Source: Locus Online Perspectives » Cory Doctorow: Wealth Inequality Is Even Worse in Reputation Economies
unless you believe that evolution produced exactly one brilliant tech entrepreneur in the ranks of Syrian refugees and one brilliant scientist with ALS, then you have to believe that the others just didn’t get quite so lucky
The article is somewhat interesting, but is mistitled; the article does not put forth an argument for what wealth inequality is worse in reputation economies.
Source: The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit | Quillette
the trick is to unleash so many fallacies, misrepresentations of evidence, and other misleading or erroneous statements — at such a pace, and with such little regard for the norms of careful scholarship and/or charitable academic discourse — that your opponents, who do, perhaps, feel bound by such norms, and who have better things to do with their time than to write rebuttals to each of your papers, face a dilemma. Either they can ignore you, or they can put their own research priorities on hold to try to combat the worst of your offenses.
It’s a lose-lose situation. Ignore you, and you win by default. Engage you, and you win like the pig in the proverb who enjoys hanging out in the mud.
As the programmer Alberto Brandolini is reputed to have said: “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”
Science isn’t the only place this asymmetry exists: see marketing, advertising, politics.
California’s population growth enables it to build top-of-the-line infrastructure—something that isn’t possible for Rust Belt cities.
Source: A Tale of Two Water Systems – The Atlantic
the infrastructure that gets that water to homes is expensive, and the cities are increasingly unable to afford it as more people move out and the tax base dwindles and there are fewer customers to bill
Population decline, like financial deflation, poses serious problems to systems not designed to anticipate and manage it.
RE:
– Why Apple’s fight with the FBI could have reverberations in China – LA Times
– Why Apple Is Right to Challenge an Order to Help the F.B.I. – The New York Times
“This completely undermines privacy overseas and if the administration thinks this precedent wouldn’t be used by China, Russia and others then they are in serious error,”
“This particular request to [decrypt an iPhone] is remarkably reasonable, but the precedent it sets is disastrously bad,”
– Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley
This legal case has *nothing* to do with actually accessing the information on the device. John McAfee (the founder of antivirus maker and global purveyor of computer security McAfee) offered to decrypt the phone for free. It has everything to do with punishing Apple for standing up for privacy and encryption.
More: “Secret Memo Details U.S.’s Broader Strategy to Crack Phones”, by Michael Riley and Jordan Robertson / Bloomberg News
– https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-19/secret-memo-details-u-s-s-broader-strategy-to-crack-phones
– http://www.telegram.com/article/20160219/NEWS/160219140
RE: Pennsylvania Fracking Water Contamination Much Higher Than Reported – EcoWatch
From Comments:
“Is it any wonder some say “stop it all, right now?” because there is no basis for trust that these actions are not causing long term harm that the public has to pay to deal with, and that the economic benefit is limited to those who own the production companies?”
I strongly believe that considering “how bad is it?” (alongside “how good is it?”) is the perspective necessary to objectively assess a cost-benefit analysis. Human activity is fundamentally going to involve tradeoffs and errors, and it is imperative that good progress not be damned for not being perfect. It is equally imperative that any “progress” be keenly considered, and reconsidered continually as new information is gathered, in order to damn that which rightly should be (e.g. leaded gasoline). Considering “how bad is it?” not only sets up the “cost” side of any cost-benefit analysis, but on its own it also gives some insight into how much better we might reasonably be able to do without avoiding the activity entirely (e.g. thinking about spills of North Dakota fracking output — small but readily improvable). And it is exactly this perspective that I still consider best when looking at all other environmental-industrial issues (e.g. the California gas storage facility losing/venting/leaking practically *everything*).
I really like this article in particular since it highlights two additional, important points:
1) data acquisition is itself an imperfect human endeavor that can and must be improved over time
2) without sufficient, accurate data, no meaningful cost-benefit analysis can be made, nor can a valid conclusion be drawn (GIGO – garbage in, garbage out)!
But just because something is an imperfect human endeavor does not excuse gross ignorance of history and an utter lack of forethought, foresight, and imagination…
as [a place with government] rapidly began [something happening], the [a department of government] was overwhelmed and unprepared to [respond]
– This isn’t a fundamentally new problem, even if the specifics of a particular case might be. After thousands of years of human history and decades of modern government/bureaucracy, this should be a solved problem.
Pennsylvania’s DEP did not assume a presumption of liability for the gas drilling industry … didn’t have pre-drilling water tests to compare post-drilling results
– Seriously? <sarcasm>Too bad nothing like this has ever happened before and no one could have foreseen this as something to even watch for…</sarcasm>
At this point, there is no way to find out what happened with thousands of fracking water complaints except to go door-to-door and ask what happened with a complainant’s drinking water.
– … So go do that? We have census workers who basically do that (go door-to-door with a list of addresses to gather information).