Gene Epstein, founder of the Soho Forum monthly debate series, comes on The Local Maximum to discuss and critique Max's recent debate performance on Democracy vs Monarchy.
- Also: Max's 9 Things I learned from the Debate, Gene's debate with Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times.

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Max talks about the breakage in both the crypto industry and the social media landscape in 2022, and the long term ways of thinking about it.

Probability Distribution of the Week: Non-Homogeneous Poisson

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Max and Aaron discuss the launch of the chatGPT product demo taking the internet by storm and the potential applications of this technology. The title of this episode doesn't make sense 100% - but it was generated by chatGPT when asked for an amusing title.

Probability distribution of the week: Poisson Distribution

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Max talks about the developments surrounding Amazon's Alexa, where it's been revealed that layoffs are coming and the initiative has been costing an eye-popping 10 Billion per year. Max believes there is a future for these devices, and discusses where that might be.

Max also adds some details that he missed from the discussion on hurricane Sandy, and his experience in a Tesla self-driving car.

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Max talks to guests Helen and Dave Edwards about the human side of decision making, and how we can use research in behavioral and cognitive science to practice better decision making.

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Max recalls to Aaron his experiences in New York in 2012, and the hurricane (Superstorm Sandy / Frankenstorm) that cut power in Manhattan for days during Halloween and devastated the coastal areas.

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Max defends representative democracy in an October 26th public debate for the Live Free and Debate series in New Hampshire. The resolution was "Monarchy is better than representative democracy" with Alu Axelman arguing in the affirmative and Max arguing in the negative.

It's a long one, but it was a good time with expanded perspectives all around!

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As the keys to Twitter get turned over to Elon Musk, Max talks about how the development of the open internet is proceeding. He traces back to previous predictions about the upcoming fallout from short-sighted content politics of the previous social media management, and how the dream of a decentralized communication network is progressing.

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Max and Aaron dive deeper into the sleeping beauty problem, which starts as a probability question, then wades into philosophy and finally theoretical cosmology. They take a listener email on the MLB playoff rules, and the distribution of the week is the Zeta distribution.

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Today's guest is Foursquare Principal Engineer and Unfolded Founder Isaac Brodsky, talking about the mission of location visualization and how this was achieved by tiling the world with Hexagons using the H3 open source framework and Foursquare's Hex Tiles. We learn a lot about the geometry of the globe!

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