interesting mix of ideas
the two reading pieces I have sitting on my desk are this Origin of Wealth and the latest Wired magazine. interesting to be reading them simultaneously ...
From Wired:
"Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.
But faced with massive data, this approach to science - hypothesize, model, test - is becoming obsolete.
...
There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: 'Correlation is enough.' We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot."
From Origin of Wealth:
"... not only is there a problem with data that contradicts Traditional [Economic] theories, but many theories have simply never been properly tested. One branch of economics, called econometrics, deals with data analysis. Rather than testing theoretical models, however, much econometric work is devoted to finding statistical relationships between variables (often for public policy or other applied purposes). Unfortunately, statistical correlations don't provide a causal explanation of the phenomena. Furthermore, as many economists would point out, there is often a lack of readily available data to test theories with, and even data that is available is frequently noisy or otherwise problematic."
should be an interesting week as these seemingly conflicting ideas bounce around in my head.
Support Tech Opening @ SourceForge
SourceForge is hiring for a Level 2 Support Tech!
That is all.
boycott boycottnovell.com
okay, I'll be the first to say that the Novell-Microsoft deal was bad - way bad. and I am boycotting Novell myself. to summarize my perspective on it, I'll simply present Moglen's analysis on the subject, which I consider to be one of the top 5 extemporaneous monologues of all time:
but I also take issue with the opposite extreme that, because Microsoft has done bad things with the community, they are comprehensively unable to do any good things with the community. I know that boycottnovell.com isn't the only crier of this fallacy, but they're the ones who are recently taking pot-shots at my employer - a company that I think has always valued, and continues to value, the success of the community, or else I would not have taken a job with them.
from the inside, I can tell it plainly that Microsoft is simply a sponsor and participant in our 2008 CCA awards. technically, I also happen to know that we did nothing more than pre-load a big list of Codeplex project names into our CCA 08 database. there's no conspiracy to go thru all of our projects and attach Codeplex EULA's to them, or to use our CCA awards to scare the OSS community, as Roy Schestowitz seems to imagine.
Roy's pieces at boycottnovell.com seem to flow from his presumed indisputable inference that the motivations of not only Microsoft, but also anyone who collaborates with Microsoft, are sinister in nature. and he's repeatedly making these near-libelous statements, which boycottnovell.com is enabling, and this is the reason I'm boycotting them in addition to boycotting Novell.
as I preview this post myself, it is comical to contrast Roy's proof-by-verbosity case with Moglen's eloquent and exemplary case against a specific abuse.
Austrians want to be FREE yo
wow - I must be pretty stirred to actually write a blog post again, but here it goes.
I'd call myself an Austrian-leaning student of economics. I got a minor in ECON, but that's pretty much just enough to know that I really don't know very much at all. I hit up RSS feeds from the likes of The Mises Institute to keep myself in Austrian shape.
I've also been a big fan of The Long Tail, both the book and the blog. and Chris Anderson is on the advisory board of my employer, so I respect and subscribe to pretty much all of his ideas.
so when a friend shared a Mises article discussing Anderson's upcoming book - FREE with me, my interest was most assuredly sparked. but as I read, I was disappointed to find Fernando dismissing, whole-sale, Chris's entire analysis.
I actually agree with Fernando's closing thought - "With time rightly identified as a scarce resource, economic theory is needed to understand the interchange process." and I'd be willing to bet Chris agrees as well, since Chris's article plainly states: "There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention [i.e. - time] in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later."
so really, I don't think Chris's latest thesis is contradictory to the "laws" of economics, as Fernando apparently perceives. my conclusion would rather be that new and innovative business models will live and die by how well they apply of the laws of economics to actually-scarce goods in a new "freeconomic" culture.
I think we just have two different-but-overlapping spheres of study - economics and business. Fernando cites Buchanan's explanation of why marginal costs don't determine prices - with which I agree. having not read the cited book, I poked thru it with Google Books for "marginal cost" and came onto a few interesting blurbs:
Instead he [welfare economists] would introduce, as Knight did, the possibility that hunters, generally, may have some non-pecuniary or noneconomic arguments in their utility functions.
emphasis mine. so Buchanan points out that price-marginal cost scenarios tend to rely on non-pecuniary circumstances. does he further go on to refute that those kinds of circumstances occur? nope, not really - it seems he merely elaborates on what kind of analysis is produced by their inclusion.
In resorting to noneconomic arguments in the utility function ... the economist has shifted the whole analysis from a predictive to a nonpredictive and purely logical theory.
I don't think Chris would have any qualms about admitting his idea is a "purely logical theory" rather than a "predictive economic theory", and that's how I look at it as well.
and from the perspective of an entrepreneur hoping to enter the market, do I really care which it is? isn't it enough to observe that prices are converging to marginal cost, that indeed I am able to buy marginal units of storage and process capacity, and that technological advance and competition are driving each other in a cycle?
all this stuff is pretty new - we're not re-hashing scenarios that have been recorded in dusty economics tomes for decades. sure there have always been such things as cross-subsidies and non-pecuniary psychic revenue driving free economies; Chris's theory should at least be respected because it indicates these underlying economic forces emerging in a noticeable change of our culture.
this theory is like an elephant, and we're all a bunch of blind folks getting a feel for different parts of it. some of us might be observing only this or that piece of it and get the wrong impression of what it really is, but it's certainly something - we shouldn't touch a single piece of it and dismiss it altogether.
Re: An Open Letter to the Ron Paul Faithful
I don't want to simply rant or YELL at you, but I'd like to make a few points in response to your pseudo-accusatory remarks directed at Ron Paul supporters.
First, when you say that, " ... these Internet polls are admittedly unscientific and subject to hacking," you are incorrectly implying that other "legit" polls are not so. As I understand it, a "traditional" poll method leading up to primaries is to call 400 land-line numbers of previous primary voters. This alone introduces selection bias which detracts from the "scientific" accuracy of results.
Then, you go on to conclude that, "Our poll was either hacked or the target of a campaign." Now, whether or not your poll was hacked can only be known by CNBC and your web administrators. But since your core business is to deliver accurate financial information to the public, one would hope the security and reliability of your information isn't compromised. To give you the benefit of the doubt, we'll assume that your website is reliable and, also assuming very little "legit" Ron Paul support exists, that the poll was "the target of a campaign." Is this not, for better or worse, the way our political system works? Isn't the primary vote, the presidential vote, and the votes for every other elected position in our government the "target of a campaign?" So clearly, this isn't a sufficient reason to remove the poll, or else you would also have to remove coverage of every vote ever conducted. Your reasoning doesn't add up, so to remove *this* poll is to censor and edit facts based on some other judgment. If the actions of a well-organized campaign of individuals, acting within the rules *you* establish, makes a poll un-scientific, then how much more-so does your action of censorship?
Though your "show of hands" analogy is an admiral objective, you either intentionally refuse or ignorantly fail to see where it breaks down. It seems the poll was meant to be a "show of hands" of a certain or select few people in a certain or select space you consider to be "scientifically" representative. What actually happened is that masses of people from outside your pre-supposed space poured in to demonstrate not just their support they have for one of the options you were offering, but also to indirectly demonstrate the clumsiness and inappropriateness of your selection of individuals and space. Admittedly, this is more a criticism of all of "old media" than your poll specifically, but your poll is just another example of new forces at work in our country, and in your industry specifically. I.e., "old media" used to be the ' ... well-organized and committed "few" ... ' guiding ' ... a system meant to reflect the sentiments of "the many"' but that is changing. You should be worried.
-L
