good to keep in touch, and glad to be out of the other place. Actually, after the demoralising shock of Trump's victory, I've largely retreated into studying theorems in topology! Catching up on things I should already know but don't. It's so clean and beautiful and non-depressing

I once met a hedge fund guy at a conference. He was a hedge fund guy. He told me that Nick Bostrom had PROVEN that we live in a quantum simulation. I nodded my head, "really?" It wasn't quite what I took from Bostrom's paper, which I had been reading on the way to the conference.

My experience also as a Bloomberg columnist for a decade. My most interesting opinion pieces were those where I started out building the argument for some proposition XX, and then learned things so I didn't believe XX, and ended up arguing something very different -- and learned alot in the process.

I agree, and think it will be more like 20-30 before they are very common. For an interesting perspective, look at talks or papers of Todd Litman, an expert in transport history. Such as
vtpi.org/UNext_Litman...