All of Isaac Benson's Comments + Replies

Does the Progress Movement agree with Singer's Drowning Child Argument?

I am curious what you think about it. Do you have any refutation of the argument? Is the opinion one your willing to share?

Quote quiz: “drifting into dependence”

Isaac Benson1y2

I would guess Alexander Hamilton (or other founding fathers). I assume you added the words AI in exchange for Britian.

Introductions thread (please introduce yourself)

Isaac Benson1y2

Hello everyone, I am Isaac, a CompE and math double major at UMBC. I am interested in working on medical devices and am interested in starting a for-profit startup. This startup would hopefully work on both direct impact and allow money for donations (see here).

I am also considering a PhD or Masters in Biomedical engineering, computer engineering, or electrical engineering.

AMA: Gale Pooley & Marian Tupy, Authors of "Superabundance"

Isaac Benson1y1

I have read in Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson that innovation can be modelled by a graph where create a vertex on the graph with edges on the used technologies that are combined. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn develops paradigms where they are built upon with normal science and new paradigms are created by disproving an assumption and building a new paradigm. The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christenson has a similar idea where revolutionary technologies start out as lower quality and build up over time while competitors invest in the best short term innovation (iterative technology).

What sort of mathematical /logical model do you use for modeling innovation?

0gpooley1yThese are great books. All make important contributions to how we think about lifting one another out of poverty. Although we don't offer an explicit model for innovation, partly due to the fact that innovation always comes as a surprise and you can't model surprises (otherwise they wouldn't be surprises), we do suggest that abundance is a function of population and the freedom to innovate. Our work is informed by George Gilder. He offers three propositions: wealth is knowledge, growth is learning, and money is time. From these propositions we can derive a theorem: The growth in knowledge can be measured with time. Our analytical framework operationalizes this theorem. Wealth is knowledge: As Thomas Sowell notes, “The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is a difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used today.” We convert atoms to resources when we add knowledge to them. Economics is not about atoms, economics is about the growth of knowledge–how it is discovered, created, and shared. Unlike material atoms that are divided when they’re shared, knowledge is multiplied when it is shared and grows exponentially when it is consumed. Growth is Learning: Hayek recognized that knowledge is distributed in tiny bits spread across billions of people. Organizations seeking to create value coordinate the accumulation of this knowledge into products and services. These products and services must then be tested in free markets that are also creating new knowledge in the form of prices and valuations. We grow by discovering valuable new knowledge and then sharing it with others in organizations and markets. Money is Time: We buy things with money, but we pay for them with time. This means there are two prices: money prices and time prices. A time price is simply the money price divided by hourly income. We express money pric