Research scientist @ Robust Incentives Group, Ethereum Foundation.
Research in algorithmic game theory, large systems and cryptoeconomics with a data-driven approach.
My copy of Dune Messiah started with notes from the author’s son, Brian Herbert, commenting on the cold reception that followed the book’s release. Being full of spoilers (it perhaps assumed people had already read Dune Messiah, hence why it was printed at the beginning?), I largely avoided it but not before I got the gist of the argument: the chamber politics of Dune Messiah felt “boring” after the all-out battle of the previous opus, while Herbert conceived of Messiah as a bridge between the opening chapter and the following one, Children of Dune. More...
I really wanted to like this book. I love the ideas that are in there. I was at first suspicious, because I tend to believe most “big picture” macrotheories of the city are either blatantly wrong or push a certain agenda that is not people-oriented. The author acknowledges it from the get-go (ostentatiously name-dropping Jane Jacobs is a certificate of sorts) and did convince me that the results they found do give an insight into the rhythms of the city. More...
I would recommend the book to someone who is not familiar with economics, as there is no blatant mistake or exaggeration of what the models are as is so often found in popular science takes on economics. The papers that inspire the discussion are classics of the field and you can never learn too much about them, plus the first chapter on the economics of POW camps was entirely new to me. Still, for someone more comfortable with market mechanisms, some parts lack significant nuance, especially towards the end with the brief discussion on the sharing economy and the effects of markets on behaviour, a subject much better treated in The Moral Economy by Samuel Bowles. More...
There is a lot going on in this book, and it is my first William T. Vollmann novel as well as a partial read since I have not yet started Volume 2. This volume is divided in two. A long introduction of about 250 pages gives a compendium of different measures, units, formulas related to energy, carbon and everything scientific the remainder of the two volumes use. The second part concerns the first “carbon ideology”, nuclear power. I did also read a lot of criticism (“some of the math is wrong, the anti-nuclear position is dangerous, who cares about alpha and beta waves anyway?”) and to be quite honest, most of the points raised seem quite reasonable. More...