In a series of brilliant articles, Joe Kelly presents two possible attacks on Bitcoin: a sneak attack and a vocal attack (my terms). In the sneak attack scenario, the goal is to double spend. In the vocal attack scenario, the goal is to kill. In this post, I offer some…

A common critique of Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) is that it is “deflationary”. Usually what people mean when they say that a currency is deflationary is that its supply can’t be tweaked in order to meet changes in the aggregate demand for money. A recent example of this critique: …

Money and banking is one of those big picture topics that are endlessly debated. Although it’s a pretty complex topic — or perhaps because it’s a complex topic — I have often found that people are satisfied with lazily picking a view without diving too deeply into it. And yet…

In 2017, Andrej Karpathy wrote a seminal blog post where he called neural networks “software 2.0”. He makes the case that neural networks constitute a paradigm shift in software development. The innovation consists in substituting imperative programming with “programming by example”. Instead of writing in detail the operations a program…

Dedicating my energies to the study of the social organization which is in the future to replace the present condition of things, I’ve come to the conviction that all makers of social systems from ancient times up to the present year, have been dreamers, tellers of fairy-tales, fools who contradicted…

I recently applied for an Emergent Ventures grant to develop a course on the theory and history of governance, with an eye on the design of future governance systems. Tyler Cowen, who is leading the program, liked the idea and we hopped on a call. Our conversation quickly focused on…

RadicalXChange (RxC), a movement espousing some radical ideas for changing society, recently published a piece by Matt Prewitt offering a vision for a new kind of currency, called “plural money”. Like most ideas coming out of RxC, it’s a bold, thought-provoking proposal that challenges mainstream concepts of money. In this…

AI has a bad press problem. While it wows us, it also scares us. Both GPT3 and DALL-E 2 broke the internet when they came out, but the awe was mixed with concerns. Those concerns range from the commonplace (human obsolescence) to the obscure (deceptively-aligned mesa-optimizers). At the same time…

What college and fuck dolls have in common There’s been a lot of talk these past few years about some kind of crisis unfolding in American higher education. Lukianoff and Haidt argue in The Coddling of the American Mind that American colleges are nurturing three “great untruths” that interfere with social, emotional, and intellectual development. Those untruths are…