Sublime

Insurance has pooling effects. Allen doesn’t care if Sacha is also insured for either of our sakes, but the dispersion of risk benefits the insurance provider, enabling it to offer us both a policy in the first place. In a sense, this is true of any market, however complicated its construction. Market depth has impersonal social utility via social

What’s really happening within each city is a massive exchange of information across social and economic networks of people and organizations, all taking place on a complex infrastructural landscape of buildings, roads, pipes, and wires. For the most part there is no maestro; the properties of cities emerge from countless interactions of millions o

These changes occur at fairly regular intervals, like a molecular clock—one tiny mutation every two weeks, on average. Since those mutations happen at random places in the code, the genome of a virus in one part of the world will be slightly different than it is in other parts. By studying these cumulative, haphazard mutations collected from many t

not vary.

The value (“fitness”) of a given combination of building blocks often cannot be predicted by a summing up of values assigned to the component blocks. This nonlinearity (commonly called epistasis in genetics) leads to co-adapted sets of blocks (alleles) that serve to bias sampling and add additional layers to the hierarchy.

Instead of assuming agents were perfectly rational, we allowed there were limits to how smart they were. Instead of assuming the economy displayed diminishing returns (negative feedbacks), we allowed that it might also contain increasing returns (positive feedbacks). Instead of assuming the economy was a mechanistic system operating at equilibrium,

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature that interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”