Ole Peters
@opeters
Physicist, Ergodicity Economics
If you’re interested in — I was going to say ergodicity, then I thought ‘decisions theory’, and now I’m settling on — life?, have a look at the 20th anniversary edition of William Poundstone’s classic Fortune’s Formula. It has a brand new part about the rise of ergodicity economics.
Not entirely surprising in a tutorial session about ‘An introduction to ergodicity economics.’ Having said that — it is the only book on the subject, and there really is a feeling of witnessing science in the making here.
We don't use the term "capital" but maybe this excerpt helps, from royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.... Our views on the role of models, meaning axioms or assumptions, are laid out on p.59 of the book. ergodicityeconomics.com/an-introduct...
This book has been such a delight! By my friend and mentor Reuben Hersh, about his friend and mentor Peter Lax. Reading it feels like listening to Reuben speak about his love of mathematics and his respect, friendship, and admiration for Peter.
I was also just thinking about ontology -- the study of being and existence -- in the context of economics. Curiously, a number of the topics on your list are chapters in the EE textbook. Plenty of overlap.
That's rather lovely in a non-trivial way! At the launch party last week, we also had a big book for big ideas.
1/6 How can I put this? "Expected-utility maximizers don't maximize utility." Why? Because utility is not usually an ergodic quantity in the mathematical models used by economists, and maximizing its expected value doesn't mean much in the real world.
The result is a book that will enable its readers to go far beyond it. It's not a collection of papers, nor a comprehensive survey. It's a launch pad. Absorb what's in this book and take it in entirely new directions.
Then move to collections of individuals, then let them interact. At each level our thinking is informed by the ergodicity problem: how does our perspective change when we move from a statistical-ensemble perspective to a temporal perspective?
We start by introducing tools we found to be useful over the years, wherever they came from. Next we think about a single person making trivial decisions, then increase the complexity of the decisions one step at a time. We create a temporal context, and add ignorance.
The ergodicity question remained the key to it all: do we think of randomness as variation across time or as variation across multiple systems, real or imagined? So we called what we were doing "Ergodicity economics." www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Dozens of students worked on smaller projects during @london-math-lab.bsky.social summer placements. The network of collaborators grew into different domains; machine learning, neuroscience, psychology.
In 2015, I presented a set of lectures on the topic in Chandigarh, India. My haphazard notes for these lectures, co-authored in a rush with Alex Adamou, became a secret classic, with tens of thousands of downloads from my homepage alone.
In 2012 I set up @london-math-lab.bsky.social to host a research group dedicated to the project, with young and curious minds rotating in and out over the years. It would take too long to list them all, but my co-author Alex Adamou stayed for 10 years.
This work soon attracted the attention of some extraordinary thinkers. I had met them because we were all members of the community around the Santa Fe Institute @sfiscience.bsky.social. Among them were Murray Gell-Mann, Ken Arrow, Reuben Hersh, and Cormac McCarthy.
1/thread🧵 Almost 20 years ago, I started thinking about the ergodicity problem in the context of economics. That turned out to be surprisingly fruitful, and now there's a book about it. ergodicityeconomics.com/publications/
Happy to announce that "An Introduction to Ergodicity Economics" can now be ordered. Here: ergodicityeconomics.com/publications/
For those of you who couldn't join us at our in-person EE2025 conference in Cascais, I've written up a dinner conversation I had with Gerd Gigerenzer and put it up on LinkedIn. www.linkedin.com/pulse/ergodi...
I don't believe in rushing things, but 10 years into the writing of the EE textbook, it's good to see the cover is ready. If you want a ping when it's ready to order (very soon), sign up to our EE mailing list at ergodicityeconomics.eo.page/4ct3k
Jeremy Hunt said this. He is, of course, completely right. The question for me is how anyone who’s thought about capitalism for more than two minutes could ever get this wrong. It’s astonishing.
Nice little application of ergodicity economics to reinforcement learning, published just now. The ‘economics’ in the name of my research program is sort of a frozen accident…
So refreshingly down-to-earth (this is Reuben Hersh). I often talk about infinity as an error message. Using Reuben's language, if a computation ends up with "infinity" then we've hit the boundary of the domain we're studying, a boundary we thought we could ignore. content.ems.press/assets/publi...
4/ I've converged on the words "dispositional vs situational" and I'm delighted to see Zimbardo use the same words. And he's as careful as the subject deserves: no, it's not all situational. But yes: in our formal and narrative reasoning we overemphasize disposition.
Came across this in a book by Philip Zimbardo. Tagore…he was onto something.
The program for our ergodicity economics conference, EE2025, is now online. lml.org.uk/ee2025-progr... Have a look and sign up at ee2025.rsvpify.com if you want to join us (note: online event first, in-person event separately, the week after).
The ergodicity-economics community is just the best. The annual conferences are an opportunity for those who can to provide a little support for those who need it. And that's exactly what happens. This message arrived yesterday. Abstract deadline today. ee2025.rsvpify.com