Although you could say the same about the iPhone and Apple, since FoxConn manufactures that (and lots of other companies make the various components).
Google had significant design and engineering input into Nexxus One -- probably not as much as Apple has over iPhone, but still. Many if not most American tech companies outsource their manufacturing. If Google determines the specs and puts its brand on Nexxus One, in many senses that makes it "it's own" phone.
I don't see it as hypocricy. Flash being closed is a problem not simply because it is closed, but it is closed to Apple. If it doesn't work the way Apple wants it to, they can't do anything about it. If Apple's own closed stuff doesn't work as they wish, they can do something about it because it is, obviously, not closed to Apple.
Whether or not you agree with their business decision to not allow closed things from other companies on their devices, I don't see how you can call that hypocrisy, especially since he specifically mentions that many things from Apple are indeed closed.
Well many would lose their jobs or contracts if they didn't. So that is pretty close to "forced".
Even for a business owner, it is almost always strongly against their self interest to drop IE6 support....the tiny benefit they would get from causing people to upgrade (a benefit that is spread among ALL web developers) is insignificant compared to the downside of pushing users away from your site (this downside is not spread among anyone other than yourself). Prisoner's delimma in action.
If your solution (expect web devs to drop support for IE6) relies on people going against their own interest, you should look for another solution.
Well obviously people do care, or there wouldn't be so many articles about it. (however, there are lots of articles on lots of things I don't care about, but I don't bother commenting on them either)
To answer your question more directly, anyone contemplating any business model that includes tablet computers (such as iphone app devs) would be wise to follow this sort of news closely....first mover advantage counting for a lot.
Yes but....privacy! Don't you get it? Privacy! It is important. It doesn't matter if there is a rational reason for it, privacy is just intrinsically important and you must understand it.
BTW, while we're at it, I'd like it if my doctor didn't have to see me naked. Sure it would make his job harder, but....privacy!
I did not say wikipedia was in need of a karma system. I said wikipedia was in need of a good karma system. What I see is just lame. (btw, I do a fair amount of editing on wikipedia, but not 18 hours a day...geez, get a life!;) )
I gave a very brief description of what a good one might do. Think how much vandalism would be reduced if 90% of people browsed with recent edits (by people without a strong history of "lasting" edits) suppressed. And those who actually liked to fix vandalism would have those changes called out to them? But this doesn't just apply to vandalism, it applies to everything.
As for who decides quality, well, who decides the quality of anything, ultimately? Who decides who is an expert? In the case of Britannica, it isn't the president or chief editor, since if the public thinks the product is crap and don't buy it, they will be out of a job. There is a very complex network of responsibility....the buck never actually stops anywhere.
A proper karma system can formalize this, but in a much more efficient way.
The best analogy I can make is PageRank in Google....who decides what page is more "important" than another?
Gaming it is, as I mentioned, a difficult but solvable problem. Note that google algorithmically defeats things like link farms (most of the time). Same thing.
It also isn't necessarily about "rating things up". If you make an edit, and it tends to stay for a good while unchanged (or mostly unchanged) on a high traffic page, that is an indication that your edit was "approved" and can earn you karma. This of course is how wikipedia already works (good edits stay around), but it could be enhanced by adding a reputation/karma system to it.
Wikipedia does pretty well by tapping into wisdom of crowds. But what it really needs is a good karma system to get more quality out of it.
You may complain about the quality of the comments on slashdot, but compare it to somewhere without any karma system. (this article sums up the problem with pure anonymity, and quite humorously so)
Slashdot's system is not perfect, but it is a start in the right direction. I wonder how much wikipedia could be improved with a really good system. For instance, people with low karma would have their changes not show up immediately by default, or would be flagged as questionable, or what have you. People who didn't have a history of posting "good" stuff would tend to have few eyeballs ever see their stuff.
There is a ton that could be done. It's tough to make it ungameable, but not impossible.
Don't confuse "goal" with "conscious goal," or with any ability to anticipate future needs. But still, the word "goal" is a useful one in describing evolution.
Evolution *does* take the direct route, as it has no ability to anticipate. It never takes an indirect route to a goal.
And yes I understand that evolution is not "smart" in the sense of guided. But it does tend to drift toward beneficial features, and something that is deleterious tends to go away.
I'm just saying you didn't explain anything by saying something evolved to help cause people to take advantage of the placebo effect, that doesn't make sense.
Did you maintain a count of how many opinions were changed? How do you know?
No one is going to admit they lost an argument. Some people who argued will later realize their position is weak. Other people were fence straddlers, and simply lurked and read while others debated. And some actually changed their opinion.
There are a lot of creationists who have changed their opinion, it just happens gradually, a concept many have difficulty with. You are about as unlikely to see a creationist suddenly say "wow, you're right!" as you are to see monkey give birth to a human.
Our brains are made to continue to think about things until we figure them out....that's what curiousity is and it's key to intelligence.
Problem is, if our brain is unable to find the answer, it's best to have some sort of exception handler break it out of the loop. That's where superstition comes in. So we don't spend all day trying to answer questions about, say, how we came to be, as opposed to trying to figure out why our bow and arrow doesn't shoot as straight as we'd like.
Yeah, how I long for the good old days when netscape and IE just tried to add features as fast as they could, without stopping to check whether they were adhering to any sort of standard whatsoever.
Having benchmarks like this makes plenty of sense. Otherwise the "standard" becomes "behaves like the most popular browser". Which creates a viscious cycle which quickly eliminates competition. Is that really what you want?
Second, who you vote for is a CHOICE. Think about how that's different from everything else on your list, and you'll realize why your suggestion fails.
I've thought about it, and I'm not seeing it.
It's an obvious thing to make illegal, making it illegal is a good thing for all (whether it is about "protecting the individual's rights" or "protecting the integrity of our democracy"), so what is the problem?
Even so, if you buy a diamond that is not technically a "blood diamond", you are still supporting the market for diamonds and raising the price of those blood diamonds. And unless you are admiring your "good diamond" in private, you are supporting the culture of diamond-lovers.
Which is a long winded and less clever way of saying what the parent poster said.
But if it takes equilibrium to get there, wouldn't you want the system that is both long-term and short-term better in most cases?
Well under an equilibrium situation, Range works fine and produces the same result as Condorcet. The problem is that such a theoretically perfect equilibrium won't happen in the real world (just as "perfect competition" doesn't happen in the real world), as it requires every voter to have perfect knowledge of the preferences of every other voter, and for them to use optimum strategy in voting.
In the real world, Range deweights the votes of the courteous and the ill-informed (as to who is leading) and then throws in some random psychological issues to complicate things further. Condorcet, while a bit more complex in terms of tabulation, is way simpler in terms of what the voter has to think about. A voter who actually tries to "game" it is unlikely to benefit by doing so.
Ultimately, where Range fails is in the principle that each voter should have equal "pull." I don't think the downstream results of neglecting this principle are all that hard to predict.
On your other points, I think we are more in agreement than disagreement.
I don't think "boo hoo Gore should have won" is the point of voting reform. For me, if Perot gave the election to Clinton, then that is a problem too (even though I like Clinton).
The point for me is that due to the spoiler effect, our country is forced into two opposing parties (which normally eliminate spoilers before the general election via primaries), rather than finding candidates that are more toward the consensus. (see Duverger's_law) We have polarized government that spends more time fighting the other side than actually getting things done.
Since all of Arrow's criteria are also immediate criteria derivable from the results only...
But they go way beyond just summing up the utilities and saying "the one with the maximum is the best". That is my complaint about the whole Baysian regret thing.
I'll give you one thing, you acknowledge it is opinion that Baysian regret is the end all and be all. Most of the range voting people do not, they insist it, and if you disagree, you are wrong. They will go so far as to say that if you say that you don't want range voting, you are a liar. Seriously, they say this. Crazy.
If you want to take into account long-term, downstream consequences, please find a way to read into the future of the results.
Well, take a look at Duverger's law. A plurality system will result in two party domination. That is a predictable downstream consequence of a voting method.
My point, and the reason for my example, is that in related fields (economics and game theory), there is a ton of applicable theory. The main one being that the more a system puts people in conflict between what is best for society, and what is best for one's self, the worse that system acheives long term "utility" i.e. happiness for all. That's why they pay the engineer more...to provide incentive to go to school and work real hard to learn a skilled profession. Long term it makes sense, even if the short term result is "less utility".
Range voting people (and I assure you, I know their arguments inside and out from the election methods mailing list) seem to ignore this basic concept. They hate condorcet systems, while ignoring the fact that any Nash equilibrium of Range voting is effectively condorcet.
Bayesian regret is a term they invented to disguise that they toss away the concept of "fairness" and replace it with "maximum short term happiness with results only".
Which is broken, in so many ways. If is like saying that it is better to pay the janitor the same as the chief engineer, because that will create more happiness than paying the engineer more. Of course it doesn't take into account the long term, downstream consequences.
You are exactly right. The range voting people are on another planet. (the more you read of their stuff, the more you see they are crackpots)
The most telling thing is that they brag that honeybees use range voting. Honeybees....eusocial animals that have a queen which has all the babies, so the workers (which are the voters) are infertile. Which means they have no concept of self-interest. Well, duh. Range voting would work fine for them, they have no incentive to exagerrate.
Slashdot Mirror
Although you could say the same about the iPhone and Apple, since FoxConn manufactures that (and lots of other companies make the various components).
Google had significant design and engineering input into Nexxus One -- probably not as much as Apple has over iPhone, but still. Many if not most American tech companies outsource their manufacturing. If Google determines the specs and puts its brand on Nexxus One, in many senses that makes it "it's own" phone.
Doesn't come anywhere close to geosynchronous orbit (22,000 miles high)
I don't see it as hypocricy. Flash being closed is a problem not simply because it is closed, but it is closed to Apple. If it doesn't work the way Apple wants it to, they can't do anything about it. If Apple's own closed stuff doesn't work as they wish, they can do something about it because it is, obviously, not closed to Apple.
Whether or not you agree with their business decision to not allow closed things from other companies on their devices, I don't see how you can call that hypocrisy, especially since he specifically mentions that many things from Apple are indeed closed.
Well many would lose their jobs or contracts if they didn't. So that is pretty close to "forced".
Even for a business owner, it is almost always strongly against their self interest to drop IE6 support....the tiny benefit they would get from causing people to upgrade (a benefit that is spread among ALL web developers) is insignificant compared to the downside of pushing users away from your site (this downside is not spread among anyone other than yourself). Prisoner's delimma in action.
If your solution (expect web devs to drop support for IE6) relies on people going against their own interest, you should look for another solution.
Well obviously people do care, or there wouldn't be so many articles about it. (however, there are lots of articles on lots of things I don't care about, but I don't bother commenting on them either) To answer your question more directly, anyone contemplating any business model that includes tablet computers (such as iphone app devs) would be wise to follow this sort of news closely....first mover advantage counting for a lot.
Yes but....privacy! Don't you get it? Privacy! It is important. It doesn't matter if there is a rational reason for it, privacy is just intrinsically important and you must understand it.
BTW, while we're at it, I'd like it if my doctor didn't have to see me naked. Sure it would make his job harder, but....privacy!
I did not say wikipedia was in need of a karma system. I said wikipedia was in need of a good karma system. What I see is just lame. (btw, I do a fair amount of editing on wikipedia, but not 18 hours a day...geez, get a life! ;) )
I gave a very brief description of what a good one might do. Think how much vandalism would be reduced if 90% of people browsed with recent edits (by people without a strong history of "lasting" edits) suppressed. And those who actually liked to fix vandalism would have those changes called out to them? But this doesn't just apply to vandalism, it applies to everything.
As for who decides quality, well, who decides the quality of anything, ultimately? Who decides who is an expert? In the case of Britannica, it isn't the president or chief editor, since if the public thinks the product is crap and don't buy it, they will be out of a job. There is a very complex network of responsibility....the buck never actually stops anywhere.
A proper karma system can formalize this, but in a much more efficient way.
The best analogy I can make is PageRank in Google....who decides what page is more "important" than another?
Gaming it is, as I mentioned, a difficult but solvable problem. Note that google algorithmically defeats things like link farms (most of the time). Same thing.
It also isn't necessarily about "rating things up". If you make an edit, and it tends to stay for a good while unchanged (or mostly unchanged) on a high traffic page, that is an indication that your edit was "approved" and can earn you karma. This of course is how wikipedia already works (good edits stay around), but it could be enhanced by adding a reputation/karma system to it.
Wikipedia does pretty well by tapping into wisdom of crowds. But what it really needs is a good karma system to get more quality out of it.
You may complain about the quality of the comments on slashdot, but compare it to somewhere without any karma system. (this article sums up the problem with pure anonymity, and quite humorously so) Slashdot's system is not perfect, but it is a start in the right direction. I wonder how much wikipedia could be improved with a really good system. For instance, people with low karma would have their changes not show up immediately by default, or would be flagged as questionable, or what have you. People who didn't have a history of posting "good" stuff would tend to have few eyeballs ever see their stuff. There is a ton that could be done. It's tough to make it ungameable, but not impossible.
It never takes an indirect route to a goal.
Evolution has a goal?
Survival of one's genes into future generations?
Don't confuse "goal" with "conscious goal," or with any ability to anticipate future needs. But still, the word "goal" is a useful one in describing evolution.
Evolution *does* take the direct route, as it has no ability to anticipate. It never takes an indirect route to a goal.
And yes I understand that evolution is not "smart" in the sense of guided. But it does tend to drift toward beneficial features, and something that is deleterious tends to go away.
I'm just saying you didn't explain anything by saying something evolved to help cause people to take advantage of the placebo effect, that doesn't make sense.
Ok, well why does it require you to believe it? If the body can just magically fix itself, why have conscious thought involved?
Did you maintain a count of how many opinions were changed? How do you know?
No one is going to admit they lost an argument. Some people who argued will later realize their position is weak. Other people were fence straddlers, and simply lurked and read while others debated. And some actually changed their opinion.
There are a lot of creationists who have changed their opinion, it just happens gradually, a concept many have difficulty with. You are about as unlikely to see a creationist suddenly say "wow, you're right!" as you are to see monkey give birth to a human.
But why is the placebo effect beneficial?
Isn't that kind of stupid to have a brain evolve a feature just to counteract another arbitrary feature?
Our brains are made to continue to think about things until we figure them out....that's what curiousity is and it's key to intelligence.
Problem is, if our brain is unable to find the answer, it's best to have some sort of exception handler break it out of the loop. That's where superstition comes in. So we don't spend all day trying to answer questions about, say, how we came to be, as opposed to trying to figure out why our bow and arrow doesn't shoot as straight as we'd like.
That's my theory anyway.
Don't they want to slow people down in general, not just when they are there with a patrol car or radar gun? At least I thought that was the theory.
Yeah, how I long for the good old days when netscape and IE just tried to add features as fast as they could, without stopping to check whether they were adhering to any sort of standard whatsoever.
Having benchmarks like this makes plenty of sense. Otherwise the "standard" becomes "behaves like the most popular browser". Which creates a viscious cycle which quickly eliminates competition. Is that really what you want?
It's an obvious thing to make illegal, making it illegal is a good thing for all (whether it is about "protecting the individual's rights" or "protecting the integrity of our democracy"), so what is the problem?
Well duh.
Even so, if you buy a diamond that is not technically a "blood diamond", you are still supporting the market for diamonds and raising the price of those blood diamonds. And unless you are admiring your "good diamond" in private, you are supporting the culture of diamond-lovers.
Which is a long winded and less clever way of saying what the parent poster said.
In the real world, Range deweights the votes of the courteous and the ill-informed (as to who is leading) and then throws in some random psychological issues to complicate things further. Condorcet, while a bit more complex in terms of tabulation, is way simpler in terms of what the voter has to think about. A voter who actually tries to "game" it is unlikely to benefit by doing so.
Ultimately, where Range fails is in the principle that each voter should have equal "pull." I don't think the downstream results of neglecting this principle are all that hard to predict.
On your other points, I think we are more in agreement than disagreement.
I don't think "boo hoo Gore should have won" is the point of voting reform. For me, if Perot gave the election to Clinton, then that is a problem too (even though I like Clinton).
The point for me is that due to the spoiler effect, our country is forced into two opposing parties (which normally eliminate spoilers before the general election via primaries), rather than finding candidates that are more toward the consensus. (see Duverger's_law) We have polarized government that spends more time fighting the other side than actually getting things done.
This is the bad thing. Not that Gore lost.
I'll give you one thing, you acknowledge it is opinion that Baysian regret is the end all and be all. Most of the range voting people do not, they insist it, and if you disagree, you are wrong. They will go so far as to say that if you say that you don't want range voting, you are a liar. Seriously, they say this. Crazy.Well, take a look at Duverger's law. A plurality system will result in two party domination. That is a predictable downstream consequence of a voting method.
My point, and the reason for my example, is that in related fields (economics and game theory), there is a ton of applicable theory. The main one being that the more a system puts people in conflict between what is best for society, and what is best for one's self, the worse that system acheives long term "utility" i.e. happiness for all. That's why they pay the engineer more...to provide incentive to go to school and work real hard to learn a skilled profession. Long term it makes sense, even if the short term result is "less utility".
Range voting people (and I assure you, I know their arguments inside and out from the election methods mailing list) seem to ignore this basic concept. They hate condorcet systems, while ignoring the fact that any Nash equilibrium of Range voting is effectively condorcet.
Bayesian regret is a term they invented to disguise that they toss away the concept of "fairness" and replace it with "maximum short term happiness with results only".
Which is broken, in so many ways. If is like saying that it is better to pay the janitor the same as the chief engineer, because that will create more happiness than paying the engineer more. Of course it doesn't take into account the long term, downstream consequences.
You are exactly right. The range voting people are on another planet. (the more you read of their stuff, the more you see they are crackpots)
The most telling thing is that they brag that honeybees use range voting. Honeybees....eusocial animals that have a queen which has all the babies, so the workers (which are the voters) are infertile. Which means they have no concept of self-interest. Well, duh. Range voting would work fine for them, they have no incentive to exagerrate.
Reasonable systems don't expect that. They should simply infer than any candidate you don't rank you prefer less than those you do.
Condorcet systems especially don't mind if you rank two cnadidates the same.