All Epsilon Theory Content
Everything we have published at Epsilon Theory since 2013, an archive of more than 1,000 evergreen notes.
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This Office Hours is all about Coronavirus, except it’s not – it’s all about how institutions who solve for narrative outcomes invariably create bad results in the Real World.
Within a few months, the reality of COVID-19 will overtake the propaganda of the CCP and their toadies at the World Health Organization, as real-world companies begin making real-world economic decisions to maintain their enterprises in the face of a real-world threat.
Those decisions will be led by sports franchises.
To date, WHO leadership has simply been part of the Chinese narrative machine.
It’s not just a betrayal of the researchers and clinicians who do important work under WHO auspices. It’s a betrayal of the world.
Our social institutions require of us many songs. One of those songs is about the roots of poverty in immorality. If we’re going to stop singing their songs, this may be a good place to start.
China is fighting nCov2019 exactly like the US fought North Vietnam … with policy driven more by narrative control than by what’s best to win the war.
That was a disastrous strategic mistake for the US then, and it’s a disastrous strategic mistake for China today.
Because the danger of powerful memes, cartoons and narratives is not that they demand our acquiesence. It is that they demand our participation.
Every once in a while, narrative-world gives you a gift that just keeps on giving. So it is with outgoing CEO Ginni Rometty’s regime of despair at IBM.
Today my focus is on the IBM-sponsored hagiography that is springing up like slime molds on the underside of rotting swamp cabbages.
Two weeks ago we were being told about the coronavirus outbreak. This week we are being told how we should think about it. Right or wrong, it is important to have Clear Eyes about this kind of Fiat News.
Axioms to live by in baseball and in investing!
1) Outsiders to an organization can never know in real time what goes on inside it.
2) Human labors can never be gauged fully and dispositively in real time.
3) Chains are never stronger than their weakest links.
Outgoing IBM CEO Ginni Rometty has filed 167 SEC Form 4s detailing her stock transactions in the company.
So I downloaded and compiled all of them to see how much money she has sucked out of IBM, just like I did for outgoing Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg.
There is a median narrative theorem that can serve as a central pillar of a NEW approach to social choice theory, an approach less pedantic in its assumptions about human nature and less naive in its assumptions about modes of social power.
The median narrative theorem generates powerful predictive hypotheses about elections, hypotheses that predicted Trump’s Republican primary victory in 2016 and – if current data holds – predicts Sanders’ Democratic primary victory in 2020.
Forget about impeachment and its partisan Kabuki theater. It’s a joke.
If there’s some rich dude who bought his way onto that Wuhan evacuation flight, and you know there is … if this Administration is forsaking its ONE JOB to protect American citizens, and you know they are …
THAT’S what brings down this government.
There are many roads to serfdom, and they have all become faster and more perilous. We are walking down one of them now.
It’s the one thing that Donald Trump and Rachel Maddow can agree on … “who the hell cares about the budget?”
If you don’t see that every government in the developed world is about to embark on a massive deficit spending spree, with modern-day ziggurats constructed in every burg and hamlet … you’re just not paying attention.
On MLK, Jr. Day, we present an excerpt from a powerful and under-read sermon about status delivered to the Ebenezer Baptist Church.
I know, I know … it’s me being mean to Neel Kashkari again.
Sorry, not sorry. Belittlement and scorn is the only weapon we have against the creeping ensorcellment of the Long Now.
More from the world of universities-as-guilds and the weird war between the merely rich and ultra-rich.