I recently wrote a post on the effects financially de-risking carbon removal projects can have on the end price of removing CO₂. You can find it here.
Scaling Carbon Removal
This is more a redirect to a site I made to talk about the cost and scaling challenges associated with getting to the IPCC 10Gt of CO₂ target by 2050. It's interactive so you can click on any green value to change it and see the effects of this on any of the calculations and… Continue reading Scaling Carbon Removal
A taxonomy of group dynamics
Most things are made of some kind of group, your neighbourhood, your workplace, the UN. Yet there are many times when the behaviour of the group does not seem to conform to what we would expect. If we got a look at the members who made it up we may be surprised at what the outcome is. Why is this? Predominantly inspired by Schelling's Micromotives and Macrobehaviours I've tried to lay out some systems that can help shed light on this.
Buyers of first resort
So this is a little bit different, I wrote a piece for the excellent Works in Progress magazine which is linked here and this just to give the general overview of what it's about. The basic idea is exploring the concept of being a Buyer of first resort. What is a Buyer of first resort?… Continue reading Buyers of first resort
Governing the commons
Details matter. This is the central message running through Ostrom's most recognised work. The abstracted models of collective action like the prisoners dilemma or the tragedy of the commons are just that, abstractions. They have assumptions built in to them, that simplify the world enough to be shown in a 2x2 grid, and by necessity… Continue reading Governing the commons
Why there might be no “end of history” in politics
Vitalik has a really good post about collusion where he writes "The instability of majority games under cooperative game theory, is arguably highly underrated as a simplified general mathematical model of why there may well be no "end of history" in politics and no system that proves fully satisfactory; I personally believe it's much more… Continue reading Why there might be no “end of history” in politics
What is Ethereum
Ethereum is one of if not the most impressive invention of the last decade. There have been many advances in that time but few were as revolutionary as Ethereum. Most people who have heard of Ethereum will have heard of it in comparison or alongside Bitcoin. It is the second most widely used cryptocurrency. If… Continue reading What is Ethereum
re: Where are all the successful rationalists
I came across a blog post recently titled 'Where are all the successful rationalists' by a newish blog called Applied Divinity Studies. The post raises the point that given the focus 'rationalists' put on better thinking there don't seem to be many people who would call themselves 'rationalists' in high up positions. A few answers… Continue reading re: Where are all the successful rationalists
Popper: Conjectures and Refutations
What is the ultimate source of knowledge? If knowledge is what we seem to be continually striving for shouldn’t we have in mind a good idea of how we attain it. Do we get it from our senses, some higher authority, direct observation, tradition? In this book Popper unasks this question declaring that there is… Continue reading Popper: Conjectures and Refutations
Mechanism design: non-technical considerations
Mechanism design is a broad and somewhat abstract part of Economics that one rarely hears about in day to day conversation. At its core it is about how the systems around us map preferences onto outcomes. Before one looks more into mechanism design it can seem like quite a fringe part of Economics, many of… Continue reading Mechanism design: non-technical considerations
Neil Hacker 