timelets

timelets @ 2022-03-13T21:39:00

2022-03-14T04:49:47Z

“There are, after all, two kinds of growth. One proceeds gradually, allowing adjustments to environments as environments adjust to whatever’s new. Skillful growers can shape this process.

The other kind of growth defies environments. It’s inner-directed, and hence outwardly oblivious. It resists cultivation, setting its own direction, pace, and purpose. Anticipating no obstacles, it makes no compromises. Like an unchecked predator, an ineradicable weed, or a metastasizing cancer, it fails to see where it’s going until it’s too late. It sequentially consumes its surroundings, and ultimately itself.”
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That’s the difference, fundamental in strategy, between respecting constraints and denying their existence.

--- John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”

It's more about the relationship between external vs internal detection and control capabilities, rather than fundamental kinds of growth. The cancer example is particularly telling because during the early stages it can be dealt with relatively easily, while in a metastasizing phase it's almost impossible to contain, at least for now. The same applies to a chain reaction.

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timelets @ 2019-12-10T07:41:00

2019-12-10T06:51:45Z

Since 2005, five metro areas — Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, San Jose, Seattle, and San Diego — accounted for 90 percent of all US growth in “innovation sector” jobs, which Brookings defines as employment in the top science, technology, engineering, and math industries that include extensive research and development spending. Meanwhile, 343 metro areas lost a share of these jobs in that same period.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/9/21000162/high-tech-job-growth-concentration-brookings
https://www.brookings.edu/research/growth-centers-how-to-spread-tech-innovation-across-america/

High taxes and government regulations are good for innovation sector growth :)

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timelets @ 2019-10-19T09:40:00

2019-10-19T16:50:52Z

This is an excellent way to model both growth and decay.

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timelets @ 2018-03-20T11:55:00

2018-03-20T19:02:43Z

For every set M we may construct the monoid of endomorphisms (M → M,◦,id), where ◦ is function composition and id is the identity function.

Theorem 1.1 (Cayley representation for (Set) monoids)
Every monoid (M,⊕,e) is a sub-monoid of the monoid of endomorphisms on M.

Exequiel Rivas, Mauro Jaskelioff. 2014.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.4823v1

My hunch about the relationship b/w design and artefact turns out to be true. It also represents a mathematical version of Henry Ford's saying, "You won't get rich through inventions. You get rich through improvements."

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Объекты и стрелки

2017-10-04T21:29:02Z

В каком-то учебнике по теории категорий мне попалась фраза о том, что когда мы приносим в мир объект, мы одновременно должны принести туда же и кучу стрелок. Очень помогает думать о всяких новых штуках. Там, где я раньше видел всякие штуки, я теперь вижу разнообразные графы: чаще всего посеты со стрелками эволюции.

Например, в середине 19-го века начали резко расти города в Европе и Америке. Причем, рост не сопровождался "чумными/голодными" спадами, как в предыдущие века. В Европе, наверное, было такое же ощущение, как в Китае в конце 20 - начале 21-го веков.

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Quote of the Day: Learning by Doing

2017-02-18T04:52:07Z

I advance the hypothesis here that technical change in general can be ascribed to experience, that it is the very activity of production which gives rise to problems for which favorable responses are selected over time.
...
I therefore take instead cumulative gross investment (cumulative production of capital goods) as an index of experience. Each new machine produced and put into use is capable of changing the environment in which production takes place, so that learning is taking p!ace with continually new stimuli. This at least makes plausible the possibility of continued learning in the sense, here, of a steady rate of growth in productivity.

The Economic Implications of Learning by Doing
Author(s): Kenneth J. Arrow
Source: The Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Jun., 1962), pp. 155-173
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2295952

Also see ENDOCENOUS TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE, by Paul M. Romer.

The distinguishing feature of the technology as an input is that it is neither a conventional good nor a public good; it is a non-rival, partially excludable good.

The main conclusions are that the stock of human capital determines the rate of growth, that too little human capital is devoted to research in equilibrium, that integration into world markets will increase growth rates, and that having a large population is not sufficient to generate growth.

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