Society & Politics
10 essays.
The thing that gets you hired and the thing that actually teaches you are separating faster than most institutions have adapted to.
You can recognise thousands of faces and actively maintain far fewer relationships. The famous figure of 150 is contested — the underlying constraint is not.
The moment a job can be done from anywhere, the candidate pool for it stops being local and starts being global.
Most of human urban history was built around a 15-minute radius. The last century of car-centric planning was the actual anomaly.
Ideas that are ordinary today were once outside the range of what a respectable person said aloud. Mostly the facts didn't change — the boundary of the sayable did, and it moves by repetition.
A Nash equilibrium isn't necessarily a good outcome. It's just a stable one — which is a very different thing.
Every herder who adds a cow to the shared pasture captures the whole benefit and pays a twentieth of the cost. Nobody is greedy, everyone is correct, and the pasture dies anyway.
The prisoner's dilemma isn't really about prisoners. It's about why individually rational choices can add up to a collectively terrible outcome.
Across centuries of recorded history, a rising power challenging an established one has resolved peacefully far less often than most people assume.
Two children share one cake and one child's gain is the other's loss. Two neighbours swap mangoes for apples and both end up better off, with no new fruit. Telling these apart changes what you should do.