jorleif

This is commercial enterprise, not regulation. Taxation could simply make driving them around too expensive.

That is a good point... So now I'm back to the giant slingshot idea.

Increased pageviews, yet many users also hate constant outrage and leave the platform entirely. It is not obvious that a platform with civil, high-quality discussion would lose in the marketplace (not obvious it would win either, though).

I wonder if gliders that are powered by electric motors only during takeoff and landing could be a solution here. It's not like we get very annoyed by eagles soaring in the sky.

Sure greed/profit motive, but it is accepted by the general public because it is local direct benefit (less crop failure) vs diffuse harm to a large area.

It is not necessary, but if society was good at assigning a price to the relative merits of informational resources vs physical goods it would result in a more efficient economy.

Yes, science and art will progress, but if there is no economy attached, then they will be dominated by people who don't have to make a living. Unless we fund the whole thing publicly. That would work, but in other contexts we believe the market is more efficient.

These kinds of techniques are often claimed to be effective against flash floods, which makes sense since they slow down water transfer to rivers. Does anyone know any studies about how effective it could be against seriously heavy precipitation of the scale of Harvey or South Asia floods right now? In other words, how well does the approach scale?

True, but from the car manufacturer's point of view, all of their customers buy new cars, so comparing what is low-range or high-range to other new cars makes sense.

The author does not articulate his critique very well beyond claiming that the VC get disproportionate return compared to land and labor. A much better critique is Jaron Lanier's Who Owns the Future. There he argues that the problem is when companies create monopolies that shrink the overall economy (Instagram vs Kodak, Facebook vs publishing in general). The startup then provides the public with free services but at the same time it decreases employment opportunity. The whole machinery works as long as some other sector of the economy grows, but that is unlikely to be the case forever. Somehow there would need to be economic growth, not just lowered cost.

This seems closely related to PG's essay Black Swan farming: "there is probably at most one company in each YC batch that will have a significant effect on our returns, and the rest are just a cost of doing business"

It seems that for the publishers as well, rather than betting big on a few predicted winners, they could bet small on a large number of authors with big potential in the best case.

Is it actually feasible to 3d print a realistic rhino horn from synthesized keratin? Googling keratin 3d printing mostly turns up Pembient itself. One would suspect that keratin printing would have plenty of more humble applications (synthetic hair, nails, biomimetic prosthetics).

I feel this solves a very small part of the problem. This is only about the morality of the individual scientist, while the problem is at the level of the collective process of science. I mean, it is of course good if the individual scientist who discovers X way to kill off humanity keeps it secret, but eventually someone else will also discover X, and then someone else, and so on. Do we require of scientists that they all keep these things secret?

Of course, we may not want to have terrorists building atomic bombs, so some secrecy is prudent, but secrecy does not generally hinder: 1) Some bad people from accessing said information, now having monopoly, which may make matters even worse 2) Discovering the same thing independently - Yes, we may keep it secret, but that does not change the laws of physics, the exploitation potential is still there.

Having done a little science myself, usually there both are small incremental improvements with small but predictable gains and large leaps with big potential gains but very unpredictable outcomes. The former are optimizations around a current local optimum, and the latter try to escape it towards a better local optimum. For that reason the incremental gains tend to saturate over time, and I suspect that is what Goodenough is dismissing.

I don't disagree, but experimentation should still be on the table. Maybe a certain state or municipality should be sponsored to try policies more along the scandinavian kind. Of course this is problematic. How do you for example stop everyone from moving into that particular priviliged district, etc?

This is a very interesting idea and has some good potential for social change. So much energy, so misplaced. As a scandinavian my first thought is: Don't Americans realize that there might a point where it is cheaper to provide (or more exactly, force) better education and social security on those at risk, than increasing the police force and incarceration rates?

There is something that is not quite right with this narrative that Gladwell spins though. His past examples are about the winners of their era. On the other hand, the contemporary examples are losers who end up killed and squeezed by the police. Presumably, in the earlier mafia era there were also plenty of losers, we just don't hear about them.

The main thesis which I think is sound, though, is that innovation often (usually) involves a certain amount of breaking societal norms (which includes laws). It can take violent forms, such as the mafia, but also less violent law-breaking is often present. Think Napster, as a clear example but why not include Uber and AirBnB as well? Often innovation is not just about new technology, but rather re-negotiating social contracts. For this reason, when technological or social change introduces new economic opportunity, often it becomes populated by people who are willing to violate laws. I think as societies, we should try to figure out how to better utilize the violent and rebellious behvior of people, while limiting the detrimental effects. The same adrenaline addict might kill himself and a few pedestrian on a motorcycle when evading the police, but could instead be allowed to risk his life in some space exploration program or why not a technology startup.

While you are of course right trivially about the sheer amount of information, I'm not so sure about the useless part. Right now a lot of consumer protection and activism is driven by someone trying to sift through similar information and then make a lot of noise about their findings. That is also inefficient in a way that favors certain kinds of players in the marketplace.

For instance, if I knew the producer of certain items, I might decide to buy directly from them instead of through a middleman, such as a grocery store, but now there are all kinds of barriers to doing just that. Furthermore, if I could somehow contact the coffee farmer who grew my coffee beans, then I could also ask him for a particular kind of bean that I might prefer. This is less efficient in the production sense than shipping everything in large batches, but might be more efficient in the sense of getting what I want. It is quite common when shopping for furniture to find exactly what you want, except too wide, narrow, high, etc. Having it hand-made in the west would be prohibitively expensive, perhaps 10x of the price of the item, so we settle for the one which is not quite right. But if there was a simple mechanism for ordering the modified item from the original developing world producer then that might be very useful.

I guess the question is not whether we could make marketplaces more visible to better know whom our elves are. The question is whether we want to.

I have sometimes wondered if technology could be used to make some house-elves more visible. When I buy an apple or some meat in the grocery store they are simply opaque to me. Their production is completely invisible. Was it a farmer in my home country who produced it, driving around in his comfortable tractor, or was it a hard pressed third world farmer whose children go uneducated despite his best efforts? Knowing this through some technological means, even to an imperfect degree, would probably affect my choices.

> People were incredibly indignant about who might receive some benefit from stuff that was often just a step above garbage.

This is a quite fascinating phenomenon psychologically that one has to face when meeting low income people: They don't necessarily want most the things you think they should want most. I remember being shocked by seeing "poor people" have IPods and IPhones or similar "luxurious" electronics while complaining that they don't have money for rent. One part of it is that electronics are actually very cheap compared to living expenses. The other part is that it does not matter what your income level is, there is still a desire for self-actualization. This last point is well argued in this following quote:

When you actually meet people living in tough conditions, you realize that they don’t exactly make up dreams for their lives in some UN-approved sequence; water first, food next, healthcare third, money fourth, philosophy when I am rich, alcohol and marijuana never. ... Humans are capable of nurturing rockstar dreams even while they are schlepping their twenty-miles-a-day to fetch water. There is a reason there is music and art in all societies, not just the privileged ones. (http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/07/31/the-quality-of-life/)

While I don't know exactly how, I think the insight that the receivers of social security are not primarily motivated to climb the Maslow hierarchy one level at the time, but rather shopping all levels at the same time, could be useful to build better interventions.

> College-educated white men can expect to live to age 80, while counterparts without a high-school diploma die by age 67.

I wonder if reality is as bad as it sounds here. Factors that cause early death might very well correlate with bad education outcomes. Any kind of lacking self-control could result both in bad education outcomes as well as early death.

Probability theory is great, but there are still environments that are unpredictable enough that experimentation is the only alternative. Think of science, for example; If probability theory combined with past experience was enough, there would be no point in doing experiments.

Probability theory can only give you the best estimate from the past. If the future is in any way different from the past, for instance because the past gives insufficient information about the process in question, the prediction will still often be wrong, and you are back to experimentation rather than thinking.

Excellent point, but would you care to explain how you would match subjects in this case? They should be comparable pre-something, but what would that something be?

As the author was speaking of his experience as a founder, I read his "logic does not always agree with reality" to mean that in an environment of sufficient uncertainty logic is not that useful, because you can think logically as much as you want, but you still cannot predict your environment. No thinking-based solution, be it logic or something else can work if you cannot predict your environment. It does not matter if logic is flawless or not. It is misleading to think about it as putting in the wrong assumptions, rather it is that in an unpredictable environment you cannot know what the right assumptions are.

Yes, but you say that as if it was a bad thing. For me it was a really hard experience when doing science, that I could not "be smart about it", and do things "in smart ways", because that would require me to be able to predict which experiments would work out etc. Any high uncertainty environments are "throwing shit on the wall". You can't be smart about the throwing part, only what you do when something sticks. This is very hard for smart people to accept. See also: http://www.ted.com/talks/uri_alon_why_truly_innovative_scien...

It may come as a surprise to people who read lots of startup news, because you tend to only hear about the successes, but generally it is not very easy to disrupt any business, or even become a millionaire. Achieving those for e.g. laundry might not make the world a much better place, but it is still quite an achievement.

The other side of this "wholly unnecessary"-business, is that with rising standards of living, necessities are already fairly well provided for, so it is quite obvious that any future desired consumer good will be mostly in the unnecessary category. A funny read about these types of things is "The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation" by Christopher J. Berry, where he describes 18th century philosophers discussing what is luxury (i.e unnecessary) and what is necessity. They end up with a paradoxical example regardning the scant clothing of "savages" (that is non-europeans in warmer climates), and cannot resolve the fact that despite this clothing being really primitive by their standards, it is not strictly necessary for survival, or even most other activities, so they must conclude that even that is just luxury.

I find this idea of a cultural problem interesting, and in my opinion that we program with plain text is essentially a completely arbitrary choice. That said, in practice almost all of the non-plain-text tools I know are some kind of special case tool and then you still need to write source code for all the pieces of the program that don't fit the mold of the GUI tool.

As I see it, WYSIWYG works great if you create a non-interactive thing, like a document, image or video. As soon as you want to present the same information in several formats, or show headlines of articles in several places you need to abstract those things. None of this is impossible with WYSIWYG, but it is usually much more work than just having some kind of plain-text at the core.

On the other hand, a well-executed WYSIWYG editor with a well-defined abstract document model would be a great thing. The abstract document model is really essential (and probably plain-text based). The minute you let people WYSIWYG edit, they start doing formatting oriented things such as add spacing using actual spaces. It looks the same on their screen, but might break other formats of the same information. If you tell them to stop doing "that kind of thing", then very soon they are essentially doing plain text-editing with a WYSIWYG tool.

While this is true, I would argue that there is a social expectation that an IMDB review is written by someone who has seen the movie. Especially, it is expected to be true on average with the usual "few bad apples" thrown in the mix. In this case, this expectation does not hold, and in this sense these reviews are truly anomalous (they are produced by a different process than the other ones). From the perspective of the expected usage of the reviews this anomaly is indeed possible to see as an error, rather than just slightly different behavior.

While the answer to the question is quite good, the rant at the end really considers any kind of skepticism towards medicine "mumbo-jumbo". The key point is the accuracy of the medical prediction from the measurements. If you indeed have a tumor of the kind Jobs had, then it is certain that you will have problems. However, if you have mild hypertension or high cholesterol, you might have a problem, or then you might not. Treatment itself can cause problems of similar magnitude, and therefore being skeptical can be well founded.

Ideally you get to work on "what you are interested in", which is the key appeal. Money-wise it is often a game for suckers.

I agree, my own experiences in CS are not at all as bad as those of the OP, but still it took a long time for me to figure out how the system works, and why senior people might choose to leave students to their own devices when the student clearly does not know what to do, and how to be productive.