Humans: Why They Triumphed
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
"The rate of cultural and economic progress depends on the rate at which ideas are having sex", "In the modern world, innovation is a collective enterprise that relies on exchange" and other similar phrases and sentences permeate the article.
Are we lobotomizing current culture, or merely freezing it in place with patents, copyrights and other "intellectual property" conceptions?
You don't have to be able to use an invention commercially to learn from it, combine it with other ideas, improve on it, invent around it.
Rather, patents probably impedes the progress of industries as varied as steam engines and software.
There is at least two economists in the world who dispute patents and copyright having place in the natural order of the free market:
Examine the evidence and decide for yourself:
It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is not like ordinary property at all, but constitutes a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not neccesary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty. -- Against Intellectual Monopoly
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...
The book is free to read online, but you can also get yourself a dead tree version of the book if you like.
Through theory and example people have also shown that virtually unregulated capitalism produces the "most prosperous" results. They have done this for Marxism as well.
Properly applied patents and intellectual property protection can aid the rate of innovation and progress.
Now, has it ever been properly applied in this world? Can it ever be applied correctly in this world? How hard is it to apply it properly in this world if it can be applied?
I would argue that the drug development has generally had properly applied patents. Drug prices suck. That poor countries cannot get adequate medical drugs sucks. However that is an entirely different kind of pain than the drugs not existing yet.
It is likely not that hard to apply properly. I think we just don't like how it feels. It reminds me of free speech. We gain so much good from it -- but we also have the Hannity, Beck, Jenny McCarthy types too.
It's trade secrets that enforce celibacy.
Lots of things that do get patented could easily be reverse-engineered were they not published.
You don't have to be able to use an invention
commercially to learn from it, combine it with
other ideas, improve on it, invent around it.
* I thought of a candidate. I was once told that there was insider knowledge involved in the production of the glass that goes into true glass eyes, held by a community of glassblowers in a town in eastern germany, and that this is key to being able to get the glass dynamic enough to do things like make the veins look right.
I have a different take on it. Patents, copyrights, and intellectual property increases the rate of new technology because people are forced to be creative (companies have to put R&D into something new and different that isn't already protected).
If Google could just copy the iPhone, do you think we would have ever seen anything like the new Android phones?
Open source is another example of this phenomenon. How many Linux distros do we have out there that are just copies of the same thing? Even look at apps like VNC. I've seen so many companies just use VNC as a base for their remote viewing app rather than engineer something new. This results in the same bugs, slowness, and overall bad technology rather than a fresh, new approach.
Everyone complains about Mysql, yet nobody really has an incentive to create something to replace it (because it's easier to just use it).
It might be more economically efficient to put effort into old technologies rather than trying to come up with novel technologies that does the same thing a little bit better. Sorta like how Linux was able to run on anything and everything.
Google chrome, Firefox, and other browsers do not seem to suffer from too much duplications even though they are open source.
We also aren't seeing much development of innovative new browsers (even though we may not need a new browser), aside from the recent chrome browser.
The fact that Internet Explorer is closed source created the need for something new (Firefox). Once all of the browsers are open, it will leave even less of an incentive for a new one to be created. Which might be fine, but browser innovation will stagnate. I hate to see a world where all software was like this.
Even Linux was created as an open alternative to closed, proprietary, Unices of the day. Would you even bother creating your own operating system now? Most people would just take the Linux kernel and branch out from there.
This same principal can also be applied to development jobs. At some point, most businesses won't require engineers any longer (high paying, intelligent software developers) because the difficult parts have already been created, refined, and given out for free. Instead, a code mechanic (low paying, less education) will be all most businesses need. In essence, open source developers are putting themselves out of a future job.
I suppose this is what eventually happens to all industries.
The example of the Tasmanians, who were forced to invent their own stuff not only did not progress technologically, they went backward.
So the article supports the idea that if google could just copy the iPhone and add something we would have progress. But if they just re-invent it badly we have regression.
As for Linux distos, I would argue that they have out innovated windows in many ways, such as 'apt-get', and knoppix.
There are many efforts to replace MySQL, such as CouchDB, Cassandra and MongoDB. Besides MySQL actually works pretty well, its just that SQL apologists try to pretend that other SQL database are significantly different.
Why would we want them to re-invent it badly? I want something completely different. If they just copied the iPhone and added a few things, it might be slightly innovative, but not nearly as much as it could be.
It also wouldn't be regression because all of our existing technology wouldn't suddenly degrade.
It's nice to find a something positive among the gloom and doom of human development (wars, plagues, famines, climate change, terrorism).
so just the fact that humans now dominate the planet is by itself something positive, despite wars, plagues, famines, climate change, terrorism, being stuck in a career you hate, burning to death in a fire, the unending history of exploitative labor practices, etc., ...?
Indeed, I wonder what's all the hoohas about mass extinction if humans are able to survive it? Moreover, engineer and synthesize biological lifeforms and replicators.
i suppose being the product of an evolutionary process it's not surprising we have this mentality.
For extra bonus points, figure out how to actually answer the question without reference to the utility of the biosphere to humans. (Which includes the classic "But plants and animals being driven extinct might have the cure for cancer!" which manages to be simultaneously ignorant of how modern drug research is done and how evolution works.) For double-bonus-points, explain why your answer doesn't imply that all tool users anywhere in the universe should immediately commit suicide. (For quadruple bonus points, explain why every other tool user did come to this conclusion and how this solves the Fermi paradox. But I digress...)
Once you get past the fuzzy-wuzzy "I wuv pwanet Earth!" indoctrination, it turns out to be a surprisingly challenging question. I'm not saying you won't find an answer. But actually taking the time to work it out and encode it into actual words based on actual arguments can be very educational. (And you may be surprised. A lot of otherwise popular axiomatic ethical choices lead to not having a reason to care as long as humans aren't impacted too badly. I'm not endorsing this, just observing that there's a lot of ethical hypocrisy in this area.)
(Actually defining justice in a way that covers all life forms is also a rather interesting question to ponder for a while; given the diversity of "life", such as the classic "virus" conundrum, it becomes hard to avoid including non-life in the definition as well. And what do you do with an ethical system that has an opinion about a black hole destroying a star, whatever that opinion may be?)
That said, fully expanding your point would probably blow out the HN comment limit; you could probably get a medium-large essay out of it. But I would be sort of curious if you could sketch out a bit more. I'm actually not interested in attacking it, because I'm not actually trying to push a viewpoint on the question today; the goal of my first paragraph is to more thoroughly explain my confusion about your statement than criticize something too short for me to even understand.
As to rational agents etc., let us say that we are rational when we are behind the veil, but we may end up as any kind of life form.
Rawls' theory doesn't necessarily follow from his original position, IMO. Rawls seemed to prefer quite a conservative, fearful, optimizing for the worst kind of case, but I don't think that's the only way to look at it. I don't buy too deeply into the Second Principle in Theory of Justice. But the Original Position, as a thought experiment, has a lot to say for it, particularly because it resolves problems inherent in the golden rule (e.g. a masochist becomes a sadist).
I do think though, that if you're to get to some concept of fairness as it relates to animals etc., that you have to get out of anthropocentrism.
this thread began with the answer to that question:
"wars, plagues, famines, climate change, terrorism, being stuck in a career you hate, burning to death in a fire, the unending history of exploitative labor practices, etc., ..."
human survival is illegitimate in and of it self, without concern for the ecology we displace. (there is tremendous suffering in the animal world, and i think it would be fantastic if we could turn that off)
> For double-bonus-points, explain why your answer doesn't imply that all tool users anywhere in the universe should immediately commit suicide.
feel free to read through my comment history. that's exactly what i advocate. i am not opposed to extinction - i'm opposed to surviving and struggling, because of the inevitability of suffering.
One problem is that if we head down a path, where we destroy all else, we have no option of changing our minds later if we do the wrong thing, or we find out that we do actually need other animals/plants.
The bigger issue might be that we don't need to keel everything in order to survive and grow. Right now we are doing things the completely wrong way. We clearly do not put a high enough value on our natural environment, and we have little studies of the long term effects of living in our modern world. A lot of problems like asthma may be exascerbated by the world we live in. We just don't know.
Although recently I came across a brilliant cellular biologist called Bruce Lipton who offers some great insights into human evolution and environment (with a little quantum physics sprinkled in), check him out if you're interested.
Thanks, Matt.
Evidence also points towards the cro-mangon ability (vs neanderthal) to predict their environment. Specifically the ability to use the cycles of the moon to predict patterns of large game and organize group hunts allowed the cro-magnon to out-resource their Neanderthal peers. Prediction allowed for expanded social ability - not just tooling - which has a different notion of cognitive capability. One interesting article on the topic: http://www.bionomics-institute.org/text/resource/articles/ar...
That's not the thesis. The thesis is that humans flourished because they started trading, which led to innovations and also allowed people to tap into the "collective intelligence" of other groups.
For Galileo, Columbus, J.Bruno, Einstein, and others, it wasn't about nice intellectual discources with their contemporaries about great ideas - it was a struggle for their ideas to survive, though they themselves might perish in it. Although they were right, as we all know for sure now.
"If it's really a good idea, you'd have to hammer it down people's throat" -- Ken Iverson, the inventor of APL (The quote might not be exact, but the idea is ;)
-Mark Zuckerberg in today's WP article. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05...
The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (Hardcover)
http://www.amazon.com/000-Year-Explosion-Civilization-Accele...
Hardly a triumph.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/science/07neanderthal.html...
Most interestingly, it is convincingly argued that Neanderthal genetic contributions explain a sudden and profound explosion in technological sophistication of European and Asian cultures. It is very possible that modern humanity is defined by its Neanderthal genes.
Convincingly argued? Not really. The Neanderthal's genetic imprint on "modern" Europeans and Asians is very limited, and is stated as such in the NYT article you cite. From what we've mapped so far, the DNA man retained from the Neanderthal is superfluous. There is also no anthropological evidence it gave Europeans or Asians any advantage.
Also, wouldn't the distinct lack of Neanderthal-like qualities in modern Europeans and Asians be a strong indication that Neanderthal genetic traits were not very advantageous? If they were the "secret sauce" of the West and the East, one would assume their traits would manifest themselves in locations other than the "junk" portion of our genome.
globalization? If you want to further the notion that ideas should have sex with each other, then you want to break down power hierarchies (state, country, global unions) that prevent freedom.
globalization is centralized control whereas internet is decentralized. I wouldn't couple these two things.
The Eloi were not very self-sufficient and had everything they wanted. I'll gladly incur some poverty to escape an Eloi existence.