3 ms·

The author disingenuously wants you to believe that he's never heard of Moore's law.

by flubert 11y ago

geofft 11y ago
Hm, can you explain how you see Moore's Law as relevant? It talks about the number of transistors on a chip, or at least most generally about the technical performance of a computer system; it does not address the actual contribution to the economy / to productivity / to society by transistors. In fact, by the markets-are-generally-good-at-things hypothesis, and the generalization of Moore's Law that computing power that can be obtained at equal price is growing exponentially, we have a good reason to believe that the exponential growth of technical performance is not contributing at all to productivity. An uncharitable interpretation would be that most of the gains in technical progress have been lost to rent-seeking by the developers of ever-more-complicated frameworks and operating systems and UIs; while the ability to be productive on Google Docs today is higher than the ability to be productive on Office 95, it does not seem to be 2^(20 years/18 months) = 10,000 times higher. But nobody would put up with Office 95 today, for entirely artificial reasons.
- flubert 11y ago
  >can you explain how you see Moore's Law as relevant? The author explicitly asks: "In what sense does technology grow “exponentially”?" If the author wants to claim that the results of Moore's law hasn't trickled down to the common man, then he should do that. Pretending to not know about Moore's law just fails for me as a rhetorical device. The wheat example seems weak as well (not to say that there aren't many other weak point in the article). To make it stronger, he should create a plot of the number of human hours involved in harvesting a bushel of wheat vs. the calendar year, for say the last 2,000 years. >In fact, by the markets-are-generally-good-at-things hypothesis, and the generalization of Moore's Law that computing power that can be obtained at equal price is growing exponentially, we have a good reason to believe that the exponential growth of technical performance is not contributing at all to productivity. On a totally unrelated note, proponents of "Basic Income" seem to also be relying on ever increasing technology productivity to replace human jobs, paying their dividends to all. I wonder how those ideas square with each other, and how many of basic income advocates hold a technology-doesn't-produce-productivity (I'm not saying you or the original author are proponents of basic income guarantees).
  - forgottenpass 11y ago
    The author explicitly asks: "In what sense does technology grow “exponentially”?" If the author wants to claim that the results of Moore's law hasn't trickled down to the common man, then he should do that. Pretending to not know about Moore's law just fails for me as a rhetorical device. If the author was searching their mind for ways that technology has grown exponentially, with business and society on the mind. I find it quite reasonable that under-the-bonnet numbers didn't spring to mind. I don't really see how missing this is a meaningful criticism. Sure Moore's law is a thing, but it's not really useful and I forget it exists all the time too.
  - laughinghan 11y ago
    The context of your quote (note no ellipses because I'm not eliding anything, the context is literally the preceding sentence): > The rate at which individuals can create wealth depends on the > technology available to them, and that grows exponentially. In what sense does technology grow “exponentially”? I think the context makes clear that the author means "In what sense does technology grow the rate at which individuals can create wealth “exponentially”?". It's not a rhetorical device where he "pretends" to not know about Moore's law. He is in fact baldly claiming that the results of Moore's law haven't "trickled down" to the common man. > The wheat example seems weak as well The author merely presents it as less weak than an allusion to Moore's law, which it is. > proponents of "Basic Income" seem to also be relying on ever increasing technology productivity to replace human jobs A well-credentialed economist, who I assure you has no interest in "post-scarcity" fantasies, asserted to me that a negative income tax bracket is considered by mainstream economics academia to be the best way to foster socioeconomic mobility, and the only opposition to its implementation is political. The reasoning presented to me was sublime: government programs for wealth redistribution like food stamps, education grants and loans, Medicaid, commodity subsidies, etc, which are widely accepted, are typically based on income anyway, but they all have independent standards and techniques to determine who gets how much aid, and consequently are rife with abuse (commodity subsidies going mostly towards large, profitable corporations; education grants filling University of Pheonix's coffers; etc). Consolidating them into just a negative income tax would be much more efficient, maximizing resources and incentives to prevent abuse.
  - 11y ago

The author disingenuously wants you to believe that he's never heard of Moore's law.

by flubert 11y ago

The author disingenuously wants you to believe that he's never heard of Moore's law.

Hm, can you explain how you see Moore's Law as relevant? It talks about the number of transistors on a chip, or at least most generally about the technical performance of a computer system; it does not address the actual contribution to the economy / to productivity / to society by transistors. In fact, by the markets-are-generally-good-at-things hypothesis, and the generalization of Moore's Law that computing power that can be obtained at equal price is growing exponentially, we have a good reason to believe that the exponential growth of technical performance is not contributing at all to productivity. An uncharitable interpretation would be that most of the gains in technical progress have been lost to rent-seeking by the developers of ever-more-complicated frameworks and operating systems and UIs; while the ability to be productive on Google Docs today is higher than the ability to be productive on Office 95, it does not seem to be 2^(20 years/18 months) = 10,000 times higher. But nobody would put up with Office 95 today, for entirely artificial reasons.

flubert 11y ago
>can you explain how you see Moore's Law as relevant? The author explicitly asks: "In what sense does technology grow “exponentially”?" If the author wants to claim that the results of Moore's law hasn't trickled down to the common man, then he should do that. Pretending to not know about Moore's law just fails for me as a rhetorical device. The wheat example seems weak as well (not to say that there aren't many other weak point in the article). To make it stronger, he should create a plot of the number of human hours involved in harvesting a bushel of wheat vs. the calendar year, for say the last 2,000 years. >In fact, by the markets-are-generally-good-at-things hypothesis, and the generalization of Moore's Law that computing power that can be obtained at equal price is growing exponentially, we have a good reason to believe that the exponential growth of technical performance is not contributing at all to productivity. On a totally unrelated note, proponents of "Basic Income" seem to also be relying on ever increasing technology productivity to replace human jobs, paying their dividends to all. I wonder how those ideas square with each other, and how many of basic income advocates hold a technology-doesn't-produce-productivity (I'm not saying you or the original author are proponents of basic income guarantees).
- forgottenpass 11y ago
  The author explicitly asks: "In what sense does technology grow “exponentially”?" If the author wants to claim that the results of Moore's law hasn't trickled down to the common man, then he should do that. Pretending to not know about Moore's law just fails for me as a rhetorical device. If the author was searching their mind for ways that technology has grown exponentially, with business and society on the mind. I find it quite reasonable that under-the-bonnet numbers didn't spring to mind. I don't really see how missing this is a meaningful criticism. Sure Moore's law is a thing, but it's not really useful and I forget it exists all the time too.
- laughinghan 11y ago
  The context of your quote (note no ellipses because I'm not eliding anything, the context is literally the preceding sentence): > The rate at which individuals can create wealth depends on the > technology available to them, and that grows exponentially. In what sense does technology grow “exponentially”? I think the context makes clear that the author means "In what sense does technology grow the rate at which individuals can create wealth “exponentially”?". It's not a rhetorical device where he "pretends" to not know about Moore's law. He is in fact baldly claiming that the results of Moore's law haven't "trickled down" to the common man. > The wheat example seems weak as well The author merely presents it as less weak than an allusion to Moore's law, which it is. > proponents of "Basic Income" seem to also be relying on ever increasing technology productivity to replace human jobs A well-credentialed economist, who I assure you has no interest in "post-scarcity" fantasies, asserted to me that a negative income tax bracket is considered by mainstream economics academia to be the best way to foster socioeconomic mobility, and the only opposition to its implementation is political. The reasoning presented to me was sublime: government programs for wealth redistribution like food stamps, education grants and loans, Medicaid, commodity subsidies, etc, which are widely accepted, are typically based on income anyway, but they all have independent standards and techniques to determine who gets how much aid, and consequently are rife with abuse (commodity subsidies going mostly towards large, profitable corporations; education grants filling University of Pheonix's coffers; etc). Consolidating them into just a negative income tax would be much more efficient, maximizing resources and incentives to prevent abuse.
- 11y ago