The reductionist view of science is that all high-level behavior consists of the underlying lower-level behavior and should be analyzed into components to fully understand.

A reductionist argument against an explanation might be that it is incorrect because there are multiple explanations of the same phenomena.

The selloff and resulting crash in cryptocurrency prices on Jan 21, 2022, which wiped out over $1 trillion from the major coins, showed that cryptocurrency behaves like any other risky asset in the market.

Economists and financial analysts often assume high interest rates are associated with tight monetary conditions and, conversely, low interest rates are associated with easy money.

When two people have competing ideas (let’s call them idea A and idea B), it’s common to compromise somewhere between idea A and idea B (let’s call that idea C).

Literary notes from reading Monetizing Innovation. Product failure is rooted in failure to put the customer’s willingness to pay for a new product at the core of product design.

This note does not have a description yet. Links to this note Kardeshev Scale

An inverse relationship exists between group size and productivity which shows that group effort does not necessarily lead to increased effort from the group members.

While remote work is obviously better for reducing exposure to COVID-19 than going to the office, the rapid increase in Omicron cases shows that remote work has little impact on reducing Omicron case counts.

A popular view of the environment, “Spaceship Earth”, is that the planet provides just the right biosphere to support human life.

From 2017 to 2021 the median size of Series A funding rounds grew from $7MM to $13MM.

If you sell to startups you should expect churn (they go out of business) and if you happen to catch the next big startup, you’re business model needs to be uncapped to grow along with it.

Every financial transaction, no matter how simple or fast, has non-monetary transaction costs.

Richard Feynman said about science that, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

A parochial error happens when you falsely believe that something in your narrow view of the world applies more broadly than it does.

The original idea of the web was that everyone would be both a producer and a consumer.

Blockchains are a server technology. They don’t live on the client and things like a web frontend to a dApp can’t perform CRUD operations without a server.

The process of seeking out good explanations is error correcting. It is tolerant of dissent with a healthy dose of skepticism and distrust of authority.

The Emacs advice system lets you modify the code running Emacs in a simple way.

A good explanation can not be modified or molded to fit when new information contradicts it.

One way to answer “how do we know…?” is to justify one’s belief by reference to an authoritative source or cornerstone of knowledge.

In 1984 it was discovered that the Soviet Union was spying on communications from US embassies.

Extrapolating from past data points is not an explanation. Building your confidence that something that will happen—like Bayes Theorem—is useful for descrete, observable problems, but fails to reveal the truth.

Written by David Deutsch. See also: Epistemology Links to this note How to Detect and Eliminate Errors Is the Most Important Knowledge