Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) (@PublicHamilton) profile picture

Cosmic dust. I write about complex social problems. PhD from the University of São Paulo. Most tweets in English.

Sao Paulo, Brazil
Joined July 2008
Photo by Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) (@PublicHamilton)Photo by Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) (@PublicHamilton)Photo by Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) (@PublicHamilton)Photo by Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) (@PublicHamilton)Photo by Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) (@PublicHamilton)Photo by Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) (@PublicHamilton)Photo by Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) (@PublicHamilton)Photo by Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) (@PublicHamilton)Photo by Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) (@PublicHamilton)Photo by Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) (@PublicHamilton)
Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) retweeted
Most success in business is fat-tailed and probabilistic. Most effort in business is dedicated to pretending that it isn't.
Amidst all the controversy over Shaun's model (who cares), I think this is a key point. Private equity tends to be focused on incrementalism. Cutting costs. Growing with existing customers. Adding new, similar customers. Gaining wallet share. These aren't bad; they make sense. They just aren't step function, exponential. The focus on what you can underwrite may raise the floor, but it also limits the ceiling. That's their model. "The models that dominate all human decision-making today are duly heavy on simplistic logic, and light on magic – a spreadsheet leaves no room for miracles." -@rorysutherland This seems be especially true with AI. I am seeing a lot of PE guys very skeptical of ROI on AI. But the experimentation and giving some room for "magic" could lead to exponential improvement. It's not a criticism of PE, it's just not their model. They need hard data on ROI for every dollar they spend. That's the delta between the two groups - PE needs to underwrite every single expense and VC is trying to find exponential outcomes.
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Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) retweeted
Denmark is moving to ban Frankenchickens — the first country in the world to do so. What we’ve done to chickens is the largest genetic experiment ever run on any animal, and one of the most troubling. Geneticists took a scrawny bird and engineered an obese meat machine. The chickens we eat today grow four times faster than chickens did in 1957. But their bodies are not four times stronger. By just six weeks old, many will suffer ailments of old age — heart failure, organ colapse — while one in four will become lame (Knowles et al., 2008). In studies, lame birds will choose feed laced with painkillers — a sign of chronic pain (Danbury et al., 2000). Their parents meanwhile are kept on starvation rations. Birds engineered to grow this fast would otherwise eat themselves to death before laying a single egg. We now breed over 70 billion of these birds a year. Denmark is acting to reverse this giant genetic experiment. The rest of the world should follow suit.
The Danish government wants to ban a fast-growing breed known as “turbo chickens,” setting up another clash with the farm sector over animal welfare. vist.ly/5qhf8
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Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) retweeted
What is happening in Brazil? Many abroad read Lula’s reelection over Flávio Bolsonaro as a win for liberal democracy. We are a Brazilian group that has studied liberal democracy for over 15 years, and we think that reading is wrong. A thread 🧵 1/16
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Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) retweeted
Agent-Based Modeling: Worlds Within Worlds, a new interactive story from the Santa Fe Institute, chronicles the rise of ABMs in the social sciences, with a focus on SFI contributions. Over the next few weeks we’ll highlight pieces of this story. First, how it begins: PART 1: In a former convent in Santa Fe in the late 1980s, economists, physicists, and computer scientists scribble equations on a blackboard where an altar used to be. They are  discussing a promising new approach to scientific modeling, one that represents individual actors in, say, an economy or a pandemic, and the rules those “agents” follow. Today, the method — known as agent-based modeling — offers powerful insights for predicting financial crises, managing pandemics, and even uncovering truths about the past. Read the full story and run the models yourself: santafe.edu/abm
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Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) retweeted
I think foie gras is pretty barbaric, as are the ways we produce a lot of meat products in general. I support any and all bans on specific meat products that most people would agree are produced in horrific ways, and that they wouldn't endorse if they just read about the conditions the animals are in, so I support the proposed foie gras ban in DC. If this were a law about force feeding dogs in the same way I don't think we'd be having as many conversations about the second order effects.
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Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) retweeted
This is an extraordinary advertisement because it's effectively spending 60 seconds to tell us how technology is ruining our lives. Incidentally, it fails to point out that not only is French toast not toast, but Canadian bacon is not technically bacon.
This might be the first time I’ve ever watched an Apple ad that made me actively not want to buy the product
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Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) retweeted
New essay! It explores a very simple and in some sense pretty obvious idea that I think is nevertheless hugely important for understanding politics, culture wars, and media bias. Put simply, our brains evaluate ideas based on their diffusion value: not just whether they seem true, but whether other people accepting them would advance our goals. conspicuouscognition.substac…
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Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) retweeted
The comments are revealing here. You would expect a few people to disagree. Literally nobody does. – at Sundridge, South East
Some 17pc go through an entire working day without speaking to anyone face-to-face while 40pc feel lonely at work, 37pc have no close friends there and almost a third felt lonelier in the office than they did alone at home during lockdown. @rorysutherland the vice-chairman of Ogilvy and a Spectator columnist, believes the origins of today’s antisocial workplace can be traced back to the popularisation of the open-plan office. While it was adopted to save money on floor space, he says it was sold on false promises of enhanced sociability and collaboration: “Now, there’s nowhere you can have a chat without disturbing or annoying someone else.” 🔗 telegraph.co.uk/money/jobs/w…
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Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) retweeted
🔪"...natural selection will favor the motivational psychology & cognitive facilities for capitalizing upon opportunities to amplify ego-beneficial shared heuristics. Sighted watchmakers will habitually push cultural consensuses toward personal expediency."cambridge.org/core/journals/…
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How should we represent a belief system? As a position on a scale? A collection of survey answers? A set of statements? A network? In our chapter, we introduce Belief Network Theory: a measurement framework for studying how beliefs are held, expressed, perceived, and...
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Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) retweeted
I have observed this on many occasions. For instance, a friend of mine who is a brilliant planner and a brilliant copywriter found it almost impossible to gain employment. It may be part of a wider phenomenon which explains the popularity of performance marketing. Because performance marketing is entirely devoted to achieving one narrow thing, it appears 100% effective at that one thing. Other communication forms which achieve multiple objectives don't have a pet single metric all of their own to make themselves look good. – at Sundridge, South East
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Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) retweeted
Violence was endemic in Neolithic Europe: pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pna…
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AI can design viruses—but the biological threats that have already arisen through evolution present much more immediate perils, @KatherineJWu reports: theatlantic.com/health/2026/…
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Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) retweeted
This paper answers why psychopaths keep ending up as CEOs and politicians. Researchers mapping out the mechanics of "successful psychopathy" found that corporate capitalism and modern political selection systems are not neutral. They are hyper-efficient filtering machines. And they are specifically optimized to select for the exact traits normal people find repulsive. Normal leaders are constrained by empathy, guilt, and long-term risk aversion. They hesitate when a decision hurts people. They feel the weight of collateral damage. Psychopaths don’t have an emotional brake pedal. When a company or a political party needs someone to ruthlessly slash budgets, fire thousands of people, bluff through a crisis, or project absolute, unshakeable confidence, normal candidates stutter. Psychopaths step right up. Their superficial charm, pathological fearlessness, and total lack of remorse look identical to "strong leadership" during an interview or a campaign. They weaponize corporate chaos. While everyone else is panicking, they ruthlessly manipulate the narrative, step over their peers, and take credit for the wins. They weaponize charisma to dazzle the board or the voters, and hide their emptiness behind a mask of high performance. The system rewards the ruthlessness, promotes them to the top, and punishes anyone who tries to slow them down with ethics. The researchers call it a feedback loop of structural decay. Corporations and governments built an environment where being entirely devoid of a conscience isn't a disqualifier. It’s a competitive advantage.
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Hamilton Carvalho (oi, complexidade) retweeted
AI models are transforming access to knowledge. By giving everyone an expert assistant, they will improve the prevalence of rigorous takes in public debates while limiting experts' ability to use their authority beyond what their evidence warrants. optimallyirrational.com/p/po…
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