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Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

cjohnson.io

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Re: Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

#121

Post by marincounty »

ajsharp wrote: post #67

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…

I don't want to start a east coast vs. west coast feud over how rich boys spend their money, but there's a difference. I can spot an east coast transplant, even after they lose the accent--and they think, and spend their money differently too. There are always exceptions, but in my world East coast men are more competitive, less empathetic, and have taken more money out of my pocket than west coast men. Yes--I'm stereotyping, but in my world I try to avoid doing business with people who grew up in highly populated areas of the east coast. It's harder to make money on the east coast. I couldn't imagine trying to compete in New York. I'll get beat up over this post, "down voted", whatever--I've just noticed real differences in people between the two coasts. I'm tired of being so polite--oops I did it again.

Re: Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

#122

Post by [deleted] »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #58
rayiner wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see where we disagree. Bringing a product to market isn't innovation in the way developing something new is. You can't bring products to market using technogies that don't exist, and history has shown that monopolies are a fertile ground for developing such technologies. Your Microsoft example is consistent with the ones I presented, so is Intel. Intel heavily relies on trade secrets to ensure that its compet…

> Bringing a product to market isn't innovation in the way developing something new is. I think this is where we disagree. I view the technology of production as equally (but not more) important to the success of a new product -- where success means, "in the hands of as many people as possible". I have a poor view of the importance (and therefore value) of inventions that never reach their markets. Dean Kamen is a gr…

[deleted]

Re: Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

#124

Post by rayiner »

tstactplsignore wrote: post #64
rayiner wrote: post #35

The idea that the Pareto-optimal situation is the one where everyone freely copies from each other may be appropriate for the market Tesla finds itself in, but is in general directly contradicted by the actual experience of the technology industry. The experience of the technology industry is that innovation happens in periods of monopoly. That monopoly might arise from first-mover effects, network effects, lock-in e…

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…

> The Internet; The Web; Firefox, WebKit; GNU/Linux, Unix; HTTP; SSH, SSL, AES; Python, Ruby, C, C++.

The internet came from the ultimate monopoly: the government. It was a government project developed by government contractors. Unix and C were invented at Bell Labs when AT&T was a government sanctioned monopoly. AES was developed while the authors were at an university research lab. Stroustrup started C++ in his PhD work, and did much of its early development at Bell Labs pre-breakup. HTTP and WWW were developed at CERN, a government research lab, as was the first webserver.

Its odd to use Python and Ruby as examples of the bazaar. They were developed by Matz and GVR, tackling the fundamental design decisions, before they were released to the community.

Development doesn't mean innovation, though its important too. There is innovation in open source, sure, but making another OO scripting language isn't as innovative as inventing Smalltalk in the first place (which was done at PARC when Xerox had 100% of the US copier market thanks to its patents).

Re: Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

#125

Post by Symmetry »

hibikir wrote: post #41

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…

We don't have any particular reason to think that trust is high among corporate executives though.

Re: Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

#126

Post by jsweojtj »

cdash wrote: post #119
adventured wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Im not sure you can take a single thing, the patent system, which also exists in many other countries, and then apply that as the reason for the US to be a bastion of innovation for 200 years. How do you even know that the US has not been innovative despite the patent system. That if the patent system did not exist, it would have progressed even further than it has.

Adventured was saying that the US is a counterexample to the proposed statement that meant non-restrictive or non existent patent systems will be bastions of innovation.

In no way was Adventured arguing that because of the patent system, the US became a bastion of innovation.

Re: Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

#127

Post by Symmetry »

robbrown451 wrote: post #70
yomritoyj wrote: post #66

The author is seriously mistaken about game theory. The Nash Equilibrium requires every player to be maximizing their payoffs given what the other players are doing. But game theory itself does not say what the nature of the payoffs are: there is no problem in modelling altruistic players who attach a high payoff to outcomes which are good for everyone and low payoffs to outcomes which benefit only themselves. The Pa…

I think when you allow for altruistic players, the core insights you get from game theory tend to vanish. I think the author had that part mostly right, actually.

In the case of a perfectly selfless person playing with a selfish person yes, that is a place where game theory ceases to be useful. But real altruists are imperfect, and have somewhat different notions of utility and planning horizons. Some games cease to be interesting but others turn from pure conflict to interesting games.

In fact, most of the examples I remember from The Strategy of Conflict are among groups that generally mutually altruistic, like parent and child or soldiers fighting on the same side in a war.

Of course, games played among roughly altruistic players tend to have much better outcomes...

Re: Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

#128

Post by Dylan16807 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #102
fulafel wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, it's possible that the various proxy wars that have been fought since WWII have killed more people than a hypothetical knock-down, drag-out WWIII would have. But the point stands, you can argue both ways.

>it's possible that the various proxy wars that have been fought since WWII have killed more people than a hypothetical knock-down, drag-out WWIII would have

Mmm, no, I'm pretty sure that's not possible. It would be possible to have some kind of super-low-casualty 'world war' with fewer deaths than those, but not a knock-down, drag out world war.

Re: Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

#129

Post by grey-area »

rayiner wrote: post #124
tstactplsignore wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The Internet; The Web; Firefox, WebKit; GNU/Linux, Unix; HTTP; SSH, SSL, AES; Python, Ruby, C, C++. The internet came from the ultimate monopoly: the government. It was a government project developed by government contractors. Unix and C were invented at Bell Labs when AT&T was a government sanctioned monopoly. AES was developed while the authors were at an university research lab. Stroustrup started C++ in his PhD…

So far you've included university research (Google), large public companies (Xerox), state-sanctioned monopolies (Bell), companies taking advantage of network effects (Facebook), startups (Google's big innovation was in search before the company was born), and anything funded by governments in your definition of a monopoly.

If you define monopoly in such a broad way it's really not surprising that most innovation happens there, because your definition encompasses most of human endeavour.

Re: Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

#130

Post by couchand »

jsweojtj wrote: post #126
cdash wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not sure you can take a single thing, the patent system, which also exists in many other countries, and then apply that as the reason for the US to be a bastion of innovation for 200 years. How do you even know that the US has not been innovative despite the patent system. That if the patent system did not exist, it would have progressed even further than it has.

Adventured was saying that the US is a counterexample to the proposed statement that meant non-restrictive or non existent patent systems will be bastions of innovation. In no way was Adventured arguing that because of the patent system, the US became a bastion of innovation.

The problem with that reply is that it's denying the antecedent. The original point was regarding a hypothetical country that jettisons its patent architecture, or never evolved a restrictive one to begin with. Using the US as a counterexample is arguing a different question.

As the original comment pointed out, the US has been successful, but it could be for many confounding reasons.

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