The Image category submissions for the “Uplift Universe” Computer Graphics contest are closing on Monday 12th May, so gather up all your little green men and submit them to the contest before the end of this weekend! There is over US$100,000 in prizes being dished out, so get involved before it all gets zapped with a laser. (Those doing movie trailers have a month longer.)
THROUGH STRANGER EYES -- a collection of my book reviews, introductions and essays on popular culture -- will soon be released in the Western Hemisphere by Nimble Books and in the Eastern Hemisphere by Altair (Australia). Included will be those infamous articles about Tolkien and Star Wars, sober reflections on Jared Diamond's Collapse, and Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows, scientific ponderings on Feynman and Gott, appraisals of Brunner, Resnick, Zelazny, Verne, and Orwell... all the way to fun riffs on the Matrix and Buffy! Watch for news here!
------ Speaking of... um... genius. Nathan Myhrvold and his Intellectual Ventures innovation superorganism are subjects of an in-depth New Yorker profile. And yes, I can testify that the tales about Nathan are scarcely exaggerated. Some people really do make better use of both dollars and neurons than others. (My eldest son is especially anxious to see the famed Myhrvold collection of analog and mechanical calculating machines, though I told him he must invent something first, in order to make up for spilling wine across Nathan’s table cloth, when he was a year old.)
------- A way to contribute to disaster relief in Myanmar. Mike Treder has researched what he thinks may be the best avenue... the Burmese monks' cyclone relief efforts.
------- And just when I get exhausted, arguing with dreamy SETI fetishists over whether sapient life in the universe must automatically be altruistic... and I am tired of being the bad guy, the grouch, pointing out that “it ain’t necessarily so”... along http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifcomes something that reminds me that I really am the guy who wrote about dolphins and chimps in space. I really HOPE there’s altruism in nature. And Stefan just shared this heartening example.
------- Some fascinating introductory video on “computer forensics” by fellow nanotech policy theorist Steve Burgess.
And a cute satire of an online discussion forum of time travelers.
===== MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS!======
Two studies provide new insights on exceptional longevity. In a study of risk factors that may be part of the 75% of human life span variation not attributable to genetics, Brigham & Women's Hospital researchers estimated that a 70-year-old man who did not smoke and had normal blood pressure and weight, no diabetes and exercised two to four...
A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals to the vocal cords has been used to make a "voiceless" phone call. (Um, hey, a little cred here?)
Peking University researchers have found five biochemical pathways that may be at the core of the process of addiction.Dr Wei and her colleagues wanted to answer three questions. First, what are the genes and biochemical pathways in addiction? Second, does addiction to different substances involve the same core biochemical mechanisms? Third, does anything in those mechanisms explain why addiction is so hard to shake off? Fascinating article. But still, no one will ask: does this hijack parts of the natural behavior reinforcement process?...
Disney Revives 'House of the Future.'
Converting corn to ethanol in Iowa not only leads to clearing more of the Amazonian rainforest, researchers report, but also would do little to slow global warming. It may often make it worse & exacerbate hunger.
Word of a 40 percent increase in the efficiency of a common thermoelectric material, making possible solar panels and car exhaust pipes that use waste heat for electrical power.
A study group identified 25 potential future threats to the environment in the UK, which they say researchers should focus on. In addition to well-publicised risks such as toxic nanomaterials, the acidification of the ocean and increasingly frequent extreme weather events, the list includes some more outlandish possibilities. These include: • Biomimetic robots that could become new invasive species. • Experiments involving climate engineering, for instance and • Increased demand for the biomass needed to make biofuel. • Disruption to marine ecosystems caused by offshore power generation. Experiments to control invasive species using genetically engineered viruses.
=== A WORD ABOUT WORD ===
Re setting standards based upon Microsoft Word... that is like letting Yogi Bera write a textbook on grammar or appointing Harpo Marx to the Supreme Court... not exactly immoral or criminal, but absolutely crazy. I still write using a 1996 version of Word Perfect for the Macintosh... a product that is now totally unsupported and that has gone unrevised for a decade! Why? Because the logical pattern of its commands, its formatting, its toolkit and the far smaller number of outrageously dumb steps made it seem designed by and for humans, not denizens of Planet Regrespa.
Seriously, Word is big and complex and follows a kind of logic. Every time I curse and scratch my head over some vastly complicated, multi-step weirdness that the whole world now takes for granted, because it became the “standard,” I eventually have an epiphany moment when I say “Oh! I see what they’re doing!”
Only then I add... “But... why???” Seriously. I have long suspected that MEN IN BLACK had it right. There are clusters of aliens on Earth, mostly in America, pretty decent folk, paying their taxes, fitting in. Some are inimical, like those pod beings who have taken over NASA Marshall Space-Nonflight Center, doing everything in their power, for thirty years, to keep us out of space...
And others, like a giant hive in Redmond Washington, just want to make money monopolizing our software. They don’t even mean us harm! But their logic is not our logic.
=== MORE MISC STUFF ====
A cute comparison of ten differences between writers and mathematicians.
want to take part in a survey about sci fi movie cliches? I mean tropes? I mean used-a-lot old stories?
Another brilliant Jared Diamond article, this time about the roots of the human impulse for revenge.
See a fairly long audio interview with me, in which Stephen Euin Cobb asks about what I liked... and hated... about my recent, top-rated, event on Second Life!
109 comments:
I have ideas about uplift scenes, but neither the time, skill or resources to do anythng about them, which is hardly helpful!
does this hijack parts of the natural behavior reinforcement process?...
Have you seen the Scientific American article on tobacco addiction? It presents the hypothesis that the brain has systems for generating and inhibiting cravings. It is suggested that nicotine actually stimulates the *suppression* systems. The brain reacts by boosting the craving generation systems itself, which are then thrown out of balance again when the nicotine is withdrawn.
Permanent changes in brain chemistry have been observed with as little as one cigarette.
And this stuff's legal?!
I have been following the recent OOXML saga, both on Groklaw, and on Tim Bray's blog (he was one of the Canadian delegation attending the March meeting)
My opinion is summarised here.
---
One final thing. I received a survey from the Planetary Society which seeks to determine the public's priorities in space exploration. It might be worth sharing with you folks.
The four questions are:
1. What should the driving goal of future space exploration be?
- a: Building a permanent, human-occupied base on the Moon.
- b: Sending human expeditions to Mars.
- c: Using only robots to explore our solar system.
2. If you could advise the next president about the U.S. space program, what would you say?
- a: Build the shuttle replacement, but do not commit to future human exploration beyond the Space Station.
- b: Seek international cooperation for lunar landings and Mars exploration.
- c: Build a U.S. lunar base as a stepping-stone to Mars.
3. Scientists have warned that the world will soon lose its space-based ability to monitor climate. Should NASA step up its Earth Observing Program to meet this challenge?
- a: Yes. Global warming and other Earth issues are paramount. Government space programs must find ways to fund this research.
- b: No. Limited space funds are better spent exploring
beyond Earth.
4. Do you have any specific questions you would like us to put to the presidential candidates?
Yay, another WP fan. I know Katharine Kerr also uses it and is horribly afraid her old PC will break down since she is unsure WP 5 will even install on a modern machine. There is of course "WP Classic" available with the latest version (X3), that emulates WP 5.1 layout, keyboard & additional features.
Microsoft word is another fine example of the failure of capitalism.
Perhaps you'd like to start up your own firm to compete with Microsoft Word, if you're so confident in the power of markets? You've made a good case for there being a demand...
Allowing Microsoft to decide these things, to further their own profit, is the most undemocratic way we could manage our resources.
You've presented an even nastier example in Earth... 1990's diaper disposal in California, where the capitalist firm exploits the environment to the detriment of the more environmentally sound diaper services.
But your retort, "Capitalism is good" is enough for you, I suppose...
Where did I hear something about criticism being the only known remedy for self deception?
This is why Adam Smith argued vigorously against corporations! He -knew- merchants were more likely to collude than compete, and any solutions to that problem are now hopelessly outdated by our new feudalism.
Re: Word as the new standard.
Could it be the "Qwerty" of the 21st Century?
I use OpenOffice Writer, which is more or less based on Word, but has, at least, the advantage of not costing me anything.
I just finished Mr. Diamond's Collapse, very sobering indeed.
Don't know if you were serious or tongue in cheek re: Nathan Myhrvold. I met him once and came away with the impression that I had just met a slimy thug. His company IV may just be patent trolls (justifying the slimy thug description).
This article on IV seems to cherish the notion that ideas are easily made. And it's true. When you're not encumbered by having to work out the difficult details and actually create products, you can rattle off ideas very quickly. So IV are definitely patent trolls.
That isn't necessarily bad for civilization on the whole; we'll have to wait and see, I suppose.
Any system whereby the government and universities could fund biomedical research, that research could be converted into a lifesaving drug-- and then that drug could be patented by a private firm so that they can charge a prohibitively expensive price for that drug such that people suffer and die is not a good system.
Patents kill people.
What is all this on WP vs Word? I'm still debating between Vi and Emacs ;)
Seriously though, I get very annoyed by far too often receiving Word documents by people who just assume everyone uses it. I don't even have MS word, and because Word is such a baroque PoS, the 'office' like programs I do use (Open-office derivatives) most often have problems with the files.
My main word processor is emacs. It is so much easier writing anything with math in it using a text editor and LaTeX. Many biologists just use word, and I would argue their work suffers for it (as well as making me not want to collaborate with them.) Also, apparently many Asian (Japanese and Korean at least) pubs and conferences only accept Word formatted stuff.
Hell, I even get sent conference and seminar announcements, job postings, and other such mundane things as *attached word docs*... WTF! How insanely stupid overkill is that!
Just fire up a text editor and write a f*cking html doc if you really want to have a bulleted list and italics. It only takes about 5min to learn basic HTML, but I'd even gladly suffer the bad html generated by a WYSIWYG composer over getting a Word doc. And everyone could actually read it without sending money to Redmond.
BTW: Google Docs work reasonably well for text-and-images stuff. Though I haven't tried to do anything fancy with it (since I just use LaTeX for anything involved).
PS: While I'm on a rant... let me mention 'logical vs literal' formatting (apologies if those are not the correct terms of art). HTML (and LaTeX) is really designed to do 'logical' formatting... instead of specifying italics or exactly where an embedded image goes, you are supposed to specify that certain text is 'emphasized' and an image is associated with a certain block of text... the exact layout is supposed to be handled by whatever is interpreting the code. This is far superior in most cases to tying to specify all the details of page layout. If you really want that level of specificity, use PDF... otherwise just try and relax and trust the reader side to handle logical formatting appropriately.
"Logical" formatting is more usually called "semantic" formatting, and I think "literal" is thus "syntactic".
It's usually called "structural markup" vs. "presentational markup". "Semantic" as in "the semantic web" refers to something different, namely, attaching metadata to text so that computer programs can understand it more easily.
In any case, LaTeX is a mix, but mostly presentational.
Travc, if you're on a Mac, you might want to try TextMate. Takes some of the best ideas from Emacs and brings them out of the 1970s.
Mac OS 7 was so charming; good to hear somebody still finds it useful.
Microsoft Word was a remarkable advance . . . back when the alternative was Wordstar.
What ticks me most off about the versions of Word that came with my last couple of computers is that they are SLOW. It takes upwards of a minute for everything to come up, and the computer crawls in the process. Even on my primary desktop, a P4 3.2 MHz.
I recently installed Fedora Linux on a much slower (P4 1.7 MHz) machine that sits right next to my main machine. Someday I'm going to do a side-by-side test of the Star Office word processor and Word.
There's a definite steep learning curve to Linux, but once you learn the ropes you've got a very nice environment that doesn't have to take a break to upload virus detection rules every time it's turned on.
I went from SUN OS -> Solaris -> RedHat Linux -> openSUSE. I've never had a Windows desktop as a primary machine. Consequently, I still find Windows to be quite weird.
Lately, I've become saddened by the prospects of desktop linux to the point of stopping all linux evangelization efforts. People still seem to want to give MickeySoft their hard earned cash.
Linux for me, too. I'm puzzled by Stefan's remarks about Linux having a steep learning curve. I mean, yes, it has a rich set of CLI commands with the traditional terse, obscure and geeky names like grep awk ls etc, but they're no more obscure than the Windows command prompt (and a good deal more powerful: twenty years of development, and Windows still doesn't have an effective equivalent of a soft link! Come on, guys, it isn't rocket science!!)
Even at the Graphical interface level, which most users tend to use, I don't see a huge problem (Windows may have the edge there, but it's narrowing)
Installation? In my experience with Ubuntu, apart from the partitioning hassles (which come from trying to share the system with another operating system) it just... works.
BTW, speaking of gaps narrowing, it appears that Obama now has more pledged superdelegates than Clinton.
GOP convention chair resigns due to ties to Burma dictatorship. :)
http://www.newsweek.com/id/136321
I heartily recommend 'Little Brother,' by Cory Doctorow.
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/
It is fairly 'adult' YA SciFi, (lots of sex, drugs, and rock and roll) set in the very near future. Teenagers picked up by the DoHS after a terrorist attack fight back against the DoHS using hacking, smart mobs, etc.
Check out the free downloads on the website I've given (Cory used to work for the EFF), and the 'donate a copy to a library’ link.
Note that 'Little Brother' is in some ways diametrically opposed to our hosts' transparency screed, being yet another SciFi novel that says that the future is best served by everyone having hard crypto. It's always good to hear from both sides of an argument, and I think that Dr. Brin and Cory do share some basic desires for our future.
http://www.world-science.net/
has a lot of great articles. Just a sampling of the current offerings:
* Dip in brainpower may follow drop in real power:
Researchers say low status seems to erode mental function -- with complicated implications for society.
http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/080510_power
* Designer isotopes push the frontiers: Creating rare variants of chemical elements may be the next big thing in nuclear physics.
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/080509_isotopes
* Brain molecules may tell of child abuse: A study has found distinct chemical markings on the DNA of people who took their own lives after suffering maltreatment.
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/080506_abuse
* Study: galactic goings-on were dinos' undoing, and maybe ours: Our movement through the galaxy may cause mass extinctions, researchers claim.
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/080503_galaxy
* Probe to reach near sun: An unmanned NASA craft would plunge into an inferno more than hot enough to melt stone.
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/080501_solarprobe
* "Nanotrees" might help miniaturize gadgetry: Beautiful and possibly useful, tiny structures shed light on strange aspects of crystal growth, scientists say.
http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/080501_nanotrees
My personal-machine linux experience has been with Fedora. Two MythTV boxes and a (just installed) general purpose machine.
Maybe Ubuntu is better at screening users from the incandescent sulfurous hell of dependency snarl-ups and battling repositories. Next time I find a computer in the garbage I'll give it a whirl.
Stefan, that's exactly what my 16 year old Ben has done. He bought ten trashed laptops off ebay for 50$ and managed to fix two of them including a cool Thinkpad. He loaded Ubuntu on those and loves Linux... tho of course, part of it is because he is far more ornery and contrarian than his old man. (He refuses to acknowledge the inherent superiority of Macs.)
GOP convention chair resigns due to ties to Burma dictatorship. :)
Blark. When will somebody do the statistics and picket Matt Drudge till he admits that goppers are utter thug whores? Barry Goldwater's spin rate has gone hypersonic.
Thanks for the 'textmate' pointer... yeah I do use a mac laptop, though I do work on a desktop running Ubuntu. (A laptop can't quite cut it with the TBs of data I'm currently working on.)
Anyway, Windows is needed for gaming unfortunately. Though it is getting to the point that consoles are dominating that these days (I could go on a long rant about the inferiority of consoles and the corrosive effects of porting games from console to PC, at least with my favorite types of games... but I won't for not.) As for why Windows dominates... VHS vs Beta (though now we have DVDs and vid on demand).
I seem to be the Neal Stephenson troll... but if you haven't read "in the beginning there was the command line", it is a good one.
here
As for Macs... With OSX they are really superior for most purposes. Best of both worlds.
---
An opinion/observation on Apple vs Microsoft which I'd like to share:
Microsoft sells software. This is problematic in many ways... Needing to continually make previous versions obsolete to drive sales, having all the interoperability problems working with a huge set of poorly coordinated hardware bits, and the entire weirdness of actually selling what is essentially information.
Apple, on the other hand, sells computing devices. Interoperability is obviously easier. But also, issues of 'code freedom' are a lot less worrysome to me with Apple because the business model is completely different. Maybe I'm being naive, but it makes an important difference in my perception at least. It is a lot harder to be pissed off at Apple for selling a computer which uses proprietary code than Microsoft which just sell the code.
I can't explain it well, but perhaps a little seed will get planted in the brain of someone who can.
--
re: Nathan Myhrvold, I have only met him one briefly (1/2 hour I think), but he seemed to be a clever enough fellow. Nothing super extraordinary, but I'm pretty hard to really impress... I'm quite used to being around people far smarter than I am.
As for IV (or whatever that business is called), an idea/'incubator' company isn't really all that new. IdeaLab is the one I'm most familiar with (several friends worked there). The key difference between a real useful company and a patent scam is in the 'development' of the idea. IdeaLab didn't just patent ideas, but built up a reasonable business plan and developed the idea to the point where others could pick it up and run with it (sometimes into a brick wall, but sometimes successfully). For example (assuming I got my history correct), the idea of tying advertising on the internet to search terms (now expanded to on-page ads relevant to the context on the page) came out of IdeaLab... but equally important, they figured out how to account for all the micropayments and actually built a functioning Yellow-pages type system. So, the bit that makes Google an actual company which can make money was thought-up, patented, and developed into a working system by an 'incubator' company. (Google stole it and probably broke the law in the process, but the parties involved apparently sorted it out like reasonable adults.)
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I once observed an interesting scenario in the country, involving a large family of cats. A 4 week old kitten had died and was lying in my driveway. Watching out the window, I observed a few of the other cats in a semi-circle around the dead kitten. The cats took turns in a ritualistic-like manner, going up to the dead kitten, sitting for awhile, then leaving. They didn’t look at the dead kitten, they merely sat for a moment, looking around. One of them, a younger cat between 6 months and year and considered a teenager by our standards, pawed at the kitten as if to be sure it was really dead… or perhaps just seeing what death was all about. It was quite fascinating to watch. I’m a realist in a lot of respects and believe in treating animals for what they are… life that lives on instincts not intellect. What I observed was real and animals apparently do “understand” death on some level.
As for the dreamy SETI people who assume… and it isn’t that I don’t think life can’t be out there, but I always saw the search for life and the belief in aliens, a modern day search for God. What people are really arguing, is the fact that God is good and exists out there somehwhere in the universe. Therefore, you will never convince them otherwise. :o)
I can't afford to be a platform bigot; my job has me working with Windows PCs, Linux PCs, a Solaris workstation, and video servers that run a variant of the Plan 9 operating system (supposed to be the successor to Unix, but little known outside of labs).
* * *
FYIage: Freeware versions of Civilization and Colonization are available on the Linux platform. Although I'm not sure if announcing that is doing anyone a favor.
* * *
During my obligatory Mothers' Day call, learned that my father stumbled on and recorded ARCHITechs and both of them watched and enjoyed the show. Paraphrasing: "That Brin guy sure is a non-linear thinker."
* * *
OH! Yes, I strongly suggest everyone read "In The Beginning Was The Command Line." A real brain-stretching and insightful essay.
Hi Dr. Brin:
I recently left this comment on Malcolm Gladwell's blog in response to the NYer Myrhvold article. I apologize for the cut-and-paste, but I think it's important.
"Dear Mr. Gladwell,
I'm a longtime reader and a big fan. However, I think your most recent NYer article on Nathan Myhrvold and "inventions" does a disservice to your readers.
Myhrvold's company, Microsoft, was convicted of anti-competitive practices concerning intellectual property for actions taken when he was their Chief Technical Officer and 3rd in command. It's an interesting choice to use him as your primary source on an article concerning intellectual property.
In the words of the U.S. judge hearing the monopoly case, Microsoft executives had "proved, time and time again, to be inaccurate, misleading, evasive, and transparently false. ... Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect. It is also a company whose senior management is not averse to offering specious testimony to support spurious defenses to claims of its wrongdoing." The total fine levied by the EU is nearing 3 billion dollars.
What his new company does is generally known as patent trolling. It exploits our broken patent system and inhibits innovation. You should not be able to get a patent on an "invention" without a working prototype. A concept and a drawing is not enough, no matter how many high-priced lawyers you have. Brainstorming ideas is fine, but it occurs in every graduate school and company in the world. You should not have legal protection from competitors until you do the hard work to get results. The differences between Myhrvold and Bell or Myhrvold and Kelvin could not be greater.
Furthermore, Myhrvold's attitude and character are well illustrated by his quote: “People in biology and medicine don’t do arithmetic.” That is simply ridiculous and shows a profound lack of understanding. Quantitative data and statistical analysis are the foundation of biology and medicine.
Fond regards,
theDAWG"
DAWG you make very good points. And yes, patent and IP law is often misunderstood, even by judges. When it fails at its one and only original purpose -- luring creative activity into the open and accelerating leveraged progress -- then the law should be re-interpreted in such a way as to achieve that original purpose.
Certainly, a patent that is accompanied by a working model and/or a vigorous product-development plan merits stronger protection than a sketch and "looka what we thought of last night!"
Nevertheless, I need to point out that Nathan M's IV company does try hard to pick the best ideas and invest serious time/money into them.
Furthermore, there is something to be said for patents that get idea out there, getting attention paid to them, and starting the expiration clock ticking. Twenty years later, it's all public domain.
True, Nathan could simply MAKE them public domain, which is where a third factor comes in. I believe he ought to publish a journal and site offering partnerships at cascading levels to ANYBODY willing and able to run with an idea, with reasonable (low) rates that let him maintain overhead off of the few that succeed.
Of course, this is blather from a fellow who has failed to break through mental blocks surrounding one of his own areas of innovation. I thought for sure that, when I got my hugely broad and encompassing Holocene patents, somebody would notice the gaping gaps in online interation that the patent exposes. I figured: "Sure, this doesn't prove that there's no sliver of prior art the examiners missed. But it does prove that nobody out there is making big money from these concepts."
Nope. My recent visit to 2nd Life... one of the best attended events they ever had... involved fancy avatars & buildings -- and the still-horrific 30 year old scrolling "chat" BS in the corner. No wonder progress has ground to a halt.
Patents are deliberately written so as to be difficult to understand. This obscurantism undermines their stated purpose-- to further innovation, in part, by allowing other potential innovators
The patent system also reinforces the fiction that sole geniuses produce innovation. Instead, it is most often teams who push forward the boundaries.
Patents are most useful to large companies...
And imagine for a moment... that fateful day when Klaatu steps out. A member of an older and wiser race, Klaatu's people have broad patents covering everything from electronics to applecarts-- and theirs is a law without expiration.
No doubt you think that is absurd... and the folk in China, India, Ecuador, and a host of other nations agree.
This is OT, so apologies up front:
I was recently talking with my local Ostrich (local in a social networking sense). It is a lot less enjoyable than most chats/debates, because I really can't seen to get a grip on this otherwise very intelligent guy's thought process re: politics and public policy.
Anyway, a few things that struck me:
A while back he mentioned Wright in the context of 'Obama scaring' him. This time he repeated the worried/scared about Obama stuff, but accepted my assertion the the Wright stuff is supremely silly and irrelevant. Seems to me there is something he does not trust about Democrats (to a lesser extent, politicians in general) at a very deep level, and whatever post-hoc justifications available will be used to support the feeling. I really have no idea how to get around that.
Another thing came up talking about Carter and Reagan. He thinks Reagan was pretty great because he (and he assumes most Americans) felt good about stuff... and Carter was 'the worst' because he made people feel bad. I retorted by pointing out the on policy grounds, Carter was amazingly good while Reagan was pretty bad. I wish I knew more details of Carter's economic and fiscal policies, because those are counts where Reagan was particularly bad (long term at least).
He also asserted the the hostages held in Iran were release because Reagan would have bombed/invaded/whatever and Iran was scared of him. That doesn't seem plausible to me, but my memory of the time is hazy and actual reality-based history is hard to come by.
On one positive note... Brining up Iran-Contra in the context of older non-very-engaged president and GOP foreign policy seems pretty sticky. It is exactly the sort of thing you expect the Repubs to do when they can... and at least some Repubs will even admit it.
Anyway, I wish I could get this guy to take a hard rational look at politics. Unfortunately, he seems to view it more as an occasional entertainment, doesn't think any news is reliable (so enjoys Faux News, since it isn't any worse at least), and goes on some sort of feelings/gut that I really don't get, much less know how to counter.
travc, most people tend to go on their 'gut feelings' and then justify them later. While they can apply reason, surprisingly few people are consciously familiar with even basic deductive logic. We aren't as rational as we'd like to think. Aristotle realised it. I think the repubs realise it better then the dems, too. Which is why their rhetoric has been more persuasive (people are increasingly seeing beyond the smoke and mirrors, however).
Anyway, going back to Aristotle, he described three forms of argument:
- logos: appeals to reason (I think this because that)
- pathos: appeals to emotion (Hype. Also, how would you feel if...?)
- ethos: appeals to morality (thou shalt/not...)
Of these, logos is actually the *weakest* at persuasion (although very handy in defending an idea). You can see this in the Intelligent Design tussle: The IDers are on the offensive, but make no progress at all. OTOH scientists don't seem to be able to dismiss those annoying nits.
I think this is where you might be going wrong with the ostrich management.
Appeals to morality are fraught with pitfalls. You're dealing with hardwired circuitry here, so better to avoid a stance that requires a shift in moral ground. It isn't going to happen, and you will lose your audience. (example, Dawkins' attacks on religion. I think he has a well argued thesis, but to what point?)
Conversely, an argument that uses morality as a lever is nearly unassailable, and is the basis for the rhetorical tactic of 'framing'
(eg: 'You want to get out of Iraq? You want to abandon the sacrifice our brave men and women have made?' ... that sort of thing. Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, for good reason.)
So what's left but hype and grooming? This will, at least get your audience in a 'feel good' frame of mind. They might then be more receptive to your more rational points. If you slip them in like the anti-worming tablets in the cat's liver (changing analogs, but cats *adore* liver), they are harder to avoid. This is the basic tactic underlying Brin's 'Clinton Gambit': 'if Clinton did... *WHAT!!? (well, actually, Bush did WHAT squared...)'
...Then again, some cats are pretty adept at separating pill from liver! The problem appears to be that so much emotion has been wrapped up in an ostrich's political allegiance, that it has become an ethical stance. You can't change their beliefs for them. The best you can do is to paint them into a corner and let them work it out for themselves.
(*disclaimer: most of the above is gleaned from a good, but brief, course on effective communication. There will, no doubt, be a few omissions and mistakes, but it 'feels' right to me ;-)
Hope that all helps, or at least, doesn't hinder.
Actually, Dawkins is quite capable of using all three at once:
"Religious indoctrination of children is child abuse."
One of David's continuing complaints about contractors operating in the Iraq war gets an airing over at Truthout.org. They interview Dina Rasor about her book "Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War".
Truthout
Also mentioned is Keytam(not sure on spelling) where if an individual in a company has evidence of fraud in a govt contract they can file on behalf of the govt and if the action is successful will get a percentage of the win against the company. I don't know how long this has been in so don't know if David can add it to his prediction wins list or not.
"Religious indoctrination of children is child abuse."
As presented here, this assertion appeals to the emotions (and the indign-aid), but it is ethically ambiguous (see below), and has no rational backing. Oh! I'm sure Dawkins could provide a book's worth, and the recent Texas sect revelations are fresh in people's minds. Still, it's presentation that matters. The sentence does not stand on its own.
Appeals to morality had better be made to the morals of the audience! Traditional religion is associated with the caring and nurture of children. Child abuse is viewed as repugnant. So, by setting up a paradoxical conflict between two *strong* moral issues, the statement simply gets people steamed!
I used Dawkins as an example of the problems you can encounter when tackling a moral issue. I haven't read his books, but I have seen the documentary he made on 'The God Delusion'. I felt that using arguments like the above *on religious leaders* was not helpful. (I am told the book is much better presented, however)
Tony, thanks. A short course is generally all that is needed if it is indeed good. (I often make an analogous statement about short stories vs novels with respect to interesting ideas... just to make an SciFi connection.)
One problem I have is that this guy is smart and good at deductive reasoning, at least applied to his field of work... a scientist. He is also older and in a more accomplished position than I. Anyway, my interactions are strictly of the 'chit-chat' sort, since he is and acquaintance, not a friend. So long heated debates (which I personally enjoy) are not appropriate.
On morality, I generally agree with him actually. So appeals on that level are probably possible, but tricky to make since I would have to show that his support for the GOP (or fear / lack of support for alternative which is more relevant probably) is somehow at odds with his existing moral views.
I think the core difficulty is really that he does not (and I think does not want to) view politics as important. That allows an otherwise pretty hard-headed person to just go on fuzzy feelings and post-hoc justifications, because it doesn't really matter anyway.
The Faux News thing is perhaps too indicative. If one really thinks that all news sources are full of crap, you might as well just enjoy the 'sport' of watching FOX... since they are more amusing. The fact that some of the crap actually does stick and leads to being misinformed doesn't really ultimately seem to matter to him (maybe he has a inflated view of his own BS detector).
For me, this is actually getting a bit depressing. I don't get too worked up over actual conservative vs liberal politics. I do feel very strongly about pragmatism vs ideology and authoritarianism.
---
On the up side, I loaned Soros's "Age of Fallibility" to my adviser at UCLA, and he found it much more deep and profound that I did (I thought it is pretty good). I guess that is another book suggestion to make to people.
George Soros
"The Age of Fallibility"
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=wm-7Y-xtzGYC&dq=Age+of+Fallibility&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=n8Lo5pjyAq&sig=ahmUjXGtAjqmp1TGRomMVQpT7cU#PPP1,M1
PS: On think I do think is really interesting from that book... Soros was a student of Karl Popper (philosophy of science) for a year, and Soros's highly successful investment methodology was inspired by his philosophical work (which you *should* already know all about, really!)
PPS: For some reason I'm typing like shit tonight... please forgive the odd typos and such. You can understand what I mean and that is the point after all of conversational speech.
Another thought:
Perhaps it is time to start working out how to take over and rebuild the Republican party.
Obama and his campaign are working on wresting power from the current establishment on the Dem side with mounting success, but the Repubs are in great flux and will probably (if McCain looses, as looks likely) be ripe for a realignment.
Bob Barr is running as a libertarian (there are many good thing about Barr despite the obvious BS he engaged in against Clinton). Maybe he (and others) are thinking that the GOP may be supplanted by a third party... possible. However, a 'from within' strategy is more plausible and maybe more effective in actually facilitating a long term shift towards sanity.
Fortunately and unfortunately, the religious right, tax cut uberalis, and neo-cons all worked out mechanisms different mechanisms for internal party takeovers. Delay's faction probably provides the best model, which basically boils down to getting really involved in low level party processes (which are susceptible to 'invasion' due to low knowledge and participation in the processes.) Note: Obama's campaign learned from this too... which is one reason he has done so well in caucuses and is actually in a position to challenge the DLC power brokers.
Anyway, I'll leave it open for others to expand on why we should really want a viable GOP realigned to represent actual conservative predilections (though from a more pragmatic instead of ideological basis). Now seems like a good time to start working on making it happen.
PS: I would like to coin the term pragmatic-right (and pragmatic-left). Seems more fundamentally meaningful that 'center-right'. (Conservative / liberal / progressive / libertarian are all possible valid suffixes for 'pragmatic'.)
travc,
(maybe he has a inflated view of his own BS detector)
Sounds like your acquaintance needs the 'sight o' Kate' to wake him up!
So, if you've a mind to, choose a falsifiable assertion he has made, (presumably from an excess of faux), and demonstrate it to be wrong.
Then, after he has admitted it (and irrelevant to how important it is), ask him how a bright guy like him thinks he came to the wrong conclusion.
Repeat a few times. If he's really bright, any patterns will become apparent to him.
... From the train wreck the Liberal party has become in Australia (a side effect of having too few 'princely' leaders hanging on to power for too long), I think a rework of the repubs is definitely to be considered.
Don't hold your breath, however. Nine years after Kennett's defeat, the Victorian liberals are *still* all over the place on policy and presenting an effective alternative to a state government that needs a few short shocks. With a leader whose ratings are in single figure land, the feds are in the same predicament (although I think there's still a bit of talent to be had, there)
Tony I have had run-ins with some of the “New Atheists” -- those who cannot perceive the irony of their own militancy. I agree with you that you are better off taking others on on their on premises.
Hence, my biggest argument against the bigotry, narrowmindedness and anti-science attitudes that are rife in fundamentalism is that their attitudes are blasphemous to the very same Creator they claim to defend. I point out that my God -- who was isn some way involved in the creation of a 13.4 billion year-old galaxy of fantastic galaxies -- could take on their measly little 6,000 year master of petty vengefulness with His left pinky toe! That the Bible has its beauty and relevance. But so do Dick and Jane. And it is no accident that those who bother to look at the lessons in the rocks and stars and minerals and isotopes feel a thrill of new revelation as they rise above the Bible’s kindergarten moralisms to enter the graduate school that is science.
The two CAN be seen as compatible! But not if you do the standard mind-twist of the creationists etc, who feel they must reduce the status of science to “merely studying the details.” I believe that science has profound theological implications. We are in the Creator’s workroom, learning His craft at a rapidly accelerating pace. This has to have been our purpose, to become apprentices at the Father’s profession. And, soon, to be co creators ourselves. (Some of of sci fi authors may qualify, already! ;-)
And yes, the Bible itself hints at this, in the only pure moment in the entire story, where Creator and created interact without threats, demands, or the pollution of issues of sin. When God asked Man to name the beasts.
Note that this position is NOT “conciliatory or wimpy, like other attempts to stake a bridging middle ground between faith and science. No, this is a bridge, all right, but one that’s militant. The faith on the other side of this bridge had better accommodate science. And I make that demand in terms of faith.
Oh, some of you have heard my explanation for “the abortion thing.” That, too, is easy to pinion and pillory, if you grasp WHY the obsession burst forth in fury, from a political faction that knew what Jesus would say, if that bearded, beaded, hairy sandal-wearing came back today. They needed an on-off moral issue that would force him into their camp, socialist or no.
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Of course I am a fan of Soros... and The Transparent Society was partly based on Popper. I wish Soros were my seventh billionaire. Maybe he’d actually listen for longer than a dinner.
@David On Second Life: This is actually my field (online games). There are a lot of things wrong with Second Life (starting with it being a dead end in the evolution of virtual environments), but the Chat thing you complain about is pretty standard. Other things have been tried, and all wound up being functionally inferior to good, old fashioned, IRC chat. This is one of those "wheel" inventions, you can change the details, but every useful wheel is going to be round.
Beating the dead horse: More agitprop for war with Iran. This one looks like a trial balloon, they want to see where the pushback will come from.
--Dave
"I haven't read his book, and don't agree with his argument, so I find him very unpersuasive" makes your point, but perhaps not how you'd intended to.
On the other hand, if you believe "Don't abuse children" isn't in the moral system of the religious, prehaps you -do- agree with his argument...
So long as you're allowing for there being acceptable premises not based on fact or evidence, so long as you pat the Bible and say "and this is a Good Book, you're doing "the Devil's work" for him.
My choice of literature doesn't include lauding praise of genocide, rape, slavery, infinite torture...
And you don't understand why I'm glad you stood up to Stein?
Enjoy your dark tent, Achilles.
Perhaps, though, the primacy of evidence is outside of -your- logical, moral, and ethical world?
Dave R, your acceptance of a horrific SQUARE wheel is (alas) fairly typical of what I've found, across a decade of trying to shake some sense into bright web-ists like you. It is as if whole neuronal clusters have been mass-scooped out by aliens, resulting in an entire population that cannot see what's in front of their faces.
IRC "chat" is NOT acceptable. It lobotomizes online conversation, ensuring that discours is at best limited to one sentence at a time and without ANY of the thousand tools that we use, in order to allocate attention and priority in real life.
I'd recommend that you watch my Google Tech Talk: http://tinyurl.com/yy7yxm ... except that bright guys in that audience did the same thing. They blinked, got angry and talked PAST every single idea in the talk, insisting that nothing needs to be done about attention allocation or priority.
Everything that can be invented has already been invented. And this was at Google. Well, the patent office doesn't think so. (Because, by law, they were required to actually look for prior art to my invention, and found none.)
Ah well. The same is true of games. Copy what has sold so far, over and over and over and over and over....
----
BD, you are welcome here, we need a resident lefty and at least you are more polite than our last one.
Even when most of us snicker at the charming -retro simplicity of the quasi Marxist view (ah, the sixties) it does us good to be reminded that the evils of today's Right Wing aren't all just pragmatic and vampiric-predatory and insane betrayals of decent conservatism... some of them may be based upon fundamental class issues and faults of ALL versions of conservatism.
Still, right now we need the decent conservatives to help us turn this into a rout. I don't need them as class enemies. If the republic can be saved from monsters, then we can argue left vs right.
I'm starting to suspect Senator Clinton might be fighting on in West Virginia and possibly Kentucky so to end her Presidential bid on a high note before bowing out. One thing I urged people over at Daily Kos was the need to reach out to Clinton's supporters and to show respect, something that a number of Clinton supporters feel has not been shown. I will admit, there is a bit of misogyny shown in various comment threads to articles about Obama and Clinton, both in DKos and on a multitude of news sites... and urged readers to let go of their own anger on what's been said to welcome Clinton's supporters into the fold as equal partners.
Who ever thought that I'd be defending Senator Clinton? Heh.
Robert A. Howard, Tangents Reviews
On the topic of Second Life / IRC / whatever online interaction forum:
Sorry to always use Neal Stephenson for examples (I really need to read more of Dr Brin's books, since I'm sure the idea is probably in one of them someplace)... The real innovation of the "Black Sun" in Snowcrash is a pretty good model. In case you aren't familiar, it is basically a nightclub in a virtual world, but distinguished by having subtly but importantly superior facial expression capabilities. This makes it substantially more useful, and thus 'the place to be'.
The underlaying tech is pretty fanciful, but the core idea is spot on. Humans are social animals evolved for face-to-face communication utilizing a pretty high bandwidth visual 'side channel' along with the auditory one.
Voice based chat doesn't really come close, and text (while having some unique benefits) is a very poor replacement for many interaction types.
---
An aside on this general topic. The NPR station in the bay area had some interviews/discussion with people studying online social networking (facebook and myspace basically). One aspect that seemed odd to one expert was that people will have trivial 'personal' conversations in a public sphere even though private messages are no more cumbersome to use (the example was stuff like "hey, want to go get some pizza")... Which really isn't all that odd really.
Observing other people having social interactions is critically important in learning how to be social (a never ending learning process). It is probably actually more important than actually participating/practicing directly. (Aside aside: for at least some bird species, the critical part of song learning is observing adults interacting, not just listening to one adult singing away by himself.)
This makes sense, since communication is about interactions, and watching two sides (or more) shows important context, relevance, and results. It also fits well into the theory of how associative learning systems (like brains) learn.
The upshot... having social interactions in public (allowing others to overhear if they choose to) helps others learn how to interact as well as putting out more reliable information about oneself (since it is implicitly verified by the other side of the interaction.) That second part, the desire to 'be known', does not seem so odd to people who study such things in humans or other social animals.
The implications for online interactions, especially virtual worlds type stuff, is kindof cool IMO. Not being excessively secretive is a social public service. Also fits in with watching-the-watchers and addressing pervasive surveillance by fostering more realistic (and less judgmental) expectations of what is normal and acceptable behaviour.
Even when most of us snicker at the charming -retro simplicity of the quasi Marxist view
If you insist on debating the dead, rather than considering the very real positions of the living (Michael Albert, Michael Parenti, Michael Moore), you might as well direct them at Bakunin, Durruti, or Proudhon, not Marx.
Decent conservatives were busy plotting to overthrow the government during the depression and selling census machines to facilitate the German Holocaust while leftists were being shelled from all sides in Spain.
Ah, and a name amongst the honored dead has escaped me... if you must pick on a dead Socialist, try to find something you can throw against Eugene Debs, back from when this dangerous experiment in Empire got into high gear.
Dr Brin, I'm quite disappointed you didn't get a more receptive reaction at Google.
Attention allocation (salience filtering on perception to put in other words) is utterly critical. Chatting with a few people via voice or IRC or whatever works passably well for a small (though important) domain. One aspect really missing is the ability to 'mingle' for lack of a better term. Some sort of proximity or context based filter is required for that... and one would think that Google would find that aspect fascinating.
One way to view (at least one aspect) of the better social networking sites is that they provide a proximity filter based on the social network graph. The news feed thing on Facebook pops to mind as an example. The virtual worlds approach may end up being inferior, since a social-network based proximity metric is perhaps better than some sort of physical distance analogue. Though virtual worlds should someday provide a more 'face to face' sort of interaction...
The media isn't the message. So maybe different messages (really interactions) are better suited to different media.
Perhaps Google wasn't responsive because they thought he was (gasp) wrong...
I spotted another error in the first minute of the presentation, and it is one I've brought up before and which hasn't been addressed to my knowledge--
Dr. Brin claims the wealthy today don't inherit their position from their parents. The last time I checked, Americans were the wealthiest people in the world, and they inherit their position as Americans from their parents...
It is a pyramid after all...
While I'm ranting...
Any good ideas how to create a good hierarchical (or multiple overlaying hierarchies) forum for politics?
It strikes me that the political/governmental structure in most places is specifically hierarchical. Local politics and issues really should matter more to individuals, but the flat structure of most news/media pushes the focus up to higher levels which impact more people but to a lesser extent.
We have the technology to do much better.
(The political forums in Ender's Game initially sparked my thinking about this a long time ago.)
B. Dewhirst, I for one don't really snicker at Marx... though he did fail to foresee powerful trade unions, which was a pretty big error.
Anyway, you are right to point out that the philosophy of the left is far from static. Though I suggest that just throwing out lists of names is not the best way of doing it. Instead, why don't you point out relevant ideas/policy prescriptions to the topics being discussed?
My pov is highly biased by the fact that I find complex adaptive systems fascinating and have spent over a decade studying them (mostly in the instantiation of biological evolution, but also economics, computer science, and a smidgen of sociology.) So I generally think of market-like systems when looking for ways to address the systemic ills of the world.
Oh, and there is no need to repeatedly point out that the economic (and power) condition of the world at large is a pyramid. Dr Brin's point (if I may be presumptuous enough to paraphrase my understanding of it) is that Enlightenment based societies strive for a diamond structure (or at least a pyramid levitated more and more off the ground). They are not strictly egalitarian, since they recognize that people are not inherently the same (or even different but equivalent) in capability. Of course, that does not mean that people of marginally greater abilities should hold absolute power or that people of marginally lesser abilities should be ground down into serfdom.
I believe classical liberal fundamentally breaks from leftist views with respect to the equality of people. It seems to me (though it is alien to my way of thinking, so perhaps I am missing it) that the left views people fundamentally as clay molded by society and environment denying or at least minimizing inherent variation in ability as well as many aspects of 'human nature'. By contrast, the structure of the government of United States as set forth in the Constitution assumes that many if not all people are power-hungry and attempts to construct a system which still 'works' reasonably well even when selfish bastards are in office.
I am interested in your views on actual equality and egalitarianism.
Instead, why don't you point out relevant ideas/policy prescriptions to the topics being discussed?
Because, having had my more substantive critiques ignored, I am not inspired to waste more time talking to myself so that I can be ignored to satisfy some lip-service attention to critique.
I've already pointed out that the patent system is murderous and confiscatory, and that it doesn't serve its intended purpose.
I've already indicated twice that the 'diamond' social structure Brin brings up is myopic and wrong-- and see how hard Brin is ready to fight to keep Americans at the top of the pyramid!
Really, there is no response possible to "Capitalism is Good." It is an axiomatic position with no connection to the real world—since he means real capitalism is good, and if something turns up that looks like it is bad, it must not be capitalism—a ’no true Scotsman’ argument if there ever was one.
As far as I’m concerned, “real conservatives” are of much the same character—they’re only “real” conservatives when they stop listening to McCarthy. If Brin’s attempted realignment along the lines of “those who want progress” and “those who want romance” actually applied to what the media said and how people feel about themselves, he might have a point—but they don’t, and it is a distinction without a difference. The goal is to educate them –until they cease to be conservatives-.
Similarly, his ‘militant moderation’ is simply an inverse fallacy of the undistributed middle—he believes all –true- positions lie between two poles.
Some bullet summaries of why those names made the list.
Michael Albert is an advocate for a non-capitalistic economic system called Parecon which seeks to 1) remunerate the time worked, effort put into work, and danger of a given job 2) place decision making in the hands of those impacted by those decisions 3) group tasks into jobs such that folk are equally empowered by what they do
Michael Parenti is able to, very concisely, explain why Capitalism is a crock of sh*t—most of the world is capitalistic. Most of the world is poor. Most of the world isn’t very democratic. Capitalism doesn’t lead to democracy or wealth. (The real question to “does capitalism work?” is… “For whom does capitalism work?”.)
Michael Moore’s recent campaign for universal single-payer healthcare, and his name fitting the theme, is what led to his place on the list, but he has also pointed out the greed-fueled-evil of corporations like GM, the fraud in getting into the Iraq war, etc etc etc. is also notable.
Chang's Bad Samaritans, which I've mentioned in the past, makes it clear that Thomas Friedman is either a liar or an idiot-- his argument is false throughout, and neoliberal free trade concentrates wealth in a very few hands-- he is proposing folk go swimming with a golden straightjacket on.
Travc -
I really like reddit.com's commenting system (the content, however, is of highly varying quality...) It is a "news" aggregator site; users submit, rank, and comment on web pages.
(click the word "comments" under on of the links to see the user comments).
The features that make it better than any other widely used system I've seen:
1) Management of conversation trees, which are of unlimited depth; some conversations last for days, whereas sites like digg just leave in enough depth for one snarky reply.
The obviously tricky part is deciding what do display: too much, and it is hard to get an overview of the whole thread; too little and you waste a lot of time expanding nodes to find the interesting bits.
The reddit solution to this to assign a (proprietary) heuristic score to every node in the tree, based on activity under that node, accumulated 'points' (user votes), etc., sort the nodes (by score), and determine cut-off points for branch depths.
I imagine there are a whole lot of neater things you could do with spiffier graphics, like transparencies, attention-getters, and hyperbolic visualizations. (Still haven't seen the Holocene talk -- I promise I will!)
2) Good organization. Click on anyone's name to see a list of their posts, and click on a post to go to its position within a thread tree, and you can then navigate up and down the nodes. Click a link to see any new responses to your own posts.
It's pretty amazing what they can do with such a linear, homogeneous method of presentation.
BD I don't want to be insulting, but you really do flatter yourself. I have not answered your detailed refutations of me and my positions because:
1) as I told everyone here, I am slammed for time and my wife has made me promise to eschew the time-sink of this comments section.
2) your characterizations of my positions are utter strawmen, devoid of almost any relationship that is actual or meaningful, with actual things that I have said or held.
True that exaggerates and oversimplifies, in its own turn. But it is all I can offer now, unfair or not.
Capsule: Montrous romantic movements of the left have slaughtered and oppressed easily as many people as have monstrous romantic movements of the right. Stalin and Mao weren't pikers. Oh, and Hitler led the National Socialist Worker's Party. Ever studied his actual economic policies toward ARYAN WORKERS? They were decidedly leftist.
No, the left is not today's big worry. An attempted putsch by would-be feudalists who want inherited aristocracy is our #1 threat... along with a jihad being waged NOT by terrorists but a family we've given several trillion $ who wants the West to fall. The rightist-aristocratic anti-competitive tendencies that Adam Smith despised, above all, are making their move ... and thus, you and I are allies.
But I have my wary eye on your left. I do NOT hold militant moderation because I navigate compulsively between two poles. I advocate it because it is about pragmatic negotiation and true liberalism with a mix of competitive and cooperative human powers at work, ignoring pleas from Rand to lop off my left hand or from Marx to lop off my right.
It is those who think that human nature is easily scripted and diagnosed with silly dogmatic nostrums who are the proved dangerous ones. They are romantics, whether clothed in raiment of traditionalism or utopian egalitarianism... it all boils down to defenders of the pyramid.
And that is all I have to say for now. I need my wife's goodwill more than I need yours! ;-)
But do hang around. Use the open mike. Play fair, do not claim you know what I think. Try paraphrasing, argue. But do NOT deride me for ignoring you. Some of us are busy.
(But I do read.)
On politics and capitalism: The Pareto Optimum (20% of the participants in anything get 80% of the benefits) seems to be an invariant law of economics. If you try to chop the top off the pareto optimum (soak the rich) you just squash the entire curve. If you try to lift the base, you just transfer the load somewhere else (so poor Americans have a minimum threshold that appears to be levitating, but they're supported by more poverty elsewhere in the world). You can move the misery around, but you can't eliminate it.
That being said, our current economic conditions are nowhere near the Pareto optimum, the richest 1/10th of 1% have an outsized chunk of the wealth. Active "progressive" tax schemes are required to defeat the Matthew Effect (the most successful have the greatest opportunities for more success) and keep the top of the curve from sucking all the wealth out. Once it reaches the point where the rich are able to dictate the law, they will create laws that favor their acquisition of wealth (which will increase their power to control the law). Doesn't matter if we're talking about feudalism or K Street.
David is mistaken in saying US society is diamond shaped. In fact, until you reach the top 1/10th of 1%, it's the classic Pareto distribution, and has been for the last century. In the 80's the top of the distribution perpetrated "trickle-down economics" on the country and started running away from the rest of us, sucking up all the growth in the economy since that time.
Problem is that the mass of wealth at the top as become so large that the entire growth of the economy is no longer able to satisfy the gravitational attraction of that wealth, and it's entering "black hole" mode, sucking the rest of the economy into the event horizon.
@David B:
I'm normally on the side of arguing for more innovation. But this particular subject is one that we've beaten to death in the industry.
Many other methods of providing communication in online games have been tried, and continue to be tried, and someday one of them might even work. In-world presentations (cartoon speech bubbles), voice chat, trying to create equivalents for body language, etc. They players always revert back to IRC style chat tools, using actual IRC if the game doesn't provide them. Even Microsoft in X-Box Live, where voice chat support is a given and the number of participants can be controlled, had to bow to the inevitable and create a new keyboard controller mod to support text chat.
IRC style chat is the worst communication system for online environments...except for all the others.
There is one narrow exception to this rule: When large numbers of people are taking orders from a very small number of people, and time and activity bandwidth are critical, voice chat systems are used, again even if the game itself does not provide them.
--Dave
So... this whole thing began with Stein comparing scientists to Nazis, and you've come full circle to equating Nazis and socialists. Been hanging out with Jonah Goldberg lately?
Fine reasoning there... and you "didn't mean to be insulting."
Bah.
If you don't want it to be a time sink, don't throw rocks then run off... only to protest you don't have more time and lob more fallacies.
If anything, Adam Smith is even more irrelevant than Karl Marx-- after all, Smith was an anti-coprorate anti-patent type.
Moderation is -defined- by those poles of public opinion. Perhaps one of the other, less-busy commenters can show me how you're -not- being dogmatic-- and again, for the hundreth time, if you must compare me to a mid-19th century anticapitalist, pick a different one!
Between Cointelpro, McCarthy, Debs' imprisonment, Gitmo, and all the sins of the CIA past and present-- it is I who must keep an eye on you and yours.
Perhaps someone else wishes to defend Brin's 'diamond' against my accusation that it is a pyramid in disguise? (I've got 2.6 billion people without sanitation who say I'm right...)
I'm sorry if I gave the impression I expected your especial attention... but there are many other readers here who're free to step in and defend Capitalism against the evil "marxist." (Shall I brand you all vile papists or monarchists, I wonder? I've too much respect for what Adam Smith -actually said- to brand you Smithists...)
What I -do- expect is that, when you write your semi-professional essays on politics, you direct your attention at the actual positions of the other side... rather than dredging up romantic dragons of the past to slay. In all that you've written, you've done very little to tie a Michael Albert to a Karl Marx (to say nothing of an Adolph Hitler.)
Has another reader spotted where he makes it clear that the -modern- social justice advocates, the -modern- critics of global neoclassical liberal free trade (aka 'Globalism,' and 'those romantic lies that Tom Friedman spouts') are the same thing as old Karl?
I was not equating Nazis with socialists, I was pointing out a historical fact that they WERE socialists... though bizarre ones who believed in extreme and total genetic determinism rather than extreme and total environmental determinism. My point was not so much to attack the left as to remind everybody that simpleminded dogmas are the zone where you find monsters.
By that token, Eugene Debs, though officially socialist, was in fact a reforming liberal.
No moderation is NOT defined by the poles of public opinion. That is dead and diametrically wrong and informs your entire wrongness. Moderation is an attitude of willingness to use all reasonable tools, to recognize that both environment and genes help explain human differences, and that differences in ability can be relevant, but shouldn't create lords.
It is recognizing that human beings are BOTH cooperative and competitive and that the latter is responsible for most of our progress, but only when rules prevent cheating and when the maximum feed stock of human talent is fed into the competitive arena (which requires socialist means to ensure the poor children aren't handicapped.)
I am through talking to you because you are not talking to me. You are talking AT a strawman that makes you feel good.
Oh and of course you can weight the diamond by amount of property owned, and get a needle spiking upward, a needle that worries me as much at any of you and that I am fighting FAR more effectively.
But you guys are deliberately strawmanning the diamond, too. The middle class outnumbers the poor in more nations every year. Why do the textile mills move from one country to the next? Because they flee countries that have developed enough for labor unions to start demanding more. This cascade effect can only be denied by obstinate self-deceivers.
And now I am through talking to you till you admit I hate the same guys you hate most, and stop yelling at a strawman who is miles from me.
====
Dave, contemplate a possibility. That IRC remains dominant because the offered alternatives are crap. And the fact that you still use a horrid crappy interface that lobotomizes discourse is because you've never tried anything better.
Contemplate a possibility: Me and my colleagues are pretty bright people who have actually considered and tried a large variety of different methods. And our customers also include some pretty bright people, who have retro-fitted our creations with a lot of different ideas (for example, most WoW players use customized UI's that far extend the standard, but retain the chat).
IRC-style chat has turned out to have a lot of inherent advantages. The asynchronous nature of it allows multiple parallel discussions, as wide or as narrow as desired. Although it starts running into scaling problems, given the proper channel management tools the players seem to be pretty good at managing those.
When they want to discourse in ways that the system can't support, they turn to outside tools such as the Web, Ventrillo/Teamspeak, etc. Efforts to integrate those into the game UI have generally been ignored by the players. One narrow exception to that has been found, the Eve Online In-Game Browser, although generally inferior, makes game status information available to the external web servers that they can use for in-game e-commerce and information collaboration. On the other hand, the game-supported voice chat is used barely at all (probably because it offers only slight advantages to the out of game versions, and those don't go down with the server in the middle of a battle or require an extra fee).
On the issue of the inherent trustworthiness of ideologues: I'm on your side in this, any ideology that pursues purity of thought or application winds up in a bad place. The left is far less of a hazard to society in general than the right at this time, and really hasn't been a significant threat since the 30's or earlier. But an over-reaction to the left to some extreme provocation from the right is something we'd have to watch out for. The recent primaries have shown that ultimately, the moonbat left is no more firmly rooted in the reality-based community than the wingnut right.
--Dave