…
Infotainment. When I was growing up, phrases like “couch potato” in the public discourse were markers of a disenchantment with TV culture and societal awareness of the emptiness of mass media content. The rise of the internet gave hope of a way out of the homogeneity and banality of mass media. The internet promised to enable anyone to author and distribute unique and diverse perspectives, at…
PETE: Did you ever wonder what you’d be working on if you lived in a different generation? Like suppose you were the same age in 1969? Techno Industrial Alienation. ME: Hmm, ya. Maybe somehow involved in the civil rights movement, or the space program. I also just wonder about how I might be doing something totally different had I met different people or had different experiences in this life. In…
Arun walks over, excited. Arun: Woooweee! Me: You feeling this music? Arun: Now I am. I had two beers earlier tonight, which was two too many. My body doesn’t respond well to alcohol these days. It just slows me down. Not the right energy for dancing or for interesting conversation. “So, I walk over to Sofia. I say, I need to wake up, my energy is all wrong right now. I need you to smack me, OK?…
When I told a few friends about this idea I had for a soup restaurant, I got responses of laughter, smirks, puzzlement: “Everyone who lives in NYC wants to open a restaurant at some point. It's like a rite of passage.” Rather than ameliorating their confusion, I'd respond, “Yea, I want to do a restaurant like that too, but my idea for a sitdown NYC restaurant is a totally separate project. This…
— Budd, Kill Bill Vol 2 As someone who derives much of my vitality and creative energy from doing work I believe is important, my immediate reaction to Ezekial Emmanuel's Why I Hope to Die at 75 was: Emmanuel must have run out of things to work on . With my mother approaching retirement age, my next thought was: I hope no one I love feels the way Emmanuel does . I have reread Emmanuel's essay a…
This was so honest, so good, I had to share here. This is the full text of Charlie Kaufman’s Screenwriters’ Lecture for BAFTA [ with my highlights bolded ]. Charlie Kaufman: Thank you very much. I’m actually really happy to be here; at least that’s what I’m telling myself. I’ve never delivered a speech before, which is why I decided to do this tonight. I wanted to do something that I don’t know…
I have always advocated for stocking the office with healthy snacks, like fresh fruits and vegetables. Just as important as stocking healthy snacks, in my opinion, is keeping the space free of unhealthy snacks. I remember a long debate with Vaughan about allowing M&Ms in the office. My philosophy around stocking food is nicely summarized by a phrase Matt D once related to me, “I’m not a healthy…
I often speak about the origins of Venmo in person and finally wrote down the story here to share with our latest intern class that started this week. (You can also watch an excellent video of Iqram speaking about even more of the history of Venmo here . It’s a good place to pickup the story where this post leaves off.) My friend Iqram and I started Venmo to solve a very simple problem for…
A collection of my thoughts on higher education, specifically on the value of liberal arts education. 19 Apr 2017 The Whartonization of Higher Education More and more, it seems that students (and colleges themselves) seem to value college purely in terms of the job opportunities that result from a diploma. Curriucla emphasize the practical - marketing, business, management, accounting, etc.…
Cormac McCarthy is my kind of guy: In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time. Read the entire WSJ…