538 karma · joined December 11, 2008
A short reply so as not to strain your reading comprehension:
I've asked you to explain why you hold your premises and you haven't; you just continue reiterating that you hold them, and then point out that if I also held your beliefs I'd be in the wrong.
I get that. If you can't justify your own premises -- why the obvious differences between a ditch and knowledge don't matter -- there's not much more to discuss.
You are arguing that the obligation to releave the hardships of the poor falls narrowly, landing on the shoulders of those who provide the goods to the poor. Your argument would show that if a cripple is unable to afford a wheel chair, then the wheel chair maker must reach into his own pocket to pay poor relief. Your argument would show that it is the greed of the bricklayer and the roofer that is to blame for homelessness.
But this:
I want a wheelchair but can't afford one from the legitimate supplier. I know how to make one myself and have all the tools and materials at hand. I've made a good-faith attempt to negotiate a hardship discount with the legitimate supplier and have been spurned; failure to get a wheelchair means I'll die soon. In this circumstance I think it is moral to make a wheelchair for myself using my own tools and materials.
Even more precisely, the scenario (with India vs rest of world) is pretty much:
- GSK et al would like India to crack down on offlabel pharma shops
- India clearly prefers letting offlabel pharma companies operate
...and neither on their own can force the other other to stop what they're doing, which is why each party:
- GSK et al
- India (and other countries in similar boats)
...are appealing to the rest of the world for sympathy and support; each of these entities has valid moral claims on their position, so how is one to decide which claim is more justified?
I've argued my position. You're arguing against a different position than I took (or really, drawing false generalizations that I don't hold and then taking me to task for holding those positions, which I only hold in your imagination; if you want to talk to yourself count me out of it).
I don't feel entitled to Joe's knowledge; in the hypothetical scenario I already have Joe's knowledge, at which point why yes I do feel "entitled" to make use of said knowledge, unless there's a good reason not to make use of it.
I tell you what: if you can explain to me the concepts of:
- rivalrous and nonrivalrous goods
- excludable and non-excludable goods
...and then either:
- explain how both ditches and knowledge share an identical classification along both of those axes, thereby properly being treated together
- or explain not only that your little theory doesn't recognize distinctions about the above but also why your little theory ignores the distinction
...then I'll walk away from this with the sense that you're someone with a rational outlook that just happens to disagree substantially with mine, and call it a day.
Otherwise I'm going to conclude you've just gotten a lot of ego attached to a self-image as a defender of some moral order or other, which feat you regularly accomplish by throwing totem-words until people quit; they get bored, you feel like a winnar.
Firstly: the notion that there's something absurd in my being able to profit from work some pharma research did in an earlier era is itself absurd; if you really believe that under no circumstance is that warranted, you wind either being against patent expiry at all (b/c why would it suddenly become ok just b/c some years have passed) -- which is a tenable but very minority position -- or you have to concede that there's no general principle against such situations, at which point we can get to arguing details.
That's why it's LOL-worthy; it's already the case that it's totally fine to "profit" from work done earlier without compensating the person who did it, provided that the work was done sufficiently long ago (so as to have fallen out of whatever ip bracket it fell into)...which means the argument-from-principles is just ignorant, and the real argument is "do you consider exigent circumstances to also justify such "profiting" from previously-performed labor in the same way that "the passage of time" justifies the same, or not.
Reasonable people can disagree on the latter topic; arguing that my argument somehow fails because it violates a principle that is also violated by all the world's systems of intellectual property is a position you can take, at the expense of revealing yourself to be holding a position contrary to pretty much all the serious thought on IP in general.
But let's move along. The notion of "withholding his labor" is manifestly silly: he created knowledge, knowledge is not excludable once distributed, so there's no intrinsic ability to "deny" future-time use of already-produced-and-distributed-knowledge...whatever ability Joe has to "deny his labor" in this specific case is a gift from those he would deny it to.
This makes the programmers-versus-ditch-diggers a red herring: programmers get paid what they do because they can deny their labor if they're not paid a satisfactory wage (they stop working, it's that easy); a knowledge-producer can't deny use of already-distributed knowledge in anything like the same way, and depends on the state's willingness to enforce certain rules for what capacity to "deny labor" that way.
Which of course means that yes it is imprudent not to mollify righteous thugs in other nations; those righteous thugs are the means by which a pharma company would be "denying its labor" in that nation, and failing to strike a mutually-agreeable bargain leaves you unlikely to be able to do any denying, at all.
That's reality and that's the scope of options within pharmas operate (and indeed they know this probably better than you and have made their choices, etc.); you are free to dislike it and find it unpleasing -- perhaps curse fate for not evolving a cerebral cortex with a functioning drm system -- but making choices based on the actual nature of reality is probably the only way to make good choices short of luck.
If you're Bob -- the duly-elected representative of the people's republic of west brokistan -- then you've got the following calculation:
- either you let Jim keep turning out off-brand tamiflu and (hypothetically) thereby saving hundred-k to millions of lives ("didn't mess with a good thing")
- or you shut Jim down, then have the fun task of explaining to your constituents that it's really better that they no longer be able to afford those drugs
...at which point either:
- Bob uses an argument like Joe's argument; this isn't going to be convincing to the public @ large b/c:
-- if they were buying Jim's stuff and now they can't the same counter-arguments as in the individual case applies
-- if they weren't buying Jim's stuff they now can't if they need it in the future
-- additionally Bob is taking away local industry and local autonomy so on in favor of foreign interests (which rarely fares well in any country)
...which is awesome for getting reelected; or maybe Bob tries the realpolitik strategy and explains:
- oh sorry I couldn't negotiate a good (i) option which is why we're forced picking between (ii) and (iii)
- oh but also sorry (oh, so very sorry) we can't pick (ii) even though we'd like to b/c doing so risks some terribly nasty trade sanctions that we just can't afford right now
...which is honest but makes Bob look so completely useless I wouldn't like Bob's re-election odds with this approach, either.
So I think given the incentives Bob's likely choices are obvious, assuming he's an elected official of some sort; a more dictatorial head honcho might make a different decision.
Whether someone more free to take a stab at long-term utility maximization ought to let Jim keep operating or not is pretty much a function of trade sanctions and so on first and only after that some calculation about "what amount of drugs will we be able to buy in the future that cover what % of what conditions will be significant in the future"?
You're somewhat wrong about knockoffs being sustainable -- generally it is sustainable, it just means that a universe of knockoffs isn't going to see new drugs. This means that pharma becomes a low-margin industry, but it's sustainable.
(Exceptions are for things like antibiotics and antivirals, which lose effectiveness over time as the wild population adapts; most other pharma products remain as effective as they ever were.)
Given the economic conditions in the third world -- india being a perfect example -- it's not surprising that india has taken the strategy it's taken; until the crippling disease-riddled poverty is taken care of the smart thing to do is to let the private sector solve the problems it can by taking a soft line on international pharma patents.
India could negotiate bulk purchases of pharma but clearly has decided it's not in its interest to do so; it's a large enough entity to get its own way and has done its own cost-benefit analyses that tip the balance in this favor; perhaps things wouldn't work out if everyone did it but then everyone isn't going to do it, anyways.
As far as Gilead goes: I can assure you that Gilead has hired mckinsey, game-theory phds, and many other eggheads to arrive at a pricing strategy in each legal region by carefully examining:
- expected purchase amount @ each pricepoint
- likelihood of country going rogue @ each pricepoint
...and that prices are set to accommodate Gilead's particular risk preference (where risk == "chance of driving a country to go rogue").
Your example is both inaccurate in critical details:
- you require me to coerce Joe into coming to touch me
- I only require Joe not prevent me from using my own pharma lab and my own materials to cook up my own batch of S
...which is why I won't even answer your question; it's irrelevant to the situation at hand (changing essential details to get the outcome you want is silly).
You're also treating Joe like he's stupid, which is not very likely if he's inventing substance S (you and I may be idiots; Joe is smart with a capital S); given that Joe's a smart cookie it's a safe assumption that Joe is well aware that he's deciding to spend 10 years developing a new technique that can be easily replicated as soon as he invents it.
He's aware of the possibility for (ii) the entire time we're negotiating (i); failing to arrive at a mutually-agreeable arrangement as per (i) (eg something close to cost-of-manufacture; it's not like I can beat that price myself, right?) is a calculated risk on his part, which doesn't always work out in his favor.
There're obvious consequences for (ii) -- among which is Joe no longer deciding to invent substance T -- but those are consequences one can opt for, in precisely the same way that Joe's inflexibility (unwilling to compromise far enough on (i)) has unwanted consequences for Joe (prompting me to pick option (ii)) that he has opted for.
Which in general is the flipside of the "patent-ignoring nations undercut incentive to innovate, making future drugs unlikely to be invented" argument: pharma companies have been extremely well aware in general of eg the situation in india and more generally the sentiment that if push comes to shove (poverty, epidemic, etc.) the right thing to do is ignore patent and manufacture; in the same way that the consequences of ignoring patents are obvious so too is it obvious that driving too hard a bargain for too long will undermine the ability to drive future bargains at all, b/c sooner or later circumstances change and your not-really customers say "fuck it".
EG: it would've been prudent in the long-term for pharmacompanies to push for a standardized international regime for temporary patent abatement (due to epidemic or poverty, etc.) that (presumbably) would have some sliding scale (dire emergencies and abject poverty == SELL AT COST, less so @ the less extreme) and (for example) some notion of compensatory patent extension (eg an extension for 2 years + 2x the duration of the abatement period); such an arrangement wouldn't be ideal, but by proactively crafting a better-than-today, even-if-not-really-good-enough compromise they could've nipped the larger issue (countries going "rogue") mostly in the bud.
Let's reduce it to the level of individual decisions.
I have a terminal disease.
"Pharma Joe" invented a recipe for substance S that will cure my disease; there's no known cure for my disease at this time other than substance S.
My options are:
(i) try to negotiate with Joe to get his permission to make a batch of substance S, thereby continuing to live
(ii) use publicly-available information to make a batch of substance S, thereby continuing to live
(iii) not acquiring substance S, thereby resigning myself to die soon
Joe would prefer that I choose (i) or (iii); I prefer options (i) or (ii).
When we can arrive at an agreeable (i) there's not much to talk about; things are only interesting when Joe wants me to pick option (iii) and I want option (ii).
What is Joe's argument for why I ought to pick (iii) instead of (i)? It amounts to:
- sure, you could save your own life by making a batch of S
- but if you do that then I won't keep inventing substances like S, and thus in the future some other person will have a disease for which there is no cure, b/c Joe's retargeted his research to penis pills
- so the right thing to do is to go off in a corner and die (and quietly, please), so that someone else in the future might live
It's not surprising that this is spectacularly unconvincing on two levels:
- Joe's asking someone to choose to die so someone else might benefit at some point in the future; aside the usual aversion to Christ-like self-sacrifice on the part of individuals, it's more than a little cheeky of Joe to insist on my making such an extreme sacrifice for the greater good when Joe himself is unwilling to make a lesser sacrifice (reduced profits) for the greater good (we know he's unwilling to do this b/c we were unable to arrive at a mutually-satisfactory arrangement in (i), like selling at prices the about-to-be deceased can afford)
- it's also unconvincing because the real "future proposition" isn't "I die but Joe invents substance T that cures some other disease saving other people's lives"; it's "Joe invents substance T that could cure some other disease but then some other schmuck is going to be in the same position of being unable to afford it and having this same conversation; my death just kicks the can down the road"
...and thus most international agreements that allow Joe color of law to enforce (iii) for "the greater good (of Joe)" have been agreed to as riders on larger treaties and whatnot, making it unsurprising that impoverished countries with disease epidemics try to wiggle around such terms as much as possible.
It's of course absolutely the case that widespread choice of (ii) does disincentivize further research on drugs targeting problems (ii)-choosing populations opt for; it's not like the people making these decisions don't understand the consequences...they've weighed the pros and cons and decided that the best option (unsurprisingly) is to put their lives ahead of someone else's intellectual property and deal with the fallout as it comes.
Even if you really think you'd put someone else's IP ahead of your life -- which I doubt you would, if it ever came to that -- it's not Joe's place to decide that I ought to die for the greater good.
The simplified version of it runs:
- medicare (etc) say: 'this is what we reimburse for this procedure', non-negotiable
- providers that take medicare charge the private sector more than the price medicare dictates
...then the argument runs that medicare is forcing private health-care purchasers to make up the shortage / subsidize its low premiums.
The curious part:
- if the private-sector purchasers (whether individuals or insurers) aren't getting their money's worth why are they buying?
In practical terms I think you (and Locklin) are committing a basic error of comparing unlike quantities, perhaps unintentionally.
Take cars, again; I think I have you checked-and-mated. Here goes:
(i) you seem to believe that with respect to personal transportation 1909-1959 saw a "significant" change because cars went from novelty to primary means of conveyance
(ii) you point out that cars haven't changed radically in 1959-2009; they are neither radically "better" (according to a metric like fuel efficiency) nor is the experience of driving 2009 cars radically different than 1959 cars
(iii) you now want to assert that the change in "everyday transportation" is greater from 1909-1959 than from 1959-2009
The structure of this argument is:
- the change you care about in (i) is SOCIAL CHANGE (in terms of lifestyles, activity pattern, etc.)
- the change you care about in (ii) is TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE (for which Locklin used the proxy metric FUEL EFFICIENCY)
- in (iii) you want to conclude that "amount of SOCIAL CHANGE" is declining
- but (ii) is pretty much the definition of a "red herring": FUEL EFFICIENCY and SOCIAL CHANGE don't have all that much to do with each other other than being measurable quantities (loosely speaking)
It's a nice cognitive trick:
- "progress" is a fuzzy word with lots of meanings in lots of places
- you want to make people accept a statement about "progress" in a particular context (overall technological progress)
- you accomplish this by inserting a factual-but-unrelated statement evidencing a lack of "progress" (in this case: in fuel efficiency)
- this "primes" the brain to accept a semantically-similar conclusion without adequate supporting argumentation
...and using FUEL EFFICIENCY as your metric is silly, especially from a physicist: given that it can't be much better than it is given the constraints at hand its lack of progress is a given, and it's only really useful in the argument for its semantic priming effect.
A less kind summary of the proposition at hand is:
- When cars became widely adopted they caused radical social change.
- Incremental changes to cars have (obviously, lol) not caused similarly radical social change (unsurprisingly)
- Ergo the rate of technological progress is slowing down, as evidenced by the lack of radical changes in cars (wut?)
This ought to be seen as a category error, full stop...but it's good enough to pass muster as a rah-rah for the self-styled iconoclast brigade; that's some mighty-fine reasoning-work there, Lou.
But, hey, let's keep running with it.
Even if you're completely right -- car-induced changes in everyday transportation are insignificant in the 1959-2009 era -- you're looking at stuff in a silly way.
I'm going to make the case for air transport being a comparable shift: air transportation did not become easily affordable for consumers until the 70s or 80s or 90s (depending on who you ask and which country you were in).
Before it became affordable it was a luxury item (hence the term "jetset" for the leisure class who could afford to travel around like that), and if people traveled long-range they did so by boat, train, or automobile.
In the modern era air travel is often unbelievably inexpensive -- in some parts of the world international tickets are on par with an expensive restaurant -- to the point that long-distance travel by anything other than plane is rare-to-nonexistent (depending on where you live and how you define long-distance).
Is this a "significant" shift? I LOL at you, b/c:
- if you say "no", you undercut what you claim in (i): that a change in affordability (leading to wider adoption and also to use for a wider variety of things than when it was expensive) counts as "progress"
- if you say "yes" you save (i) so I assume you're going to say (i)
So within the category of "personal transportation" (a mild generalization from "everyday transportation") we have had a significant technological change in the 1959-2009 era.
You can argue it's less significant than the automobile-induced changes; I've got stuff to do so won't participate but at least we're now comparing like kinds (SOCIAL CHANGE and SOCIAL CHANGE instead of SOCIAL CHANGE and FUEL EFFICIENCY).
But social change is a wiggly thing (and the perception of it is often colored by value-judgments; witness Locklin talking about most technology just enabling bad behavior); the appeal of the invalid argumentation strategy is that by throwing in hard facts you make your opinions on relative magnitudes of social change look more objective (and this will work up to the point at which you get called out on the apples-to-oranges).
The example of the cars is so completely bogus that it ought to be embarrassing for a physicist (which Locklin is) to have written it; one would expect them to know better.
It's about like saying:
- between 1900 and 1950 we invented all this awesome new technology
- but the information density of printed books (words-per-page) has remained roughly constant from 1950 to 2000
- ergo the rate of change must be declining
...in other words, compare:
- in column A: an unqualified sense of "rate of progress" over some time interval
- in column B: a product whose performance on some metric is substantially constrained by some combination of physics and rigid human factors
...and then point to lack of substantial improvement in the product's score on the metric in column B as evidence for the deceleration of progress; it is at heart only a qualitative improvement but there's no radical improvement to be had in that area, so looking to it and wondering "why no radical improvements in the information density of printed text?" says more about you than about what's happening.
Now, why the car example is bogus:
There's only so much energy in a gallon of gasoline, and fuel-efficiency is thus bounded to a pretty narrow range of variation.
Modern cars are larger and heavier than equivalent product categories of yesteryear, mainly in response to safety regulations.
Just look at the Nash Metropolitan (conveniently parked in a standard USA parking space for size reference):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nash_Metropolitan.jpg
Or if you're not so good at depth perception:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.a/6a00d8341c630a53ef01156fb...
(next to a cooper mini for comparison).
There's no mystery here: the 40mpg car he picked out of the past got 40mpg b/c it's a tiny car.
This isn't a case of some technological triumph of our forefathers being abandoned by decadent successor generations; it's a case of the laws of physics dictating the range of possible cars, and there being not all that much stateside consumer demand for microcars like the metropolitan.
So yes: cars today are little different in fuel efficiency than cherry-picked microcars of the 60s and 70s because the laws of physics haven't changed between now and then; we're not driving 100mpg micromachines because no one wants to buy them (yet).
I'd wager a fair amount that in a universe in which we were all driving microcars good old Locklin would be bitching about the forgotten musclecars are of yesteryear, along the lines of his concorde complaint in the same article.
I've been through Shiryaev and have very mixed feelings on that one.
It sounds like what you're doing is generating a new worksheet and populating it with (static) data generated by running the user's SQL query.
This is fine for sharing static data but b/c you're apparently not using excel formulas in generating the 'resultset' worksheet (it's just raw data, again) the 'resultset' sheets aren't going to be auto-updating if the underlying data got changed (on the 'sourcedata' worksheet, if you follow).
If you can compile SQL queries into excel formulas that'll stay updated as data change this goes from an A to A+ produce.
You should start by looking at the documentation for Vlookup and Hlookup, as those are the built-in functions people use to (fake) selection.
How do you interpret this:
I was kind of hoping I could hand the blog over to someone else, who could release their indentity and really not worry about it. Plus, it would get some pressure off of me.
...want to place bets about the source of that pressure and what it consists of?
Too bad it never went anywhere; it is the best article on this I've seen.
The easiest heuristic is always to first ask qui bono, and then heavily discount information whose content if true would advance the interests of the information supplier.
Thus: if Pepsi runs an ad on TV saying Pepsi is the schizz and Coke is just fizz, you discount that information heavily b/c Pepsi's just talking its book.
There's a loose analogy to information-theory proper here: the information content of a message is proportional to its unpredictability; if for example you could reliably reproduce an N-bit message once you had the first k < N bits you'd say the message only has k bits of information, not N.
Thus if knowing who is speaking lets you know what they'll say you should just ignore them; if you ever want to find out what they said you just have to remember who they were and reconstruct what they were saying, so you can defer considering it until you have a reason to care.
This looks like ad hominem but isn't; it's just avoiding low-information-gain use of your time.
The other thing to do is to back away from the twin notions that:
(1) holding true beliefs is in and of itself as valuable as you think it is
(2) most participants in a debate (a) attach the same importance to holding true beliefs that you do and (b) would switch to a different belief if the evidence supported it
(1) is probably the hardest to let go, but it's something you have to let go (holding true beliefs when such beliefs are inputs to an important decision is important; otherwise not so much).
(2) is more important.
A good general rule of thumb is that most people like to think of their lives as having had some kind of meaning or purpose, etc.; just living, enjoying what life brings you, and peacefully shuffling off the mortal coil isn't a satisfying life for many people (probably b/c our brains are hardwired for a difficult life in the jungle and get bored in the absence of real threats to overcome).
In places where life is nasty, brutish, and short survival itself is enough of a challenge that the struggle for simple survival is itself enough to cast your life into a narrative where you're a hero of some sort; in modern societies the challenges of life aren't generally enough on their own to provide a convincing narrative of moral heft and so other struggles have to be invented to fill in the meaning.
A first consequence of this impulse is firstly that people tend to assign excessive moral heft to the things they're good at:
- someone who has eg bootstrapped themselves out of a bad situation by virtue of wise decisions and self-restraint will assign a high moral value to wise decisionmaking and self-restraint, so that their life's story has a heroic bent to it above-and-beyond simple utility maximization
- someone who has strong aesthetic or artistic preferences or beliefs will assign a high moral value to aesthetics and artistic purity so that the decisions they have made (not "selling out", etc.) take on a heroic bent above-and-beyond simple utility maximization
- and of course someone who believes themselves to be good at arriving at true beliefs will assign an irrationally high importance to holding true beliefs (if you doubt this just count the # of times pundits or would-be "thinkers" write sentences like "I used to believe X but then I learned about Y and after some struggle I now believe Z instead X")
...etc. and a second consequence of this impulse arises from how it interacts with social life; people are at heart social beings and thus it is very easy to add additional axes of meaning to one's narrative by banding together into a faction as part of a larger struggle against other faction(s).
These affiliation-derived meanings range from sports teams to political labels to "sides" in an argument or public debate.
These two dynamics intersect in areas of contention in predictable ways:
- on each side of an argument you'll have some nucleus (core members) who will be a mix of people who assign a huge important to true beliefs (and currently believe in the side they're on) and shills (representatives of those whose interests hinge on what way the debate gets resolved if it gets resolved)
- then thanks to the way that additional meaning can be added to people's lives the mechanism by which affiliation-derived meaning can be added just by taking a side means that many hangers-on pick sides based on the meaning it gives them to do so (or because they've already made a commitment to a faction in exchange for enhanced meaning and "in for a penny in for a pound" (eg: joining a church makes it easier for them to cast their life as partially a struggle for virtue and against sin; b/c of that prior commitment they also commit against evolution as in the church they joined they can't do both))
With the following consequences:
- the people who hold true belief important can be convinced by reasoning and argumentation, provided the argumentation is sufficiently, overwhelmingly powerful that it's impossible to see said argumentation without coming to agree with it as a rational being; most argumentation -- especially on debatable issues -- is not that strong, and thus not enough on its own merits to nudge someone on the "other side" to take the hit to their self-esteem (as a discerner of true beliefs) and switch
- the shills can't be convinced by anything; they're dishonest participants and will argue their case as long as they keep getting paid
- the affiliational-types aren't going to be convinced by reasoning; the get convinced only when it becomes clear that greater meaning-in-their-lives can be had by switching to the other side, which is more about reconciling conflicting affiliational claims than it is about winning a debate (eg: finding a away to reconcile their religious beliefs with the other side -- thereby letting them keep their religious affiliation and join your side -- is more important than convincing them your side is right). A huge downside of even trying to argue is that arguing with them increases the amount of meaning their participation in the struggle gives them -- as it starts to look and talk like a real struggle, with conflict and bad guys and so on -- best just to make your side seem like the more-meaningful side
Which en fin is why such issues are best ignored. Things will only get worse as technology improves: allowing more communication => more opinions transmitted to more places => more factions / debates (and thus less time to learn the intricacies of each of them even if you wanted to) => more opportunities to join factions and add meaning to life => more of the same only more so.
This will be especially true for historical stuff, since history is vastly underdetermined by the available evidence and the same set of historical facts can usually support dozens of reasonable interpretations; much of the apparent previous state of consensus about what happened historically is as much a function of the previously high barriers to entry in publishing stuff as it is a sign that the previous consensus opinion was correct.
Seasteading is far-out but Patri seems self-aware of that and has the wisdom to take an "I don't have all the answers yet" attitude where warranted.
From what I've seen of David's work (again: if this is any indication) it seems poorly thought-through (probably) or dishonest (possibly); a post-state anarchist society is going to be different, this stuff reads like epicycles-within-epicycles to convince you it'd be "the same but better".
Not editing so as to leave evidence of ignorance intact.
The entire article is a mix of mildly-interesting speculation with lots of bizarre shortcomings of imagination (bizarre in the context of such other flights of fancy; keep in mind this is a guy imaginative enough to come up with the seasteading notion, so he's not lacking in visionary skills).
A quick idiocy is the capital-punishment example:
Consider, as a particular example, the issue of capital punishment. Some people might feel that the risk to themselves of being convicted, correctly or incorrectly, and executed for a capital crime outweighed any possible advantages of capital punishment. They would prefer, where possible, to patronize protection agencies that patronized courts that did not give capital punishment. Other citizens might feel that they would be safer from potential murderers if it was known that anyone who murdered them would end up in the electric chair. They might consider that safety more important than the risk of ending up in the electric chair themselves or of being responsible for the death of an innocent accused of murder. They would, if possible, patronize agencies that patronized courts that did give capital punishment.
If one position or the other is almost universal, it may pay all protection agencies to use courts of the one sort or the other. If some people feel one way and some the other, and if their feelings are strong enough to affect their choice of protection agencies, it pays some agencies to adopt a policy of guaranteeing, whenever possible, to use courts that do not recognize capital punishment. They can then attract anti-capital-punishment customers. Other agencies do the opposite.
There's many bugs in the logic here. The biggest one is that there's such an obvious tension between the theory that you can opt out of capital punishment risk by smart choice of defense agencies and the theory that you can opt for a better deterrent factor by smart choice of defense agencies (eg: those that supply capital punishment) that it's surprising someone could even write the two paragraphs above.
If you don't see it immediately, it works like this:
Firstly is the notion that you can have a greater deterrent to would-be murderers by patronizing a defense agency that patronizes a court that hands out decisions that include the option of capital punishment.
So some dude murders me; what is supposed to happen in this world is something like:
- despite being dead, my contract with the defense agency specifies that they are to pursue vengeance against whoever murdered me
- my defense agency investigates and discovers my killer is Killem Abdul Murder-ar
- (following the example of Tannahelp) rather than just hire a sniper to satisfy the contract in an efficient fashion, my defense agency instead calls up Murder-ar's defense agency and we set a court date
- my defense agency presents the case ; we get a pronouncement of the death penalty
- my defense agency then tracks Murder-ar down and shoots him, satisfying its contract
...and knowledge of this hypothetical sequence of events is enough to deter would-be murderers b/c it illustrates the grave consequences to them that would follow from murdering me.
Secondly is the notion that I can opt out of capital punishment by patronizing a defense agency that doesn't patronize a court that hands out capital punishment.
So I accidentally kill some dude b/c I drive my forklift in an irresponsible fashion, but his aggrieved widow believes my actions to be murder and has her defense agency pursue matters. What is supposed to happen is something like:
- the widow's agency calls my agency and is like "we want to kill frig to satisfy the murder-vengeance clause in our defense contract"
- my agency is like "we're a defense agency so of course we're not going to say 'fine with us'"; a court date is arranged
- because my agency is one that doesn't patronize courts that hand out death penalties I can sleep soundly at night because I know that whatever punishment the court metes out for my manslaughter at least it won't be capital punishment
Thought of in isolation these both seem cool -- oh wow I can scare away potential murders with the threat of capital punishment or I can avoid the threat of capital punishment if I so choose! Freedom rocks!
But there's such an obvious tension between the two possibilities:
- deterring people from killing you via exposing them to capital punishment risk depends upon being able to expose them to capital punishment risk even against their own wishes
- being able to expose people to capital punishment risk against their own wishes directly works against your ability to voluntarily opt out of capital punishment risk
...including them back-to-back with no explanation of how the tension reconciles is (or should be) embarrassing.
There's a lot in the linked essay that's similar (which is impressive in its own right given how short it is).
I wish it was better thought-out than it is; it reads like a "blub" political philosopher explaining why X is a better blub than Y.
http://www.usps.com/postalhistory/_pdf/PostalSavingsSystem.p...
...we had this but it got phased out in the 60s. Who knew?
It works good for memberships or online shopping; you have something like amazon.orders@your.domain, zappos.orders@your.domain, etc.
In real life not so much: people know they're getting a "fake" email address (regardless of whatever scheme you pick) and get put off by this.
There's two kinds of things here (and I'd lump them separately):
(1) there's "putting money in vaults" and handling long-distance transactions (eg: debit cards, check-clearing, and so on)
(2) there's banks as "so you've got money you want to lend but no time? give your money to us and we'll loan it out, passing some share of the profits back to you" intermediaries
(1) is arguably what most people actually use banks for; (2) is how most consumer banks make their money (in the form of mortgages and cds and so on).
Aside from historical circumstance there's no particular reason why (1) and (2) are handled by the same institutions. Since (1) on its own isn't profitable any institution that does (1) needs to have its (1) activity subsidized; the present situation is that banks subsidize (1) via (2), but there's nothing that intrinsically says institutions that do (2) should do (1) (or that the only way to subsidize (1) is via (2)).
In many countries (Japan, some european countries that escape me now) there's an entire system of "postal banking" which is basically de-facto state-subsidized banking expressly for the purpose of (1).
If you think about it the connection between (1) and the postal system is pretty logical: the postal service exists to streamline communication within the state; it's pretty sensible to piggyback a payments and money transfer system on the existing communications infrastructure (and of course it's much more reliable to transfer money then it is mail an envelope with cash).
The USA never went the route of establishing a postal savings bank (nb: the historical names include "savings" but they always allowed payments / de-facto "checks" to be drawn); this was mainly b/c the idea was invented well after the founding of the republic and the USA is pretty slow on the uptake wrt good ideas invented elsewhere.
One of the takeaways or realizations I see people coming to a lot in response to the current crises is along the following lines:
- at the moment keeping commerce flowing depends on keeping checking and debit and credit-card systems all working smoothly (in other words: keeping the (1) activity going); without that the economy halts
- currently keeping (1) going is dependent upon the health of various private parties (banks + other financial firms); as these entities don't really make any money from (1) directly their ability to perform the services of (1) is contingent on how well they're doing in their other endeavors (activities in category (2), writ large); (1) is not enough
- thus disruption in (2) leads to disruption in (1) leads to disruption in the entire economy, even when (so it seems) there's no direct connection between (2) and (1)
...which leads to a realization that the current arrangement worked until it didn't but it's not that great of a system because it needlessly couples (1) to (2); depending on the kindness (and prosperity) of strangers to keep essential infrastructure running isn't a good plan.
Once people have that reaction they tend to produce one of the following proposals:
(A) set up a system of state-run full-reserve checking+savings accounts + debit cards, etc. (and optionally: phase out the FDIC guarantees; if you want a guarantee go with the full reserve bank); fund operations from taxes
(B) set up a dumb/simple/basic bank that just does the basics and takes almost no risk
I tend to think (A) is the longer-term smarter option but am well aware how against the grain it runs in the USA; (B) is like someone trying to accomplish the same goals but not really understanding how the tools they have at hand work (that's what the original post is like).
The quick case for (A) is that there's a reason the constitution grants the authority to build a post-office: aside from the general betterment of the commonwealth it specifically prevents a situation where your (then-fledgling) government is effectively held hostage by private-sector actors because those private actors own and operate infrastructure essential for the government to function (what good is a federal government if Megamail Inc. won't deliver it's mail?). These days basic savings + checking + long-distance payments are critical infrastructure on par with the post office (and on par with the original grant of authority to coin money and so on), and to avoid being held hostage the right option is to provide a de minimis payment infrastructure.
Good luck with that politically, though.
I think you meant this link:
http://www.machinelearning.org/proceedings/icml2005/papers/0...
...reading now.
Does anyone have any insight into intuitive interpretations of the eigenvectors fpr the eigenvalues < 1? I'm drawing blanks.
(Edited: to be clear, I understand what the linked algorithm is doing and I think it is very clever, and I am not surprised that it works reasonably well for finding similar topics on wikipedia. I'm just at a blank for what it means to say that 'the i-th component of the (unit) eigenvector for the k-th largest eigenvalue is X'.)
If you want to try it out this is a fun tool:
http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~paoluzzi/plasm/
It's a dialect of FL with stuff tossed in for programmatically generating 3d models.
I'm not aware of any other easily accessible working implementations of FL-alike languages.
"Colored personalities": within a few seconds of meeting someone in person I have a very strong colored visual image associated with them; this is mostly consistent (subsequent meetings with the same person will induce very similar visual images) and it feels like there are patterns to what sorts of people yield what colored image but there's no easily-summarizable rule like "sad people == blue, happy people == red".
The sequence of perceptions is roughly:
- step 1: see person, wait a few seconds
- step 2: color-pattern visual image emerges
- step 3: the color-pattern visual image itself triggers a reaction in me (at a subconscious/"gut feeling" level) about what I'll likely think of this person, eg particular colors+patterns will leave me with a feeling that I'll be more likely to get along with or not get along with a particular person, or that a particular person is/is not reliable, etc
...so it's basically an involuntary/automatic production of a colored visual pattern that then triggers a gestalt response (particular color patterns suggest a person's personality is composed of a particular weighted superposition of eigenpersonalities, so to speak).
I'd say the accuracy is pretty high; I don't keep exact score but I'd ballpark these reactions as accurate in the high 80% range (or higher).
Before I saw in the linked article that 6% or so of respondents mentioned "colored personalities" I wouldn't have thought to call this synaesthesia; a perceptual quirk, sure, but not synaesthesia proper. Even now, without knowing more about what the people claiming to have "colored personality" synaesthesia are actually claiming to perceive I'm not sure that what I just described is the same thing, really.
The simplest interpretation of the underlying process would be that there's some mix of gestalt-ish perceptions of things like: gait, posture, body movement patterns, eye movement patterns, and facial expression movement patterns that can be perceived quickly and work as fairly reliable indicators of "personality"; the "synaesthasia" here works by having those gestalts get mapped to some combination of color + spatial pattern which then get superposed and presented.
I figure the same perceptual process (sans colored image) is at work in everyone; assuming my interpretation of the underlying mechanic is correct the only "advantage" this form of "synaesthesia" provides is that such gestalt perceptions pass through a portion of my mind more easily accessible to conscious thought (and introspection), which makes it somewhat easier to introspectively modify my behavior ("my gut is telling me this person is a flake, but even so I need to be polite, so let me act polite." instead of unknowingly / unintentionally treating the person like I would treat a flake due to automatic perceptions) or to adjust what I'm doing to the specific person at hand ("clearly this person is like THIS so I should present this material like THAT").
Neither of those behavior adjustments requires this "synaesthesia"; it's just easier to remember to do it when there's a consciously-accessible visual flag reminding you to do it.
That's rather lengthy I know but I don't know a shorter way to summarize a "synaesthesia" of something abstract ("personality"); I'm still on the fence as to whether it's best characterized as "synaesthesia" or just a perceptual / personality quirk, and short of ultra-granular real-time brain imaging becoming available I don't know that the distinction between "synaesthesia"/"perceptual quirk" will be cleanly resolvable.
The others are simpler to summarize:
"Colored tastes": most flavors have a color pattern associated with them that isn't really associated with the item's actual color. EG: ketchup is a dull grey blob fading to an undersaturated neon pink around the edges; it disappears by shrinking inwards (the pink fringe remaining constant width as it does so, until it becomes so small that there's no gray interior) until it vanishes. Whereas mustard is a shotgun-distributed bunch of deep deep green-brown rectangles (much wider than tall) with purplish-green grains in them that vanish first (to a deeper purple-green) then the surrounding rectangles fade to the same purple green then the green abruptly fades out leaving a hazy translucent unsaturated purple stain that itself slowly evaporates.
Specific flavors' visuals are pretty consistent. Since you ask: this doesn't give me any particular ratatouille-style knack for cooking or any heightened enjoyment of food; it seems pretty useless generally.
"Colored Pain": what's to summarize here? Examples are that extreme muscle fatigue is somewhat ultraviolet (eg a deep black-purple core with a very thin, very bright purple fringe around the deg) and is more ripply (like sand dunes) if it's on my backside and more like prison bars or a city skyline (lots of tall-but-narrow parallel vertical strips); tendonitis-style inflamed pinching is more white-yellow (white core yellow fringe) and ellipsoidal, with some overlay of radial banding and grid overlays...etc.
"Colored Odors": odors have (nonsensical) colors attached. Vanilla is a circular white-yellow area with ripples like it'd have if a wind was blowing "upwards"; seaweed has a relaxing orange-yellow undulation to it; hotdogs have a white-yellow "jailbar" look, etc.
"Colored temperatures": should really be "colored temperature + humidity + airflow pattern (eg how windy is it, how choppy is the wind)". Here the color is mostly about airflow and the various grid patterns are more about temperature.
As with the longer explanation about "colored personalities" I would be hesitant to call these synaesthesia proper; unlike seeing letters in particular colors these perceptions are not directly overlaid on my normal visual field; they're just simply very prominently displayed in minds eye in response to various stimuli, and I think of them more as color associations then as synaesthetic perceptions.
I've gone into this much detail b/c I was surprised to see these mentioned as often as they were by self-identified synaesthetes, so I figured may as well post the general experiences and see if anything turns up.
Colored personalities
Colored tastes
Colored pain
Colored odors
Colored temperature
but (of the list at the bottom) those five are all things I've arguably experienced; that said it's hard to know what to say of these really as the distinction between a strong+reliable association and synaesthesia proper when you're talking about more-abstract "senses"; given that they're all color<->nonvisual perception the simpler explanation is probably just strong color associations, not synaesthasia.
I was motivated to post b/c I was actually surprised that "colored personalities" were as high on the list of responses (or really on it at all); it's surprising it's (apparently) that common.
If that's what it is it seems like a poor investment; hopefully it's something better.