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It seems so many of these debates have strayed away from some VERY core ideas. Learning is good, knowledge is good. Giving people the ability everywhere to lea

by jrm4 4y ago

It seems so many of these debates have strayed away from some VERY core ideas. Learning is good, knowledge is good. Giving people the ability everywhere to learn at their own pace is important. More important that paying authors. I'm not saying MUCH MORE, it is very good to compensate (actual) creators. Now, people can get just about as much knowledge as they want for a very cheap price, and the barriers to that are so utterly artificial. An E-book reader can contain just about as much knowledge as one might ever need. Priority ONE, enable learning. All other priorities fall WELL below that, law be darned.

memonkey 4y ago
Learning is good to whom? Knowledge is good to whom? Even if all the research says it is good for economies and countries at scale doesn't deter others from saying otherwise.
toyg 4y ago
> some VERY core ideas. [...] Priority ONE, enable learning. That's your core idea. The core idea of capitalism is "Priority ONE, get all the money". Those core ideas are not the easiest of fellows.
- tm-guimaraes 4y ago
  No. Core idea of capitalism is that everything has value, you have a right to own and trade value, and we should quantify that value to enable efficient transactions of valuables. It's about freedom of ownership (and ownership rights) including transferring that ownership, capital is a measure of what you own. Capitalism doesn't have a core value of "getting more capital", capitalism has a core value of "being able to freely use my capital". The distinction from what GP is saying is that somethings should not be "owned" or "fully owned", ie, not have all the kind of rights that you would expect when you say "I own this". In the particular scenario of publishing, is questioning if "owning distributing rights" make sense (in the way of, I have the rights, you don't. I can do what I want as it is mine, you can do what I allow because it's mine not yours). In which he claims that "easiness of learning" is more important than profit, which in this scenario means that your freedom of doing what you want with your ownership, ie: selling rights to very limited used of your valuable (book, etc) is less important than sharing/acquiring knowledge, ie: i should be able to lend you or maybe even give you a copy of a book. The dilemma is incentives to publish/share knowledge: Capitalism works in hand with incentives due to everything having "value", so you can own things like "intellectual property" and have rights over it, so can sell it, or sell its use, giving you an incentive to "produce knowledge", the drawback is that anyone else has to use "value/capital" to access it. (same applies if you decide it's the governament that subsidies, still, something is giving back that "value/capital". Also, because of your rights to own, you can also share it without need to be rewarded, as it is your inherent right. But, the thing about all this is "measure". Not everything is easily measurable, but to facilitate using ownership rights and their transaction/use, you have to measure. That the big problem of capitalism, plenty of things can't really have a price tag, and value of anything is not only subjective, but also hard to know for sure without full info, so "easy" measures are used. This notion of "hard to measure value" is also a reason for not everything to have full ownership rights, using the current example, it's hard to measure to value of lending a book, including it's secondary effects (author getting more famous, a person getting more knowledge and its implications), so treating all these very hard to measure things the same way as more easily measurable things can and does have nasty effects. This is basically the issue of our current ways to measure value is mostly "what are you able to trade it for", ie: tossing into a free market, which can and suffers the "tragedy of the commons" and other issues like trading with someone with lacks the necessary knowledge to give a decent assessment of value.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
Knowledge and learning are good, but you have to be able to incentivize people to write good material to read and learn from. In our economy, we usually do this with money. Compensating the actual creators isn't a lower priority, it's a prerequisite. (None of this should be read as a defense of the current state of publishing, only to gently push back on your exact view of the priorities here)
- jrm4 4y ago
  Sigh. Come on. Wikipedia has already clearly debunked this silly idea. We are not knowledge vending machines into which you must insert money to get knowledge.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    Write a book yourself and publish it freely. You can legally do this, today, and nobody can stop you. People are already doing this.. but it's a lot more work than wikipedia edits and typically people only do this when compensated.
    - jrm4 4y ago
      A. A lot more work than wikipedia edits? Maybe. Now, how about "accuracy?" B. I'll see your "books" and raise you "virtually all academic writing" How much of that is typically directly compensated? Virtually none. Again, I'm not saying "no one should get paid." I am saying that there is nothing to suggest that spreading knowledge requires paying individuals via a system that relies heavily on intellectual property and/or classic "capitalist" ideas to do so. Universities and libraries are a thing, and have been for some time.
      - vorpalhex 4y ago
        "Directly" is doing too much work. We pay researchers to research. Part of research is writing that work and submitting it. It is literally part of their job. It is so much part of their job that we have a system in place to isolate them from day to day political worries and let them focus on big projects. > I am saying that there is nothing to suggest that spreading knowledge requires paying individuals... It doesn't. People publish things for free all the time. See your own example of research papers and open access journals.
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
> Learning is good, knowledge is good. Giving people the ability everywhere to learn at their own pace is important. Agreed. > More important that paying authors. It's the same thing as paying authors. Stuff that is worth reading is rarely written for free, out of the goodness of the author's heart. It is written because the author expects to make money to at least somewhat repay the effort. So if you want the material that allows people to learn at their own pace, you need a way for the authors to get paid.
- jrm4 4y ago
  You are simply, flat-out, wrong. You do NOT need a way for authors to get paid and this idea is already thoroughly disproven. Wikipedia gets written. Academic articles get written, fan-fiction gets written. Now we can discuss particulars about volume and quality and distribution. But we already see that a GREAT DEAL of EXCELLENT KNOWLEDGE has been created, written and distributed without strong, or occasionally ANY, expectation of "payment."
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    You don't think academic articles get written in the expectation of payment? They get written because writing them is a big part of an academic's job, and they are paid for their job. That's not payment in the form of a check from the journal, but they're still getting paid to produce it. Fan fiction I will give you. It's not paid, but it's also often not excellent. Some is; most isn't. Look, I generate free content too. I'm doing it now. I think it's worth doing. It's not worthless. But it's worth less in terms of passing on knowledge than professionally-written books. Do you really want to learn, say, differential equations from Wikipedia? Or would you do better with a good textbook?

by jrm4 4y ago

memonkey 4y ago

Learning is good to whom? Knowledge is good to whom? Even if all the research says it is good for economies and countries at scale doesn't deter others from saying otherwise.

toyg 4y ago

> some VERY core ideas. [...] Priority ONE, enable learning. That's your core idea. The core idea of capitalism is "Priority ONE, get all the money". Those core ideas are not the easiest of fellows.

tm-guimaraes 4y ago
No. Core idea of capitalism is that everything has value, you have a right to own and trade value, and we should quantify that value to enable efficient transactions of valuables. It's about freedom of ownership (and ownership rights) including transferring that ownership, capital is a measure of what you own. Capitalism doesn't have a core value of "getting more capital", capitalism has a core value of "being able to freely use my capital". The distinction from what GP is saying is that somethings should not be "owned" or "fully owned", ie, not have all the kind of rights that you would expect when you say "I own this". In the particular scenario of publishing, is questioning if "owning distributing rights" make sense (in the way of, I have the rights, you don't. I can do what I want as it is mine, you can do what I allow because it's mine not yours). In which he claims that "easiness of learning" is more important than profit, which in this scenario means that your freedom of doing what you want with your ownership, ie: selling rights to very limited used of your valuable (book, etc) is less important than sharing/acquiring knowledge, ie: i should be able to lend you or maybe even give you a copy of a book. The dilemma is incentives to publish/share knowledge: Capitalism works in hand with incentives due to everything having "value", so you can own things like "intellectual property" and have rights over it, so can sell it, or sell its use, giving you an incentive to "produce knowledge", the drawback is that anyone else has to use "value/capital" to access it. (same applies if you decide it's the governament that subsidies, still, something is giving back that "value/capital". Also, because of your rights to own, you can also share it without need to be rewarded, as it is your inherent right. But, the thing about all this is "measure". Not everything is easily measurable, but to facilitate using ownership rights and their transaction/use, you have to measure. That the big problem of capitalism, plenty of things can't really have a price tag, and value of anything is not only subjective, but also hard to know for sure without full info, so "easy" measures are used. This notion of "hard to measure value" is also a reason for not everything to have full ownership rights, using the current example, it's hard to measure to value of lending a book, including it's secondary effects (author getting more famous, a person getting more knowledge and its implications), so treating all these very hard to measure things the same way as more easily measurable things can and does have nasty effects. This is basically the issue of our current ways to measure value is mostly "what are you able to trade it for", ie: tossing into a free market, which can and suffers the "tragedy of the commons" and other issues like trading with someone with lacks the necessary knowledge to give a decent assessment of value.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago

Knowledge and learning are good, but you have to be able to incentivize people to write good material to read and learn from. In our economy, we usually do this with money. Compensating the actual creators isn't a lower priority, it's a prerequisite. (None of this should be read as a defense of the current state of publishing, only to gently push back on your exact view of the priorities here)

jrm4 4y ago
Sigh. Come on. Wikipedia has already clearly debunked this silly idea. We are not knowledge vending machines into which you must insert money to get knowledge.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  Write a book yourself and publish it freely. You can legally do this, today, and nobody can stop you. People are already doing this.. but it's a lot more work than wikipedia edits and typically people only do this when compensated.
  - jrm4 4y ago
    A. A lot more work than wikipedia edits? Maybe. Now, how about "accuracy?" B. I'll see your "books" and raise you "virtually all academic writing" How much of that is typically directly compensated? Virtually none. Again, I'm not saying "no one should get paid." I am saying that there is nothing to suggest that spreading knowledge requires paying individuals via a system that relies heavily on intellectual property and/or classic "capitalist" ideas to do so. Universities and libraries are a thing, and have been for some time.
    - vorpalhex 4y ago
      "Directly" is doing too much work. We pay researchers to research. Part of research is writing that work and submitting it. It is literally part of their job. It is so much part of their job that we have a system in place to isolate them from day to day political worries and let them focus on big projects. > I am saying that there is nothing to suggest that spreading knowledge requires paying individuals... It doesn't. People publish things for free all the time. See your own example of research papers and open access journals.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

> Learning is good, knowledge is good. Giving people the ability everywhere to learn at their own pace is important. Agreed. > More important that paying authors. It's the same thing as paying authors. Stuff that is worth reading is rarely written for free, out of the goodness of the author's heart. It is written because the author expects to make money to at least somewhat repay the effort. So if you want the material that allows people to learn at their own pace, you need a way for the authors to get paid.

jrm4 4y ago
You are simply, flat-out, wrong. You do NOT need a way for authors to get paid and this idea is already thoroughly disproven. Wikipedia gets written. Academic articles get written, fan-fiction gets written. Now we can discuss particulars about volume and quality and distribution. But we already see that a GREAT DEAL of EXCELLENT KNOWLEDGE has been created, written and distributed without strong, or occasionally ANY, expectation of "payment."
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  You don't think academic articles get written in the expectation of payment? They get written because writing them is a big part of an academic's job, and they are paid for their job. That's not payment in the form of a check from the journal, but they're still getting paid to produce it. Fan fiction I will give you. It's not paid, but it's also often not excellent. Some is; most isn't. Look, I generate free content too. I'm doing it now. I think it's worth doing. It's not worthless. But it's worth less in terms of passing on knowledge than professionally-written books. Do you really want to learn, say, differential equations from Wikipedia? Or would you do better with a good textbook?