continuations.com

It was upsetting to see Notre Dame burn on Monday, as the building is a beloved landmark to the many millions who have visited Paris and enjoyed a stroll near its majestic presence. That means interventions have limited upside (marginal improvement) but, as we have seen, dramatic downside. Whenever the payoff structure of any activity has this asymmetry of limited upside, unlimited downside it is advisable considering not engaging in it at all, or proceeding with extreme caution. next Uncertainty Wednesday we will look at how the nearly same intervention can have a very different payoff structure when the circumstances are different.

After Capital, but last week involved a lot of travel so I didn’t make enough progress. Instead, if you have not seen it already, I recommend watching Andrew Yang’s CNN Town Hall. Andrew is to-date the only presidential candidate to support a Universal Basic Income, which is one of the key policies I recommend in World After Capital in the chapter on Economic Freedom.

Consider a similar coincidence: you meet a stranger, say on an airplane flight (writing this in the air) and you discover after some conversation that you both really like a rather obscure arthouse movie. But your conversation with the stranger on the airplane is similarly just one of tens of millions of people are having with a stranger today. Just like there is no information in someone winning the lottery of the kind I described above. Even if there were no targeting of any kind, we should, at the population level expect to see quite a few dead on hits, such as hearing aids being advertised to someone who never before searched for hearing aids but recently mentioned them in conversation.

Most religion meets these human needs by claiming that our purpose is to follow a divine set of rules and if we follow those rules the respective god or gods will recognize our existence. There are anti rational memes, such as believing in a pre-ordained individual destiny, that can be used to answer one’s need for purpose, but will prevent one from being psychologically free. A new Humanism, based on the importance of knowledge, provides an alternative source of purpose and recognition that does not inhibit psychological freedom but rather enhances it. We will need a new system instead that celebrates knowledge (as broadly defined here) for its own sake, allows students to discover their individual interests and deepen those into a purpose, and educates them about techniques for being psychologically free.