Author Archives: Timothy B Lee

Entrepreneurship and Hayekian Discovery

Brink Lindsey points me to this great article on how entrepreneurs think. It turns out that many entrepreneurs hate the concept of market research. Rather than trying to predict the overall size of the market in advance, their approach is … Continue reading

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The Innovator’s Dilemma in Higher Education

Matt Yglesias points me to a a new report on the future of higher education from the Center for American Progress. The report has Clay Christensen, the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, as its lead author. Not surprisingly, he leans … Continue reading

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City Planning and the Rule of Law

The excellent Greater Greater Washington blog endorses this video from the City of Beverly Hills, an impressive bit of filmmaking that devote a tremendous amount of effort to knocking over a rather silly straw man: Riffing on It’s a Wonder … Continue reading

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F. A. Hayek, Liberal

A couple of months ago I wrote a post for the Technology Liberation Front offering a qualified defense Tim Wu’s book, The Master Switch. My erstwhile colleagues at TLF had taken turns lambasting the book for what they regarded as … Continue reading

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Bottom-Up Chat: Dara Lind and Immigration Reform

Regular readers know that we periodically do text-based chats using Envolve, a Facebook-style chat startup co-founded by my brother. Our next chat will be tomorrow (Wednesday) evening, and will feature special guest Dara Lind. By day she works for an … Continue reading

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The Return of Bottom-up Liberalism

This week left-of-center bloggers have been abuzz over this lengthy treatise about the supposed absence of genuinely left-wing voices in the online conversation. Freddie DeBoer complains that the lefty blogosphere is dominated by “neoliberals” like Matt Yglesias, Jonathan Chait and … Continue reading

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Reply to Hanson on Brain Emulation

Robin Hanson responds to my last post about simulating/emulating the brain: To emulate a biological signal processor, one need only identify its key internal signal dimensions and their internal mappings – how input signals are mapped to output signals for … Continue reading

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Emulation, Simulation, and the Human Brain

On this week’s episode of the EconTalk podcast, Russ Roberts asked Robin Hanson on the show to discuss his theory of the technological singularity. In a nutshell, Hanson believes that in the next few decades, humans will develop the technologies … Continue reading

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The Cycle that Wasn’t

Over at Ars Technica, I’ve got a review of Tim Wu’s The Master Switch. An excerpt: By mid-century, each of these communications technologies [telephone, movies, radio, television] was in the grip of one or a few large companies. Yet everything … Continue reading

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When is a Tax Not a Tax?

Megan McArdle and I have been having an interesting discussion in the comments to my last ObamaCare post. She’s convinced me that the ObamaCare individual mandate is structured in a way that would be difficult to actually duplicate within the … Continue reading

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