todayiamme

I have a very pessimistic hypothesis that this event will trigger a recession and that India has effectively committed economic suicide.

My reasoning behind this derives from the question, why doesn't this happen in developed economies? Or, in other words, why do people in developed economies / less corrupt countries prefer official institutions over cash transactions?

From a first principles perspective, I suspect that the answer is the services associated with these institutions and channels.

When I make a business transaction anywhere within the developed world, I am exchanging money for the promise of goods and services - creating a form of contract which binds me and the entity I am transacting with. This contract is enforceable (at varying cost) through the court system, which offers a form of insurance in case things go wrong i.e. one side or the other reneges upon their promise. It is therefore rational to participate within that system for that reason alone - it's very hard (or at least harder) for someone to disappear with your money without some consequences associated with it.

Participation within the system also grants access to additional services and benefits from civic services to relatively low transactions costs. Further, there is an active system which punishes deflection. Therefore all of these factors combined with social shibboleths serve to prevent deflection.

India has none of this. The court system isn't functional, civic services are non-existent, and there is no punishment for deflection. Therefore, there is no rational reason why an actor within this system would transact via the official channels - it increases costs and provides no additional benefits in return.

From this perspective, I believe that the "black" or parallel economy actually serves like a decentralized gross settlement system. People create contracts with the strength of their social ties in mind and they transact accordingly. When these people demonetized 80% of the tender in circulation, [1] they actually disrupted this settlement system and wiped out the central mechanism through which most business transactions are done. The reason why I think this is the case is because it is actually highly irrational to hoard cash - especially in an economy that suffers from a high amount of inflation. Surely anyone with even a tiny bit of prudence would invest / consume their ill gotten gains?

If my hypothesis is correct, then this war on cash will a) never achieve its goals, b) disrupt supply chains, c) suppress consumer activity, and d) create other unpredictable economic repercussions. This may be equal to institutional failure to perform settlements [2] within a developed economy - the velocity of money has sharply dropped leading to an economic crisis.

I don't know what comes next, but it's likely to go down in history as a Bad Idea in a year full of Bad Ideas.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-modi-corruption-idUS...

[2] Essentially the idea is that if one bank fails to settle payments within the system, then it could lead to a failure cascade due to how strongly all banks are tied together within a modern economy. http://www.econ.tcu.edu/quinn/crisis/Deleveraging/Bank%20Fai...

This may be subjective, but it feels like there is a lot of cargo culting going on in the VC industry. To a certain extent this makes sense as predicting the future is hard. There will always be a large gap between observed metrics and the end results, because companies are being launched into an unpredictable landscape and the conditions necessary for success change all the time. As a result these uncertain conditions create a strong incentive to pick up "best practices" even if they don't make sense at the time.

However, at the same time, the cargo culting creates inefficiencies and a lot of group pressure which forces companies to conform to the metrics du jour to raise funds. From a vantage point outside of the industry, these metrics feel almost memetic in nature. It seems that a lot of these hoops exist because other people have used these set of hoops before, therefore they must be valid in some shape or form. It's a recursive sort of logic whereby the rationale behind an investment metric is reinforced by the social signals around it. Plus, I'm sure that it doesn't help that most VCs don't actually have a quant styled background and most VCs don't model their investments in any shape or form. (while the modeling may not be accurate - it is still a useful tool for thinking through investments)

Of course all of this is actually an opportunity for the enterprising VC. A smart VC firm could theoretically create a better, more quantitative process and pick up unconventional companies for cheaper and get better returns as a result.

edit: Just in case it wasn't clear, I'm not accusing the OP of cargo culting - it's rather the opposite. It's more of a meta-observation / addendum to his observations.

I am sure this is a carefully considered opinion backed by an analysis of the anonymous user's work history, connections, technical competence, geographical location, and personality. And that you have offset this against your own to arrive at the observation that you are more "competitive for the better jobs" than him.

Apologies for the snark, but all of this is anecdotal data. Your analysis is unwarranted.

> Since the movement at large is just as Unstructured as most of its constituent groups, it is similarly susceptible to indirect influence. But the phenomenon manifests itself differently. On a local level most groups can operate autonomously; but the only groups that can organize a national activity are nationally organized groups. Thus, it is often the Structured feminist organizations that provide national direction for feminist activities, and this direction is determined by the priorities of those organizations.

A very interesting aspect of structureless entities is that it is very hard to form counter-narratives to them. If you look back at successful revolutions, then their rhetoric revolves around specific events that show everyone why something is unreasonable. For the American revolution, it was the Boston Massacre - a specific instance in time that the revolutionaries could use as evidence of injustice. The dismissal of Jacques Necker, a finance minister in Louis XVI's cabinet, led to the storming of the Bastille and in turn the French revolution. Change often revolves around a commonly shared notion of injustice.

Without an explicit power structure, it is hard to create the common ground necessary to ferment change. How can you find a specific experience that everyone can relate to when everyone's experience of the group is inherently different? How can you find that one thing within the structure that frames the overall problem, when there is no commonly agreed one to pin down? People will spend more time arguing about what the structure might be than finding practical solutions to problems.

This effect seems to be so powerful and unseen that it is becoming a fashionable method for preserving the status quo. It's popping up everywhere from businesses to nation states. My favourite example is the work of Putin's advisor Vladislav Surkov, a man who was once the publisher of avant-garde poetry and a patron of deconstructionist art. He has worked very hard to deconstruct war for Putin and create a structureless society. At its heart his doctrine is a heightened form of that same structurelessness this article discusses. Except its done at the national scale.

Inside Surkov's Russia, the Kremlin maintains control by ensuring that there is no explicit power structure - just shifting cliques in perpetual conflict with other cliques;

"""

[..] The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with 20th-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd.

One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human-rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern-art exhibitions.

The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hid...

"""

I haven't logged into Chrome, as I want to avoid giving Google even more information to "personalise" my search results with. Is this dashboard different from the default search settings page Google takes you to? If so, then is there any other way for me to access it?

I agree. I'm just trying to understand the other position without condoning or condemning.

Step into their perspective. From what I have read, a lot of strategists seem to feel that these conflicts have an inevitability to them. The pieces were put on the board a long time ago. The question everyone seems to be asking is how they can play their turn. The algorithm at play is unlikely to be achieving peace - as that may well be unattainable within the near future.

Again without condemnation or condonance, can you see why a strategist might choose this option while being perfectly rational and valid within their frame of reference?

> (Also, I find expectations on how Syrians would read USA involvement just wishful thinking)

Russian involvement in Syria is certainly looked at as that way i.e. they're propping up Assad as opposed to driving aggression and making major strategic moves.

I honestly don't know. It's probably not what is said publicly. It's whatever some document somewhere that requires a high clearance to read lays out.

For what its worth, I agree with you. I'm just trying to think about the problem from the other side. What do the people who are actually making this policy thinking? Clearly they aren't idiots, so why are they making the "wrong" choices repeatedly?

It does come back to the problem we're attempting to solve. What if you could side step all of the political and ideological hang ups most people have and still get what you want? All you have to do is refine your goals and what you're willing to do to get there.

One of Putin's most trusted advisors is Vladislav Surkov, who used to publish avant-garde poetry and loves deconstructionist art. He has now deconstructed war for Putin and advanced the Gerasimov doctrine [1] to create a very different work of art. He recently wrote a science fiction story called "Without the Sky" as a way to describe his thesis on non-linear warfare. Here is a quote from the translation by Peter Pomerantsev;

"""

It was the first non-linear war. In the primitive wars of the 19th and 20th centuries it was common for just two sides to fight. Two countries. Two groups of allies. Now four coalitions collided. Not two against two, or three against one. No. All against all.

And what coalitions! Not like the ones you had before… It was rare for whole countries to enter. A few provinces would join one side, a few others a different one. One town or generation or gender would join yet another. Then they could switch sides, sometimes mid-battle.

Their aims were quite different. To take over a disputed coastal shelf. To forcefully introduce a new religion. Raise ratings. Try out new lasers. To stop humans being divided into men and women as gender differences undermine the unity of a nation.

Most understood the war to be part of a process. Not necessarily its most important part.

- http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/03/28/peter-pomerantsev/non-l...

- http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/05/05/how-putin-is-reinventing...

"""

Within this deconstruction, conflict is not a means to an end. Conflict is an end to itself. The fact that all sides are fighting all sides is desired and encouraged, as it ensures the strategic objective as a whole. For instance, the article mentions that in Syria the allies we arm are bombing each other. People armed by the Pentagon are bombing the group armed by the CIA. What if this was the desired state? Assad is weakened, there is continuous presence in Syria, allies use the US to ward off against other allies, creating voluntary strategic dependence without requiring any boots on the ground.

No one even needs to do regime change. The regime is weakened and if things fall apart too much, it can be strengthened with a deeper alliance to pay-off the expensive conflict. Strategically speaking, the end-state perspective over here is perhaps superior to that of a conventional war, as all of this can be theoretically accomplished without having any formal boots on the ground.

Simultaneously, can the Syrians really view us as the enemy in this new war? There are after all no American troops on the ground. Sure a lot of the parties have American backing, but they sought out that backing and letting it be known works to our advantage and with the right propaganda it can be cast as giving control of their homeland back to them with American help. Especially if troops never follow.

This new form of war is ideologically and politically safe, while being extremely effective.

[1] http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/MilitaryReview/Archives/English/...

Do we even need to win the war? This is a serious question. If the key strategic objectives can be met without a conventional end state, is winning the war itself necessary?

This may seem like a stupid question, but clearly there has to be some reason why every decision maker within the system is incentivised to continue with the current state of things. I wonder if they have come to the conclusion that the long-term cost-to-benefit ratio of winning wars is too low to merit the type of strategy and resources you're describing. Maybe they've just created a new way to have a perpetual strategic presence without the typical costs of one?

That's because they are and it has probably caused more harm than good by leading to the creation of these strategies.

Technicaly it isn't insider trading as they aren't getting data from the company. They are guessing it from a private company that is exempt from such guidance.

>>> Technology also means that the strategies of active managers can be replicated at much lower cost. Take value managers, who claim to be able to beat the market by picking cheap shares. A computer program can comb the market for stocks that look cheap relative to their profits, asset values, or dividends; investors have no need to worry that the active manager might lose focus or change style. When it comes to choosing between asset markets, robo-advisers, using computer models, can help investors manage their wealth for a very low fee. Earlier this month Goldman Sachs, a big bank, became the latest big financial firm to buy one. <<<

There is absolutely no doubt that an algorithm can outperform most asset managers using traditional strategies quite well, but their implied thesis is wrong. It is extremely unlikely that any system short of an AGI, no matter how sophisticated, will be able to displace all active managers.

The reason behind that is that the best active managers try to build up positions by creating an informational edge. The very best ones are willing to do whatever it takes. Some have specialists analysing satellite imagery. Others are willing to snap up equity in private competitors of a company to check out their orderbook to predict the reality of the market before it can be reflected by the market. Or fund studies and do their own work. Whatever it takes.

A really great example of this trend is the rise of activist hedge funds which work by shorting the market and exposing malfeasance at companies. Last year an activist hedge fund manager, Whitney Tilson, found out that the products of Lumber Liquidators was laced with a carcinogen. He had lab tests conducted, shorted the stock, announced his results publicly, and created a media campaign around it resulting in a tumble. http://seekingalpha.com/article/3019166-lumber-liquidators-i...

It is extremely unlikely that any system could have replicated Tilson's work, because none of this data was online or existed somewhere that could be easily queried. At best these systems can trade far more effectively humans can with existing strategies, but that does not mean they can produce great returns, as they're operating upon the information the market already knows, as opposed to seeking out what isn't known.

There are similar examples within commodities - there are firms that specialise in using satellite imagery to predict if OPEC has increased production or what the global yield of rice / wheat is going to be. (case in point http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-07-08/satellite-... ) There is an arms race going on right now to know what the state of any economy will be before anyone else knows it. They will continue to specialise along this route by funding remote sensing companies, putting money into internet analytics to predict future usage patterns, and everything else they can think of before anyone else.

Machines just can't compete - at least, for now.

Hey, how can I contact you?

I am not saying that the model isn't useful - I am saying that it isn't universally applicable. We have so many deep evolutionary drives that we re-program to our ends all the time. Contraception is a great example of this, as are people trying to get over PTSD, eating disorders, and so on.

So, yeah, sure the model explains quite a bit and explains why we find certain things attractive, but it says nothing whatsoever about why certain people marry each other - which is what the question is.

As a woman, I'm not sure if marriage is as simple as a checkbox of wants, needs, desires, and luxuries. A lot of people seem to model these things as a game where there is some sort of fitness function that needs to be maximised and so on, but I'm not sure if that works too well.

In the middle of the 20th century, von Neumann and his ilk predicted nuclear war with absolute certainty. So certain were they in their conviction that they in fact advocated a first-strike policy by the US, but that war never came. The models were adjusted to include repeated games and then people said, that's the reason why we haven't blown up. (see: http://www.scu.edu/business/economics/workingpapers/upload/F... ) But rationally speaking the game of global annihilation was a single game - the person who moved first would have the fewest people die and then there would be no more games, so their analysis doesn't quite hold up. Indeed there have been times where people have tried to destroy the world, but someone, somewhere down the chain of command has said no and prevented that outcome. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov )

Maybe, just maybe, we should accept that while looking at the world through the lens of game theoretic models is useful for a lot of applications - it isn't the be all and end all of human society. There are women out there who do indeed care about those points and want to "better" their rank within the game they play. There are others for whom that game doesn't even exist and they can be just as desirable and amazing as the first group. So at the end, you could very well end up not playing the game and have a shot at a pretty decent life and find some happiness.

The dexterity of the human body really should not be underestimated. A human being can perform relatively complex analysis in a lab precisely because s/he can move the samples around and whack the equipment a bit if it gets stuck. If you want a robot to do that without getting stuck - ever, then that becomes extremely expensive or you figure out a way to do it in a single chamber like the viking lander did, which is still way more expensive and starts ruling out more complicated forms of analysis. If some element of this mission breaks down, then the human being can also do in-field repairs - something that even the most sophisticated robots of our time can't do.

Beyond picking up rocks, the human can traverse the terrain more easily and s/he can climb up and down really steep slopes - even ones at a nearly 90˚ angle. Whether you'd want the human to do that due to safety concerns on an alien world is another matter, but the amount of terrain accessible to this being is far larger than most billion dollar robots.

Oh and the human being does all of this while being powered on tuna sandwiches. They might be expensive to send to Mars, but once they're there humans can explore a larger area than all rover missions combined in a single mission.

Quite respectfully, your tone is disparaging and I don't think you understand what's going on over here.

I might be wrong in this, but YC is not in the business of precisely predicting the future. It is within the business of creating and curating a network. Let me explain why, most VC funds are organised around a theme - they have a particular industry that they look at and then they create a narrow window around it and predict that by time X, this will be worth a lot, so they'll find people to capture Y. YC on the other hand has a thesis focussed around its own network. Yes, they seem to fund around general trends, but mostly they give smart people money and get out of their way.

Let's unpack that. Let's say you have 20 smart people and you want to guide them, give them resources, and then stay out of their way. What's the best way to do that? Well, the best way seems to be to create a peer group - a band of sister + brothers - who have set out to do something extraordinary. And then let common stress signals bake in the ties.

Now let's assume that you have these ties between people i.e. they become good friends. What happens when one of them achieves success? Well they'll start getting approached by people asking for help too. Young people, lost, and trying to do something extraordinary. Where do you think they'll refer these people on to?

So what started out as a support group, suddenly starts growing organically, and YC starts getting its pick of founders provided that the original people they seed it with are the right kind. The kind of people who attract other intelligent people. And identifying that is literally the core job of YC, which seems to be jl's job...

Is it unfair to say that she made YC given that?

I get more than a little bit worried when I look at the American political circus. The soft power the US once held has now been eroded by the steady stream of WTFs coming out of the country. I think that what most Americans don't realise is that when people threaten to shut down the American government over women's healthcare - the craziness shakes up the risk calculus of the world and people start searching for alternatives. This is bad for America and it's bad for the world.

For the longest time, we've been under a hegemony that was originally far more stable than the world before it. This has helped to bring an unprecedented era of prosperity. The American empire is perhaps the first empire in history where people want to be under its banner as opposed to out in the cold.† But current antics threaten that very tenuous stability that was fought over for so many centuries. It is not without any faults, but out of all the alternatives out there - this is the most peaceful one.

Yes, there are arguments that broadening the base of support will help not hinder stability.ß The fact remains that this is the best system we have found so far and it does actually work. We might even someday have something far more stable than this, but the transition to that is not going to be easy. In fact, I think that on the existential risks meter of the world - stabilising American hegemony should be a priority. It is vital that this system is maintained until a better one emerges to take its place.

People might disagree, but it really is a tragedy that countries and groups now want to overthrow the American hegemony largely due to political missteps at home and a steady disconnect between what it means to be hegemon and the day-to-day of American politics. They've forgotten that their alliances were built upon shaky ground and need upkeep to maintain. And that even the firmest of empires do fall.

† http://www.middlebury.edu/media/view/214721/original/OdomPap... ß http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/02/wo...

What I'm trying to say is that they don't even have to touch that entire "community" thing. It's a massive headache and it's better to leave it alone than try to whip it into something monetisable. They can treat it as a loss-leader, extract the data it generates, and spin-off revenue generating assets from it.

"""James Erwin, a Reddit moderator of several subreddits including r/history, argues that Reddit’s unwillingness over the years to provide strong, hands-on leadership to the site’s community is at the heart of the company’s lackluster business performance. Without a firm editorial grip, the flourishing of disreputable subreddits opened the door for BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and others, which sift through Reddit content and repackage it to advertisers in more sanitized conditions. “Reddit is watching other people eat its lunch,” Erwin says."""

I think this loses the magical thing Reddit has - extremely strong intent signals from millions of people who are constantly voting on these items.

An interesting route to monetisation for Reddit would be divorcing the hive mind from the more passive viewers. There are probably a sizeable number of people who really don't care about the discussions / community interactivity element within Reddit and don't even possess accounts. What if Reddit created an independent app which used the live data from all of these sub-reddit upvotes, comments, (sentiment analysis?) and the rate at which something got picked up to do their "buzzfeed"-esque curation? Reddit's repackaging would create that neutral advertising-safe space, which could be successfully monetised in different ways.

An example of this would be say a deep-connect with content providers like Netflix and Hulu as well as whatever sub-reddits exist for movies, where they have a curated, passive viewing experience of say short-movies culled from a combination of Youtube, Vimeo, and Netflix to create a unique mix that wouldn't exist anywhere else. This would create a constantly changing, dynamic "TV-like" experience. Some viewers would like to engage around what they've watched and then Reddit could close the loop and get more data. I'm sure there are other interesting things to do with all of the photos they have in their dataset. As well all the articles and user-submitted content. (a better Flipboard type app?)

Reddit the company doesn't have to fight with reddit the chaotic force. They can just harness and use it to achieve a scale of manual curation no one has ever attempted before. It could become something quite special.

I try to usually stay away from such debates, but I've thought a lot about the point you're making: if people are being irrational with respect to hiring then clearly the solution is to start a company that isn't ageist, sexist, or any -ist by formalising the hiring logic and finding people who share something deep - like a passion for building things - in common. But after talking to people and many, many companies, I've come to realise that, although a "market correction" is inevitable, markets can stay irrational longer than most people can stay solvent.

Change is inevitable and sooner or later a company will come along which will swoop up all of these people and apply them towards an audacious goal, but the time at which the stars align and such a company is born cannot be predicted and most people can't hold on until that time. Hence their desire to fix it through advocacy, which is quite understandable.

It is always strange when people who have had an outsized impact upon others die. Prof. Nash wasn't just someone who was killed in a traffic accident. He was someone who touched the lives of many, many people in surprising ways. His work itself has a large sphere of influence that will exist without him, but I'm talking about a more personal kind of influence. He was an example of living to who you could be regardless of what was broken inside of you or what was "missing."

When I was a teenager, I had the good fortune of attending a lecture by Prof. Nash. Although I did not have the maturity to truly grasp what he was trying to explain - the event did influence my later life. I started reading up about him and his struggles with his schizophrenia, the work he wanted to do, the fears he had of never achieving it, and how despite everything he ended up manifesting his work anyway. This influenced my own struggle with teenage depression and made me realise that there was probably more I could contribute beyond the seemingly staunch limits of my own mind. That altered my life trajectory in a "tiny" but measurable way, so that I - a complete stranger - feel moved by the loss.

I'm sure he stands for so much more to so many people and that's a testament to the power of a life well lived.

Thanks for the solution! I was hoping for a more algebraic solution as opposed to an iterative one. Is there a way to know if an algebraic solution - if any exists for this problem? And if it does, how can I find it? Because expanding upon nodes and checking every branch is still a form of brute forcing the problem. I'm wondering if there is some elegant solution to this.

He was and always will be a vestige of my childhood.

Star Trek was one of the reasons why I became passionate about science and tech. Its humanism deeply shaped the beliefs I eventually formed. The notion of kindness and fairness intermingled with the belief that through technology we could achieve a better world for all. But that took a while to percolate. His depiction of Spock was what kept me watching in the first place.

>>> The art of telling a story involves change which is far more compelling if it creates at least some conflict and confusion[1], and if AI or artificial mind enhancements are key, they're more interesting as a cause than a solution to the problem[2] <<<

I agree with you that conflict is the source of much of compelling story telling, but the question over here is why isn't the AI an ally as opposed to a malevolent entity? This in of itself is very revealing about the nature of our culture. If you contrast the work from the early 1900s to the mid 1900s, as personified by Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, then a lot of the stories were based around conflict, but the transgressor was in fact a complex chain of events or a third party entity and the AI was a factor as opposed to something evil that needed to be taken down.

Even for the events in 2001, Clarke painfully explains over the course of the second novel that the AI had been driven insane by conflicting goals imposed by human authorities who should have known better, but didn't. The AI lashed out in madness not because it had malevolent intent. In fact, much of the themes of those books could be summed up in, my friend - this really awesome and earnest robot - and me are out in the vast cosmic unknown and it's desolate, lonely, and I'm one step away from going looney, but luckily my friend - the robot - is here for me.

>>> When it comes to assessing how people might react when blessed with superaugmented intelligences, there are plenty of cautionary examples of people with natural but notable extremes of intelligence who've been tripped up by crippling vulnerabilities. <<<

Except, if you examine this belief then it is a somewhat recent thing. If you go back a few decades, then there was marked optimism about how humanity was going to evolve beyond our very humdrum beginnings into something like the star child Dave Bowman becomes at the end of 2001 - a gift that's bestowed upon him by benevolent alien entities working with a machine.

There are actual surveys which show the rise of this distrust, it is very much an artefact of modern culture as opposed to being something inherent to technology itself.

http://www.ecumenicalnews.com/article/new-study-reveals-a-st...

http://motherboard.vice.com/en_ca/read/it-doesnt-matter-that...

>>> For all the article's comments about the "mindboggling" potential of Moore's law, my word processor looks about the same as it did nineteen years ago, and computers still suck at simple games like Go that, unlike chess, can't be brute forced. I'm grateful to Google for making finding information that bit easier, but I'm even more grateful for humans for creating or curating the content in the first place. <<<

Except now you have this one organisation that has written this magical piece of code that executes in parts across millions of individual computers to search trillions of documents and gives you the reply to any question within milliseconds. This allows you to access all of the world's information on a slab of glass and plastic that is portable and can help you communicate with most of humanity.

At the other end, we finally have control systems that can turn an entire rocket into a robot - allowing it to perfectly hover in mid air and land on its own. A feat that would have been deemed impossible if not magical a few decades ago.

Sure, there are so many things that need to be done, but where we are going is fundamentally beautiful and wonderful. Technology continues to be simply magical, but just not the ways we want it to be. This in of itself says nothing about the technology, just about how we're focussing our attention as a society and as a civilisation.

We can still make magical nuclear reactors and go to mars. There's nothing stopping us, but us. All of those challenges can be surmounted if we push and develop the promise of our tools and technology. We can indeed do another Apollo and the fact that such a thing doesn't exist isn't a fact about our tools, but it's a fact about us.

So all in all colour me puzzled over why technological pessimism is on the rise.

Okay, so pardon me for saying this, but why not? Why can't we work to create something out of companionship even if its towards not so idealistic ends?

Palantir is a fantastic example for this, if you go beyond their entire CIA hunting down people origins, the function of Palantir is at its core co-operative. It connects some patterns and offers a search based interaction with a numerous set of databases, and in turn the relies upon a human being to work with and match semantic patterns.

>>> Peter Thiel: Without trying to start a fistfight, we’ll ask Bob: Why is the correct intelligence augmentation, not strong AI?

Bob McGrew: Most successes in AI haven’t been things that pass Turing tests. They’ve been solutions to discrete problems. The self-driving car, for instance, is really cool. But it’s not generally intelligent. Other successes, in things like translation or image processing, have involved enabling people to specify increasingly complex models for the world and then having computers optimize them. In other words, the big successes have all come from gains from trade. People are better than computers at some things, and vice versa.

Intelligence augmentation works because it focuses on conceptual understanding. If there is no existing model for a problem, you have to come up with a concept. Computers are really bad at that. It’d be a terrible idea to build an AI that just finds terrorists. You’d have to make a machine think like a terrorist. We’re probably 20 years away from that. But computers are good at data processing and pattern matching. And people are good at developing conceptual understandings. Put those pieces together and you get the augmentation approach, where gains from trade let you solve problems vertical by vertical.

- http://blakemasters.com/post/24464587112/peter-thiels-cs183-... <<<

Yup!

That's actually quite impressive and it ties into why I started the project. When I was a teenager I read a paper that talked about the drive used by Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The magneto-hydrodynamic drive† basically tries to push seawater through a set of coils and, as you've said, it's very, very inefficient and currently impractical.

Reading that paper inspired me to look into this and I ended up trying to make a submersible with the limited budget I had. It was very frustrating and I just gave up and ended up trying to make linear actuators for touch sensing instead.

†http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_drive

http://www.skewsme.com/mhd.html#axzz3ACp7NENa

I've experimented with building a submersible robot and - by far - the most challenging aspect of the build was creating an interface between the motor and the propellor that was waterproof in a reliable way. (applying grease or something hydrophobic on a shaft lasts only so long)

By abstracting away that schlep for me, - a schlep, which is usually the least interesting bit about a machine - these guys might be able to create something analogous to Arduino for marine robots. Before Arduino, you needed a complete test bed to get a micro-controller up and running. After Arduino, you usually focus on what you want to do, instead of getting the micro-controller to work. That shift makes creating something extremely accessible, allowing anyone to jump in and try things out. A line of products like these, might actually make robotics far more accessible than any number of kits before it. In other words, this could be the start of something incredible.

Edit: I just realised another way of phrasing what they're doing. Imagine how hard payments was before Stripe came along. These people are basically the Stripe for marine robotics, which is really awesome.

Of course! I'd love to help. I've sent you an email with the subject: How can I help?

I tried out Seven Cups of Tea after reading this article, and I have a few points of feedback.

From what I make of it, it's apparent that the business model is that of "professional listeners" i.e. a few listeners charge for their service and essentially become an online version of therapists without being therapists. (although a few do appear to be trained as such and they charge their usual rates, most of the people on the roster don't appear to be professional psychologists)

This all fine and good, but the problem within the model though is that there's a tension between the positive side vs. the revenue side: we volunteer and help people who need a listener, but we try to nudge people towards paying for these sessions. This manifests itself through these constant popup windows while the listener is engaged in a heavy emotional conversation. Imagine you're pouring your heart out to someone and things are at an emotional juncture, and a sickly cheerful popup comes up on the screen cajoling you to sign up or rate the listener. It feels horridly out of context and it takes away the experience of the person within that moment. And this has happened to me 4 times so far in around 25 minutes.

Of course, the thing is that 7 Cups of Tea needs to convert its users and it needs to make that happen relentlessly, but the key over here is subtlety and I feel that this design iteration, sadly, misses that. However - from an outside perspective - it doesn't have to be this way. You see, anyone who visits this website and connects emotionally with a listener experiences the purest form of engagement - emotional engagement and a genuine empathic bond with someone. If the person or the bond is strong, then there is no reason why they won't sign up, after all the product has touched the very core of their being. Of course they will sign up, if there isn't any friction! They're hooked and they want to maintain that bond. They want to connect with this person again and they want to feel that sense of connectedness again and again. They want to feel okay again and again. So really the best thing 7 Cups of Tea could possibly do is get out of the way and let people connect with one another and let things flow from there.

In other words, this can be so much more. It has the ingredients of being so much more. It just needs the right touch. A light touch.