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When More Information Isn't a Good Thing
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "'Most of the time, speedier, cheaper information allows the economy to produce more from less, often by eliminating mistakes, cutting wasted effort and shrinking doubt,' David Wessel writes in the Wall Street Journal. But better information through technology has a downside; sometimes, efficiency benefits certain players to the detriment of society. One example Wessel cites: software that tells patent litigants which courts have the most favorable historical record for their side. 'It doesn't help the economy produce more goods or services. It creates nothing of beauty or pleasure,' he writes. 'It simply helps someone get a bigger slice of the pie.'"
'It doesn't help the economy produce more goods or services. It creates nothing of beauty or pleasure,' he writes. 'It simply helps someone get a bigger slice of the pie.'
Welcome to planet Earth.
Who ordered that?
'Knowledge is Power' vs 'Ignorance is Bliss'
It helps us identify courts with bias, and hopefully correct that.
Lies about crimes
When your parents are discussing their sexual preferences.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
The problem lies with the court system and the patent office.
Choosing which hospital has the best success rate for my operation is in the same ball court.
How about choosing which school has the best results for certain subjects.
If the number of applicants is the same for these examples then society doesn't benefit whichever I choose [discounting the relative merits of my self / children to society], so by his argument I shouldn't need that information.
Finding the lowest price for a product could be considered detrimental to society [less sales tax / corporaqtion tax paid or some such].
Choosing to buy one's fuel based on price is bad for the exchequer too, it is the highest taxed item in my country. Perhaps We should be prevented from knowing where to get the cheapest fuels too.
ad nauseum.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
This issue isn't unique to information. Kitchen knives make nice tools for cutting up dinner...or the neighbor's cat. The entire concept of "significant non-infringing uses" is the foundation for the legality of such devices as ubiquitous as the VCR, CD/DVD recorder, TiVO and photo copy machine.
"The sword cuts both ways" is a phrase that was invented long before the information age.
Easy access to large amounts of information has benefits to society that vastly outweigh the detriments.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I'm sure someone applied the same argument to guns when they were first invented (well actually, people STILL do).
Its a tool and it can be used for good or bad purposes. The good almost always outweighs the bad.
Unfortunately, we can moan all we want, it's a fact of life. About the best we can do is convince judges to prohibit use of the Internet from within the courtroom.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
'It doesn't help the economy produce more goods or services. It creates nothing of beauty or pleasure,' he writes. 'It simply helps someone get a bigger slice of the pie.'
The one with the most money to throw around has always had an advantage in patent (or any other type of) litigation. This software doesn't change that.
What it does do is make the process more efficient, which reduces use of resources that can now be spent on something more productive, rather than having been "wasted" on patent litigation.
That in fact DOES 'help the economy produce more goods or services'. It even helps the 'little guy' by allowing them to do a type of search and analysis with lower resources.
Anyone who thinks that lowering the cost of entry to perform a particular activity helps the big players at the expense of the smaller players needs to go back to economics 101 and stop reading so many technophobe books.
This article is similar to saying 'The low cost of the Apache web server software allows big companies to get a bigger slice of the pie, since they no longer have to pay as much for serving web pages. Since big companies have more web sites per company than little companies, they save so much more money. How will the little people keep up!?!?'
It's complete and utter BS to blame a tool becoming more efficient for how that tool is used by someone.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
One example Wessel cites: software that tells patent litigants which courts have the most favorable historical record for their side.
That seems like an issue with the ability of litigants to go forum shopping in the first place (a problem with the judicial system), rather than the fault of information and processing tools.
It simply helps someone get a bigger slice of the pie.
When an economy grows the pie gets bigger. I hate it when people think that when somebody (Gates, Ellison, Jobs, etc.) gets richer that means somebody else is getting poorer. That is not necessarily true!!!
I'm sure someone applied the same argument to guns when they were first invented (well actually, people STILL do). Its a tool and it can be used for good or bad purposes. The good almost always outweighs the bad.
go ahead. mod me troll or flamebait... i'm still not convinced there's a "good purpose" for guns, and i have no idea how they are a "tool" that can be used for good
in the case of shooting the guy who's trying to break into my house, i'll give you a bit, but i'd rather call that "necessary, but still bad" rather than "good"
'It doesn't help the economy produce more goods or services. It creates nothing of beauty or pleasure,' he writes. 'It simply helps someone get a bigger slice of the pie.'
You just described 99% of modern "brand-awareness" marketing. When will ads for Pepsi featuring the most recent just-overage female singer be recognized for the waste of resources that they are?
Every law carves off a slice of the economic pie for the legal profession.
Every member of the legislature has a fundamental conflict of interest, as they do or expect to move between law firms, legislative posts and judicial positions.
Florida has (or had) a Constitutional provision prohibiting lawyers from being members of the legislature. It was not/is not enforced.
Lew
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
a "bigger slice of the pie" is a thing of beauty and pleasure to some people. To a lawyer, this "bigger slice" for him/her and their client is a job well done. I have no problems whatsoever with anyone using freely available information, in a legal way, to help them in their jobs.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
More information, even info like this (weakness in patent vetting system) is a good thing. But only when it's more info consumed by more people. Unfair access to these kinds of stats has always been the privilege of the rich, the connected, the Harvard Law School. Tech makes it cheap enough to be more widely available. That means a "level playing field". And quite possibly closing the holes revealed by the stats. If only because the Harvard Law School needs to keep equitable access to system vulnerabilities as proprietary knowledge, closing the holes that offer nonmembers any comparative advantage. No surprise that the Wall Street Journal wants this cheap dirt off the streets, and back in the boardrooms where (they think) it belongs.
--
make install -not war
After RTFAing...
How about the service offered by LegalMetric LLC, a start-up founded by patent lawyer Greg Upchurch? Contemplating a patent-infringement case in Delaware? For $795, Mr. Upchurch will tell you which judges rule most swiftly and which tend to favor patent holders. Making a motion for summary judgment? Mr. Upchurch can tell you how the judge has ruled on similar motions versus his peers.
- Will possibly make apparent significant biases of one judge over another, and allow procedures to be setup which monitor or train judges to become less biased?
Imagine a place with uncertain weather where food is plentiful in rainy spots, but not in others. Residents, in essence, buy insurance. The lucky feed the unlucky. No one starves. Then it becomes possible to buy accurate weather forecasts. One who buys the forecast knows whether he needs insurance or not; he profits. But the total amount of food available is unchanged. And if everyone buys the weather forecast, the insurance market becomes impossible.
- Knowing where food can be produced and where it cannot can help people choose where to live. Perhaps even develop a more effecient way to produce the food.
If deciphering the human genome allows each of us to know the precise odds of contracting a dread disease, life and health insurance will be very tricky.
- Identifying which genes lead to diseases is the first step to preventing/eradicating them at the genome level for everyone.
The only time that "too much information" could be harmful socialy, as Arrow put it, is when that information is shown to a minority and withheld from the majority. In fact, this is the lack of information that is not beneficial.
Ultimately what Arrow is trying to say is that information given to one party but withheld from another can be detrimental to the later. Seems common sense to me.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
First of all, if the laws allow one court to decide differently than another court, then they're probably not good enough laws. Laws should be ultra-clear. Patent law as much as any other law.
Secondly, if the laws are clear, then the judges should be deciding even-handedly. If they were, what would the software have to "detect"?
These things should not be matters of opinion. If they are, the legal system is at fault, not some chunk of software that winnows who has what opinion out of the pile of conflicting crap that comprises judicial patent rulings.
Not that I think any of this is going to change — far from it — but that is what I think the problem is.
Blaming the software seems to me to be the equivalent of blaming a newspaper photographer for photographing a murder scene. The photographer wasn't responsible for the problem. But that doesn't mean it isn't useful and worthwhile for people to know the facts of the matter. Stopping the newspaper reporter isn't the point. Stopping the murderer is.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
i'd rather call that "necessary, but still bad" rather than "good"
You agree on the substantive part, that it is better than the alternatives. What words you prefer to use discussing it does not affect what actions you recommend people take.