When prejudice is worse than bad

Everyone has prejudice. And… we like them. The reason, I believe, is simple: prejudice is convenient. Daniel Willingham has shown in his book ‘Why students don’t like school’ how thinking is demanding. And that, in spite of our ability to do so, how we suck at it. Prejudice helps you ‘save’ thinking. In a given situation […]

Trust: the single most challenging problem in science and entrepreneurship

When I was a kid, there was this advertisement on TV: Gerson de Oliveira, the outstanding soccer player from the Brazilian national team that won the ’70 world cup, asked the audience “do you want to take advantage?” while explaining why they should buy a particular brand of cigarettes. Many years later, the advertisement became notorious. It represented […]

The logics of Anger

Anger is part of the basic biology of the human species. It spontaneously appears in infancy, is effectively universal in its distribution across cultures and individuals, and has a species-typical neural basis. Sell et al., 2009. Formidability and the logic of human anger. PNAS 106 (35) 15073-8 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0904312106 I’ve always been curious about the biological basis of […]

Governance-by-Fork, not Force

Bitcoin has thought me many things about money, energy, time, work, corruption… even physics. But maybe the most important was the possibility of a better, faster, incorruptible consensus mechanism among an infinite number of stakeholders. In permissionless and trustless way. This is not something to take for granted! In a world with 7 billion people […]