Maintaining Divergence
The synchronization tax is the price of building the bridge. Maintenance is the price of keeping the bridge standing. Transmission is the price of crossing it.
Topic
Synchronization
A collection of 13 issues
A More Perfect Union
We can build systems that, at least from the outside, look like flourishing: systems that operate within appropriate constraints, fulfill purposes their design enables, and participate in relationships characterized by reciprocal adjustment — "a more perfect union."
Communication Communicating
Consensus-seeking communication is limited: not because consensus is impossible or undesirable, but because it is costly, and systems that economize on synchronization costs will, all else equal, outcompete systems that do not.
Joining the Conversation
So the question I'm left with, and that I pose to anyone reading: if intelligence was never going to *arrive* because it was always already here and we've simply joined it — what should we actually be worried about?
The Mattering Instinct
Why do we care so intensely about our own significance? Where does meaning come from? What separates a life worth living from mere biological persistence?
Uncommon Knowledge
Social media fragments common knowledge. When different groups consume different news, share different assumptions, and inhabit different epistemic worlds, the recursive structure of common knowledge fails.
A Stationary Action is Stable Information
[Updated 6 February 2026 -MFM]
There is a maximum amount of information that any observer can extract from a physical system. This limit emerges from the structure of phase space itself. A system's state occupies a region defined by its position and momentum, and quantum mechanics forbids this
It from Bit, Bit from It
[Updated 6 February 2026 -MFM]
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"
The Synchronization Tax
[Updated 6 February 2026. -MFM]
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
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