wmorgan

I guess this is my point of disagreement with the article:

> We have thus arrived at the intriguing result that wealth averaged over many systems grows at 5% per round, but wealth averaged in one system over a long time shrinks at about 5% per round.

Wealth averaged over many systems doesn’t grow by 5%. It shrinks just like the average. The EV calculation is just wrong. For any finite starting wealth between the players and the bank, there is a number of iterations where the EV turns negative.

If you say, well let the starting wealth be infinite, I say, okay? If you have infinite dollars there are a lot of tricks for making infinite more dollars. It doesn’t work in the real world.

> If we put bounds on the bank in SPP, the first coin toss would still have positive EV.

Not if the bank starts with $0. 0 is just as valid a bound as a trillion. You can’t calculate the EV without knowing how much the bank has, and once you know that, you realize the naive calculation for EV is wrong.

This is the St. Petersburg paradox with an extra variable.

In SPP, EV approaches infinity as the bank's resources approach infinity. Put bounds on the bank's resources, and you find that even with trillions of dollars your EV is less than $50.

Here, not only are we assuming that the bank's resources are infinite, we're also assuming that the population is large enough that there are always enough lucky players to compensate for the unlucky ones. Put bounds on the size of the population, and you see that everyone goes bust in all but a tiny fraction of cases. Put bounds on the bank, and even that tiny fraction can't compensate for all the losers, and EV is negative.

I don’t know about Airbnb. But you realize that before Uber existed, people ran businesses which were entirely, “you call us up, we’ll send you a car and take you where you want to go,” (And that driver was an independent contractor)

I really don’t see the angle that Uber was doing something fundamentally new, except to the extent that they dramatically lowered the price and a lot more people used the service.

Whooping cough is a funny example, since most adults are in fact not vaccinated for it -- in the US anyway, the vaccination rate for pertussis is under 30%. The reason newborns aren't dying from whooping cough is not that we vaccinate everyone. Instead, we make the vaccine widely available for people who want it (I got my booster at one of my wife's ultrasounds), and we tell parents not to expose their newborns to anyone who isn't vaccinated, until the baby can get their own. So for whooping cough specifically, it really is up to the parents, and I would say more of an individual responsibility thing.

The term of art is "capitalized labor." For example, this is from Microsoft's accounting policies:

> Costs incurred internally in researching and developing a computer software product are charged to expense until technological feasibility has been established for the product. Once technological feasibility is established, software costs are capitalized until the product is available for general release to customers.

Then later

> The amortization of these costs is included in cost of revenue over the estimated life of the products.

https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar21/index.html

Sure, it’s just a different frame: “you developed doing this thing. Now you’re saying we can’t do that same thing.” Why should The West “get credit” for the ocean’s CO2 dissolution capacity just because they industrialized earlier? Either way, we have to lift everyone out of poverty. Again, just a different way of framing the problem.

The GP said CO2 “in the atmosphere” meaning that if you count all the industrialization in the 1800s and 1900s then China doesn’t look so bad.

Why not? Lots of ordinary people were watching it in 1980's, when it actually was in the public domain. I don't think they realize it gets the same level of legal protection as new releases.

My point is there's plenty of good content people want that's 30-70 years old & they don't feel bad about pirating it. My dad by his principles would never download a new movie; nevertheless he's looking up the songs from his childhood on YouTube. He feels entitled to listen to them whenever and however he wants. I think that's a pretty common attitude toward the older stuff.

That's a timely question with the holidays coming up. A lot of people will be wanting to watch movies from the 1940's and 50's. Many of them don't realize those works are still under copyright.

It's not just hypothetical. In our family we subscribe to 3 or 4 streaming services, but last year we still had to pay $5 to watch It's a Wonderful Life (1946), a movie that was literally in the public domain for 20 years. A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) wasn't available at any price, except with ads that stretched its 25-minute runtime to nearly an hour. We pirated that one. I don't think most people would think there was anything wrong with that.

I didn't even realize you could do this. Won't the swarm stop talking to you if you don't share?

Disagree. We humans are emphatically not optimized for the world we live in today. We're adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/adaptationexecuters_not_fitnessma...

Why is this story so polarizing? Here's a theory, inspired by a Less Wrong post [1]: some people, thinking back to their time in class, remember how distracting it was for a student to come to class in the middle of a lecture. Others, like myself, barely even noticed.

The one side thinks "how rude of the student to walk in and out of lectures like that!" and the other side thinks "what's the big deal? Just ignore it!" and from there they side with the professor or the student, respectively.

Does this gel with your personal experiences? Is there anyone who sided with the professor but does not find student movement distracting? Or anyone who sided with the student but can't stand it?

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/