Rationality Quotes Thread July 2015
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you’d like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
Dammit. This quote makes me feel even more of a pawn in the grand scheme of things.
Literally nobody else can see through your eyes. That’s a pretty privileged point of view. Does that help at all?
-- Egregore Peck (source)
Sounds similar to paradox of voting.
Sansa: “It can’t be worse.”
Theon: “It can. It can always be worse.”
Game of Thrones TV series
Part of the reason I supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was because I thought he was so bad that the alternative had to be better. I didn’t take enough time to consider worse alternatives to him.
But can it always be better?
Yes, unless you die.
“In King’s Landing, there are two sorts of people. The players and the pieces.”
“And I was a piece?” She dreaded the answer.
“Yes, but don’t let that trouble you. You’re still half a child. Every man’s a piece to strart with, and every maid as well. Even some who think they are players.”
Talk between Sansa and Petyr—A Song of Ice and Fire: A Storm of Swords
Why is this a rationality quote? I mean sure it is technically true (for any situation you’ll find yourself in), but that really shouldn’t stop us from trying to improve the situation. Theon has basically given up all hope and is advocating compliance to a psychopath for fear of what he may do to you otherwise, doesn’t sound particularly rational to me.
It corrects an error people sometimes make when in a bad situation of assuming things can’t get worse so any change can’t be for the worst. Sansa had not been tortured by the psychopath in question while Theon had, so Theon better understood the price of defiance.
Ok, fair enough. I still hold that Sansa was more rational than Theon at this point, but that error is one that is definitely worth correcting.
“When you make plans to stop something bad, make sure that you also make plans to ensure that it is not replaced by something worse—since there is always something worse that exists”.
That’s what I get from it, anyhow.
--Seneca, Letter XLVII
Just because a man has died for it, does not make it true.
Oscar Wilde
But isn’t it evidence that this man strongly believed it? And isn’t someone’s strong belief at least a weak evidence for it?
And so we come to “A thing is not necessarily true because there is weak evidence for it” which seems like a fair statement :-)
A nitpick. This is a paraphrase of the original quote which can be found in The Portrait of Mr. W. H., page 29. The original quote is:
Thomas Sowell
Somewhat true, but if you want very badly to help people then you’ll tell them the truth in a way that makes them feel good.
-- Archfiend Screwtape, The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis
Allow me to play captain obvious: This is screwtape’s (the archdevil? tempter?) advice to one of the devils assigned to a human (patient). He basically states here that humans don’t need to have certainty that a philosophical system is well founded, what he cares about is that it is controversial, scandalous, etc. And I have to agree to that, gone are the times that people change their lifestyle according to the latest scientific literature or piece of philosophy; how many among those who’ve read Nietzsche actually understood the profundity and the weakness of his writings? It appears that since he is wrongly associated with the Nazis it qualify him to be a philosopher of the edgy thirteen year olds.
On the other hand I see this as Lewis’s jab at the philosophy that he opposes, particularly atheistic and agnostic ones. He didn’t disprove them, he just committed slander. TSL is a good read tho
-- Jim Butcher, Turn Coat
-- Ozy Frantz (source)
1) This strikes me as careful cherrypicking of “absurd” results to pick only the non-absurd “absurd” ones. You’re supposed to say “well, giving women rights isn’t so absurd after all, people who thought it is absurd were mistaken”, but not all absurd conclusions from the past turned out to be okay in hindsight. Some were pretty horrible.
2) People who say “it is okay if my moral reasoning produces absurd results” generally don’t personally think “that sounds absurd, but I’ll accept it anyway”. Typically, the result is something they are strongly motivated to believe, but which is thought absurd by others. They welcome the moral reasoning because it provides a way to reject their critics.
(In the LW-sphere, there are people who actually do accept results that seem personally absurd, but the LW-sphere is a minority. Most people don’t act that way. Go tell a vegetarian that he should support exterminating all wildlife to end wild animal suffering, and see what response you get.)
3) Rejecting reasoning that produces absurd results even if we can’t find a flaw in the reasoning is an important way we avoid errors.
I don’t think Ozy is claiming that all absurd conclusions are correct. Rather, Ozy claims that some absurd conclusions are correct. When you just need an existence proof, there’s no cherry-picking—you just pick your example/s and you’re done.
Maybe they should! My impression is that Ozy does.
Ozy’s a vegetarian, and their position on wild animal suffering is:
Seems pretty open to absurdity to me.
I’d prefer the framing of applying an absurdity penalty to one’s estimated probability, rather than “rejecting” it in a binary way, but yes: absurdity could be a useful thing to weight in one’s estimated probability of a conclusion being correct.
Ozy is in the LW-sphere. As I pointed out, people in the LW-sphere may actually say “it sounds absurd, but I’ll still believe it despite that” and mean it. But people in the LW-sphere are exceptions. Most people, when they say that, don’t really mean it, and instead mean that their opponents think the conclusion is absurd, but they personally think it’s only slightly unusual.
And an addendum:
4) Sometimes people accept results that are absurd as a way of signalling commitment to an idea. If you’re so dedicated to your religion that you’re willing to stand up and publicly say it’s wrong to lie even if telling the truth leads to someone’s death, or so dedicated to your ethical system that you’re willing to say that helping a stranger’s child is as good as helping your own, you must be really committed.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Lack of curiosity made people lose money to Madoff. This you already know—people did not due their due diligence.
Here’s what Bienes, a partner of Madoff’s who passed clients to him, said to the PBS interviewer for The Madoff Affair (before the 10 minute mark) when asked how he thought Madoff could promise 20%:
Bienes: ‘How do I know? How do you split an atom, I know that you can split them, I don’t know how you do it. How does an airplane fly? I don’t ask.’ ‘Did you ask him?’ ’Never! Why would I ask him? I wouldn’t understand it if he explained it!’
And a minute later: ‘Did you ever think to yourself, this is just too easy, this is too good?’ Bienes: ‘I said ‘I’m a little too lucky. Why am I so fortunate?’ And then I came up with the answer, my wife and I came up with the answer: ‘God wanted us to have this. God gave us this.’ ’
Interesting. Modern religious people tend to not believe in the devil much, probably because that is not a very reassuring thing to believe and it is a pretty much a feelings based cafeteria today. This sounds like an example where believing in the devil would have been useful. “Maybe god wants us to be lucky, or maybe the devil tempts us into financial doom.”
What do you expect to find if we look only at Christians who express belief in the Devil?
In addition to that, perhaps it is because they are much more likely to perform a ritual of praying to the god, whereas rituals of fending of the devil seem to be rare. Thus the latter becomes a vague and remote figure, easy to forget and disbelieve.
-- Dan Davies
Inapplicable when you’re writing about natural sciences for layman audience.
Apparently, Davies thinks that half the time the layman audience isn’t really there, and the rest of the time, they’re not interested in a watered-down version of the real natural sciences. Even if you succeed, all that you achieve is that now a bunch of morons don’t understand the natural sciences and think that you agree with them.
Sec. 107. in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science
Max Shron, Thinking with Data, p. 32
I am skeptical of this.
We’re not happy about the successful conclusion of World War II because it is distant in time, and that seems reasonable unless he’s arguing that we should be happier about, say, the death of Genghis Khan.
He seems to imply that we should be happy at the end of World War II because the total benefits from winning the war are large. But people were also happy at the intermediate steps of winning the war and that happiness needs to be subtracted. In other words, if you’re happy at the liberation of France, you can’t be happy at the end of the war based on the entire benefit of winning the war, including the portion of that benefit that consists of France being liberated. That’s double counting.
This argument would apply to bad news too. Among people who think Obama’s Iran deal is likely to lead to Iran getting nuclear weapons, should they be a lot unhappier than they are?
Blindsight is an amazingly Less Wrong book, with much discussion of epistemology and cognitive failures, starting with the title of the book. It is some of the hardest science fiction in existence, with a 22-page “Notes and References” section walking through 144 citations for the underlying science.
Pushing a related quote to a comment… Pushing discussion to another comment...
This being Less Wrong, this might be the point where you bring up whether P=NP and that solutions are often much easier to verify than compute. Easier does not necessarily mean easy or even within human cognitive capabilities. And if it does in whatever example comes to mind, just keep pushing to harder problems until we need not only tools to solve the problem but also meta-tools to tell us what our tools are telling us. And you can keep pushing that meta. (Did I mention that Blindsight is a very Less Wrong book?)
We trust our tools because we trust the process we used to develop our tools, and we trust the previous generation of tools used to develop those tools and processes, and we trust… At some point, you look at the edifice of knowledge and realize your life depends on a lot of interdependencies, and that can be scary.
And then I trust Google Maps to get me most places, because I know it has a much better direction sense than me and it knows things like construction and traffic conditions.
In Blindsight, a “vampire” is a predatory, sociopathic genius built through genetic engineering. They have human brain mass but use it differently; take all the brain power we spend on self-awareness and channel it towards more processing power. The mission leader in Blindsight is a vampire, because he is more intelligent and able to make dispassionate decisions, but how do you check whether your vampire is right or even still on your side? Like Quirrelmort, they are always playing at least one level higher than you.
The synthesist quote is the first time Blindsight brings up the problem of what to do when you build smarter-than-human AI. The vampire quote approaches it from a different angle, with a smarter-than-human biological AI. Vampires present a trade-off: they cannot rewrite their source code, so they cannot have a hard takeoff, but you know they are less than friendly AI.
(If you know what is wrong with the above, please ROT13 your spoilers.)
I don’t know if this was featured here, but I hope it generates some discussion. Edsger Dijkstra, https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD611.html
“Traditionally there are two ways in which science can be justified, the Platonic and the pragmatic one. In the Platonic way —”l’art pour l’art”— science justifies itself by its beauty and internal consistency, in the pragmatic way science is justified by the usefulness of its products. My overall impression is that along this scale —which is not entirely independent of the Buxton Index— Europe, for better or for worse, is more Platonic, whereas the USA, and Canada to a lesser extent, are more pragmatic.”
“It is here that I must mention three general phenomena that go hand in hand with greater pragmatism.”
“The first phenomenon is a greater tolerance for the soft sciences which purport to contribute to the solutions of “real” problems, but whose “intellectual contents” are singularly lacking. (When I was a student at Leyden, a quarter of a century ago, economy and psychology had been admitted to the campus, but only with great reservations and absolutely no one considered them as respectable; we had not dreamt of “management science” —I think we would have regarded it as a contradiction in terms— and “business administration” as an academic discipline is still utterly preposterous.)”
“The second phenomenon is the one for which I had to coin the term “integralism”. Scientific Thought, as I understand it, derives its effectiveness from our willingness to acknowledge the smallness of our heads: instead of trying to cope with a complex, inarticulate problem in a single sweep, scientific thought tries to extract all the relevant aspects of the problem, and then to deal with them in turn in depth and in isolation. (...) Dealing with some aspect of a complex problem “in depth and in isolation” implies two things. “In isolation” means that you are (temporarily) ignoring most other aspects of the original total problem, “in depth” means that you are willing to generalize the aspect under consideration, are willing to investigate variations that are needed for a proper understanding, but are in themselves of no significance within the original problem statement. The true integralist becomes impatient and annoyed at what he feels to be “games”; by his mental make-up he is compelled to remain constantly aware of the whole chain, when asked to focus his attention upon a single link. (When being shown the derivation of a correct program he will interrupt: “But how do you know that the compiler is correct?”.) The rigorous separation of concerns evokes his resistance because all the time he feels that you are not solving “the real problem”.”
“The third phenomenon that goes hand in hand with a greater pragmatism is that universities are seen less as seats of learning and centres of intellectual innovation and more as schools preparing students for well-paid jobs. If industry and government ask for the wrong type of people —students, brain-washed by COBOL and FORTRAN— that is then what they get.” (This was written in 1982, perhaps, today that will be Java.)
“Finally a difference that is very specific to academic computing science in Europe: Artificial Intelligence never really caught on. All sorts of explanation are possible: Europe’s economic situation in the early fifties when the subject emerged, lack of vision of the European academic or military world, European reluctance to admit soft sciences to the university campus, cultural resistance to the subject being more deeply rooted in Europe, etc. I don’t know the true explanation, it is probably a mixture of the above and a few more. We should be aware of this difference, whether we can explain it or not, because the difference is definitely there and it has its influence on the outlook of the computing scientist.”
For me the first quote hits really close to home. I am so immersed in a “Platonic” tradition that I am constantly amazed how pragmatic LW-ers are, I constantly feel like a Sophisticus.
Ken wants you to be specific because a vague claim is usually a meritless claim. Not citing a good example implies that there are no good examples.
To match action to word, here are some of Ken’s specific examples of vague legal claims, presumed meritless until actual examples can be cited (in reverse chronological order):
Donald Trump
Randy Queen
Todd Kincannon
WorldVentures
Peak Internet
Steve Stockman
Bharat Aggarwal
Casey Movers
A demonstration of dark arts. Ellipses are mine, to remove unnecessary amplification.
Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum.
See also “The Danger of Stories” and “Tyler Cowen on Stories”. Of course, the quote itself is excerpted from an explicitly fictional story.
Is all of Foucault’s Pendulum like this? I’ve read a summary before, but this is much better than the writing I would have expected from it.
The quoted section is fairly representative. Foucault’s Pendulum is quite a good novel, IMO, and worth reading.
Seconded.
No. That’s one of the few parts with content. It’s not worth the hundreds of pages of tedium that come before.
“There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had not heard there was such a thing.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld
Jeremy Bentham (standing on the shoulders of Joseph Priestley and Cesare Beccaria)
That assertion isn’t actually true, in the strong form in which he intends it. Even if you rely on the vagueness of “morals”, it’s certainly not true for legislation.
Bentham is using Enlightenment shorthand; he means “good, just, natural-law-following legislation”. He’s not talking about the actual sausages that we get from real legislatures.
Cicero from latin “Salus populi suprema lex esto”
Gargantua’s admonishment of Pantagruel to employ his youth to profit both in studies and in virtue:
-- Chapter 2.VIII. in Project Gutenberg’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete, by Francois Rabelais written in 1532-1564, translated in 1894, see also Wikipedia on Gargantua and Pantagruel
Note that this is not advice for everyone but apparently for a very capable youth:
I’m sympathetic towards the idea that pursuing all the knowledge we can get our hands on is a good thing. It is a tempting idea for me to believe in, because it offers a justification that is satisfying to values I hold like curiosity and respect for information. However, this means I might be biased. And I don’t want to believe this idea if it isn’t true.
When I think critically about this, I’m inclined to think that seeking so much knowledge across so many subjects is a suboptimal use of time, even for the prodigiously talented. My view is that details are important insofar as learning them helps us to learn broad patterns, and some types of details predictably are unlikely to lead to such insights and so can be safely ignored. For non-biologists, I don’t think there is much value in knowing all the names and types of the plants. For non-astronomers, I don’t think that the stars and planets are worth studying.
I acknowledge that there sometimes are cross-applicable ideas or universal patterns which can be discovered by studying obscure fields. For example, Newton’s laws of motion or his law of gravity are useful to almost all of science, not just to astronomers. However, even acknowledging this, it’s unclear to me whether the probability of discovering such patterns is high enough that it’s worth the opportunity cost. Maybe if people before Newton had been more inclined towards specialized knowledge, some astronomer would have discovered the equation for gravitational attraction even sooner. Perhaps we’d also have some additional knowledge besides.
Is there any actual evidence for the idea that unfiltered pursuit of knowledge is superior to the filtered pursuit of knowledge? The only other argument for it that I can advance is that a lot of famous intelligent people have believed so, but I find this argument pretty unpersuasive. Thoughts?
Partly, I may simply be taking reliable access to high quality detailed information for granted, since I’m used to living with internet access and Wikipedia.
In my view, it’s about the right level of filtering. For most people, I think looking at much more sources than they currently do is justified, as is developing the ability to quickly extract important pieces of information from sources for efficiency. The latter includes developing the ability to prioritize, skim, summarize, and assimilate information as well as abilities related to acquiring new sources, like knowing how to reach people with knowledge of other fields who can expand your horizons. I think it’s also helpful to interact with others who can fill in gaps in your knowledge, e.g., you might have decided that learning about X was unimportant, but your friend in the same field read a lot about X and understands its importance. That example is basically applying parallel processing to knowledge acquisition. I can also think of a number of instances where I was looking for information about something, concluded it didn’t exist, but later found what I was looking for (or something close) in a different related field, often with different terminology.
For some basic evidence, consider the foxes and hedgehogs dichotomy. Foxes, who take a more global view, tend to perform better in predictions. Geoff Colvin also thinks that more knowledge is better and he discusses this in his book Talent is Overrated on pp. 150-151. (Edit: Actually, the latter author says nothing about the unfiltered vs. filtered distinction as I recall now, but he does believe that more knowledge is better in a general sense.)
There’s another common related view, which I see as misguided. Sometimes people claim that your thinking is often less constrained (i.e., you are more creative) if you are not familiar with a subject. I recently read a book, Gossamer Odyssey, where very successful engineer Paul MacCready attributed his success in human powered flight to not doing things the “standard” way, because he was totally unfamiliar with the standard way. He had a PhD in aerospace engineering, but he focused on atmospheric physics, not aeronautics. In MacCready’s case, I think he was wrong about ignorance being the key. It was broader knowledge that helped him here. His knowledge of gliders rather than traditional aircraft turned out to be the key. Indeed, if you look at a lot of the cases where “ignorance” is held up as being useful for creativity, you see that having broader knowledge actually was the key (This blog post about Invisalign is another example I can find right now).
So, this seems to me like a post-hoc rationalization of intellectual laziness, and misleading because wider knowledge (“unfiltered” knowledge as 27chaos put it) is often key in cases where ignorance is held up as a benefit. Even if some creativity benefits come from ignorance, it does not follow that one should always remain ignorant in a field you are interested in. It seems to me that an hybrid strategy would be best: think about things before and after you learn. That way if your mind is unconstrained early on, you get the benefits of that. (In this popular book on decisions, they recommend the same thing on p. 50 according to my notes.)
However, according to this blog post, the book Origins of Genius by Dean Keith Simonton provides evidence that creativity follows an inverted U curve as a function of knowledge, where both too little and too much knowledge can hurt you. I have not read the book, but you might find it to be of interest.
Excellent comment, thanks for all the links!
Here are the ellipses restored:
What might rationalist!Rabelais write in place of those passages?
Replacing “God” by “Reality” goes quite a long way.
Two words: “opportunity costs”.
Two more words: “training montage”.
-Exchange between Dr. Bunnigus and the Benevolent Overlord AI (Petey) that turned the galactic core into a power generator. Schlock Mercenary 2015-07-25 by Howard Taylor
This little arc starts here and has a few gems.
“When all hope was gone, they heeded the counsels of despair. Had they continued to strive, defying their doom, some unforseen wonder might have occurred.”
-Stephen R. Donaldson
I’m posting several quotes enbloc since they are all from the same video: All from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryFB6mvy4uE
We’re always too prone to thinking what’s valuable is what the other company is doing
Investors overvalue things they do use, and undervalue things they don’t use
(Start-ups that are about brining existing products and services together] are capital intensive
(On difficulty of first experience with start-ups’ relationship to subsequent work ethic) easy and impossible converge to not working hard (see ~18.50 for verbatim, explained better)
(You can’t just assume it will be built – deterministic technological futures egg. Ai WILL happen) you have to ask yourself what is the future you want to build, then work on that
People always ask me about the future and about trends, I’m not a prophet, I don’t think the future is fixed in that way
Things that are underrated, are the ones that there are no buzzwords, it doesn’t fit into any pre-existing categories, and you got to walkways be listening for those
(about investing in weed) maybe a lot of the money (in the drug industry) came from the illegality so people are able to charge a lot for it…the details are what matters, not necessarily the big trends
If (inaudible) is perfectly competitive, you’d never be able to make any profit…. (Gives example of restaurant industry in some location)
These monopolies are the reward for innovation
Monopolies are the reward for innovation (~COMPETITION can be bad for business, and monopolies drive progress)
The goal of every successful business is to have a monopoly
Compares regulation of bits to regulation to atoms—points out that it might cost 100k to get a drug through the fad, but nobody does rats on video games to determine if they’re addictive
addItional quote that I’ll post for verbatim review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_yJTCDU4uE&feature=youtu.be&t=15m01s
quote shown in a slide, not spoken, from someone else: If you’re not working on your best idea right now, you’re doing it wrong—David Hansson
He definately privellages specific over sensitive answers (in the medical sense) and has inspired me to read The Reasonableness of Christianity and reconsider Chrstian practice from the allegorical perspective. I was inspired by his thoughts on original sin as a cultural critique. The name dropping of Straussian encourages me to read about Strauss who I haven’t come across before.
**
from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_yJTCDU4uE
What great investments does not one like, what great cause is unpopular. Fund those causes...invest in those ideas. Contrarian
You can always disown a child, but you can’t disown anything you’ve written (Talks about there being technologies innovations potentially that subvert the liberty/privacy vs security paradigm—can get more secure and more privacy concurrently)
A good scientist is very much the opposite, more like 180 degree, 179.5 degrees the opposite of a good politician a scientist is someone who’s interested in the truth, and a political is someone with a very troubled relationship with the truth.… (But academic science) egressions law—the bad scientist have driven out the good, those who are nimble in writing government grant application have replaced the eccentric scientists who have really pushed the research. And that’s sort of this deep corruption of the public. It’s very hard for the public to really appreciate it, because science is so specialised….self-reinforcing expert communities…have made this process of politicisation extremely opaque to the broader public
(on how happy the super rich are) I don’t think this is an easy thing to measure, think it’s extremely subject...
I’m not sure subjective happiness is the best way to evaluate things...I think there are many other ways of evaluating things (I think he’s implying that if it’s just subjective you’re measuring, what’s the point—they can intuit that themselves anyway)
I am going to disagree vehemently with the notion that monopolies drive progress.
Telkom spent a long time as a fixed-line telecommunications monopoly, and South Africa still has terrible fixed-line internet costs as a result.
Monopolies, as far as I can see, will almost always relax once their monopoly is secure and just keep doing things the same way all the time, holding onto their monopoly. (Sometimes they will even attempt to squash competitors before they grow large enough to threaten said monopoly). Companies in competition, on the other hand, will improve their offerings and/or lower their prices in order to attract more customers. Therefore—and this is borne out by the Telkom example—I conclude that monopolies lead to stagnation, while healthy competition is more likely to lead to progress.
You seem to interpret “progress” as “lower prices” :-)
While I think that Clarity is misunderstanding Peter Thiel (Thiel says that a potential monopoly is the carrot that drives a lot of innovation; Clarity wrongly interprets this as “monopolies drive progress”), the question of monopolies and progress is complicated. The two major examples that come to mind are Bell Labs (run by AT&T) and IBM (in the 1950s − 80s era).
Assuming you are referring to IBM’s mainframe business, they did not really have a monopoly; they were just a dominant player. Competitors at that time included Amdahl, Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data, Honeywell, General Electric and RCA. Amdahl even offered products that were compatible with IBM’s mainframe offerings and could run software developed on/for IBM.
Given the context, I’m interpreting “monopoly” loosely and include being the dominant player in the definition.
Thiel talks about how you would want to parlay your technological (or first-mover) advantage into a monopoly and he clearly means companies like Microsoft or Google which are not legal monopolies like AT&T was.
I read Thiel to be making the second argument as well, because monopolies have capacity to make the profits necessary for major R&D spending, as well as the capacity to benefit directly from major R&D spending. No individual commodity producer making zero economic profit has an incentive to invest in better methods of producing their commodity, as they correctly believe that the innovation will rapidly spread and benefit the consumers, rather than them.
The short way to visualize it is that the market for innovations has producer and consumer surplus, and only monopolists can capture both at once, which would suggest a monopolistic industry would spend more on innovation than a competitive industry. (This is true for some innovations and not others; monopolies should be expected to be better at developing basic science related to an industry, and competitions should be expected to be better at determining customer preferences.)
Your explanation is compelling and unexpected. Can you reference a Wikipedia article (preferable) or another internet source so I can read more broadly on this thesis? The closest approximation I can find is theses on why patents and other forms of IP are awarded.
Consider this article by Thiel.
I see how it can look like that. But no, they are two related but seperate effects of a healthily competitive market.
That is a statement that I can agree with. (And I wouldn’t count a severely dominant player as a monopoly; a dominant player can drive a lot of progress as the smaller fish frantically try to find a way to one-up it and pull in customers)
You’re right, monopolies certainly don’t drive progress. But the possibility of a monopoly can.
Progress requires R&D, and R&D is expensive and unpredictable. No one would want to do the type of long-term research that invigorates the economy or even creates brand new industries if they won’t take in the lion’s share of the profits. So it would be a bad idea to implement a policy of breaking up any and all monopolies, despite the fact that it is better in the moment (similar to Newcomb’s problem). In fact, we actually institute monopolies using government power, via intellectual property.
Agreed. The attempt to reach a monopoly is a great driver of progress; it’s only once a company reaches that state that it starts to hinder progress.
Simon Kuper
Simon Kuper
This quote describes a common failure mode. At the same time, if no one experimented with new visionary ideas, there wouldn’t be examples for others to draw lessons from.
-- Feynman Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman
The book is readable in general.
I think you’re missing one full stop; it parses like this:
I wonder why.
I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why (I wonder why (I wonder why I wonder)).
Am I the only one who can’t read this without singing “Lemon Tree” in my head?
Still makes me smile as I remember the context and nerdy philosophy professor. Hyperbolic but it doesn’t make it any worse
Why doesn’t the Gates foundation just close the funding gap of the Against Malaria Foundation and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative?
Niccolò Machiavelli “it is much safer to be feared than loved because …love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”