17 ms·

Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

480 points by natural219 12y ago

skepticalone 12y ago
<place holder for skeptical comment>
- deleted 12y ago
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greatzebu 12y ago
> A "Pareto optimal" solution is one which, given all the possibilities of action, produces the best outcome for both parties (with some negotiable surplus). This isn't quite right. In a Pareto optimal solution, there's no way to improve things for one party without making them worse for another party, but there's no guarantee that the outcome is good for everyone. "I get everything, you get nothing" is a Pareto-optimal way of diving things up.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  That still isn't quite right. Pareto optimal better describes transitions than states. A state can be described as Pareto optimal only in the sense that there are no Pareto optimal transitions out of it. So for example, in prisoner's dilemma, all of the states are Pareto optimal because none of the moves are. No matter what anyone does, somebody will be worse off than the alternative. As another example, "I get everything, you get nothing" isn't necessarily Pareto optimal because there could be something non-rivalrous that the person getting nothing could have without depriving the person getting everything of it.
  - araftery 12y ago
    Agreed. Seems like the author is looking for something more along the lines of "socially optimal." Also seems like he mixed up which outcome is Nash and which is socially optimal. (Deny, Deny) = (Defect, Defect) = Nash Eq. (Confess, Confess) = (Cooperate, Cooperate) = socially optimal.
deleted 12y ago
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- viraptor 12y ago
  If you want to just serve this one page quickly, you can take the result and save it as static page. Add a specific routing rule just for the url you submitted. (the page looks completely static anyway) You can play with varnish once you don't have thousands of people who will actually want to read the contents you posted :) (a.k.a don't upgrade anything the day of the release)
  - natural219 12y ago
    Haha. It's static. I've never actually written anything that anybody's read before, so I have no idea what point I need to start looking into a cache.
    - viraptor 12y ago
      If it's already static (ie. served from a generated static file), cache won't help you much (if at all). All reads will already come from the memory. Unless you have some crazy routing rules in the webserver, varnish is unlikely to be faster than direct serving. some old comparison for static files: http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/apache-vs-nginx-vs-varnish-vs-gwan/ http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/apache-vs-nginx-vs-v...
      - natural219 12y ago
        Thanks, this is a great read. I feared since my nginx configuration looks like this[1], something isn't being cached properly in memory, but it looks like I'm being overly paranoid. [1]https://www.dropbox.com/s/x2k7ms057xh7zkm/Screenshot%202014-06-12%2017.21.38.png https://www.dropbox.com/s/x2k7ms057xh7zkm/Screenshot%202014-...
- chollida1 12y ago
  > OP here. I'm working with a 1GB DigitalOcean box. Didn't expect hacker news haha. Umm, you posted this article yourself to hn. You also plastered links to hn on the article. It's very hard to believe you in this instance:) Having said that, great article, keep them coming!
carsongross 12y ago
The only hope is cultural change. The only hope is cultural trust, and the only way to achieve that is to allow like-minded individuals to separate themselves into autonomous political units. This is dangerous thinking Chris, if you start following these thoughts through to the end, rather than spinning off into happy-clappy "change the world's heart" wishing...
- istorical 12y ago
  Did you not see the link at the end of the article to Balaji's talk on exit? (Genuine question. If you haven't checked out that talk, its about opting out as an option for pursuing change and it sounds like what you're alluding to!)
  - msutherl 12y ago
    Like he said, dangerous thoughts. Think warring city-states. Think StarCraft.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  Or you could just learn to live with people who aren't exactly like you. You know, like everyone on the planet except for wealthy and reactionary enclaves of the United States.
  - happyscrappy 12y ago
    That is stupendously naïve.
  - carsongross 12y ago
    Everyone? http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/oneyoungworld/2014/06/05/south-africas-rape-crisis-2/ http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/oneyoungworld/2014/06/05/sout...
- Florin_Andrei 12y ago
  > The only hope is cultural trust, and the only way to achieve that is to allow like-minded individuals to separate themselves into autonomous political units ...and the reason why you're separating is because you don't trust anyone else. Nice.
nipponese 12y ago
David: What is the primary goal? Joshua/WOPR: You should know, Professor. You programmed me. David: Oh, c'mon. What is the primary goal? Joshua/WOPR: To win the game.
darkmighty 12y ago
Playing devils advocate, I'd say sure, it sucks that some (or most) people are selfish dickheads leading to mutually degrading situations. But it would suck almost as much to always be at mercy of your competitors good will (that he won't arbitrarily screw you, leave unpunished and with a better outcome), even if it happens sparsely. The obvious solution to this fabricated game theory dilemma is regulation, which is nothing more than eliminating those scenarios which are undesirable for society altogether. Not only it avoids the risk of being screwed, or the costs associated with being screwed, or the loss of optimality of outcomes -- but most importantly it simplifies greatly the game. Markets are quite complex already and the added constraint of having to think hard about your oponents and consider all the scenarios to make sure you're not screwing them is enormous. I think this behavior is distinct from bad faith, it's just a matter of responsibility and scope. This, to me, is ideal capitalistic behavior: oblivious, but with good faith (not trying to 'unfairly' or 'destructively' bring down your opponent) -- and it should come with swift regulations and laws flexible enough to punish edge cases. We have a truly unrecognized gift as a species: morality. Not because it's cute or honorable (that would be a circular assessment), but because it allows us to reach those Pareto optimal spots. We just have to use it in proper settings, with proper rules.
- blackskad 12y ago
  In this story, it's regulation that has put some companies at the merci of competitors. Small Startup Y has to hope that Big Corp X wants to license a patent for a fair $ amount. Startup Y has no way to negotiate a large fee down to an acceptable level, pay the expensive licenses or fight in court if they ignore the patent. Considering two companies with patents, you get the Nash equilibrium where both companies go to court for patent infringement (assuming the plaintiff always wins). The payoff matrix could look like this, where the numbers are the changes in profits in %. | court | not court --------------------------------- court | -5 \ -5 | -15 \ 10 ----------|---------------------- not court | 10 \ -15 | 1 \ 1 --------------------------------- Assume the profit of the previous year is 14%. - If no company goes to court, both profits grow slightly with 1% to 15%. - If one company goes to court, and the other doesn't, the plaintiff's profit increases with 10% to 24% and the defendant's drops with 15% to -1% (placing it a loss). - If both companies go to court, the profits of both companies drop with 5% to 9%. If you want a real-life example of this situation, just look at the lawsuits between Samsung & Apple. Probably the only case where they'll evolve to the pareto optimal solution, is when patents no longer exist at all. A world without patents would allow companies to win customers based on pure attractiveness and features, not by getting competition banned. Note that this isn't the same as giving your key designs away for free. It means I could reverse engineer an iphone touchscreen and create a compatible version, without being sued by anyone. Apple would still have the early mover advantage with existing customers; the consumer would have more/better/cheaper choices and i would have a more attractive product. (Note that this might not be the case for other sectors, like pharma, where it costs a lot to develop a new drug from scratch, rather than the cheaper additive innovations in the tech sector).
matnewton85 12y ago
This article expresses perfectly why: a) I'm very cautious about working with American companies b) Why my contractors nearly all bitch about working with American companies (I use a lot of contractors on oDesk and they tell me the same thing). America's great but the lack of trust in business is the one thing that really grates on me.
- smutticus 12y ago
  As someone who has done lots of work for both EU and US companies I agree. The amount of times American companies just say "trust us" versus EU companies definitely grates on me. The US is not all terrible, but there is tons of work force exploitation going on in the US. Especially in the bay area.
stringbeans 12y ago
really like this article... but your font (or font weight) hurts my eyes :(
- ars 12y ago
  Same here, I had to disable the font-family css command in order to read it.
nostromo 12y ago
I've been thinking of patents as nukes during the Cold War lately. Superpowers (US/USSR, Apple/Google) acquire very large nuclear/patent arsenals under the guise of protection/defense. These arsenals are relatively cheap for superpowers to build, but they are expensive for small states (small countries/small businesses) to acquire. The US and USSR were roughly equivalent in their arsenals so it made little sense for either party to act offensively. However, the implied power behind the arsenals gave them a lot of power when dealing with smaller actors. The superpowers benefit greatly from acquiring these arsenals. Even without using them publicly, the threat can always be used behind closed doors (as Jobs has been shown to do). But there's a third actor; the most universally feared actor: terrorists/patent trolls. These actors behave only offensively because they have nothing to defend. These actors are best poised to benefit from nukes and patents and can send an otherwise orderly system into chaos. Anyway, just a fun but flawed analogy to play with in your noodle. :)
- houseofshards 12y ago
  As a consequence, nuclear scientists/physicists of the Cold War era are analogous to patent lawyers today. Kind of sad don't you think ? :)
  - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
    That's the point where the analogy breaks down though, because the actors in the patent case are private actors rather than sovereigns. So if you e.g. abolish software patents the whole problem disappears, but nobody can "abolish" nuclear weapons because they're a consequence of the laws of physics rather than the laws of the United States. If humans had the power to amend the laws of physics to make nuclear weapons impossible and yet nuclear physicists lobbied against it, then they would be in the same position as patent lawyers.
  - hhg_az 12y ago
    not quite. The scientists didnt like what they were doing and were driven by making sure that thier side was best equipped. Patent lawyers just make money. Go to trial? Pay up (even if you loose) Need a new patent? Pay up. Want to enforce your existing patent? Pay up. Want to check to see if someone is infringing on your patents? Pay up. The lawyers, more or less are neutral benefactors of the patent wars.
robbrown451 12y ago
This explains, at the very least, why rampant partisanship is an inevitability in a large Democracy, despite it being worse off for everybody (including politicians themselves). Instead of saying "in a large Democracy" it should say "in a large Democracy which uses plurality voting." Some voting systems (for instance Condorcet compatible ones) do not encourage partisanship in the same way as plurality does. In fact other systems actually encourage cooperation and favor candidates that are more in the center. And I think that points to a flaw in the conclusion of the article: attempting to directly change human nature (or culture, as the OP suggests) is a fool's errand. Instead, changing the rules of a system, such that the Pareto optimal result and the Nash Equilibrium align more closely, is a much more realistic approach. And I believe that when you do set up good systems where people are rewarded for cooperating, the culture changes with it. (Regardless I think it is an excellent article and the more people who understand the Game Theory stuff he explains, the better. And I absolutely agree with his sentiment than Musk should be lauded for what he is doing rather than being met with cynicism.)
- jessriedel 12y ago
  > In fact other systems actually encourage cooperation and favor candidates that are more in the center. Actually, single-round winner-take-all democracy induces a race toward the middle, not polarization. (If everyone is aligned on a 1D spectrum and votes for the candidate closest to their position, then both candidates are incentivized move toward the median position.) What you're really getting at isn't the idea of polarizations versus moderation, it's voting coordination (i.e. political parties) aka collusion. Unfortunately, alternate voting systems don't eliminate collusion, they just push it to a different level (e.g. proportional representative systems still have 51% coalitions at the level of parliament). You might reasonably argue that that's a better level to put that collusion, but it's definitely not eliminated through some simple choice of voting system. If you really want to eliminate collusion and induce consensus making, you can consider "randomized parliaments". They operate in a way very analogous to the mechanism that makes poker showdowns rare. Although he chooses an unfortunate name of "quantum parliment" (since there's nothing quantum about the randomness), Aerts explains the idea well here: http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0503078 http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0503078
teawithcarl 12y ago
Thanks Chris - a superb article, deeply meaningful.
absherwin 12y ago
Reputation should solve this problem given that life is a repeated game as long as we also are able to be long-sighted. A more formal argument can be found here: http://economics.mit.edu/files/4754 http://economics.mit.edu/files/4754 That suggests the cultural problem is decline in longer-term thinking or more likely a decline in arbitrary codes of behavior without a concomitant increase in longer-term thinking that would recreate many of those same norms. American business used to place a high value on trust: "A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom. I think that is the fundamental basis of business." -J. Pierpont Morgan As another example, Warren Buffet seldom does diligence to determine an offer; he trusts those from who he buys to deal and report honestly.
babenzele 12y ago
Any company would be stupid to develop car manufacturing based on another company's held patents. But just ask your lawyer to talk to Tesla's lawyers to buy a very cheap, almost free license. Then we'll see if they're serious about this or not.
- brongondwana 12y ago
  Obviously you would do more than just trust a web page as a licence to the patents, but I imagine it would be hard for Tesla to win an infringement case after publishing this. This is no "Sun CEO blogs congratulating Google on android" level of plausible ambiguity.
E_Carefree 12y ago
So much win in this! Let's move together towards Musk's Pareto Optimal solution!
smutticus 12y ago
One of the inherent assumptions of neo-classical economics is that we're all selfish, rational, utility maximizing, humans. That's built into our understanding of markets and how they function. Now I understand where the author is coming from, and I agree there is a terrible lack of trust in modern America. I just don't agree that the cynical view, that all humans are untrustworthy shit-bags, is all that terrible. Cyncism causes parties to make explicit their assumptions about future behavior. We can then codify this assumed behavior in contracts. If I was a battery manufacturer and I wanted to use Tesla's patents, I would approach Tesla and ask for a contractual agreement whereby Tesla agreed not to use those patents against me. If Tesla were unwilling to enter into this sort of contractual agreement with me, I would assume they were reserving the right to later use these patents against me.
gojomo 12y ago
Author is very unfair to the "capitalist environment like America's". Our market-driven society requires, and rewards/trains, a level of trust that's less-common elsewhere. Just two data points: (1) Americans are "The Weirdest People in the World", per one review of psychological studies, in economic games. They're more willing to punish 'unfair' offers in the 'Ultimatum Game', and offer higher shares against naked self-interest in the similar 'Dictator Game'. See for more details: http://www.psmag.com/magazines/magazine-feature-story-magazines/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/ http://www.psmag.com/magazines/magazine-feature-story-magazi... (2) We've had a number of explicitly "anti-capitalist" nation-states in the last 150 years. They haven't been paragons of collective action for the greater good, or protection of the common environment. In particular, the ex-Communist societies and emigrants-from-same sometimes take a while to adjust to new economies where every stranger, government and non-government alike, isn't constantly trying to screw them under false pretense of shared-sacrifice. The actual games in "capitalist America" are only very occasionally dog-eat-dog zero-sum affairs. More often, they're iterated games rewarding not just consciously chosen cooperation but an optimistic, cooperate-by-default mindset. Politics, with its zero-sum elections and redistributions, is an exception. Its partisanship shouldn't be attributed to market processes, but to electoral/governmental ones.
guelo 12y ago
So if we could all just trust Elon Musk and never question anything about him or his companies we could save the environment, and capitalism and our culture and all of humanity? OK then.
rayiner 12y ago
The idea that the Pareto-optimal situation is the one where everyone freely copies from each other may be appropriate for the market Tesla finds itself in, but is in general directly contradicted by the actual experience of the technology industry. The experience of the technology industry is that innovation happens in periods of monopoly. That monopoly might arise from first-mover effects, network effects, lock-in effects, or IP protections (patents, copyrights, and trademarks). This has been true from Bell Labs to Xerox to Google to Facebook. Bell Labs had its heyday when AT&T was a government-sanctioned monopoly. The Xerox Alto, which pioneered the GUI, the mouse, and networking, was invented at a Xerox that had 100% of the U.S. copier industry, a few years before an antitrust consent decree forced it to license its patents to Japanese competitors, quickly destroying its marketshare.[1] If another search engine could easily copy Google's data and algorithms, they wouldn't have the money to be working on self-driving cars and AI. Facebook is a textbook example of network effects precluding perfect competition. In comparison, look at the PC industry, which is based on open standards and an OS licensed on non-discriminatory terms. What has happened to the PC? They have become commodities and innovation is essentially dead. Companies like Lenovo eke out single-digit profit margins, and nobody can afford to spend money on R&D. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox#1970s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox#1970s
- thaumaturgy 12y ago
  AT&T developed the transistor, but it was government pressure that prompted AT&T to release control of its patents on the invention, and it was licensees like Motorola, Texas Instruments, and Fairchild (which gave birth to Intel) that did the bulk of the work in the transistor market. AT&T wasn't even sure what to do with it; they were just looking for something better than the vacuum tube. The Alto was first built in 1973, but was used only internally at Xerox and was never made into a commercial product. Meanwhile, a loose-knit Homebrew Computer Club had among its members two guys named Steve. It was a visit to Xerox by one of them, in 1979 -- a full six years after the initial release of the Alto -- that led to the beginning of the modern graphical interface. Microsoft began developing multi-touch technology in 2001, but it was the iPhone, in 2007, that won the market. Rumors of Microsoft's wall-mounted multitouch displays predate Apple's products, but it was Apple that figured out how to get the products into customers' hands. What has happened to the PC is that it has become mature. This happens to all technologies. Modern automobiles are not very different from their 1950s counterparts -- just more refined. Refinements in PC technology however has led to things like the Raspberry Pi and a second-generation community of electronics tinkerers. Not to belabor the point, but the automobile was also patent-encumbered, and it was the development of better production techniques (the moving assembly line, by Ford), that made the automobile accessible to large numbers of people. The fundamental problem of product development is that those most suited to inventing things are usually not also those most suited to bring a product to market.
mythz 12y ago
Elon Musk's response: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/477223079421046785 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/477223079421046785 "Apparently, lots of confused media inquiries about blog title. Look, we just to make sure they don't set us up the bomb."
- Lagged2Death 12y ago
  It's "up us" dammit.
jleader 12y ago
Isn't the ultimate socially-optimal answer for the "guess 2/3rds of the average" game be to convince everyone to answer 0? Because 2/3rds of 0 is 0, so everyone wins.
hibikir 12y ago
Trust is not a binary decision, it is a continuum. And within that continuum, the US is way further to being a trusting society than not. When we sign a contract, we have an expectation that it will be fulfilled, and that if it isn't, the courts will work, albeit slowly. You get a job, and you tend to get paid. Go in a cab, not expect to get robbed, or murdered. If you hire an employee, you expect him to at least attempt to do his job. Is someone does a good job, there's a chance there's some reward behind it. There's a reason Southern Europe has worse economic outcomes, and that's trust. You get even worse results as you move towards the development world. And many parts of South America make Southern Europe seem downright trustworthy. It's important to have a high trust society, but it's really more of a systemic trust than anything: About having negative consequences to breaking trust, not about taking leaps of faith to trust companies.
- sergiosgc 12y ago
  > There's a reason Southern Europe has worse economic outcomes, and that's trust. I have no idea where you got this impression from. It is wrong, though. I did business in several southern Europe countries, and you can seal a deal with a handshake and be confident it'll go through.
  - ahomescu1 12y ago
    > It is wrong, though. As an Eastern European, I think he got it right. From my own experience, there's a huge difference in trustworthiness between the Western and other countries/regions. I have tons of stories to support this, but here's just one: in supermarkets in my own country, you're not allowed to walk in with a backpack (you have to seal it outside or leave it in a locker); I've never had to do that in the US.
- Symmetry 12y ago
  We don't have any particular reason to think that trust is high among corporate executives though.
E_Carefree 12y ago
If Tesla did this in the early game, would they still be in the position they are today? I think this open source movement works but only if you have the next thing in hand or after you've taken your fill and are ready to move on. In Tesla's case, I think both are true. If a hunter goes out, learns out how to kill an animal, and then teaches everyone else in the tribe how to do the same, he is shooting himself in the foot because he is no longer useful. The tribe can get their own food and his specialization is no longer special. So he dies off. Unless, he's ready to retire the hunting business and/or holds the monopoly for creating the weapons. In Musk's case, he seems more interested in what SpaceX is doing and just built the largest electric car battery factory. It's amazingly philanthropic and evil genius at the same fucking time!
- gfodor 12y ago
  Your argument only makes sense if you ignore the fact that Tesla is a company made up of a large number of employees, not literally Elon Musk personally designing, building, and selling electric cars.
- ahomescu1 12y ago
  > If a hunter goes out, learns out how to kill an animal, and then teaches everyone else in the tribe how to do the same, he is shooting himself in the foot because he is no longer useful. The tribe can get their own food and his specialization is no longer special. So he dies off. Unless, he's ready to retire the hunting business and/or holds the monopoly for creating the weapons. This ignores competitive and first-mover advantages. Maybe he's the best hunter (because of experience or talent), or maybe no one else wants or is able to be a hunter (especially if it's dangerous or physically-demanding). Essentially, you're arguing that the sole hunter should keep a strong grip on the hunting monopoly by keeping everyone ignorant. In practice, this never works out well.
crusso 12y ago
The thing about capitalism, and our dismal history with capitalism-at-large, the "assume the other party is a shitbag" idea is so fundamentally ingrained in our cultural What's that got to do with Capitalism? Correct me if I'm making a straw man, but the alternative to capitalism is to remove negotiation from individual interactions by implementing more State-heavy mechanisms like Communism. Isn't creating a crap-ton of government bureaucracy, rules and regulations to tell people exactly how to live and interact with each other institutionalizing the idea that people are shitbags and shouldn't be allowed the freedom to behave freely? I liked your original HN post and tend to be similarly disappointed in the lack of giving some people like Musk his due for trying to do the right thing... not to mention the nit-picking posts that assume that Musk and his people are too mentally deficient to properly allow use of their patents.
- deleted 12y ago
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- 21echoes 12y ago
  There are plenty of alternatives to Capitalism that do not involve State-heavy mechanisms. For instance, in Communism, despite your assertion to the contrary, there is actually no state at all.
  - cgh 12y ago
    Can you name a historical example where such a system has been successfully implemented?
    - deleted 12y ago
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    - 21echoes 12y ago
      All cultures prior to the invention of the modern state. Basically all current "native" cultures, including but in no sense limited to: the Bemba, the Nuer, the Iroquois, Polynesians, Melanesians, etc. etc. etc. Almost all day to day interactions (familial, friendly, etc.). And that's also honestly not relevant to the discussion at hand. OP stated "the alternative to capitalism is to remove negotiation from individual interactions by implementing more State-heavy mechanisms like Communism" and asked if (s)he was making a straw man. I responded that (s)he was on many levels -- there are plenty of alternatives to Capitalism other than Communism, and Communism is also the opposite of a "state-heavy mechanism" given that it literally has no state.
cubancigar11 12y ago
"I believe the current skepticism around Silicon Valley's "Make The World a Better Place" mentality is deeply rooted in historical anxiety about institutional capitalism." I am sorry, but that statement shows misunderstanding the issue at such level it is hard for me take his argument as something based on facts. No. The skepticism around Silicon Valley has always been because of its coziness with the gub'mint. From internet to Siri, DARPA funds large parts of our research. And when this research reaches the public via SV, it automatically divides people into two groups - those who can use it and those who have been replaced. The group which can trump this research, though, keeps disappearing. It doesn't, by definition, follow the principals of capitalism. That institution in 'institutional capitalism' is the government and it cannot be whitewashed over.
highCs 12y ago
In the prisoners dilemna, you know the outcomes - mostly because the game has a short life span. In life, you don't know the outcomes since the game has no end. So you never know if you've ultimately chosen the right solution. It's all about your own moral at some point.
MarcusVorenus 12y ago
You are being melodramatic. There is no anti-Tesla sentiment, at least here on HN. People were simply asking why didn't Tesla release the patents under an irrevocable, royalty-free defensive patent license instead of just blogging about it, which is a perfectly legitimate concern. Also optimism has never been as high as it is now with all this talk about full automation of the economy and people living happily ever after with their guaranteed basic income.
hawkharris 12y ago
Interesting article, but the font is very difficult to read. I had to change it using the Web Inspector before I could finish reading.
deleted 12y ago
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yomritoyj 12y ago
The author is seriously mistaken about game theory. The Nash Equilibrium requires every player to be maximizing their payoffs given what the other players are doing. But game theory itself does not say what the nature of the payoffs are: there is no problem in modelling altruistic players who attach a high payoff to outcomes which are good for everyone and low payoffs to outcomes which benefit only themselves. The Pareto Optimal is not an outcome which is best for both, since the whole point of this concept is to avoid giving a definition of "best for both". Rather it is an outcome from which no player can be made better off without making some other player worse off. So, for example, for two greedy people sharing a cake, any division of the cake, including one which gives the entire cake to one person, is Pareto optimal. Anyone seriously interested in understanding what game theory really says and avoiding superficial mistakes in its interpretation should read at least the first chapter of Binmore's 'Playing for Real'.
- robbrown451 12y ago
  I think when you allow for altruistic players, the core insights you get from game theory tend to vanish. I think the author had that part mostly right, actually.
  - yomritoyj 12y ago
    But if you really are a selfish player, and you have somehow persuaded the other player to trust you and play "deny" then you should definitely play "confess" to maximize your payoff. With selfish players there is no way to move to ("deny","deny") in a one-shot Prisoners' Dilemma. Cultural change cannot help unless it amounts to a change in payoffs. [The story would have been different in a coordination game with multiple Pareto-ranked equilibria where a change in beliefs can move you from a bad equilibrium to a good equilibrium.]
  - Symmetry 12y ago
    In the case of a perfectly selfless person playing with a selfish person yes, that is a place where game theory ceases to be useful. But real altruists are imperfect, and have somewhat different notions of utility and planning horizons. Some games cease to be interesting but others turn from pure conflict to interesting games. In fact, most of the examples I remember from The Strategy of Conflict are among groups that generally mutually altruistic, like parent and child or soldiers fighting on the same side in a war. Of course, games played among roughly altruistic players tend to have much better outcomes...
ajsharp 12y ago
I enjoyed your post. I have a couple of thoughts / suggestions for you. I got the impression that the underlying motivation for writing the post, and tactic you used for justifying your positions was largely in response to what I would consider the overly myopic hacker news user base. That is, disproportionately white, male, curmudgeoney programmers. I sympathize with your frustration, but urge you not to let their world-view cloud yours, or cause you to search for complicated answers to simple questions. An example of what I mean: > I believe the current skepticism around Silicon Valley's "Make The World a Better Place" mentality is deeply rooted in historical anxiety about institutional capitalism. On this point, I urge you to consider a much simpler explanation: that people are skeptical because there is much to be skeptical of. People like Musk are a rare breed in Silicon Valley. Today's tech "entrepreneur" rarely looks like Elon Musk, someone who genuinely seems to want to do good things for the world. The skeptisism exists because there are a lot of startups doing plain silly things, masked in global do-goodery marketing narrative. Startups are the new gold rush, today's investment banking. But the west coast has much different cultural norms towards opulent wealth than does the east coast. Put simply, we like to hide it out here, they like to flaunt it out there. Thus, "we're making the world a better place" instead of something like The Wolf of Wall Street. Still, I enjoyed your post and your choice of using macro-economic theory as a lens through which to view this. Thanks for writing.
- hindsightbias 12y ago
  Yes, I'd like to see the evidence that someone like Musk, Wozniak, and maybe arguably Jobs, are not just outliers. As for his mention of the WWW, I don't credit the valley for all that and wonder if Vint Cerf has emoted about his mentality when coding TCP/IP. > cultural norms Not sure about that, unless you consider it a very recent 'value.' There was quite a bit of flaunting during the dot-com era.
  - krmmalik 12y ago
    I know of one person personally and by extension one or two more that are very much like Elon Musk. Joel Gascoigne from Buffer for example. He's taking a very similar approach to things, especially if you look at how transparent he is about himself and his company. They've set a lot of waves in their space.
nickbauman 12y ago
Really great post. There's another angle here that has implications around the notion that the Nash Equilibrium is the norm: Path dependence. Getting out of this mess may be less possible because of that notion because how we can proceed is path dependent upon all of us thinking that, underneath it all, Musk is also a shitbag. We've got a lot of problems facing humankind right now. The stakes get higher every day. Whatever it is we have to do to solve the toughest one we need to do _whatever it takes._
autokad 12y ago
"Of course, this applies way beyond Tesla. I believe the current skepticism around Silicon Valley's "Make The World a Better Place" mentality is deeply rooted in historical anxiety about institutional capitalism." silicon valley really needs to get over itself. the only thing different about silicon valley and other companies is that silicon valley is to naive to realize they are just like every other company, no matter how much they doth protest. companies dont set out to make the world a worse place for the most part, even hated companies like BP have good intentions. but if you want to be a publically traded company, and if you want to make money, you have to make profit. i mentioned on HN before that its funny how Amazon is loved and Walmart is loathed. all the reasons why walmart is loathed Amazon has in spades. i also feel your view on how capitalism works in the western world. in fact, it has always been a prisoners dilemma / golden rule do onto others as you would have them do onto you economy. thats actually a reason why capitalism has worked so well for the west, and one of the reasons why it took longer in places like China.
recursive 12y ago
> The Prisoner's Dilemma demonstrates that a Nash equilibrium solution is not always Pareto optimal. The "confess-confess" solution is the Nash equilibrium. You will always be better off screwing the other person over, whether they are honest or dishonest. The "deny-deny" solution is Pareto optimal. If both parties can somehow trust each other, they will both be better off selecting this solution. This part is very confusing to me. I've always understood that deny was the screw-over move in the prisoner's dilemma. But this segment suggests that confessing is a local optimum. Have I misunderstood the prisoner's dilemma all these years?
- haihaibye 12y ago
  >> deny was the screw-over move in the prisoner's dilemma. But this segment suggests that confessing is a local optimum. The competition is between you and the other prisoner, not vs the state. Confessing screws over the other prisoner.
rowyourboat 12y ago
I believe the current skepticism around Silicon Valley's "Make The World a Better Place" mentality is deeply rooted in historical anxiety about institutional capitalism. OT rant here: I don't think this is related to Tesla opening up at all. "We make the World a Better Place" is self-important bullshit in 99.9% of cases. The most likely outcome is that what you are doing has no measurable impact on the "goodness" of the world. In most cases, what you are doing matters only to a tiny fraction of the world's population. "Making the World a Better Place" is simply self-important hyperbole to the extreme.
- rowyourboat 12y ago
  Addendum: The fact that your fancy new app is only for a tiny fraction of the world's population is totally fine. Most products are like that. Just don't pretend it's anything more than it is.
WhoBeI 12y ago
Got to love this. I'm reading the comments on the earlier thread and thinking 'shit, people are really negative'. I refresh the page and this thing shows up. Nice to see that at least on HN people possess Second Thoughts or would this be Thirds Thoughts?
bindley 12y ago
I wonder if a foundation of multiculturalism is why America's business culture is so distrusting.
pmarca 12y ago
Great piece.
osmala 12y ago
Comment to claim in that large scale democracy automatically becomes more partisan. In large scale democracy partisanship is not necessity. American system has some specific methods to cause it, compared to Finland where it isn't really a problem. And its really these TWO issues that make the american politics more partisan than rest of the world. A) Election system is strongly geared towards creating two party. When new party has gained enough support it replaces one of the previous two parties at the control, and there is new TWO parties which compete each other. Compare that to systems in which allows smaller parties to get seats. For examble in Finland there are 3-4 big parties that total 60-70% of seats and rest goes to smaller parties. That means to pass anything you pretty much have to have two big parties agreeing on the matter and either third big agreeing or some small parties agreeing. B) Executive branch is Winner takes all. In Finland the parliament(legislative branch) selects Executive branch and because no party has half or near half seats there is need to be enough parties agreeing on the matter. So if you are REALLY uncompromising you NEVER get to be part of executive branch EVEN if you become the biggest party of elections, since you didn't get more than half the seats anyway in multiparty system. The biggest party gets first attempt to create the cabinet, but they still need to get enough others onboard. The cabinet pretty much needs majority of legislative branch to support it. They need a program which over half the legislative branch supports and usually give seats in the cabinet to enough other parties that have over 50% of parliament. If biggest party fails to create agreement of the program the responsibility of trying to form the cabinet goes to next largest party. And if all else fails parliament may agree a minority government OR even putting some professional bureaucrats instead of politicians in top positions of executive branch. Both are extremely rare situations in here.
zby 12y ago
There is a body of literature on the subject how self governing groups escape the tragedy of the commons. For example: http://www.amazon.com/Governing-Commons-Evolution-Institutions-Collective/dp/0521405998 http://www.amazon.com/Governing-Commons-Evolution-Institutio... This is all empirical studies.
hueving 12y ago
The author makes some big statements about what Elon is doing and then wonders why everyone isn't guzzling the kool-aid like the author. It has nothing to do with the prisoners dilemma. First, there is a large portion of the population that doesn't believe global warming is an issue. Second, there is another large population that doesn't believe global warming can be stopped by a slow transition to electric cars. Third, there is a large majority of the population that can't afford a 90k luxury car so they fail to see how Tesla will revolutionize the world. This is compacted by the fact that the batteries will need to be replaced in 6-10 years and it will likely cost 20k+. These cars are out of reach for the majority of Americans it's not really going to reduce CO2 output by anything significant enough in time to matter. Fourth, Elon made a fat stack of cash selling PayPal to Ebay. With that being his primary historical success story, it doesn't make it sound like he is doing just what is optimal for humanity. SpaceX is great for space exploration, but that's not really optimal for humanity considering our current problems. The article had a nice write up on pareto optimal solutions and the prisoner's dilemma but they are completely irrelevant to the skepticism observed here.
- avz 12y ago
  You've alluded to "things which are optimal for humanity" and "our current problems". Could you elaborate? What do you think is optimal for humanity? Which current problems are more significant than planetary-level challenges like global warming and confinement of our specifies to a single planet? These put the existence of our civilization at risk. I would really love to hear which other problems are more significant than those.
  - hueving 12y ago
    Cut the melodrama. Your post reeks of first-world privilege. Confinement of our species to a single planet is much lower priority than the suffering caused by violent governments, starvation, diseases, and drug problems. Colonizing another planet might be optimal for spreading of our species, but it does little to reduce the suffering here. Global warming is a problem. However, making luxury electric cars is a drop in the bucket compared to convincing China and India to crack down on things like unfiltered coal power plants.
lsalamon 12y ago
Testa try new battery design now: CarbonBattery The Ryden dual carbon battery developed by Power Japan Plus is balancing the energy storage equation of performance, cost, reliability and safety. http://powerjapanplus.com/ http://powerjapanplus.com/
noodlehead 12y ago
Anti-Tesla sentiment certainly wouldn't have anything to do with Tesla's defrauding taxpayers, would it? http://doubtingisthinking.blogspot.com.es/2013/10/tesla-carbon-credits-ongoing-scandal.html http://doubtingisthinking.blogspot.com.es/2013/10/tesla-carb...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
smackfu 12y ago
I'm just generally skeptical of Musk. He is great at putting out blog posts that people don't treat like the press releases they are.
snarfy 12y ago
It's a lack of leadership, and it's endemic to society. The Prisoner's Dilemma highlights this. Trust on both sides isn't the only Pareto optimal solution. A leader dictates the correct outcome and does not require trusting a subordinate's decision. If both sides were leaders, they would reach the optimal outcome. Elon Musk is one of the few leaders in the world.
dabernathy89 12y ago
> under the assumption the other player is a selfish dickhead. In a capitalist environment like America's, with no social controls or other factors besides ruthless logic, this is the default behavior. Sigh. One of the most prominent features of capitalism is that it relies on mutually beneficial exchanges.
- dropit_sphere 12y ago
  That's the theory. The implementation must take into account search costs and due diligence costs. In a low-trust society due diligence costs rise, dramatically shrinking the number of possible exchanges, which then raises search costs, shrinking possible exchanges all the more.
- ep103 12y ago
  Ideal capitalism. Much of modern capitalism is about getting the person on the other side of the table into a desperate enough situation, that they have to take your 'mutually beneficial' offer. I present as Exhibit A Greenspan's speeches on lowering worker mobility during his tenure.
ntoshev 12y ago
Just having the right culture is not a solution. You can have a culture that routinely goes for Pareto optimality. If that's not an evolutionary stable strategy, the moment you introduce agents that choose the Nash equilibrium instead, they would start winning and gaining ground. I wonder about a different solution though: can you design a mechanism that transforms the Nash equilibrium of a Prisoner's dilemma game into the Pareto optimal outcome? Something similar to escrow? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy
typingduck 12y ago
Great article. Very well articulated. If you haven't seen it already, there's a BBC series called "The Trap" which raises interesting questions too around game theory reflecting human behaviour versus game theory driving human behaviour through modern capitalism.
markbnj 12y ago
I'm willing to overlook that horrible font because I learned what a "Keynesian Beauty Contest" is. Excellent article.
rooodini 12y ago
> between 1 and 100 I think this should be between 0 and 100 (for the Nash equilibrium to work, anyway.)
wtbob 12y ago
I think he's making a grave error to attribute mistrust to capitalism; in any other system dishonesty is also possible.
Liz0 12y ago
So first off I also want to say I found this a great read -- I studied poly-sci and business and work in the tech scene, and when they all collide it gets really interesting. This raised a lot questions for me though. I was trying to draw the payoff matrix for adopting Tesla technology. How would this look? How to estimate relative gains for each player? I was hoping he'd go through it a-la Khan Academy.
AndrewCoyle 12y ago
Individuals and corporations are not rational machines. Things are much more complex then an equation.
x0054 12y ago
Patent discussion aside, I just want to point out that battery powered cars are NOT the solution to global warming, at least not at the current state of technology. Aside from all the environmental damage involved in producing the lithium cells them selves, you have to also consider that to charge those cells we are still burning cola and then transmitting that power over an incredibly inefficient, almost 100 year old power grid (in US). In fact, given the environmental damage from production of a new car combined with environmental damage from production of lithium batteries, combined with CO2 emissions from the cola burning power plants and nuclear waste from the nuclear power plants, I would argue that the earth is better off if you were to drive an older F150 pickup truck for another 300k miles, rather than buy a new Tesla. If you have an option though, you should choose something more efficient. But overall, I just wanted to point out to anyone who is honestly concerned about global warming. Driving your current car for longer (assuming it's reasonably economical), and investing the money into fixing it up and getting more miles out of it is way better environmentally than buying a new car. Remamber, repair > reuse > recycle > replace.
- quotient 12y ago
  The idea is that battery powered cars will become more prevalent and effectively cleaner as the electrical energy used to power them is drawn from more renewable sources, rather than from fossil fuels.
- nawitus 12y ago
  Your point should've been "transportation emissions are only a small share of total CO2 emissions". If you want to reduce CO2 emissions, you should start by becoming a vegan.
  - falcolas 12y ago
    > If you want to reduce CO2 emissions, you should start by becoming a vegan. I'm going to regret this, I have no doubt. Vegan != no carbon footprint. In fact, I would imagine that when compared to a typical vegetarian diet, it is less carbon efficient. Isolation from animal (by)products means that food bound for vegans typically requires specialized handling and processing. Loss of efficiency gained from the economies of scale. Limited food processing means that food can not be easily stockpiled and distributed. This results in more frequent but smaller food shipments - the opposite direction you want to go for efficiency. The small intersection with the average person's diet also means that vegan foodstuffs don't gain any production efficiency when compared to, say, a vegetarian's diet. All of that, and vegan-bound foodstuffs still have to be planted, fertilized, harvested and transported.
xtx23 12y ago
making anti-tesla looks like supporting everything that is wrong with establishment and patent system is exactly the kind of connection he wants people to make. Just another PR gimmick there.
Q6T46nT668w6i3m 12y ago
While a Homo economicus plays the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a Homo sapien plays Calvinball.
jarradhope 12y ago
Relies too heavily on Prisoners Dilemma, should read Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom

480 points by natural219 12y ago

skepticalone 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
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greatzebu 12y ago

> A "Pareto optimal" solution is one which, given all the possibilities of action, produces the best outcome for both parties (with some negotiable surplus). This isn't quite right. In a Pareto optimal solution, there's no way to improve things for one party without making them worse for another party, but there's no guarantee that the outcome is good for everyone. "I get everything, you get nothing" is a Pareto-optimal way of diving things up.

AnthonyMouse 12y ago
That still isn't quite right. Pareto optimal better describes transitions than states. A state can be described as Pareto optimal only in the sense that there are no Pareto optimal transitions out of it. So for example, in prisoner's dilemma, all of the states are Pareto optimal because none of the moves are. No matter what anyone does, somebody will be worse off than the alternative. As another example, "I get everything, you get nothing" isn't necessarily Pareto optimal because there could be something non-rivalrous that the person getting nothing could have without depriving the person getting everything of it.
- araftery 12y ago
  Agreed. Seems like the author is looking for something more along the lines of "socially optimal." Also seems like he mixed up which outcome is Nash and which is socially optimal. (Deny, Deny) = (Defect, Defect) = Nash Eq. (Confess, Confess) = (Cooperate, Cooperate) = socially optimal.

deleted 12y ago

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viraptor 12y ago
If you want to just serve this one page quickly, you can take the result and save it as static page. Add a specific routing rule just for the url you submitted. (the page looks completely static anyway) You can play with varnish once you don't have thousands of people who will actually want to read the contents you posted :) (a.k.a don't upgrade anything the day of the release)
- natural219 12y ago
  Haha. It's static. I've never actually written anything that anybody's read before, so I have no idea what point I need to start looking into a cache.
  - viraptor 12y ago
    If it's already static (ie. served from a generated static file), cache won't help you much (if at all). All reads will already come from the memory. Unless you have some crazy routing rules in the webserver, varnish is unlikely to be faster than direct serving. some old comparison for static files: http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/apache-vs-nginx-vs-varnish-vs-gwan/ http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/apache-vs-nginx-vs-v...
    - natural219 12y ago
      Thanks, this is a great read. I feared since my nginx configuration looks like this[1], something isn't being cached properly in memory, but it looks like I'm being overly paranoid. [1]https://www.dropbox.com/s/x2k7ms057xh7zkm/Screenshot%202014-06-12%2017.21.38.png https://www.dropbox.com/s/x2k7ms057xh7zkm/Screenshot%202014-...
chollida1 12y ago
> OP here. I'm working with a 1GB DigitalOcean box. Didn't expect hacker news haha. Umm, you posted this article yourself to hn. You also plastered links to hn on the article. It's very hard to believe you in this instance:) Having said that, great article, keep them coming!

carsongross 12y ago

The only hope is cultural change. The only hope is cultural trust, and the only way to achieve that is to allow like-minded individuals to separate themselves into autonomous political units. This is dangerous thinking Chris, if you start following these thoughts through to the end, rather than spinning off into happy-clappy "change the world's heart" wishing...

istorical 12y ago
Did you not see the link at the end of the article to Balaji's talk on exit? (Genuine question. If you haven't checked out that talk, its about opting out as an option for pursuing change and it sounds like what you're alluding to!)
- msutherl 12y ago
  Like he said, dangerous thoughts. Think warring city-states. Think StarCraft.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
Or you could just learn to live with people who aren't exactly like you. You know, like everyone on the planet except for wealthy and reactionary enclaves of the United States.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  That is stupendously naïve.
- carsongross 12y ago
  Everyone? http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/oneyoungworld/2014/06/05/south-africas-rape-crisis-2/ http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/oneyoungworld/2014/06/05/sout...
Florin_Andrei 12y ago
> The only hope is cultural trust, and the only way to achieve that is to allow like-minded individuals to separate themselves into autonomous political units ...and the reason why you're separating is because you don't trust anyone else. Nice.

nipponese 12y ago

David: What is the primary goal? Joshua/WOPR: You should know, Professor. You programmed me. David: Oh, c'mon. What is the primary goal? Joshua/WOPR: To win the game.

darkmighty 12y ago

Playing devils advocate, I'd say sure, it sucks that some (or most) people are selfish dickheads leading to mutually degrading situations. But it would suck almost as much to always be at mercy of your competitors good will (that he won't arbitrarily screw you, leave unpunished and with a better outcome), even if it happens sparsely. The obvious solution to this fabricated game theory dilemma is regulation, which is nothing more than eliminating those scenarios which are undesirable for society altogether. Not only it avoids the risk of being screwed, or the costs associated with being screwed, or the loss of optimality of outcomes -- but most importantly it simplifies greatly the game. Markets are quite complex already and the added constraint of having to think hard about your oponents and consider all the scenarios to make sure you're not screwing them is enormous. I think this behavior is distinct from bad faith, it's just a matter of responsibility and scope. This, to me, is ideal capitalistic behavior: oblivious, but with good faith (not trying to 'unfairly' or 'destructively' bring down your opponent) -- and it should come with swift regulations and laws flexible enough to punish edge cases. We have a truly unrecognized gift as a species: morality. Not because it's cute or honorable (that would be a circular assessment), but because it allows us to reach those Pareto optimal spots. We just have to use it in proper settings, with proper rules.

blackskad 12y ago
In this story, it's regulation that has put some companies at the merci of competitors. Small Startup Y has to hope that Big Corp X wants to license a patent for a fair $ amount. Startup Y has no way to negotiate a large fee down to an acceptable level, pay the expensive licenses or fight in court if they ignore the patent. Considering two companies with patents, you get the Nash equilibrium where both companies go to court for patent infringement (assuming the plaintiff always wins). The payoff matrix could look like this, where the numbers are the changes in profits in %. | court | not court --------------------------------- court | -5 \ -5 | -15 \ 10 ----------|---------------------- not court | 10 \ -15 | 1 \ 1 --------------------------------- Assume the profit of the previous year is 14%. - If no company goes to court, both profits grow slightly with 1% to 15%. - If one company goes to court, and the other doesn't, the plaintiff's profit increases with 10% to 24% and the defendant's drops with 15% to -1% (placing it a loss). - If both companies go to court, the profits of both companies drop with 5% to 9%. If you want a real-life example of this situation, just look at the lawsuits between Samsung & Apple. Probably the only case where they'll evolve to the pareto optimal solution, is when patents no longer exist at all. A world without patents would allow companies to win customers based on pure attractiveness and features, not by getting competition banned. Note that this isn't the same as giving your key designs away for free. It means I could reverse engineer an iphone touchscreen and create a compatible version, without being sued by anyone. Apple would still have the early mover advantage with existing customers; the consumer would have more/better/cheaper choices and i would have a more attractive product. (Note that this might not be the case for other sectors, like pharma, where it costs a lot to develop a new drug from scratch, rather than the cheaper additive innovations in the tech sector).

matnewton85 12y ago

This article expresses perfectly why: a) I'm very cautious about working with American companies b) Why my contractors nearly all bitch about working with American companies (I use a lot of contractors on oDesk and they tell me the same thing). America's great but the lack of trust in business is the one thing that really grates on me.

smutticus 12y ago
As someone who has done lots of work for both EU and US companies I agree. The amount of times American companies just say "trust us" versus EU companies definitely grates on me. The US is not all terrible, but there is tons of work force exploitation going on in the US. Especially in the bay area.

stringbeans 12y ago

really like this article... but your font (or font weight) hurts my eyes :(

ars 12y ago
Same here, I had to disable the font-family css command in order to read it.

nostromo 12y ago

I've been thinking of patents as nukes during the Cold War lately. Superpowers (US/USSR, Apple/Google) acquire very large nuclear/patent arsenals under the guise of protection/defense. These arsenals are relatively cheap for superpowers to build, but they are expensive for small states (small countries/small businesses) to acquire. The US and USSR were roughly equivalent in their arsenals so it made little sense for either party to act offensively. However, the implied power behind the arsenals gave them a lot of power when dealing with smaller actors. The superpowers benefit greatly from acquiring these arsenals. Even without using them publicly, the threat can always be used behind closed doors (as Jobs has been shown to do). But there's a third actor; the most universally feared actor: terrorists/patent trolls. These actors behave only offensively because they have nothing to defend. These actors are best poised to benefit from nukes and patents and can send an otherwise orderly system into chaos. Anyway, just a fun but flawed analogy to play with in your noodle. :)

houseofshards 12y ago
As a consequence, nuclear scientists/physicists of the Cold War era are analogous to patent lawyers today. Kind of sad don't you think ? :)
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  That's the point where the analogy breaks down though, because the actors in the patent case are private actors rather than sovereigns. So if you e.g. abolish software patents the whole problem disappears, but nobody can "abolish" nuclear weapons because they're a consequence of the laws of physics rather than the laws of the United States. If humans had the power to amend the laws of physics to make nuclear weapons impossible and yet nuclear physicists lobbied against it, then they would be in the same position as patent lawyers.
- hhg_az 12y ago
  not quite. The scientists didnt like what they were doing and were driven by making sure that thier side was best equipped. Patent lawyers just make money. Go to trial? Pay up (even if you loose) Need a new patent? Pay up. Want to enforce your existing patent? Pay up. Want to check to see if someone is infringing on your patents? Pay up. The lawyers, more or less are neutral benefactors of the patent wars.

robbrown451 12y ago

This explains, at the very least, why rampant partisanship is an inevitability in a large Democracy, despite it being worse off for everybody (including politicians themselves). Instead of saying "in a large Democracy" it should say "in a large Democracy which uses plurality voting." Some voting systems (for instance Condorcet compatible ones) do not encourage partisanship in the same way as plurality does. In fact other systems actually encourage cooperation and favor candidates that are more in the center. And I think that points to a flaw in the conclusion of the article: attempting to directly change human nature (or culture, as the OP suggests) is a fool's errand. Instead, changing the rules of a system, such that the Pareto optimal result and the Nash Equilibrium align more closely, is a much more realistic approach. And I believe that when you do set up good systems where people are rewarded for cooperating, the culture changes with it. (Regardless I think it is an excellent article and the more people who understand the Game Theory stuff he explains, the better. And I absolutely agree with his sentiment than Musk should be lauded for what he is doing rather than being met with cynicism.)

jessriedel 12y ago
> In fact other systems actually encourage cooperation and favor candidates that are more in the center. Actually, single-round winner-take-all democracy induces a race toward the middle, not polarization. (If everyone is aligned on a 1D spectrum and votes for the candidate closest to their position, then both candidates are incentivized move toward the median position.) What you're really getting at isn't the idea of polarizations versus moderation, it's voting coordination (i.e. political parties) aka collusion. Unfortunately, alternate voting systems don't eliminate collusion, they just push it to a different level (e.g. proportional representative systems still have 51% coalitions at the level of parliament). You might reasonably argue that that's a better level to put that collusion, but it's definitely not eliminated through some simple choice of voting system. If you really want to eliminate collusion and induce consensus making, you can consider "randomized parliaments". They operate in a way very analogous to the mechanism that makes poker showdowns rare. Although he chooses an unfortunate name of "quantum parliment" (since there's nothing quantum about the randomness), Aerts explains the idea well here: http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0503078 http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0503078

teawithcarl 12y ago

Thanks Chris - a superb article, deeply meaningful.

absherwin 12y ago

Reputation should solve this problem given that life is a repeated game as long as we also are able to be long-sighted. A more formal argument can be found here: http://economics.mit.edu/files/4754 http://economics.mit.edu/files/4754 That suggests the cultural problem is decline in longer-term thinking or more likely a decline in arbitrary codes of behavior without a concomitant increase in longer-term thinking that would recreate many of those same norms. American business used to place a high value on trust: "A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom. I think that is the fundamental basis of business." -J. Pierpont Morgan As another example, Warren Buffet seldom does diligence to determine an offer; he trusts those from who he buys to deal and report honestly.

babenzele 12y ago

Any company would be stupid to develop car manufacturing based on another company's held patents. But just ask your lawyer to talk to Tesla's lawyers to buy a very cheap, almost free license. Then we'll see if they're serious about this or not.

brongondwana 12y ago
Obviously you would do more than just trust a web page as a licence to the patents, but I imagine it would be hard for Tesla to win an infringement case after publishing this. This is no "Sun CEO blogs congratulating Google on android" level of plausible ambiguity.

E_Carefree 12y ago

So much win in this! Let's move together towards Musk's Pareto Optimal solution!

smutticus 12y ago

One of the inherent assumptions of neo-classical economics is that we're all selfish, rational, utility maximizing, humans. That's built into our understanding of markets and how they function. Now I understand where the author is coming from, and I agree there is a terrible lack of trust in modern America. I just don't agree that the cynical view, that all humans are untrustworthy shit-bags, is all that terrible. Cyncism causes parties to make explicit their assumptions about future behavior. We can then codify this assumed behavior in contracts. If I was a battery manufacturer and I wanted to use Tesla's patents, I would approach Tesla and ask for a contractual agreement whereby Tesla agreed not to use those patents against me. If Tesla were unwilling to enter into this sort of contractual agreement with me, I would assume they were reserving the right to later use these patents against me.

gojomo 12y ago

Author is very unfair to the "capitalist environment like America's". Our market-driven society requires, and rewards/trains, a level of trust that's less-common elsewhere. Just two data points: (1) Americans are "The Weirdest People in the World", per one review of psychological studies, in economic games. They're more willing to punish 'unfair' offers in the 'Ultimatum Game', and offer higher shares against naked self-interest in the similar 'Dictator Game'. See for more details: http://www.psmag.com/magazines/magazine-feature-story-magazines/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/ http://www.psmag.com/magazines/magazine-feature-story-magazi... (2) We've had a number of explicitly "anti-capitalist" nation-states in the last 150 years. They haven't been paragons of collective action for the greater good, or protection of the common environment. In particular, the ex-Communist societies and emigrants-from-same sometimes take a while to adjust to new economies where every stranger, government and non-government alike, isn't constantly trying to screw them under false pretense of shared-sacrifice. The actual games in "capitalist America" are only very occasionally dog-eat-dog zero-sum affairs. More often, they're iterated games rewarding not just consciously chosen cooperation but an optimistic, cooperate-by-default mindset. Politics, with its zero-sum elections and redistributions, is an exception. Its partisanship shouldn't be attributed to market processes, but to electoral/governmental ones.

guelo 12y ago

So if we could all just trust Elon Musk and never question anything about him or his companies we could save the environment, and capitalism and our culture and all of humanity? OK then.

rayiner 12y ago

The idea that the Pareto-optimal situation is the one where everyone freely copies from each other may be appropriate for the market Tesla finds itself in, but is in general directly contradicted by the actual experience of the technology industry. The experience of the technology industry is that innovation happens in periods of monopoly. That monopoly might arise from first-mover effects, network effects, lock-in effects, or IP protections (patents, copyrights, and trademarks). This has been true from Bell Labs to Xerox to Google to Facebook. Bell Labs had its heyday when AT&T was a government-sanctioned monopoly. The Xerox Alto, which pioneered the GUI, the mouse, and networking, was invented at a Xerox that had 100% of the U.S. copier industry, a few years before an antitrust consent decree forced it to license its patents to Japanese competitors, quickly destroying its marketshare.[1] If another search engine could easily copy Google's data and algorithms, they wouldn't have the money to be working on self-driving cars and AI. Facebook is a textbook example of network effects precluding perfect competition. In comparison, look at the PC industry, which is based on open standards and an OS licensed on non-discriminatory terms. What has happened to the PC? They have become commodities and innovation is essentially dead. Companies like Lenovo eke out single-digit profit margins, and nobody can afford to spend money on R&D. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox#1970s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox#1970s

thaumaturgy 12y ago
AT&T developed the transistor, but it was government pressure that prompted AT&T to release control of its patents on the invention, and it was licensees like Motorola, Texas Instruments, and Fairchild (which gave birth to Intel) that did the bulk of the work in the transistor market. AT&T wasn't even sure what to do with it; they were just looking for something better than the vacuum tube. The Alto was first built in 1973, but was used only internally at Xerox and was never made into a commercial product. Meanwhile, a loose-knit Homebrew Computer Club had among its members two guys named Steve. It was a visit to Xerox by one of them, in 1979 -- a full six years after the initial release of the Alto -- that led to the beginning of the modern graphical interface. Microsoft began developing multi-touch technology in 2001, but it was the iPhone, in 2007, that won the market. Rumors of Microsoft's wall-mounted multitouch displays predate Apple's products, but it was Apple that figured out how to get the products into customers' hands. What has happened to the PC is that it has become mature. This happens to all technologies. Modern automobiles are not very different from their 1950s counterparts -- just more refined. Refinements in PC technology however has led to things like the Raspberry Pi and a second-generation community of electronics tinkerers. Not to belabor the point, but the automobile was also patent-encumbered, and it was the development of better production techniques (the moving assembly line, by Ford), that made the automobile accessible to large numbers of people. The fundamental problem of product development is that those most suited to inventing things are usually not also those most suited to bring a product to market.

mythz 12y ago

Elon Musk's response: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/477223079421046785 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/477223079421046785 "Apparently, lots of confused media inquiries about blog title. Look, we just to make sure they don't set us up the bomb."

Lagged2Death 12y ago
It's "up us" dammit.

jleader 12y ago

Isn't the ultimate socially-optimal answer for the "guess 2/3rds of the average" game be to convince everyone to answer 0? Because 2/3rds of 0 is 0, so everyone wins.

hibikir 12y ago

Trust is not a binary decision, it is a continuum. And within that continuum, the US is way further to being a trusting society than not. When we sign a contract, we have an expectation that it will be fulfilled, and that if it isn't, the courts will work, albeit slowly. You get a job, and you tend to get paid. Go in a cab, not expect to get robbed, or murdered. If you hire an employee, you expect him to at least attempt to do his job. Is someone does a good job, there's a chance there's some reward behind it. There's a reason Southern Europe has worse economic outcomes, and that's trust. You get even worse results as you move towards the development world. And many parts of South America make Southern Europe seem downright trustworthy. It's important to have a high trust society, but it's really more of a systemic trust than anything: About having negative consequences to breaking trust, not about taking leaps of faith to trust companies.

sergiosgc 12y ago
> There's a reason Southern Europe has worse economic outcomes, and that's trust. I have no idea where you got this impression from. It is wrong, though. I did business in several southern Europe countries, and you can seal a deal with a handshake and be confident it'll go through.
- ahomescu1 12y ago
  > It is wrong, though. As an Eastern European, I think he got it right. From my own experience, there's a huge difference in trustworthiness between the Western and other countries/regions. I have tons of stories to support this, but here's just one: in supermarkets in my own country, you're not allowed to walk in with a backpack (you have to seal it outside or leave it in a locker); I've never had to do that in the US.
Symmetry 12y ago
We don't have any particular reason to think that trust is high among corporate executives though.

E_Carefree 12y ago

If Tesla did this in the early game, would they still be in the position they are today? I think this open source movement works but only if you have the next thing in hand or after you've taken your fill and are ready to move on. In Tesla's case, I think both are true. If a hunter goes out, learns out how to kill an animal, and then teaches everyone else in the tribe how to do the same, he is shooting himself in the foot because he is no longer useful. The tribe can get their own food and his specialization is no longer special. So he dies off. Unless, he's ready to retire the hunting business and/or holds the monopoly for creating the weapons. In Musk's case, he seems more interested in what SpaceX is doing and just built the largest electric car battery factory. It's amazingly philanthropic and evil genius at the same fucking time!

gfodor 12y ago
Your argument only makes sense if you ignore the fact that Tesla is a company made up of a large number of employees, not literally Elon Musk personally designing, building, and selling electric cars.
ahomescu1 12y ago
> If a hunter goes out, learns out how to kill an animal, and then teaches everyone else in the tribe how to do the same, he is shooting himself in the foot because he is no longer useful. The tribe can get their own food and his specialization is no longer special. So he dies off. Unless, he's ready to retire the hunting business and/or holds the monopoly for creating the weapons. This ignores competitive and first-mover advantages. Maybe he's the best hunter (because of experience or talent), or maybe no one else wants or is able to be a hunter (especially if it's dangerous or physically-demanding). Essentially, you're arguing that the sole hunter should keep a strong grip on the hunting monopoly by keeping everyone ignorant. In practice, this never works out well.

crusso 12y ago

The thing about capitalism, and our dismal history with capitalism-at-large, the "assume the other party is a shitbag" idea is so fundamentally ingrained in our cultural What's that got to do with Capitalism? Correct me if I'm making a straw man, but the alternative to capitalism is to remove negotiation from individual interactions by implementing more State-heavy mechanisms like Communism. Isn't creating a crap-ton of government bureaucracy, rules and regulations to tell people exactly how to live and interact with each other institutionalizing the idea that people are shitbags and shouldn't be allowed the freedom to behave freely? I liked your original HN post and tend to be similarly disappointed in the lack of giving some people like Musk his due for trying to do the right thing... not to mention the nit-picking posts that assume that Musk and his people are too mentally deficient to properly allow use of their patents.

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21echoes 12y ago
There are plenty of alternatives to Capitalism that do not involve State-heavy mechanisms. For instance, in Communism, despite your assertion to the contrary, there is actually no state at all.
- cgh 12y ago
  Can you name a historical example where such a system has been successfully implemented?
  - deleted 12y ago
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  - 21echoes 12y ago
    All cultures prior to the invention of the modern state. Basically all current "native" cultures, including but in no sense limited to: the Bemba, the Nuer, the Iroquois, Polynesians, Melanesians, etc. etc. etc. Almost all day to day interactions (familial, friendly, etc.). And that's also honestly not relevant to the discussion at hand. OP stated "the alternative to capitalism is to remove negotiation from individual interactions by implementing more State-heavy mechanisms like Communism" and asked if (s)he was making a straw man. I responded that (s)he was on many levels -- there are plenty of alternatives to Capitalism other than Communism, and Communism is also the opposite of a "state-heavy mechanism" given that it literally has no state.

cubancigar11 12y ago

"I believe the current skepticism around Silicon Valley's "Make The World a Better Place" mentality is deeply rooted in historical anxiety about institutional capitalism." I am sorry, but that statement shows misunderstanding the issue at such level it is hard for me take his argument as something based on facts. No. The skepticism around Silicon Valley has always been because of its coziness with the gub'mint. From internet to Siri, DARPA funds large parts of our research. And when this research reaches the public via SV, it automatically divides people into two groups - those who can use it and those who have been replaced. The group which can trump this research, though, keeps disappearing. It doesn't, by definition, follow the principals of capitalism. That institution in 'institutional capitalism' is the government and it cannot be whitewashed over.

highCs 12y ago

In the prisoners dilemna, you know the outcomes - mostly because the game has a short life span. In life, you don't know the outcomes since the game has no end. So you never know if you've ultimately chosen the right solution. It's all about your own moral at some point.

MarcusVorenus 12y ago

You are being melodramatic. There is no anti-Tesla sentiment, at least here on HN. People were simply asking why didn't Tesla release the patents under an irrevocable, royalty-free defensive patent license instead of just blogging about it, which is a perfectly legitimate concern. Also optimism has never been as high as it is now with all this talk about full automation of the economy and people living happily ever after with their guaranteed basic income.

hawkharris 12y ago

Interesting article, but the font is very difficult to read. I had to change it using the Web Inspector before I could finish reading.

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yomritoyj 12y ago

The author is seriously mistaken about game theory. The Nash Equilibrium requires every player to be maximizing their payoffs given what the other players are doing. But game theory itself does not say what the nature of the payoffs are: there is no problem in modelling altruistic players who attach a high payoff to outcomes which are good for everyone and low payoffs to outcomes which benefit only themselves. The Pareto Optimal is not an outcome which is best for both, since the whole point of this concept is to avoid giving a definition of "best for both". Rather it is an outcome from which no player can be made better off without making some other player worse off. So, for example, for two greedy people sharing a cake, any division of the cake, including one which gives the entire cake to one person, is Pareto optimal. Anyone seriously interested in understanding what game theory really says and avoiding superficial mistakes in its interpretation should read at least the first chapter of Binmore's 'Playing for Real'.

robbrown451 12y ago
I think when you allow for altruistic players, the core insights you get from game theory tend to vanish. I think the author had that part mostly right, actually.
- yomritoyj 12y ago
  But if you really are a selfish player, and you have somehow persuaded the other player to trust you and play "deny" then you should definitely play "confess" to maximize your payoff. With selfish players there is no way to move to ("deny","deny") in a one-shot Prisoners' Dilemma. Cultural change cannot help unless it amounts to a change in payoffs. [The story would have been different in a coordination game with multiple Pareto-ranked equilibria where a change in beliefs can move you from a bad equilibrium to a good equilibrium.]
- Symmetry 12y ago
  In the case of a perfectly selfless person playing with a selfish person yes, that is a place where game theory ceases to be useful. But real altruists are imperfect, and have somewhat different notions of utility and planning horizons. Some games cease to be interesting but others turn from pure conflict to interesting games. In fact, most of the examples I remember from The Strategy of Conflict are among groups that generally mutually altruistic, like parent and child or soldiers fighting on the same side in a war. Of course, games played among roughly altruistic players tend to have much better outcomes...

ajsharp 12y ago

I enjoyed your post. I have a couple of thoughts / suggestions for you. I got the impression that the underlying motivation for writing the post, and tactic you used for justifying your positions was largely in response to what I would consider the overly myopic hacker news user base. That is, disproportionately white, male, curmudgeoney programmers. I sympathize with your frustration, but urge you not to let their world-view cloud yours, or cause you to search for complicated answers to simple questions. An example of what I mean: > I believe the current skepticism around Silicon Valley's "Make The World a Better Place" mentality is deeply rooted in historical anxiety about institutional capitalism. On this point, I urge you to consider a much simpler explanation: that people are skeptical because there is much to be skeptical of. People like Musk are a rare breed in Silicon Valley. Today's tech "entrepreneur" rarely looks like Elon Musk, someone who genuinely seems to want to do good things for the world. The skeptisism exists because there are a lot of startups doing plain silly things, masked in global do-goodery marketing narrative. Startups are the new gold rush, today's investment banking. But the west coast has much different cultural norms towards opulent wealth than does the east coast. Put simply, we like to hide it out here, they like to flaunt it out there. Thus, "we're making the world a better place" instead of something like The Wolf of Wall Street. Still, I enjoyed your post and your choice of using macro-economic theory as a lens through which to view this. Thanks for writing.

hindsightbias 12y ago
Yes, I'd like to see the evidence that someone like Musk, Wozniak, and maybe arguably Jobs, are not just outliers. As for his mention of the WWW, I don't credit the valley for all that and wonder if Vint Cerf has emoted about his mentality when coding TCP/IP. > cultural norms Not sure about that, unless you consider it a very recent 'value.' There was quite a bit of flaunting during the dot-com era.
- krmmalik 12y ago
  I know of one person personally and by extension one or two more that are very much like Elon Musk. Joel Gascoigne from Buffer for example. He's taking a very similar approach to things, especially if you look at how transparent he is about himself and his company. They've set a lot of waves in their space.

nickbauman 12y ago

Really great post. There's another angle here that has implications around the notion that the Nash Equilibrium is the norm: Path dependence. Getting out of this mess may be less possible because of that notion because how we can proceed is path dependent upon all of us thinking that, underneath it all, Musk is also a shitbag. We've got a lot of problems facing humankind right now. The stakes get higher every day. Whatever it is we have to do to solve the toughest one we need to do _whatever it takes._

autokad 12y ago

"Of course, this applies way beyond Tesla. I believe the current skepticism around Silicon Valley's "Make The World a Better Place" mentality is deeply rooted in historical anxiety about institutional capitalism." silicon valley really needs to get over itself. the only thing different about silicon valley and other companies is that silicon valley is to naive to realize they are just like every other company, no matter how much they doth protest. companies dont set out to make the world a worse place for the most part, even hated companies like BP have good intentions. but if you want to be a publically traded company, and if you want to make money, you have to make profit. i mentioned on HN before that its funny how Amazon is loved and Walmart is loathed. all the reasons why walmart is loathed Amazon has in spades. i also feel your view on how capitalism works in the western world. in fact, it has always been a prisoners dilemma / golden rule do onto others as you would have them do onto you economy. thats actually a reason why capitalism has worked so well for the west, and one of the reasons why it took longer in places like China.

recursive 12y ago

> The Prisoner's Dilemma demonstrates that a Nash equilibrium solution is not always Pareto optimal. The "confess-confess" solution is the Nash equilibrium. You will always be better off screwing the other person over, whether they are honest or dishonest. The "deny-deny" solution is Pareto optimal. If both parties can somehow trust each other, they will both be better off selecting this solution. This part is very confusing to me. I've always understood that deny was the screw-over move in the prisoner's dilemma. But this segment suggests that confessing is a local optimum. Have I misunderstood the prisoner's dilemma all these years?

haihaibye 12y ago
>> deny was the screw-over move in the prisoner's dilemma. But this segment suggests that confessing is a local optimum. The competition is between you and the other prisoner, not vs the state. Confessing screws over the other prisoner.

rowyourboat 12y ago

I believe the current skepticism around Silicon Valley's "Make The World a Better Place" mentality is deeply rooted in historical anxiety about institutional capitalism. OT rant here: I don't think this is related to Tesla opening up at all. "We make the World a Better Place" is self-important bullshit in 99.9% of cases. The most likely outcome is that what you are doing has no measurable impact on the "goodness" of the world. In most cases, what you are doing matters only to a tiny fraction of the world's population. "Making the World a Better Place" is simply self-important hyperbole to the extreme.

rowyourboat 12y ago
Addendum: The fact that your fancy new app is only for a tiny fraction of the world's population is totally fine. Most products are like that. Just don't pretend it's anything more than it is.

WhoBeI 12y ago

Got to love this. I'm reading the comments on the earlier thread and thinking 'shit, people are really negative'. I refresh the page and this thing shows up. Nice to see that at least on HN people possess Second Thoughts or would this be Thirds Thoughts?

bindley 12y ago

I wonder if a foundation of multiculturalism is why America's business culture is so distrusting.

pmarca 12y ago

Great piece.

osmala 12y ago

Comment to claim in that large scale democracy automatically becomes more partisan. In large scale democracy partisanship is not necessity. American system has some specific methods to cause it, compared to Finland where it isn't really a problem. And its really these TWO issues that make the american politics more partisan than rest of the world. A) Election system is strongly geared towards creating two party. When new party has gained enough support it replaces one of the previous two parties at the control, and there is new TWO parties which compete each other. Compare that to systems in which allows smaller parties to get seats. For examble in Finland there are 3-4 big parties that total 60-70% of seats and rest goes to smaller parties. That means to pass anything you pretty much have to have two big parties agreeing on the matter and either third big agreeing or some small parties agreeing. B) Executive branch is Winner takes all. In Finland the parliament(legislative branch) selects Executive branch and because no party has half or near half seats there is need to be enough parties agreeing on the matter. So if you are REALLY uncompromising you NEVER get to be part of executive branch EVEN if you become the biggest party of elections, since you didn't get more than half the seats anyway in multiparty system. The biggest party gets first attempt to create the cabinet, but they still need to get enough others onboard. The cabinet pretty much needs majority of legislative branch to support it. They need a program which over half the legislative branch supports and usually give seats in the cabinet to enough other parties that have over 50% of parliament. If biggest party fails to create agreement of the program the responsibility of trying to form the cabinet goes to next largest party. And if all else fails parliament may agree a minority government OR even putting some professional bureaucrats instead of politicians in top positions of executive branch. Both are extremely rare situations in here.

zby 12y ago

There is a body of literature on the subject how self governing groups escape the tragedy of the commons. For example: http://www.amazon.com/Governing-Commons-Evolution-Institutions-Collective/dp/0521405998 http://www.amazon.com/Governing-Commons-Evolution-Institutio... This is all empirical studies.

hueving 12y ago

The author makes some big statements about what Elon is doing and then wonders why everyone isn't guzzling the kool-aid like the author. It has nothing to do with the prisoners dilemma. First, there is a large portion of the population that doesn't believe global warming is an issue. Second, there is another large population that doesn't believe global warming can be stopped by a slow transition to electric cars. Third, there is a large majority of the population that can't afford a 90k luxury car so they fail to see how Tesla will revolutionize the world. This is compacted by the fact that the batteries will need to be replaced in 6-10 years and it will likely cost 20k+. These cars are out of reach for the majority of Americans it's not really going to reduce CO2 output by anything significant enough in time to matter. Fourth, Elon made a fat stack of cash selling PayPal to Ebay. With that being his primary historical success story, it doesn't make it sound like he is doing just what is optimal for humanity. SpaceX is great for space exploration, but that's not really optimal for humanity considering our current problems. The article had a nice write up on pareto optimal solutions and the prisoner's dilemma but they are completely irrelevant to the skepticism observed here.

avz 12y ago
You've alluded to "things which are optimal for humanity" and "our current problems". Could you elaborate? What do you think is optimal for humanity? Which current problems are more significant than planetary-level challenges like global warming and confinement of our specifies to a single planet? These put the existence of our civilization at risk. I would really love to hear which other problems are more significant than those.
- hueving 12y ago
  Cut the melodrama. Your post reeks of first-world privilege. Confinement of our species to a single planet is much lower priority than the suffering caused by violent governments, starvation, diseases, and drug problems. Colonizing another planet might be optimal for spreading of our species, but it does little to reduce the suffering here. Global warming is a problem. However, making luxury electric cars is a drop in the bucket compared to convincing China and India to crack down on things like unfiltered coal power plants.

lsalamon 12y ago

Testa try new battery design now: CarbonBattery The Ryden dual carbon battery developed by Power Japan Plus is balancing the energy storage equation of performance, cost, reliability and safety. http://powerjapanplus.com/ http://powerjapanplus.com/

noodlehead 12y ago

Anti-Tesla sentiment certainly wouldn't have anything to do with Tesla's defrauding taxpayers, would it? http://doubtingisthinking.blogspot.com.es/2013/10/tesla-carbon-credits-ongoing-scandal.html http://doubtingisthinking.blogspot.com.es/2013/10/tesla-carb...

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smackfu 12y ago

I'm just generally skeptical of Musk. He is great at putting out blog posts that people don't treat like the press releases they are.

snarfy 12y ago

It's a lack of leadership, and it's endemic to society. The Prisoner's Dilemma highlights this. Trust on both sides isn't the only Pareto optimal solution. A leader dictates the correct outcome and does not require trusting a subordinate's decision. If both sides were leaders, they would reach the optimal outcome. Elon Musk is one of the few leaders in the world.

dabernathy89 12y ago

> under the assumption the other player is a selfish dickhead. In a capitalist environment like America's, with no social controls or other factors besides ruthless logic, this is the default behavior. Sigh. One of the most prominent features of capitalism is that it relies on mutually beneficial exchanges.

dropit_sphere 12y ago
That's the theory. The implementation must take into account search costs and due diligence costs. In a low-trust society due diligence costs rise, dramatically shrinking the number of possible exchanges, which then raises search costs, shrinking possible exchanges all the more.
ep103 12y ago
Ideal capitalism. Much of modern capitalism is about getting the person on the other side of the table into a desperate enough situation, that they have to take your 'mutually beneficial' offer. I present as Exhibit A Greenspan's speeches on lowering worker mobility during his tenure.

ntoshev 12y ago

Just having the right culture is not a solution. You can have a culture that routinely goes for Pareto optimality. If that's not an evolutionary stable strategy, the moment you introduce agents that choose the Nash equilibrium instead, they would start winning and gaining ground. I wonder about a different solution though: can you design a mechanism that transforms the Nash equilibrium of a Prisoner's dilemma game into the Pareto optimal outcome? Something similar to escrow? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy

typingduck 12y ago

Great article. Very well articulated. If you haven't seen it already, there's a BBC series called "The Trap" which raises interesting questions too around game theory reflecting human behaviour versus game theory driving human behaviour through modern capitalism.

markbnj 12y ago

I'm willing to overlook that horrible font because I learned what a "Keynesian Beauty Contest" is. Excellent article.

rooodini 12y ago

> between 1 and 100 I think this should be between 0 and 100 (for the Nash equilibrium to work, anyway.)

wtbob 12y ago

I think he's making a grave error to attribute mistrust to capitalism; in any other system dishonesty is also possible.

Liz0 12y ago

So first off I also want to say I found this a great read -- I studied poly-sci and business and work in the tech scene, and when they all collide it gets really interesting. This raised a lot questions for me though. I was trying to draw the payoff matrix for adopting Tesla technology. How would this look? How to estimate relative gains for each player? I was hoping he'd go through it a-la Khan Academy.

AndrewCoyle 12y ago

Individuals and corporations are not rational machines. Things are much more complex then an equation.

x0054 12y ago

Patent discussion aside, I just want to point out that battery powered cars are NOT the solution to global warming, at least not at the current state of technology. Aside from all the environmental damage involved in producing the lithium cells them selves, you have to also consider that to charge those cells we are still burning cola and then transmitting that power over an incredibly inefficient, almost 100 year old power grid (in US). In fact, given the environmental damage from production of a new car combined with environmental damage from production of lithium batteries, combined with CO2 emissions from the cola burning power plants and nuclear waste from the nuclear power plants, I would argue that the earth is better off if you were to drive an older F150 pickup truck for another 300k miles, rather than buy a new Tesla. If you have an option though, you should choose something more efficient. But overall, I just wanted to point out to anyone who is honestly concerned about global warming. Driving your current car for longer (assuming it's reasonably economical), and investing the money into fixing it up and getting more miles out of it is way better environmentally than buying a new car. Remamber, repair > reuse > recycle > replace.

quotient 12y ago
The idea is that battery powered cars will become more prevalent and effectively cleaner as the electrical energy used to power them is drawn from more renewable sources, rather than from fossil fuels.
nawitus 12y ago
Your point should've been "transportation emissions are only a small share of total CO2 emissions". If you want to reduce CO2 emissions, you should start by becoming a vegan.
- falcolas 12y ago
  > If you want to reduce CO2 emissions, you should start by becoming a vegan. I'm going to regret this, I have no doubt. Vegan != no carbon footprint. In fact, I would imagine that when compared to a typical vegetarian diet, it is less carbon efficient. Isolation from animal (by)products means that food bound for vegans typically requires specialized handling and processing. Loss of efficiency gained from the economies of scale. Limited food processing means that food can not be easily stockpiled and distributed. This results in more frequent but smaller food shipments - the opposite direction you want to go for efficiency. The small intersection with the average person's diet also means that vegan foodstuffs don't gain any production efficiency when compared to, say, a vegetarian's diet. All of that, and vegan-bound foodstuffs still have to be planted, fertilized, harvested and transported.

xtx23 12y ago

making anti-tesla looks like supporting everything that is wrong with establishment and patent system is exactly the kind of connection he wants people to make. Just another PR gimmick there.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m 12y ago

While a Homo economicus plays the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a Homo sapien plays Calvinball.

jarradhope 12y ago

Relies too heavily on Prisoners Dilemma, should read Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom