Posts

On Cost

One time I heard Ezra Klein talk about how someone needed to invent a technology that made some activity much easier. It’s probably annoying to read that sentence and not to have filled in after just what the activity was, but I think the ideas here will apply generally.

What Do Mavericks Need to Understand?

Partly motivated by my writing last night, where I take an interest in how maverick thinkers can actually buck against conventional wisdoms too unwieldy for a single person to have been responsible for them, I’m here tonight to meditate on how humans organize to do things that are too complicated for any individual human to do, such as the generation...

Reasoning From First-Principles v. Inherited Wisdom

• I’ve been struck in recent years by a push–most availably from the Elon Musk genre of person–to reason from first principles. This on the one hand strikes me as good because I immediately can list off a litany of problems with reasoning from \(n\)th principles where \(n \neq 1\).
• Inherited conventional wisdom is hard to...

Philosophers v. Practical Persons

I’ve got a buddy who rather likes rolling his eyes at economists; these were the deliverers of lectures that he’d rather not have had to sit through, who failed to make his college experience sufficiently practical or fun. To this friend, I feel the need to make an argument for “why science”?

A Local, Conflicted, Practical, English Conversation