13 ms·

I think most in the tech space tacitly believe that if Alice has a cool string of 0s and 1s, but you have to pay $5 to go into her house to see it, and Bob happ

I think most in the tech space tacitly believe that if Alice has a cool string of 0s and 1s, but you have to pay $5 to go into her house to see it, and Bob happens to memorize the string of 0s and 1s and decides to display it publicly for all to see on a billboard, that this is an extremely based and good thing to do and prevents Alice from holding back human progress. People who don't believe this are probably biased because they are Alice. Don't be Alice.

neilv 3y ago
I was thinking our tacit belief is usually more "I want that, but I also want to keep my money. whynotboth.gif?" When challenged, rationalizations might come out. Circumstantial evidence of this is that we really don't see a lot of clear altruistic looking towards human progress... on other topics. If we mostly only talk about principled stands when it happens to be very convenient in a selfish way, the selfish way seems a more likely explanation.
- stavros 3y ago
  For me, the issue is that I don't want to subscribe to the NYT because I never explicitly go to the NYT. If I'm linked to an article there, I'll read it, but subscribing on the off chance that I'm linked to an article there isn't a good reason. If there were a way to give two cents for each article I read, I'd do that, but there isn't.
  - mewpmewp2 3y ago
    Yeah, I also wish for such a way. Global metered system for services like those. I don't ever read one single thing, but I read an article or two from countless of services.
  - sam0x17 3y ago
    That they can't make enough money from contextual advertising with literally the entire internet linking to them all the time is a spectacular failure.
    - stavros 3y ago
      Probably a failure of the advertising model as a whole, I think. I wonder if the incentives would align much better if we had a micropayments provider.
      - sam0x17 3y ago
        I agree this should be a thing. Or imagine a new distributed internet where every request is an extremely extremely small micro transaction / mining event.
        stavros 3y ago
        In my opinion, flattr was a good way to do it. Shame it didn't catch on.
- sam0x17 3y ago
  I think the moral dilemma is a completely artificial one. You have to do a lot of bending over backwards in your head before you come to the extremely weird conclusion that knowledge can "belong" to a particular person or entity, and the even weirder conclusion that even if you pay for access to the knowledge, you still don't get to share it as you see fit. This is just capitalism-brain, nothing more. It's not natural, and it's definitely not optimal as far as moral maxims go. That modern society is structured around protecting Alice rather than protecting Bob and helping him free the 0s and 1s is simply a side effect of this, and an extremely unfortunate, progress-stalling one... the kind where you seriously contemplate going back in a time-machine to fix whatever went wrong to make us end up with.. this...
  - brickteacup 3y ago
    > extremely weird conclusion I agree, it's so weird that people who devote time, effort, and resources to the production of articles or books somehow think they're entitled to be compensated for the use of those products! What a bizarre belief! I mean, obviously they should just give them away for free. Not like they need money to survive or anything. They can just go on food stamps and live under a bridge or something.
    - sam0x17 3y ago
      It really is. Society should be structured such that these people (and really, everyone) can just work on their creative works or whatever they are good at without having to worry about where their next meal is coming from or whether their loved ones and dependents will be provided for. That we have to capitalize and monetize everything instead of just distributing resources fairly is bizarre. If we were to simulate thousands of different realities, I would think this state of being would be like a shitty local minima that you tweak the hyper-parameters to avoid. As a creative person currently making an obscenely high amount of money doing rust development (north of $350k/yr), I'd happily throw all of that away to just be able to work on my open source projects in perpetuity if I could trust that society will take care of me, forever, in exchange. In fact, playing this whole capitalism game is a huge waste of my time and energy that I'd much rather spend making creative works without worrying about how I'll monetize them. As someone who makes creative works, I don't _want_ to have to charge people to use/access/enjoy them.
- benlivengood 3y ago
  I can't pay for a single article; I have to subscribe. It is intentionally hard to cancel subscriptions. There are enough website data breaches that giving my credit card number to a random subscription site is an unpleasant risk. I happily pay for Youtube Premium so that I can listen to whatever music I want anytime. Spotify and other services are fungible with that. I sort of happily pay for Netflix, but their catalog is shrinking. I would happily pay a subscription for access to all or at least ~99% of newspapers. Whatever music did right (ASCAP, BMI) isn't perfect but it's miles ahead of the trash subscription schemes anywhere else.
  - sam0x17 3y ago
    > I can't pay for a single article Yeah this is a super good idea. I would pay $5 a lot of the time to access these just so I don't have to deal. Would have to accept paypal and I'd do it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

neilv 3y ago

I was thinking our tacit belief is usually more "I want that, but I also want to keep my money. whynotboth.gif?" When challenged, rationalizations might come out. Circumstantial evidence of this is that we really don't see a lot of clear altruistic looking towards human progress... on other topics. If we mostly only talk about principled stands when it happens to be very convenient in a selfish way, the selfish way seems a more likely explanation.

stavros 3y ago
For me, the issue is that I don't want to subscribe to the NYT because I never explicitly go to the NYT. If I'm linked to an article there, I'll read it, but subscribing on the off chance that I'm linked to an article there isn't a good reason. If there were a way to give two cents for each article I read, I'd do that, but there isn't.
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  Yeah, I also wish for such a way. Global metered system for services like those. I don't ever read one single thing, but I read an article or two from countless of services.
- sam0x17 3y ago
  That they can't make enough money from contextual advertising with literally the entire internet linking to them all the time is a spectacular failure.
  - stavros 3y ago
    Probably a failure of the advertising model as a whole, I think. I wonder if the incentives would align much better if we had a micropayments provider.
    - sam0x17 3y ago
      I agree this should be a thing. Or imagine a new distributed internet where every request is an extremely extremely small micro transaction / mining event.
      - stavros 3y ago
        In my opinion, flattr was a good way to do it. Shame it didn't catch on.
sam0x17 3y ago
I think the moral dilemma is a completely artificial one. You have to do a lot of bending over backwards in your head before you come to the extremely weird conclusion that knowledge can "belong" to a particular person or entity, and the even weirder conclusion that even if you pay for access to the knowledge, you still don't get to share it as you see fit. This is just capitalism-brain, nothing more. It's not natural, and it's definitely not optimal as far as moral maxims go. That modern society is structured around protecting Alice rather than protecting Bob and helping him free the 0s and 1s is simply a side effect of this, and an extremely unfortunate, progress-stalling one... the kind where you seriously contemplate going back in a time-machine to fix whatever went wrong to make us end up with.. this...
- brickteacup 3y ago
  > extremely weird conclusion I agree, it's so weird that people who devote time, effort, and resources to the production of articles or books somehow think they're entitled to be compensated for the use of those products! What a bizarre belief! I mean, obviously they should just give them away for free. Not like they need money to survive or anything. They can just go on food stamps and live under a bridge or something.
  - sam0x17 3y ago
    It really is. Society should be structured such that these people (and really, everyone) can just work on their creative works or whatever they are good at without having to worry about where their next meal is coming from or whether their loved ones and dependents will be provided for. That we have to capitalize and monetize everything instead of just distributing resources fairly is bizarre. If we were to simulate thousands of different realities, I would think this state of being would be like a shitty local minima that you tweak the hyper-parameters to avoid. As a creative person currently making an obscenely high amount of money doing rust development (north of $350k/yr), I'd happily throw all of that away to just be able to work on my open source projects in perpetuity if I could trust that society will take care of me, forever, in exchange. In fact, playing this whole capitalism game is a huge waste of my time and energy that I'd much rather spend making creative works without worrying about how I'll monetize them. As someone who makes creative works, I don't _want_ to have to charge people to use/access/enjoy them.
benlivengood 3y ago
I can't pay for a single article; I have to subscribe. It is intentionally hard to cancel subscriptions. There are enough website data breaches that giving my credit card number to a random subscription site is an unpleasant risk. I happily pay for Youtube Premium so that I can listen to whatever music I want anytime. Spotify and other services are fungible with that. I sort of happily pay for Netflix, but their catalog is shrinking. I would happily pay a subscription for access to all or at least ~99% of newspapers. Whatever music did right (ASCAP, BMI) isn't perfect but it's miles ahead of the trash subscription schemes anywhere else.
- sam0x17 3y ago
  > I can't pay for a single article Yeah this is a super good idea. I would pay $5 a lot of the time to access these just so I don't have to deal. Would have to accept paypal and I'd do it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]