“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently what should not be done at all.”—Peter Drucker
CronoDAS
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I had one as a kid along with who knows what other diagnoses. I’m not on any medication for it but I also feel like don’t really need it the way my life currently is?
One case of the changing the level of friction drastically changing things was when, in the late 1990s and 2000s, Napster and successive services made spreading copyrighted files much, much easier than it had been. These days you don’t need to pirate your music because you can get almost any recorded song on YouTube whenever you want for free (possibly with an ad) or on Spotify for a cheap subscription fee...
There’s one more scenario that often occurs in real life: often both sides of a potential patent fight are licensing different patents to each other. If Alpha Corp demands exorbitant licensing fees from Beta Corp, Beta Corp can threaten Alpha Corp with similar licensing fees that would cancel out any increased revenue Alpha Corp could extort from Beta Corp. As a result, neither side ever actually wins a patent fight, so they don’t start.
Patent trolls are particularly likely to become predatory because, since they don’t manufacture anything, they don’t actually use anyone else’s patents and are therefore immune to this kind of retaliation. In the United States, it seems as though one of the more common ways to avoid paying a predatory patent troll is to assert that you are not actually infringing upon a vaild patent (because what you are doing is slightly different from what was actually patented or because the patent should never have been granted in the first place) and force the patent troll to attempt to enforce its patent in court.
on the grounds that their political mindkillery effects trump their relevance to this discussion
Pun intended? ;)
But yeah, it’s getting off-topic and there’s plenty of other places to discuss that kind of thing.
I believe that Trump is, in fact, exactly that clueless and completely unaware of how clueless he is.
Edit: For the record: my biggest reason for believing this is having read reports of what many mainstream Republicans who worked under him during his first term have said and written about what he was like.
Yeah, in Star Trek, genetic engineering for increased intelligence reliably produces arrogant bastards, but that’s just so they don’t have to show the consequences of genetic engineering on humans...
Do we have it in any other animal besides cows? Dogs? Housecats? Fruit flies? Guinea pigs? Any other short-lived animal commonly used in laboratory research that still has a decent amount of genetic diversity?
If you do not have compulsory patent licensing with court-set fees, then why should any one patent troll—or even the holder of a rare real patent—stop short of demanding the company’s entire profit?
In practice, there are often substitutes for whatever it is that the patent owner has a patent on—if someone has a patent on making wheels out of metal and won’t let you license that patent at a reasonable price, you can still make wheels out of wood or stone instead even if they’re not nearly as good. So there is a limit to the amount of revenue that a patent holder can demand.
Additionally, if the patent holder and the licensee don’t agree on a price, neither of them gets anything, so they each have an incentive to make an offer the other will accept. The game theory of bargaining over a fixed surplus applies here.
And yet you will observe that in all public political discourse that makes it onto TV, all the sober talking heads in business suits are talking as if by subsidizing people with $120 checks we are causing their bank accounts to go up by $120, rather than talking about how many new universities or doctors or houses the $120 checks will cause to exist.
On the bright side, the discourse might be getting a little bit better in places. Some years ago, a California politician proposed helping renters by making rent tax deductible. The proposal was immediately mocked as being a giveaway to landlords.
I have an objection to the section titled “supply and demand are always equal”. In my Econ 101 textbook, “quantity supplied” and “quantity demanded” are always equal; the terms “supply” and “demand” only referred to supply curves and demand curves. Maybe this is a nitpick, but I think it’s an important one. I’d like to propose some rather significant edits to that section and to the following one about subsidies, but is this the kind of page where it’s okay for changes to come from anyone, or is it important that it stay “by Eliezer Yudkowsky”?
It’s not agreed among economists which countries today might be suffering from too little aggregate demand, and working under capacity. The economists in my preferred school suspect that it is presently happening inside the European Union due to the European Central Bank being run by lunatics.
This may have been true in 2017, but post-COVID inflation suggests that it’s not true anymore.
Are there really people in the world who can do nothing that anybody else with money wants?
Yes. These people are often called “disabled”, “retired”, or “children”. For example, a person with severe Alzheimer’s disease or schizophrenia is unlikely to be able to produce much of anything at all. Most people, if they live long enough, will eventually suffer enough damage from aging that they semi-voluntarily remove themselves from the labor force. Similarly, your average two-year-old probably isn’t going to be productively employable either, regardless of the wage, because it would cost more to supervise them than they would be able to produce. However, most people who are of prime working age and unemployed are not, in fact, disabled to the point where even in an ideal world there would be nobody that would want to pay them to do something.
many theoretical computer scientists think our conjecture is false
Does that mean that you (plural) are either members of a theoretical computer science community or have discussed the conjecture with people that are? (I have no idea who you are or what connections you may or may not have with academia in general.)
Looking good to his superiors is the one thing the Pointy-Haired Boss is actually good at. Several strips show that some of his ridiculous-seeming decisions make perfect sense from that perspective.
<irony>Robustly generalizible like noticing that bacteria aren’t growing next to a certain kind of mold that contaminated your petri dish or that photographic film is getting fogged when there’s no obvious source of light?</irony>
Elaborating on The Very General Helper Strategy: the first thing you do when planning a route by hand is find some reasonably up-to-date maps.
One thing that almost always tends to robustly generalize is improving the tools that people use to gather information and make measurements. And this also tends to snowball in unexpected ways—would anyone have guessed beforehand that the most important invention in the history of medicine would turn out to be a better magnifying glass? (And tools can include mathematical techniques, too—being able to run statistical analysis on a computer lets you find a lot of patterns you wouldn’t be able to find if it was 1920 and you had to do it all by hand.)
With regards to AI, that might mean interpretability research?
Hmmm. Taking this literally, if I didn’t know where I was going, one thing I might do is look up hotel chains and find out which ones suit my needs with respect to price level and features and which don’t, so when I know what city I want to travel to, I can then find out if my top choices of hotel chain have a hotel in a convenient location there.
Meta-strategy: try to find things that are both relevant to what you want and mostly independent of the things you don’t know about?
For some reason, this story generated a sense of dread in me—I kept waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop.
This is silly of me, but I can’t help thinking that this would make a great “Pinky and the Brain” episode.