The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

It's practically impossible to avoid the news of ecological crises (plural) these days. I'm not talking about Russia strangling Europe this winter by cutting gas flows. That will be a politically-made crisis. I'm talking about the epochal droughts afflicting the entire planet. You know it's bad when river flows in Europe are so low that the Rhine can't sustain commercial traffic; when the Tiber water levels in Rome are so low that the foundations of Roman bridges from the times of Nero are exposed.  Resurfaced remains of a bridge in Rome’s River Tiber, in July. Photographer: Alessia Pierdomenico/Bloomberg But you know it's next level bad when the literal "hunger stone" appears in the Czech Republic --an inscription from 1619 at the bottom of the Elbe river that says " If you see me, then weep " Hunger stone on the Elbe in Decin, Czech Republic (AFP/Getty) I wish it was only Europe. The Western US is going through the worst drought in 1200 yea...

Another cycle around our star and we're still stuck in the same rut. Still talking about dealing with uncertainty; about counting your blessings; about stopping and smelling the roses because  life is short  and it's better to appreciate the small things when a virus can snatch your life away any second should you dare step outside. Is Omicron deadlier? More contagious? Resistant to Pfizer? To Moderna? How many mutations did you say it had? Does it evade natural immunity? But it doesn't affect your smell? Oh, the symptoms are the same as the common cold? But masks still work, right? Oh, but not cloth ones?  The noise is  maddening .  Our hyper-mediatized, over-stimulated minds can't think of nothing other than what's in our handheld screens. And at the same time, our hyper-cynical minds won't believe those very same incessant, flickering alerts, either. Somehow our collective mind has entered a sort of  Schrödinger -like, superposition state. We  ...

Once upon a time there was this Republic called Quirkistan. It was ruled by a hyper intelligent elite, possessors of the most shiny and reputed tokens. These tokens vested in them utmost respect and reverence, as only the most brilliant, capable, responsible, and deserving Quirkistanis were issued them. The tokens were granted with great pomp and circumstance by velour-robed Sages in solemn ceremonies, after listening to liturgy imparted by an elevated Sage in an annual ritual of initiation so full of symbolism and self-congratulation that for many, of the recipients the initiation represented the single most important day of their lives.  How could they think otherwise? That token granted them access to the upper echelons of Quirkistan. Attaining one was akin to the assurance of a life full of opulence, comfort, and the absence of suffering. The institutions that issued them prided themselves in hand-picking their future tokenholders from the most brilliant, meritoc...

Trust is the lifeblood that keeps societies alive, and by extension, what keeps the lives of hundreds of millions of people from harm. Without trust, societies can't exist. You need to trust that your employer will honor your salary, your bank to keep your money safe, and your Angie's list-sourced plumber to not show up with an ax to chop your head off. At the beginning of human existence, morals and reputation within the tribe represented a kind of currency of value, which was used to interact cooperatively and constructively to further the shared goals of survival. Trust, it can be argued, is behind human's success on this planet. As hunter-gatherer groups grew in size, our brains' mental capacities to assimilate and process trust maxed out. After all, keeping a mental score of the number of people that have betrayed you in the tribe reaches a limit (called the  Dunbar number ) fairly quickly. Due to this mental ceiling, humankind demographic growth was constricted...

The human brain is a marvelous adaptation. More than that. It's our super weapon. If we measured its capacity in bytes, it would be equivalent to 2.5 petabytes (or 2.5 million Gigabytes). For those who want to measure it in more palatable units, that's roughly 3 million hours of TV shows . No wonder why it's such an energy suck : with only 3% of our body mass, it uses 20% of the body's total blood supply and 25% of its oxygen. Our brain is what made us competitive in nature, what's allowed us to increase our standard of living, and what facilitated the domination of the elements for the exclusive and selfish benefit of our kin. And maybe, too, for the benefit of one or two super lucky chosen species that we like over the rest of the animal kingdom because we happened to breed them to our liking. But before we dominated the planet, natural selection was this randomized process of trial and error in which each species could get better generation after gener...

We live in an unstable world. The probability of what used to be thought as improbable is becoming more and more likely. The old definition of a statistical outlier as a "1 in a 100 years" event has morphed into the now famous " Black Swan " event. Using Didier Sornette 's term, " Dragon Kings " are now becoming more likely. Put it probability distribution terms, the distribution of all possible outcomes is becoming more bimodal (tails are "fatter", as shown in the graph below). It appears that reality is abandoning the familiar Normal probability distribution shape, depriving us of the standard tools we used to rely on to estimate the future. The comfort of saying that there is a 95% probability that an event will be within 2 standard deviations from its mean is gone, leaving analysts and futurologists clueless. Sornette (2011): Scaled Distribution of Runs of Gains (Right) / Losses (Losses) for 30 major US stocks.  Notice the f...