But war-for-no-apparent-reason may not be so unrealistic. Consider history/current events: In the US, basic necessities like food, clothing, housing and energy are cheap and plentiful, and have been for more than a century. No foreign power has posed a truly credible threat to the US mainland since before the turn of the 20th century. Life in the US isn't perfect, and it isn't even that great for every single resident. But from a big-picture, world-history perspective, it looks like a veritable Utopia.
This is in large measure owing to imperialism, a condition which is in constant danger of collapse. Without an imperialist foreign policy, natural resources and labor would have the same price everywhere, and Americans could not afford their relative luxury. The US foreign policy is not so ambitious as to hope to increase this wealth, but aims merely to maintain it. Every individual military effort can be explained very simply in terms of real economic interest -- where there is no oil or iron, etc., and no competing empire, there is absolutely no interest in war, no matter how "evil" leadership may be. That is the difference between history and Star Wars.
I have a more general question about Star Wars: what are they fighting about? The Star Wars universe seems to have free energy and abundant everything. While good and evil fight in the foreground, business as usual seems to go on in the background among the peons, whom we never meet. They never starve, and the lights never go out. Are those people supposed to care whether the rulers of the universe are good or evil? What power, exactly, do the rulers have, and how is it relevant when energy is free?
Star Wars seems to have the juvenile, xenophobic conception of conflict that characterizes war propaganda: good vs. evil fight because they can't stand to allow each other even mere existence, and we should always side with good because (as it happens) our country is always the good one. Real conflict, of course, is never good vs. evil for the sake of good or evil. The evil, if any, has to be disregarding people for some purpose; the good, if any, has to be resisting evil to defend something of value. Otherwise there'd be no conflict. What's the purpose? What's being defended?
Maybe Star Wars answers these questions, and I've just forgotten what the answers are. It's been a while. I saw the last of the movies recently, though, and I know it never came up in that one. All we have is Darth Vader declaring his desire to "rule the universe" and make things as he wants them to be. But what things, and how does he want them? And why should we care? Indeed, why does he?
If the poor in the USA are really getting poorer, how come DVD players and AC are now ubiquitous in "poor" homes?
Because they're cheaper. A DVD player is cheaper than going to a doctor once. Poor people spend most of their money on rent and utilities; techno-trinkets are generally a drop in the bucket. If the "standard of living" is measured in gadgets that make up a couple percent of the purchases of the poor, then it's sure to go up even as the poor lose their homes and start to live out of their cars. They will at least have power windows.
The way I think about this: there are thousands of movies I haven't seen, and at any given time I seek to watch only the absolute #1 best of them. It's difficult, of course, to determine what that will be, having seen none of them. But no matter what movie it is, the probability that the best movie I haven't yet seen is in a theater is undoubtedly very, very small. The probability that it is available on DVD, however, is quite high.
I only watch movies in theaters when the movie itself calls for a big screen; e.g., Kill Bill is clearly going to suffer even on a 40" TV. If I had anywhere to put one, I would just buy a projector and never go to a theater again.
Home Theater: Selection from nearly every movie ever made, at any time, in any language, with subtitles available in your language of choice.
Theater: Selection from ~20 movies within a given month, all released in the last few months, most made for a very ignorant LCD.
Of course, this is what the media industries are really worried about. If people start choosing movies or music or books from the huge library of material made before the last 6-12 months, there will be much less money going into new works that have little justification to exist in terms of quality. They don't want copyright to last forever so they can still charge you for the Beetles in thirty years -- they don't want anybody to be listening to the Beetles at all in thirty years.
"Beg" in "begging the question" does not mean "assume"; it means request. The argument that begs the question asks for the conclusion to be taken as premise, generally in some obscured way. The usage is idiomatic, but not obsolete.
The modern usage is clearly a deformity resulting from illiteracy. The best course is to avoid the phrase altogether.
On the general topic of usage Nazism, W. V. Quine has written an enlightening essay, Usage and Abusage, in his book Quiddities.
And less basic economics then suggests ways that smaller companies routinely and reliably beat big companies.
I'm quite familiar with the idea of disruptive technology; in fact, though, these are just new markets that look like new entries into the old market, and they coalesce on their own, too. So it's not so complicated, really. Within the group of firms competing to deliver the disruptive technology, the same principles apply; the biggest will win.
It depends on what you consider a "market" (see below). Every new electronics device is a market, in a sense, but when you look at manufacturing industry realities, "electronics manufacture" is a single market, or anyway a much smaller number of them than there are devices. For example, the cell phone revolution is just another product line when you look at the businesses involved. In general, manufacturing is pretty well closed, as retail increasingly becomes. Internet businesses that capitalize on the long tail are new, but obviously destined for closure: economy of scale is exactly what makes them possible.
Still, you're right that new technologies still provide new markets. Maybe the rate at which new markets emerge will outstrip the rate at which the old ones coalesce. This hasn't happened yet, but it's certainly possible. I think it depends on what sorts of new technologies emerge, particularly manufacturing technologies. Software emerged as a new market precisely because it required no capital whatever to manufacture, including (at the time) compatibility.
The maturation of the companies creating automobiles created a high barrier-to-entry for new auto makers, but also stabilized brand new markets for gas stations, in-dash radios, fancy tires, sign builders, pavers, and fuzzy dice.
Gas stations are just retailers, and although retail was still cottage industry at that time, that's going away fast -- one revolution I certainly expect to see completed in my lifetime (when was the last time you saw a non-franchise gas station?). In-dash radios are just radios; when was the last time a new company formed to make radios? Tires were a genuinely new market, I think, but anyway just as quickly industrialized and closed as cars. Sign-builders are just metal-working companies and I doubt any new companies formed to make signs. I don't know the early history of road construction, but it was almost certainly closed from the beginning, as is every industry that lives on government contracts. And fuzzy dice are just textile manufacture.
After years and years in postgraduate academia, reviewing papers and publishing papers, I've never once heard of this "common practice". Many journals are at least nominally blinded during review, and a huge chunk of journal first authors are written by people with BS and MS degrees (ie grad students). Additionally, there are also many journals that don't affix degrees with author names and list the degree field as "optional" when submitting. Thus, why would someone feel the need to lie like that?
Frankly I've no personal experience in the matter; I'm repeating what I've heard from others. However, I do imagine that standards differ between journals and fields.
To be more specific, there are things that require a formal institution to be possible.
To be more accurate, there are things for which the formal institutions require themselves to be possible.
Which is to say: if all the money goes through certain channels, then those channels will be necessary to get the money, but that is only an artifact of the system. In fact, though, people do get around the system: there is a somewhat common practice of PhDs putting their names on research done by non-PhDs in order to get it published. What does that say?
Of course not. But unless you're truly brilliant (and very few people are), you still need to learn that material somewhere, and the best resources to do that are in universitites. Generally, the "best resources" are experts in the field, and they generally teach in colleges and universities.
Well, you need to learn it whether you're brilliant or not... but the idea that schools provide this should be a controversial hypothesis. It is certainly not one that has had any experimental validation. As social organizations schools certainly seem to have value (only because they buy up all the talent; if there weren't any schools it wouldn't be necessary to go to them), but so far as teaching goes -- any purported value is dubious at best.
It is probably generally true that only the most brilliant people do succeed outside the school system today, but it seems quite plausible that only they would even try to escape the dominant system. Looking back, Fermat was no great mathematician but he still succeeded, and collaborated, without the aid of any formal license. Erdos is another good example -- not his success, but rather the success he had in collaboration with others. Erdos was certainly more valuable than a university, and many individuals could probably serve the same function. Would an Erdos-style linked-list collaboration of all mathematicians provide faster progress than the university system? Who knows! There's certainly no empirical reason to draw a conclusion one way or another. One thing is certain: nobody will bother to try for a very long time. Until then, education will remain cargo cult science.
Einstein had a Ph.D.
My mistake -- I thought Germany had adopted the Ph.D around the same time England did (turns out they invented it). Nevertheless, let's not forget that science can get along just fine without degrees, and of course Einstein was not an academic when he did his most important work. He was very skeptical of the value of schools, saying they contained altogether too much teaching.
One very important point to make about all those companies, though, is that they relied on a natural monopoly to prevent workalikes from being manufactured by (for example) IBM. If IBM could have just released Granny Smith, a compatible alternative to the Mac, they would have made it cost half as much, and Apple would have died. They couldn't, because compatibility would have required copyright violation. So there's an anomoly in the regular free market operation because of that.
Of course, that's how all big fortunes are built. You always need a monopoly, or it would work just like they taught us in Microecon. 101, with profit-margins tending towards zero. The thing to look for is not new markets to exploit but new monopolies. Those are tough to get into, though, because it's all about being first to get a critical mass, and that's easier the more resources you have at your disposal.
I also think that you'd better be prepared to site some specific statistics that show that fewer companies are being launched today than at any other time post industrial revolution. That is a very broad claim to make.
It's clearly true in every market I can think of, and also follows from general economic principles. The number of farms is going down; the number of phone companies is going down; the number of computer manufacturers is going down; the number of cable companies is going down; number of retailers is going down; etc. In markets where the number isn't going down, it's because they've already gone down to a stable state: car manufacturers are an example. And of course, there are still exceptions, like Kia -- but Kia is considered a huge upset. Compare this to the beginning of the auto market, when there were dozens of startups, and it was a matter of course (and they cost a lot less money).
This is not pessimistic; in fact, what this means is industrialization, more efficient processes, centralized management of resources, etc. The monopoly economy is much more efficient than the old, pre-industrial economy of redundant cottage industry. But whatever we prefer, let's be realistic: cottage industry can't last in any free market. Industrialization is inevitable.
Also, I believe that todays capitalistic and free market systems _REWARD_ competence and even (gasp!) excellence.
I think you're missing the point. When I say competence is a commodity, I mean, for example, that if you design a better PC, every other PC manufacturer can duplicate anything better about that PC in the course of a few months. So being better gets you a few months ahead; but being a huge business gets you a few years ahead. On the labor market, the people coming up with the new ideas will make more money than the people duplicating them, but that is an orthogonal issue.
Anyway, the free market system rewards, more than anything else, not competence or excellence but size. The bigger your company, the better. This is basic economics, although not a part that libertarian idealogues like to emphasize. Of course it's irrelevant in the labor market except in the special case of unions.
I'm sorry. But I refuse to believe that the business climate is soo ruthless that it is flat out impossible to achieve greatness.
I didn't say that. However, I would hardly consider most business success to amount to "greatness". If you want greatness, become a scientist.
I see companies every day paying serious cash for products that could be done better, and get service that could be improved on. A new idea with solid execution can still hit it huge.
But what can stop your competitors from implementing your idea? If what you're talking about is just technical superiority, then nothing. (Leaving aside market irregularities like patents).
I would almost argue that intelligence can be a hinderance in a college setting.
In fact, this argument can be made more than "almost". IQ above a certain point is very well correlated with failure in school and employment.
Personally, I've tried school a number of times, and although each time it was easy to get top grades at first, in a matter of months I found myself consumed by the emptiness of the exercise. I had no time to read books, no self-direction in my studies, no motivation to acquire the depth of understanding I would demand from myself if the grades were not there. I burn out and drop out... then feel the need for approval and go back for more. Finally though I've mustered up the self-esteem to stay out for good.
Human resources is a cargo cult science. A company willing to think differently (and correctly) in hiring decisions could make a fortune capitalizing on all the unused talent that can't find outlet today.
Even Google, though, with its IQ test PR stunt, requires formalities above capabilities. Probably only Walmart does it right: huge computer applications, data collected on every employee, and data-mining techniques to find out what means what and what means nothing. Unfortunately it seems they're just trying to predict obedience rather than talent.
Try doing real, novel science without a Ph.D. Sure, you can go into IT or even software engineering without a degree, but there's tons of interesting stuff that you simply won't be able to comprehend without years of school.
Is there any one thing, in particular, that cannot be understood without school? I'd be very interested in knowing about something like this: it would be an astonishing and novel empirical fact about the nature of human learning.
(I assume you do have a Ph.D in human learning that qualifies you to make such statements).
P.S. Most of science predates the Ph.D -- including Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein.
Don't let $ keep you back either - I worked my way through school. It is possible, but difficult
It gets more difficult every year. Whether it has passed the threshold of "possible" for the majority of potential students is a matter of debate. Both of my parents did it in their youth, but consider it impossible today. My mother payed for school by working -- only -- during the summer. Imagine that!
I don't think that you are correct about the barriers to entry being too high to start something new.
I meant in that specific market (PC manufacture). Barriers to entry are small in new markets and progressively rise with time. There are of course always new markets, but even the initial barriers to entry are often prohibitive.
There are technologies which have radically changed almost everything about peoples lives in the last 10 years. Do you really think that every product or technology is as good as it can be.
Do you really think superior product is sufficient for success? (You must be new here!) Anyway, the nature of modern technique is that any new product can be duplicated by a larger company that will be able to achieve a much higher scale of production, acquire capital, materials, labor, and publicity at a much cheaper price, and afford a far greater up-front loss. There are certainly areas in which a new business is possible, but it requires a lot of luck to find yourself in one.
I don't think that there has ever been a better time to start a new disruptive companies. Startup costs are at an all time low, your ability to communicate to the masses has never been higher.
This is of course nonsense by any objective metric. The number of successful businesses being started today is smaller than ever and getting smaller. The best time to start a business was surely at the beginning of the industrial revolution, or any time before that. After industrialization, competence becomes a commodity.
Clearly, your mileage may vary. But what you get out of school is, at the very least, proportional to what you put into it. Blaming The Man for not hacking it in school is pretty damn weak.
Tell that to Galois. Frankly, students who are impressed by today's schools are unexceptionally unimpressive. I've met teachers less competent than me, and teachers more competent than me, but neither has been able to teach me anything I couldn't better learn on my own, or anyway outside the school system. School offers the advantage of regular evaluation, without which motivation can be difficult, but so far as education the approach is obviously wrong. And the motivation problems are largely an artifact of the schooling system: nobody is learning what he really wants to learn.
To learn a subject requires a combination of practice, which of course schooling cannot provide, and progressive and complete in-take of knowledge, which it provides poorly at best. More concretely: if you want to learn how to program, you hack until you find it easy, and you study whatever you need to know until you have a deep and lasting understanding of it. The very organization of schooling precludes this: you study a subject until the end of a semester, then you stop. Generally the "subject" is a collection so large as to preclude a deep understanding of any part within the time provided, and such is never necessary to receive the highest grade. It's simply insane.
But what you get out of school is, at the very least, proportional to what you put into it
Don't forget that what you put in to school is also proportional to the opportunity you lose in other endeavors, such as learning to program or to write poetry.
School precludes any serious intellectual endeavor, simply through its dictates over time. This is progressively less true until one achieves tenure, but it is true enough for men like Einstein to find more opportunity to do physics in a patent office than a university. This sad state of affairs is not limited to Germany or to the past.
The real tragedy, though, is when men like G. H. Hardy conform to the dictates of the system in their ignorant youth, and lose much of their intellectual prime in the process. Hardy is no exception: he is one example of an entire generation of British mathematicians who wasted their minds mastering a poorly-designed standardized test. This specific problem has been acknowledged and addressed, but surely not in fact remedied. It exists in all university schooling today, in admissions, in grading, and in graduation requirements.
A solution is not to be found in platitudes about getting out what you put in.
People don't drop out because they're stupid -- being stupid is no barrier to academic success. If there is any one trait to be singled out as a cause of dropping out, it is surely neither intelligence nor stupidity but disobedience.
This is an absurd and offensive characterization. A huge number of competent people lack the professional qualifications, connections, or luck to escape underemployment. This is particularly true in the software industry today, as opposed to a decade ago.
The disconnect between professional requirements and competence is a serious social problem. There are certainly incompetents without qualifications, but there are plenty of amply competent (potential) workers without them -- what do you say to those?
Steve Jobs hardly offers a solution. He entered the business at a time when hundreds of new businesses testified to the potential for entry. Today, the barriers to entry are far too high for the mere ability to produce a superior product to suffice, and it is plain to observe that there are no new entries to speak of. Of course, this is the fate of every market; any serious economy of scale means coalescence to oligopy sooner or later. So, what do you say to today's young Steve Jobs who cannot find his way to a job interview?
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Star Wars seems to have the juvenile, xenophobic conception of conflict that characterizes war propaganda: good vs. evil fight because they can't stand to allow each other even mere existence, and we should always side with good because (as it happens) our country is always the good one. Real conflict, of course, is never good vs. evil for the sake of good or evil. The evil, if any, has to be disregarding people for some purpose; the good, if any, has to be resisting evil to defend something of value. Otherwise there'd be no conflict. What's the purpose? What's being defended?
Maybe Star Wars answers these questions, and I've just forgotten what the answers are. It's been a while. I saw the last of the movies recently, though, and I know it never came up in that one. All we have is Darth Vader declaring his desire to "rule the universe" and make things as he wants them to be. But what things, and how does he want them? And why should we care? Indeed, why does he?
I only watch movies in theaters when the movie itself calls for a big screen; e.g., Kill Bill is clearly going to suffer even on a 40" TV. If I had anywhere to put one, I would just buy a projector and never go to a theater again.
- Home Theater: Selection from nearly every movie ever made, at any time, in any language, with subtitles available in your language of choice.
- Theater: Selection from ~20 movies within a given month, all released in the last few months, most made for a very ignorant LCD.
Of course, this is what the media industries are really worried about. If people start choosing movies or music or books from the huge library of material made before the last 6-12 months, there will be much less money going into new works that have little justification to exist in terms of quality. They don't want copyright to last forever so they can still charge you for the Beetles in thirty years -- they don't want anybody to be listening to the Beetles at all in thirty years.The modern usage is clearly a deformity resulting from illiteracy. The best course is to avoid the phrase altogether.
On the general topic of usage Nazism, W. V. Quine has written an enlightening essay, Usage and Abusage, in his book Quiddities.
Still, you're right that new technologies still provide new markets. Maybe the rate at which new markets emerge will outstrip the rate at which the old ones coalesce. This hasn't happened yet, but it's certainly possible. I think it depends on what sorts of new technologies emerge, particularly manufacturing technologies. Software emerged as a new market precisely because it required no capital whatever to manufacture, including (at the time) compatibility.
Gas stations are just retailers, and although retail was still cottage industry at that time, that's going away fast -- one revolution I certainly expect to see completed in my lifetime (when was the last time you saw a non-franchise gas station?). In-dash radios are just radios; when was the last time a new company formed to make radios? Tires were a genuinely new market, I think, but anyway just as quickly industrialized and closed as cars. Sign-builders are just metal-working companies and I doubt any new companies formed to make signs. I don't know the early history of road construction, but it was almost certainly closed from the beginning, as is every industry that lives on government contracts. And fuzzy dice are just textile manufacture.A monopoly is not 100% market share; it's any share in a market that prevents entry.
Which is to say: if all the money goes through certain channels, then those channels will be necessary to get the money, but that is only an artifact of the system. In fact, though, people do get around the system: there is a somewhat common practice of PhDs putting their names on research done by non-PhDs in order to get it published. What does that say?
It is probably generally true that only the most brilliant people do succeed outside the school system today, but it seems quite plausible that only they would even try to escape the dominant system. Looking back, Fermat was no great mathematician but he still succeeded, and collaborated, without the aid of any formal license. Erdos is another good example -- not his success, but rather the success he had in collaboration with others. Erdos was certainly more valuable than a university, and many individuals could probably serve the same function. Would an Erdos-style linked-list collaboration of all mathematicians provide faster progress than the university system? Who knows! There's certainly no empirical reason to draw a conclusion one way or another. One thing is certain: nobody will bother to try for a very long time. Until then, education will remain cargo cult science.
My mistake -- I thought Germany had adopted the Ph.D around the same time England did (turns out they invented it). Nevertheless, let's not forget that science can get along just fine without degrees, and of course Einstein was not an academic when he did his most important work. He was very skeptical of the value of schools, saying they contained altogether too much teaching.Of course, that's how all big fortunes are built. You always need a monopoly, or it would work just like they taught us in Microecon. 101, with profit-margins tending towards zero. The thing to look for is not new markets to exploit but new monopolies. Those are tough to get into, though, because it's all about being first to get a critical mass, and that's easier the more resources you have at your disposal.
This is not pessimistic; in fact, what this means is industrialization, more efficient processes, centralized management of resources, etc. The monopoly economy is much more efficient than the old, pre-industrial economy of redundant cottage industry. But whatever we prefer, let's be realistic: cottage industry can't last in any free market. Industrialization is inevitable.
I think you're missing the point. When I say competence is a commodity, I mean, for example, that if you design a better PC, every other PC manufacturer can duplicate anything better about that PC in the course of a few months. So being better gets you a few months ahead; but being a huge business gets you a few years ahead. On the labor market, the people coming up with the new ideas will make more money than the people duplicating them, but that is an orthogonal issue.Anyway, the free market system rewards, more than anything else, not competence or excellence but size. The bigger your company, the better. This is basic economics, although not a part that libertarian idealogues like to emphasize. Of course it's irrelevant in the labor market except in the special case of unions.
I didn't say that. However, I would hardly consider most business success to amount to "greatness". If you want greatness, become a scientist. But what can stop your competitors from implementing your idea? If what you're talking about is just technical superiority, then nothing. (Leaving aside market irregularities like patents).Personally, I've tried school a number of times, and although each time it was easy to get top grades at first, in a matter of months I found myself consumed by the emptiness of the exercise. I had no time to read books, no self-direction in my studies, no motivation to acquire the depth of understanding I would demand from myself if the grades were not there. I burn out and drop out... then feel the need for approval and go back for more. Finally though I've mustered up the self-esteem to stay out for good.
Even Google, though, with its IQ test PR stunt, requires formalities above capabilities. Probably only Walmart does it right: huge computer applications, data collected on every employee, and data-mining techniques to find out what means what and what means nothing. Unfortunately it seems they're just trying to predict obedience rather than talent.
(I assume you do have a Ph.D in human learning that qualifies you to make such statements).
P.S. Most of science predates the Ph.D -- including Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein.
To learn a subject requires a combination of practice, which of course schooling cannot provide, and progressive and complete in-take of knowledge, which it provides poorly at best. More concretely: if you want to learn how to program, you hack until you find it easy, and you study whatever you need to know until you have a deep and lasting understanding of it. The very organization of schooling precludes this: you study a subject until the end of a semester, then you stop. Generally the "subject" is a collection so large as to preclude a deep understanding of any part within the time provided, and such is never necessary to receive the highest grade. It's simply insane.
Don't forget that what you put in to school is also proportional to the opportunity you lose in other endeavors, such as learning to program or to write poetry.School precludes any serious intellectual endeavor, simply through its dictates over time. This is progressively less true until one achieves tenure, but it is true enough for men like Einstein to find more opportunity to do physics in a patent office than a university. This sad state of affairs is not limited to Germany or to the past.
The real tragedy, though, is when men like G. H. Hardy conform to the dictates of the system in their ignorant youth, and lose much of their intellectual prime in the process. Hardy is no exception: he is one example of an entire generation of British mathematicians who wasted their minds mastering a poorly-designed standardized test. This specific problem has been acknowledged and addressed, but surely not in fact remedied. It exists in all university schooling today, in admissions, in grading, and in graduation requirements.
A solution is not to be found in platitudes about getting out what you put in.
People don't drop out because they're stupid -- being stupid is no barrier to academic success. If there is any one trait to be singled out as a cause of dropping out, it is surely neither intelligence nor stupidity but disobedience.
Actually that was just his cover story for taking LSD. (He admitted it later on).
This is an absurd and offensive characterization. A huge number of competent people lack the professional qualifications, connections, or luck to escape underemployment. This is particularly true in the software industry today, as opposed to a decade ago.
The disconnect between professional requirements and competence is a serious social problem. There are certainly incompetents without qualifications, but there are plenty of amply competent (potential) workers without them -- what do you say to those?
Steve Jobs hardly offers a solution. He entered the business at a time when hundreds of new businesses testified to the potential for entry. Today, the barriers to entry are far too high for the mere ability to produce a superior product to suffice, and it is plain to observe that there are no new entries to speak of. Of course, this is the fate of every market; any serious economy of scale means coalescence to oligopy sooner or later. So, what do you say to today's young Steve Jobs who cannot find his way to a job interview?