Sublime

The Distorting Power of Incentives (or the “Pointed Carrot”)

For reasons mathematical, psychological, and sociological, it is a good idea to use a money management system that is relatively forgiving of estimation errors.

The big advantage of physicists—I think Doyne Farmer may have once said this to me—is not what they have learned, the tools. It’s how they have learned to think. In particular, physicists are quite good at being very, very broad, taking tools from all over the place. That is something that economists are very, very remiss in. It is a b—tch to try t

Keep in mind that the most efficient algorithm is not always the algorithm of choice.

In our largely segregated cities, geography is a highly effective proxy for race.

Over the course of several summers in the late 1960s, Baum and Lloyd Welch, an information theorist working down the hall, developed an algorithm to analyze Markov chains, which are sequences of events in which the probability of what happens next depends only on the current state, not past events.

who had a rapid run of success in poker tournaments between 2015 and 2018 before leaving to go into effective altruism–related jobs.

we’re willing to sacrifice efficiency for generality.