Stuart Russell wrote a new book about managing the coming artificial intelligence revolution called Human Compatible. He believes that the main danger of AI is not that it will become conscious and decide to maximize its own well-being at the…
Blog Archives
Inequality & The Good Place
I’ve been watching the first season of The Good Place on Netflix which is a sit-com (with super-high ratings on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes) about two people who are mistakenly sent to heaven and must learn moral philosophy to be…
Posted in Philosophy and ethics
US primary elections are a crapfest. Time for some intelligent design.
Joe Biden has been the Democratic frontrunner for the entire 2020 primary until last week when Elizabeth Warren surged in the polls and briefly became the frontrunner. Her momentum made it look like she was going to demolish all the…
Posted in Pence2018, Public Finance
Best place to work: McDonald’s France
French people like to do things their own way. When they brought McDonald’s to their country, they customized it right down to the famous yellow on red logo that we have in the United States. In France, they like a…
Posted in Medianism
This month may be the best time in history to look for a job!
One of the oddities of the macroeconomy is the fact that GDP falls wildly every year in the beginning of winter. That means that there is a kind of recession every winter. It isn’t an official recession because everyone expects…
NPR thinks the average American looks like the average Trump supporter
Planet Money and the New York Times’ Ben Casselman teamed up to try to demonstrate that, “Mode, not average, is a better way to find the typical American.” They are wrong. Here is how they set up the issue: MALONE:…
Posted in Metrology
Big land
Bloomberg investigated the 100 people that own the most land in America and this map shows where they have bought land: The 100 largest owners of private property in the U.S., newcomers and old-timers together, have 40 million acres, or…
Posted in Public Finance
Medianism 