But this is a factor of what 'competitive' media is. As we lower friction and make it so a mass audience of largely idiots can flow effortlessly to whatever they like (yay tech industry optimism! Boo gatekeepers!) this is not only what happens but the ONLY thing that can happen.
I also think of it as Ramseyfication. You know how on 'Hell's Kitchen' in almost every challenge and certainly every big final challenge, the score always goes back and forth and ends in a big dramatic tie? That's because the show can't possibly risk seeing events go less than the most calculatedly high-stakes thing imaginable. You can watch that stuff as a carefully crafted rivalry/competition play, orchestrated down to the smallest detail. Super effective, because it has to be.
So you have to like seeing that story echo again and again, and enjoy the minor variations (like mastering 12-bar blues or something). It's not about being surprised on any level, even the outcomes will be telegraphed because you have to: if the outcome's surprising and apparently unjust, viewers will be lost.
EVERYTHING MUST BE LIKE THIS in the totally fluid media of the future because only successful things survive, and the fluidity/openness makes it so nobody has to sit through temporary dissatisfaction or learning or anything like that. This is the world you, the tech industry, have created by wresting it from gatekeepers.
Same rules, ALL THE CHOICES, and this is what you get.
The answer isn't more choices or better ways of finding out what's the most popular thing while allowing more crap to be flung at the wall.
The answer is figuring out how to celebrate weird little failure things that don't make it to mass media. Until we get better at that, we'll have this: everything becomes 'Upworthy' and calculated to the Nth degree.
Well, the problem with that approach is it delivers a death blow to market-based and libertarian ideas.
This doesn't worry me personally that much, but I do understand there's a lot of people who get cognitive dissonance off such a conclusion. Here's why we can't have both this and a 'market' or 'freedom'; basing things off people individual decisions means those decisions have to be legitimate.
If the rule is that you're lied to and tricked, no person can devote the amount of time and energy needed to unearth the truth against the continuing efforts of entire organizations to conceal it.
If that occurs in EVERY AREA OF LIFE then you have to triage, and you're working far too hard to test that your drinking water isn't poisoned to give much of a crap about gaming journalism. Generally food-related and immediate-safety-related things will pre-empt everything else, and you'll feel pretty embattled as a general thing. Everything else in life, you're fair game as you just don't have the bandwidth.
If there are no consequences to extensive conning, it becomes completely impossible for a market-based system to cope with it as the gains are way out of proportion to the losses. It becomes impossible to compete honestly for a large share (I think it's possible to deal honestly and get a marginal, niche share on specifically that as a positioning statement, but I also think it locks you out of any significant market share which kills your ability to access capital)
People's attention is not detailed enough to support a full range of honest products in a world of lies. For instance, I support Jim Sterling's patreon. Are there other Jim Sterlings? There might be but I'll never know about it, so Jim ends up holding 90% of that 'market' through having been that person consistently for many years, and building a huge catalog of works as that. Effectively, you can't jump in and do what Jim does because there's already a Jim, and the world is big enough to support one Jim.
Now if the world was NOT FULL OF LIES, you could hear about things and not have to check up on them and you'd not get burned or lied to. In that way a market economy could arise where people sought out goods and services based on what they heard about 'em and what the marketing information told them. The information would be correct and trustworthy, allowing for stratification of a market into categories where stuff balanced out depending on how it was sort of minmaxed. And it'd be clear no product could promise everything, because that'd be dishonest: everything has its downside and that'd be clear too.
We don't have that.
We have gaming journalism, writ large. And that's why this matters.
This is silly. Climate is a huge chaotic system. The FIRST thing you learn about a chaotic system is that if you reduce the energy fed into it, you simplify it and can even calm it down to periodic states. Past a threshold (long passed for climate) you get chaotic flow, which is well understood.
If you increase the energy in the system, it is not mysterious at all what happens. You increase the range and unpredictability of the chaos.
In that light, it is not automatically 'increase the number' of hurricanes, that's merely the most likely outcome. What's really happening is you're increasing the whole range of possible behavior. You're increasing the insanity of the system. Four hurricanes? Try six all on top of each other, then nothing for months, then bam, the largest hurricane in recorded history, completely impossible to cope with. It becomes impossible to make ANY prediction, even to the extent of 'what a hurricane can be'.
This is inherent in the math of chaos and totally inescapable. By its very nature, you will never get 'a nice linear increase in number of hurricanes', instead you get a widening of the possibility space to include stuff that was not possible at all in the 1800s. The amount of energy in the system wouldn't support it, but that's changed.
Yeah, this is Notch. Looks like he already struggled with making personal connections with people, and this didn't help. My brother ain't Notch rich but is much the same way: kind of challenging even for another nerd, appreciates getting to be friends/brothers like a human, but does awkward things like punitive tipping that's either 'zilch' or '$50 bill' like some feudal lord.
Must be kind of like being a giant robot wanting to befriend humans. It's either 'nerd SMASH!' or 'here, let me effortlessly do for you what you're stressing horribly about because to me it's literally no big deal'. That's very distancing and you gotta work hard to not be distorted by a reality like that.
Maybe nobody is willing to work hard to be a normal person to Notch. I volunteer!:D
'cos I'm Slashdot User #580. ha HA! I bet Notch isn't a three-digit slashdotter. And clearly that is the only important thing in life, right? So we can be friends, and I'll try not to condescend too much to Notch:)
But that IS the market. That IS capitalism. It's not some external, malign force: that's what the market is.
If you want it to actually be good, you're talking about some form of direction, oversight or regulation to stop obviously stupid or broken things from happening.
That's not a market anymore. The market is the thing that stampedes towards the stupid because everybody's doing it. See 'stock market'.
Maybe you just don't like capitalism as much as you thought you did!:)
If it turns out that advertisers can test this—for instance, on Facebook, let's say—and discovered that it's not true: that there's a measurable advantage to obnoxiousness in that you're outnumbered by the people who shrug off the obnoxiousness yet retain the payload then you're mistaken.
I think they've already tested this, and we're seeing the outcome. Results are in: short of legislating better behavior, being abusive gets you enough local gains that it becomes a required strategy, impossible to compete against without adopting the same strategy.
It would be nice if the 'I boycott youuuu!' reaction made any sort of difference, but clearly it does not.
Given that climate is Chaos in action, it might well be.
The interesting thing is that we can know certain things, such as if the climate warms a few degrees, the energy fed into the system increases. Since it's a chaotic system, what it does is get even more chaotic and start coughing up crazier 'outlier' events, things we've not seen before. You get nutty stuff like snow in June and it's just because the total behavior of the system got more chaotic and more unpredictable.
Predictably unpredictable, if you follow me.:)
So we can predict with high confidence a sharply increasing quotient of WTFness in the already chaotic weather. To get it to behave more predictably, we'd have to cool the whole system down a couple degrees.
Maybe it's the indie small business dev in me but I saw this and had one question:
How much do you have to pay Amazon to be the one product in a given market segment that they do a Dash Button for?
That's where the real money is, and precisely what Wal-Mart has been up to for all these years.
If Huggies wants to kick Pampers off the Dash button so that everybody out there will randomly change products without thinking too much about it, they simply have to outbid Pampers. And whether the product has glass shards (actually crystallized sodium methylparaben, a preservative) has nothing to do with it.
That's what the Dash Button is. Other companies bid to be the one represented on it, very likely losing money in order to have a little 'brand awareness' token stuck in people's actual houses, and Amazon gets paid from both ends.
Call me crazy, but when I see apologists for eager would-be robber baron types speak of 'the rabble', I have to wonder whether perhaps they're revealing truths about the whole operation.
Because your ability to deal with a predictable outside world has value and affects your own ability to be consistent and reliable in turn.
The only time you want to play the market lottery with literally everything in life is if you figure your resources are (and always will be) superior to any possible thing that will happen to you. For most people, that's not the case.
Elastic is an understatement. In any given city, Uber can literally go away at the push of a button should the company get control of local transportation and want to teach the town a lesson. They can dump into a market or vanish away into the night as quickly as the flip of a bit.
And will, whenever such a point 'needs to be made'. These are not nice people, nor are their defenders.
And bridges serve as a daily reminder of what gravity DOES, but we're not clamoring to have them all removed, are we?
Bit less ideology and a bit more practicality, please? We stabilize that stuff for a reason.
Potholes are a daily reminder of what road wear DOES, and that's surely legitimate too, but it is a worthwhile convenience to have those repaired lest cheap and expensive cars alike lose an axle. And no one car's presented with the bill. That would be silly...
One problem with this whole perspective is, you're placing a huge discretion burden on the actual taxi passengers, for the benefit of the company alone.
People make their plans for doing a thing based on their estimation of what it's gonna cost, how dangerous it is, how practical it seems. The stability of this estimation has huge social value, and these 'old fashioned' institutions being 'disrupted' have typically been through all this years or even centuries ago (for instance, stuff that dates back to before the USA was a thing) and arrived at social expectations everyone's pretty used to.
I recently saw some friends on a sound engineer forum talking about traveling on business. They were going to San Francisco, I think? We sometimes have committments that MUST be honored, agree to do things where it's not an option to randomly fail to show up. Another guy mentioned AirBNB, another 'disruptive' thing. But it didn't get treated like a real suggestion by this group of professionals, because they knew how tough it could be to book a hotel room in the area, and they mentioned that AirBNB would let the room-renter cancel on something like TWO DAYS notice. Ever try to get a backup room for a major show, or convention, on two days notice? Hell, I've worked conventions where all three con hotels sell out the FIRST MORNING rooms are available.
You are suggesting removing the existing 'old' infrastructure where you can plan for things, to replace it with a host of 'disruptive' systems where everything is just-in-time and tied to demand, for the benefit of companies like Uber. And I typically see an associated willingness to have all the old stuff literally destroyed so that all there is, is the JIT surge priced stuff.
I don't mean to assume unseriousness, but have you NEVER had to book a room or a trip months ahead of time knowing the gig you're doing is going to be a madhouse swamped with people? D:
Resistance to high-fat? That's weird. High fat is basically keto, I would ask if there's resistance to high fat-and-carbs-and-salt-and-sugar, which is basically the American formula processed food uses.
I've found fat makes little difference and it's sugar that flips the switch between 'it's energy food' and 'get fat on it'. I also liked Robert Lustig's talks on the subject, which are mindblowingly technical and hard to follow if you're not a chemist or biologist.
Resistance to high fat is easy, just don't take in any sugars or carbs;)
Yes: if it's on you to make your own judgement calls, inspect your own meat, all the things associated with a maximally 'free' environment, you need enough free time, leisure and disposable income to spend time studying these situations and making rational decisions.
I figure you can't BE a 'rational free agent' without quite a lot of liberty to consider situations, products etc. and the ability to casually say 'no' or 'not yet, I'm still thinking about it'.
Reducing the pressure for basic survival drastically helps people be rational free agents, or good Libertarians, or indeed people who'd support more of a Libertarian system.
It's like the famous Bob The Angry Flower cartoon. Who's going to till the soil? Somebody who knows hungry people with disposable capital. When you already like gardening and you can make out like a bandit tilling that soil, then tilling the soil heads towards its true market value, without being distorted by coercion.
Water's a challenge. With 3D printing, does a house remain expensive?
How expensive should High Speed Internet be, really? Could there be competitive benefits to a country deciding that should just be maxed out to all citizens unconditionally so they can get/produce all the information they could imagine?
What about ten, twenty years from now? We're barely twenty years out from dialup modems
Slashdot Mirror
So is this actually about honesty in egg journalism?
Yeah, this: "Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's personalized learning plans" is about the most worrying set of words ever :)
But this is a factor of what 'competitive' media is. As we lower friction and make it so a mass audience of largely idiots can flow effortlessly to whatever they like (yay tech industry optimism! Boo gatekeepers!) this is not only what happens but the ONLY thing that can happen.
I also think of it as Ramseyfication. You know how on 'Hell's Kitchen' in almost every challenge and certainly every big final challenge, the score always goes back and forth and ends in a big dramatic tie? That's because the show can't possibly risk seeing events go less than the most calculatedly high-stakes thing imaginable. You can watch that stuff as a carefully crafted rivalry/competition play, orchestrated down to the smallest detail. Super effective, because it has to be.
So you have to like seeing that story echo again and again, and enjoy the minor variations (like mastering 12-bar blues or something). It's not about being surprised on any level, even the outcomes will be telegraphed because you have to: if the outcome's surprising and apparently unjust, viewers will be lost.
EVERYTHING MUST BE LIKE THIS in the totally fluid media of the future because only successful things survive, and the fluidity/openness makes it so nobody has to sit through temporary dissatisfaction or learning or anything like that. This is the world you, the tech industry, have created by wresting it from gatekeepers.
Same rules, ALL THE CHOICES, and this is what you get.
The answer isn't more choices or better ways of finding out what's the most popular thing while allowing more crap to be flung at the wall.
The answer is figuring out how to celebrate weird little failure things that don't make it to mass media. Until we get better at that, we'll have this: everything becomes 'Upworthy' and calculated to the Nth degree.
That is because you're considering 'effective' in strictly local terms rather than systemic terms.
A concept like 'ethics' is about managing the functioning of whole systems: it's not simply a moral scold.
I shan't moral scold, as I think you may not understand the concept. I am merely highlighting the system-failure side of things :)
Well, the problem with that approach is it delivers a death blow to market-based and libertarian ideas.
This doesn't worry me personally that much, but I do understand there's a lot of people who get cognitive dissonance off such a conclusion. Here's why we can't have both this and a 'market' or 'freedom'; basing things off people individual decisions means those decisions have to be legitimate.
If the rule is that you're lied to and tricked, no person can devote the amount of time and energy needed to unearth the truth against the continuing efforts of entire organizations to conceal it.
If that occurs in EVERY AREA OF LIFE then you have to triage, and you're working far too hard to test that your drinking water isn't poisoned to give much of a crap about gaming journalism. Generally food-related and immediate-safety-related things will pre-empt everything else, and you'll feel pretty embattled as a general thing. Everything else in life, you're fair game as you just don't have the bandwidth.
If there are no consequences to extensive conning, it becomes completely impossible for a market-based system to cope with it as the gains are way out of proportion to the losses. It becomes impossible to compete honestly for a large share (I think it's possible to deal honestly and get a marginal, niche share on specifically that as a positioning statement, but I also think it locks you out of any significant market share which kills your ability to access capital)
People's attention is not detailed enough to support a full range of honest products in a world of lies. For instance, I support Jim Sterling's patreon. Are there other Jim Sterlings? There might be but I'll never know about it, so Jim ends up holding 90% of that 'market' through having been that person consistently for many years, and building a huge catalog of works as that. Effectively, you can't jump in and do what Jim does because there's already a Jim, and the world is big enough to support one Jim.
Now if the world was NOT FULL OF LIES, you could hear about things and not have to check up on them and you'd not get burned or lied to. In that way a market economy could arise where people sought out goods and services based on what they heard about 'em and what the marketing information told them. The information would be correct and trustworthy, allowing for stratification of a market into categories where stuff balanced out depending on how it was sort of minmaxed. And it'd be clear no product could promise everything, because that'd be dishonest: everything has its downside and that'd be clear too.
We don't have that.
We have gaming journalism, writ large. And that's why this matters.
This is silly. Climate is a huge chaotic system. The FIRST thing you learn about a chaotic system is that if you reduce the energy fed into it, you simplify it and can even calm it down to periodic states. Past a threshold (long passed for climate) you get chaotic flow, which is well understood.
If you increase the energy in the system, it is not mysterious at all what happens. You increase the range and unpredictability of the chaos.
In that light, it is not automatically 'increase the number' of hurricanes, that's merely the most likely outcome. What's really happening is you're increasing the whole range of possible behavior. You're increasing the insanity of the system. Four hurricanes? Try six all on top of each other, then nothing for months, then bam, the largest hurricane in recorded history, completely impossible to cope with. It becomes impossible to make ANY prediction, even to the extent of 'what a hurricane can be'.
This is inherent in the math of chaos and totally inescapable. By its very nature, you will never get 'a nice linear increase in number of hurricanes', instead you get a widening of the possibility space to include stuff that was not possible at all in the 1800s. The amount of energy in the system wouldn't support it, but that's changed.
That ain't what Bernie is about. Which is sort of the point of that exercise
Yeah, this is Notch. Looks like he already struggled with making personal connections with people, and this didn't help. My brother ain't Notch rich but is much the same way: kind of challenging even for another nerd, appreciates getting to be friends/brothers like a human, but does awkward things like punitive tipping that's either 'zilch' or '$50 bill' like some feudal lord.
Must be kind of like being a giant robot wanting to befriend humans. It's either 'nerd SMASH!' or 'here, let me effortlessly do for you what you're stressing horribly about because to me it's literally no big deal'. That's very distancing and you gotta work hard to not be distorted by a reality like that.
Maybe nobody is willing to work hard to be a normal person to Notch. I volunteer! :D
'cos I'm Slashdot User #580. ha HA! I bet Notch isn't a three-digit slashdotter. And clearly that is the only important thing in life, right? So we can be friends, and I'll try not to condescend too much to Notch :)
Uber envisions being able to mysteriously stop Google self-driving cars that aren't on the Uber payroll :)
But that IS the market. That IS capitalism. It's not some external, malign force: that's what the market is.
If you want it to actually be good, you're talking about some form of direction, oversight or regulation to stop obviously stupid or broken things from happening.
That's not a market anymore. The market is the thing that stampedes towards the stupid because everybody's doing it. See 'stock market'.
Maybe you just don't like capitalism as much as you thought you did! :)
Have you tested this conclusion?
If it turns out that advertisers can test this—for instance, on Facebook, let's say—and discovered that it's not true: that there's a measurable advantage to obnoxiousness in that you're outnumbered by the people who shrug off the obnoxiousness yet retain the payload then you're mistaken.
I think they've already tested this, and we're seeing the outcome. Results are in: short of legislating better behavior, being abusive gets you enough local gains that it becomes a required strategy, impossible to compete against without adopting the same strategy.
It would be nice if the 'I boycott youuuu!' reaction made any sort of difference, but clearly it does not.
Given that climate is Chaos in action, it might well be.
The interesting thing is that we can know certain things, such as if the climate warms a few degrees, the energy fed into the system increases. Since it's a chaotic system, what it does is get even more chaotic and start coughing up crazier 'outlier' events, things we've not seen before. You get nutty stuff like snow in June and it's just because the total behavior of the system got more chaotic and more unpredictable.
Predictably unpredictable, if you follow me. :)
So we can predict with high confidence a sharply increasing quotient of WTFness in the already chaotic weather. To get it to behave more predictably, we'd have to cool the whole system down a couple degrees.
Maybe it's the indie small business dev in me but I saw this and had one question:
How much do you have to pay Amazon to be the one product in a given market segment that they do a Dash Button for?
That's where the real money is, and precisely what Wal-Mart has been up to for all these years.
If Huggies wants to kick Pampers off the Dash button so that everybody out there will randomly change products without thinking too much about it, they simply have to outbid Pampers. And whether the product has glass shards (actually crystallized sodium methylparaben, a preservative) has nothing to do with it.
That's what the Dash Button is. Other companies bid to be the one represented on it, very likely losing money in order to have a little 'brand awareness' token stuck in people's actual houses, and Amazon gets paid from both ends.
Not MY Dash Button ;) http://ep.yimg.com/ay/stylinon...
'It's okay, it's already being done by Google' is NOT reassuring! D:
Call me crazy, but when I see apologists for eager would-be robber baron types speak of 'the rabble', I have to wonder whether perhaps they're revealing truths about the whole operation.
Rabble, eh?
rabble rabble rabble...
Because your ability to deal with a predictable outside world has value and affects your own ability to be consistent and reliable in turn.
The only time you want to play the market lottery with literally everything in life is if you figure your resources are (and always will be) superior to any possible thing that will happen to you. For most people, that's not the case.
Elastic is an understatement. In any given city, Uber can literally go away at the push of a button should the company get control of local transportation and want to teach the town a lesson. They can dump into a market or vanish away into the night as quickly as the flip of a bit.
And will, whenever such a point 'needs to be made'. These are not nice people, nor are their defenders.
And bridges serve as a daily reminder of what gravity DOES, but we're not clamoring to have them all removed, are we?
Bit less ideology and a bit more practicality, please? We stabilize that stuff for a reason.
Potholes are a daily reminder of what road wear DOES, and that's surely legitimate too, but it is a worthwhile convenience to have those repaired lest cheap and expensive cars alike lose an axle. And no one car's presented with the bill. That would be silly...
One problem with this whole perspective is, you're placing a huge discretion burden on the actual taxi passengers, for the benefit of the company alone.
People make their plans for doing a thing based on their estimation of what it's gonna cost, how dangerous it is, how practical it seems. The stability of this estimation has huge social value, and these 'old fashioned' institutions being 'disrupted' have typically been through all this years or even centuries ago (for instance, stuff that dates back to before the USA was a thing) and arrived at social expectations everyone's pretty used to.
I recently saw some friends on a sound engineer forum talking about traveling on business. They were going to San Francisco, I think? We sometimes have committments that MUST be honored, agree to do things where it's not an option to randomly fail to show up. Another guy mentioned AirBNB, another 'disruptive' thing. But it didn't get treated like a real suggestion by this group of professionals, because they knew how tough it could be to book a hotel room in the area, and they mentioned that AirBNB would let the room-renter cancel on something like TWO DAYS notice. Ever try to get a backup room for a major show, or convention, on two days notice? Hell, I've worked conventions where all three con hotels sell out the FIRST MORNING rooms are available.
You are suggesting removing the existing 'old' infrastructure where you can plan for things, to replace it with a host of 'disruptive' systems where everything is just-in-time and tied to demand, for the benefit of companies like Uber. And I typically see an associated willingness to have all the old stuff literally destroyed so that all there is, is the JIT surge priced stuff.
I don't mean to assume unseriousness, but have you NEVER had to book a room or a trip months ahead of time knowing the gig you're doing is going to be a madhouse swamped with people? D:
Resistance to high-fat? That's weird. High fat is basically keto, I would ask if there's resistance to high fat-and-carbs-and-salt-and-sugar, which is basically the American formula processed food uses.
I've found fat makes little difference and it's sugar that flips the switch between 'it's energy food' and 'get fat on it'. I also liked Robert Lustig's talks on the subject, which are mindblowingly technical and hard to follow if you're not a chemist or biologist.
Resistance to high fat is easy, just don't take in any sugars or carbs ;)
I wonder how many people who say that have ever tried to meditate.
Or do ANYTHING that involved sitting around all day with nowhere to go and nothing to do.
Just about anybody will get bored and do something, and it might be more valuable than what their 'day job' would have been.
For instance, someone could give up hedge fund managing, and take up chronic masturbating, for a net benefit to society :)
First time I've agreed with a Randian in ages.
Yes: if it's on you to make your own judgement calls, inspect your own meat, all the things associated with a maximally 'free' environment, you need enough free time, leisure and disposable income to spend time studying these situations and making rational decisions.
I figure you can't BE a 'rational free agent' without quite a lot of liberty to consider situations, products etc. and the ability to casually say 'no' or 'not yet, I'm still thinking about it'.
Reducing the pressure for basic survival drastically helps people be rational free agents, or good Libertarians, or indeed people who'd support more of a Libertarian system.
It's like the famous Bob The Angry Flower cartoon. Who's going to till the soil? Somebody who knows hungry people with disposable capital. When you already like gardening and you can make out like a bandit tilling that soil, then tilling the soil heads towards its true market value, without being distorted by coercion.
You want to put all the poor people to work as telemarketers? D:
ALL of my nope...
Water's a challenge. With 3D printing, does a house remain expensive?
How expensive should High Speed Internet be, really? Could there be competitive benefits to a country deciding that should just be maxed out to all citizens unconditionally so they can get/produce all the information they could imagine?
What about ten, twenty years from now? We're barely twenty years out from dialup modems
I just wish I still had that guy's flexibility of spine >_