iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Started adding books I’ve read to my profile there after seeing your tweet. How fun to remember those. I shall continue.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Nick Hanauer on how the ergodicity problem in economics informs his thinking about inequality. youtube.com/shorts/cOhbe...

youtube.com

Monopoly Economy: Why Markets Aren't Ergodic #shorts

YouTube video by Blackbook Protocol

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

I just checked, and you can get the book for EUR 5.17 at the moment: www.kennys.ie/shop/fortune...

kennys.ie

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Reposted by Ole Peters

James King @jamesking.io · 29/07/2026

Just finished reading the 20th anniversary edition of Fortune’s Formula by William Poundstone. It is such a good book. The new edition has an extra part, titled Ergodicity, which covers the work of Ole Peters and others.

The cover of William Poundstone’s book, Fortune’s Formula, 20th Anniversary edition.

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Reposted by Ole Peters

Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Applications now open for Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships at @sfiscience.bsky.social! apply-sfi.smapply.org/prog/complex...

apply-sfi.smapply.org

Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowship - Santa Fe Institute

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

"ohne daß irgendwelche besondere Hypothese zugrunde gelegt werden müßte"

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

So good to see this book in libraries. Everyone should have access.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

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.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

Interesting exercise: use ergodicity economics to determine the conditions under which the answers are rational.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

If ergodicity had been part of our cultural vocabulary, we wouldn’t have got into the communication mess over Covid vaccines. Another 100 years and we’ll all be on the same page…

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

4. It also predicts that apparent loss aversion depends on the wealth dynamic, for example diminishing (λ → 1) under additive dynamics. Those qualitative predictions seem well suited to behavioral and neuroscience experiments.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

3/ Assuming good bracketing (subjects key off in-game wealth), EE predicts that apparent loss aversion varies with wealth, which may be testable.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

2/ For example, in the null model of multiplicative dynamics, optimizing long-term wealth growth implies an apparent loss-aversion coefficient λ(x) = −ln(1−x)/ln(1+x), with x the stake as a fraction of current wealth. Curiously λ = 2 exactly when x = (√5−1)/2, the reciprocal of the golden ratio.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

1/ Very curious about this, @cfcamerer.bsky.social. Long-term growth optimization, studied in ergodicity economics, provides an interesting baseline for the "cold calculation" part of loss aversion. It makes predictions that may already be testable using data you've collected.

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Reposted by Ole Peters

kajak.bsky.social @kajak.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

likewise I thank @opeters.bsky.social for dispelling the myth the rational actor cannot be altruistic of Micro101 because "ergodicity fallacy", i.e. treating optimization as if it had no memory and running into St. Petersburg paradox. In reality: The Farmers Fable of utlity maximizing cooperation

farmersfable.org

Farmers Fable. A Tale of Cooperation

From Marc Elsberg thriller GIER, based on scientific work of London Mathematical Laboratory, explains the fundamental principle of the cooperation benefit.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

If I post a link on here, will my post be suppressed, like on twitter and linkedIn, or is BlueSky the last refuge for people who actually want to communicate content?

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

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.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

Nothing like the comedy store players.

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Reposted by Ole Peters

Santa Fe Institute @sfiscience.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

New book: An Introduction to Ergodicity Economics A new textbook by SFI External Professor Ole Peters and Alexander Adamou re-examines core assumptions in economic theory. It presents a formal challenge to expected-value thinking and shows how non-ergodicity can arise naturally in economic models.

santafe.edu

New book: Introduction to Ergodicity Economics

An Introduction to Ergodicity Economics is a new textbook that draws on physics to re-examine traditional economic theory. It begins with flipping a coin. And a hypothetical gambit. Imagine you were o...

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

For those of you who couldn't make it to the launch event in June, here's a video about the "why" behind writing the textbook.

youtu.be

Why we wrote a textbook

YouTube video by Ergodicity TV

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

The story that orthodox economics is as good as a formal theory of human behavior can ever be has been holding economic theory back for a long time. I know one formal theory that’s better than the orthodoxy.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

Is there an age limit to apply?

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

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...

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

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.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

That’s true, it’s not exactly the Ising model. Closer to a lattice gas, which can be mapped to a spin-1 Ising model… Upshot: statistical mechanicians studied variants of these systems, around the time when Schelling proposed his model.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

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.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

It makes me exceedingly happy that there are people all around the world who enjoy this kind of gentle slow meditation. Social-media scatter brain be damned. And if one of them is Dave Bacon, you know it's good stuff!

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

That's rather lovely in a non-trivial way! At the launch party last week, we also had a big book for big ideas.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

6/ And, of course, have a look at our textbook, where we develop Ergodicity Economics, from the ground up. A fully functioning formal alternative to orthodox economic theory. ergodicityeconomics.com/publications/

ergodicityeconomics.com

Textbook – Ergodicity Economics

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

5/ If you find this as interesting as I do, come along next week to listen to one of the authors, Duncan James, present the book and recent updates, in our EE seminar series: ergodicityeconomics.com/event/semina...

ergodicityeconomics.com

Seminar. Duncan James. “Risky Curves–New Results and Future Directions” – Ergodicity Economics

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

4/ That was established in an admirable effort by 4 economists, experts in expected-utility theory, who reviewed 8 decades of empirical work, concluding: "The power to predict out-of-sample is in the poor to non-existent range." See "Risky Curves" routledge.com/Risky-Curves...

routledge.com

Risky Curves: On the Empirical Failure of Expected Utility

For several decades, the orthodox economics approach to understanding choice under risk has been to assume that each individual person maximizes some sort of personal utility function defined over pur...

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

3/ What does that mean? I would say it means that this core concept of orthodox economics -- utility -- is meaningless and misleading. But don't take my word for it - this is known: empirically, expected-utility theory and its descendants, like prospect theory etc., don't work.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

2/ I've written a blog post about this with Ollie Hulme, where we spell out the mathematics and give you an interactive app. Try it out for yourself. Maximizing expected utility destroys actual utility. ergodicityeconomics.com/2025/05/28/exp

ergodicityeconomics.com

Expected-utility maximizers don’t maximize utility. – Ergodicity Economics

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

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.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

15 years ago I started SAM, the Society for the Advancement of Mediocrity. It went alright, and I think it was an ok idea.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

And please stay in touch and tell us what you find. ergodicityeconomics.eo.page/4ct3k Most of all: enjoy! This is creative, living, science, and I think the fun we had while writing the book shines through on the page.

ergodicityeconomics.eo.page

Ergodicity Economics mailing list

Join for all things ergodicity!

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

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.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

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?

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

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.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

And we ended up with a delightful book. A textbook that you can actually read because it outlines the beginning of a new field. It's deliberate, systematic, and maximally simple. ergodicityeconomics.com/publications/

ergodicityeconomics.com

Textbook – Ergodicity Economics

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

We unified, simplified, and systematized.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

We collected earlier work by researchers who had also asked the ergodicity question, explicitly or implicitly. We traced this problem back over the centuries, found relevant tricks in books on physics, signal processing, economics, mathematics. ergodicityeconomics.com/2024/02/05/e...

ergodicityeconomics.com

Ergodicity economics — a history – Ergodicity Economics

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

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...

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

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.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

Something genuinely new was emerging. While there are several excellent critiques of economic theory, including by some of its key architects, what we were developing was a constructive alternative.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

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.

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Ole Peters @opeters.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

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.

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