Questions
patrickcollison.com
Questions
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Re: Questions
#2Tangentially related, for the chart related to american gdp embedded in this article, even though it claims to be on a logarithmic scale, that doesn't mean it doesn't have some sort of "banking to 45" applied.
http://vis.stanford.edu/papers/banking
Paradoxically (to me at times, perhaps to you) banking to 45 is supposed to make the chart more accurately read. It does so by more apparent to the viewer where the relevant inflection points are (in this case, the great depression really sticks out visually).
Theoretically, the great depression might not stick out as well if banking to 45 were not done (as I suspect may have been done here).
Whether or not it turns out to be the case here, I suppose lots of the other curious questions in the article have similar answers. When dealing with qualitative measures using qualitative measures, I think even ethical people can forge a system where emergent fudging arises.
I think we (the tech folk) need to sort of up our game in casual analysis from tools like excel (which in actuality relatively good) to something like www.anylogic.com. With systems dynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics software I think we have a tool that can better elucidate this curious phenomenon where we notice questions whose data "feels a little funny" but may turn out to actually have a demonstrable excuse/justifiable explanation for looking so.
Re: Questions
#3Why are programming environments primitive? That’s worth a blog post-length reply, but I think it’s because coding is relatively silo’d and non-standardized (in languages, build systems, deployment schemes, and other tools). The impact of a single better tool is minimal because it could only address a tiny fraction of all developers. This is changing quickly, though, so I’m optimistic.
We are working on making programming environments less primitive. Here is our master plan: https://about.sourcegraph.com/plan/.
Re: Questions
#4Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how?
How about adding some sort of block based scripting language line Scratch or Snap. Make it more approachable and encourage experimentation
Re: Questions
#5"Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?"
Because relative prices (e.g. the ratio of the price of a 42" TV to the price of a cinema ticket) are constantly changing due to changes in technology and competitive dynamics.
Some things have gotten (and continue to get) much cheaper due to technological progress and economies of scale. So, relative to those, anything that hasn't benefited from the same trends looks like it's getting expensive (in real terms). And if that thing (e.g. undergraduate degrees in the US) has weird competitive dynamics (e.g. willingness to pay is driven by the availability of credit, and availability of credit is driven by sticker price, and sticker price is driven by willingness to pay), then that effect is even more pronounced.
Re: Questions
#6> While a lot happened in the US during World War II, it's easy to forget how short the period in question was: American involvement lasted 3 years 8 months and 23 days.
How does this stack up against US involvement in other"good" wars, where the foe is the unambiguously bad?
I.e not a Vietnam style ideologically motivated confrontation.
Re: Questions
#7> Why can't I connect my editor to a running program and hover over values to see what they last were? Why isn't time-traveling debugging widely deployed? Why can't I debug a function without restarting my program? Why in the name of the good lord are REPLs still textual? Why can't I copy a URL to my editor to enable real-time collaboration with someone else? Why isn't my editor integrated with the terminal? Why doesn't autocomplete help me based on the adjacent problems others have solved?
I think all of these are possible already in VSCode/Atom, and especially true if you’re doing reactive UI programming for the web - time travelling, improved REPL, live debugging are all there. A very good spot to be in :)
Re: Questions
#8> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved?
> Books are great (unless you're Socrates). We now have magic ink. As an artifact for effecting the transmission of knowledge (rather than a source of entertainment), how can the book be improved? How can we help authors understand how well their work is doing in practice? (Which parts are readers confused by or stumbling over or skipping?) How can we follow shared annotations by the people we admire? Being limited in our years on the earth, how can we incentivize brevity? Is there any way to facilitate user-suggested improvements?
The great thing about books is that no matter how long they've been sitting around, it's easy to take one off the shelf and read it. The cultural infrastructure of written language has been around much longer (and been much more stable) than the computational infrastructure you'd need have your "magic ink" still work in 1000 years. At some point we need to start treating computers and software more seriously if we want to have things like this.
Re: Questions
#9> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?
This is something I noticed too. And it can't be just blamed to "inflation" of the US GDP. Almost any other country I checked does have fluctuations. Goes through booms and bust. China has gone through an exponential rise but slowed down and seems like it broke the pattern recently.
The US is the only country so far that has been going decades through a constant rate of change. And you can't blame that on inflation since inflation is neither constant; or it would mean that the GDP is constant (and inflation is increasing it). The GDP being constant would be weird too.
So is the US the singularity? Is the US dollar affecting the US GDP; and does it being the reserve currency of the world changes the landscape of the US economy?
Re: Questions
#10> But how do we get a sufficient replacement rate in systems and institutions that aren't naturally subject to extinction processes?
I think he s talking about boomers