nmrm

> ACH is infuriatingly slow.

Tell me about it.

> If you'd like a payroll run to arrive in employee accounts on a Friday, it must be initiated almost a week prior.

Right. It'd love to see BC companies do well and then die off, so that we get reforms in banking without the unnecessary cruft of an intermediate currency intended for nothing except standing in-between fiat transactions. OR the inherent risk to consumers which comes with lack of regulation.

> The real benefit is time of transfer.

To what extent does this benefit come from not being subject to regulation? (edit: not rhetorical; I've no idea)

> If you'd like a payroll run to arrive in employee accounts on a Friday, it must be initiated almost a week prior.

But the check still arrives on Friday, so the benefit is really to the business rather than the employee. This negates the employee-centric benefits you mention in the next paragraph (pay day loans, credit cards, etc.)

That is, unless the business is giving advances on payroll. But I think that's something companies don't do for reasons unrelated to choice of currency and transfer time. (edit: I suppose another alternative is that you could pay your employees more often because the process is cheaper and faster. That would be a big win. But I think other cash flows would in some cases prevent this from happening unless everything is done in BTC.)

edit: Die off is a bit harsh? I don't want fiat->btc->fiat because it's just silly, but of course if btc causes reforms in the banking industry I sincerely hope btc companies make a huge amount of money in the process :-)

edit2: Also, thanks for the link!

> transactions, once confirmed are not reversible.

Oh wonderful! So if I (as a customer or as a service) make a mistake I'm completely hosed. And since the service isn't insured (yay no regulation), a mistake on one customer's account can harm everyone else.

My point was that this business model exposes everyone to unacceptable risk, and therefore isn't sustainable with or without regulation.

> Instead you can use escrows while paying with Bitcoins.

Escrow is not a competitive advantage.

> Secondly the Bitcoin network is much more efficient in terms of economic resources

Fiat -> BTC -> Fiat adds an unnecessary link to the Fiat -> Fiat transfer. How could this possibly be more efficient?

There are two sets of reasons.

The first are essential -- insurance, regulation, etc.. My claim is that BC's competitive advantage in these settings will evaporate with scale.

The second set is inessential -- banks got lazy and greedy. Again, at scale BC has no advantage over lean cash transfer startups or even just banks cutting the fat when BC becomes anything close to a threat.

For me, the best-case scenario is that BC startups are successful, force banks to reform, and then languish in obscurity since the extra step of indirection isn't necessary for fast/safe/cheap cash transfers.

The rhetoric around explanations of the utility of cryptocurrency has changed a lot in the past few years.

These days, the major emphasis is on circumventing the fees/processes associated with banking (as opposed to the libertarian and/or anonymity rhetoric, which dominated a couple years ago). As a witness, this landing page.

And I think the rhetoric has converged to the strongest argument -- political ideology aside, the only true substantial marketplace advantage of BC over sovereign currency is the ability to side-step the banking industry.

But then, this makes Bitcoin mostly a cottage industry taking advantage of technology to side-step banking regulations. I see two likely outcomes -- regulations are extended to BC and BC companies start charging as much as banks to compensate for the inherent riskiness of the business, or banks push for regulatory reform while making their services significantly cheaper and faster.

I hope for the latter, because if fiat -> fiat transaction is your only goal, cryptocurrency is just an inefficient hack. If I just want to transfer some cash to someone, I'd much rather go directly through my bank (quickly and without fees) than route through another currency just for the hell of it. There's no reason to broaden the attack surface and add yet another middle-man (I mean, entrepreneur).

In reality, I expect a combination of the two former scenarios will cripple BC, and that a new era of internet cash transfer services will serve this market instead.

I have another apt application of this already-stretched analogy, but I think it works well w.r.t. the pain of doing large projects without the right tools:

A bicycle ride to the next town is enjoyable. Paddle boating across the Atlantic gets old fast.

okay, fair enough.

What about the Code Complete examples posted somewhere on this thread? ("above", at the moment)?

What about checkable specifications together with a comment explaining the formula, particularly for anything with a nice physical intuition? This kind-of addresses the out-of-date comment problem.

Another example which came to mind is a Lamport comment about some sort of layout-related thing, I can't remember specifics. The comment gives a really good intuitive feel for why his code produces a nice-looking layout. Without the physical intuition provided by the comment, the code is pretty difficult to grok. I can't find it, so I really hope I'm not making this up...

edit: 2nd par

> For scientific coding, comments should align with the underlying theory for the code

100x this. Scientific software should be held to a different set of standards than non-scientific software, primarily because you can probably not assume that your reading is familiar with the underlying domain.

I'm not sure I would describe Racket as recent.

> All those can steal users money if compromised.

Not in a vacuum; they have to be deployed in a setting where that's possible.

> Would you include web browsers, OSs, system libraries and such in that definition?

It's sort-of a moot point, because the major products in all of these areas are routinely analyzed from a security perspective. Apple and Microsoft both spend a lot of money on security, and security researchers spend lots of time and effort auditing linux.

> If so, who do you suggest be responsible for that in an open source project?

The organization deploying the software in a security-critical setting should follow best practices when selecting and maintaining components.

There's a significant difference between engineering failures that happen even when you've followed best practices, and very preventable engineering failures that happen only because you've not followed best practices. Just because perfect security isn't possible doesn't mean we should give up entirely and not even both sanitizing input, for instance.

Additionally, OS vendors should not encourage users to use their software in security-critical settings unless the vendor is following best practices w.r.t. security. This is where I could see some bitcoin projects getting into trouble.

I'm referring only to the specific case of regulations which cover engineering practice (as opposed to more industry-specific regulations, for instance, which I don't know enough to comment on).

In these cases, absolutely yes! The shouldness should be codified into law.

The best mechanism (regulation vs. after-the-fact culpability; specific legislation vs. using existing frameworks, etc.) is debatable.

But companies who cause public harm by not following best practices (either intentionally or due to poor trained engineers) should be held legally responsible for preventable disasters. Just like it's done in many more mature (as in older) engineering fields.

I think this makes a lot more sense in the case of gas/oil, where you actually need something to fill the tubes.

This is great to hear. The best way for software to keep itself relatively unburdened by (poorly implemented) regulation is for industry to hold itself to high standards. And why wouldn't we? We're proud of what we build.

I'll be very curious to see how companies built up around client software but not directly handling money are treated in your proposal. I think safety-critical industries cover these in various different ways, normally under the assumption that the companies are producing either a) "components" for use in safety-critical systems; or b) tools which will be used for QA processes. I'm not sure either applies well, especially in the case of OSS. And I don't know of anything similar in finance.

The honest answer is that I don't know, because I don't know how much money the reddit tipbot handles or how long the money stays vulnerable to a potential bug in the software. This is criteria I suggest:

> for any piece of software from which it's possible to drain large sums of money

To which I might add "directly" or "quickly" or "covertly", but I think you get the intent. My edit to the parent comment also applies, since none of these is a binary value and risk management should match the assumed risk.

edit: I would say that the fact that it's only a few bucks per user is not relevant, especially if that limit isn't hard-coded.

Professional auditing and security testing should be necessary for any piece of software from which it's possible to drain large sums of money, regardless of who's running the software or holding the money. In fact, I'd argue anything less constitutes an ethical breach on the part of the lead engineer(s).

I'm not really sure why that particular regulation is so onerous in any of these situations, since any responsible team would be thinking about security throughout, including and especially post-development.

At least in principle (maybe you'd prefer different auditing standards or practices -- that's what I mean by in principle).

edit: of course each of these is a different sort of service, and different levels of risk management are appropriate. In particular, the case of Blockchain seems like a real quagmire. I guess it would probably depend heavily on the revenue model.

Really my only point is that I would have a really hard time sleeping at night if I had to sign off on not applying state-of-the-art auditing and testing techniques any of these, even Blockchain. Maybe I'm too crotchety and old-school for bitcoin.

So, I tried to think of counter-examples to "most (and possibly all?) early application of mathematics required computation" just for the sake of discussion.

I think I have only one, which is the establishment of axioms, both philosophically (as a method) and specifically (e.g. in Elements).

A revisionist history might say that choosing axioms doesn't require any computation, just a keen sense of style and close observation of the world.

But actually, I'm sure that the choice of axioms was a long and drawn-out process informed mostly by computation and checks that the computed values/proven theorems matched with physical intuition. After all, that's kind-of how it's done today, even by people who have lots of experience with formal systems.

Now I really want to read pre-Euclidean mathematical philosophy to see if I'm correct :-)

> Premises are not part of the argument, they're assertions that the argument is based on

You kind of answer yourself by identifying the fact that premises are often called into question during the course of an argument:

> If we don't simply agree on the premises, an argument has to be made to support the ones we don't agree on, and that argument will have further premises. If we don't agree on those premises, an argument has to be made to support the ones we don't agree on, and that argument will have further premises.

Your parent's argument was that this can go on forever, and never really grounds out, which demonstrates the flaw in the "argumentation is reducible to mechanistic checking" mentality.

I pretty much agree with your parent, because you can see it even when you go all the way to the ground. A lot of evidence cannot get better than statistical, and statisticians sometimes argue about the best way to approach their field. Even for non-statistical arguments, there's some old beef in mathematics about aoc.

But even for most issues where these foundational questions aren't relevant, doing enough work to formalize arguments is intractable.

> That I claim to have a moral value is an objectively verifiable external truth.

That's not very useful when we're trying to make a moral decision and have different competing values. Most political discussions are utilitarian with a mix of various moral imperatives (e.g. optimize well-being, but abide by the constitution's letter and intent).

> Isn't the entire political process an act of trying?

I think he meant it's not worth trying to treat the arguments as chains of reasoning working from a closed set of premises.

Although I agree that the political process in most places could benefit from a bit more logic, it's worth noting that the political process is the act of trying to get power, not trying to reason soundly :-)

> It doesn't take 20 years to evaluate an argument.

Yes it can, and even in barely contrived scenarios if your proof calculus isn't nice enough.

More importantly, in very practical cases even not assuming adversarial (e.g. Microsoft on standards committees), it most definitely can take 20 years to find a valid argument. Exponential growth is serious stuff. Triple exponential growth is just stupid fast.

If you can't wait 20 years, then you have to move forward with arguments for not-valid-but-sometimes-true cases. And in this case, the agent with the most compute power can generate contradictions for opposing props more quickly and can also generate true instances matching his policy preferences more quickly. Thus, bounded argumentation often inherently favors the more resource-rich adversary.

And the same thing works in more informal settings as well.

One way to cope with this is to disregard arguments from known bad actors. We can discuss rather that's the correct course of action, but the need is a provable fact of the most useful formal systems and an observable fact of informal argumentation (I'm still not sure which you want to discuss, since your assumptions make me think you view all arguments as formal systems, but most arguments -- including this one -- clearly aren't in any meaningful sense of the word formalized).

> I disagree with your premise. I believe that all arguments rest of the degree of truth of their premises

I categorically wasn't referring to the choice of premises, but rather to the cost of finding and evaluating valid arguments themselves, even once premises are settled, for pretty much any interesting/realistic set of premises. That is, in your words, "how those premises lead to their conclusion"

The cost of finding a valid argument, or even deciding rather a prop is true without producing a witnessing argument, is more often than not intractable.

> No, I'm not [assuming arguments cost nothing -- in terms of money or effort -- to produce]

> I'm only interested within this thread about the portion of marketing that is argument construction and analysis, and not in conflating argumentation with rhetoric, marketing, or propaganda.

I assert these two statements are in direct contradiction, since I've provided several examples in this thread of how even and especially appeals to valid argumentation can be used as a form of rhetorical manipulation or propaganda.

Arguments, formal or informal, are costly to produce and even sometimes costly to evaluate.

People with vested interests can and do produce higher-quality arguments than those who don't have the means or simply don't care. Or people who want no action to happen can bog down the conversation. Or people who want something to happen can throw more resources at research and argument construction than their opponents for finite time, and win out.

And all of this even if we assume that every prop has a truth value and that finding that truth value is even decidable, which definitely is not the case.

> Why would you do that?

Because I have a finite amount of time in the world. Because we need to decide which policy to enact (or not) today and not in 20 years. Because producing and evaluating arguments takes time, and -- most importantly -- because bad actors exist.

> The idea that I would throw out someone's argument because I've decided that it must be wrong in advance seems ludicrous.

Witness e.g. Microsoft trolling standards committees into non-existence back in the day. I'm sure they had an endless supply of valid and brilliantly illustrated technical points to consider, but at some point you have to say "you're a bad actor, and I'm going to start disregarding your arguments because you're making the decision process intractable and, like it or not, something needs to be done eventually".

--

Regarding infomercials:

> The reason I don't waste my time vetting the arguments in infomercials is because I'm not currently interested in a juicer, not because of a belief that people who make infomercials are liars, no matter how consistent their arguments or verifiable their premises.

Right. You have an a priori opinion that you don't need a juicer (or whatever), and you stick with that instead of wasting time considering the commercial's many valid arguments about how buying a juicer will totally enhance your life.

edit: it's not that the infomercial guys are liars per se. It's just that you've decided that evaluating their arguments for why their product will make you happier probably isn't worth your time. And in most cases, I claim that most people make that decision precisely because the source is a paid advertisement. That's an ad hom dismissal of the argument that juicers save marriages (or whatever, can you tell I don't watch infomercials? :-) ).

> Those reasons came after listening to their arguments, not before.

It's the particular person, not any of his theories per se. If one of these theories was mentioned by another person (even someone I didn't know), I would probably investigate if I found the time. But this particular person proved his signal-to-noise ratio is too high long ago, so I stopped listening. That's ad hom, but it's also a cost-effective. I don't want to spend my finite time on this planet objectively analyzing the evidence for every conspiracy theory my friend happens to latch on to. And I think that's rational, even though it's ad hom. And the reason is that evaluating the veracity of arguments is time consuming, and I have finite time.

> One party claims to be right, states its premises, and how those premises lead to their conclusion.

This is a very vague sentence. What does "how those premises lead to their conclusion" mean?

A formal system?

If not a formal system, then I don't think "being right" is at all well-defined in this sentence. This case converges to the comment below on tractability, which I'll reply to shortly.

If you are referring to a formal system, then the rest of your comment actually is correct. But even in mathematics itself, codifying proof in a formal system is quite rare and practiced only by logicians, certain subfields of CS, and a few early adopters. edit: And, far more to the point, most arguments aren't and can't be mathematical in nature.

> Attacking that argument means pointing out flaws in the reasoning or the premises.

> I don't understand how the rest of your comment relates to argumentation.

The problem is that you're assuming arguments cost nothing -- in terms of money or effort -- to produce. But this simply is not the case. Even in the very best-case scenario of mathematics itself, proof search for even relatively trivial theories is incredibly costly (triple exponential). So even for tiny little factoids that are perfectly well-defined, constructing a valid argument can be intractable.

Now consider the more likely situation where the actual truth of the proposition is effectively unknowable (most of economics and politics) or very difficult to know a priori (a lot of modern science). The resources committed to producing argumentation is probably the most important indicator of the quality of arguments.

> It sounds more like a comment on marketing - and while marketing may use different arguments of varying quality, it is not in itself an argument.

Right, well, I claimed that a lot of marketing is argument construction. So yes, there are other aspects to most marketing as well. But argumentation is certainly part of it.

edit: various small mechanical errors, slight rewording of hastily written sentences.

> And if there aren't better arguments for the other things, then those are the things that should be done.

As a tangential but related point, I think this can be a very dangerous position.

Arguments aren't created in a vacuum, and neither is the lion's share of what makes an argument "good". This is true even discounting the fact that the dominant measure of argumentative quality is largely a function of persuasion.

Producing arguments takes a lot of work and money. That's basically the only reason think tanks and law firms exist. It's also where a lot of marketing money -- political or otherwise -- gets spent. Having really good arguments for something mostly indicates you've invested a lot of time, money, or both into constructing those arguments. (edit: note that this is not an indicator that the thing is actually true, which is the root of the problem).

edit: sometimes, as in science, the motive can be fairly pure. In those cases, even though lots of money is spent constructing the arguments, we can still very much trust the veracity of those arguments.

Sometimes, as in the case of many (not all) think tanks, somehow every argument and study produced always re-entrenches and provides support for a pre-existing viewpoint. I'm therefore far more inclined to view these with suspicion, which is really an ad hom but imho justified.

I think our fundamental disagreement boils down to a question of tractability. It's not that better arguments don't exist. Rather, it's a matter of whether the argument is even worth our time.

> It may be important to note, but it's not argumentation.

Isn't it? The end effect is disregarding a certain set of arguments entirely. If completely ignoring the relevance of an argument isn't a powerful argumentative tool, I'm not sure what is.

> You don't need to attack the person making the argument or the medium delivering the argument in order to question its premises.

But isn't that exactly what's happening in the infomercial case? And surely we shouldn't waste our (bounded, finite) time addressing, point-by-point, infomercial arguments?

I have something more practical and less specific in mind as well. You'll find all manner of conspiracy theorists. The more serious ones can bash you over the head with truth claim after truth claim. At some point, in order to avoid endless rabbit holes, it becomes necessary to disregard certain arguments simply because of their source. I typically do this with a 9/11 truther friend (also chem trains and luminati (sp?) and so on), and only consider his factoids non-fictional when I hear them from other sources as well.

There's also an important distinction between attacking the source per se, and attacking the source's credibility/veracity in the argument at hand. We might be talking past each other due to that distinction as well.

edit: ambiguous grammar

I disagree. The term "computer" was typically reserved for people who exclusively did often pre-defined computations, and didn't contribute much other than the computation to the mathematics at hand. That is, someone else had come up with the novel method of computation, and someone else had formulated the problem. The human computer was applying the computation to problem that someone else handed them.

There was plenty of mathematics before mathematics got to the point where we needed dedicated humans who spend their whole day computing things in a prescribed manner.

But regardless, for some reason I think the original post was referring to electrical/mechanical computers :)

> A good argument made with bad intentions is still a good argument.

I agree with your parent here, though. There's almost always a good argument for any given thing, and often several.

It's sometimes useful to be able to say "yes, there is a huge pile of good arguments in favor of X here. And I don't have time to address each one. But it's important to note that the author of this pile of good arguments stands to make a great deal of money if people believe X, regardless of its truth."

It's kind-of like how you rarely trust the implicit or explicit claims in super long infomercials, even without examining the veracity of the evidence for the commercial's claims, or taking the time to think up counter-claims.

This comment is fairly comical, since most of the groups singled out in the book are typically associated with conservative politics (religious arguments are singled out several times, for instance).

I agree with grandparent for pragmatic reasons -- suggesting this book to a religious friend could easily be misconstrued by said friend as a back-handed insult.

> Mathematics in the broadest sense is nothing but logic applied to axioms.

mmmm. Lots of people would disagree with this :-)

> Until computers came along, math was entirely a theoretical pursuit

Not at all; mathematics always had applications. Not all mathematics, but it's certainly not that case that math was "all theory" and without serious application before computing.

> because for the first time we can take a mathematical idea from inside our heads and express it in a physical computer which executes it according to the logic we've defined.

We've had calculation assistants in various forms for centuries. Also, ballistics and construction based on mathematics are more-or-less "taking a mathematical idea and expressing it in the physical world".

> because I don't have the background, and I wish I could. Differential equations and fft come to mind.

You should just resolve learn these things and work through a section a day.

I have a math degree but never learned these things because my department was more pure than engineering oriented (an ode course wasn't required) and wanted to learn both for my day job. Turns out they are both fairly simple, and there are tons of free books. Esp differential equations have this mysticism to them before you start, and it turns out they're actually very straight-forward. Almost depressingly so, until you get pretty deep into the analysis behind them.

So... here's my encouragement to you -- just do it!

> violent and bloody revolutions will be necessary to regain the rights we thought we already (re)gained decades or centuries ago.

Digital privacy is one of these funny freedoms which everyone either greatly over or under-estimates.

I don't think anyone with a firm grasp on politics really thinks digital privacy will spark violent uprisings, so I'll put the question another way: do you really believe you're morally justified in killing over domestic spying?

What's up with the yellow lines going from already-excluded parties?

> The same should be able to be said about everything on Wikipedia

I don't think so. Well-written encyclopedic entries are in far shorter supply than bare lists of facts.

I guess the fundamental difference of opinion is between those who feel Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and those who feel it's a dumping ground for human knowledge. Note that I'm not taking sides, just trying to explain the root causes for the difference of opinion.

Also, on a purely technical note, I very much doubt that you couldn't find the information in bot-generated articles anywhere else using a search engine. If that were the case, where are the bots getting the data?