Albert Wenger | Union Square Ventures | Page 24 of 170

Apr 5, 2019

Google formed and then within a week dissolved an AI Ethics board, in the corporate equivalent of many celebrity weddings: ill conceived, but quickly ended. The calls for ethics in AI have been strong and understandable. AI is powerful technology [...]

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Apr 3, 2019

I got the idea for today’s Uncertainty Wednesday from seeing quite a few tweets in my timeline to the effect that startups don’t really have meaningful upside for employees. Tracing these tweets back, led me to this post titled “working [...]

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Apr 1, 2019

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from my book World After Capital continues the chapter on psychological freedom. After the prior excerpts on freedom to learn and create, today is about the freedom to share. Even after we have created something, many of [...]

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Mar 27, 2019

In the last few Uncertainty Wednesdays, we have been looking at various fallacies arising from our lack of appreciation of uncertainty, such as imperfect correlation (narrative fallacy) and the baserate fallacy. Today we will look at hindsight bias, for which [...]

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Mar 25, 2019

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from my book World After Capital continues the chapter on psychological freedom. The next step in the Knowledge Loop after learning is creating. Here too we need to work on our freedom. Picasso once said: “we all [...]

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Mar 22, 2019

Last Friday I wrote about the power and danger of the meme of suppressed truth. In the post, I suggested that one form of countering negative memes is through positive ones. Since creating memes is definitely not my strength, please [...]

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Mar 20, 2019

Last week’s Uncertainty Wednesday was titled “Fooled by Small Numbers” and discussed why drawing conclusions from small samples is dangerous. A reader asked how that relates to grounding the Boeing 737 Max 8 airplane after two crashes? Isn’t that also [...]

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Mar 18, 2019

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from my book World After Capital continues the discussion of Psychological Freedom by examining how we can make ourselves free to learn. Young kids ask upwards of three hundred questions a day. Humans are naturally curious, [...]

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Mar 15, 2019

At dinner last night a friend in his mid 50s asked, quite genuinely: so what exactly is a meme? Our teenage son laughed about this apparent ignorance but the confusion is well founded given that many people today use the [...]

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