Wow, this is excellent, congrats on the release. Are you planning on adding the ability for people to feed in suggestions/feedback or is that too prone to abuse? Great seeing more cool NLP technology out there!
Sad thing about this article is that it is amazing, and yet the last thirty years has probably favoured well-credentialed people more so than any point in history. While there's an argument to be made that this is now turning around (and no doubt it should, and should have many years ago), I still think the trend is moving in favour of credentialism rather than away from it.
I don't really know what can be done about it because as Nassim Taleb put it, university degrees are like racketeering - bad for the collective but good for the individual,[0] so unfortunately I think it will continue to get worse for the foreseeable future at least. If you had disregarded everything this article said in 1985 and gone straight to HBS followed by Goldman, you would probably be sitting in your mansion right now and not care in the slightest about the credentialism problem, entrepreneurship or Silicon Valley. Obviously there's a ton of value judgments you can make about that, but the fact it is true is a huge net negative for society, as we need to align prestige and financial incentives around behaviours which are good for the collective.
Ultimately I think any solution to this problem would have to go back to the root of it, which is the increasing strength of vested interests in Western society who push for the creation of rents to perpetuate their wealth and power. Ultimately that reality is what makes rent-seeking professions so attractive, and in turn allows those professions to monopolise and 'rent seek from rent-seeking', i.e. have a monopoly over rent-extraction in the same way the law and investment banking does.
How you would solve that? ... well I don't know. Get some sort of 21st century Theodore Roosevelt, I guess.
The article specifically states that an arbitrary measurement of "professional" fitness is the problem. How would a ranking system be any different than a credential system?
A more effective solution at finding the right candidates is an educational system available to all.
>A more effective solution at finding the right candidates is an educational system available to all.
Yes, will be good. Also important is the free movement of talent to where it is needed.
>arbitrary
Not all ranking is arbitrary. A lot of it is targetted for the skillset a job needs. What I find arbitrary is quotas. I see this in medicine and actuarial science. Where instead of basic competency, they take the top x %.
The problem with all of these graphs is that the rise of cloud players like Coinbase means that a lot (and I'd think probably most) of the Bitcoin transactions taking place these days are off-chain.
Coinbase can settle most trades internally and push out any 'interbank trades' onto the chain. Some of the patterns others have noticed could be them settling internal accounts, not sure though.
Did you read the words too? What did you think about this part?
Regarding the prospect of growth in value exchange occurring via off-blockchain services: I still think we would expect to see off-blockchain value transfer manifest itself on-blockchain, in much the same way that buy and sell pressure at a single off-blockchain service flows throughout the entire ecosystem. If an off-blockchain service did somehow manage to become an “island” and transact increasing amounts of value without any of the growth showing up on-blockchain… it would be bad for bitcoin on a number of levels.
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the rise of cloud players like Coinbase means that a lot (and I'd think probably most) of the Bitcoin transactions taking place these days are off-chain.
It's ironic that you so often see these comments forecasting how in the future most bitcoin activity will occur in these single authority corrals, or 'cloud players' as you call them. It's really no different from saying "Most people using bitcoin in the future, won't actually be using bitcoin."
So it raises the question of, if the future of using bitcoin is not actually using bitcoin, what is the future of bitcoin?
1. Is money really speech? If so then there's a lot of laws that need to be overturned. Not to mention you can't hold 'free speech' up as a sword to swat away anything that affects speech (libel? slander? copyright violations?). The idea of a constitutionally protected right to free speech is to stop the government from silencing debate. But limiting people from handing money to members of congress isn't stopping your ability to voice your opinion at all, it's just limiting your ability to influence your member of congress by donating more money than the next guy. If anything it increases freedom of speech - it allows all people to voice their views in a marketplace of ideas where the amount of money in their bank accounts is irrelevant, and they are assessed on the merits of their arguments alone. The current situation allows every person to speak, but one person to hold a megaphone.
2. The problem you've identified is the fact that there is a government, or that powerful people exist. There will always be powerful people, and hopefully there will always be government, and it will always be in your interests to influence those powerful people so that they can help you out. So in any system where there is a government, there needs to be a robust system of checks and balances to ensure that representatives act in the interests of the public (which is the idea behind representative democracy) rather than the interests of their private funders.
3. Yes, of course it does, but again, that is just a symptom of checks and balances failing. In a system where there is a perfect representative democracy and a strong constitution, the people will never vote for a federal government larger than it needs to be. In the system we have now, the federal government swells in size no matter which party is in government (just depends whether it is the public service, or the military that grows). Private interests fuel this effect and governments wave their hands to make it look like cuts are being made, but they're not.
Lessig has nailed the arguments around why campaign finance reform is necessary - whether he's going to be successful is in question but I think most legal experts can see that the system is broken, with money being the core of the problem.
1. Can Oprah, or any famous person, support/campaign for a candidate? How is her cashing on her celebrity any different than a person funding an advertisement? And the current laws to a large extent support the idea money=speech. Lessig's group couldn't even follow the campaign laws that already exist (http://www.campaignfreedom.org/2014/11/20/fec-complaint-mayd...)
2. The problem I've identified is that the federal government has grown too large and does too many things. This is the problem, powerful people will be powerful and have an influence on society - through fame, money, etc.
3. Reducing the scope of the government could easily be accomplished if the commerce clause was read in a different way. If granting new power to the federal government required constitutional amendments then it would be better -- prohibition required an amendment, why don't modern drug laws? Additionally, returning the selection of senators to the state government instead of a popular vote would also be be an improvement.
I don't think he has nailed the arguments, I think he fundamentally simplifies and distorts the case. Money is a symptom, the problem is the size/scope/breadth of action.
> This is the problem, powerful people will be powerful and have an influence on society - through fame, money, etc.
Absolutely, but that's exactly why the government needs to be large and do lots of things. Take minimum wage for example. Assume that tomorrow the government revoked the power to control wages. What happens next?
Fast food chains and big box stores would push their wages as low as the market will bear. Some employees will quit, but a lot will stay because working 80 hours a week and living in abject poverty is still better than literally starving. There's still a minimum wage, it's just now being set by corporate entities that don't (and shouldn't) have any motivations beyond their own company's self interest.
Or maybe the employees unionize. They get organized and set terms for as high a wage as they can extract from the employers. The employee's quality of life goes up, but the business owners now have no recourse but to pay the demanded wages or close. And the new employment contracts start including clauses about mandatory union membership (including dues). Again, a minimum wage is being set by someone, just not someone who has (or should have) any interest in the larger economic repercussions.
The power exists, and it's going to be wielded by somebody somewhere. The government, at least, is ostensibly motivated by the best interests of the populace at large. That interest is, of course, frustrated as often as its honored in the real world. Still, I don't see how taking power from an institution that only intermittently pursues my best interests and handing it to an institution that never does is in any way an improvement.
> How is her cashing on her celebrity any different than a person funding an advertisement?
1. Popularity is naturally limited - you can only be so popular.
2. Laws made by Congress have negligible influence on Ophra's popularity. Not so with money. Corporations fund laws that make them more money which they can fund laws with.
In general it's the old fallacy of equating people's natural variance in ability - limited, not susceptible to positive feedback loop with the money/power inequality - practically unlimited, strongly reinforced by a positive feedback loop.
I guess you're more trusting, but, personally, when someone is opposed to a rule, I'd take their claims about what the rule actually requires with many grains of salt.
I hear/read your first argument quite a bit. It's a fantastic piece of social engineering, because it both reduces and reinforces a fundamental cognitive dissonance: Bribes are used to coerce; politicians shouldn't be corrupt and accept bribes; politicians accept vast amounts of campaign money. To ease this dissonance, equating campaign/PAC contributions to celebrity endorsement is amazingly well suited: how could Oprah possibly have that much sway over, say, a piece of federal pork for a dioxin spewing chemical company?
The basic difference, of course, is that social capital is very much different than monetary capital. One is used to buy things, and the other is used to boost signals. One can be taken away by the same individuals who gave it in the first place; the other is taken away at a publicly specified rate, but can be given away freely or traded for goods and services.
Oprah can use her celebrity voice to endorse one or ten or one hundred candidates. There are diminishing returns, of course: how much of a signal boost would it be if Oprah endorsed just everyone? The only time she loses her influence is if she spends too much of it in the same category too quickly, or if the signal she chooses to boost is disagreed with by those who lend her credence and give her the social capital in the first place.
As a signal multiplier, its function is fundamentally different than the signal multiplier of money.
When money is spent, if enough money is available, it can be used to endorse one or ten or one hundred candidates with none of the same diminishing returns. It does not lose its effectiveness if it is spent too quickly on too many different things. If this were about a companies publicly endorsing candidates (and by doing so, putting their brand's reputation on the line) it would be one thing. But this is about companies (or individuals) being able to disproportionately influence policy without risking their own reputation by being associated with the crafting of that policy.
2. If you want to curtail the size of the federal government, one thing you might be interested in is campaign finance reform - so your elected politicians aren't as interested in doing favors for <AARP|Dow Chemical|The Teamsters|Focus on the Family|Goldman Sachs> and are more interested in the plight of their actual constituents.
3. It could be, but you're dreaming if that would ever happen with the number of favors owed the private sector by congress.
He's nailed the arguments, but I don't think new law is ever going to fix it.
The only way to fix it is by making money irrelevant to re-election.
(edit: let me put it in a different way than all that stuff about cognitive dissonance and social capital. You ask what the difference is between an Oprah endorsement and a campaign contribution; I'll ask you: what is the difference between a Facebook status update that gets shared 1,000 times and a Facebook status update the author of which pays for it to show up on 1,000 timelines?)
> The problem you've identified is the fact that there is a government, or that powerful people exist.
The problem is the unnecessary concentration of power in the hands of very few politicians. The key to solving this problem lies less in reducing government powers, but in distributing it better. By the principle of subsidiarity, regulation should always happen at the lowest possible level. At first sight, it sounds inefficient to have slightly different laws that govern the same things in every state. But there is a lot of value in diversity, as it allows for direct comparisons and thereby the system as a whole to evolve much more naturally. Also, it allows for fine-tuning of regulation to local situations.
The ancients used to select one of their own (sometimes even their own children) and periodically sacrifice them to the gods.
The moderns instead periodically select one person and have the entire world turn on them through Twitter, having them perish in the flames of hundreds of angry tweets.
Hopefully their sacrifice will atone for all of our sins before the eyes of the gods.
I really don't understand the need for this type of hyperbole. I always hear people accuse reddit of "getting out the pitchforks" and now it's that Hacker News is "having them perish in the flames of hundreds of angry tweets." And of course, by this, you mean that some people called a guy a dick for being a dick. No one is dying, no one is even facing minor injury. They are simply being called a dick for behaving like one. What are you hoping to accomplish with this completely over the top disconnection from reality?
I feel like the UI should be consistent dang, because I've been flagging entire threads where there's an inappropriate comment (not knowing that there was a comment flag there).
I think at the moment it's too easy to hit that flag button on the front page (as others have said, especially on mobile), so maybe it should be moved back too?
The consistency would be to remove the flag button from the front page, but clicking on a story and flagging it in the thread itself is equivalent to clicking on a comment to flag it in its page.
People who put their money into Bitcoin without knowledge of the risks involved would have lost their money on a penny stock scam or a pyramid scheme if it weren't for this. You can't just pan Bitcoin because some of its early adopters were idiots, a lot of the internet's early adopters were seedy criminals and pests too.
Bitcoin's community will evolve in the same way every online community does. It's found some early traction in the form of speculation which has encouraged people to buy and own Bitcoin. Now that a lot of people know what it is and own some, it's easier to test services built with BTC.
I agree with this, but I think it is still an extremely difficult problem to solve. Most of the political problems we have are low hanging fruit from a technical perspective, the thing that renders them almost impossible is the fact that they run contrary to vested interests.
Part of the reason that Uber and Airbnb have succeeded where other content-based startups have failed is the fact that they are dealing with city-based, rather than federal regulations. As copyright is regulated federally, the only way to fix it is by first fixing the broken system of electoral funding that encourages politicians in DC to follow the money that flows out of the RIAA and similar cashed up lobbying bodies.
It's even worse, copyright is regulated by international treaties[1]. Every time someone comes up with an idea to reform copyright, shorten the terms etc. it's immediately shot down by the argument that we are bound by those agreegments and cannot change anything ourselves.
I don't see it as a real problem. Copyright internationalization is mostly pushed by the USA. If USA itself decides to reform copyright, everybody else will jump on the bandwagon.
Of course, it's the money. It would be interesting seeing copyright rents by country.
Marijuana legalization is the very same story. Other countries wouldn't do it, fearing the wrath of USA. But now USA states are opening that mellon.
Unfortunately that's always a risk when you develop for FB or any platform. If it is bad for users (like most of the Zynga notifications were) or something they want to pursue themselves (like birthday gifting), then bad luck. You get the advantage of their distribution at the cost of platform risk.
