Using Namecoin for Identity
On the internet, it can be a challenge to know if you are connecting with who you think you are and not some impostor. Many websites don’t care who they are talking to in particular, as long as one person can’t masquerade as another person, so they ask each user to choose a password and […]
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Fermi’s Paradox
Wikipedia describes Fermi’s Paradox as follows: “The apparent size and age of the universe suggest that many technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations ought to exist. However, this hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it.” Scientists estimate that out of the roughly 200 billion star systems in our Galaxy, there are roughly […]
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Zero to One
This book has really good reviews, but I think it is mostly due to “success bias”: people have a tendency to overrate anything associated with successful people. There were very few original ideas in this book, if any. The main thesis is that we live in a time of technological stagnation and that entrepreneurs should […]
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The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
Overview of the basic concepts of marketing. The laws are simple, but they aren’t always obvious. The emphasizes that successful marketing is more about appealing to the customer’s psychology than their rational decision making process.
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Crossing the Chasm
This book provides a great mental model for how high-tech marketing works. It presents a technology adoption bell curve divided into customer groups based on how early they will adopt a new technology. The groups correspond to innovators who try new technologies for fun, early adopters (or visionaries) who are the first to find a […]
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The Black Swan
This book is about the idea that people over-rely on the gaussian distribution and that big events happen much more often than a gaussian distribution would predict. It’s an important concept, but there wasn’t much useful information in the book.
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Manna: Two Visions of Humanity’s Future
I really like how this book addressed the issue of technological unemployment. It depicts a future in which an artificial intelligence called “Manna” is used to direct low-paid employees through headsets to optimize their performance. It would give step-by-step instructions to employees for how to cook a hamburger, take out the trash, or restock the […]
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Net Neutrality vs Freedom
In my last post, I discussed some problems with the general concept of net neutrality, but in this post I want to discuss net neutrality more concretely and in the sense that most people are talking about online. The general assumption is that every user of the internet, whether they are a content provider or […]
Read more from the Economics category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: 2 Comments. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.
Net Neutrality is Wrong
EDIT 5-15-14: If you believe that I’m using the wrong definition of “net neutrality”, see this comment. Net neutrality is factually, practically, and ethically wrong. I’ve never disagreed with the ACLU before, but if there is one thing that I’ve learned it’s that every organization has some kind of unfair bias to help unify it. […]
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Is taxation theft?
Preamble: When discussing the question “is taxation theft?” people often commit the logical fallacy known as a “red herring” by diverting the discussion to the possible justifications for taxation rather than discussing the original question, which is whether taxation satisfies the formal definition of the word “theft”. Try to be cognizant of this. To determine […]
Read more from the Political Philosophy category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: 2 Comments. or stay up to date with this post via RSS from your site.