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>So you're saying: "It's very complicated, you won't understand my arguments." No, that's not at all what he's saying. He's saying that intellectual property

by TeeDub 14y ago

>So you're saying: "It's very complicated, you won't understand my arguments." No, that's not at all what he's saying. He's saying that intellectual property is actually an immensely broad and complicated issue. (Rather: That's what I interpreted him to be saying; I could be wrong here.) I don't think you can really make a statement like "IP laws lead to slower development of science and industry..." because "IP laws" are such a broad category of laws. Do you mean patents? What kind of patents? (Does a 5 year patent on medicines, something proposed by the Pirate Party, count as an IP law that reduces development? Why? How does it differ from other patents that are longer / renewable?) Can I make a contract to stop someone from disclosing an idea of mine? Is that an IP law? (Probably) Is it aggregating money into the hands of the few? (More dubious claim there...) Don't get me wrong, I tend to agree that there should be limits on the sorts of monopolies that IP laws tend to foster, and I think that the current IP regimes that are dominant are typically very damaging. But I also think there could be certain IP controls that are acceptable and positive. (Allowing for IP regimes that are basically "trade secrets only" seems a bit inadequate to me, especially since patents offer valuable protections to certain kinds of innovations.) This is a view that your wildly over-broad/under-specified interpretation of IP would not accommodate.

danso 14y ago
You interpreted me right. One dimension that needs to be considered is that, as opposed to Newton's day, the average human has substantially less chance of dying from a consumer product. The pharma industry is a very good example of this...the costs of drugs and the tricks pharma companies use to extend patents is rightly criticized...on the other hand, the research and regulatory process is massively lengthy and costly, and one that no one would pursue if another company could swoop in and profit on billions of R&D. There's also something else...rate of advancement is likely going to seem slower than it was in the past few centuries, because of a natural diminishing rate of return. To paraphrase -- I think, Stephen Colbert -- it's easy to make scientific discoveries when not burying diseased corpses next to your water supply is considered a health breakthrough.
- TeeDub 14y ago
  >"There's also something else...rate of advancement is likely going to seem slower than it was in the past few centuries, because of a natural diminishing rate of return. To paraphrase -- I think, Stephen Colbert -- it's easy to make scientific discoveries when not burying diseased corpses next to your water supply is considered a health breakthrough." This is a particularly superb point! I really like this argument.
  - dingfeng_quek 14y ago
    Really depends on your metric of "rate of advancement". If it's going to be about what common people think, then consumer-product and lifestyle innovations would be over-weighted. Viewed by a specialist in any field, that field's progress would be overweighted. From the perspective of productivity increase (or GDP per capita increase), qualitative changes in lifestyle would be underweighted. etc. Furthermore, even after deciding on a vague sort of metric, it's hard to quantize (choose a measure, in math jargon), advancement to be able to have rates.
- Strshps1MoreTim 14y ago
  >> rate of advancement is likely going to seem slower Wow, it's amazing how different our views of the world are. IMHO the rate of advancement is now far, far, far surpassing any other time in the known history. The PC (1975), Web(1991), FB(2004), iPhone(2007) have created such an enormous change so fast. Have a look at "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought" by Ray Kurzweil to see how crucial sciences nowadays are advancing by the month.
  - danso 14y ago
    I don't think we're disagreeing here. I said "seem" slower when in actuality, we are progressing quite fast. However, it seemed that you were implying that our rate of progress was not fast enough because of the IP laws we have now. In any case, I don't see the point in making a big debate over this on a post that's about porting C&C to HTML5. I think it's enough to point out that when there are protracted debates, it's because the issues involved are much more complicated than just a conspiratorial power-grab.

by TeeDub 14y ago

danso 14y ago

You interpreted me right. One dimension that needs to be considered is that, as opposed to Newton's day, the average human has substantially less chance of dying from a consumer product. The pharma industry is a very good example of this...the costs of drugs and the tricks pharma companies use to extend patents is rightly criticized...on the other hand, the research and regulatory process is massively lengthy and costly, and one that no one would pursue if another company could swoop in and profit on billions of R&D. There's also something else...rate of advancement is likely going to seem slower than it was in the past few centuries, because of a natural diminishing rate of return. To paraphrase -- I think, Stephen Colbert -- it's easy to make scientific discoveries when not burying diseased corpses next to your water supply is considered a health breakthrough.

TeeDub 14y ago
>"There's also something else...rate of advancement is likely going to seem slower than it was in the past few centuries, because of a natural diminishing rate of return. To paraphrase -- I think, Stephen Colbert -- it's easy to make scientific discoveries when not burying diseased corpses next to your water supply is considered a health breakthrough." This is a particularly superb point! I really like this argument.
- dingfeng_quek 14y ago
  Really depends on your metric of "rate of advancement". If it's going to be about what common people think, then consumer-product and lifestyle innovations would be over-weighted. Viewed by a specialist in any field, that field's progress would be overweighted. From the perspective of productivity increase (or GDP per capita increase), qualitative changes in lifestyle would be underweighted. etc. Furthermore, even after deciding on a vague sort of metric, it's hard to quantize (choose a measure, in math jargon), advancement to be able to have rates.
Strshps1MoreTim 14y ago
>> rate of advancement is likely going to seem slower Wow, it's amazing how different our views of the world are. IMHO the rate of advancement is now far, far, far surpassing any other time in the known history. The PC (1975), Web(1991), FB(2004), iPhone(2007) have created such an enormous change so fast. Have a look at "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought" by Ray Kurzweil to see how crucial sciences nowadays are advancing by the month.
- danso 14y ago
  I don't think we're disagreeing here. I said "seem" slower when in actuality, we are progressing quite fast. However, it seemed that you were implying that our rate of progress was not fast enough because of the IP laws we have now. In any case, I don't see the point in making a big debate over this on a post that's about porting C&C to HTML5. I think it's enough to point out that when there are protracted debates, it's because the issues involved are much more complicated than just a conspiratorial power-grab.