The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

We can't predict the future. Chaos always reigns. The unpredictable compounding of events is inevitable, and we can always count on surprises occurring , which is why it pays to build our lives (and invest) with the certainty that something will inevitably go wrong. Accounting for the certitude that something you planned for will not go as planned should prod you to hedge yourself via diversification --or even better, redundancies. Of course, building redundancies takes resources. That insurance policy doesn't pay for itself. You sacrifice current income (and/or effort) to build that safety net in case SHTF.  And although it could very well be that you'll never use it, it's not stupid to build it. An example: Nature, in its infinite iteration game called evolution, gave us two kidneys. I am pretty sure it's not free (evolutionarily speaking) to carry an extra filter behind your belly just in case one clogs with crap you throw at your body. If evolution settles on an...

Knowledge accumulates throughout generations. It travels through time as long as there is always someone at the other end of the arrow of time to absorb it, assimilate it and apply it. Language helped it transcend --first in oral traditions , then in written form. Sure, there were some instances of miscommunication between some generations and knowledge stalled at times, but generally speaking, knowledge compounds itself. It exhibits the same exponential behavior as wealth. For early forager humans, the knowledge to conquer our environment (learning about medicine plants, edible roots, game migrating patters) was as valuable then as it is today to learn what's the next meme stock being hyped on reddit.  At the beginning the band forager culture fomented cooperation. To share what early foragers gathered/hunted was the rational thing to do. After all, the volatility of your returns (one day you'd have a good kill, but then days would go by without a catch) pushed you to share ...

One of the most ironic things about the political revolution that manifested itself with battle cry " Make America Great Again " is its inherent ideological contradiction. Although  Trump supporters   never explicitly explain what " America " they want to bring back, implicit is the notion that they want to see again the dominant, stable U.S. of the post war II period. A country characterized by economic stability, a rising  middle class;  a country where people could pay for their own college education with a waiter's wage, and where corporate employees could rely on the certainty that their corporation looked at them as life partners who deserved to retire with juicy defined benefit pensions.  Where's the contradiction, you ask? Well, the political leaning of the era --the one that allowed stability and prosperity for its middle class--was markedly left-leaning: the New Deal  of FDR, the Great Society of LBJ. Even Republican Eisenhower knew better than go...

Out of all the forms of societal organization (the tribe, bands, the  Kingdom, The City-State, The Empire, etc), the Nation-State seems to have been the most stable and successful way of human association. The competition was somewhat settled after WWI with the collapse of the last of the great empires, like the Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian one. But " most stable and successful " does not mean absolutely stable nor absolutely successful. Everything that's built by a human is bound to be flawed. From the concept of the family, to the effectiveness of vaccines, to the engineering of the Boeing 737 MAX . One of the most important functions of leadership in Nation-State is to keep stability. Without it, no society can sustain itself. Social stability depends on trust and legitimacy of its institutions. Economic activity rests on the bedrock of rule of law and contract enforcement. No one would venture to embark on a business if marauders will destroy your property on a whim...

It finally ended. The year we all will never forget won't be with us any longer. Which means nothing, really, since 2020 didn't really bring us all the bad stuff we suffered through the last 12 months. In an effort to unload all of our frustrations about the things we would like to have happened differently this year, we are going to say " fuck you 2020 ", " good riddance ", " 2020, you will not be missed " etc. etc., but the reality is that calendars are nothing more than arbitrary cutoffs we agreed upon simply because we needed to keep track of time. This planet happens to circle our star once every 365 days, so we had to start counting one day out of those 365. That we started counting the terrestrial journey around the sun 6 days after winter solstice is as random as the reason why The Mona Lisa is the most admired work of art in human history --a guy made it famous (because he stole it), and then enough people agreed it was beautiful (why, I d...

Tú y yo no somos mas que diminutas hormigas, peleando contra el desorden de nuestro alrededor, en medio de un universo que tiende al caos. Desde nuestro insignificante y unilateral punto de vista (el humano), siempre estamos tratando de minimizar sorpresas. Ese fue el cerebro que la evolución nos regaló.    Y cuando las sorpresas aparecen,   aprendemos , esperando aplicar lo aprendido en nuestra próxima interacción con nuestro entorno, con la esperanza de sobrevivir. Bueno, tal vez no seamos "nosotros" como tal, sino nuestros genes, porque nosotros en realidad solo somos el vehículo que nuestros genes usan para perpetuarse a la posteridad.  Si tan solo nuestra lucha contra el desorden fuera exenta de consecuencias. Cada vez que tratamos de reducir el desorden a nuestro alrededor (de reducir entropía), para reacomodar nuestro ambiente de tal manera que sea menos hostil para nosotros, en realidad estamos incrementando el desorden (la entropía) en el universo en general...

We are nothing more than little ants fighting disorder in our immediate environment living in a universe trending towards chaos. From our insignificant, unilateral (human) viewpoint, we are always striving to minimize surprises. That's the brain evolution gifted us . And when surprises appear, we learn , hoping to apply what's learned in our next interaction with our environment, so we hopefully survive. Ok, maybe not "we" , but our genes, because we're really just the vehicle genes use to perpetuate themselves into posterity.  If only us little ants' fight was costless. Every time we strive to reduce disorder locally (reduce entropy), and rearrange our environment so that it's less hostile to us, we actually increase disorder (entropy) in the overall universe. When we chop down forests to dedicate that land for human crops, and we reduce the threat of going hungry (reducing entropy from humans' perspective), we actually increase entropy at the planet...