Featured | Democratic Firms
Lord Eustace Percy’s “Unknown State” Lecture
Lord Eustace Percy was a Conservative public servant but was better known as a serious thinker, indeed, as the “Minister of Thinking.” There is a remarkable and much-quoted passage in his 1944 Riddell Lecture The Unknown State.
Panopticon vs. McGregor’s Theory Y
This paper is part of a larger project to better understand the limitations of the economic theory of agency and incentives. The economic approach focuses on extrinsic incentives whereas a better understanding of human organization requires an understanding of intrinsic motivation and the complementary or substitutive relationships with extrinsic motivation.
Featured | Development
Panopticon vs. McGregor’s Theory Y
This paper is part of a larger project to better understand the limitations of the economic theory of agency and incentives. The economic approach focuses on extrinsic incentives whereas a better understanding of human organization requires an understanding of intrinsic motivation and the complementary or substitutive relationships with extrinsic motivation.
Knowledge and Institutional Change
This paper attempts set forth systematically some of the knowledge questions that determine certain strategies for institutional change.
Featured | Property Theory
Lord Eustace Percy’s “Unknown State” Lecture
Lord Eustace Percy was a Conservative public servant but was better known as a serious thinker, indeed, as the “Minister of Thinking.” There is a remarkable and much-quoted passage in his 1944 Riddell Lecture The Unknown State.
The case against the employment-system based on the norms of ordinary jurisprudence
This is a draft paper that presents some of the arguments I have been making for years in a framework analogous to Type I and Type II error in statistics–which seems to clarify the arguments.
Featured | Quantum Mechanics
Talk: Hamming distance in classical and quantum logical information theory
This is a set of slides from a talk on introducing the Hamming distance into classical logical information theory and then developing the quantum logical notion of Hamming distance–which turns out to equal a standard notion of distance in quantum information theory, the Hilbert-Schmidt distance.
Talk: New Foundations for Quantum Information Theory
These are the slides for a talk given at the 6th International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics on Crete in August 2017.
Featured | Mathematics
A Note on Spencer-Brown’s Algebra
George Spencer-Brown in his cryptic book, Laws of Form, started off reasoning about “the Distinction” and ended up with an algebra that later writers showed to be the Boolean algebra of two elements.
Talk: Hamming distance in classical and quantum logical information theory
This is a set of slides from a talk on introducing the Hamming distance into classical logical information theory and then developing the quantum logical notion of Hamming distance–which turns out to equal a standard notion of distance in quantum information theory, the Hilbert-Schmidt distance.
