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People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

freakonomics.com

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Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#241

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

delecti wrote: post #233
Symmetry wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our civilization has attained its complexity by encompassing such knowledge that it would take a million lifetimes to learn all of it. I have made my career learning about technology and learning about science is a great hobby of mine. But I have only the dimmest understanding of even how much there is to know.

I've been bingeing my way through a youtube channel [1] that's largely focused on old/outdated consumer technology. I'm astounded by how little I knew about how any of it worked. In particular, I was astonished when I watched the one about how VHS tapes works. There's just so much knowledge underpinning even relatively obsolete technology. As time goes on the fantasy trope of "ancient lost knowledge" becomes less har…

There's a kind of technological pre-horizon involved in understanding any advanced technology.

Thought experiment: someone gives you a hard drive with some music and video files on it...but you have no idea what a hard drive is, or what music and video files are, or what a file format is.

Beyond a certain level, you can only reverse engineer tech if you already know almost everything there is to know about how it works, or you're vastly smarter than the original designers - by at least a couple of orders of magnitude.

I can't imagine anyone alive today being able to solve the hard drive problem, or an alien equivalent, from scratch.

You'd have to be able to work out the basic physics of magnetic storage, the disk-level coding system used, the higher level file and data organisation, the chip design in the drive firmware, the code in the firmware, the rest of the drive electronics, the coding and compression systems used for audio and video data (how do FLAC or H.265 work on the inside?) - and you'd only be able to do all that if you understood that the hardware target was a modulated gas compression reproduction system with a certain frequency range intended for use in an atmosphere with specific characteristics, and a planar display technology with a similarly limited ability to generate a moving pattern of electronic magnetic frequencies.

And even if you could decode and view the cat videos on the drive, you probably still wouldn't find them funny.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#242

Post by SolaceQuantum »

1996 wrote: post #229
bitwize wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit reminded of the Zentraedi from Macross , who know how to fly and fight with advanced spaceships/mechs, but not how to repair them or how they work. Except in that case it's because their patron race, the Protoculture, deliberately kept them dependent; Protoculture factories supplied as many ships and weapons as the Zentraedi might need, meanwhile, the average Zentraedi was kept at about a five-year-old huma…

Good catch! It reminded me the same thing, Macross. There is indeed something keeping working class humans dependants: a focus on growth at all costs (including population growth). It is pervasive (the ideology is reinforced with ads) and makes you desire for example the latest iPhone X. With a permanent growth, the basic problem is all humans are still born with a dependancy on housing and food (and other fancier th…

I would think millenials actually desire growth as much as any other generation desires it. That they don’t implies they may not be able to.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#243

Post by jjoonathan »

HenryTheHorse wrote: post #217
extralego wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For similar reasons, I highly recommend a book called Capital: Critique of Political Economy. And likewise, some people may have strong opinions about the author’s work. I'd really encourage them to put them aside and deeply understand his points + context.

I can't quite tell if you're being sarcastic or earnest.

The descriptive work of he-who-shall-not-be-named is leagues ahead of his prescriptive work (not surprising -- fixing problems tends to be harder than finding them).

The problems he addresses still abound and it's really a pity we have culturally suppressed the vocabulary and arguments he put forward to talk about them.

So, my guess: serious.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#244

Post by gbacon »

WilliamEdward wrote: post #75
gbacon wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politicians and civil servants are subject to behavioral concerns too. Who will watch the watchmen?

it doesn't have to be an endless hierarchy of people looking over one another. For example, we could watch the people that watch us.

We watch, we note abuses, they launch internal investigations, and they conclude that nothing was wrong.

Case closed. Pay your taxes, citizen. Thank you; drive through.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#245

Post by tomp »

Zimahl wrote: post #154
dqpb wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with liberal arts education is that it teaches you how to talk and what to say, but not how to think.

That's the anti-college talking point that republicans like to preach to the uneducated masses. It's absolutely designed to devalue what is actually being taught in higher education, allow for the easy dismissal of soft sciences. And once you can dismiss soft sciences, you can certainly dismiss the hard sciences with guilt by association. I earned my CS degree from a liberal arts college and took my share of liberal…

"soft" sciences are not sciences.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#246

Post by notahacker »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #137
ppeetteerr wrote: post #34

This is probably the greatest argument for big government. If we were to eliminate the supervision of the establishment over the safety and security of everyday life, it would be very time consuming to handle every single aspect of it. There is always the issue of an overreaching government, and that's where the left/right party split comes in. Each party either creates more regulation and protection or take some awa…

> This is probably the greatest argument for big government The article talks about institutional inertia. The advantage of a market economy is your Blockbusters get replaced by Netflix. Imagine if film renting were a public agency. It would be much harder to disrupt. Governments are, by design, immortal. A crucial design decision is choosing what, in our society, we want to be immortal and what we want to be replace…

The elected component of the government sector in a properly functioning democracy is far more mortal than large corporations and newly elected Cabinets generally more zealous about reforming (for better or worse) the way agencies and services are run than newly appointed corporate board members. Sure, some services are prioritised more than others; no government is going to get voted out of office solely for running the nationalised film rental agency into the ground, but the main reason for the institutional inertia is the same scale, complexity and principal/agent problems large corporations also suffer from.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#247

Post by tootie »

hutzlibu wrote: post #176

I admit I only skimmed the article, but I still throw in a potential controversal counterthought (even though I don't disagree with the article from what I read): People* are dumb. Why? They have been breed like that for many generations. Because all the classic Civilisations and Empires needed lots of dumb workers and peasants who were able to do their simple work, but not smart enough, to organize any opposition ag…

"Because all the classic Civilisations and Empires needed lots of dumb workers and peasants who were able to do their simple work, but not smart enough, to organize any opposition against the current empire."

I think that's a pretty preposterous claim. Selective breeding of humans has happened in earnest very rarely in human history. Far too little to have created an evolutionary bottleneck. The Flynn Effect would seem to indicate that the opposite has been happening at least in recent history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#248

Post by stingraycharles »

aantix wrote: post #237
stingraycharles wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok normally I don’t approve of these types of comments on HN, but this was witty. For those who do not get the reference, Alan Kay is the inventor of SmallTalk: http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/

I love how you revealed that you dislike joke comments on HN and unintentionally killed it at the same time.

Didn’t intent on killing the joke, I was hoping it would allow more people to appreciate it. But apparently I failed at that. :)

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#249

Post by mjevans »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #241
delecti wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been bingeing my way through a youtube channel [1] that's largely focused on old/outdated consumer technology. I'm astounded by how little I knew about how any of it worked. In particular, I was astonished when I watched the one about how VHS tapes works. There's just so much knowledge underpinning even relatively obsolete technology. As time goes on the fantasy trope of "ancient lost knowledge" becomes less har…

There's a kind of technological pre-horizon involved in understanding any advanced technology. Thought experiment: someone gives you a hard drive with some music and video files on it...but you have no idea what a hard drive is, or what music and video files are, or what a file format is. Beyond a certain level, you can only reverse engineer tech if you already know almost everything there is to know about how it wor…

I'd like to take that experiment a step further.

Instead of /just/ the hard drive (much like having JUST a VHS tape) you also have some complete things it would slot against. An actual (if broken) VHS player or two to examine.

Having that hardware as a reference would exponentially reduce the difficulty of the task. Even if the capacitance values are completely screwed up over time there'd at least be a sort of range and general outline encoded by the type of components involved.

Modern electronics are harder; a lot of them are electronically programmable, so you'd actually rather hope to find one of the really cut-throat cheep units that are mass produced where actual mask-roms are used. Those might hold up over time. We can hope that some sort of advanced imaging system can 'de lid' the chip without resorting to a freeze and slice method, but even then it might be possible for the mask roms to be decoded. The EEproms will have probably long lost anything other than the fact that a given quantity of storage MIGHT have been used. The actual contents of their less-volatile registers may well have decayed past any sort of recognition.

For such cases hacker/collectors might have actually done some of the job; it's possible that some archivist's collection has an obscure dump of some firmware blob or update that is requisite for the task. A civilization level archaeology effort might be able to reconstruct sufficient artifacts to either reproduce a conformant unit or at least emulate one via more sophisticated methods.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#250

Post by tootie »

enraged_camel wrote: post #109
gdubs wrote: post #95

Reminded of this timeless Carl Sagan quote: "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology."

Asimov’s Foundation series is an excellent commentary on this very phenomenon. One of the antagonists is a galactic empire that is technologically advanced, but has been stagnating and decaying slowly as those in power start viewing scientists with disdain and distrust. Over time the empire loses the ability to develop new technology, and ends up with those who can only maintain/repair existing technology (which even…

On that topic, I think you can directly equate Behavioral Economics to Psychohistory. In fact, fellow Nobel winner Paul Krugman claims to have become an economist because it was the closest he could come to being a pyschohistorian in real life.
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