I've spent a couple of posts criticising the book mentioned in the title. I think criticising is more important than agreeing. Agreeing just takes an 'Okay', criticising needs more work: you need to explain where the chain of reasoning breaks off. But still, it may be of some use to make explicit the points that Mazzucato makes in her book that I endorse. Firstly, we have an explanation and rejection of the linear model of innovation. This is the idea that advances in technology and science go from basic sc…

Sometimes I encounters with the word 'holistic' around, and most, if not all, of those times, the quality of the work the word is being used in is usually poor. Holistic explanations also abound: they talk about interconectedness, the importance of the relation between parts above and beyond them, and so on. In more serious work, holistic-like explanations can be found in reference to 'emergence' or 'spontaneous behaviour'. The problem with the attitude of refusing to analyse the parts of a particular syste…

As the linguist Noam Chomsky has pointed out, when we strive to build a machine that moves underwater, we don’t require it to “swim” – and a submarine is no less of an achievement for its inability to do the backstroke. Smithsonian Magazine The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim; (Edsger W. Dijkstra) These kind of remarks are used to say that the Turing test is enough, and that further debate about what the apparatus is really doing is baseless. W…

This post will cover chapters 8 and 9 of the Entrepreneurial State. The first point the chapters make is that there is a disconnection between risk and return, contrary to what one would expect in a market. The chapter also rails against companies making huge profits, inequality, that disconnecting rewards from risk generates inequality, Apple not generating enough jobs, Apple generating not good enough jobs, and Apple's executies earning too much relative to Asian workers who manufacture the iPhones, corpo…

Read this first. Let's call what follows Formulation A of Newcomb's dilemma: One day, you get a call from some Robert Nozick to inform you that yo have been selected to earn some free money. He asks you to meet him somewhere. You go there and he is with two boxes. Welcome to Newcomb's dilemma, he says. The rules are simple: Here, in the first box, he says while he opens it, there are 1000$. So now you have a box and 1000$ on a table. In the other box you can have either nothing or 1000000$. Your goal, he i…

There are many ways of saying the same thing, both in writing and in speech. Here I will try to type down some examples of what I think are good practises. Note that I am not a native English writer, but the tips here are valid, in principle, for any language. A duty to make sense is implicit in the act of writing itself. This is why you should care about it. When you write, except when you are taking notes, you write for others to read. In order for you to be successful, you need to put complex concepts y…