frig

Not some folk-theory or heuristic, but actually understanding the mechanism.

6. Extract natural resources from the earth or space.

with your 1, 2, and 3 could be seen as including all there is to say about energy; there are many perils trying to classify things.

"Value of X" == what someone might pay for X; thus, if you have a barrel of oil and the current market price is $50/barrel then the value of your barrel is $50 (assuming you can get the market price for it, etc.); if tomorrow the market price is $55 or $45 that's its value tomorrow.

If your primary interest in oil is buying it and selling it value is what you should care about.

Now, let's suppose your interest is in using that oil; you operate a machine shop and the oil is enough fuel to run some machine for a week.

How long the oil powers your machine doesn't change overnight; if the market price goes to $55 or to $45 you get a week of machine operation out of that barrel, same as you did when it was @ $50.

The intuition behind splitting off "wealth" from "value" is that you want some term that captures how useful something is for a particular non-market use (powering a machine); this term captures the notion that there is a kind of utility which is not very effected by the item's market price.

So usually when people make a distinction between "wealth" and "value" they're trying to differentiate between "what price something costs/fetches" and "how useful is it if actually used"; intuitively those are two different things but it becomes very hard to thoroughly disentangle them.

You see this notion re-invented many times, but not always with the same terminology; Warren Buffet likes to say that "price is what you pay; value is what you get", which is expressing something like the same distinction but using the term "price" for "value" and "value" for what I (and the original post) call "wealth"...the important thing isn't what you call things so much as that you can make the distinction.

The reason disentangling the notions is harder than it looks is that in any kind of market economy each is in effect dependent on the other in a kind of endlessly recursive fashion.

Explaining the endless recursion is an endless chore so I won't bother; you can get a hint of it if you think about the machine shop:

- a barrel of oil's intrinsic utility to the machine shop is that it lets the shop operate for a weak

- ...but why does the shop want to operate? It could be that this is a hobby shop and the operator just has an intrinsic love of working in it, but it's probably the case that the shop operates b/c the product of its operation has enough value that it's worth doing

- thus the barrel is intrinsically useful in that it lets the shop run, but the utility of running the shop has to do with value, and so forth

As for wealth-production leading to value-destruction, this is readily apparent if you look at any time technology's disrupted an industry.

A great historical example is the invention of refrigerators circa the 1900s and how it impacted the ice merchants of the time.

Before the invention of the refrigerator there was a large industry in the form of going to cold places, carving out giant chunks of ice, packing them in insulation (generally thick layers of straw), transporting them to warmer locations, and then selling them off piece-by-piece to anyone who needed to keep stuff cold.

After the invention of the refrigerator this ice-market evaporated, as you might expect; this wasn't b/c ice suddenly stopped working as a source of cold but b/c its relative utility compared to refrigeration plummeted...since money is scarce people allocate it towards what they think is the best available option and once you had refrigeration the ice-merchants were the best available option a lot less of the time.

You see something similar today: by any measure having substantial portions of the world's intellectual property available online for free is an enormous increase in the world's wealth -- the same as if every home having the entire library of alexandria in it -- but it also destroys a great deal of value, in that there's a lot less willingness to pay for the stuff that's easily findable online.

But even without disruptive technology there are often cases of increased wealth leading to value destruction; a common example is that in cities with effective mass-transit systems (most Japanese cities, most major cities in the Eurozone, NYC + other east-coast USA cities) there's a lot less demand for personal transit...having a solution to a problem (in this case: getting around) is a kind of wealth, and tends to reduce the value of other solutions to the same problem (private transit alternatives), b/c it's a solved problem.

Tough to do without going through a full course but a slightly-less-handwavy explanation would go like this:

There's a mathematical tool (called measure) that formalizes-and-generalizes the notion of "volume".

It generally behaves very much as you'd expect; your intuitions about how "volumes" combine and intersect will generally apply.

There's a catch, though: the way the tool is constructed leaves open the possibility of a non-measurable set, meaning a set for which the definition of the tool leaves you unable to assign that set a well-defined "volume"; you can't just assume that the measure of a set exists.

If you assume the Axiom of Choice then not only are such sets possible, but you can construct non-measurable sets.

The core process in Banach-Tarksi looks like this:

(1) take the sphere (a 'nice' set, which we'll say has "volume" V)

(2) divide that sphere into some sub-sets that are non-measurable (are sets for which our tool cannot supply a measurement) (2.a) Effect on total volume: should have no impact, as the parts we have reassemble to an object of known volume

(3) move the subsets around by sliding-and-rotating them (3.a) Effect on total volume: should have no impact, as neither sliding nor rotating changes volume

(4) wind up with 2 spheres (both 'nice' sets, each with "volume" V)???

The paradox comes from getting double the volume through a sequence of operations that are apparently volume-conserving.

You can go with this a couple different directions.

I'm not convinced this should be an intuitive outcome.

An intuitive, hand-wavy explanation for what's "really going on" would be something like non-measurable sets carry around infinite amounts of finely-detailed structure (too finely-detailed to perceive using our measuring tool); depending on how you position some sets relative to each other their finely-detailed structure might either cancel out (adding no volume) or reinforce each other (adding lots of volume).

That said I think the real lesson here is that your intuition is trying to have its cake -- a non-measurable set -- and eat it too -- have the "volume" of a non-measurable set be preserved under volume-preserving operations.

You really would want a three-way split between wealth and money and value; it's often the case that wealth production leads to value-destruction, which keeps things interesting.

It's also the case that once you have the three way wealth/value/money dynamic going you have to figure out:

- what are other people's states of mind in this classification? or, at least, what can they be?

Because, for example, in some sense fame is a kind of wealth -- it's useful if it's the right kind -- as is demand for your particular goods (or disdain for your competitor's wares), as it's also useful.

On the other hand it's not clear that it fits your description of wealth.

If it is wealth then advertisers and other persuaders count as wealth-producers.

If it isn't either you need a fourth category or you need to shoehorn it into some more-abstract notion of value.

Sidenote: I've always thought it extremely unfortunate that English uses the phrase "make money", as unless you're actually "making money" what you're doing is "getting money" (which phrase is, incidentally, apparently the vernacular amongst the unschooled dwellers of the inner city); first, rectify all the names.

This kind of sloppiness in language leads to worse derangements, as evidenced in Vitriolic's notion of creating wealth (what he's talking about is accumulating surplus wealth).

(Gelfand's prophecy:) Sporadic simple groups are not groups, they are objects from a still unknown infinite family, some number of which happened to be groups, just by chance.

...first here: http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2006/09/mathematical_kin...

It's stayed with me ever since.

What does happen is that later on substantial #s of your classmates while wind up having having gone back to the law school or the b-school or whatnot.

This means that even if you, personally, never met anyone at the b-school, you probably know people who went there later on, making most b-school people only a couple degrees of separation away from you.

This means the big alumni network is loosely connected, but is comparatively connected, and predictably so; it's also the case that probably someone in your undergraduate class went to Wharton (or whatever) and thus probably there's some chain-of-acquaintances connecting you to the class at Wharton some year, but it's a lot more tenuous than the intra-university network.

So, short version: not that much interaction @ the time of study; across time, the alumni bodies are much more cross-linked (though admittedly not to the same extent that you see inside the particular sub-schools).

You're underestimating the impact of combination: those startups will need CFOs and council and so forth and having attached professional schools with their own robust alumni network(s) helps.

If a Harvard education was useless -- and Harvard alums to a one all room-temperature iq, slackjawed mouthbreathers -- it wouldn't matter how scarce the degrees are, as they'd be valueless.

Once you assume a particular level of educational quality and/or other 'intrinsic' value (here 'intrinsic' == everything other than the pure scarcity premium) it is of course the case that ceteris paribus the degree becomes less valuable the more people have it.

But even then not entirely: if you cut the class size too small the consequent diminishment of the alumni network might take away more than the increased scarcity gave.

There is one problem with this theory and it is that the US only issues patents that are valid for the US. China issues patents for China, Japan for Japan, etc. Thus, the Chinese are not really beholden to American IP owners in their own country unless they give those American IP owners Chinese patents.

...but then you say this:

I think the US is generally pro-patent and pro-IP because we know that one of the few areas we hold some kind of competitive advantage is in RD, design, arts, etc. We have to keep our hands on these intangible goods because if it comes down to making things we are really, really behind.

...which is cute in that the more you espouse to the outlook implied in the first quote the less the opinion in the second quote makes sense: how would being pro-patent and pro-IP help our competitive advantage with other countries unless there were were some mechanisms by which domestic IP influenced foreign operations?

You've also basically backed your way into the smart version of the theory in question:

- the USA currently has few strong competitive advantages short of producing IP

- the USA is thus pro-IP (domestically + in its international negotiations) as a way of preserving or strengthening its global position vis-a-vis its trading partners

...which makes it unclear what we're arguing about.

As I've heard the argument (and it's been around since the 90s) the argument comes in two versions (the 'lite' and the 'sinister' versions).

The 'lite' version is a balance-of-payments issue: since we're offshoring actually making stuff we will have a substantial trade deficit; having a lot of obligatory patent licenses can mitigate the imbalance. EG:

- (low-patents): original manufacturer builds dvd player with about $20 in parts and labor and sells it to an import/export type for $25 and then best buy gets it @ $45/unit in bulk and it sells for $70 or so; so ~$45/unit is flowing out of the country

- (high-patents): same as before, but now obligatory patent licenses tack on another $5-10 or so per unit; as the people espousing the theory would have it the effect is less net money runs it (they don't get into trying to calculate which parts of the chain have more negotiating ability, and stick with 'less' rather than make more precise estimates)

It's not enough to neutralize a trade deficit but it can knock it down substantially; key to the strategy succeeding is legislative support that helps promote sufficient patent coverage in as many product categories as possible, then letting the market sort out which actually get licensed and for how much.

The issue of patents to foreign holders -- whether USA patents or overseas -- is essentially moot from the balance-of-payments outlook: they mainly impact the internal distribution of money sent to the trading partner but don't have a substantial effect on the total amount sent over.

The 'sinister' version takes the above and throws in some assumption as to how you produce patent-worthy R+D and so forth.

Basically it assumes you can't jump to the forefront of technology immediately (reasonable) and thus even though the USA patent system is equal opportunity in some sense as a practical matter there aren't going to be Chinese-originated patents worth licensing anytime soon; as a large chunk of industrial r+d is funded out of retained earnings the reduced earnings under the high-patent regime (reduced b/c they've been "taxed away" via licensing fees) will retard the technological progress of your trading partners; this lets you keep the upper hand for longer, even if they will close the gap eventually.

- (1) patents, schmatents! It's not under patent in China, so I can export to USA whilst scoffing at the USA patents?

- (2) if not necessarily me then someone in the distribution chain will have to obtain proper patent licenses before putting the goods up for sale in the USA

You're a real life patent attorney so you should know this.

It's going to be some time before I can get to using it but like I said this pretty much is exactly what a currently-stalled project has been looking for.

If I make a real use of this library I'll pass along a proper description so you can see what use it's getting.

As it'll be awhile I'll give you a minimal summary now (in as much detail as I can, which isn't that much sorry).

The overall point is to take input (sequence of words), and then generate further input that is "related" but not identical (think: clearly a variation on the theme, but not rote repetition). The mechanism is that there's a set of grammars specifying overlapping formal languages; input is broken into words and each word is parsed in each grammar that contains that word; some inference and calculation is done to generate a sort-of style profile and then that profile is used together with the underlying grammars to drive generation of new output.

The quality of the output has been underwhelming, mainly b/c doing exact parsing seems to leave a nasty trade-off between the "interestingness" of the grammars in the set and nontriviality of the "style profile":

- having "interesting" grammars means the style profile is too constrained (so the generated output too closely resembles the input)

- having "larger" grammars means the style profile is richer but the output is weak (doesn't adequately resemble the input to a human observer)

Where a library like hampi fits into this is (hopefully) the ability to efficiently loosen-up the parsing in a nicely-constrained way; using some metadata attached to the grammars it ought to be possible to intelligently knock-out part of a word and ask hampi to find a replacement string that makes the word parse within a particular language.

Essentially intentional misunderstanding of input => novel synthesis.

Serendipity at its finest.

Suppose that it is pretty easy to look at money printing and figure out how much devaluation results (eg: prices will wind up 10% later).

Even if that's true deciding when to raise your prices (and how much to raise them) has a lot more to do with supply (of your inputs) and demand (for your products) and also what your competitors are up to.

EG:

- you raise your price now, but your competitors raise it less; they take a lot of your business pretty easily

- your customers haven't gotten "their share" of the printed money yet (eg: wages haven't caught up with the devaluation, or they haven't raised prices proportionately yet, etc.) so you lose more by raising prices than you lose by leaving them as-is

...that kind of thing.

These are non-load-bearing purely-decorative bricks. What does your intuition tell you is a good ballpark for the ratio of "load-bearing" bricks to "decorative" bricks?

Time-delay effect. In theory if everyone knows how much new money is being pumped into the economy (and exactly when it arrives, etc.) then the adjustment to reduced value of money happens instantly and you haven't accomplished much.

If instead the new money is injected stealthily into the economy (or at least: knowledge about it doesn't spread everywhere instantaneously) then the cost (in inflation) will be deferred (until "everyone figures it out" / prices re-adjust).

Thus in the short-term private sector spending would be mostly unaffected (b/c people have about the same nominal amounts of money as before and prices are still at about their previous nominal amounts) and over the longer term the inflationary effect kicks in and you pay for it.

In Keynes's time it would be pretty likely you could stealthily inject money and also it would be pretty likely that readjustment to the increased money supply would happen slowly; no internet, for one, and generally nowhere near as tightly integrated an economy as we have today.

That's not as clear today (information moves faster), but on the other hand information still takes time to work its way through the economy.

Just look @ how our "researcher" (ahem) "researches" the only known-to-him example of raw data being given out:

- supposedly "Peter Webster" has (a subset of) the "raw data"

- no other "researchers" aside from the data originators have the "raw data" (at least insofar as is known to Michaels as revealed in this article)

- supposedly Michaels is interested in obtaining the "raw data"

Is there any evidence in the article that, you know, Michaels tried calling Webster up and asking for the "raw data"? The kind of thing you'd do if you were, you know, seriously interested in getting your hands on this data?

Not really:

- there's no explicit mention of (attempting to) get in touch with Webster

- there's a half-hearted attempt to strew fear and doubt based on the fact that Webster's findings (about hurricane and warming correlation) are apparently at variance with what others have found, but it's half-hearted b/c:

-- it doesn't examine whether the different findings are due to methodological differences or due to "raw data" differences (only the latter of which implicates the "raw data" as perhaps suspect)

-- as per usual it's not like Michaels tried calling Webster and being like: "do you think your results are different b/c the data has been mangled?"

So just with respect to Michael's actions with Webster there's a rather transparent pattern of some mix of incuriousness or laziness.

Which (quite apart from any think-tank connections) is why he ought to come across as not all that credible: he's lazy or incompetent or both.

I mean really: say you were to read an article wherein the author:

- is supposedly searching for some holy grail

- identifies a source that has it

- makes no mention of trying to get it from that source

...would that not raise a red flag as to the author's sincerity and/or general competence? Would you be more or less likely to take his other claims at face value after seeing that?

Incidentally a good historical anecdote; in addition to many aspects in-and-around copyright I tend to think the thinking around public records laws is woefully antiquated (to our general detriment).

Thanks for finding that.

Why would rational people expose themselves to economies that do this to them?

Amongst other reasons:

- the cost (in terms of wealth taken) of redistribution is less than the cost of letting things sort out (eg in fallen asset prices or lost opportunities)

- (for those with only a little accumulated wealth) the prospect of attempting to accumulate wealth -- but failing at it -- is very likely and the consequences of failing at it are very high

...though as always a specific situation requires specific analysis, and there's no particular reason to believe the math works out one way or the other in a given scenario (and, also, to pretend to know the shape of someone else's preferences).

You might be able to do better than means-tested (flat-rate payouts to everyone! minksy-style "employer of last resort" arrangements!) but the underlying dynamic doesn't materially change: (loosely speaking) devaluing currency by X% takes away a lot more wealth from billionaires then from dollar-menuaires; if programs A and B both result in X% devaluation but A is means-tested and B isn't the difference in "cost of program" to the wealthy would be a rounding error.

The real story behind the story you might've heard would've been more like a page-layout type defense with the fact that the contents of each page (by #) were identical between two competing works; throw in the usual misreporting and there you go.

If you track it down please do share.

The CSV thing is really where it gets tricky: generally "trivial" obfuscations or rearrangements to get around existing laws don't fare well in court (and sadly even "trivial" isn't really well-defined), so if a CSV "counts" then rearranging the columns (or randomly sorting the rows, etc.) won't help you. But it's not obvious that a CSV doesn't count either.

Basically the model is supposed to be:

- you see a printed pages containing representations of facts

- you "learn" the facts (eg: "copied" them to your brain)

- you produce printed pages containing representations of facts

...and of course there may be incidental and/or unavoidable resemblances between the two representations but insofar as what you "copied" was just the facts you had fair game.

It's sort-of tacitly assumed that if you did make an exact copy it'd be pretty obvious and that if you went through the above process what you did would look different enough to be pretty obvious also (unless you deliberately cloned something the hard way, which is stupid enough to be rare).

With straight-digital "database" dumps (like the CSV) you have a situation in which if you went through the full process you'd create something that's pretty much indistinguishable from what you'd get if you just hit ctrl-d; this pretty much breaks the rules of thumb / intuition behind the rules around "facts".

In the map case: if I make a map of the coast of Florida by:

- looking at maps A, B, and C

- drawing my own map based on what I learned

...then the publishers of A (B or C) can't come sue me for violating their copyright over the shape of the coast of Florida; they have copyright over their specific depiction of that shape but not the shape itself.

Once you move into all-digital datasets a lot of the grounding assumptions are no longer there (perfect reproduction is easy; the data is more abstract and may only really be representable in one way).

NO: The kicker is that if you did that they'd sue you for breach of contract.

YES: once you passed it off to third parties (in violation of contract) it's not clear how strong of a remedy AggData actually has.

Some of the notions + folk wisdom about copyrightability of facts is based on assumptions that increasingly don't hold.

EG: you can't really copyright the factual contents of the phonebook; if I want to compete with the existing phonebook publisher by retyping the phone book they don't have a copyright claim against me (provided I only transcribe the facts, and organize the information in an obvious or mechanical fashion, like alphabetical ordering).

If you were instead to compete with an existing phone book company by literally xeroxing their product they could probably take you to trial (on a theory that the underlying facts aren't under copyright but the specific page layouts and so on are; there's also the issue of the ads you'd be xeroxing but let's not muddle things overmuch).

If this has already happened and been litigated I've never heard of it.

What something like AggData is doing shows some of the conceptual limits of the existing framework:

- existing physical instantiations of abstract "databases" (collections of fact)

-- (1) couldn't be economically "xeroxed" (EG: if you do it cheaply it is visibly inferior-looking; if you do a very high fidelity reproduction it's about as costly as just re-doing it from scratch)

-- (2) had enough "wiggle room" in how they might be represented in a human-friendly medium such that:

--- (A) on the one hand there's the possibility of a viable copyright claim against a "xeroxer" (under the theory that the page layout is under copyright even if the facts themselves are not)

--- (B) on the other hand allowing for the possibility of "retypers" to actually take advantage of the not-copyrighted status of the underlying facts and actually produce a different product (b/c it is possible to reproduce the same facts with a format sufficiently-different from the source you drew them from)

- but as the "database" becomes increasingly digital

-- (1) "xeroxing" is very economical (far more so than "retyping")

-- (2) there's increasingly less meaningful "wiggle room" as to how the facts might be represented in a "database"; changes-of-format dont' do much, but once the data is shorn of its human-friendly formatting all the useful ways of storing it are essentially isomorphic, meaning (2.B) above is increasingly unlikely (it may no longer be possible to "clone" the abstract data without being too close to the exact format of the source for legal protection).

If someone's actually seen these issues played out or "settled" I'd love to learn more about it.

Look at paragraph 2:

In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more?

and paragraph 4:

Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.

Consider these two claims:

- CLAIM A: "prices don't depend on quality of content"

- CLAIM B: "prices depend on manufacturing cost" (=> CLAIM A)

...which claim would you imagine the author to be advancing? "CLAIM A" -- that content quality has nothing to do with pricing? -- or "CLAIM B" -- that 'publishers...set prices based on the cost of [manufacturing]'?

If, further, interposed between those paragraphs you saw paragraph 3:

A copy of Time costs $5 for 58 pages, or 8.6 cents a page. The Economist costs $7 for 86 pages, or 8.1 cents a page. Better journalism is actually slightly cheaper.

...which claim does that paragraph do more to support?

If I've misread the essay I think I can be forgiven for assuming pg attempted to argue that price is set based on cost of manufacture (and not just that 'quality of content does not dictate price').

About the metric:

I wasn't clear on the sense in which I think "price per page" is dubious. From the consumer standpoint it's not irredeemably flawed; $-per-word is better (gets at the same point more accurately) but that'd take actual work to calculate so it's not going to show up in one of these essays.

That said it has some weaknesses, mainly variations on the "Fallacy of Division".

The major dubiousness as a consumer metric is it runs the risk of double-counting "quality" when applied to the nonfiction written word: you can have a better article either by better writing or by being longer + more comprehensive. Within the constraints of magazine writing you'll see a narrow band of variation in "writing style", leaving "length/comprehensiveness" as the major source of one article's "better quality content" when compared to some other article. Thus the risk of double-counting: if a 10000-word article A on Edo-period Japan is better than a 2500 word article B on Edo-period Japan mainly b/c of how much more nuanced and detailed it is, you double count when you:

- praise A for the higher quality of its contents (thoroughness/nuance/etc.) when compared to be B

- praise A for also giving you more to read than there is in B

...which won't ruin the metric but is an easy way to overstate a case. SHORT VERSION: "local" content quality (at the word or page level) is heavily dependent on the overall quality of the larger item it's a part of (the article); when you say "this awesome 10 kiloword article has 10000 awesome words in it" you double-count the awesomeness.

This isn't enough to sink PG's thesis but it is a danger to be aware of when naively applying the metric.

What sinks his thesis is that I can throw evidence that "quality of content" does impact the price people are willing to pay; his example of newsstand pricing is more about the extent to which magazine retailers can "tax" retail magazine purchasers than about the underlying economics.

The various and sundry evidence for "quality of content" impacting price:

- subscriptions (which cut out the middleman) clearly have what he deems "better content" priced at a marked premium to inferior content; perhaps "newsstands" are just a pathological retail channel?

- the subscription price also gives nice upper bounds on publication costs; these are pretty tiny (rounding in a way prejudicially to my argument: 50 pages per issue and 50 issues per year of time magazine => .8c/page; given the similar production values of the economist we can safely assume it's similar). I'll say more on this later.

- the consumer price per unit of content varies widely between genres. Look at "Parabola", a new-agey magazine: it's 9.50 / issue at the newsstand, is always 128 pages, and is printed on 5"x8" paper. When you correct for page size you get ~17c per "page" (really: per 8.5x11" paper's worth of printed words). Do you have an explanation for why content-units of "Parabola" sell for higher prices than content-units of the economist other than some difference in the quality of their contents? If time and the economist selling for ~8.x cents per page @ the newsstand is evidence of the market value of their content why is this not evidence for the market value of "Parabola"

I can do this all day: prices per content unit vary much more widely than the narrow range PG's anecdote suggests; this is true @ the subscription price and @ the newsstand price. You'll neither find find consistent cost-per-page to cost-of-product multipliers nor will you find that going super heavypaper + glossy ink (with concomitant jump in cost-per-page) has any obvious impact on cost of product either (cf vogue or seventeen or W).

After awhile occam's razor will suggest: "newsstand" prices aren't good measurements of magazine prices (compared to subscriptions); regardless of where you measure different types of content sell at different prices per unit of content; likeliest explanation is that quality of content has a lot to do with what price something sells at (which is why there aren't any $20 weekly newsmagazines).

Additionally: publishers are already quite close to the post-medium world, in the sense that their costs-of-publication are already quite small vis-a-vis price.

An alternative explanation for the phenomenon PG is observing is something like:

- (a) each type of content will fetch a different price; this price has a lot to do with what the content is

- (b) for a given "type" of content there's a constraint on what is involved in producing an instance in it; eg: there are no 300 or 500 page newsweeklies, but there are 50-100 page newsweeklies

- (c) within each "type" prices will cluster around some central point but higher quality content will fetch higher prices

- (d) within the constraints of the genre there's a strong correlation with longer == better

- (e) together, (b) (c) and (d) make it look roughly like the time + economist situation: 'economist > time but priced < time per content unit'

...but b/c publishing costs are such a small part of the price to consumer (which has more to do firstly with content genre and secondly with relative quality of content within genre) the "length" as such isn't a big factor in setting price; the relationship described in (e) is literally a red herring.

You can differentiate this scenario from pg's by checking across content genres; if prices-to-consumer are hovering within a narrow range per unit price his looks better, but if price per content unit vary widely across genres mine looks better.

But look again at what you're claiming here: "price doesn't depend on quality of content".

Here's the evidence you start from:

- Time: lower quality content, ~$5 / issue

- Economist: higher quality content, ~$7 / issue

Which to an outside observer certainly doesn't look like a case of price not depending on quality of content.

To turn the above facts into evidence for your claim you introduce a "price per page" metric, which lets you salvage your point at the expense of introducing a dubious metric.

Leaving aside the dubiousness of the metric, your chosen datapoints don't hold up once you leave the newsstand:

- 1 year of time: ~$20. http://www.amazon.com/TIME-1-year/dp/B00007BK3L/ref=sr_1_1?i...

- 1 year of the economist: ~$127. http://www.amazon.com/The-Economist/dp/B00077B7M6/ref=sr_1_1...

Difference in quality of content may not be a complete explanation for the above differential, but I'd wager a guess it has something to do with it.

And even at the newsstand you can find a wide range of price-per-sheet values (eg: 4c to 20c by my estimates), enough so that you could just as easily, say, have picked "Foreign Affairs" and "Time" and have it come out that higher quality content yields higher per-page prices.

Which is why this looks like a sloppy generalization: you're trying to argue against a statistical relationship (generally "higher-quality content => generally higher prices") by means of anecdote, and not really a carefully-vetted anecdote at that (as evidenced in the subscription pricing).

If you go to an actual bookstore (or library) and look at newsstand prices for, eg, Canteen or Dwell or Parabola or Foreign Affairs or New Left Review or Ampersand or 34th Parallel (or god forbid Science + Nature) and so on you'd have a harder time arriving at such a neat relationship.

Now, if you grouped by "content niche" and analyzed each niche separately you might find in some niches (like "news", specifically) a clean relationship like what you proposed.

I think the actual situation is that "agreement" as such is communicated by actions (either cooperation or mimicry) and "disagreement" as such is communicated by talking (eg: 'u r rong and eevil' responses).

When you look at successful ad-hoc or loosely organized groups the common theme is outlets for mimicry or cooperation; eg:

- 'birthers' don't post "i'm so ghey for your evidence and theories" love-notes to each other on the movement leaders' blogs; they indicate "agreement" by taking the message to new venues (cooperation), starting up (or taking over) local 'patriot' organizations (cooperation + mimicry), starting new blogs advancing the cause (mimicry) and trade strategies / information with each other (cooperation)

- 'raelians' are actually a fairly ad-hoc and decentralized cult as cults go; there's lots of outlets for missionary work (mimicry + cooperation), 'spiritual practice' (mimicry + cooperation), and so on

If the "host" doesn't have outlets for cooperation + mimicry that are both (a) visible to the host and (b) beneficial to the host then whatever agreement it generates will either be invisible or not beneficial or both; in the same way, if you convince people with your controversial blog post the "agreement" you'll see will come in the form of people linking to you (at its most visible) as 'great post by jerf' and more often it's just some invisible-to-you uptick in what % of people have similar takes on the issue you discussed.

This makes a fundraiser for an institute to promote "rationalism" essentially a multiply-pathological case study with predictably poor results.

EDIT: forgot one thing.

"Communication" is a broad thing (most human action is communicative at some level or other). Different message types are best transmitted using different communications types, and I think this is probably unavoidable / not teachable.

When you frame it as: "I communicate messages of type A on medium B and only get back responses of type C, but wish I also got messages of type D" it's a little limiting; the fact of the matter is that perhaps messages of type D are going out in other media, they're just not reaching your attention.

I'm pessimistic in general as to how malleable the message-type and media-type pairing can be; my suspicion is that if you care about getting messages of type D you should first figure out how those messages are communicated -- eg medium E -- and then find a way to work with that constraint in mind.

This probably means that the current internet communications media are:

- productivity enhancers for existing high-passion groups

- allowing new, low-intensity, low-passion groups to get made that otherwise wouldn't happen (cf: shirky's notion of the coasean floor)

- ...not really going to enable the latter to graduate to the former on its own