4 paradoxes Modern conflicts over property rights and commodification The 21st century has become increasingly defined by fights over property rights and boundaries of commodification
AI AI hype is a mirror of market fundamentalism Both AI enthusiasts and market fundamentalists gloss over the context needed to understand complex systems.
AI Featured LLM “intelligence” is a dark pattern LLMs leverage scaffolding and user psychology to appear as slabs of raw intelligence in service of a costly illusion.
AI A (less) technical guide for understanding large language models Disambiguating LLMs from other machine learning tech is the first step to making sense of the current AI boom.
capitalist serialization The historical contingencies of Anglo-capitalism Capitalism is a social technology and a system of governance predicated on specific historical developments.
information asymmetry Featured Capitalism runs like a computer (and it's being hacked) Like computer networks, market capitalism rewards actors that exploit gaps created by system and user behavior.
4 paradoxes The tension at the heart of market capitalism Capitalism promises competition, but its biggest winners avoid it. Separating markets from capitalism explains this paradox.
information asymmetry What do AI alignment fears reveal about market capitalism? Capitalism's misincentives won't create Skynet but resemble optimization problems AI programmers face.
Mammon When optimization goes wrong: Caught in Mammon’s Grasp We return to my metaphor for maloptimization, or optimization failure, to describe different ways optimization processes often go wrong.
optimization What is optimization? Optimization and optimization-like dynamics shape the behavior of systems like markets and societies, making even a high-level understanding of optimization valuable for navigating the modern world.
Mammon Beyond greed: Mammon as an analogy for maloptimization and wicked problems “Mammon” is my name for the tendency of technology to give rise to seemingly paradoxical and unintended consequences.
booklist Book list - Rising Risks: Navigating the Modern Risk Society Complex risks, fueled by abstract and sometimes interrelated crises, are becoming a common feature of the modern world and our politics.
information asymmetry The lethal economics of corporate kung fu Does competition in market capitalism incentivize increasingly cleverer ways of bypassing economic competition?
externalities What's the purpose of Misaligned Markets Misaligned Markets is the result of a long intellectual journey to understand the structure and moral dimensions of markets under capitalism.
