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CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri (Book Review) A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER 2021. Predictions are hard, especially when they are about the future. A quote that is variously attributed to Nils Bohr and Yogi Berra but with an, unsurprisingly, more complicated history, feels perfect when thinking about 2021.The range of possible outcomes includes everything from getting the pandemic behind us rapidly, to a new strain emerging through mutation that the current crop of CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM) In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity.After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER VC Backed Startups and PPP: Do You Really Need It? There has been a lot of discussion of whether or not startups qualify for forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program administered by the SBA (part of the CARES Act). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean under Fat Tails (Cont’d) Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday will be quite short as I am super swamped. Last week I showed some code and an initial graph for sample means of size 100 from a Cauchy distribution.Here is a plot (narrowed down to the -25 to +25 range again) for sample size 10: CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Speaking up Against Trump. I have stayed away from commenting on Trump because I prefer to address issues rather than individual politicians. But Trump’s call yesterday to block the entry of all Muslims into the US requires a broad based response. Even Dick Cheney came out saying that this “goes against everything we stand for” (and this from the man who supported torture). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER You Are Not Alone (USV CEO Summit) Today is our annual get together for USV portfolio company CEOs. A few years back, when we first started building out the USV network, we switched to an un-conference format. Gary Chou who first started to bring portfolio companies in the network pioneered this. Gary’s insight was to create an opportunity to talk about issues in small groups of peers and CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Tech Tuesday: CSS. In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER : ABOUT About. Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks. USV portfolio companies include: Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and Shapeways. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s saleto Yahoo.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri (Book Review) A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER 2021. Predictions are hard, especially when they are about the future. A quote that is variously attributed to Nils Bohr and Yogi Berra but with an, unsurprisingly, more complicated history, feels perfect when thinking about 2021.The range of possible outcomes includes everything from getting the pandemic behind us rapidly, to a new strain emerging through mutation that the current crop of CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM) In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity.After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER VC Backed Startups and PPP: Do You Really Need It? There has been a lot of discussion of whether or not startups qualify for forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program administered by the SBA (part of the CARES Act). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean under Fat Tails (Cont’d) Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday will be quite short as I am super swamped. Last week I showed some code and an initial graph for sample means of size 100 from a Cauchy distribution.Here is a plot (narrowed down to the -25 to +25 range again) for sample size 10: CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Speaking up Against Trump. I have stayed away from commenting on Trump because I prefer to address issues rather than individual politicians. But Trump’s call yesterday to block the entry of all Muslims into the US requires a broad based response. Even Dick Cheney came out saying that this “goes against everything we stand for” (and this from the man who supported torture). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER You Are Not Alone (USV CEO Summit) Today is our annual get together for USV portfolio company CEOs. A few years back, when we first started building out the USV network, we switched to an un-conference format. Gary Chou who first started to bring portfolio companies in the network pioneered this. Gary’s insight was to create an opportunity to talk about issues in small groups of peers and CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Tech Tuesday: CSS. In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER COVID19 What’s Next? Innovation FTW. I wrote a post about flattening the curve last week. I believe this week we will see some kind of government enforced lockdown in the US similar to the one in place in Italy, Spain and France.It is really the only way left at this point to have even a chance of not completely overwhelming the healthcare system (and even that’s questionable). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: The Problem with P-Values (Incentives) Last Uncertainty Wednesday, I introduced the concept of p-values.We looked at the example of a null hypothesis (explanation) that a coin is fair, observing heads (H) or tails (T) six times in a row and rejecting that the coin is fair because the probability of that happening with a fair coin is only 0.03125 which is less than 0.05 CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean under Fat Tails (Cont’d) Today’s Uncertainty Wednesday will be quite short as I am super swamped. Last week I showed some code and an initial graph for sample means of size 100 from a Cauchy distribution.Here is a plot (narrowed down to the -25 to +25 range again) for sample size 10: CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Voice Platforms: Open Alternative is an Opportunity. There is a lot of excitement among startups and other companies about building for Amazon’s and Google’s voice platforms. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER More on Facial Recognition Regulation. I have written previously about the need to regulate the use of facial recognition technology.The calls for regulation have become stronger in the wake of Kashmir Hill’s New York Times article about Clearview AI.It is extremely important to get this right. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Martin Luther King Jr Supported Basic Income. We have the USV office closed today in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. day. In his book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community” he wrote: In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing — they areindirect.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Presenting Option Grants to Boards. One of the nearly routine items at startup board meetings is the discussion and ratification of option grants for new employees and CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Liberate Apps Through Protocols: Lets Update IRC! One of the apps on your phone is unlike all the others: the web browser. There are many reasons it is different but here is the most fundamental one – you tell it what to connect to! CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Bad Driving, Throughput and Waiting Times. There are two bad habits in car drivers that I find quite annoying: not pulling into the intersection and not signaling turns. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER : ABOUT About. Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks. USV portfolio companies include: Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and Shapeways. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s saleto Yahoo.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri (Book Review) A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER 2021. Predictions are hard, especially when they are about the future. A quote that is variously attributed to Nils Bohr and Yogi Berra but with an, unsurprisingly, more complicated history, feels perfect when thinking about 2021.The range of possible outcomes includes everything from getting the pandemic behind us rapidly, to a new strain emerging through mutation that the current crop of CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM) In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity.After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER VC Backed Startups and PPP: Do You Really Need It? There has been a lot of discussion of whether or not startups qualify for forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program administered by the SBA (part of the CARES Act). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER : ABOUT About. Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks. USV portfolio companies include: Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and Shapeways. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s saleto Yahoo.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri (Book Review) A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER 2021. Predictions are hard, especially when they are about the future. A quote that is variously attributed to Nils Bohr and Yogi Berra but with an, unsurprisingly, more complicated history, feels perfect when thinking about 2021.The range of possible outcomes includes everything from getting the pandemic behind us rapidly, to a new strain emerging through mutation that the current crop of CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM) In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity.After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER VC Backed Startups and PPP: Do You Really Need It? There has been a lot of discussion of whether or not startups qualify for forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program administered by the SBA (part of the CARES Act). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER You Are Not Alone (USV CEO Summit) Today is our annual get together for USV portfolio company CEOs. A few years back, when we first started building out the USV network, we switched to an un-conference format. Gary Chou who first started to bring portfolio companies in the network pioneered this. Gary’s insight was to create an opportunity to talk about issues in small groups of peers and CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Question 4 is about basic income and technological underemployment, asking whether the latter is the best argument for the former. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean (Part 3) Last Uncertainty Wednesday we dug deeper into understanding the distribution of sample means.I ended with asking why the chart for 100,000 samples of size 10 looked smoother than then one for samples of size 100 (just as a refresher, these are all rolls of a fair die).Well, for a sample of size 10, there are 51 possible values of the mean: 1.0, 1.1 CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Tech Tuesday: CSS. In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER : ABOUT About. Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks. USV portfolio companies include: Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and Shapeways. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s saleto Yahoo.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri (Book Review) A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER 2021. Predictions are hard, especially when they are about the future. A quote that is variously attributed to Nils Bohr and Yogi Berra but with an, unsurprisingly, more complicated history, feels perfect when thinking about 2021.The range of possible outcomes includes everything from getting the pandemic behind us rapidly, to a new strain emerging through mutation that the current crop of CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM) In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity.After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Ask Me Anything: Questions 3 & 4. For your Sunday viewing pleasure, here are the next two questions and answers in my Ask Me Anything series.Question 3 is about an area of physics – dark matter and energy – that I don’t know anything about: CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Presenting Option Grants to Boards. One of the nearly routine items at startup board meetings is the discussion and ratification of option grants for new employees and CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean (Part 3) Last Uncertainty Wednesday we dug deeper into understanding the distribution of sample means.I ended with asking why the chart for 100,000 samples of size 10 looked smoother than then one for samples of size 100 (just as a refresher, these are all rolls of a fair die).Well, for a sample of size 10, there are 51 possible values of the mean: 1.0, 1.1 CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Tech Tuesday: CSS. In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER (Intentionally) Missing the Point of Online Social. So I haven’t seen “The Social Network” yet and there is a good chance I won’t get around to it at all, as I CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER India Impressions. We just spent two weeks in India traveling to some of the famous tourist destinations including Varanasi, Agra and Jodhpur. It was an intense sensory experience of colors, sounds and smells that this blog post won’t even try to do justice. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER : ABOUT About. Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks. USV portfolio companies include: Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and Shapeways. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s saleto Yahoo.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri (Book Review) A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM) In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity.After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER VC Backed Startups and PPP: Do You Really Need It? There has been a lot of discussion of whether or not startups qualify for forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program administered by the SBA (part of the CARES Act). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Threat of a Trump Dictatorship. I wrote a post last week that incensed some people who took issue both with my use of the term fascism and with the apparent focus on the deployment of DHS agents in Portland. Based on the comments here is a new post. I believe there is a clear and present danger of Trump attempting to become a dictatorthis fall.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER You Are Not Alone (USV CEO Summit) Today is our annual get together for USV portfolio company CEOs. A few years back, when we first started building out the USV network, we switched to an un-conference format. Gary Chou who first started to bring portfolio companies in the network pioneered this. Gary’s insight was to create an opportunity to talk about issues in small groups of peers and CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Question 4 is about basic income and technological underemployment, asking whether the latter is the best argument for the former. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Tech Tuesday: CSS. In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean (Part 3) Last Uncertainty Wednesday we dug deeper into understanding the distribution of sample means.I ended with asking why the chart for 100,000 samples of size 10 looked smoother than then one for samples of size 100 (just as a refresher, these are all rolls of a fair die).Well, for a sample of size 10, there are 51 possible values of the mean: 1.0, 1.1 CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER : ABOUT About. Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks. USV portfolio companies include: Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and Shapeways. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s saleto Yahoo.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri (Book Review) A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM) In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity.After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER VC Backed Startups and PPP: Do You Really Need It? There has been a lot of discussion of whether or not startups qualify for forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program administered by the SBA (part of the CARES Act). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Threat of a Trump Dictatorship. I wrote a post last week that incensed some people who took issue both with my use of the term fascism and with the apparent focus on the deployment of DHS agents in Portland. Based on the comments here is a new post. I believe there is a clear and present danger of Trump attempting to become a dictatorthis fall.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER You Are Not Alone (USV CEO Summit) Today is our annual get together for USV portfolio company CEOs. A few years back, when we first started building out the USV network, we switched to an un-conference format. Gary Chou who first started to bring portfolio companies in the network pioneered this. Gary’s insight was to create an opportunity to talk about issues in small groups of peers and CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Question 4 is about basic income and technological underemployment, asking whether the latter is the best argument for the former. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Tech Tuesday: CSS. In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean (Part 3) Last Uncertainty Wednesday we dug deeper into understanding the distribution of sample means.I ended with asking why the chart for 100,000 samples of size 10 looked smoother than then one for samples of size 100 (just as a refresher, these are all rolls of a fair die).Well, for a sample of size 10, there are 51 possible values of the mean: 1.0, 1.1 CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER : ABOUT About. Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks. USV portfolio companies include: Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and Shapeways. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s saleto Yahoo.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri (Book Review) A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM) In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity.After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Threat of a Trump Dictatorship. I wrote a post last week that incensed some people who took issue both with my use of the term fascism and with the apparent focus on the deployment of DHS agents in Portland. Based on the comments here is a new post. I believe there is a clear and present danger of Trump attempting to become a dictatorthis fall.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Ask Me Anything: Questions 3 & 4. For your Sunday viewing pleasure, here are the next two questions and answers in my Ask Me Anything series.Question 3 is about an area of physics – dark matter and energy – that I don’t know anything about: CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Presenting Option Grants to Boards. One of the nearly routine items at startup board meetings is the discussion and ratification of option grants for new employees and CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Tech Tuesday: CSS. In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean (Part 3) Last Uncertainty Wednesday we dug deeper into understanding the distribution of sample means.I ended with asking why the chart for 100,000 samples of size 10 looked smoother than then one for samples of size 100 (just as a refresher, these are all rolls of a fair die).Well, for a sample of size 10, there are 51 possible values of the mean: 1.0, 1.1 CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER (Intentionally) Missing the Point of Online Social. So I haven’t seen “The Social Network” yet and there is a good chance I won’t get around to it at all, as I CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER India Impressions. We just spent two weeks in India traveling to some of the famous tourist destinations including Varanasi, Agra and Jodhpur. It was an intense sensory experience of colors, sounds and smells that this blog post won’t even try to do justice. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER : ABOUT About. Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks. USV portfolio companies include: Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and Shapeways. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s saleto Yahoo.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri (Book Review) A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM) In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity.After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER VC Backed Startups and PPP: Do You Really Need It? There has been a lot of discussion of whether or not startups qualify for forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program administered by the SBA (part of the CARES Act). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Threat of a Trump Dictatorship. I wrote a post last week that incensed some people who took issue both with my use of the term fascism and with the apparent focus on the deployment of DHS agents in Portland. Based on the comments here is a new post. I believe there is a clear and present danger of Trump attempting to become a dictatorthis fall.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER More on Facial Recognition Regulation. I have written previously about the need to regulate the use of facial recognition technology.The calls for regulation have become stronger in the wake of Kashmir Hill’s New York Times article about Clearview AI.It is extremely important to get this right. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Question 4 is about basic income and technological underemployment, asking whether the latter is the best argument for the former. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Bad Driving, Throughput and Waiting Times. There are two bad habits in car drivers that I find quite annoying: not pulling into the intersection and not signaling turns. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean (Part 3) Last Uncertainty Wednesday we dug deeper into understanding the distribution of sample means.I ended with asking why the chart for 100,000 samples of size 10 looked smoother than then one for samples of size 100 (just as a refresher, these are all rolls of a fair die).Well, for a sample of size 10, there are 51 possible values of the mean: 1.0, 1.1 CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER : ABOUT About. Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks. USV portfolio companies include: Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and Shapeways. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s saleto Yahoo.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri (Book Review) A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM) In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity.After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER VC Backed Startups and PPP: Do You Really Need It? There has been a lot of discussion of whether or not startups qualify for forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program administered by the SBA (part of the CARES Act). CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Threat of a Trump Dictatorship. I wrote a post last week that incensed some people who took issue both with my use of the term fascism and with the apparent focus on the deployment of DHS agents in Portland. Based on the comments here is a new post. I believe there is a clear and present danger of Trump attempting to become a dictatorthis fall.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER New USV Website. Today we have launched a new website for USV.It is the second complete overhaul of the site since USV launched with a blog in 2004 (modulo some smaller experiments with tagging in CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER More on Facial Recognition Regulation. I have written previously about the need to regulate the use of facial recognition technology.The calls for regulation have become stronger in the wake of Kashmir Hill’s New York Times article about Clearview AI.It is extremely important to get this right. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Question 4 is about basic income and technological underemployment, asking whether the latter is the best argument for the former. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Bad Driving, Throughput and Waiting Times. There are two bad habits in car drivers that I find quite annoying: not pulling into the intersection and not signaling turns. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean (Part 3) Last Uncertainty Wednesday we dug deeper into understanding the distribution of sample means.I ended with asking why the chart for 100,000 samples of size 10 looked smoother than then one for samples of size 100 (just as a refresher, these are all rolls of a fair die).Well, for a sample of size 10, there are 51 possible values of the mean: 1.0, 1.1 CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER : ABOUT About. Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks. USV portfolio companies include: Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and Shapeways. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s saleto Yahoo.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri (Book Review) A recent event that caught many by surprise was a short squeeze in Gamestop. Several hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, had big short positions that came under intense pressure when a group of buyers emerged via a CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER A Theory of History and Society: Technology, Constraints and Measurement (TCM) In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity.After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER The Threat of a Trump Dictatorship. I wrote a post last week that incensed some people who took issue both with my use of the term fascism and with the apparent focus on the deployment of DHS agents in Portland. Based on the comments here is a new post. I believe there is a clear and present danger of Trump attempting to become a dictatorthis fall.
CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Ask Me Anything: Questions 3 & 4. For your Sunday viewing pleasure, here are the next two questions and answers in my Ask Me Anything series.Question 3 is about an area of physics – dark matter and energy – that I don’t know anything about: CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Presenting Option Grants to Boards. One of the nearly routine items at startup board meetings is the discussion and ratification of option grants for new employees and CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Tech Tuesday: CSS. In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER Uncertainty Wednesday: Sample Mean (Part 3) Last Uncertainty Wednesday we dug deeper into understanding the distribution of sample means.I ended with asking why the chart for 100,000 samples of size 10 looked smoother than then one for samples of size 100 (just as a refresher, these are all rolls of a fair die).Well, for a sample of size 10, there are 51 possible values of the mean: 1.0, 1.1 CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER India Impressions. We just spent two weeks in India traveling to some of the famous tourist destinations including Varanasi, Agra and Jodhpur. It was an intense sensory experience of colors, sounds and smells that this blog post won’t even try to do justice. CONTINUATIONS BY ALBERT WENGER (Intentionally) Missing the Point of Online Social. So I haven’t seen “The Social Network” yet and there is a good chance I won’t get around to it at all, as I* Home
* Archive
* Tech Tuesday
* Uncertainty Wednesday* About
WE MUST STRENGTHEN OUR DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS A peaceful transition of power between elected governments is one of the crucial aspects of representative democracies. Let’s hope that is what the coming weeks and months bring here in the US. As regular readers of Continuations know, I have been concerned about Trump’s various attempts to undermine this process for some time. Some claim that such concern was misguided as they see Trump as simply incompetent – but that strikes me as a problematic claim to make about someone who both had a successful national television show and managed to win a Presidential election. What strikes me as important though is to examine some of the institutions that are required for a successful democracy. By this I don’t just mean the currently obvious ones, such as Congress itself and the actual voting process, but also mass and social media and most importantly the judiciary and civic education. It is all too easy to have a narrow conception of what democratic institutions are and as a result underinvest in what it really takes to sustain such a complex system, especially during periods of change and risk, such as the transition out of the industrial age. We are seeing the importance of the judiciary right now. Whenever you have laws (or simply rules), there is a need to adjudicate whether someone has broken the rules. That’s of course also true for rules about democratic processes, such as the counting of ballots. The independence and rigor of the judiciary are crucial so that matters are decided on the basis of evidence and the law rather than that of a political agenda. Here is a good example of one set of lawsuits currently underway in Nevada.
It is in this context that the highest court, the US Supreme Court, plays such a critical role because that’s where the most important cases will ultimately wind up. Some recent decisions there, such as Shelby vs. Holder,
raise troubling questions about some the Supreme Court judges’ commitment to a well-functioning democracy (see also cases about gerrymandering). There are no easy answers for what to do about strengthening the judiciary but it starts with everyone looking beyond their favorite issue, on which they would like courts to opine. This leads directly to the second often underestimated democratic institution is civic education. I grew up mostly in Germany before coming here for college and graduate school but spent one year in a High School in the US (in Rochester, Minnesota). I had a great time there but can firmly say that my civic education experience at John Marshall High School was underwhelming. My government class was taught by the football coach who read from the textbook. That was a fairly stark contrast to the attention on civics that had permeated my education in Germany, where it was woven into many different subjects. Now it is entirely possible that my US experience was the exception but the frequency with which I encounter certain nonsensical claims, such as “the US is a Republic, not a Democracy” makes me wonder. The more people know about not just their own present-day government but the history and complexity of democracy, the better it will be for actually making it work. This will become ever more important as the existing education system struggles and alternative paths, including homeschooling, become ever more popular. If anyone has efforts they are supporting either with regard to the judiciary or to civic education, I would love to learn about them. While I very much hope that in the end we will transition away peacefully from the Trump era, we badly need to strengthen our democratic institutions across the board. The next attempt at moving the US towards autocratic government will be more competent, more determined and will be able to draw on the anti-democratic narratives that have been gaining ground for many years now. Posted: 8th November 2020– 44 Comments
Tags: politics democracyunited states
USV TEAM POSTS
* Fred Wilson — Nov 27, 2020 FUNDING FRIDAY: ACTIVE SHIELD ------------------------- THE COMING FIGHT FOR CONTROL OF THE INTERNET I have been blogging very little, as I have been swamped with a big and exciting work project. As the peak effort on that is now past, I look forward to writing more on Continuations again, as well as taking another turn revising my book The World After Capital.
In the meantime, here are some observations on the most recent iteration of the debate around regulating large tech companies generally, the role of Section 230 specifically and how these relate to speech on the Internet. Topics that I have been writing about formany years.
First, information cascades are real and have been known to be a problem for a long time. Both through low effort enduser actions (such as a retweet) and through algorithmic amplification (one user’s like winds up on others’ timelines) “news” travels fast. As has been well studied the more outrageous it is, the faster it travels. Second, this problem has been known for a long time and one of Twitter’s and Facebook’s biggest failings has been to do nothing about it, while at the same time suppressing third party efforts. Twitter’s handling of some links last week by simply not allowing them to be posted was a ham fisted attempt to rectify this last minute before an election. A later and broader iteration aimed at slowing down retweets is more of a step in the right direction. Third, it is clear that Facebook is back to selling out everyone else with Zuckerberg’s support for undoing Section 230. This is of course exactly what happened with the awful SESTA/FOSTA, which initially had a tech coalition aligned against it until Zuckerberg saw that it would be to Facebook’s advantage to support it. These are classic “pull-up-the-ladder” moves by powerful company aimed at suppressing competition. Fourth, at the very same time Facebook is trying to suppress third party monitoring by sending a cease and desist to an NYU based research project in which Facebook users voluntarily contribute information. Facebook claims this represents a Terms of Service violation. If Facebook succeeds with this legal strategy, it would be a grave restriction of enduser freedom at a time when we need theexact opposite.
Fifth, it feels like all of this will come to a head following the election, no matter who wins it. What’s at stake is far larger than most people seem to believe. This isn’t about some small tweak to Section 230. This is and will be a battle about who controls information and computation on the internet. At present it looks as if we are headed in completely the wrong direction with an awful combination of too much corporate and too much state power all atonce.
More to come as this unfolds, but in the meantime you can always read the “Informational Freedom” chapter in The World After Capital.
Posted: 30th October 2020– 5 Comments
Tags: section230
speech apis
wearing).
I have now done this for seven months and have been quite happy with the results. Here is a rough inventory: a bunch of underwear and socks (mostly lightweight quick dry from Ex Officio), two pairs of light long pants and two pairs of heavier long pants (one jeans, one khaki), a bunch of t-shirts and four shirts (again quick dry from Ex Officio), two sweatshirts and a zippered fleece (Patagonia). As for shoes I have a pair of hiking boots, a pair of sneakers and a pair of flip flops. I also have some miscellaneous clothing items like swim trunks, a baseball hat and sunglasses. I probably should lay them all out and take a picture but the image below taken from this post does a pretty good job: Now as we are headed into winter I will need a few more items, such as a warmer jacket, warmer hat and some long underwear. To be clear, I am not at all suggesting that people are somehow bad if they want more clothes. I want (and have) more clothes. The initial point is far simpler: that the clothes required as a solution for a needs can be quite minimal. Everything else above that is driven by wants. And while that may seem trivial, making that distinction clearly is what lets us understand that we (a) have enough physical capital in the world for everyone to have need-based clothing and (b) that clothing expenses can be small, which is one of the components of what people would cover out a Universal Basic Income. I am now intrigued by the idea of running similar personal experiments in other areas, such as food and housing, which are solutions to other important human needs. If you have suggestions for how to do so or have done so yourself – or want to share your minimalist wardrobe, please post in the comments. PS The title of this post is a reference to the wonderful book “How Much is Enough?” by Edward and Robert Skidelsky.
Posted: 18th October 2020– 15 Comments
Tags: clothing needswants
INNOVATION UPENDS EXTRAPOLATION: URBANIZATION One of my favorite example of a mindless extrapolation was a headline I saw a few years back that said “By 2100 We Will All Live In Cities” (sadly I can’t find it anymore and failed to bookmark it). It may have been slightly exaggerated for dramatic purpose, but it is easy to find extrapolations that say by 2100 more than 80% of the global population will live in cities. Here is an example from the World Economic Forum:
You will readily get there if you simply extrapolate charts like this one from Our World in Data.
But extrapolation
is dangerous (much more so than interpolation).
In extrapolation you are assuming that the trends driving the observed changes will continue in their present form. That’s largely safe when you are dealing with simple physical systems like the trajectory of a single tennis ball. But when you are dealing with a system of massive complexity such as human societies, it is generally a terrible idea, especially over more than a few years. There are many confounding factors, but the one I am most interested in is innovation. Suppose you had gone back to the year 1800 and extrapolated urban population based on the last 300 years, you might have come up with an estimate for the year 1900 of say 10% urban population and been off a fair bit (actual number 16%). Then in 1900 again even if you had allowed for significant further acceleration you would have likely put 2000 at maybe 30-some% instead of the 47% thatactually occurred.
In retrospect it is easy to know how how innovation upended extrapolation. Building improvements made much denser urban centers possible. Work changed from agriculture to manufacturing and with industrialization came economies of scale which required largefactories.
But further innovation today is starting to work in the opposite direction.With COVID-19 we have seen a massive acceleration in remote work with a spike in demand for rural real estate. For now the possibility of remote work is available only to some segment of the population. With more automation though we might eventually wind up with a new social contract that involves some kind of universal basic income. That would radically alter the relative growth urban and rural population. Most rural areas are deserted today not because people hate it there but rather because people can’t afford to live there. Agriculture has been highly mechanized dramatically reducing the number of jobs and most economic activity has become concentrated inurban areas.
I love cities and have visited many of them around the world. But I also grew up in the country side of Germany and am happy walking and working in a forest. I am super fortunate in that I can split my time between the country and the city and I believe that in the future there will be more flexibility for more people to experience both in their lives. Here too, innovation will play a crucial role. For example, some level of autonomous driving is already transforming how exhausting a drive is. And services like AirBnB and HipCamp make it possible to spend time periods in different places. In summary then: using extrapolation, you would have underestimated future urbanization in the past and are very likely to be overestimating it now. Both times dues to innovation. PS This will be the first in a series of posts. The next one will beon land use.
Posted: 10th October 2020– 2 Comments
Tags: innovation
prediction urbanization FEAR IS THE MIND-KILLER We have reached the stage in the devolution of our democracy where people have become afraid. Not in the overt, trembling with fear way, but in the semi-conscious, easily suppressed, but no less potent one. If I say something now, what happens if Trump stays in power? Will my company (or portfolio companies) face repercussions, such as losing government contracts? Will the IRS turn over my finances? Will I be called out publicly and have an angry mob show up at my door? The more you have to lose, the easier it is for these fears, however fleeting they may be, to result in silence and inaction. I am sure I will have some commenters show up here and blame “the left” for cancel culture and suggest that I have this all backwards, that it is Trump supporters who are afraid. Except that the evidence is in the other direction: Trump support is getting more vocal and brazen, at the same time that Trump’s statements are becoming more outrageous. And more importantly, it is of course the Trump side that controls government power and has done so for the last four years (to deflect from these we get ongoing deep state conspiracy theories). I am writing this post to admit openly that I have had the above fears pop into my mind. I don’t think these fears are at all crazy, given the cruelty and vindictiveness Trump and his administration have displayed time and time again. But it is exactly the experience of those fears that makes me redouble my efforts. So let me state itclearly again:
TRUMP IS UNDERMINING CORE INSTITUTIONS OF DEMOCRACY AND THERE IS A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER OF A TRUMP DICTATORSHIP.
If you are wondering what you can do with the election just around the corner, check out and donate to Truth Not Lies.
Posted: 24th September 2020– 49 Comments
Tags: politics feartrump
democracy
FIGHTING THE CLIMATE CRISIS IS THE MOST PRO-PROGRESS PROGRAM There are still people out there who seem to believe that fighting the climate crisis is somehow in opposition to progress. That it will hold the economy back. The exact opposite is the case. Fighting the climate crisis is the most pro-progress program we can embark on. Driving an EV is a superior experience to driving a car with an internal combustion engine. I say this as someone who has driven a great many high end German cars. Using modern heat pumps combined with solar can save many households in the US one to two thousand dollars a year compared to their existing solutions. Also, with the right setup your house or community will no longer be dependent on some big utility company. Indoor farming when done right produces intensely flavorful salads, tomatoes and other vegetables year-round. Unlike the stuff that was harvested pre-maturely, so that it could be trucked all the way acrossthe continent.
All of the above also has the potential to create a large number of interesting new jobs, much of it in local employment (eg solar and heat pump installation). The case against this rests on flawed assumptions about cost and feasibility. Never mind that it of course completely ignores the extreme cost of not acting which will ultimately be the death of millions if not billions of people. Oh, and before someone objects with “but what about the global South,” suggesting that this somehow would prevent progress from occurring in poor countries, it is even more true there. For example, would you rather create heat and light at night by burning fuels such as wood or kerosene in your abode inhaling smoke that causes deadly lung disease? Or would you prefer a solar panel plus battery? Of course the latter is far superior and constitutes massive progress. The same goes for mobility and internet access. Electrification are making these more accessible everywhere and solar is leading the wayfor that.
And yes, it is utterly affordable already today because of the extraordinary progress that’s been made with solar and batteries as can be seen in these two charts A decarbonized world will be an amazing world and one we should work towards at full speed. I consider this the ultimate win-win: avoid extinction and make progress. Posted: 21st September 2020– 19 Comments
Tags: climate crisiseconomy
progress
MARXISM REMAINS A DANGEROUS IDEA I have been meaning to write a blog post about Marxism following an exchange in the comments to one of my posts about Trump’s dictatorial tendencies.
Essentially the thrust of the comment was that Marxism is a bigger threat in the US today than fascism. I disagree with this assertion, but I do think that the extremes to which we have taken capitalism have opened the door for a resurgence of beliefs that it needs to be toppled entirely rather than shrunken dramatically, as I propose in The World After Capital.
I want to start by pointing out a few things that should be obvious but maybe aren’t. First, there is a huge body of Marxist thinking that has evolved over more than a century and entire books have been written about narrow subfields, such as say Marxist critiques of modern cinema. I find it somewhat comical to think that anyone would find this a threat — it is a valid mode of criticism, which one can debate on its merits, but which in no way is going to give rise to a revolution. When people say that the liberal arts are overrun with Marxist thinking, it is useful to keep this in mind. Second, there are policies, such as the Green New Deal or Single Payer Healthcare that I disagree with for a variety of reasons (mostly related to their approaches to labor and innovation) but which are not Marxist per se. Applying the Marxist label to them is often an attempt to smear them and avoid a debate on the merits. Canada and the UK have national health systems and last I checked neither of them is a Marxist country. Here it is worth keeping in mind that healthcare is but one sector of the economy and we have other heavily regulated or government owned sectors (e.g. water and sewage). So the central idea that matters and is worth discussing is that of class struggle between labor and capital that can ultimately get resolved only through worker control of the means of production (and by extension the abolishment of capitalists). The first thing to note is that Marx was perceptive and right in understanding that there is a conflict here — that the interests of those providing labor often diverge from the interest of those providing capital. The second thing to note is that this conflict lay somewhat dormant for many decades as capitalism produced material progress that was widely shared. And the third thing to note is that with the advent of digital technology, the role of capital has changed (again this is the central theme of my book The World After Capital).
What then is wrong with the Marxist idea? The key problem is one of scale. It is entirely possible to have small worker owned companies and there are tons of successful examples for that. The question is how do you do implement worker ownership for something that requires thousands or tens of thousands of people, such as say a car company? Or at even bigger scale, how does worker ownership apply to the economy as a whole? One very quickly runs into governance issues which defy easy solution. That has been the key source of the problems with the attempted implementations of the Marxist model. So far the result has inevitably been a bureaucracy that wields great power and becomes deeply entrenched often abusing the very workers it was meant to represent. This is especially true in the model of Marxism where the means of production are owned outright by the state as a proxy for workers (the idea being that the state *IS* the workers, but the state inevitably winds up being its own entity). Now I should be quick to point out that the same governance problem also exists in capitalism, but in theory bureaucratic excess is checked there by the functioning of markets. I say in theory, because in practice, especially over the last few decades of the rise of managerial capitalism combined with ever more concentrated markets and regulatory capture, the bureaucratic hierarchy has in fact become largely unaccountable (as have large concentrations of financial capital). We see this is in many forms including the extraordinary rise of managerial compensation as well as various abuses of marketpower.
So where does all of this leave us? I believe that the idea that all means of production should be owned by the state is a genuinely dangerous one due to the power that it vests in what becomes an unaccountable bureaucracy. The ideas that we have well-functioning capitalism today or for that matter that capitalism can solve all problems are, however, equally dangerous. As long as we promote these (which unfortunately most of the political establishment in the US does, including much of the Democratic Party) we will have more and more people flocking back to ideas, such as Marxism, which argue that we should overthrow capitalism entirely. My book The World After Capital, is an explicit attempt to point to an alternative path. A path in which over time capitalist activity will shrink as a part of human affairs, much as agriculture has gone from being the defining aspect of societies to being one of many endeavors. Posted: 13th August 2020– 21 Comments
Tags: politics economymarxism
capitalism
worldaftercapital
THE THREAT OF A TRUMP DICTATORSHIP I wrote a post last week that incensed some people who took issue both with my use of the term fascism and with the apparent focus on the deployment of DHS agents in Portland. Based on the comments here is a new post. I believe there is a clear and present danger of Trump attempting to become a dictator this fall. I am putting this at less than 10% probability but significantly above 0%. Enough so that I believe now is the time to push back hard against this possibility and not afterit has happened.
For reference, I had a hard time in 2016 convincing people – including people I knew on the Hilary Clinton campaign – that Trump had a good chance of winning. It is exactly because people simply couldn’t imagine it happening that they made a lot of bad choices, such as not campaigning in some states. Similarly, if you cannot imagine the possibility of a Trump dictatorship you will not take steps to prevent it. Let me start by saying that I deem it unlikely that Trump has a masterplan for becoming a dictator. Then again he probably didn’t have a masterplan for becoming president but he pulled it off nonetheless and being a reality show host worked well in that regard (whether planned or not), as did his embrace of Twitter and his ability to inoculate himself against rational criticism. Time and again Trump has shown the ability to seize opportunities that present themselves and part of the opportunity has always been that opponents underestimate what he is capable of. So what about dictatorship? Well for starters it is clear that Trump publicly admires dictators and that he revels in power. This is obviously not new but something he has announced for a long time in many different forms, including the design of his homes in dictatorstyle.
What has Trump done in office that substantiates any risk? Here are some of the actions that I am aware of that are part of an overall pattern that demonstrates the potential of a flip to dictatorship. These are all actions that have historic precedent as part of dictatorial power grabs: * Trump has declared the press an “enemy of the people” and a source of “fake news” * Trump has held continued rallies throughout his presidency * Trump has agencies run by “actings” who serve at his digression and have not gone through a congressional vetting process which giveshim direct power
* Trump has undermined the independence and effectiveness of the judiciary through his appointments of unqualified judges, verbal attacks on judges that have ruled against him, and by commuting the sentence of someone convicted of obstructing Congress * Trump is tweeting frequently about how the election is being rigged as a way of putting the legitimacy of the results in question * Trump has been torpedoing the United States Postal Service as a way of interfering with mail-in ballots * Trump is moving federal agents into predominantly Democratic cities, nominally under a “law and order” agenda * Trump has pardoned soldiers implicated in war crimes and has publicly belittle military leadership. * Trump has interfered with the functioning of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) by not nominating commissioners depriving the FEC repeatedly of a quorum. I am sure there are other actions that fit the pattern that I am missing and I would love for people to contribute more examples (update: the ones marked with * above are additions based oncomments).
My longstanding opposition to Trump, going back to his 2016 campaign, rests on my view that he represents a meaningful threat to the workings of democracy and the principles of critical inquiry and science, which together have accounted for much of the progress thatwe have achieved.
To be clear, as this was also brought up in comments, I do believe that we require dramatic changes and that recent Presidents, including Obama, were incrementalists which has been completely inadequate fo the challenges we are facing (this is the subject of my book World After Capital). And yes Hilary Clinton would have been an incrementalist as well. Finally, let me also add, lest someone bring it up as a distraction from the risk discussed here, that I am against violence, including damage to buildings — both because I believe it to be wrong, but also because I think it is ineffective and worse than that plays into the hands of someone who is a potential dictator as it provides anexcuse.
PS For one commenter in particular, I will write a post about Marxism also. I do believe its resurgence is deeply problematic but doesn’t pose the same kind of clear and present danger (I will explain both ofthese in the post).
Posted: 27th July 2020– 183 Comments
Tags: democracy trumpdictatorship
SOME THOUGHTS ON GPT-3 By now, if you are in tech and haven’t been on an extended Techmeme and Twitter break you have heard about GPT-3 a new and massive language model developed by OpenAI. I have played around with it a bit myself and its capabilities are impressive. Here are some thoughts. The model perfectly illustrates the ever moving bar on what we consider artificial intelligence. Not that long ago facial recognition didn’t work at all, now computers routinely outperform humans. Putting together more than a couple of new sentences that actually made sense was a really challenging problem, GPT-3 routinely cranks out multiple paragraphs. “But it doesn’t understand the sentences” is the immediate objection often heard. Of course “understanding” is as poorly defined a term as “intelligence” so that objection really doesn’t do much. Instead, a better way of thinking about these capabilities is to consider where and how they can be deployed instead of using humans. One obvious example would be customer support. A customer writes in and someone needs to write an answer. I am not suggesting that anyone should send out GPT-3 produced answers without checking them first, but the number of customer support requests that someone might be able to handle using GPT-3 could go up tremendously. Another great example is producing UI code. This is often a labor intensive part of projects and a lot of engineers dread it as it’s not exactly solving fun problems but rather wrestling with the idiosyncrasies of different platforms. There are already several early demos of how GPT-3 or a model like it could be used for that. And yes, this does and should change how we think about the longterm demand for human software engineers (something I pointed out 6 years ago in a post titled “Software Is Eating Software”).
A similarly faulty line of thinking has been that only humans can be creative. Again this is enabled by a completely underspecified definition of what it means to be creative. Here is an example of apoem
that GPT-3 cranked out. Admittedly not exactly a masterwork but if a young student would turn this in the teacher or parents might say “that’s so creative!” But it doesn’t stop here. After a bit of back and forth over Twitter about submitting GPT-3 work to a poetry contest, Joshua Schachter prompted the model for a story about using AI to submit a poem to a contest. And the resulting short story is really quite impressive.
All of this is to say that objections around intelligence and creativity are rooted in definitional problems and also obscure the extraordinary potential of this technology to change the need for human labor. Of course, this is one of the foundational premises of my book World After Capital.
Of course it is also clear how this type of model can be used for all sorts of bad things, such as automating high quality bot attacks on social media or even creating content that can be passed off as having come from a particular author (but was not in fact written by them). This will put a premium on attribution, something I have written about in the past in a post called “Sign All Things.” One
key reason for having self sovereign identity, with some probability of that identity being a human attached, is to mitigate against these types of attacks (btw, humans even under their real names say plenty of terrible things, so it doesn’t help with that as people sometimesthink).
Finally a brief thought on the question of bias which always arises. Of course models are biased by the data on which they have been trained (at this point this is well established). The same is of course true for humans who are biased based on how they have been trained. But there are some key differences that are worth keeping in mind. The bias in a model is more measurable than for a human – the will produce text after text after text (and it will not be strategic about its answers, well, at least not intentionally strategic, it might be implicitly strategic in as much as it has picked those strategies up from the training data). There is also a much clearer hope of reducing the bias in models compared to humans. Where does all of that leave us? GPT-3 is a major step forward in the capability set. It shows great new powers and as we know from Spiderman, with that comes great responsibility. There is the responsibility of OpenAI to monitor how this model is used and to measure and reduce its biases. But as importantly is our collective responsibility to create a future that lets humanity benefit broadly from these emerging powers. That is the very subject of World AfterCapital
.
Posted: 27th July 2020– 4 Comments
Tags: gpt-3 artificialintelligence
machine
learning future
A CATALOG OF EXCUSES Earlier this week I wrote a post about Trump’s fascist actions which need to be vigorously opposed. In the post I predicted that people would show up with excuses. The comment section delivered on this in spades. I will save anyone the pain of wading through the mess and provide a summary here. Excuse #1: The actions are legal This is presented along with some copy/pasted section of law or some assertion as to the powers of the President. While we absolutely have given the Feds too much power via laws such as the Patriot Act, this excuse falls down on multiple grounds. First, we have the judiciary to establish the legality of an action and the actions in question here are being contested in court. Second, there are no clear cut laws here. For everything people cited as incontrovertible there are countervailing considerations, including the First Amendment and the Tenth Amendment (which nobody brought up). Third, just because a law currently exists doesn’t mean it is constitutional. Excuse #2: Trump is protecting federal property This goes along with a variety of criticism of local government and/or protestors. If the administration really cared about the building they would not have waited seven weeks before this action. Also of course, this excuse got destroyed later in the day by non other than Trump himself announcing the extension of federal agent activities to other cities that don’t have any threats to a federal building. This type of excuse is the simple repetition of propaganda. Excuse #3: Agents were actually identified For starters even if they truly were this wouldn’t change anything unless they also stayed in the immediate proximity of the Federal Building, arrested only people right there who were attacking them or the building and had been deployed to actually protect the property (see #2). But of course even in isolation this doesn’t hold any water. The only evidence presented for this excuse was the DHS press conference. Any review of the many images and footage of the agents operating shows that they were impossible to identify. Excuse #4: Trump is just grandstanding, playing to his base,campaigning
This excuse is a way of belittling a large transgression of political norms to make it appear small. The deployment of federal agents in large groups to states is a big deal. One easy way to see this is to consider how rare it has been throughout US history. The Tenth Amendment covers the division of labor between the federal and state level with policing clearly the role of the state. This matters a lot considering that the elections are coming up in November. The cities the administration has on their list are heavily Democrat, which is exactly where Trump has a strong interest in voter suppression which will be a lot easier to accomplish with federal agents alreadydeployed.
Excuse #5: Calling it fascism is hysteria This excuse comes in some harmless sounding form like “this does look bad, but calling it fascism is hysteria” where it appears that the commenter is sort of agreeing. The label “lame” isn’t quite appropriate here — “pernicious” would be a lot better. It deliberately or unwittingly removes the effectiveness of protest by trying to remove the label of “fascism.” A related excuse is to get into nitpicking over whether this is “fascism” or “authoritarianism.” Again these are ways of blunting the criticism to the point where it becomes ineffective. Why am I calling these excuses instead of arguments? Because a situation of clear and present danger requires action. And when arguments have either the explicit purpose or the inadvertent side-effect of suppressing action then they become excuses. What is the clear and present danger? The possibility of Trump becoming a dictator. To be clear, I am putting that at less than 10% but also significantly above 0%. Not because I think Trump has a masterplan but because he is an opportunist with an admiration of and desire for dictatorial power. And the combination of COVID19 and demonstrations provides the perfect opportunity for seizing emergencypowers.
PS I am also banning a commenter for using schoolyard bullying tactics which I had previously explained to him were not acceptable here on Continuations. I gave him the opportunity to remove the specific comments which he chose not to. I will reconsider this, if he goes ahead and deletes those. Posted: 24th July 2020– 229 Comments
Tags: trump fascismOlder posts
About Albert Wenger
I am a partner at Union Square Ventures . My wife Susan Danziger co-founded and runs Ziggeo . Together we have three wonderful children. Enjoy reading!Details
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