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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

#331

Post by drb91 »

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?

There’s quite a few reasons, but I suspect the largest is lack of a corporate sponsor. People use what they know of, and few things have shipped with smalltalk.

And honestly, the language itself isn’t that remarkable by today’s standards; there’s so many dialects floating around most of the features have made their way into mainstream languages. It’s the tooling that I dream of. Sadly, it’s probably also another reason why it never took off: people couldn’t easily incrementally adopt it.

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

#332

Post by mcguire »

mjevans wrote: post #256
jknz wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Typically, voting results are highly skewed towards 50/50, say in most elections in democratic regimes with fair elections. This was the case for Brexit or the popular vote in the US 2016 election for instance. For an electi…

That's actually a strong argument for requiring a 'super majority' to decide any major decision.

Then no decision would be made, which is a decision.

When was the last time someone got a supermajority with more than a small number of voters?

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

#333

Post by mcguire »

gbacon wrote: post #73
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…

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

Ideally, the electorate.

In a small government scenario, who watches those providing services?

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

#334

Post by baddox »

mcguire wrote: post #332
mjevans wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually a strong argument for requiring a 'super majority' to decide any major decision.

Then no decision would be made, which is a decision. When was the last time someone got a supermajority with more than a small number of voters?

Presumably different referenda would be put to a vote if a supermajority were required, namely, ones that are less controversial.

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

#335

Post by hinkley »

tynpeddler wrote: post #271
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #134

An interesting bit from the article was that he talks about 'sunk cost' with the defining example of ordering a dessert when you're nearly full and feeling compelled to finish it. > There was an economist once early in my career who said to me, “You know, if you’re right, what am I supposed to do? What I know how to do is solve optimization problems.” A career economist not wanting to change their ways because they h…

Sometimes it's a mistake to think about how these companies could pivot to adapt to new technology. A major feature of capitalism is that companies are (relatively) unimportant and it's the market and society that really matter. Without companies collapsing, it can be really difficult to recycle the manpower and capital invested in obsolete business models. Blockbuster's organizational, legal and physical infrastruct…

I’ve been an employee in a buyout twice by a company that didn’t get it. One of those times they thought they did, but they still crushed us anyway. It was hard to watch. Especially from a front row seat. :/. I’ve worked at two places a year or two after the buyout. Not as real for me but my coworkers were clearly frustrated.

For a while I was pretty sure I knew what a healthy buyout should look like. Now I’ve no idea. How do people pull this off?

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

#336

Post by mcguire »

dv_dt wrote: post #72
jeffdavis wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Collective action has its own problem: power structures encourage corruption and misuse of the pooled power." Exactly. I tend to be wary of concentrating power. The larger the group the more likely that there are conflicts of interest within the group. Perhaps more importantly, large groups just don't make sense in a lot of cases. If I make a union of milk drinkers, we can buy in huge bulk and get a discount. But th…

But as a criticism against the already collected power of corporations and oligarchs that wariness just means individuals stay unfocused and weak vs concentrated and powerful interests. The broad correlation (and correlation isn't necessarily causation) is that as union power decreased, so did real wage growth.

Short version: power vacuums get filled.

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

#337

Post by thedailymail »

woah wrote: post #323
HenryTheHorse wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It makes me smile that his concept of immiseration has the valid alternative spelling: e-miseration

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

#338

Post by ranit »

skadamat wrote: post #223
copperx wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people have strong opinions about Alan Kay's CS / programming work I'm curious. I wasn't aware of this. What are these strong opinions about?

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

You made me curious. Do you have any links to the criticism you quote?

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

#339

Post by PinkMilkshake »

sirclueless wrote: post #330
woah wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 effici…

People unfamiliar with history live in a fantasy world.

Smalltalk or more specifically one of it's dialects, Self (an even more "extreme" Smalltalk), made huge advances in JIT compilation. Advances which later ended up in the Java HotSpot virtual machine. Some benchmarks hit half the performance of optimized C. That was in the late 90s.

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

#340

Post by Retra »

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?

Why don't you just use it, rather than waiting for the industry to adopt it and translate it for you? The industry doesn't adopt things because they are great. It adopts things because it has to.

In my little corner of the industry, we've adopted a big heap of things for entirely political reasons, and they're mostly crap in one way or another.

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