Hacker News Reader

Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I think researchers do not understand second-order effects of their pet theories.

The societal/market result of stuff like this will inevitably be something like "Let's crowdsource more of these creative activities, so we can drive down the already rock-bottom compensation rates of the few jobs that cannot be automated - this research says we're not going to lose anything on the quality side anyway". In the (laudable) quest to make amateurs respectable, they might well end up stripping even professionals of what little respectability they had accrued.

It's likely that democratization of creativity is a fundamentally unstoppable force in itself (like we've seen in photography, music, video etc); there is no need to hasten its rise though.

View on HN

In general, researchers don't try to understand second-order effects of their pet theories, because the consequences of the theories are not relevant to the theories being true or false - it's an "is-vs-ought" distinction.

This is an article that observes and describes aspects of how X influences Y. The question whether Y and its implications are good or bad is orthogonal to that; any discussion about whether Y should be hastened or slowed down would be simply offtopic. Discussion about which other factors would hasten or slow down this effect would be relevant though.

I'd go even beyond and argue that researchers should explicitly and intentionally avoid considering such "second-order effects". Let's assume that this research is true (perhaps it's not, I have no strong opinion on that) and, as you state, acknowledging that "this research says we're not going to lose anything on the quality side anyway" will cause some unwelcome consequences. In that case, what should we do about it? Should we avoid saying the truth because we don't like it? Should we lie and say "oh, we are going to lose on the quality side" because we don't like the second-order social effects of acknowledging the truth? I'd argue that allowing the social consequences (how things ought to be) to affect your view of reality (how tings are) is anathema to the concept of science, we should instead strive for objectivity even if (and especially if) we don't like what the looking glass is showing us.

See my other answer to the sibling comment.

If person A wants to get paid to do something and person B wants to do the same thing to a similar quality for free as a leisure activity, isn't it sort of expected that it will become hard for person A to make a living? Doesn't it make sense that to make a living they will have to either produce something far better than the amateur, or do the parts that amateurs don't want to do, or differentiate themselves in some other way?

It seems to me that it would be an odd society which didn't even allow people to ask questions about the relative merits of person A and person B's work, in case they found out something which would be disruptive to person A's business model.

Predicting second- and subsequent order effects accurately is basically impossible for any non-trivial issue.

Here I'd argue that the effect may instead be that professionals are able to figure out what the amateurs are doing differently and incorporate it into their discipline.

If you hold up the research trying to figure out which second-order effect is more likely, you'll never get any research done on anything of substance. (You see, the second order effect of your suggestion is an overall suppression of research. Damn, arguing from second-order effects sure is tempting!)

Suppression, no; but choosing priorities carries an element of ethical responsibility. You can choose to dedicate your time towards improving chemical weapons or towards improving harvest yields. Better chemical weapons will likely come about anyway, but why hasten their arrival?

Isn't that a first order effect though?

A second order effect would be researching a life-saving drug for a lifestyle condition. You research means people have less incentive to live healthily and end up dying even sooner from some other diet-related disease. The disease you cured would have scared them "straight" diet-wise.

This is nitpicking. Replace "improving chemical weapons" with "improving gases that will likely only be used in chemical weapons".

I'm curious about what you see as the end state.

What does this possible outcome mean for the people who are making games now?

What does it mean for the entrants?

Both short term and long term. How do you see this going?

I'm not him, but looking at the other markets this "democratisation of creativity" has happened in, it seems like we're going to get more of the patronage model where the professionals and better hobbyists can individually put their work up for subscribers with some free content as advertising.

I don't know how this will work with board games which have physical products that need creating and sending. It might be the right place for distributed "print shops" with card printers, 3D printers, and laser cutters to provide the actual game pieces.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com