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Mike

When optimization goes wrong: Caught in Mammon’s Grasp
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.
18 Apr 2025 18 min read
Simple negative feedback loop - Credit Wikimedia
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.
04 Apr 2025 7 min read
King Midas with his daughter, from A Wonder Book for Boys and Girls by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1893) - Credit Wikimedia
optimization

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.
01 Mar 2025 11 min read
Book list - Rising Risks: Navigating the Modern Risk Society
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.
14 Feb 2025 7 min read
The Matrix - Agent Smith Dodging with Kung Fu
externalities

The lethal economics of corporate kung fu

Does competition in market capitalism incentivize increasingly cleverer ways of bypassing economic competition?
29 Jan 2025 8 min read
Pileup of plastic waste in Thilafushi, 2012 - Credit Dying Regime: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dyingregime/8283823882/
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.
21 Jan 2025 5 min read
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