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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

#321

Post by cercatrova »

rogerbinns wrote: post #231
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.

That is fine! In economics there is a famous essay I, Pencil[1] explaining that no one knows how to make a pencil. Sure you put some graphite in some wood, but how do you make graphite? And how do you make the machines that make it. And how do you make the components that go into that. Or updating this, no one knows how to make a computer mouse. (You'd need some hydro-carbons for the plastic, machines, machines that…

There is a YouTube channel[1] that discusses making things such as a hamburger from scratch, much like your pencil example.

[1] https://youtube.com/channel/UCfIqCzQJXvYj9ssCoHq327g

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

#322

Post by woah »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #295
skadamat wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Common ones I hear: - He hasn't shipped anything popular (he's a researcher, expanding the tree of knowledge, not an engineer optimizing for shipping) - Smalltalk isn't as great as Alan makes it out to be (again he's a researcher) - That the computer revolution has happened but he's stuck in the 70's - Many, many more things

FWIW: I used Smalltalk a bit in college and then for about a year professionally, about four years into a now twenty year career. I've shipped software in about five languages over my career and have never again come anywhere close to as productive as I was during that time using Smalltalk. Ironically, the work environment at that time was perhaps the worst of my career but Smalltalk just makes it so darn easy to cra…

If it’s so great, why isn’t it used in industry? Cranking out functionality is what everyone wants. As someone who has never seen or used it, I always hear about how all these languages are inspired by smalltalk but just don’t get it right or whatever. Why doesn’t somebody do a straight up port of it if it’s that great?

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

#323

Post by woah »

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.

It’s very good. This guy was about 150 years ahead of the AI job loss/ singularity crowd. In Capital he doesn’t even really get into the politics that much, it’s more an analysis of automated manufacturing.

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

#324

Post by comex »

gbacon wrote: post #244
WilliamEdward wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

And then, occasionally, there are protests in the streets, people start running for office pledging to fix the abuses, we vote for them, and things slowly start to change.

Alternately, sometimes we sue them, or else a state or federal attorney general sues them; the matter ends up in the judicial system, and the behavior is reviewed by an independent judge – albeit only for violations of law, not of sense.

As avenues for redress, both of these are highly imperfect, with well-known limits and failure cases; but they’re not nothing.

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

#325

Post by mcguire »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #295
skadamat wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Common ones I hear: - He hasn't shipped anything popular (he's a researcher, expanding the tree of knowledge, not an engineer optimizing for shipping) - Smalltalk isn't as great as Alan makes it out to be (again he's a researcher) - That the computer revolution has happened but he's stuck in the 70's - Many, many more things

FWIW: I used Smalltalk a bit in college and then for about a year professionally, about four years into a now twenty year career. I've shipped software in about five languages over my career and have never again come anywhere close to as productive as I was during that time using Smalltalk. Ironically, the work environment at that time was perhaps the worst of my career but Smalltalk just makes it so darn easy to cra…

Did you ship anything in Smalltalk? (I didn't, when I was using it.) If so, how? Ship the whole image?

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

#326

Post by s-shellfish »

ballenf wrote: post #296
smhost wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did he mean at 1:09:22 ( https://youtu.be/R1R2jH4PQEo?t=1h09m22s ) when he says "nobody complains about multiplying one fraction by another because it looks reasonable, but it turns out it isn't reasonable at all"?

He explains that it was a "triumph of Greek mathematics" to prove that multiplying the top and bottom of a fraction is how you multiply two fractions. That is, we accept as true that you can multiply fractions this way, but we kind of just got lucky that it does work that way. Proving that it always works is non-trivial, but that is totally glossed over in math classes, doing a disservice to students. This is in cont…

The problem with teaching math is you must give them the tools that were created last, so they have the tools to keep up with math. They then must use those tools to understand and prove what they first had to accept as true, lacking proof.

Tend to think about constructive mathematics for this particular insight.

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

#327

Post by jameshart »

mjevans wrote: post #249
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Instructions unclear: hard drive now stuck in VHS player.

But seriously - imagine you had a blu-ray disc, and a CD player. How many years wasted trying to figure out how that laser and that control circuitry could possibly extract data from that surface? Yet clearly they're intended to go together...

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

#328

Post by StanislavPetrov »

ppeetteerr wrote: post #197
StanislavPetrov wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it would be very time consuming to handle every single aspect of it. Life is complicated. It is time consuming to become an knowledgeable, aware person capable of contributing intelligently to society. It is also absolutely necessary if we want to have a self-governed society worth living in. You can't have a worthwhile government - let alone a big government - governed by the will of the masses when the masses are…

That is where domain experts come in. It would be impossible for me, as an individual, to understand the repercussions of tax credits on the solar energy industry. I vote instead for competent people who I believe are best positioned to find the right people to answer these questions on my behalf.

If you don't have a general understanding, how can you decide who is competent? Staying informed and aware is hard, but necessary, work. Our reliance on pundits to recommend "experts" in the information age has led to our current society - where the overwhelming majority of voters are pushed, pulled, and manipulated by various government and corporate interests. I would contend that in order to judge who is competent to lead we as a people have to work harder to have a far better grasp of all the issues. We have fallen short in this way and we are suffering the consequences, on every level of government.

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

#329

Post by mcguire »

rvern wrote: post #135
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…

No, this is one of the greatest arguments for small government or no government. People are more rational when the cost to them of being irrational is larger. Voting for good policies is a public good. When a voter is one among three hundred millions of citizens, only 1/300,000,000 (on average) of the benefits of the vote befall the individual voter. This gigantic externality means that the democratic market will sev…

"People are more rational when the cost to them of being irrational is larger."

We may need a source on that. Are you are familiar with Thaler's work?

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

#330

Post by sirclueless »

woah wrote: post #322
poulsbohemian wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW: I used Smalltalk a bit in college and then for about a year professionally, about four years into a now twenty year career. I've shipped software in about five languages over my career and have never again come anywhere close to as productive as I was during that time using Smalltalk. Ironically, the work environment at that time was perhaps the worst of my career but Smalltalk just makes it so darn easy to cra…

If it’s so great, why isn’t it used in industry? Cranking out functionality is what everyone wants. As someone who has never seen or used it, I always hear about how all these languages are inspired by smalltalk but just don’t get it right or whatever. Why doesn’t somebody do a straight up port of it if it’s that great?

I think people who say other languages "just don't get it right" are living in a fantasy world. At the end of the day, Smalltalk is a pretty extreme language. The insistence that, e.g., every integer value is an object that can be sent messages, or that every code block is an object, or that every code block can introspect its caller, all lead to a pretty extreme amount of flexibility but an inability to write efficient code or do much optimization.

At the end of the day, languages that were less extreme won the popularity contest. Ruby and Python, for example, are just more accessible and full-featured.

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