Comment by zohebv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zohebv | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I mean this inclination doesn't imply anything about what economic policy should be

Isn't it disingenuous to infer that this inclination should not imply anything about economic policy? I would arrive at the opposite conclusion. Economics are sentiment driven by a huge factor. Robert Shiller's work in behavioral economics and his book Irrational exuberance has established and popularized this idea. Krugman's discussion of the unsuitability of BitCoin as a currency rests largely on the peculiar nature of human sentiment and behavior. Large income gaps are perceived by most people as unfair irrespective of the contributions by the wealthy. No one thinks that Bill Gates/ Edison made a greater contribution to social progress than Einstein/Gandhi. I don't think the association of the net worth of an individual to the contribution that they have made to society is very strong. Economies rewards people largely on the basis of demand/supply with I believe is a weak proxy for social contributions.

Perhaps you want to draw an analogy to say gay marriage where the popular vote might end up denying gay rights, but I don't think a similar argument holds in the case of wealth distribution.

> No one thinks that Bill Gates/ Edison made a greater contribution to social progress than Einstein/Gandhi.

Um, I do.

Likewise though only for Gandhi.

I should have said most people, rather than noone. Bill Gates helped make the PC cheap by building a hardware independent OS that commoditized hardware. Edison has a fairly colorful commercial history. But the PC/electricity revolution would have happened with or without these individuals, there were enough competitors. The same cannot be said about Einstein. When Einstein published the General Theory only 2 other people were able to understand it. Virtually, all peaceful civil disobedience protests that we see all over the world from American Civil rights to the Tunisian revolution follow a template set up by Gandhi. Peaceful civil resistance is an action that was never really thought of as practical/possible before. Bill Gates is making substantial social difference via vaccines now, but I would not count his work at Microsoft in the same league as Einstein/Gandhi.

You are severely overestimating Einstein and Gandhi. If you look at the history of general relativity* you notice that while Einstein was at the center he developed his theory with much help from others such as Hilbert and Levi-Civita. As for Gandhi, he himself was inspired by others such as the March 1st Movement in Korea; his greater fame could be perhaps linked more to the fact that India is huge. Not to take anything away from those two, except perhaps the world's almost deific portrayal of them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1st_Movement

I do know about Hilbert, however Einstein and Hilbert were in heavy correspondence in the preceding few months and Hilbert never claimed primacy over Einstein. My conclusion, after seeing many accounts appears to be that Einstein would have arrived at the equations irrespective of Hilbert's inputs but not vice-versa. "Hilbert's treatise was exceedingly involved, or indeed confused—according to Felix Klein."

Also it should be noted that Satyagraha and Gandhi's civil resistance predates the March 1st movement.

The physics community was already converging on the special theory of relativity when Einstein published it. All the signs were there --and had been for quite a while--, but someone needed to add 1 + 1 together and accept the implications. Einstein did that and his explication was very clear, making it immediately undeniable (which doesn't mean that it didn't take some time for people to acknowledge that). However, if he hadn't, one of dozens of others would have. The time was ripe and the evidence was clear.

  When Einstein published the General Theory only 2 other 
  people were able to understand it.

This is an urban legend. There were dozens of people that immediately understood it and hundreds that understood it after some additional explanation. That doesn't mean they accepted it in the absence of experimental confirmation.

However, the General theory was a far greater achievement than the Special theory, because the idea of mass influencing the geometry of space-time was far less obvious and it may have been a decade before anyone else would have investigated that possibility. Nevertheless: someone else would have come up with it. Einstein was no greater than any of the other great physicists of the time, who each had brilliant idea. Einstein just happened to have one that became widely known.

> This is an urban legend

This is true, I stand corrected. However outside of Hilbert and Einstein no one was looking at Reimannian Geometry for answers.

> The physics community was already converging on the special theory of relativity

They had the Lorentz equations for decades but were not getting anywhere close to the final result apart from Poincare. And even Poincare inspite of getting almost all equations lined up, seemed to miss the fact that there is no absolute time and that time is only partially and not totally ordered. Einstein hit the nail on the head inspite of the fact that Lorentz/Poincare had been working on the problem for possibly decades. It still seems likely that Poincare could have arrived at the result.

This is the reason I cited GR. As far as I know, no one apart from Einstein/Hilbert seemed to ave been working on it.

In hindsight special relativity was "obvious", but Maxwell's equations had been around for decades and the Lorentz transforms emerged in 1887 and yet no one was able to make the mental leap required to re-interpret the nature of Time. SR could have ended up taking decades more to sort out. Einstein hit the ball out of the park in his 20s when the scientists working on the problem had spent decades on it. And GR could have only followed after SR.

Well, Einstein had a few great ideas, not one. Special relativity, general relativity, statistical mechanics, and energy = mass. He only really missed quantum mechanics. Newton and Leibniz come close, but none of his contemporaries.

But it is really off topic. Let's say Einstein and his contemporaries are more important than Bill, the guy who really made DOS, and the first few MS employees, but obviously the later group is a lot wealthier.

That's difficult to compare. For my own life, the PC and then internet were a lot more disruptive than anything directly related to relativity theory, although there may be indirect connections that I don't understand.

And it's very much a matter of timing. If IBM had been able to delay the broad commercial success of PCs by 15 years, which is not inconceivable, it would have been too late for me to choose a career in this field.

I think the great commercializers like Bill Gates or Edison have made tremendous contributions to society. You need business model disruption in order to make new technologies broadly accessible.

However, I do understand what you're saying. If the discoveries of Einstein or Gandhi had simply never been made, that would be a tragedy for the world, not just a delay affecting my own life.

I'm with you about Gates/Edison.

But I think that this sentence is unfair for Einstein.

I think people find it hard to understand that wealth isn't a zero sum game and it doesn't all come down to the number assigned to it. If you compare someone from the 70s to now even if they aren't earning more the price of things has come way down relatively and while people like Gates have generated a heap of wealth they have in turn made everyone lives better with easy access to technology that was almost unthinkable in the 70s.

Actually, Bill Gates has simply built gates and extracted a toll for using them. His products were rarely acceptable alternatives if evaluated on their own merits and sold largely because of strong-arm deals with the OEMs.

Gates is a tremendous example of modern capitalism - ie leveraging regulatory capture. Microsoft, as an unneeded but forcibly installed middleman, has been a drain on the economy. Broken windows for everyone.

The major Microsoft products are Windows and Office.

Windows is a better corporate OS than any of the alternatives and Office is an awesome piece of software by any standard.

I don't think any hacker is going to upvote you for that. You have to make people like through the eyes of a common man for that!

Both stunk and wouldn't have survived on their merits alone. They may be better than the alternatives NOW because they killed most of them. Having thirty unmolested years to perfect a product helps.

> Actually, Bill Gates has simply built gates and extracted a toll for using them. His products were rarely acceptable alternatives if evaluated on their own merits and sold largely because of strong-arm deals with the OEMs.

While I have cited Bill Gates as a weaker contributor than Einstein/Gandhi, I think you are being far too critical here and missing a few key things. The fundamental insight that Bill Gates had was that software is king and the hardware is the add on. Even Steve Jobs credited Bill for the insight at D5. All other competing OSes at the time were a hardware and software bundle. Bill realized that what was of essence was the software and the hardware wasn't as important. He licensed the software and commoditized the hardware industry into a fierce race to the bottom that saw PC prices dropping every month. If Apple/Amiga had won that round we would be spending a couple of grand on a PC even to this day and poorer economies wouldn't have been able to afford computers as freely as they do now.

There were quite a few pure-software platforms that never got off the ground because OEMs didn't dare even offer them as options for fear of angering Microsoft. Unless you were savvy enough to build your own machine from parts, they made it as hard as they possibly could to avoid paying for a copy of DOS and later Windows whether or not you would have preferred to run something else. Most famously, Be got a $23M settlement over this, yet never managed to get fair access to the marketplace so they could compete on commodity hardware. Gates's tactics cost us years of progress, and now he's getting accolades for giving away extorted money DOJ should have seized for his victims.

That's what I mean, it's BS. "Software is king - hur hur".

Hardware is king - try executing your code manually if you disagree. Try wiring the world with a particularly clever algorithm or executing that massively parallel algorithm on a single-core CPU.

When he says software is king he means that it's profitable to dominate because its incremental costs are minimal. And with the DMCA preventing reverse engineering, software patents preventing use of trivial algorithms, etc, they're assuring the monarchy will last forever.

> If Apple/Amiga had won that round we [...]

... could still have a free market where competitors weren't locked out before they started.

Microsoft delivered crippled products to its customers specifically to preserve its marketshare. If I did that as a consultant it'd be criminal.

> poorer economies wouldn't have been able to afford computers as freely as they do now.

Hardware is ultimately fungible so the same boom would have occurred regardless. The boom was happening before MS and the PC, and before Apple too.

Just as an example, it'd be as reasonable to credit RMS for the hardware commoditization as Gates. Stallman was largely personally responsible for reinventing proprietary lisp-machine functionality. By killing off one of the most potentially profitable specialized hardware companies Stallman started the commodity hardware trend.

If anyone really influenced it though it was one of the computing pioneers like Turing simply by proving computational equivalence. After that it's a given.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com