It is the height of arrogance to think that you deserve all of the credit for your success in life. Certainly, it is usually true to some degree that a successful person has worked hard, but it is extremely likely that they also benefited from advantages that other people didn’t have and caught a few lucky breaks. For instance, even just by virtue of being born in the right place, most Americans are among the richest 5% of earthlings. Moreover, successful people invariably rely upon technology and circumstances created by the past and present work of countless other people. Society is a collective project, and it is incredibly arrogant to try to benefit from its fruits without giving your fair share back.

No man is an island. We live together. Everyone, even the super-rich, depends on the participation of everyone else in the economy in order for them to get money to buy things with. The people below you on the social ladder are essentially forced to participate in the system in order to live.  You are too, just to a slightly lesser extent. If you treat the people below you with less than complete empathy because to do so would require you to accept being a little less well off, then you are in a dangerous place should the social structures that shackle the people below you ever disappear. And a society with a large proportion of members who consider the people below them in this light, well, that is a society ripe for revolution.

Suck on that, Randroids.

This amazing cosmic conception of knowledge starts at 6:15.

Billions of years ago, and billions of light years away, the material at the center of a galaxy collapsed towards a super-massive black hole. And then intense magnetic fields directed some of the energy of that gravitational collapse. And some of the matter, back out in the form of tremendous jets which illuminated lobes with the brilliance of – I think it’s a trillion suns.

Now, the physics of the human brain could hardly be more unlike the physics of such a jet. We couldn’t survive for an instant in it. Language breaks down when trying to describe what it would be like in one of those jets. It would be a bit like experiencing a supernova explosion, but at point-blank range and for millions of years at a time. (Laughter) And yet, that jet happened in precisely such a way that billions of years later, on the other side of the universe, some bit of chemical scum could accurately describe, and model, and predict, and explain, above all – there’s your reference – what was happening there, in reality. The one physical system, the brain, contains an accurate working model of the other – the quasar. Not just a superficial image of it, though it contains that as well, but an explanatory model, embodying the same mathematical relationships and the same causal structure.

Now that is knowledge. And if that weren’t amazing enough, the faithfulness with which the one structure resembles the other is increasing with time. That is the growth of knowledge. So, the laws of physics have this special property. That physical objects, as unlike each other as they could possibly be, can nevertheless embody the same mathematical and causal structure and to do it more and more so over time.

So we are a chemical scum that is different. This chemical scum has universality. Its structure contains, with ever-increasing precision, the structure of everything. This place, and not other places in the universe, is a hub which contains within itself the structural and causal essence of the whole of the rest of physical reality. And so, far from being insignificant, the fact that the laws of physics allow this, or even mandate that this can happen, is one of the most important things about the physical world.

I’m not being hyperbolic. Just read http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/09/28/330109/science-of-global-warming-impacts/ (and maybe also the links at http://pinboard.in/u:metamw/t:global_warming), think about the cracks in the system already starting to emerge due to food insecurity, and tell me how the next 100 or even 50 years can happen without the collapse of civilization and billions of deaths.  (Then, consider what James Hansen, the NASA climatologist who has been sounding the alarm on global warming longer and more accurately than just about anyone else, has said: if we burn all the unconventional sources of oil left in the earth, we run a serious risk of setting off runaway warming that will boil off the oceans and leave Earth uninhabitable for life.)

Ultimately, until it actually happens, you can doubt whether it will; out of sight, out of mind, no need to confront ultimate despair, your cosmic impotence in the face of humanity’s mass suicide.  I am not going to respond to any arguments for denial, delay, or trust in geo-engineering that may arise in the comments as a rationalization of inaction.  I have read enough to decide that expecting this century to be anything but an unmitigated disaster is life-threateningly risky.  I have given up on humanity’s ability to wake up and organize itself in time to prevent catastrophic warming in favor of merely highly disruptive warming, and I, for one, am going to do everything I can to ensure that I live at least a natural lifespan.  If you’re not already preparing to obtain arable land at a high latitude away from population centers, you’re behind the game.  If you wait ten or twenty years, it may very well be too late.

If you are unwilling to continue further into this century awaiting the approaching collapse of normality while pretending that inhabiting whatever niche you inhabit of the system that got us into this mess is an acceptable course of action, then let me know, and we can all buy some land together and set up a sustainable, self-sufficient community.  A community, where, in the last days of the race to utopia or oblivion, maybe we can be a safe haven for work on things that have the potential to save us from ourselves, like technology that enables better forms of social organization, or superhuman AI.

Going forward, I think people who are conscious of the overriding importance of sustainable living as we face catastrophic global warming need to start using it as a litmus test.  If you are too proud of your learned ignorance or too content in your learned helplessness to admit the facts and take action, I can only regard you as a mortal enemy; you are hurting our shared future, and if I could, I would rather live on a different planet than you.  If geo-engineering saves the day in the end, you can laugh at my naiveté all you want, but if it doesn’t, and I was prepared, don’t expect me to help you.

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Today, vast numbers of people obtain music, movies, software, and other forms of copyrighted content in ways that don’t result in any income for the content creator, namely through online piracy or bootleg physical copies. We can expect that such piracy will continue to become more common as it becomes easier and more accepted. This trend poses a serious threat to society’s cultural health. If almost everyone pirates, eventually the price will become so high that the people who do pay will stop. If no one pays, then there is no incentive to create. It’s true that creativity is often its own reward, but certainly a large portion of the current output of content wouldn’t exist if not for the profit motive, things like major motion pictures.

For a useful discussion of this issue, it is necessary to realize that the term “intellectual property” is a misnomer. For the vast majority of human history, people would have laughed at you if you shared an idea, story, or song and then asserted the right to control its future dissemination and use. It was understood that if you wanted to keep something for yourself, you should keep it to yourself. Property is the possession of scarce physical objects that can only be obtained by stealing them from their owner. It doesn’t make sense to apply the property metaphor to digital content, which can be copied infinitely without the original owner becoming any poorer. For more about why intellectual property is bad terminology designed to confuse you, see this essay by Richard Stallman, one of the founders of the free software movement.

Intellectual property rights are thus not natural rights, but rights granted by the state in order to incentivize creativity and innovation. If people can have a temporary monopoly on an idea, so the theory goes, then they will be more likely to create things that benefit everyone, but would otherwise not be worth creating because of the risk of someone else copying their idea or creation and taking away potential profit. There is actually no empirical evidence that state protection of intellectual property rights has historically or presently resulted in a higher level of creativity and innovation than what would have existed in their absence, and some reason to suspect that the opposite is in fact true.

With the invention of the printing press, and then the phonograph, and then motion picture film, people were able to make money from content, but what they were really doing was charging for the physical medium. With this state of affairs, intellectual property worked okay for a long time, until new facts got in the way. The advent of the Internet, which makes the cost of reproducing content almost zero, upended that business model, and the content industries are still struggling to adjust. The Internet also reduces the barrier to entry for content creators and makes it easier for creators and consumers to find each other, both of which obsolete the traditional industries whose value propositions mainly consist of (a) helping finance new works, because they are expensive and time-consuming (economically risky) to create and (b) helping expose those works to a large market.

There are several possible solutions:

• Institute pervasive Internet monitoring and punishment for pirates.  This won’t do, because police states are bad, and it’s also politically unlikely and technically infeasible due to widespread strong encryption.
• The status quo.  It actually seems to work alright.  A lot of people will pay, a lot of people will pirate, live experiences like concerts and movie theaters will continue to offer added value, and the RIAA and MPAA will continue to attempt to implement the business model of suing torrenters and offering modest settlements as an alternative.
• The content industries could adjust prices to reflect the market.  Most people would like to support their favorite artists if they could afford it.  Setting prices high enough to turn a profit but low enough to make piracy unattractive could actually increase sales. former record label executive suggested that £1 albums would be optimal.
• The government (or some corporation) could set up a distribution channel for all content.  Let everyone download as much content as they want.  Artists are paid based on the popularity of their work.  This could be funded by any of several taxation schemes based on whether cultural products should be available free to all or paid for in proportion to their use.

Since I believe in freely sharing ideas for the benefit of everyone, may the best execution win, I’m going to share a couple decent non-revolutionary low-risk/low-reward ones that have been nagging me for a while now. Yell at me if I haven’t done at least one within a couple months.

1. Soulver meets Etherpad
   
   Soulver is an excellent iPad/iPhone app that I would call a “literate spreadsheet”. For probably 90% of what people use spreadsheets for, it’s much better than a traditional spreadsheet application. I really wish there was a free software equivalent, so I started to think about how to build it on Linux and then realized, why not just make it on the web? You could create a parser and calculator for the necessary types of expressions using something like Jison. 

   Etherpad (demo) is an amazing realtime collaborative rich-text editor. Why not put your web version of Soulver on top of EtherPad? It should be doable, but I sadly don’t have the ninja JS skills required.

2. Automate the production of parallel bilingual books
   
   I’m not sure how much of a market there is for this, but it seems like between academics and bibliophile foreign language learners, it should exist.Create a program that takes two translations of the same book in Markdown or LaTeX and joins them together into a facing-page parallel edition using this LaTeX package. You have a substantial number of public domain books to choose from, anything published in the US before 1923, if my understanding of U.S. copyright law is correct. The difficulty may be in finding translations also under public domain, but it shouldn’t be insurmountable. 

   Hopefully, preparation time would get down to a couple hours per book. You could make the software and source files free, sell PDFs for a couple dollars, and sell print-on-demand paper books through Lulu. You could list on Amazon through Lulu and place AdWords ads to attract people interested in specific books.

Why don’t we have a general exchange for every kind of good that can be bought and sold?  Why should I have to search Google, Amazon, some price comparison site or Craigslist when I want something, often coming up empty-handed, when I could just place a buy order for it on a global exchange, and have the exchange find the optimal seller, if one exists, based on price, proximity, reputation, etc., transfer them my money, and tell them to mail me my item?

One might object that everyday goods aren’t like financial instruments. There’s an infinite number of kinds of goods, and the instances of one kind of good are going to differ from each other slightly or significantly in various ways that are of concern to the buyer.  This is all true, but I don’t think it’s a barrier to automated trading.  You’d just need an agreed-upon taxonomy of goods and an ontology for describing them.  Then, buyers can state the type and minimum attributes of what they want and sellers can state the type and attributes of what they have.  The exchange executes a transaction, optionally taking into consideration factors like how good the seller’s reputation is and how long it will take to ship.

Voila, Semantic Market.

The question of whether or not, when you see something, you see only the light, or you see the thing you’re looking at, is one of those don’t-be-philosophical things that an ordinary person has no difficulty with.  Even the most profound philosopher, sitting eating his dinner, has many difficulties.  What he looks at perhaps might be only the light from the steak, but it still implies the existence of the steak, which he’s able to lift by the fork to his mouth.  Philosophers that were unable to make that analysis of that idea have fallen by the wayside to hunger.

For my benefit, I worked on Draft Bloomberg, helping in a very, very small way to influence the political process in the U.S. Bloomberg’s possible candidacy was always tangentially related to the electoral college, because any discussion of what percent of the votes he could win (even believers would admit that it probably couldn’t have been more than 40%) must be accompanied by a rational strategy for winning an electoral college majority. If no candidate wins an electoral college majority, the president is elected by the House, making Bloomberg’s chances of winning small. Some proposed complicated contingency plans involving cabinet seats or policy promises, but ultimately, there was no clear way for Bloomberg to become president.

One of the schemes I came up with was to have Bloomberg call upon the other two candidates to recognize the unfairness of the House contingent election and the fact that a popular vote plurality winner might not become president.  Since electors are chosen by state parties, the candidates could direct their party apparatusses to ensure electors would vote for the national popular vote winner regardless of who won in their state, ensuring that the national popular vote winner would be elected president.  This is essentially a way of implementing the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (which will hopefully be in effect by 2016—which could be to late) with the need for any legislation.

Read the paper I wrote about this for my product (apologies if the writing is less than perfect).