101–110 of 212 posts
I enjoyed your post. I have a couple of thoughts / suggestions for you. I got the impression that the underlying motivation for writing the post, and tactic you used for justifying your positions was largely in response to what I would consider the overly myopic hacker news user base. That is, disproportionately white, male, curmudgeoney programmers. I sympathize with your frustration, but urge you not to let their w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I see nukes as more ethical than patents. You can make the argument that MAD-based nuclear deterrence has saved us (at least so far) from a third world war. Not everyone will agree, of course, but a strong case can be made. On the other hand, to defend patents, you have to show that there are things on the market that we can buy that would not have been made available to us if not for patent rights. Nobod…
A strong case can be made that the risk of nuclear war that we incurred is worse than a conventional ww3. Say we had a 1/2 risk of nuclear war and a probable cost of conventional war would be 1/10 of a nuclear ww3.
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I think you've cleverly bundled together a couple of meaningless correlations. Yes, there's a grab bag (but, in my opinion, not much more than that) of important technological innovations which have come from large companies, but so what? You still have corporations with large amounts of disposable cash for R&D in a world without monopolies and intellectual property. The handful of innovations you can mention don't r…
"majority of important software innovations have come from the open bazaar, not the cathedral. The Internet; The Web; Firefox, WebKit; GNU/Linux, Unix; HTTP; SSH, SSL, AES; Python, Ruby, C, C++." The vast majority of those were not developed by an open bazaar, but rather by focused cathedral organizations: the early Internet, UNIX, C, C++, SSH, Firefox, SSL. The bazaar maintains them or cloned the success of others (…
WebSphere is an app server rather than a straight http server. The equivalent to Apache/Nginx from IBM would be IBM HTTP Server, which is an extension of Apache.
This explains, at the very least, why rampant partisanship is an inevitability in a large Democracy, despite it being worse off for everybody (including politicians themselves). Instead of saying "in a large Democracy" it should say "in a large Democracy which uses plurality voting." Some voting systems (for instance Condorcet compatible ones) do not encourage partisanship in the same way as plurality does. In fact o…
But the second impression he gives is also very wrong. By definition, everyone is a "selfish dickhead" both in Nash equilibria interactions and pareto efficient interactions. This is a basic tenet of economy, that people "in the limit" act in their own self interest, never out of altruism. Why ? Simple : if anyone is systematically altruistic, he/she will be eliminated from the game (meaning end up dirt poor, imprisoned or dead or otherwise prevented from participating in the system). The predictions this makes are extremely accurate, and have been for millenia.
Always assume nobody is altruistic, ever, for any reason.
The real difference between nash equilibrium transactions and pareto efficient transactions is this :
nash equilibrium : A and B, both "selfish dickheads", transact. If A gets a good deal, B got screwed.
Pareto efficiency : A and B, both "selfish dickheads", transact. A and B got a good deal.
This is why the "always cooperate" strategy in the prisoner's dilemma game is not actually pareto efficient : it is obviously possible for the other guy to screw you. If it were a pareto efficient strategy, it wouldn't be possible to take advantage of this.
In capitalism, if there is a pareto-efficient strategy to transact, people following that tactic will quickly increase in numbers, and therefore the whole society will become pareto efficient. This happens BECAUSE everyone is a "selfish dickhead", not because some people are morally superior to others. That fact is why every economist is so impressed with capitalism. Capitalism is a system that can succeed, for everyone, in the presence of selfish dickheads. A centrally planned economy, by contrast, necessarily either destabilizes entirely (not good for anyone, unless you truly believe in anarchism), or turns into a Nash equilibrium over time.
Capitalism is a learning algorithm, or a "crowd-sourcing" algorithm with money as "karma" : it makes sure that resource allocations are decided by people who previously made good allocations. That is of course what people really have against capitalism :
1) "abusers"/"power mongers"/... : complain about capitalism because they can't keep abusing the system. If they use their resources to force certain outcomes that wouldn't normally be achieved (e.g. personal power), that can only work for so long.
2) moralists: complain about capitalism because it's amoral, like any learning algorithm. It does not care if any action improves or destroys other people, or which factors determine success, merely if it increases an abstract "value" concept. If they have resources (e.g. because you have an islamist state), it requires a constant large cost to force any non-optimal outcome (e.g. not letting women work). Needless to say this is perceived by the moralists as capitalism fighting allah (when of course it's really reality itself that's at odds with allah), and then they usually just grab the weapons.
If there ever was a "true" religion, it's trivial to see capitalism would quickly grow it, not work against it. "Surprisingly" this has not happened yet, one can only wonder why.
In large scale democracy partisanship is not necessity. American system has some specific methods to cause it, compared to Finland where it isn't really a problem. And its really these TWO issues that make the american politics more partisan than rest of the world.
A) Election system is strongly geared towards creating two party. When new party has gained enough support it replaces one of the previous two parties at the control, and there is new TWO parties which compete each other. Compare that to systems in which allows smaller parties to get seats. For examble in Finland there are 3-4 big parties that total 60-70% of seats and rest goes to smaller parties. That means to pass anything you pretty much have to have two big parties agreeing on the matter and either third big agreeing or some small parties agreeing.
B) Executive branch is Winner takes all. In Finland the parliament(legislative branch) selects Executive branch and because no party has half or near half seats there is need to be enough parties agreeing on the matter. So if you are REALLY uncompromising you NEVER get to be part of executive branch EVEN if you become the biggest party of elections, since you didn't get more than half the seats anyway in multiparty system. The biggest party gets first attempt to create the cabinet, but they still need to get enough others onboard. The cabinet pretty much needs majority of legislative branch to support it. They need a program which over half the legislative branch supports and usually give seats in the cabinet to enough other parties that have over 50% of parliament. If biggest party fails to create agreement of the program the responsibility of trying to form the cabinet goes to next largest party. And if all else fails parliament may agree a minority government OR even putting some professional bureaucrats instead of politicians in top positions of executive branch. Both are extremely rare situations in here.
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Two things: First, you might want to clarify in the first paragraph that you're talking about the existence of nukes, as opposed to the use of nukes. It's clear from reading your entire comment, but I find it's good to play it safe with that sort of topic! ;) Second, to play devil's advocate, is it possible that landmines could have a net positive impact if they could somehow be properly, globally regulated? For and…
How's this for "correctly?" http://www.defensivepatentlicense.com/ Kind of like copyleft- but for patents.
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Interestingly, this analogy works very much at the company level, but reverses at the country level. For companies, patents represent weapons in an arsenal, in which MAD prevents offensive action, as you've said. For countries, the reverse holds: a country that jettisons its patent architecture, or never evolved a restrictive one to begin with, will be a bastion for innovators. The stable equilibrium is no bad patent…
A nice hypothesis, do you have any examples that show this to be true? The realist in me bets that innovation has only a weak relationship to IP laws, and rather a strong relationship to a certain world-view that fosters innovation since childhood (go USA!)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly, this analogy works very much at the company level, but reverses at the country level. For companies, patents represent weapons in an arsenal, in which MAD prevents offensive action, as you've said. For countries, the reverse holds: a country that jettisons its patent architecture, or never evolved a restrictive one to begin with, will be a bastion for innovators. The stable equilibrium is no bad patent…
Can you list numerous countries that are examples of not having a restrictive patent system, and subsequently are bastions of innovation? The US economy has been an extreme bastion of innovation for 200 years, while also having a robust patent system (one that has only recently become particularly stifling). In fact I'd argue there has hardly been a greater bastion of innovation in world history than the US economy f…
This explains, at the very least, why rampant partisanship is an inevitability in a large Democracy, despite it being worse off for everybody (including politicians themselves). Instead of saying "in a large Democracy" it should say "in a large Democracy which uses plurality voting." Some voting systems (for instance Condorcet compatible ones) do not encourage partisanship in the same way as plurality does. In fact o…
> In fact other systems actually encourage cooperation and favor candidates that are more in the center. Actually, single-round winner-take-all democracy induces a race toward the middle, not polarization. (If everyone is aligned on a 1D spectrum and votes for the candidate closest to their position, then both candidates are incentivized move toward the median position.) What you're really getting at isn't the idea o…
Trust is not a binary decision, it is a continuum. And within that continuum, the US is way further to being a trusting society than not. When we sign a contract, we have an expectation that it will be fulfilled, and that if it isn't, the courts will work, albeit slowly. You get a job, and you tend to get paid. Go in a cab, not expect to get robbed, or murdered. If you hire an employee, you expect him to at least att…
I have no idea where you got this impression from. It is wrong, though. I did business in several southern Europe countries, and you can seal a deal with a handshake and be confident it'll go through.