Ideas Having Sex
reason.com
reason.com
The structure and basic mechanism of action of penicillin was determined in 1945, not that much later than its 1928(ish) discovery and certainly not "the time bacteria learned to defeat it".
I don't even know what to make of the comment that machines in early industrial england "would not have surprised Archimedes".
The sole source to support the claim about nonexistent connections between science spending and innovation appears to be an OECD study, which I would very much like to see.
Hero of Alexandria worked (as the name suggests) in a hub of technological development, published extensively, and was cited by many influential arabic texts.
Dude, come on.
Not true. There were stronger optimists than the people discussed, such as William Godwin. He did not think progress had diminishing returns. And he wrote a book refuting Malthus's pessimistic views on overpopulation!
(BTW, interesting story, Godwin thought Malthus' pessimism was sufficiently dumb that it didn't need a reply -- people would see it was false without help. He only replied later after Malthus started to gain substantial influence. By then, it turns out, he was too late.)
One interesting question posed was whether Ridley believed in Ray Kurzweil's singularity theory. He responded that he believed futurists are looking at the wrong area of technology as the center of advancement in the next 50 to 100 years. Just as futurists from previous eras predicted huge advancements in transportation (like flying cars), because transportation happened to be booming at the time, current futurists focus too much on communication, and assume it will continue to advance at the same rate. He predicts that advancement in communication will slow down in the future, to be replaced by another area, such as, for example, biotech.
Then he may understand generalized futurism, but he doesn't understand Singularity theory. They're the ones going on about brain uploading and nanotechnology, not saying we'll have nicer cell phones in the future. Predicting that the future will be the result of current trends just played out a bit larger is not a problem Singularity theory has, as the entire argument is exactly the opposite.
If that's true, it makes a pretty strong case for open source.
If the goal is to make as much money as possible, probably not (well, a faster rate of innovation would probably increase the total productivity of society more rapidly, but the people personally involved with open-source might be making less).
I've been paid a fair amount of money to write software that I could have created just as easily in a tenth of the time with off-the-shelf FOSS software, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that. Did I make money? Yes. But I could have made just as much money, and accomplished 10 times as much if my hands hadn't been tied by proprietary preferences. (And just for the record I'm talking about entrenched legacy stuff that's still in use, not any big modern names.)
FOSS shrinks markets, but it doesn't make work less valuable. If anything it makes work more valuable.
As I said, the overall productivity of society would definitely go up.
I've only looked at the URL so far, but George Monbiot accusing anyone else's ideas of being suspect because they're coloured by political dogma is like a kettle being called black by a galactic-core sized black hole. Painted black. At night.
Yes, I realise I'm relying on ad hominem to dismiss someone else's ad hominem review here (I finally looked at the article, he starts off by complaining about Northern Rock, I haven't read on...), but I'm gonna assume that if Monbiot's points have any validity they'll eventually appear in a review by a less far-out reviewer.
Diminishing returns says that as you increase a factor of production the output relative to tha increase becomes smaller. In other worse return per unit investment gets smaller with each increase becomes smaller. In other worse return per unit investment gets smaller with each marginal investment. The author totally gets this concept wrong with the bowl of nuts analogy. If you are using one hand to look for pecans in a bowl of nuts and the pecans become harder to find over time, then this does not demonstrate diminishing returns because no factor of production was modified.
Umm, no. Ridley was a non-executive director. He accepts blame for its demise in the book. He wasn't an executive running the company, though as a director he certainly should have exercised more oversight.
If Ridley worries you so much, would you consider this former director of an effectively bankrupt financial institution to be a "dangerous maniac"? Unlike Ridley, he's now one of the most powerful men in the world:
Emanuel was named to the Board of Directors of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) by President Bill Clinton in 2000. His position earned him at least $320,000, including later stock sales.[31][32] He was not assigned to any of the board's working committees, and the Board met no more than six times per year.[32] During his time on the board, Freddie Mac was plagued with scandals involving campaign contributions and accounting irregularities.[32][33] The Obama Administration rejected a request under the Freedom of Information Act to review Freddie Mac board minutes and correspondence during Emanuel's time as a director.
The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) later accused the board of having "failed in its duty to follow up on matters brought to its attention." Emanuel resigned from the board in 2001 when he ran for Congress.
There is nothing polite or fact-based about that. You were just making a complaint that was neither relevant nor useful.
Also, I don't think there's anything wrong with concise, specific criticism about a submitted article if the intent is to help improve the quality of HN as a resource. YMMV.
Your misreading the title is no grounds for whining about link-baiting, and offering it as an excuse indicates you did not bother to actually read the article in any detail.
YMMV, but I don't see anything useful about "tl;dr: nobody has sex in article"-style remarks, no matter how you frame them. I want to see fewer of such, and I will continue to try to discourage them, but I will not further respond to you in this thread.
because I've heard/seen/thought the same thing many times before, and with similar patterns such as:
thoughts while drinking
problem-solving in the shower
etc.
This is why this is the only response you're getting from me on this thread, and why I always, always vote down any such valueless whinging about what some blogger titled eir post.