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Michael Frank Martin

Michael Frank Martin

This is a personal blog, and the opinions here are not necessarily shared by anybody else, including my employer.

📍 Saratoga, California

It from Bit, Bit from It

If you have ever felt uneasy reading about quantum mechanics, you are in good company. For nearly a century, the idea that a cat can be both alive and dead — or that an electron exists in a cloud of probability until "looked at" — has struck even world-class physicists

The Synchronization Tax

A physicist, a computer scientist, and a banker walk into a bar. They cannot agree on who got there first. This is not a joke. This is a central problem of physics, computer science, and economics. The physicist points out that simultaneity is relative — who was there "first"

Estimation Culture

Reason recently published a lovely article by Davidson Heath about the history of statistical significance and estimation. I enjoyed the article very much, but I'm afraid that even for people who use the tools described in the article in their day-to-day work, the message might be a little

The Causal Arrow of Altruism

I recently explored group selection and kin selection models in an essay on Radamacher Complexity and Group Competition, attempting to reconcile seemingly irreconcilable differences using measures of model Rademacher Complexity. The essay chose to use the definition of group selection provided by Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson (NTW) 2010, which also

Rademacher Complexity and Models of Group Competition

What do Radamacher Complexity and mean field approximations have to do with kin and group selection models in evolutionary biology? And what might consideration of the Radamacher Complexity of kin and group selection models suggest to us about cooperation and competition in human groups? Here are tentative answers to what

The Coasean Singularity in Patents

Patent rights exist to solve a fundamental economic problem: Inventors need incentives to innovate, but after revealing an invention, others can copy freely. The patent system grants limited monopolies to inventors in exchange for public disclosure. This is the patent system as God intended. But the patent system has struggled

What is creativity?

Csikszentmihalyi's book Creativity is one of my favorite books, and one of my favorite insights from the book is his systems theory of creativity. Creativity is not a characteristic or trait of an individual person or work. Rather, it is a phenomenon manifest in the incorporation of an

Invention as Exploration

Richard Sutton's Bitter Lesson is that general methods leveraged by more computation beat specialized intuition encoded in domain-specific algorithms. The Bitter Lesson gets lots of attention these days because of its implications for artificial intelligence. But for a patent lawyer like me, it's more interesting for

Problems with the Problem of Synchronization

The allure of the rigor and predictive power of physical theory is a perennial temptation in the study of problems in economics and sociology. The hypothesis articulated in the The Problem of Synchronization, provides a case study. It posits that markets are fundamentally mechanisms for temporal coordination, utilizing price signals

Patents, Trust, and the Health of the Startup Ecosystem

From the wrangling over the definition of AGI between Microsoft and OpenAI (thanks to the terms of an exclusive IP license) to the recent acqui-hires of the founders of Character.AI, Windsurf, Scale AI, and more (absent many of their colleagues) there has never been a better teaching moment for