I am not an expert in infectious diseases, but I did sleep in a Holiday Inn Express last night... Seriously, though, I do have a certificate from the Real World Risk Institute [1] which I believe makes me a kind-of "anti-expert" [2] in infectious diseases and other things related to complex domains (economics, sociology, synthetic biology, psychology, medicine, diet, exercise, etc.). As an"anti-expert" — or more colloquially refere...

Professor Harte speaking about the Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt, or Maximum Information) principle as a basis for understanding complexity in all ecosystems.

It’s a common nightmare for programmers to come in late to a project or organization and then have to make sense of a complex "spaghetti mess" of code created over the previous 10 years — a technical debt that takes huge resources in time and money to clean up. Ten years of technical debt is an all-too common headache: Decades of debt were at the root of the Y2K COBOL nightmare. MySpace struggled famously for years with a crippling t...

1. Beware of obvious rewards and excessive competition—they increase exposure to chance events and reduce the role of skill in acquiring rewards2. Watch for hidden correlations3. Be suspicious of stability or the appearance of stability—there are higher dimensions of risk lurking in the shadows4. Remember that volatility begets volatility5. Invest in preparation—insure against the worst-case-scenario6. Take a large number of risks wh...