Not to be a jerk, but "[Copernicus] was forced into it, because it was the only way to make the numbers come out right" just isn't correct.
Tycho Brahe's measurements showed that Ptolemy's model was more accurate than Copernicus's. The point still stands that Copernicus transcended his time, but he was really riding on the coattails of Ptolemy's genius. Ptolemy never gets enough credit...
Really, Copernicus' accomplishment was that his model worked very well yet left out a huge heap of epicycles. Heliocentric = fewer epicycles. That was Copernicus' contribution.
This pales in comparison to Kepler's "Equal areas in equal time." That observation is a very strong hint towards Newtonian mechanics and Calculus.
Actually, strictly speaking, Copernicus's system has more epicycles that Ptolemy's (or at least no fewer, depending on how you work out the details of it). Copernicus's big win is getting rid of the equant, easily the most mathematically ugly thing in the Ptolemaic system.
The equant has a planet moving in a circle around one point, but moving uniformly from the perspective of a different point--essentially a way to avoid the restriction to uniform circular motion. It's a cheap hack, and it's the flaw that drove Copernicus away from Ptolemy in the first place. Or anyway, it looks like a cheap hack, until Kepler comes along and realizes that it's hinting at, as you said, "equal areas in equal time".
So I guess what I mean to say is: yeah, Kepler's pretty awesome.
(Sorry, don't mind me. I just spent way too much time reading Ptolemy in college, and I have no reason to believe there will ever be another opportunity to apply that bit of my education.)
This makes me think of over-fitting in machine learning algorithms. The epicycles fit the data very well, but added a lot of parameters to the model. It makes me wonder if there is a bias/variance trade off for scientific models, but I don't know how to express the connection formally.
In machine learning algorithms, we hold out a dataset to test for over-fitting. We don't exactly have a spare universe to test our scientific models for over-fitting, but maybe if there were a second planetary system at the time to test against it would have been clear sooner that the "epicycles" model fit only this solar system from the vantage point of earth? Maybe you could "train" the model on some heavenly bodies, then test on others?
I'm pretty sure I'm making a fool of myself at this point and missing something obvious, and I'm hoping one or more of you will point that obvious thing out to me.
Kepler's ellipses fit the data with an even simpler model. Newton added an underlying model which could be generalized to hypothetical bodies. In other words, you could plan something like an Apollo mission with it. I doubt you could do something like that with the Copernican, Ptolemaic, or even the Keplerian model. Newton's model gave you enough insight to hack. And not just surface hacks, but deep hacks. Everything before was merely descriptive.
Newton's model also showed convergence. The way the planets moved became connected with the way cannonballs behaved. Mechanics could also subsume models of buildings and machines. Engineering and architecture were unified by Newtonian Mechanics.
It's not just a matter fitting. It's a matter of transcending current models. (Another reason to study different programming languages/paradigms.)
I think you've hit on a weakness of the whole Machine Learning paradigm. I might get this wrong, but I believe every machine learning algorithm necessarily introduces some bias into selecting which possibilities to consider, and without some kind of bias, learning is impossible.
But once you've chosen how you will bias your model, you are only going to search for solutions in the space defined by that bias. So, figuring out the parameters of the ellipses describing the movement of heavenly bodies, but not questioning whether ellipses are a good choice to begin with. There is also feature selection, how you decide which aspects of reality (or measurements of reality, actually) are relevant to the learning problem. (There are feature selection techniques, but that presumes you already have a finite set of candidate features and then determine which ones have the most value.)
It seems that, perhaps, this kind of paradigm busting discovery is out of reach of current machine learning methods, and that the kinds of decisions about what to model and how to bias your model is where humans add value to the process.
This is all philosophical bullshit at this point, but I remain curious about the relationship between learning algorithms and scientific discovery. If anyone is still reading, are there any good books on this topic?
The reason I forbid my children to use words like "fuck" and "shit" is not that I want them to seem innocent, but because these words are ill-mannered and contribute nothing to communication.
For me that's not why. I don't let my seven year old curse for the same reason I don't let her use power tools (yet). They require skill and can be a bit dangerous if you don't use them properly.
I suppose if I sat down and thought about it I could come up with an appropriate occasion for my seven year old to curse. But then to explain that corner case to her and expect her to manage it isn't worth the effort. And for my four year old it's simply not possible.
My kids will figure out these rules on their own, in due time.
I didn't actually forbid either of my sons from swearing.
I tended to swear like a sailor when I was younger. When my first child was 2 years old and used some four letter word he had heard from me, I took a few seconds to think about the fact that a) he was wired to mimic me, that was how he was learning to talk, so it would be cruel and counterproductive to punish him for doing so and b) my language wasn't going to be miraculously cleaned up overnight. So I turned to him and said "That's a bad word and I shouldn't use it either. I will let you know what the bad words are and when you forget, I will remind you not to use them and when I forget you can remind me not to use them."
So my two sons spent their childhood trying to clean up my language. My oldest never swore and by the age of 11 had an extremely obnoxious superiority complex about it, looking down on anyone who used such language as being too stupid to come up with a better means to express themselves. (This led to me giving him a lesson in reasons why such strong language is sometimes the only way to adequately express something.) My youngest, who is more strongly emotional (just like me) was still inclined to use faux-swear words (like "darn!") when he was frustrated or what not but really didn't take up swearing until his late teens.
This off-the-cuff policy that I thought up in mere seconds was so wildly successful in discouraging my kids from swearing that I spent a lot of time wondering why. I ultimately concluded that forbidding children from using swear words and reserving it for adult use makes cussing attractive as a power play. It's a way of grabbing power and announcing you are all grown up or as good as the adults or some such. But telling mom to clean up her mouth was a much more genuine exercise of power over me, way cooler than cussing could possibly be. So I effectively removed almost all temptation, except for the intriguing detail that my youngest still found something emotionally satisfying in strong language even without the allure of defiantly displaying some forbidden social power.
When they were school age, I would explain what a word meant and that using it at school (and some other social situations) was likely to cause fall-out they didn't want, but still did not forbid them from using "bad" language (including words that aren't swear words but are considered simply "rude"). They didn't want to be hassled by a teacher/other adults, so they watched their mouths -- not because I required it, but because it was in their own best interest to not attract trouble.
If you ask parents why kids shouldn't swear, the less educated ones usually reply with some question-begging answer like "it's inappropriate," while the more educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations. -- (also from a Paul Graham's essay)
"If you ask parents why kids shouldn't [violate social norm X], the less educated ones usually reply with some question-begging answer like 'it's inappropriate', while the more educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations."
I see no loss of meaning, but that's probably because there's so little meaning in the dismissive little excerpt you've chosen to deploy here.
My kids aren't allowed to swear either, for exactly the same reason that this commenter gave. People who think words can't be dangerous, especially for a 10 year old, seem likely to me to be leading sheltered and confined lives.
my rule is simple - they can use the words when they understand (properly) what they mean.
Meanwhile we explain they are "grown up" words and they shouldn't use them. Like another poster above this seems to provoke outbursts of "ooh you shouldn't say that" from the children when we swear.
It took me a couple re-readings of the first page or so, because I didn't understand that these were responses to some objections you got.
I spent several minutes trying to decide if French Literary profs might be able to publish physics journal articles in your scenario. I eventually decided they would be able to, since the physics journals would now be run by French Literary theorists.
I'm surprised that noone has mentioned the case of Igor and Grichka Bogdanov here. These were borderline literary theorists that actually did have a complete nonsense physics article published.
Maybe only sci/fi critics? Also I once tried to read their papers and it reminded me of experiences where I've tried to read lit-crit. There were some superficial stylistic similarities, between the two.
As a physics journal editor you could publish articles by French lit. profs which would save their lives, but which any competent physicist would see were clearly bluffs, so wouldn't you be somewhat obliged to do so?
I am not that sure about the integrity of physics. Maybe with quantum physics, you can also get away with talking a lot of nonsense.
Edit: I don't claim that quantum physics is nonsense, just that in the name of quantum physics a lot of strange ideas have been put forward. My impression is that quantum physics is sound (mathematically), but I remain doubtful about "many worlds", for example.
I'm not entirely sure (my physics days are a few years back), but I think the most nutjob papers are probably published in particle physics. (leaving aside metaphysics, which is philosophy, not physics) I doubt you can publish a QM paper which doesn't use any fairly involved maths, and the maths is probably the easiest giveavay.
In particle physics, you might be able to get away with postulating particles you just made up if your justification is long enough and you have pretty diagrams showing where in the hierarchy of particles it appears. As a bonus, come up with yet another model to explain the existing particles.
In fairness, I'm partly basing this on my experiences with professors in the subjects, all of whom managed to publish papers in their fields. :)
The other strong factor determining your success would be the choice of journal you're submitting to. You're hardly going to pick Science, Nature or Physical Review Letters (PRL).
In any case, my money is still on physicists getting published in French literary journals.
The Copenhagen interpretation is nonsense not because it's wrong, but because it's the minimal explanation for what is actually happening. It gives us a single-history picture of reality without making any other assumptions--the quantum wavefunction isn't even considered "real" in the traditional version of the interpretation.
Compare this to academic nonsense, where all kinds of unneccesary nonsense is introduced to satisfy the academic's whims. It's nonsense by inclusion, not exclusion.
physicists are smarter than professors of French Literature
I would tend to say the opposite. Paul, you're mixing up here what I would call "savantism" with intelligence. We know that there is no true definition of intelligence, but I think whatever the definition ends up being, it has to be based more on understanding than just knowledge and mechanizations within that knowledge. Who would be more afraid, in your scenario, between the physicist and a Cantonese scholar?
if [Finland] seems that much more socialist than the US, it is probably simply because they don't spend so much on their military
Exactly. So it's not about dismissing Socialism (especially since all modern countries operate on both Socialistic and Capitalistic principles), as much as making an argument as to what the upper tax bracket should be. And for that, I would look at companies that have tremendous bonus systems. (I won't exhibit the obvious.) Are they more productive? Do they take more risks? What are the benefits and consequences of those risks? Personally, I'm not as concerned about the marginal incentive between $10 million and $1 billion as I am that a society, as a whole, functions, and doesn't degenerate into something "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".
It's not so much what the upper bracket should be, it's about what the threshold for the bracket needs to be!
In Belgium, the top bracket of 50% starts at about 32,000 euro's. In addition to that, there's a separate flat social security tax of 13%, meaning that my marginal tax rate is about 60% - with a mediocre salary.
I definitely agree with the fact that good services cost money. And I don't mind paying a high tax rate per se, but when almost every full-time worker ends up in the highest bracket, something is wrong.
> if [Finland] seems that much more socialist than the US, it is probably simply because they don't spend so much on their military
I just have to interject that even if Finland spends relatively little of money for it's defense, when you consider all costs the budget climbs quite high. What I'm obviously talking about is conscription, which Finland still has in use. Just how do you measure the cost of one year of the life of nearly the entire male population?
If you live in Holland, that last point is pretty much a no-brainer. Politicians are constantly accusing each other of saying things that are 'not done'. We have our wannabe-Fortuyn (Geert Wilders) at the moment. Heck, a politician just stepped down for not adhering to 'the code' another sign we're not that tolerant. We're just tolerant about homosexuality and drugs.
" If you doubt that, imagine what people in 1830 would think of our default educated east coast beliefs about, say, premarital sex, homosexuality, or the literal truth of the Bible."
Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson didn't believe the Bible to be literally correct. It's well documented. Jefferson even went as far as to create his own Bible, editing out most miracles, the resurrection, and immaculate conception.
We can be more general than that. It wasn't really until the fundamentalist movement that people felt inclined to defend the literal truth of the Bible. Catholics historically (going back to Augustine) have believed that parts of the Bible like the creation account in Genesis are allegorical rather than literal. They wouldn't have gone as far as Jefferson (obviously) but it's sort of a myth that Christians have always felt the need to defend the literal truth of everything in the Bible.
I'm not sure that Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson count as "people in 1830" in the same way that the Salem Witch Trials might constitute "people in 1692". I'm also of the opinion that you should also account for the other two points, even if to say that you don't mean to refute them by refuting the third.
I am not trying to refute the other two points, I just quoted the whole sentence so it would make sense.
I would like to think that the 1700s and 1800s represented a golden age in American religiosity, where our political and cultural leaders were deeply spiritual, yet not biblical literalists. Now, it seems that dialog has broken down and we are in fractious camps. I'm sure I am just romanticizing the period though.
Premarital sex and homosexuality have also been around for thousands of years, but I think it's safe to say what is generally accepted by the mainstream ("of our default educated east coast beliefs") would shock & awe the mainstream of the 1830s.
We can sort of account for pre-marital sex, since most fathers, irregardless of the century, don't like the idea of their daughters screwing around too much, but what they like even less is them getting pregnant prematurely. Society has invented solution for that latter.
but semiconductors or light bulbs or the plumbing of e-commerce probably have to be developed by entrepreneurs. Life in the Soviet Union would have been even poorer if they hadn't had American technologies to copy.
semiconductors: it wasn't e-commerce plumbing driving it, but fear from Sputnik and its consequences (mobile computing ...in Minutemen). That wasn't entrepreneurship (no risks taken on behalf of "entrepreneurs") at Bell either: state subsidized monopoly which was somewhat acknowledged a little later with the babies. The Valley had its paying customers before anything to "market" (see HP f[o]unding letter).
light bulbs: that's a dead horse kicked around too often.
plumbing of e-commerce: being in the right circle helps (No Such Ancestors). Btw. Minitel "3615" was there way before on scale with the actual plumbing (net and terminal used to sell services from the armchair countrywide [amazon/paypal/etc do not serve every country either]). Also from State Monopoly. The Kahns in the USA never ran any risks.
And life in Afghanistan is as poor as it was, America has copied the Soviet Union.
Specifically, this response is what I wanted to bring up.
The fact that you can't say something doesn't mean it's true.
I believe this is implicit in "So it's likely that visitors from the future would agree with at least some of the statements that get people in trouble today." In an earlier version I made this point explicitly, but it seemed repetitive, so I cut it.
The funny thing about Sokal is not so much that he (supposedly) slipped a bogus paper past the editors, but rather in how so many people react to the event and take it as proof positive that the entire field is bogus or even that publishing that paper was a mistake of the editors.
The editors, by publishing the piece, were not saying "Aha! Brilliant reasoning in this text!" but rather "People in our field should see this submission. People in his field should, as well."
What didn't happen after Sokal's paper was published? Years of earnest, tortured academic work by others commenting on it as if it were serious on its face.
'"People in our field should see this submission. People in his field should, as well."'
This doesn't strike me as a good defense; in fact it seems to me to concede the point you think you're fighting. The editors think that people should see sheer nonsense? What are they doing, again? There's no justification for publishing sheer nonsense; there's an infinite supply of that, and precious few journal pages by comparison.
If they did not see some value in it, they would not have published it. Therefore, they did see some value in utter nonsense. Therefore, I am justified in treating them as people who see value in total nonsense. As a person interested in learning, these are not people I want to emulate or respect.
"Jan Hendrik Schön (born 1970) is a German physicist who briefly rose to prominence after a series of apparent breakthroughs that were later discovered to be fraudulent.[1] Before he was exposed, Schön had received the Otto-Klung-Weberbank Prize for Physics in 2001, the Braunschweig Prize in 2001 and the Outstanding Young Investigator Award of the Materials Research Society in 2002."
Note that this appears to be a scam conference. The people who pulled this prank were proving that the conference had bad reviewing practices, not that the study of physics does:
That's a funny link, but you really, really don't want to open up the "are physics or computer scientists smarter" debate, a lot of people here probably don't want to know the truth.
I find this really annoying about Paul's otherwise insightful and interested articles. Namely that he assumes you know everything he's written and when and what it was called and that you know how to easily find it so you can understand the context.
Paul, would you PLEASE date your articles (and RFS for that matter) and link to whatever it is you're talking about?
To be fair, unless someone goes and posts the URL to Hacker News or something, the only way you'd get to this post is by reading "What You Can't Say" and reading the links at the bottom. His top-level essays do have the date on them.
Smart people might work on sexy projects like fighter planes and space rockets for ordinary wages, but semiconductors or light bulbs or the plumbing of e-commerce probably have to be developed by entrepreneurs.
I don't agree that this is the case. Many smart people don't see the need to be rewarded in a financially appropriate way. (Those that do make their way into finance or startups eventually). Look at institutes such as the CSIRO in Australia for science/technology in general or the BBC for broadcasting technology.
I agree with you that many smart people work for ordinary wages. But the point seems to be to ask the question: is "many", enough to keep an economy growing optimally?
Great Depression[1] : 25% unemployment, thus roughly 75% employment.
Many people were employed, but were enough people in a job?
The BBC's a good example, how long have they been working on their own Dirac codec? That's taxpayer's money they're spending. Sure it probably makes a few geeks happy but remember - these geeks know fully well that if they tried to do that outside the safety of the BBC, they'd starve. At the end of the day, in the private sector you get stuff done because if you don't you don't eat.
You seem to be implying that the BBC's Dirac work has produced no useful results; I would disagree. Sure, it's not the format-of-choice of BitTorrent users, and it hasn't cropped up in the endless discussions of the <video/> element in HTML5, but that doesn't mean it's vanished. A subset of Dirac colloquially called Dirac Pro has been standardised by the SMPTE as "VC-2" (Windows Media Video was VC-1):
you missed the point. in the private sector you don't need to justify costs back and forth to each other...either the product is wanted at its current production costs or it isn't. would it be used if consumers had to pay the full cost of its development? or do they only use it because those costs were offloaded to the taxpayer and it can essentially be given away?
you are missing that Beeb IT was "outsourced" to Siemens, which in turn has a patent-tech X agreement with MS: no place for free (as in freedom) vendor lockin-free tech here...
you are missing that Beeb IT was "outsourced" to Siemens, which in turn has a patent-tech X agreement with MS: no place for free (as in freedom) vendor lockin-free tech here...
It sure didn't play out that way on my high school cross-country team. We had a gymnast who couldn't even manage a 25min 5k by the end of the season and three swimmers who beat that by a big margin in the very first meet.
That's not because swimmers aren't physically fit though (physical fitness being the comparison to intelligence) it's because swimming is more specialized than gymnastics.
You really can't say gymnasts are more fit than swimmers, just that gymnastics is a more versatile sport so you learn a wider range of abilities.
It's nothing to do with fitness or being specialized. It's about "movement IQ" or "coordination capacity" for lack of a better term. Gymnasts typically have a huge talent reserve, and move to other sports and often dominate. It's why many national talent programs use gymnastics as their foundations. Swimming tends to attract the less talented for some reason, and these people don't adapt well to other sports.
To paraphrase pg: Take some swimmers and gymnasts and tell them they have to learn each others discipline or be executed. Who's the most worried?
Funny anecdote: a recent olympic swimming team failed to ride to the stadium in Beijing because most of them couldn't ride bikes.
The best gymnasts are short people; the best swimmers are not. There are always exceptions (Janet Evans). Short people have certain advantages in gymnastics due to the physics of motion. Years ago tall men and women did compete in Olympic gymnastics but do so rarely today.
In today's increasingly competitive world, we find only short gymnasts in the top tier. Competitors will go so far as to change birthdates to get younger (ergo smaller) gymnasts into competition.
"to paraphrase pg: Take some swimmers and gymnasts and tell them they have to learn each others discipline or be executed. Who's the most worried?"
I don't think the gymnasts swim times would be nearly as good as the swimmers. Nor do I think the swimmers would perform as well as the gymnasts at gymnastics. Each sport has evolved to the point where body type must be taken into account.
But consider a more realistic hypothetical: Put a swimmer and a gymnast in a room and tell them only one of them can come out. My money's on the swimmer!8-))
"In today's increasingly competitive world, we find only short gymnasts in the top tier."
That is less true now than it was 10 years ago. Nastia Liukin and Svetlana Khorkina are both of above-average height (5'4" and 5'5", respectively), as is Sandra Izbasa (5'5"), the reigning Olympic gold medalist on floor. You still see some very short gymnasts (eg. Shawn Johnson or the Chinese), but tall women can actually be competitive now.
You still seem to be confusing the issue. This isn't about fitness which is trainable. This is about coordination. I'm also talking about the general case, not a specific case.
People who do gymnastics tend to be much more gifted with coordination than swimmers.
Also, your money would be on the swimmer in a fight? Are you serious? Perhaps you are thinking of rythmic gymnastics?
No, I wasn't talking about fitness. And is "coordination" indeed not trainable? Perhaps people who do gymnastics are, as you say, more "coordinated" because they "coordinate" more (i.e., train more)?
Swimmers are, on average taller/bigger than gymnasts. In a fight, the bigger guy/gal usually wins. That's a lesson you should have learned in the first grade. Schools these days!
Key quote:
"I don't remember what it was, but I have scars all over my body just literally from falling all over the place"
The assertion about size in fights only holds when all else is equal, which is rarely the case. Gymnasts are extremely strong due to spending most of their training holding up their entire body in strange positions. Swimmers on the other hand are extremely weak (look in the literature if you don't believe me) due to the amount of time spent training supported by the water. Plus there are huge speed and explosiveness differences as well. I know where my money would be.
In baseball, maybe the gymnast, but the extended reach of the swimmer and his/her ability to bat harder might win out. In weightlifting, definitely the swimmer. In cross country skiing, the gymnast, for the following reason.
Weight is proportional to the cube of body size (length) while muscular strength is proportional to body size. The strength/weight ratio is inversely proportional to the square of body size. As size increases strength increases proportionately but the power/weight ratio goes down rapidly.
Fleas are an extreme example: they can broad-jump like no person. Shorter people, like fleas, have an advantage in some sports (e.g., gymnastics) because of their higher power/weight ratio. This also makes a difference in endurance events where shorter people can sometimes perform exceptionally well because they expend less energy per mile.
Don't waste your money on old myths. Serious swimmers today do weight training. Big people are stronger than small people generally. If you don't believe me, pick a fight with a mean guy who's taller than you. Or better yet, pick a fight with a mean, tall competitive swimmer.
Did you even read the attached article? This is not an isolated case, as I mentioned with the olympic swimmers who were unable to ride a bike.
I'm not sure where you get your info from about "tall" people are stronger, perhaps you should tell that to the international weightlifting federation or the powerlifting federation. I'm sure they would be interested. Also, the UFC should just throw out all the smaller guys, and just select purely on height. :)
Yes, I read the article, which states that Michael Phelps is clumsy. Anecdotal.
From your earlier post:
"Funny anecdote: a recent olympic swimming team failed to ride to the stadium in Beijing because most of them couldn't ride bikes."
I'm skeptical about this. I've been in Beijing traffic. Also consider the indignity: Olympic swimmers riding bicycles (not their sport) to the stadium, heads bowed over and the risk of falling on their face before thousands of people and getting injured. In contrast compare walking proudly upright, waving with both hands to the crowd. Claiming that one is not able to ride a bicycle seems like an excellent face-saving excuse for all parties involved.
"where you get your info from about "tall" people are stronger"
"The principal conclusions of this study are that muscle strength and height are related by a common factor and that muscle strength approaches absolute maxima at heights of ~183 cm for men and ~175 cm for women, at least using current training techniques."
It's a common anecdote. Where do you think fish out of water comes from? You may be skeptical about the biking but it's a fact, I work with these people :)
In an ideal world height is directly related to strength obviously. Weightlifters spend 5-10+ years training, are genetically gifted for strength, maxed-out muscular potential. Swimmers aren't what I would call ideal candidates for this!
Also, read graph D. Swimmers are typically taller and have less cross sectional area than other athletes, which shows in their poor non-water fitness assessments (read the lit if you are interested). Gymnasts are shorter (170ish+-10) and have more cross sectional area for their size. I've worked with many sub elite gymnasts who went almost directly into national rankings in many sports (e.g. cycling, weightlifting, football, american football, track and field disciplines).
Influence of sports background on leg muscle coordination in vertical jumps:
"You may be skeptical about the biking but it's a fact, I work with these people :)"
Is it a fact? Who are "these people"? Perhaps there's a URL you could provide that tells authoritatively the story of how certain swimmers in Beijing decided to not ride bicycles?
"let's agree to disagree."
Nah. Your previous statements, vague evasions and dismissal of the obvious (even when backed up by evidence) incline me to believe you're merely stretching any truth you may possess and are not a reliable source of information. But then Robert Trivers seems to say we should expect that from everyone, so big dea.
Let's not continue this here. If you are really interested, go talk to any local sports scientist involved in professional or olympic level sport and ask them their expert opinion.
Or, put your email on your profile and I'll fill you in privately.
I don't follow. If you mean url to talk to a sports scientist you will probably need to just call into your local sports institute/academy and have a chat.
"You may be skeptical about the biking but it's a fact, I work with these people :)"
Is it a fact? Who are "these people"? Perhaps there's a URL you could provide that tells authoritatively the story of how certain swimmers in Beijing decided to not ride bicycles?
They can't dance for shit though. A gymnast moving into breaking stands out by a mile. It's as if they've left their clothes hanger inside their clothes.
What do academic economists actually have to say about the link between entrepreneurship and taxation? My impression is that new tech companies start in response to new technological opportunities and have little to do with marginal tax rates.
Income tax rates are a red herring. In general, entrepreneurial activity is taxed as long term capital gains. You can see those rate are more attractive.
Hewlett Packard 1939 - 63% (1 year holding) to 23% (10 year holding)
Intel 1968 - 25%
Microsoft 1975 - 20%
Adobe 1982 - 20%
Google 1998 - 20%
Yet the Beatles continued to pump out more than one album a year. I think there are incentives other than money - fame, status, power, creativity, curiosity etc.
> Yet the Beatles continued to pump out more than one album a year. I think there are incentives other than money - fame, status, power, creativity, curiosity etc.
While there are other incentives, it's somewhat silly to think that the Beatles were paying the top marginal rate in the US.
Didn't we just find out that U2 has done what the Rolling Stones and others did before them to almost completely avoid tax revenue by carefully picking where their royalties were taxed?
Marginal tax rates rarely affect the super rich. Instead, they hit the merely well off.
That's by design - the "merely well off" collectively have far more money and much less political clout. In fact, you can hit them while claiming to be going after the rich.
Music is bad area to be dealing with economic arguments because copyright is such a murky topic, but by way of counter-example - John Fogerty cut back his productivity due to disagreements with a recording company. Further, the fact that there are incentives other than money doesn't affect the point that money is a factor. You need to consider the examples that an era didn't produce, not just the ones that it did.
Not exactly. Paul McCartney subsequently released 22 studio albums, Lennon 8, Harrison 10 and Starr 15. I think we can safely say that all four would have already been in the top income tax bracket from their Beatles royalties alone. Yet they were somehow motivated to continue making music.
I suspect that the Beatles were interested in expression, craft, and having made their FU money.
Is the latest economic downturn a sign that there's too much FU money out there? Is everyone with a 7 figure bank account like the hordes of minor nobles? Is our form of meritocracy real and valid? Do we still have civic values that go beyond everyone being in the game so they can quit playing? (Are religious values filling the void in the US in a subtle theocratic takeover?)
Little-known fact: due to the onerous UK taxes they were paying at the time, the Beatles (including John's estate) collected more from their "1" album than they did over the entirety of their previous careers as Beatles.
You're shoehorning facts to fit your argument: I would be surprised if any single one of the founders of the companies mentioned above knew what the long term capital gains percentage was while they were innovating. The truth is: money is one of many motivators.
I'm not sure what pg means with "socialism." (Does this word mean that workplaces are run by the workers, an important concept within socialism? Or is it just something about higher taxes?) In any case, I probably don't agree with his argument that the profit motive is necessary for hard work, though I do believe that people who are their own bosses (self-managing workers) are likely much better for innovation than the alternative.
French Lit is harder. Much harder per Kolmogorov complexity, but even if you're running it on monkeys, getting the right answer out to the limits of evidence would be a huge work of detective and archeological and historical study far beyond the source text. You would be attempting to reconstruct someone's mind from the outside in, with very fragmentary life-logs.
IOW, French lit only seems easy because academics aren't aiming to be right. They just want an informed guess. In physics, this is considered the start of an investigation, not the end product.
Having had some training in classical lit. and [previously] gone out with a girl reading French Lit. at university I cant help but agree.
I expect a Physicist could write enough to fool a French Lit. magazine - but only superficially. I dont think they could write meaningfully on a subject.
I also know a few literary students who I suspect could write a sufficiently obtuse piece of work in, say, a month to fool some physicists. Again only superficially.
I think the fallacy Paul falls into is the thinking that French Lit. professors don't question what they read in the same way Physicists do. Unfortunately it's a stereotype that does bear out in some respects - but the top guys certainly do question everything. Indeed they will almost certainly disagree by default and go out of their way to find proof.
If you think you've seen scientists bitching and arguing you've never hung round with literature scholars :D
In physics, there's at least the illusion that there's a "correct" answer. If your theory predicts that a cubic meter of gold has less mass than a cubic meter of water, you've got a serious problem.
In literature, there is no "gold standard" to use as a referee or to consult in helping to make a decision.
To be 100% correct in literature you would need a time machine and a mind-reading device. To be the closest evidential approximation to correct, you would have to do your best to simulate these machines using every possibly accessible causal consequent of the relevant past remaining in the present. This is the "gold standard" but it would be technologically and financially implausible. Thus, "doing it right" is impossibly hard. Only "doing it wrong" is easy.
French lit only seems easy because academics aren't aiming to be right.
But that is the whole problem: whether or not the discipline aims to be right. I am very closely acquainted with a relative who has a Ph.D. in French literature, and he literally would rather die than attempt to earn even an undergraduate degree in physics.
It's too bad that the majority takes the moral fashions Paul talks about in these two articles so seriously. So, in the end, one can only discuss these topics with close friends, whose reaction you can be fairly sure about.
Case in point: someone's comment in a thread about suicide last night. Sure, it was offensive. And the karma drop that resulted was frightening. Which is exactly the point: if you state a certain opinion on certain subjects, the outcome is something entirely different from rational discussion.
I remember that "Things You Can't Say" was picked up and discussed a lot by people with no connection to hacking or technology. Several political blogs made their list of predictions for ideas today that will be considered barbaric in the future, for example. I specifically remember Andrew Sullivan linking to it (my favorite political blogger).
It may have been successful (though it also tells bloggers what they want to hear, and does so with a stamp of authority --- the fact that it came from a tech/startup person adds novelty for political bloggers, and probably subtracts nothing). That's kind of not my point.
I'm actually a lot more interested in what jimbokun really thinks of the article than what Andrew Sullivan thinks about it. What's the insight you got from it? That thinking forbidden thoughts is, in fact, like stretching your brain?
I disagree. I showed the original article to several friends of mine who are in no way hackers and had no idea who Paul was and they all felt that it was a very good, thoughtful article.
Dismissing socialism is as silly as dismissing capitalism would be. There is no simple answer to society: The best combination is a mixture of many things. There'll be hints of socialism there.
Similarly, perhaps Paul was criticized for his dismissal of French Literature professors because a lot of people realized what a stupid blanket statement he made. Just because it's easier to bullshit about literature doesn't mean the whole of literature is bullshit. That's like assuming that just because math is about simplistic formulas, the entirety of math is simple to comprehend.
I don't know much about French literature, but what I do know of it tells me that by learning about it, I'd be learning not just about literary theory but about French sociology, French history, and the feelings behind France at various moments in times. There's an incredible amount of information in literature. It's not a bug that it's subjective in nature and prone to debate. That's the feature.
But it wasn't a blanket statement (applying to all french lit profs equally). It was a generalization (a reference to the average intelligence of french lit profs).
It's meant to be understood in the same way that "men are taller than women" is meant to be understood; a counter-example will get you nowhere here.
Socialism has killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century. I think it's fair to put it into the "doubtfully useful techniques" bin, where a higher standard of proof for usefulness is required to make use of anything that seems socialist.
Unfortunately, exactly the opposite is the case today. Free enterprise and competition is looked on skeptically, while socialism (multiply disproved and damned by the experience of history) is gleefully embraced and readily adopted with insufficient skepticism.
Socialism has killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century.
I disagree completely. Implementing socialism in disenfranchised states is by far a more streamlined process than implementing any brand of capitalism. What killed "hundreds of millions of people" was the coupling of fragile citizenries with malicious and self-serving leaders, not the establishment of socialism. I see correlation, but no causation, and I find hasty dismissal of socialism as the "disproved and damned" counterpart of capitalism as completely flawed--especially in a society where the two have been working together (I'd say successfully) for quite some time.
This is the crux. Socialism/communism as implemented bears little resemblance to the utopian vision, instead of utopia the result is human tragedy on a grand scale. This has happened so many times that it's unlikely to be mere accidental correlation (Stalinist USSR, communist Eastern Europe, China under Mao, North Korea, Cuba under Castro, Myanmar under the Junta, etc.)
And yet, because the vision and practice differ so much this provides a ready excuse for every new generation of socialist utopians to put forward the theory that those historical examples were not really, truly faithful implementations of socialism/communism. Rather than the more realistic theory that utopian socialism is impractical and unstable, and when attempted to be implemented it inherently degrades into the totalitarian examples we've seen so many times from history.
My contention is only that this line of reasoning is dangerous and harmful, and that socialist ideas deserve far more skepticism in public debate than they typically receive.
The reigning tag-team champions of Democracy and Capitalism take human nature into account. They are both designed around the idea that people are self-interested. They do not function in spite of selfishness and greed. They function with it.
Unfortunately, no system is perfect, and any system can be gamed. Today, we see that this is true for Democracy and Capitalism as well.
Capitalism also bears little resemblance to its utopian vision. Perhaps the problem is following these as ideology instead of simply seeing these "models" as tools. National Parks and vast stores of natural resource leverage a communist model, Health insurance (really any insurance) leverage a social model, Growth, speculative enterprise leverage capital models. I see no reason why we cannot choose the right tools for each job.
Capitalism has killed millions too, and not just an abstraction of it posing under the name. Capitalism makes human abuse profitable. The best way to restrain that abuse requires practices that are currently being attacked in Amerca for being socialistic.
When has capitalism killed people? I often find when people trot out this claim, they're thinking of things like imperialist wars or the coercion of disadvantaged workers--things that cannot be said to be "capitalism" in the modern American use of the term.
We could take the circuitous route of pointing out our oil addiction, then pointing out how oil lobbyists strongly influenced our invading Iraq and piling up an estimated hundred thousand deaths. Or we could talk about the sweat shop system that abuses workers outside of state in order to produce cheap good. If you think the clothes on your back came clean out of squeaky-good American virtue, you got another thing coming.
But we could go a step further than that and point out that the reason they need to go to China to produce their goods is because laws exist in America banning them from doing the same here. Those laws weren't created by a third party. That's the U.S. government intervening and preventing abuse. On the scale of government, that's totalitarian rather than anarchic, and that's what we're really talking about. "Capitalism vs socialism" is debating two middlemen on a larger scale.
You need to strike a balance. You can't have a system that doesn't reward hard work, but you also can't have a system that doesn't support people on the bottom. The problem with Paul Graham's thinking is that he cuts out a lot of complexity and focuses on one shallow idea that, taken out of context, is patently absurd. Saying "Socialism doesn't work" says nothing but says it prettily and vapidly.
Fact is, we're not a wholly capitalist system. We probably need to be less capitalistic now, because the way the market works at the moment people are getting hurt. It's a straw man argument that socialism leads to Stalin and Mao and Hitler and genocide. Those weren't socialist governments. They were totalitarian governments that went corrupt. But socialism does exist in the larger part of Europe, and in many cases it's led to happy societies that don't have certain of the major issues America's got right now. A lot of them rank higher on the national happiness index than we do, so I guess they're doing something right.
"We could take the circuitous route of pointing out our oil addiction, then pointing out how oil lobbyists strongly influenced our invading Iraq..."
No, we can't take that route. Nevermind that it's a conspiracy theory. I thought I had it made it clear that I do not consider the coercive use of force to be "capitalism". Nor did any of the important economic philosophers, except for Marx, who wasn't any good at economics.
See my post below, communism has always devolved into statist tyranny in every attempt so far. If a software development methodology had an equivalent track record to communism (adjusted appropriately for the subject matter) it would be far more reviled even than waterfall (if you could imagine such a thing) and nobody would ever seriously propose using it.
While the claim that national socialism has killed hundreds of millions is an exaggeration, the actual record isn't that impressive.
Most of the hell-holes on earth are a "people's republic".
Yes, socialism seems to work in Western Europe and Japan. However, that may be more a function of Western Europe and Japan than it is of socialism. It's unclear what wouldn't work in those places.
What the fuck is that supposed to mean? What does Western Europe have that makes it instantly capable of supporting any random-ass system? It's not like Europe's some magical land of milk and honey.
The fact that socialism works in Europe is because socialism is a potent economic system.
As an aside, we don't call it socialism here. We call it social market economy. Also, true socialist parties aren't nearly as big as social democrat parties, which are more moderate.
That's understandable. There're more shades to socialism than just the one that gets used again and again in America.
It's why this entire conversation is so ridiculous. Neither Paul nor the majority of the commenters here has a clue about what they're talking about. They're spouting talking points like there's a set-in-stone socialism that all would-be socialists have to follow. I'm not at all the pinko-commie sort, but it always tickles me when this particular weakness of HN comes out. For a bunch of people who work with complex systems daily, we suck at appreciating the complexities of economic systems and we adore Paul despite his habit of oversimplifying topics to the point of satire.
> What does Western Europe have that makes it instantly capable of supporting any random-ass system?
Europe doesn't have a history of large scale spontaneous massacres, see Rwanda and Darfur for examples. (Yes, the govts occasionally go on sprees, but that's different.) There's even a history of spontaneous organization and cooperation; that isn't universal.
> The fact that socialism works in Europe is because socialism is a potent economic system.
It's not potent enough to match the US' GDP per person, and the US is handicapped by enormous defense spending....
And, socialism hasn't been all that successful in improving the world's hell-holes.
That said, it's good to see the EU decide to have a foreign policy and start developing a military. It's past time for NATO, or at least for the US to take a much smaller role. Whether or not Russia/the USSR is/was a threat, Europe is wealthy enough to take care of itself.
You know, with that "potent economic system" and all.
> Facism and national socialism killed hundreds of millions
Exaggerate much?
Nazi Germany didn't kill a hundred million, let alone hundreds of millions and Franco's Spain, Chile, and the rest weren't a significant fraction of the German total.
There is no simple answer to society: The best combination is a mixture of many things. There'll be hints of socialism there.
Why would that be true? Aside from being the mid-point between two mutually contradictory opinions, what specifically makes you think that being a little bit of both is better than either? In the US, at least, the half-socialized sectors of the economy have been responsible for the biggest disasters -- S&Ls, Enron, and Lehman were all the result of smart capitalists exploiting dumb price controls.
Also! If you'd been writing this 80 years ago, would you have said "Dismissing democracy is as silly as dismissing fascism would be.... the best combination is a mixture of many things. There'll be hints of National Socialism there."
Socialism is an ambiguous word, but roads aren't a good example of any of them.
-Does socialism mean the workers own the company? Lots of perfectly capitalistic companies are actually socialist by that standard. I even know a company where the original founder has no equity anymore and everyone else has equity based upon seniority. What socialist would do better?
-Does socialism mean that the government owns the company? Amtrak, Fannie Mae, GM, AIG.... Hasn't been an amazing success so far.
-Does socialism mean that the government provides welfare? By that standard, Bismarck was a socialist. (But in reality, he was an old fashioned aristocrat who figured out you can snip socialism in the bud by using welfare to buy off its supporters.)
-Does socialism mean that the socialist party holds a monopoly on all commerce and politics? We, ah...tried that a few times and it didn't seem to work.
Roads? Most governments build roads, if only for their armies. You think Caesar was a socialist?
Adam Smith gives the example of paying for roads by road tolls in his book The Wealth of Nations. In the United States, much of state and federal funding for highways is derived from a tax on gasoline and diesel vehicle fuel, to much the same effect. The ultimate incidence of ALL taxation is on consumers (and everyone is a consumer), as any competent economist will tell you. These forms of paying for roads are not socialism, by any definition of socialism that I have ever seen, but they are forms of taxation that allocate the cost of using the tax-supported, publicly available resource rather well.
> they are forms of taxation that allocate the cost of using the tax-supported, publicly available resource rather well.
...which is how socialism functions, by every definition of socialism.
But you're sidestepping the argument. In a completely nonsocialist environment, the roads wouldn't be government-funded to begin with. There would be private groups each coming up with their own free-market system for roads.
Actually in many more socialist countries, highways and some urban roads are payed by the people who use them. Better examples are military and police force.
"There are indeed things you can't say in Holland.
Oops, yes, I forgot about the fate of Pim Fortuyn."
I live in the Netherlands (as opposed to "Holland"), and this poor rhetoric device beats everything I've read about the matter in terms of oversimplification and naivety.
"and this poor rhetoric device beats everything I've read about the matter in terms of oversimplification and naivety."
It would be useful to the rest of us(who don't live in Holland) if you could explain why the "rhetoric device" is "poor", "oversimplified" and "naive" (vs a bald statement that it has all these qualities).
Fair enough. Long before he went into politics, Fortuyn, a columnist and frequent guest in talk shows, had always expressed opinions that were not politically correct. I do not remember him being ostracized for those opinions in any manner.
On the contrary, many people found him witty and refreshing. In fact he would be a prime example of a charismatic person getting away with saying things that other people would be called upon.
Naturally, many people disagreed with him. A single individual - possibly deranged - killed him. Both of these facts do not imply in any way that you cannot say certain things in the Netherlands.
It might say something about countries with large numbers of unassimilated minorities (in this case mostly Muslim).
That aside, pg's point was that even in Holland (which he uses as an example of a "tolerant" country), there are negative consequences to actually saying "can't say" things. E.g: Many things about Islam and its prophet are (in practice) "can't say"/undebatable things (without assuming a serious risk of getting killed).
Tycho Brahe's measurements showed that Ptolemy's model was more accurate than Copernicus's. The point still stands that Copernicus transcended his time, but he was really riding on the coattails of Ptolemy's genius. Ptolemy never gets enough credit...