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…
Este post pretende añadir al debate abierto con la publicación de Contra la Renta Básica, de Juan Ramón Rallo. Recientemente, Francisco Capella ha publicado una crítica al libro que puede encontrarse aquí.
No trataré todos los puntos de la crítica, sino una parte:
Rallo señala tres principios de justicia como ideas diferentes que pueden entrar en conflicto (libertad, propiedad y contratos)
Capella dice que sólo hay un único principio con las tres facetas que Rallo identifica como diferentes, y que no puede…
Do firms invest in long term R&D?
They do, right? There are examples around. Just recently we saw that Intel will invest 50 million dollars in Quantum Computing (Also, this brief note by Intel's CEO). They don't expect to have results immediately:
Today Intel Corporation announced a 10-year collaborative relationship with the Delft University of Technology and TNO, the Dutch Organisation for Applied Research, to accelerate advancements in quantum computing. To achieve this goal, Intel will invest US$50…