I'm lean moderately libertarian, but understand what a natural monopoly is. It's not libbys per se, more a Tea Party thing.

Some people are so seduced by the simplicity, the elegance, of an ideology, that they never pause to consider whether it is actually *correct*. They don't want to let annoying things like facts mar the beauty of their True Beliefs.

Having tried to teach them a few things, I have learned the hard way that they are paranoid, ignorant, and completely reject any information that doesn't conform to their beliefs.

"97% of scientists believe man-made global warming is right."

"See, it's not unanimous!!!!"

"If 97% of doctors told you the mole on your cheek was malignant, wouldn't you get it removed?"

"You're a liberal elitist."

They can't be bargained with. They can't be reasoned with. They doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. As far as I can tell, they are mentally-challenged Terminators.

I'm sure they'll get around to adding Emacs and NetHack functionality to it sooner or later...

This got me to thinking: if we can invent a "good enough" electronic voting system, and in an age where communication is cheap and easy, why not go farther and consider a democratic system where every citizen is allowed to vote on any issue directly, if they choose, or a person could elect their own personal representative. So there would still be room for professional politicians. But some people would prefer to read blogs containing oppinions on issues, or decide on a per-issue basis to cast their vote independently from their chosen representative. Representatives would probably have a maximum limit of representees to avoid over-concentration of personal power. Political parties would either have no legal support or might even be legislated against. I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud so to speak.

For me, the two biggest problems with US politics are (1) lobbying and campaign finances and (2) the effectiveness of propaganda. The power of lobbying would be weaker if citizens retained their right to vote directly and independently on any issue they choose to. That would also encourage legislators to blog about what they are supporting and why. This might help them gain representees as well as swinging independent votes. The effectiveness of propaganda is a much tougher issue to deal with, but I believe that disrupting a two-party system would help, as would the teaching of propaganda analysis as part of the standard curriculum at the high school level. Hopefully others have better ideas.

And before you say "That'll never happen!" let me agree on that point but then refuse to let that stop me from dreaming. In modern times, what would a more effective democracy look like? The foundation of democracy is that people are intelligent and capable of self-government. Is that even a valid principle? If so, how could we implement it better?

This hits the issue on the nose. Thanks!

I was reading Kohn's article on this just a couple days ago, and thought he made a lot of good points. It might help to know that one perspective of Kohn's is realizing the limitations and over-utilization of testing, and standardized testing in particular. "Grit" may be, in proper moderation, a good thing. But the positive feedback cycle that relentless accountability and academic assessment provides can go haywire here, rewarding students for being persistent to a fault and rewarding teachers and schools for producing such students.

The main difficulty with testing in schools, AFAICT, is that the skills, character traits, and knowledge that are most worth teaching are generally not ones that are easy to assess. Combine this with the fact that all teachable test outcomes become their own measure of success, regardless of their inherent value to a person. This makes it easy for us, as a society, to lose sight of what's really important in education.

I agree this article is mostly foolishness, but underneath this is a substantial issue with Android. It would be much easier for a provider to push a security patch if it were backported from the latest-greatest release to some of the still-active prior releases. Even then there would be a substantial time delay. The manufacturers do some initial porting of newer Android releases to their hardware, and then the providers take that software and customize it further. Most of what the providers add is best described as bloatware (and some spyware like carrierID), but some of this is network-specific support. Lots of testing happens at each stage, especially by the manufacturer.

Porting to a new Android platform actually requires a lot of additional work as often the hardware interfaces (HAL) are modified and expanded. In addition each manufacturer has a highly customized version of Android at various levels, and porting all of this takes significant effort.

Because of all this, there is no quick way for Google to "release" a patch to people's phones (except for the Nexus phones). Google could help to hurry some security patches by backporting them, but manufacturers could also do the same. It is not, technically, Google's job to do anything but support their Nexus line. They also keep most of the platform code open (publicly available anyway), allowing other manufacturers to follow along or do as they please. And because porting does require such effort, Google also needs to continue to find ways to provoke the major manufacturers into keeping up the work.

This model for Android platform software has been successful, but is obviously flawed when it comes to distributing prompt security patches to users' devices. It's easy to gripe about this but difficult to come up with practical solutions.

Their specific complaints about Apple's license agreement make it sound to me like a practical, real-world problem. I don't think the petition will garner any response from Apple directly, but it's useful for educating people who don't bother to read carefully the entire agreement before signing up. There are certainly a lot of things in that agreement that will cause me not to click Agree.

Their first objection alone makes it obvious why the EFF cannot provide the equivalent iphone app: "Ban on Public Statements" is a promise not to publicly discuss the license agreement itself. It's a recursive problem. It they intend to raise issues with any of the license agreement, they cannot agree to it in the first place, which is part of what makes it objectionable, which is why they are compelled to raise issues with it.

The United States has the planet's largest ocean between us and North Korea, the most powerful military the world has ever seen, and enough nuclear firepower to take the entire surface area of North Korea and give it escape velocity. And yet we wimp out on... showinging a 10-year old movie because it might make a tin-plate dictator mad? Seriously?

Oops wish I could self-edit. The paper is short and easy to read. It answers pretty much all these questions.

I think sterile neutrinos are among the least-exotic explanations that hasn't been ruled out yet. Still, I'd love more information here: Why hasn't this been seen before? What theories predict x-rays at these energies? What kinds of confirmation are feasable?

I think what you're pointing out is really important from a broad economic perspective, since it's not always money that motivates us.

But I also think that TFA calling the software economy a "failed" one is technically accurate. One perspective on this that I've been pondering for a long time is the idea of Pareto optimality and the free market hypothesis. The hypothesis is that a free (unregulated) market economy becomes Pareto-optimal. A market segment that becomes sub-optimal is called a "failed" market. I think it's by that definition that the software market fails. Not that it's completely broken, just sub-optimal. Traditionally this defines where a government can step in to impose regulations to, for example, deter monopolies or prohibit cartels.

I am not an economist, and I cannot prove this, but I think that one of the assumptions underlying the free market hypothesis is that any good has a non-zero production cost. In hand-waiving terms, the concept of scarcity underlies economic theory. But a lot of our economy today is in goods that have either zero production costs, or production costs that are dwarfed by development costs. Software is the prime example, but music, movies, news, and more are also examples of this. There are other industries that are in a gray area, like microchip manufacturing, where development costs and capital investments are huge.

Pareto efficiency, as I understand it, can be thought of as a test of whether or not at any snapshot of time a redistribution of goods could theoretically be made in such a way as to make folks, on average, happier. Again I'm hand-waiving, and IANAE, etc. But if software is produced and distributed at nearly zero cost, then by giving more people who want the software, but not badly enough to pay for it, a free copy, or a free site license, we make some people happier without taking away from anyone else. Remember this is a momentary redistribution-thought-experiment, not a sales model. So any kind of commercial software, it seems to me, fails the test for Pareto optimality, and therefore the software market has "failed."

I'm not saying that commercial software is bad or evil or even unhelpful, just that a traditional free market economy does not, can not, regulate the software industry in an efficient way. We can do better. I don't know how, but I'm pretty sure there's significant room for improvement. In a sense, the success of free software (forgive the sloppy term) is a proof of this. I also tend to think of software that's paid for by advertisement revenue (free apps, web sites, all of Google) as another case study of a failed market. But that's a tangent.

I really like the idea of Snowdrift.coop. I like that they take a game theory approach to this problem and have what seems like a reasonable solution. I don't, however, think it solves the problem entirely by recovering an efficient software market. Their primary case study, OpenSSL, is not the kind of software that is by itself innovative or disruptive. It needs to work and work well, but it is a solution to a common and well-known problem. One of the key features of a free market is that it allows and even encourages failure. I don't (yet) see how the Snowdrift.coop concept will similarly encourage experimentation and failure.

To touch back on your point that we are not entirely motivated by money -- Yes of course that's true and it's important to not feel governed by the economy. If our basic needs are met then often we can focus on higher goals and motivations. But I'd still like to see a world where software and other industries like news media can thrive on equal footing with the more traditional industries. As these newer industries continue to grow, I think we need for them to be efficiently regulated.

If I were clever enough, I would like to be able to propose some modification to a market economy that can generalize to industries with zero production costs. I've thought a lot about this in spare moments here and there, but I haven't gotten anywhere. Has anyone else?

Well said.

This and the original question Gladwell was answering reminded me again of a basic question I've had since youth: why a political dichotomy anyway? Why not three types of people, or just individual issues that we have independent opinions on? Haidt explains some of this from the perspective of personality traits, but I wonder if another part of the answer lies in the most common voting system in the US: plurality voting. That system has the feature of a 3rd-party-spoiler effect, where a 3rd political party worsens the election chance of their most closely-related parties. Okay this is a bit of a stretch, but my reasoning is that this causes a two-party system to be a kind of stable equilibrium. This shapes the political landscape and makes things like mud-slinging propaganda to be unusually effective. With a simple conservative-liberal dichotomy, politicians (and advertisers to a lesser degree) can speak in terms of belonging to one group or another, about us-versus-them, and who-you-are rather than what-you-think.

Granted, Haidt does have some good points. But when Gladwell pointed out that Canadians aren't so obsessed with the liberal-conservative dichotomy I started to wonder. ... Okay, I see that Canada also has a plurality voting system, so I'm likely full of ... it. Eh, I'll post this anyway. :)

About design patterns: In my own experience, I learned about design patterns only after many years of programming experience. I had already encountered and/or invented all the patterns I later read about. But reading about them was good because it allowed for a common language to communicate with other programmers as well as a kind of self-reflection and ability to think about design patterns more conscientiously and methodically. I'm glad to have learned about these when I did, and not sooner.

It's just fine, IMO, to teach programming as a self-discovery, unguided hacking, kind of thing. This is a "constructivist education" approach, and works extremely well in many cases.

The same comments apply to a lesser degree about teaching multiple languages and general programming language concepts. I would not teach a second programming language before a young student had the chance to explore and get comfortable with their first. That may or may not take long.

"We're going to stop doing that thing that we've been promising for years that we were gonna get around to doing one of these days, but never actually got around to doing, because OBAMA"

It's sad, but adding "Obama" to any argument has become the modern day equivalent of the "Chewbacca Defense", and has been used to rationalize some profoundly stupid decisions. Even sadder, because it seems to work.

I'm a moderate (r)epublican, and it's *lonely* nowdays. The intelligent ones liked David Frum have been muffled or sidelined. Meanwhile, the Wingnut Brigade as personified by Ted Cruz is always on the lookout to shoot the public in the foot for the sake of rich people.

Many in the physics community were hoping for a "weird" Higgs boson, which might point the way towards new physics such as supersymmetry or technicolor.

Alas, the Higgs boson we actually discovered doesn't seem to require any new physics. It's covered by the Standard Model. It is, by physics standards, annoying dull. This has done a good job of killing off several people's pet theories (some models of supersymmetry and technicolor).

Rather than just admit that "when you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not zebras" (ie, the simplest explanation is usually the right one), they are busy adding epicycles to their pet theories to try to accommodate reality (which, admittedly, is how science works).

Being sensationalist and dumb, journalists hear things like "it *may be* that...", and trump up all sorts of stupid headlines like "ZOMG, scientists didn't discover Higgs after all." And we get Slashdot posts like this.

I need to disagree with your referring to the Bible as a "history book." Even though it contains a lot of historical narratives (combined with folklore), the purpose of the authors never (?) seems to be to document some piece of history but rather to highlight some moral idea, to explore our relationship to God, to help a nation have hope and stay together in times of exile, to stir up questions and provoke thought, etc. The stories told are never recent events at the time of writing, but reflect strongly and relate to the political landscape of the times they were written in. Also the style of writing is generally distinct from the style of other ancient-contemporary documents that were written to preserve history.

What I feel is a more helpful approach to the Bible is to read it like it were poetry. What analogies are being used? What is this really about? How does this change my ideas or motives? I know this conflicts with a "literal" interpretation, so I know many will violently disagree with this idea, but I can't fathom why. The Bible contains a wide range of conflicting theological opinions. We don't read cookbooks like they are philosophical treatises, and we don't read science fiction like a newspaper. Why do so many people ... Okay I'll stop. No, I won't. Consider for example the book Job, a non-historical narrative, that challenges the theology of divine retributive justice, and how that relates to the new-vs-old thought in the New Testament. Then think about the two creation myths in Genesis not as right-or-wrong histories but as stories that provide windows into human nature and the human condition.

I like the rest of your ideas. It's important to keep an open mind. Just make sure you're equally open to conflicting ideas and avoid falling into the trap that because something's possible, or because you believe it for some reason, it's true. Every good theorist hopes for the day their theory gets taken seriously enough to be experimentally proven false. Maybe in religion we should all hope for a time when we understand things well enough to realize our former beliefs were all poppycock. It's hard to find a higher (philosophical) aspiration than that.