Wasting Other People's TIme as the Greatest Sin?

Version 0.1

Wasting Other People's Time as the Greatest Sin?

Just one of those early morning wanderings of the brain... So here's something of the logical chain. Actually started from recollections of a great teacher, Bill Martin, who lost his faith while attending the Harvard Divinity School. From the perspective of his deeply religious parents, that leads to speculations about the Harvard Profanity School. Then jumped to considering the nature of the greatest sin, which linked to thoughts of time-based economic theory, where are personal time is the most precious and limited resource of all. In conclusion, the greatest sin must be wasting other people's time.

To avoid the sin, I should just stop there, but I'll just note that I still haven't any answers to the questions posed in Couch Potatoes of the World, Unite. Not even a hint.

Free speech versus moderated comments

Version 0.5

Free Speech Versus Moderated Comments

I want to clarify my position on free speech in light of my settings for moderation on all blogger comments. I think there are several elements of confusion, especially about the use of the word "free".

First, let me be clear that I strong approve of free speech in the sense of freedom to say whatever you want. That means I am STRONGLY inclined to approve EVERY comment or reaction submitted in response to any of my blogs. Except for unsolicited commercial spam, I am unable to recall any comment that I did not approve, and I have even approved a couple of replies that came dangerously close, but which seemed sincere enough and strongly relevant to the topic of the comment.

Second, I want to thank you for disagreeing with me so strongly that you actually change my mind. It doesn't happen very often (except for corrections of typos or silly mistakes), but it is possible and I really want to learn about my misconceptions, incorrect reasoning, and especially about any false evidence I am relying upon or unknown and important evidence that I should consider. Even if you disagree with me vigorously, I want to approve your post. However, if you are sincerely trying to change my mind, you should focus on new evidence or analytic flaws in my reasoning.

Third, if you just call me a bunch of vile names, I'm just going to approve your post so I can hold you up and wave you around as effectively discrediting and disproving yourself because you are unable to provide anything more substantive. I actually think emotional writing can show sincerity and there is even research showing it is more persuasive, but I insist that I am an essentially reasonable person and I'm quite happy to say something along the lines of "This fellow strongly disagrees with me, but he is contradicting himself and can therefore be dismissed as some sort of liar without even trying to figure out which side of his own words he actually believes." That's just one example, but I'm frequently surprised by how inconsistent people are... There might be some limit of angry ranting where I would just decide not to approve the comment, but I'm having trouble seeing where it would be, because the crazier someone gets in their disagreement, the more reasonable I feel and the happier I am to use their craziness as evidence of my reasonableness.

Fourth, I want to address the confusion about "free speech", which is NOT related to free beer. Being able to speak freely has almost nothing to do with the actual financial costs of speaking, especially in these days of exceedingly cheap Internet-based publishing. I am moderating these comments because of unpaid COMMERCIAL speech, specifically the scams that are being "advertised" by spammers. Okay, I admit that I don't have many readers, but I am NOT going to help the spammers in harassing them as the spammers desperately search for the tiny number of suckers who can be fooled into sending money. If you are a spammer, your comments will NEVER be approved by me and I will do everything I can think of to put you out of business. I am NOT saying we can convert spammers into decent human beings, but I do believe that without the money, they will crawl under less visible rocks.

Couch Potatoes of the World Unite

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Couch Potatoes of the World, Unite!

You have nothing to lose but your free time!

Yes, I'm being a bit tongue in cheek, but there's a serious notion underneath. We need to rethink economics, and I'm even going to outline a different way of thinking about it. I hope my conclusion surprises you: The couch potatoes are more valuable and more human than you think and they actually contribute more to our economy than they are usually given credit for.

Let's start by analyzing economic activity and classifying it into three categories. There is an essential category that keeps us afloat, an investment category that makes things better, and everything else that makes us enlightened human beings. The rest of this post is basically explaining those three ideas and offering a few of the most basic observations, but my real questions are about the numbers. I've been looking for this kind of information for some years, and so far I've been coming up dry. Isn't ANYONE else thinking along these lines? Please point me at the right economists. The comments are open for such purposes!

The essential category includes such things as producing food and clothing and maintaining houses and essential infrastructure. This is what you have to do just to keep life at the current physical level. One way to think about it is as a metric of the productivity of the civilization. A more advanced society will do this more efficiently. Think of it as an average of the total working time. In an advanced society, perhaps the average working time to produce the essentials will be 2 hours per week, and the rest of the economic activity is for other purposes, whereas a relatively less advanced society may require 30, 50, or even 80 hours of weekly work from each individual just to stay afloat. In other words, at some point a society cannot sustain itself because there aren't enough hours in the week, and there are poor and effectively dysfunctional societies that really are dependent upon outside assistance just to attempt to survive.

The investment category includes all of the spending that improves productivity and thus reduces the economic expense of the essential category. That includes things like building better infrastructure or creating better machinery for more efficient factories, but it also includes less obvious things like technical education and even abstract research where the results are years away and quite unpredictable. You can actually evaluate the spending in this category based on the RoI (Return on Investment). The easy calls are cases where you can calculate that developing a certain device will cost a certain amount of money and it will take a known amount of time to make profits that equal that amount of money. Yes, the future is never certain, but some things are relatively easy to predict and the investments in those cases are easy to justify. I actually think this part of the economy should be evaluated in competitive terms. A nation that wants to advance relative to other societies should spend more in this category, for example by tweaking the tax incentives to encourage people to shift more money from the next category...

Now we're ready for the category of everything else, and that's where the couch potatoes enter the picture as representatives of the leisure class. Yes, it's a stereotype with negative connotations, but there really are a lot of economic activities in the leisure class that are represented by the people who watch television or who read books. This category has a lot of interesting attributes. For example, it is divided into a creative and consuming side, and advanced societies have already passed the threshold of maxing out. Let's take a simple example of books: We already publish more new books than any person can possibly read, even if that person was free to spend all of his time reading new books. Another aspect is that the demand on the consuming side is never satisfied. You can only eat so much food or wear so much clothing, but the only limit on your leisure time is the time itself. A related aspect is that many of these leisure goods are not consumed, since the same movie can be viewed by any number of people. What mostly counts in this part of the economy is how people vote with their time. In the example of an advertising-based economy, it really matters to the advertisers if the couch potatoes vote for football or baseball.

Okay, I guess that's enough food for thought. As noted earlier, I've been thinking about these ideas for some years, but so far I haven't found any leads and especially I haven't been able to find any numbers. If you know of such, comments with pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Oh yeah, I better explain the subtitle about "free time"... In the original version it was "humanity", but later on I realized I was looking in the wrong direction. It is the time after all.

Corporations are persons or amoebas?

Version 0.1

Rules encourage or even force companies to become evil. Shouldn't rules force good companies to create more good companies?

This is just the original draft note, but I decided the actual blog entry should be in the blog for the decline of America. There are some broad philosophic points here, but the most dangerous examples are pretty clearly American...

Public considerations of a last will

Basically this is just a supporting document as the public side of my last will and testament. There are some parts that are more effective if revealed in public...

From an analysis of the problem, it is important to note that there are two basic kinds of wills. These days most of them are going to be imminent documents, where the person who is dying is mortally ill and knows it. As medical treatment improves, more and more deaths are for causes known in advance, and even the schedules are becoming increasingly well known. In those cases, the will is just part of wrapping things up for an inevitable outcome.

However, the other type of will is more interesting, and that is the kind I am revising at this time, the will to cover an unexpected death. The fundamental problem there is that the will has to attempt to cover an undetermined number of unexpected cases, and I'm basically required to depend upon my executor and other survivors to figure out what happened and what responses are appropriate and in accord with my wishes. Any such wishes need to be worded in a flexible manner and any 'countermeasures' have to be directed at an unknown target...

What I will say is that one category of unanticipated death involves deliberately hostile actions, and I would even like to believe that I am living my life in a way that may annoy or even anger some bad people, maybe even some people who are evil enough to want to do something about my ongoing annoyances. Insofar as I have any evidence about bad people or concrete threats, that information will therefore be included with my will. It might even give leads to investigators looking into the circumstances of my death. Obviously I can't say anything in public about the details of such precautions and countermeasures, but I will note that I'm a pretty suspicious person and I can easily save a lot of data these days.

There are actually two main problems here. One is how to collect and categorize the data to avoid or minimize false leads. The other is how to cover potentially diabolical attacks, especially ones that are intended to look like accidents and that may have been arranged well in advance... It seems sufficient to say that I have lots of ideas and a pretty good imagination, and I've been thinking about the various possibilities for many years. In fact, some of my ideas even extend into planning beyond the limits of current technologies.

Skeletal approach to motivated blogging?

Version 0.2

What are the motivations to write for public consumption? Obviously the responses of the readers, and the feedback to my various ideas has been minimal. Loss of motivation, eh?

My new idea is to throw out ideas in a skeletal format. Even the skeleton will include enough keywords to be found, assuming there is anyone who is searching. If interest is shown via the comments, then I'll be glad to flesh out the skeleton, either in the comments or as a full-fledged and justified new blog article of some length.

Today's skeleton: Why do you blog? More generally, why do you write anything at all?

Skeletal answer: Most of my writing is professional, and after 10 years as a professional editor, I've done a lot of it.

About the rating system in version numbers (which is also a new skeletal idea): My idea there is that a fractional version sort of represents an estimate of how much more the current topic would need to be fleshed out. It's purely a subjective and non-linear idea. Some of the factors to be considered are how much time would be involved, estimated fraction of the key ideas which are already included, and how long a proper treatment would run. If the theme has received substantial revision, then the whole number part might be incremented. For example, most of my prior blogs were basically intended as 1.0 versions, though many of them deserve lower ratings with version numbers around 0.8 or so. In contrast, the Fermi Paradox topic has actually received some interest, and it might be worth starting on a version 2.x consolidated rewrite of that one.

Removing the spam in the signal? Helping the good Samaritans

I'm beginning to feel like this is a catchall blog for topics that don't fit anywhere else... How to justify this entry in this place? Well, spam doesn't care about justifying its entry into every possible place. Epistemology is about the assessing the significance of information, while spam is about destroying any significance of the information it impersonates. Much of my interest in epistemology has been driven by my desire to understand the nature of "good", but I already understand that spam is bad. Ergo, it seems that the rationalization is that spam is the enemy of epistemolgy. Or should we just regard spam as the enemy of everything?

However the pragmatic purpose of this blog entry is to describe a proposed countermeasure against spam for ease of reference...

The key to this suggestion is to leverage some of the essential characteristics of spam against the spammers. First, most of the recipients of the spam do NOT want to receive it. Second, the spammers can't obfuscate their spam beyond human understanding because they are searching for the very few humans who will send them money.

The suggestion is to provide a better spam complaint tool so that the people who don't like spam can fight spam more effecively. This is not really a cast-in-concrete proposal, but just one of the possible implementations. I'm focusing on Gmail as a familiar example, but this proposal doesn't need to involve all of the email systems to have a strong effect against spam. We just need to tip the economic scales against the spammers. When the spammers stop making money, the volume of spam will decline. QED.

What I suggest is basically a kind of iterative analysis system that would combine cheap computer analysis with the human intelligence of the MANY people who hate spam. Most of the actual programming is quite straightforward for anyone who is fluent with regular expressions.

Right now Gmail has three main anti-spam options. One is the "Report spam" button for false negatives. There is also a corresponding button for false positives. These two buttons are (presumably) used for tuning the filters (which mostly just motivate the spammers to crank out more spam). The third option is the "Report phishing" option that Gmail (probably) uses for higher priority measures against some of the worst criminals among the spammers.

The new fourth option might be called "Analyze spam" to be used by the more serous 'wannabe spam fighters' (WSFs). The basic idea would be similar to SpamCop, but with deeper analysis and more iterations. The countermeasures would be targetted against the ISPs who are permitting the spam, against the websites and hosting services of those websites, against the domain registrars who are assisting the spammers, and against any other co-conspirators or accomplices. There should be options for other affected parties, as when a bank's name is being used for phishing and the bank might want to take countermeasures or when a company's valuable name is being used to sell counterfeit merchandise and the company wants to be notified to track the spam against their reputation. In each phase of analysis, the WSF will answer the questions that the computer can't deal with, making the decisions about what kind of spam it is and what kind of complaints will be most effective. After several iterations of analysis and after collecting the human decisions from the WSF, then the proper complaints and notifications would be sent.

Remember the two key point here: (1) Because there are lots of people who hate spam and very few people who will respond with money, it is certain that there will be many good Samaritans who can try to block the spam before the sucker can send the money--and the more accessible this system is, the more likely it is that the spammer will be blocked. (2) Because the spammer cannot obfuscate beyond human understanding without losing the target victims are human it is certain that the cloud of WSFs provide the system with a large pool of human intelligence directed against the spammers. Also, the human intelligence can allow for open-ended responses so the WSFs could immediately report when the spammers try to come up with a new wrinkles--because the new wrinkles still need to be open to human intelligence or the spammer can't get any money.

Yes, a WSF would have to make various decisions during the process, but this would NOT be on Google's nickle, but would just be the personal donation of some time to fighting the spammers. Actually, this system should also track the analytic performance of the human participants so Google would soon know who is really good at figuring out how to stop the spammers. In the context of Gmail, this would obviously be linked to the Gmail account that has received the spam.

In summary, this system would be a tool to make it easier and more effective for the many people who dislike spam to fight against spam. This will tip the scales against the spammers so that they will stop making money from their spam, and therefore the spam problem will be greatly reduced.