On the internet it's often hard to know if people are serious or just joking, but this reply assumes you were serious. First of all, the grandparent wasn't talking about dictating anything. He was making a suggestion in the hopes that others would find it interesting. With enough people agreeing, perhaps one could democratically agree to make it so. Nothing about a single person dictating anything.

Secondly, the grandparent wasn't taking about dictating how anything should be sold. He was discussing alternatives to monopoly on distribution. Right now we enforce an artificial monopoly on the distribution of works. This is done to encourage authors to create new works. The idea is that they will prevent others from making copies (via their monopoly), and make money by selling copies of their work. But that's only one way one could make money on one's creative output, and it might not be the best one. The grandparent pointed out several alternatives. What they have in common is that they can all function without artificial monopolies on distribution.

For example, with a Kickstarter-type method, an author would describe his plan for a new book on the site, and set his price for writing it (say $100,000). If enough people choose to buy in, he would write the book and publish it. At that point, he would already be fully compensated, and would have no need to prevent people from sharing the book. In fact, the more widely the book is shared, the more exposure he will get, and the more people will be willing to finance his next book, letting him set the next price higher. Sure, a new author would have a hard time getting people to finance him - he would probably have to write the first book for free, and use that to show his worth. But that's pretty similar to the current way of doing things, where you need to have written something very substantial by the time you approach a publisher anyway.

Getting paid up-front not only ensures that creative people are encouraged to create - it does so without putting the public in a straightjacket like the current system does. I think it's pretty neat that the internet has made the kickstarter-type approach viable (and it does seem to be viable, in the 4 years since it was started, more than 50,000 projects have been funded like that, many of them at more than $1,000,000). It probably wouldn't have worked at the time when copyright was first created. So I think this is a case of new technology allowing a better solution to a social problem.

Getting paid up-front ensures that the artist gets paid while freeing up our culture so that anyone can use it without restrictions. In fact, with a kickstarter-like model, it will be in the artist's best interests to make everyone share as many copies of his work as possible, as the more people enjoy it, the more will be willing to contribute to his next project. That's exactly the opposite of the copyright model, where it's in the artist's interest to persecute sharing.

I've written more about this on slashdot previously. I host a copy of that here if anybody's interested.

[citation needed]

How about letting the UN do what international policing is needed? That way there is a world consensus behind the policing that gets done, instead of a single country doing what's at best vigilantism. And as a bonus, the USA won't be creating so many enemies of itself all the time.

Yes, I think so. A planet the size of Earth with a moon the size of Titan would be even more of a double-planet than the Earth-Moon system is. And at least in the solar system such large moons are very uncommon for anything but the tiniest bodies.

That's not what the article is saying. It's saying that atmospheres that contain a non-equilibrium mix of chemicals that would under normal conditions react and turn into something else, are thougt to be a strong indication of the presence of life, since some non-trivial process is needed to maintain that non-equilibrium. Basically one would say "Hey, isn't it really weird that this planet has both X and Y in its atmosphere at the same time, even though those should react and form Z on a time-scale of a few hunderd thousand years? Some sort of exotic process must be continually producing X and Y to maintain this situation, or we wouldn't observe it." But as it points out, you could have perfectly balanced atmospheres containing each of those chemicals separately, so if the planet has compound X in its atmosphere, and it has a moon with compund Y in its atmosphere, then due to our limited resolution, we will only observe a compound object which appears to have both X and Y in its atmosphere at the same time, making it seem to be out of equilibrium.

The alignment of the two objects does not requrie a huge coincidence if one is the moon of the other. Then they could always be close enough that they both occupy a single pixel in the image. No equivalent/opposite cancellation stuff is going on here.

Here is a non-paywalled version (any time you see a paywalled astronomy article, you can always find a free version on arxiv.org).

I've only skimmed the article, but I did not see any mention of doppler shifts in it. I would imagine that a planet+moon system would exhibit a time-dependent doppler shift of the moon atmosphere relative to the planet atmosphere, which would make it possible to disentangle the two. However, for an Earth-Moon situation, with a relative velocity of 1 km/s, the doppler shift will only be lambda/(delta lambda) of about 3e5, which is much smaller than the spectral resolution they are assuming (1600), so perhaps it doesn't work.

[dubious][citation needed]

Humans have a known vulnerability to various exploits such as appeals to emotion, injection of associations, conditioning, suggestion, and so on, all of which are essential weapons in the advertisement/propaganda toolkit. Sadly, it's much harder to patch people than software, so these vulnerabilities are likely to stay. I therefore think a large part of the blame should lie with those exploiting these vulnerabilities rather than those who are exploited. And to a large extent, this "brain-hacking" is the domain of the Koch Brothers, Big Oil, etc.. So I think it's fair to say that they *are* a large part of the problem.

Yes, wealth leads to a democratically dispropotionate influence over politics. That's why it matters how skewed the wealth distribution is. The more skewed it is, the larger fraction of power will be in the hands of the few rich. Inequality in the USA is rising, and the problem did not use to be as bad as it is now. In the 70s, the United States had a significantly lower Gini coefficient (though still much higher than most European countries), but it has been rising since then:
http://www.americanprogress.or...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Inequality is also different from country to country. Again, due to the natural tendency for the rich to dominate, one expects that on average democracies with higher economic equality should be healthier. The USA does quite poorly on metrics of income inequality lately:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So I agree that the huge influence of people like the Koch brothers is not that surpising in light of the huge income inequality in today's USA. But it's still scary, and should not be taken for granted. It can be fought, and the most obvious way of fighting it is by reducing the different between rich and poor. Saying that "this has always happened" ignores that the degree to which it has happened has changed and can be changed.

Commenting to undu mistaken moderation.

That was an interesting wall of text. I have also dreamed of a distributed replacement for HTTP in order to remove one of the most common reason for the internet being so advertisement-laden: that hosting costs rise in proportion with traffic. Are you or anybody working on implementing this? How much of a latency and disk space overhead would this have? Freenet has similar features, but has enormous overhead (but much of that is to achieve anonymity). How much would it be hampered by current "you're a client, not a server or peer" asymmetric internet connections?

Botulinium toxin is the most deadly poison known, with an LD-50 of about 1.4 ng/kg (though that's when injected - I'm not sure what it is when drunk. I think it's broken down pretty rapidly outdoors too). With that, you would need about 15 mg to make all 143 million liters deadly (for 68 kg persons drinking 1 liter each). It it also mass produced for use in cosmetics, so it's easier to get than Batrachotoxin. Thouh as I said I think it's broken down pretty quickly under normal conditions (was it by exposure to oxygen?), so it's not anything to worry about in this context. But it's a good illustration of how potent poisons exist.

If you want to find out who out of two groups decides, you can't look at the cases where they agree. Those cases don't tell you anything about who calls the shots. You have to look at the ones where they disagree. If, for example a 30000 people group always wins when they disagree with a 30 milliion group, then either the 30000 group decides, or its interests align perfectly with a third group that does decide. In both cases, the 30 million group does not actually have any power. Just because a group is small doesn't mean it doesn't dominate over larger groups. For example, in a dictatorship, a group of 1 (or a handful) dominate over the whole rest of the population. So yes, it *can* be the other way around. That's why one needs to test these things. But the current article can't test this because they can't distinguish between the 90% quantile and the 99.9% quantile.

If 10% of the population dominates, that's also a problem, though less so.

It doesn't ignore them. They enter into the the calculation, but they don't provide any information about the power structure. Only disagreement tells you about that. And just because one group dominates in terms of power does not mean that the other groups are being stomped into the ground. Just because you don't have the ability to influence decisions doesn't mean those decisions have to be something you disagree with. For example, children probably agree with a large fraction of the decisions made by their parents (such as "let's eat"), and even the ones where they don't agree, the parents' decisions are probably for the best of the child. That's the "benevolent dictator" situation. It's not necessarily bad to live in such a situation. But it's not democracy.

You speak as if the economic mobility in the USA were perfect. it isn't. If your parents belong in the top quintile, then you are likely to end up in the top two quintiles, and very unlikely to end up in the bottom quintile. And similarly the other way around.

I don't understand your reasoning here. The groups were selected solely based on their income. They weren't selected based on their opinions or how closely they correlate with political decisions (that would be circular). The groups don't need to have consistent or stable preferences. What does that have to do with anything?

I seriously doubt that. Especially since blacks are overrepresented in the low income quantiles which have little influence, and underrepresented in the influential high income quantiles.

Why? I don't think that's obvious. You're saying that if I to a multivariate analysis of the preferences of a large group and a small group vs. political decisions, I should expect to find most of the explanatory power with the small group, regardless of which small group that is? That's a pretty outrageous statement, which needs to be substantiated.

No, it's not that surprising. But it's not what they're supposed to do. They are supposed to represent the people who elected them, 90% of which are below that bracket. When there is a conflict between what's good for the 90th percentile and the average of the electorate, the representative should not be unduly swayed by the interests of the bracket he happens to be in himself. Or alternatively such people shouldn't be elected in the first place in a well-functioning democracy. Of course, the representative might not always agree with the typical american about what's good for the people, so one shouldn't expect all his decisions to align with the majority. But a significant subset of issues are important enough that many people across income brackets have informed opinions on it, so you would expect representatives to vote against the interests of the 90th percentile, for the interests of the lower percentiles, a fair amount of the time where there is a conflict of interest between low and high percentiles. That doesn't seem to be happening.

Also, the typical representative has a 99th percentile background, not 90th percentile.

If you have a good dictator, nothing beats a benevolent dictatorship. The problem is that dictators tend to go bad. When those that wield power are out of touch with the general population, they tend to use it to further their own interests at the expense of the people. Democracy is the best safeguard against that that has been found. You may still end up with part of the population being screwed over, but at least it won't be more than 50%. In the case of representational democracy, the small minority that rules (the representatives) is held in check by the people's power to replace them. That way you end up with a rulership that makes decisions that the majority of the population is satisfied with - if a majority were dissatisfied, they could replace the representatives they disagree with. So if this system works, you expect the political decisions to follow the preferences of the majority of the population. If the majority want to protect liberty, legal rights and property, then that will happen. If they don't want those things, they can elect representatives from among themselves that will remove those things. So in the end, majority preferences is what matter in a democracy. If they don't, then democracy has been subverted somehow.

I agree that you can't really call them the "economic elite". The poor wealth resolution is a weakness that should be addressed. Still, one would hope that not only the 10% richest would be able to influence political decisions.

I think you're being too quick here. It *might* be as you say, that the US is run according to the preferences of the upper middle class, with the very rich just agreeing with them. Or it might be the other way around. One can test this by looking at what happens when they disagree. If the 90% quantile and the 99% quantile agree 70% of the time, but the 1% quantile has its way for those 30% when they disagree, then clearly the opinion of the 90% quantile does not matter. Conversely, if the 90% quantile has its way when they disagree, then they are the ones calling the shots. If something intermediate happens, then they share power. This needs to be measured.

I dispute that. That isn't the norm among high earners. Even if it were, the fact that the 90% quantile's preferences correlate more strongly with the richest and the median shows that either they do form a distinct, stable group, or their preferences change while they are in that quantile. In any case, they empirically have different interests than those in lower quantiles, which is all that matters here.

The reason why they use the preferences of the median is because some of the theories they are trying to test in this article predict that political decisions should follow the opinion of the median citizen. That requires assumptions, and those assumptions can be wrong. It would be interesting to see the same calculation done for other percentiles, or for everybody below the 90% quantile as a whole. But there are good reasons for believing the 50% quantile to be more representative of the people as a whole than the 90% quantile (and especially the 99% quantile). The income distribution curve is much flatter at that point - i.e. the 49% quantile and the 51% quantile are much more similar to the 50% quantile than the 89% and 91% quantiles are to the 90% quantile. Here is an illustrative (if a bit slow) illustration of the distribution. So many more people have similar lives to the 50% quantile than the 90% quantile, though the latter still isn't as special as the 99% quantile or higher, of course.

Oh, sure, people can be wrong - they often are. And large groups of people can be less informed than a few experts. I don't dispute that. The paper isn't implicit about that - it discusses this explicitly. They did not think there was any evidence that richer people were wiser on general policy issues. But I don't think that's the point. The point is where the power is. If a majority of the population's wishes are consistently overruled by their representatives, then they aren't actually being represented. The paper has only shown this for the 50% quantile, though, not for a majority, though I would be surprised if the picture is different for the majority.

The article discusses this too. By the way, are you sure about rich people tending to vote in favor of more tax? I thought there was a significant correlation between increasing wealth and opposition to tax increases. Especially so for progressive tax.

So you're claiming that the explanation for the lack of influence of the 50th percentile is that they don't care about politics, while the 90th percentile does? I think that's very unrealistic - certainly not something one would think a priori without evidence backing it up.

They aren't claiming that the 90% quantile is an elite. They are using it as a proxy for the opinions of those much richer because their data set does not include the real economic elite. They justify this by showing that in a much smaller auxiliary data set, the real economic elite's opinions do strongly correlate with those of the 90% quantile. But of course this should be followed up with a better data set.

This isn't just correlation with preferences. What they found was that when the 90% quantile and the 50% quantile disagree, then the 50% quantile always loses. That's domination. Nothing "active, forcible" is needed. Just one group's interests counting much more than those of another group.

The point of representative democracy is that each person doesn't have the time or interest to form an informed opinion about every issue, so we offload that on representatives who we trust to vote as we would have if we did take the time to do things ourselves. But just because we don't care about *every* issue doesn't mean that there aren't many issues where an average person can have an informed opinion. In those cases, you would expect the representative's opinions to represent those of those he represents. The issues included in this article are first and foremost that kind of issue - they are issues that were important enough for opinion surveys to be conduced, making them at least much more interesting than the average question a representative has to consider. Yet despite this, the representatives' political decisions consistently align with the richest 10% instead on these issues. That is a problem because representative democracy relies on the correspondence between voter opinions and representative opinions in order to work.

No, the correct response to this paper is "That's intriguing and somewhat worrying. A more detailed follow-up study is needed".