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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

#341

Post by felix_nagaand »

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…

Fortunately we have organizations like wikipedia, Libgen , and the web archive devoting themselves to preserving knowledge archaic, novel, fringe, and vital all alike.

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

#342

Post by poulsbohemian »

mcguire wrote: post #325
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…

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

Yes - you just shipped the whole image. At the time I was building desktop apps, but that made install super easy - you just dropped it onto the user's desktop. A guy a few cubes over was building server apps and that was equally easy - a self-contained deal with the vm, all the dependencies, etc that just needed to be dropped into /opt or wherever and was ready to run.

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

#343

Post by poulsbohemian »

drb91 wrote: post #331
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?

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 reas…

I'd generally agree with what you are saying... it was the tooling more than the language itself. That said, there was something to be said for the absolute simplicity of the language. With everything being an object that receives messages and the minimal syntax, you could teach people very quickly.

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

#344

Post by andrei_says_ »

aalleavitch wrote: post #2

We’re dumb in comparison to the systems we’ve created. Increasingly, the disparity between what our technology is capable of and our own limitations as animals will become a pressing issue. One thing that always bothers me is how we have this myth of personal responsibility that supposes an individual is equipped to defend their own interests against a multinational corporation on their own. “Well I just don’t get wh…

Placing refugee children as young as one in front of immigration courts, in seriousness, speaks volumes to this.

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

#345

Post by dang »

User23 wrote: post #68
sandworm101 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also means laws/regulations to just plain ban harmful behaviors. Collectivization to alter market forces cannot fix everything. Some things need to just stop. Selling CFCs needs to stop. That won't happen by naming and shaming involved companies. It won't happen by people gathering on facebook to organize a boycott. It happens by people in uniforms enforcing the law, with violence when necessary. Sometimes that is…

Thank you for this lucid description of the authoritarian position.

Would you please not post ideological battle comments to HN? They're not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#346

Post by opo »

rebuilder wrote: post #270
opo wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found your comment insightful, but I have to ask about this: >...I spent 6 months in prison as a conscientous objector. Could you elaborate? Under what conditions does a conscientious objector face a lengthy prison term?

In Finland, as a male, refusal to perform military or civil service is a crime punishable by approximately 6 months of imprisonment. I understand that very recently that has been put on hold as a result of a legal challenge on the grounds that a certain religious minority is exempted from such service, the claim being that this constitutes inequal treatment.

I guess that is how being a conscientous objector worked in the US during the Viet Nam war - anyone declaring themselves a conscientous objector had to due some kind of public service or face jail time (probably more than 6 months).

In the US the draft just allowed the US government to continue the Viet Nam war far longer than it otherwise would have gone, I am glad we don't have an active draft here.

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

#347

Post by ctchocula »

azernik wrote: post #299
tynpeddler wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is, by the way, a problem I see with a lot of public policy - in a market system, what's good for companies is not necessarily what's good for the system . Steve Eisman puts this well in [1] when talking about why he's investing in bank stocks even though he thinks prospective rollbacks in Dodd-Frank reforms are a bad idea: "There's two issues. There's what I think about the financial system and what I think abo…

I liked the Steve Eisman character from The Big Short, but I was disappointed his prediction bank stocks would do well didn't play out.

  KBE:   44.49 Jan 30, 2017, 47.82 July 11, 2018 = 7.48% price growth (I couldn't find numbers for total return and too lazy to compute from distribution history)
  VFAIX: 20123 Jan 30, 2017, 23569 July 11, 2018 = 17.1% total return
  VFIAX: 22291 Jan 30, 2017, 27729 July 11, 2018 = 24.4% total return

  KBE:   SPDR Bank ETF
  VFAIX: Vanguard Financial Index
  VFIAX: Vanguard S&P 500

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

#348

Post by jacobr1 »

hinkley wrote: post #335
tynpeddler wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ide…

Cisco seems to do this well. And sometimes poorly. The screwed up on the consumer products space. But they regularly succeed with enterprise hardware solutions. If they can add something their global field team can sell and support, they succeed. The leverage of their sales pipelines exceed what the acquired business could do organically in any meaningful timeframe. They have a teams of entrepreneurs that have been acquired, then left to start something new again, and then been purchased more. I think the key thing is that there isn't a fundamental disconnect. Even blockbuster did well with aligned "bolt-on" acquisitions of regional chains during its growth phase.

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

#349

Post by emp »

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…

I believe the Squeak/Pharo VMs are much faster than the Python and Ruby interpreters. There are other tricks - an Int maybe be an object, but a special one that fits in a register. The part that other languages don’t get is it’s the Smalltalk environment that makes it special, and there is just nothing like it in our modern tooling.

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

#350

Post by backpropaganda »

jjoonathan wrote: post #243
HenryTheHorse wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Funny how when I replaced the big hyphenated word with the 4-letter name, it actually triggered an emotional response in me which made me dismiss the rest of your comment, even though I was fine with the comment without the substitution. Weird how human brains work.
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