hxa7241

Anarchism can never even exist, let alone work, because it defines itself in a fundamentally nonsensical way.

It distinguishes itself on the principle of 'non-coerciveness'. But coercion is written into the fact of physical scarcity: if someone wants that food, then someone else cannot have it. Any organisational notion that does not represent that scarcity as constraint on behaviour is useless. It simply fails to address the problem.

What anarchism then does is to confuse and obscure this, or just wish it away. The motif of 'decentralised organisation' is a contradiction in terms: there cannot be structure without some constraint. If every local grouping is always free to decide the rules, then there are no rules. If everyone is free at every transaction to invent their own money, then there is no money. Plus, everyone making up new rules will not scale. (And no, people will not just naturally, magically, happen to agree.) Organisation is essentially hierarchical in its basic one-to-many informational form: there must be some single pattern followed by multiple elements.

What anarchism could sensibly propose instead is more sophisticated democracy: ie, better forms of feedback from participants to rule generation. We cannot avoid rules/structure, but we could more responsively, iteratively, steer the the construction of them.

Always good to see a zero-CSS website. The true zen-master style of web production ‒ many tacitly aspire to its purity, yet few are able to shake off worldly temptations to attain it.

https://www.hxa.name/

‒ lightweight, handmade, maybe a little bit of unusualness of design, quite a few writings, some software, other oddities, and almost 20 years old.

Software is not all made up out of thin air -- you do not 'choose your own gravity'. The equivalent of phyical laws in software are computational/algorithmical, logical laws.

For example, sorting cannot be done faster than O(n log n) -- that is as hard and objective as anything physical. (In fact, one would think it is even harder in some sense, since it is so purely logical.). Software is built within algorithmic constraints.

This is, well, shallow propagandising guff. It promotes an agenda but diverts criticism with mythologising illusion.

Markets fail in various ways. Should we just let that happen? -- and just have 'faith' in the wonder of 'freedom' etc.? As Stiglitz says, a common reason why 'the invisible hand' is invisible is because it is not actually there.

What is this 'theory' Naur talks of? It is not a nebulous feeling or sensation, it is something complex, articulate -- something 'built'. But how can something with logical structure be at the same time inexpressible? There is a contradiction lurking there.

Imagine you are 'building' one of these 'theories', to make some software. How do you know it is correct? The only way is by testing it against the world, and to do that it must be expressed. And any part that is not expressible cannot, for that reason, be a usable part of the 'theory'. (It is more basic really: a 'thing' in your mind, that cannot be expressed, is not really a 'thing' at all.)

The reason programmers are not simple replaceable resources is not because some kind of 'theory' thing is not expressible, but because making software requires certain significant practicalities of effort, knowledge, and skill.

Naur's article is based on a contradiction:

On one hand, a 'theory' is described as something completely internal and irreducible: "the theory, is not, and cannot be, expressed" (quote from PATB)

But on the other hand, a 'theory' is applied to external objects: "if viewed in relation to the theory of the program these ways [of changing it] may look very different, some of them perhaps conforming to that theory or extending it in a natural way, while others may be wholly inconsistent with that theory" (quote from PATB)

These cannot both be true. A 'theory' cannot be wholly internal if it is applied to things. If something external conforms to it to some degree, then that thing is to that degree an expression of the 'theory'. What else is an expression? And, a 'theory' cannot be irreducible if it applies to things that are reducible. If it matches something -- like software -- that is complex and determinate, it must itself be analysable into determinate properties or patterns or structure.

Since 'theory' is used to make actual software -- something that can fit or diverge from it -- 'theory' must have a substantial, and complex, objective part.

So instead of this confused term 'theory' we should think of something like a material: programming is the engineering-design of structures in a particular abstract 'material'.

That does not change the article's conclusions about programmers not being 'replaceable components of production'. But it gives a better viewpoint of the activity: not merely some obscure inaccessible idea of human thought, but some lead on the part of it that is objective and that we can get hold of and hopefully build some understanding of.

That argument, commonly associated with Hayek, quite trivially does not make sense.

If the information is unknowable, then it cannot play any role economically. If it is unknowable, the market itself cannot act upon it either. The idea lurking here is of inarticulable knowledge or inexpressible information -- and it is a contradiction in terms.

Hayek's big point -- in 'The Use of Knowledge in Society' -- is really this: an economic system is a cooperative system, a cooperative system requires networking/sharing information, and money and markets are a way to convey and share information.

Hayek does not prove that centralisation is impossible, nor does he prove that money and markets are the only means to run an economy. An argument based on information is not going to get you there -- rather the opposite in fact.

Later in that article, Hayek says -- about gathering dispersed knowledge etc. -- (not) "likely" rather than "never", and also says "it is just conceptually possible". That is the sensible view: if the market is performing a computation, then any sufficiently powerful general computer could emulate it and any sufficiently good network could transmit the relevant information around. Indeed, with enough power you could process more information than the money-market system.

And that is actually where we are now. When there is a pocketable networked computer for every human on the planet, that rather blows away the idea that we need money to solve the 'economic calculation' problem. The money-market system is already obsolete, it will just take some time to evolve away from it.

As Landes and Posner say in 'The economic structure of intellectual property law' (Conclusion, p422, s3) (2003):

"Economic analysis has come up short of providing either theoretical or empirical grounds for assessing the overall effect of intellectual property law on economic welfare."

And that is echoed in various other economic comment in later years. So there is an uncomfortable lack of research.

Now, the main purpose of copyright is to get the best trade-off in production level and access to goods. So given both that model and the lack of evidence, to say an increase in availability of goods, with a still strong level of production, is a good thing, seems very reasonable, does it not?

losing 'potential income'

What does that even mean? Really, what? If people buy more coffee machines and make coffee at home, perhaps coffee-shop owners are going to say they are losing 'potential income'. Oh no! we had better ban the use of coffee-making machines!

The law is not there to ensure certain businesses make as much money as they think they should. (Well, sadly it currently is, but it ought not to be.)

If plenty of music is being made, so what? If certain businesses cannot make so much money, tough luck on them -- they should get out of business. That is the market.

The purpose of copyright law is to ensure good amounts of production for the public overall. It is not there to help certain rent-seeking companies make money.

The copyright industry has been 'crying wolf' for ages. No-one should listen.

We do not even know that very large amounts of piracy would be bad -- the market would probably reconfigure and adapt.

We should increase people's ease at getting and using informational goods (by reducing artificial restrictions) and see what happens -- yes, observe the actual evidence.

That question has been answered: we have had plenty of piracy for years now -- and do we still have plenty of film/TV/music/book production? Yes!

So piracy (at least, as we have known it) is not harmful, in fact it seems almost certainly beneficial economically -- more goods are more widely available.

And if you like that (spheres only), you might also like this (general triangles-based), in 444 lines of Scala (and OCaml, Python, Ruby, Lua, Scheme, C++, and C):

http://www.hxa.name/minilight/

This is quite pointless because it essentially cancels out. To get a cooperative structure you have to give away surplus -- that is, people with more have to give it to people with less.

Yes, redistribution! That seems a dirty idea in a substantial part of USA politics. So 'pay it forward' chains are a peculiar thing: they summon the feeling of cooperation, in an acceptable way, without actually being effectively cooperative.

If they made lots of money, good: they offered a service the public wanted. As far as that basic model goes they added value into the economy.

Anyone who wants to claim there is something actually materially bad there needs to provide evidence that some harm was done to the economy -- show that the public lost-out. That would be really quite interesting, because economic research seems to have had difficulty doing that so far.

That's what's so stupid about the entire article. You could just as easily make a case that everything we have today is the result of gentlemen scientists from the renaissance Or that Alexander the Great is the inventor of all of western civilization..

No, the article does not overgeneralise, your comment does.

The proposition is that a substantial proportion of particular quite well-defined 'innovation' was created through state systems as opposed to private commerce.

If, in order to argue against that, you have to generalise so much that one can almost no longer say anything causes anything, because everything causes everything, you end up saying nothing. You have not refuted something, you have just made up a more meaningless way of measuring anything.

Let's not confuse product with implementation.

Someone still needs to choose and arrange data-structures and algorithms to fit available resources. That is engineering. Just because the product is ill-defined and subjectively-judged does not lessen that.

You might want an architect to be sensitive to aesthetic/political/whatever concerns, but you pay the engineers to make sure the thing stays standing up. Does a building stand up because of story-arc and character development? No, it is because of understanding of physics and materials. The same holds essentially for getting computation done within time and space.

What precisely is wrong with people copying things for free? Since these are non-rival, non-finite goods -- that is, as many people can use or reproduce them as want to without obstructing anyone else -- there is no basic physical reason for restriction.

It is illegal, but that is not the same as immoral. For illegality to imply immorality the law would need to be shown to be itself moral. But unfortunately the law has (like the game concerned) been rigged by particular interests for their own purposes. No-one has so far produced good evidence to show the current laws are economically beneficial overall.

So the intellectually honest and moral position is to admit the law is unfounded, gradually abolish it, and try to figure out other better economic arrangements that allow people to do what is the obviously moral thing: freely use and copy non-rival, non-finite goods.

Why? If you want to measure energy, measure energy. The point of currency is something else.

Currency/money is a data-structure for a kind of cooperation algorithm. That is the way to understand it in an informational world. Note that money is not really about being a 'medium of exchange', a 'unit of account', 'store of value' -- those are tautological ways to look at it, they are its particular forms of activity, the real purpose is cooperation (more) generally.

The radical thought is that we do not really want currencies. We want something more information-rich -- something made for our current information tech, rather than originated from cowry shells or whatever. Hardly anyone is thinking in this way though, disappointingly. Yet it is myopia: if you look around non-currency systems are beginning to evolve. What is reputation, or 'karma', are they currency? Not really. What are things like Flattr and Kickstarter, are they markets? Not really.

Start deliberately thinking beyond currency.

What makes using an honesty-box moral? It is not that one side has dictated the terms.

Imagine finding an empty car-park, parking your car, approaching the honesty-box and finding a note declaring the owner does not expect money but instead expects to be paid in teeth: and would the car-park users please pull-out a tooth and deposit it. Would that be moral?

Yes, one could say it is moral to all follow a general rule of reciprocating, of giving something as well as receiving. But what and how much?

The morality of cooperative interaction is not about what one person wants, it is about how all are affected.

Saying what exact actions and amounts would be moral is in general an impossible calculation. But what would clearly not be moral is one party dictating to the other. Once you deliberately offer to engage in cooperative interaction you alone no longer set the rules.

> people have decided that they have an intrinsic right to content

They do -- people do indeed have pretty much exactly that: an intrinsic right -- to copy and share intellectual/informational goods.

Why? How? Because these are non-finite non-rival goods, hence are a commons by necessity. Since there is no scarcity in instances/copies, and one person's use does not interfere with anyone else's there is no reason for restriction. Instituting a restriction creates a conflict where there was none, it reduces an abundance that is simply there in physical fact.

> "the terms of the content producers"

What producers want is irrelevant. The validity of the law has nothing to with producers' wants. What is wrong with the actual law is exactly the consequence of that erroneous view: that the law is there to benefit and enrich content producers, and therefore should be expanded and enforced ever further and more strenuously.

The law restricts the intrinsic right to copy and use public intellectual/informational goods only for a collective pragmatic purpose. The intent is to serve the public overall by ensuring plenty of content is made.

Piracy seems most likely good. Every extra copy that is used adds value into the economy; the only possible downside is that production might be reduced below what is desired. But is that what we see? Music, books, TV, movies -- is there a terrible shortage of these? Nope: there seems to be not only plenty but even more produced now than ever before. Piracy is de facto acting to correct the dysfunctionality of the current law.

Your 'publication of ideas' argument applies only to things that can be hidden.

But the patent system applies to a super-set: things that are plain, too.

Therefore, by your own argument, the patent system is operating beyond its justification, and so could indeed be described as 'broken'.

In any case, the patent system is a trade-off -- of increasing production against restricting access (see: the standard economic model of it). If it is badly calibrated, the net effect is negative. And the current state of economic knowledge is that no-one knows whether it is set correctly (see: 'The economic structure of intellectual property law'; Landes, Posner; 2003. Conclusion, p422, s3.). When there is a whole big system, of various obvious costs, and you do not even know the net effect is positive, the sensible thing is to stop doing it (probably by phasing out), until something proves otherwise.

The program get shorter because the author learned more and improved it each time, not mainly because of the languages.

Mainstream programming languages do not seem to vary much in lines of code of programs: the range is maybe about 2 or 3. Here is evidence: http://www.hxa.name/minilight/#comparison

This stands to reason. Look at everyday languages: they all have the same features -- they are perhaps surprisingly similar in basic structure. Control-flow, operations, data-primitives, data-compounds -- all are very similar. One of the more outlying is C: lacking common higher-level amenities like exceptions, nice data-structures, and particularly storage management, can expand code significantly.

While that is certainly a nice and well regarded model, it does not say much about what actually happens. It really only amounts to a proposition, and cannot be read as indicating a necessity. As Landes and Posner themselves later say:

"Economic analysis has come up short of providing either theoretical or empirical grounds for assessing the overall effect of intellectual property law on economic welfare."

-- 'The economic structure of intellectual property law'; Landes, Posner; 2003. Conclusion, p422, s3.

That is, to spell it out, we do not know if intellectual monopoly law is doing any good at all. This is easy to see for oneself: there must be, and obviously are, costs -- legal, enforcement, search engine 'fixing' -- yet we have no idea how much the gain is. If there is a negative, but the positive is unknown, it is quite possible the sum is itself negative.

Copyright is not justified by it being a way to maximise producers' revenue. Such principle would set no limit to laws that restrict people in general to make money for some few. That should immediately seem awry.

Informational goods are nonrival. The right and wrong of their use is fundamentally different from that of rival goods. One does not 'take' informational goods, one copies them. Normal property is, as a first simplification/approximation, justified by the loss of taking. And that because moral rules in general are, roughly speaking, justified by how they affect other people. Since copying lacks that effect of loss it obviously cannot reasonably be treated in the same way.

Land is rival: the owner needs to restrict others in order to not be restricted from accessing the land themself.

Informational goods are nonrival: any number of people can use them without obstructing anyone else's use.

So normal property laws are not 'just as arbitrary and artificial' as intellectual monopoly laws: they are grounded in actual physical limitations.

There is a dilemma there.

If you are only skimming a few comments, you are not reading most. But if the comments are not being read, how can they be scored properly? The extent to which points allow reduced/selective reading is the extent to which the accuracy of that selection is itself reduced.

The basic problem is a power imbalance, and its result is that they tell you how they pay. So any proposed solution built on the idea of you telling them how to pay seems very much in danger of failing for exactly the same reason that there is a problem in the first place.

(Perhaps the main avenue to a solution is in freelancers acting collectively somehow -- thereby becoming more powerful. If clients risk being unable to find service-providers because those clients have been blacklisted, they would more strongly feel the value in paying-up.)

The whole of the author's argument, and its weakness, in four words:

> It’s fine. It’s business.

Why is this inadequate? Because whether something is 'business' is not the beginning and the end of whether it is a good thing to do. It is merely one aspect.

The market is not a perfectly accurate and complete representation for all of human wishes and behaviour. So we cannot delegate to it as the final arbiter on questions of what should or should not be done.

No, the whole issue is really the other way around. What currently happen to be the rules of the business game are not grounds for telling people what they should or should not want. What people want is grounds for examining how the market and business are failing to work well -- and then pondering how that could be improved. That seems the more reasonable, just, and interesting avenue to pursue.

Requiring originality is far too restrictive. For example: would only Martin Luther King be allowed to express his opinion, and absolutely no-one else? No, that hardly sounds like freedom.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19, makes no mention of originality:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

Intellectual monopoly seems inevitably basically in conflict with that. It is only possibly justifiable as a pragmatic exception.