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Patrick Collison's Questions

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Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#281

Post by dredmorbius »

bhupy wrote: post #279
dredmorbius wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When recently the mechanized industries, particularly in metal, entered the housing field with the production of “prefabricated houses”, they were met by the resistance of property holders, especially of the banks, who hold mortgages on about 58 percent of all 1933 value of all urban real estate, and who fear that an influx of cheap modern dwellings would subtract substantially from the market value of existing struc…

> "Markets" in this case eat themselves. Being able to pass local regulations is a perversion of the term "markets". By that logic, the entire world is a free market, even those countries where national governments have been "captured" to suffocate markets like Cuba and North Korea. Either that, or we need to then come up with a term to describe "property rights free of any regulation". One of my links even describes…

Denying reality carries costs.

Smith's opus is often read as a critique of Communism. That's anachronistic: Das Capital was a critique of Smith, or at least what emerged in his name.

Smith was a critique not only of mercantilism, as is commonly acknowledged, but what we would now call capture and monopoly.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#282

Post by bhupy »

dredmorbius wrote: post #281
bhupy wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Markets" in this case eat themselves. Being able to pass local regulations is a perversion of the term "markets". By that logic, the entire world is a free market, even those countries where national governments have been "captured" to suffocate markets like Cuba and North Korea. Either that, or we need to then come up with a term to describe "property rights free of any regulation". One of my links even describes…

Denying reality carries costs. Smith's opus is often read as a critique of Communism. That's anachronistic: Das Capital was a critique of Smith, or at least what emerged in his name. Smith was a critique not only of mercantilism, as is commonly acknowledged, but what we would now call capture and monopoly.

And Locke had a proviso: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockean_proviso

In any case — it's a huge stretch to suggest that allowing other property owners to dictate what you can and can't build on your own property constitutes "property rights".

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#283

Post by gwern »

082349872349872 wrote: post #196
bschne wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> helping students specifically when they are stuck and need more personalized help. This is where most learning resources fall short of ideal - if you work on a problem without human guidance, you can often either work through it in whole and learn, or check out the solution if you get stuck, have a short "ah, of course!" moment and not learn much at all. A tutor can sort of "debug" through questions and targeted hi…

I learned basic algebra from an analog learning medium (a "choose your own adventure" style book) that attempted to diagnose and address misunderstandings and gaps.

That's called "programmed learning": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#284

Post by dredmorbius »

bhupy wrote: post #282
dredmorbius wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Denying reality carries costs. Smith's opus is often read as a critique of Communism. That's anachronistic: Das Capital was a critique of Smith, or at least what emerged in his name. Smith was a critique not only of mercantilism, as is commonly acknowledged, but what we would now call capture and monopoly.

And Locke had a proviso: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockean_proviso In any case — it's a huge stretch to suggest that allowing other property owners to dictate what you can and can't build on your own property constitutes "property rights".

No rights are absolute, and most uss of land carry some externality. I'm not willing to entertain that no consideration be given these.

That's also spectacularly missing the main point that price-inelastic goods and services (those affording economic rents) increase in price where supply can be constrained by some means, setting up an intrinsic and wholly market-consistent dynamic of increasing prices and decreasing supply relative to demand.

The same dynamic is present for most of the price-inflated goods on Collison's list, and goes a long way to explaining the behaviour he ponders.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#285

Post by bhupy »

dredmorbius wrote: post #284
bhupy wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Locke had a proviso: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockean_proviso In any case — it's a huge stretch to suggest that allowing other property owners to dictate what you can and can't build on your own property constitutes "property rights".

No rights are absolute, and most uss of land carry some externality. I'm not willing to entertain that no consideration be given these. That's also spectacularly missing the main point that price-inelastic goods and services (those affording economic rents) increase in price where supply can be constrained by some means, setting up an intrinsic and wholly market-consistent dynamic of increasing prices and decreasing…

> No rights are absolute, and most uss of land carry some externality. I'm not willing to entertain that no consideration be given these.

This is a bit of a deflection, since it’s entirely reasonable to enforce some property regulations based around reducing externalities (eg. you can’t construct a building that will collapse onto the sidewalk and injure/kill a passerby), while preserving general property rights. The US’s speech rights are pretty close to absolute, with some notable exceptions (imminent lawless action). The argument is to get our property rights to look the same.

> That’s also spectacularly missing the main point that price-inelastic goods and services (those affording economic rents) increase in price where supply can be constrained by some means

Nobody denies this, and it is entirely orthogonal to the question at hand: “does zoning regulation constitute a market-based regime?”. The answer to that question is, resoundingly “No”. If you think that this is “the market” at work, then we need to come up with a new term to describe “system that allows free enterprise, property, and trade free from regulation”. Whatever term we agree upon: that’s what we’re pushing for.

It is also historical revisionism to suggest that zoning regulation came about strictly to extract rents. While that’s the case today, the origins of zoning are rooted in racism: https://www.asu.edu/courses/aph294/total-readings/silver%20-...

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#286

Post by wenc »

ta1234567890 wrote: post #280
wenc wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have another hypothesis. Japan is a nation of craftsmen. As such, Japan excels at enterprises involving the manipulation of physical objects, like producing cars, cameras, knives, industrial equipment, computer hardware, etc. If you've ever been to Japan, you'd notice that it is a nation where physical objects/systems are very much prized. On the flip side, Japan doesn't seem to do as well with abstract objects. I'…

Video games is a pretty big counter example to that hypothesis. Japan has been a huge leader and pioneer in that industry, which is all software + art. Another counter example is robotics, which is software + hardware.

I don't know about robotics (still pretty physical, and robot software is very bespoke and specialized).

But video games definitely defeats my hypothesis, as well as anime/manga.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#287

Post by 082349872349872 »

gwern wrote: post #283
082349872349872 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned basic algebra from an analog learning medium (a "choose your own adventure" style book) that attempted to diagnose and address misunderstandings and gaps.

That's called "programmed learning": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning

Sounds somewhat familiar, but the difference to programmed learning (at least as discussed in that article) is that the book contained error paths as well as the happy path.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#288

Post by jodrellblank »

paxys wrote: post #144
hyperpallium2 wrote: post #136

Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it? "the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class"[1] As a tutor, my goal was to identify gaps and misunderstandings. Consider: how can you give a driver helpful directions if you don't know where they are? As a student, I noticed that teachers are routinely ambiguous in ways they cannot understand. And mostly, these…

I remember Salman Khan (of Khan Academy) talking about this a few years ago. He believed that the current accepted method of teaching - students attending lectures and sitting in classrooms getting knowledge from teachers, then later doing homework alone trying to apply it - needs to be inverted. Lectures, presentations, textbooks can all be online and automated. Teaching resources, limited as they are, are much bett…

Most online forums have an "RTFM" or FAQ approach to beginners. Reddit's LearnPython sub has a ton of "explain OOP/Recursion/debug my beginner code/restart game/etc." style questions, and while there is a FAQ, it's not enforced very hard. Almost the opposite of StackOverflow.

As a result, there are a huge number of people learning themselves by explaining to other people, practising by solving other people's problems, and answering the beginner questions over and over.

I think things like that have got to be part of the future of learning online, instead of dumping what you know into a FAQ and pulling the ladder up after you, closing the community from outsiders.

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