"Movies with stupid premises that no one in their right mind would go see, wouldn't get funded enough to be made."
Or would get flooded with investment money... because how many people do go and see big dumb movies which they don't want to admit they saw, but are going to see the next one anyway, because dumb is fun?
But it's interesting how this model would shift the 'censorship' curve to before a movie is made rather than afterwards. You'd have to produce a pretty good portfolio, and make it public rather than secret. Something like studios - escrow agencies, aggregators of public demand - would probably still exist, but as reputation vendors.
"Thesis: The MSM has to deal with an audience that is polarized, distracted, transient, and lazy."
I don't think 'lazy' is the correct word. Rather, 'fractured and time-pressured'. Nobody today is actually dumb on an absolute scale. We're all very passionate and in fact expert about our personal interests. It's just that those interests don't all coincide in postmodernity. 'Mainstream' media by its very nature is attempting to report on a multitude of individual passions to people who simply don't share those passions. Therefore, the coverage has to be shallow because everyone is an ill-informed non-expert in thousands more subjects than they are expert in. And the reports themselves have to be non-experts because their job is to stand in the middle, translating one community of passion's specialised history and jargon into something that's roughly understandable by all the others. The result is never going to be acceptable to everyone. It's trying to force the ocean through a drinking straw. And some of the ocean is going the other direction.
I don't know what the solution is. More specialised, user-driven publications? Small social groups? But that will lose the middle ground of 'media'. Mass education? But one community's 'education' is another's 'astroturf' or 'propaganda' - and often turns out to be, if you look at the 'public education campaigns' of the 20th century. A self-selected enlightened elite to rule from an ivory tower? That's been tried, the results weren't good historically.
We'll muddle through somehow. But it's not helpful to categorise everyone who doesn't share your narrow specialty as 'lazy'. They're not; they're just not in your subculture.
Objectivism is *false* because it does not describe reality - but not because actors are irrational, but because the true state of 'existence' is not 'existence in isolation' but 'existence in relation'. In fact, 'existence in isolation' if followed rigorously is the same as nonexistence. It means detachment from all relations, all community, and the literal sacrifice of all truly real and good things for an abstract ideal of personal existence or ego. It's the opposite of what Rand thought she was achieving, because all things that are, are relationships. The social and economic recommendations of Objectivism if followed literally therefore objectively promote social and personal decay and death.
Why the foundations of Objectivism are wrong is a very interesting philosophical problem, but a good place to start is the writings of Christopher Alexander, whose examination of the geometry of livable spaces in architecture and biology has pointed him toward a concept of existence in which every object is an overlapping field which relies on the support of others. I highly recommend him - it's good solid common sense (and has applications in computer science too).
"Some bloggers are journalists. They check out their facts, and report the facts no matter whose ox gets gored. I pay to read that."
That's nice for you. But you can't pay to link to them on your blog and say 'go read this guy, he's good'. So the conversation stops at your summary of / reaction to what they said.
With paywall content, you can pay to read, but that reading is a very lonely experience. You can't pay to share and discuss it with others. At best you can suggest others pay before they join your discussion, which is about as socially welcome as hosting an Amway party.
"I assure you the field is a valid one [arxiv.org] (unlike CASE or ERP)."
Are you sure? Aren't CASE and ERP historically both successful spinoffs/applications of AI? Why would the more ambitious field be 'valid' while the more limited and grounded ones be invalid?
"In the original I Robot stories, the robot's positronic brains were made out of something referred to as Platinum-Iridium sponge. As this is written, Platinum is $1325/troy oz. and Iridium [matthey.com] is $425. Aren't you grateful that real computers are made out of silicon."
It's worse than that. All those positrons would make the robot brain a small nuclear explosion.
"Manned space effort is based on the premise that there will be a sizable number of people living or visiting in space in the not so distant future (within say 50 years)."
Right, that's the vision of the Space!Future! I was sold as a kid in the 1970s. And I thought it must be true, because Scientists were saying so.
But one important bit was left out. What will all those people be *doing* that can't be done cheaper either on Earth, or by robots?
Doing Science? Uh-huh. That would have to mean 'astronomy'. Who pays, and how many billions can you justify to get a few more pixels over the Hubble? Mining? For what, and how do you stop those rocks from being used as weapons? Helium-3? We need basic fusion first before we even think about clean fusion. Military? We already have nukes and spysats. The gap is on the ground, not in orbit. Solar power sats? We could teleoperate repair robots with a second or so delay.
I can see how 'lots of people in space' made sense in the days before computers. It would have been the only way to achieve strategic military objectives, which were a bottomless source of funding. But now... why?
Without warp drive, there's just nothing out there. And we're not allowed to talk about warp drive. Einstein forbids it (blessed be Einstein).
The Space Age is over. It was over before most of us were born. It never really even existed in the sense in which it was sold.
"I don't think anyone wants to send boatloads of astronauts in an expensive investment without guaranteeing that they'll arrive in one piece."
And let's not forget the mass slavery which made colonising the New World an economic proposition. Maybe the key to space development is re-legalising the slave trade?
"and then the big robot we leave behind to be in charge of the cleanup operation gets crossed with a nuke and goes berserk."
That's the plot of Wall*E!
"Two rogue robots, armed with plasma cannons, rampage across a devastated Earth before breaking into a spaceship to terrorise the last human survivors and unleash a robot revolt..."
"You need somewhere to send yourself or life in general, to "diversify your portfolio", to not be "keeping all your eggs in one basket", in case of a catastrophy down here on Earth."
As long as that catastrophe isn't anything medical and infectious. As soon as you set up offworld colonies, you'll have a whole space infrastructure including regular shuttles between Earth and Mars/Venus/Titan. Effectively you'll still be in one basket, just a bigger one. Things will still spread across Sol System.
So what class catastrophe can a colony defend against? Only something really big, planet-killing, and yet not biomedical. So... a really huge comet?
And the size of colonies will be tiny compared to Earth for a long time, so genetically speaking, the chances of repopulating from space will be pretty low. Not only that, but for every space colony with dozens or hundreds of people that gets missed by the meteor strike, youre likely to have several more such isolated communities here on Earth with the same kinds of resources.
Space colonies are fun and romantic, but in the hard numbers, I don't see how they change our chance of planetary survival at all.
Long-term, what if we built a whole Cloud City up there where the atmosphere's thin-ish and the sulphuric acid rain slowed to a romantic drizzle? Maybe mine stuff from the atmosphere? There'd be one rule: don't look down, and don't breathe in. Two rules. Don't look down, don't breathe in, and don't tease the jellysquids. Three rules. I'll make orbit again.
Thinking about it a bit more... the new 'Twilight'-esque vampires are almost a deliberate reversal of the vampire legend. "Trust the secret masters, they may suck your blood but they're really the good guys". And that's the same mindset as the zombie apocalypse survivalists: the small band of elite versus the uneducated dangerous masses.
I don't like that development one bit, actually. Not one bit.
They're fear of people. Fear of the sprawling masses, to be precise. While vampires are the opposite: fear of (and/or attraction to) secretive elites.
I find the zombie apocalypse genre disturbing because it tells me that people have become comfortable with mass dehumanisation of their neighbours. And that's not a good place to be as a society.
Of a kind, yes. I'm reasonably happy with his disaster relief and vaccination - but I'm not entirely sure that genetic engineering is in the long run philanthropic. It centralises food and medicine in large corporate interests, props up the artificial scarcity regime of 'intellectual property', and locks small players out of the market. In many ways the Gates Foundation could be doing as much harm as it's doing good.
If he were to focus on truly free and open solutions, and not partner with IP industries, then I'd be a lot more charitable toward his charitable works.
"They don't have to- not with district boundaries drawn like fractals"
How does finessing a few percent with redistricting help unless they already have a guaranteed support base?
Perhaps the nasty truth is that the politicians you don't like are in power because 51% of your neighbours like them just fine and think they're doing a heckuva job protecting them from you.
That's a 'problem' (if it is one) which revolutions won't solve.
"Just because some paranoid mcarthyist hacks in the government think some guy seems a bit whack doesnt mean they should have a right to go around fucking people over with no fly lists unless its proven in a court."
"Running isolated untrusted code is problematic, because there are always new undiscovered ways for it to become unisolated."
Which in itself should give us pause.
Programming is applied logic. Logic is a rigorously provable formal system. A rigorously provable formal system DOES NOT lose its properties merely through some vague process of exposure to an environment. It can't.
Why the heck do we allow languages to be released which don't have any kind of formal proof of their properties? Isn't that a bit like building with sand? 'Shove this iron bar here... well I think it's iron, it might be plastic... or corn syrup... heck, I dunno, it's a new formula, not been tested, but it looks pretty. Hey it's only structural, it'll get replaced with something in three years anyway. Don't you know all buildings fall down eventually? For goodness sakes don't lean on it!!!'
Slashdot Mirror
"Movies with stupid premises that no one in their right mind would go see, wouldn't get funded enough to be made."
Or would get flooded with investment money... because how many people do go and see big dumb movies which they don't want to admit they saw, but are going to see the next one anyway, because dumb is fun?
But it's interesting how this model would shift the 'censorship' curve to before a movie is made rather than afterwards. You'd have to produce a pretty good portfolio, and make it public rather than secret. Something like studios - escrow agencies, aggregators of public demand - would probably still exist, but as reputation vendors.
I'd like to see this.
"Thesis: The MSM has to deal with an audience that is polarized, distracted, transient, and lazy."
I don't think 'lazy' is the correct word. Rather, 'fractured and time-pressured'. Nobody today is actually dumb on an absolute scale. We're all very passionate and in fact expert about our personal interests. It's just that those interests don't all coincide in postmodernity. 'Mainstream' media by its very nature is attempting to report on a multitude of individual passions to people who simply don't share those passions. Therefore, the coverage has to be shallow because everyone is an ill-informed non-expert in thousands more subjects than they are expert in. And the reports themselves have to be non-experts because their job is to stand in the middle, translating one community of passion's specialised history and jargon into something that's roughly understandable by all the others. The result is never going to be acceptable to everyone. It's trying to force the ocean through a drinking straw. And some of the ocean is going the other direction.
I don't know what the solution is. More specialised, user-driven publications? Small social groups? But that will lose the middle ground of 'media'. Mass education? But one community's 'education' is another's 'astroturf' or 'propaganda' - and often turns out to be, if you look at the 'public education campaigns' of the 20th century. A self-selected enlightened elite to rule from an ivory tower? That's been tried, the results weren't good historically.
We'll muddle through somehow. But it's not helpful to categorise everyone who doesn't share your narrow specialty as 'lazy'. They're not; they're just not in your subculture.
"Explain to me why Objectivism is evil"
Objectivism is *false* because it does not describe reality - but not because actors are irrational, but because the true state of 'existence' is not 'existence in isolation' but 'existence in relation'. In fact, 'existence in isolation' if followed rigorously is the same as nonexistence. It means detachment from all relations, all community, and the literal sacrifice of all truly real and good things for an abstract ideal of personal existence or ego. It's the opposite of what Rand thought she was achieving, because all things that are, are relationships. The social and economic recommendations of Objectivism if followed literally therefore objectively promote social and personal decay and death.
Why the foundations of Objectivism are wrong is a very interesting philosophical problem, but a good place to start is the writings of Christopher Alexander, whose examination of the geometry of livable spaces in architecture and biology has pointed him toward a concept of existence in which every object is an overlapping field which relies on the support of others. I highly recommend him - it's good solid common sense (and has applications in computer science too).
"The 2020 music scene (all free, nobody paying for anything) will be stunningly awful."
Moreso than the 2009 music scene?
"Some bloggers are journalists. They check out their facts, and report the facts no matter whose ox gets gored. I pay to read that."
That's nice for you. But you can't pay to link to them on your blog and say 'go read this guy, he's good'. So the conversation stops at your summary of / reaction to what they said.
With paywall content, you can pay to read, but that reading is a very lonely experience. You can't pay to share and discuss it with others. At best you can suggest others pay before they join your discussion, which is about as socially welcome as hosting an Amway party.
This is a problem, I think.
"I assure you the field is a valid one [arxiv.org] (unlike CASE or ERP)."
Are you sure? Aren't CASE and ERP historically both successful spinoffs/applications of AI? Why would the more ambitious field be 'valid' while the more limited and grounded ones be invalid?
" also defines an 'openness continuum' "
So - just like Creative Commons, then?
(IHNRTFA)
"In the original I Robot stories, the robot's positronic brains were made out of something referred to as Platinum-Iridium sponge. As this is written, Platinum is $1325/troy oz. and Iridium [matthey.com] is $425. Aren't you grateful that real computers are made out of silicon."
It's worse than that. All those positrons would make the robot brain a small nuclear explosion.
Overclock THAT.
"Manned space effort is based on the premise that there will be a sizable number of people living or visiting in space in the not so distant future (within say 50 years)."
Right, that's the vision of the Space!Future! I was sold as a kid in the 1970s. And I thought it must be true, because Scientists were saying so.
But one important bit was left out. What will all those people be *doing* that can't be done cheaper either on Earth, or by robots?
Doing Science? Uh-huh. That would have to mean 'astronomy'. Who pays, and how many billions can you justify to get a few more pixels over the Hubble?
Mining? For what, and how do you stop those rocks from being used as weapons?
Helium-3? We need basic fusion first before we even think about clean fusion.
Military? We already have nukes and spysats. The gap is on the ground, not in orbit.
Solar power sats? We could teleoperate repair robots with a second or so delay.
I can see how 'lots of people in space' made sense in the days before computers. It would have been the only way to achieve strategic military objectives, which were a bottomless source of funding. But now... why?
Without warp drive, there's just nothing out there. And we're not allowed to talk about warp drive. Einstein forbids it (blessed be Einstein).
The Space Age is over. It was over before most of us were born. It never really even existed in the sense in which it was sold.
"I don't think anyone wants to send boatloads of astronauts in an expensive investment without guaranteeing that they'll arrive in one piece."
And let's not forget the mass slavery which made colonising the New World an economic proposition. Maybe the key to space development is re-legalising the slave trade?
"Boy how would those trips compare to early the first voyages to the "New World""
Well, no Indians there at the other end for a start.
Also no corn, sugar cane, potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, turkeys, buffalo, passenger pigeons, Missippi, Great Lakes, Montezuma, or oxygen.
Other than that, exactly the same!
"Fist of all, I don't think we'll ever be sending 'meat' to mars"
But how else are McDonalds going to open there? Grow hydroponic soyburgers? I think not!
I picture vast herds of long-horn steers with cute little bubble helmets nibbling on the lichen.
"and then the big robot we leave behind to be in charge of the cleanup operation gets crossed with a nuke and goes berserk."
That's the plot of Wall*E!
"Two rogue robots, armed with plasma cannons, rampage across a devastated Earth before breaking into a spaceship to terrorise the last human survivors and unleash a robot revolt..."
"You need somewhere to send yourself or life in general, to "diversify your portfolio", to not be "keeping all your eggs in one basket", in case of a catastrophy down here on Earth."
As long as that catastrophe isn't anything medical and infectious. As soon as you set up offworld colonies, you'll have a whole space infrastructure including regular shuttles between Earth and Mars/Venus/Titan. Effectively you'll still be in one basket, just a bigger one. Things will still spread across Sol System.
So what class catastrophe can a colony defend against? Only something really big, planet-killing, and yet not biomedical. So... a really huge comet?
And the size of colonies will be tiny compared to Earth for a long time, so genetically speaking, the chances of repopulating from space will be pretty low. Not only that, but for every space colony with dozens or hundreds of people that gets missed by the meteor strike, youre likely to have several more such isolated communities here on Earth with the same kinds of resources.
Space colonies are fun and romantic, but in the hard numbers, I don't see how they change our chance of planetary survival at all.
Actually Venus and balloons do go together.
http://sciencelinks.jp/j-east/article/200210/000020021002A0351950.php
http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2009/01/asrg-missions-venus-balloon.html
Long-term, what if we built a whole Cloud City up there where the atmosphere's thin-ish and the sulphuric acid rain slowed to a romantic drizzle? Maybe mine stuff from the atmosphere? There'd be one rule: don't look down, and don't breathe in. Two rules. Don't look down, don't breathe in, and don't tease the jellysquids. Three rules. I'll make orbit again.
Thinking about it a bit more... the new 'Twilight'-esque vampires are almost a deliberate reversal of the vampire legend. "Trust the secret masters, they may suck your blood but they're really the good guys". And that's the same mindset as the zombie apocalypse survivalists: the small band of elite versus the uneducated dangerous masses.
I don't like that development one bit, actually. Not one bit.
They're fear of people. Fear of the sprawling masses, to be precise. While vampires are the opposite: fear of (and/or attraction to) secretive elites.
I find the zombie apocalypse genre disturbing because it tells me that people have become comfortable with mass dehumanisation of their neighbours. And that's not a good place to be as a society.
Now we just need a Sam Bell. And a GERTY
"spending his days doing philanthropy"
Of a kind, yes. I'm reasonably happy with his disaster relief and vaccination - but I'm not entirely sure that genetic engineering is in the long run philanthropic. It centralises food and medicine in large corporate interests, props up the artificial scarcity regime of 'intellectual property', and locks small players out of the market. In many ways the Gates Foundation could be doing as much harm as it's doing good.
If he were to focus on truly free and open solutions, and not partner with IP industries, then I'd be a lot more charitable toward his charitable works.
Now that Windows Seven is out, maybe it's time for a new Borg icon....
"it's now mouth breathers"
When is this ridiculous phrase going to go away? It's a Victorian relic like phrenology.
"They don't have to- not with district boundaries drawn like fractals"
How does finessing a few percent with redistricting help unless they already have a guaranteed support base?
Perhaps the nasty truth is that the politicians you don't like are in power because 51% of your neighbours like them just fine and think they're doing a heckuva job protecting them from you.
That's a 'problem' (if it is one) which revolutions won't solve.
"Just because some paranoid mcarthyist hacks in the government think some guy seems a bit whack doesnt mean they should have a right to go around fucking people over with no fly lists unless its proven in a court."
It's the "no breathe lists" which worry me more.
Acting suspiciously reasonable?
"Running isolated untrusted code is problematic, because there are always new undiscovered ways for it to become unisolated."
Which in itself should give us pause.
Programming is applied logic. Logic is a rigorously provable formal system. A rigorously provable formal system DOES NOT lose its properties merely through some vague process of exposure to an environment. It can't.
Why the heck do we allow languages to be released which don't have any kind of formal proof of their properties? Isn't that a bit like building with sand? 'Shove this iron bar here... well I think it's iron, it might be plastic... or corn syrup... heck, I dunno, it's a new formula, not been tested, but it looks pretty. Hey it's only structural, it'll get replaced with something in three years anyway. Don't you know all buildings fall down eventually? For goodness sakes don't lean on it!!!'
Programming: wer doin it rong.