HAYEK HAD IT MOSTLY RIGHT
“The main reasons for dwelling … on Hayek’s model is simply that it has certain properties, absent from most others, that conform exceptionally well to recent neurobiological evidence on memory and that make it particularly suited to the current discourse.”
— Joaquin Fuster, Memory in the Cerebral Cortex : An Empirical Approach to Neural Networks in the Human and Nonhuman Primate (1995), p. 89
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-23 03:38:00 UTC
HAYEK : PROFIT IS INFORMATION
“By pursuing profit, we are as altruistic as we can possibly be. Profit is the signal which tells us what we must do to serve people whom we do not know.” ~ F. A. Hayek
“…civilization begins when the individual in the pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he has himself acquired, and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance, by profiting from knowledge he does not himself possess.” ~ F. A. Hayek
(reminder from a friend)
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-23 03:37:00 UTC
http://people.ucalgary.ca/~frank/habermas.html. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-23 01:16:00 UTC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzmxQOonnGEHOW TO FIGHT POVERTY? CAPITALISM.
Halving destitute poverty by getting government out of the way.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-22 16:01:00 UTC
“…. the last time the female labor force participation rate dropped as low as 57.1 percent was in February 1989—24 years ago…..”
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-22 13:55:00 UTC
http://www.sitecore.net/GREAT COMPANY / GREAT PRODUCT : SITECORE
I have talked quite a bit about the amount of money I invested in nCompass both before and after Microsoft Purchased it, turned it into Microsoft CMS, which I saw as, along with Microsoft CMS, the platform system that microsoft needed to compete in the application market in the middle tier. But, the envy of the office team, and their fascination with Sharepoint forced a bullet to be put into Microsoft CMS, and then foolishly killed it.
A very smart couple of very pragmatic guys picked up on the market opportunity and right now, they have what nCompass/Microsoft CMS should have been, and what Sharepoint never can be: the best .NET platform available.
Microsoft ceded the app platform business to Oracle and IBM and open source leaving a career problem staring into the face of .NET developers, as potential candidates for COBOL level extinction.
I’m not really a supporter of using Microsoft technology any longer for web development, until ASP, JS, PHP, and Python become are added to the core of Visual Studio, and Microsoft puts out a dedicated web server (if ever). Given the (terrible) quality of most IDE’s, and the problem debugging code on these platforms by comparison it doesn’t make sense.
Maybe, someday, when there has been enough of a shakeup, someone in redmond will understand that this company is worth to Microsoft easily 10x revenues, if not higher.
‘Cause if someone (we know who) adds a windows emulator to their OS and sells cheap high quality desktops, and IBM, Oracle and Open source continue to squeeze Microsoft in the middle, the empire of RENT SEEKING on the NETWORK EFFECT of Windows that is the Redmond campus, will find itself without the ability to play IBM and retreat into ‘the money’. Left behind by gaming platforms. Left behind by phones. Left behind by tablets.
Microsoft is a vast rent-seeker on the pc platform. And eventually the market punishes companies that hubris.
SITECORE is one of the obvious ways back into credibility. Sitecore, CMS, Dynamics, .NET, and script friendly changes to the OS.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-22 10:33:00 UTC
THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF COMPUTER SCIENTISTS TO THE REFORMATION IN LIBERTARIAN AND CONSERVATIVE POLITICAL THOUGHT.
When I went to Mises for the Austrian Scholars Conference the first time, I was struck dumb; first, by the incredible genius of the economic calculation argument, second by hoppe’s solution to the problem of institutions… But then equally by the failure to see that that BOTH Hayek and Mises were very close but wrong; the failure to grasp the importance of Popper’s contribution; the failure to grasp that no, the calculation issue was not ‘complete’.
I realized something was wrong with Rothbard fairly quickly. It took me a few years to understand what Mises had done wrong with Praxeology, and only recently how to solve it completely. Hoppe was right about just about everything, but still had both Rothbard’s and Mises’ errors. But even so, he’d managed to get it all right anyway. Which, to me, is an even greater statement of his brilliance. Although, I’m still frustrated by his fascination with Argumentation.
But it is this emphasis on experience and morality and preference instead of calculation that is everyone’s distraction. ( A topic that needs some reflection and exposition. And so I’ll return to it.)
COMPUTER SCIENTISTS AND REFORMATION
So strange. You know, there is this strange anti-computer-science bias in academia. But since the majority of intellectual revolution has come out of Mencius’ application of Austrian thought to conservatism, and my application of Austrian thought to libertarianism, while political science is fascinated by democracy, philosophy still squandering in the artifice of metaphysical pseudo-rationality, and mainstream economics is fascinated by growth and efficiency, and the left (literature) with obscurantism, pseudo-science, equality, diversity, and central control.
And since, computer science is the only discipline that intersects between theoretical constructs and human interaction directly, I kind of think that, empirically speaking, computer science has more right than math, and certainly more right than economics. And political science and social science don’t even register signal above noise.
Economics is a process of deduction from aggregation. Computer science is atomistic by its nature. It’s not deduction. It’s calculation. And therein lies an amazing difference in perception. We do not HAVE the economic data to tell us about human behavior at the level of atomicity we do with computers that interact with people on a daily basis. This teaches you about the hubris we must avoid when interacting with human beings.
Math is platonic. Economics is idealistic. Computer science understands ‘ignorance, bias, incentives, and the limits of calculation’. Which is probably why we solved the political problem and the other groups didn’t.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-22 09:33:00 UTC
http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/arena/result/the-future-of-higher-education#comment-1091995003WILL TECHNOLOGY UNDERMINE THE UNIVERSITY SYSTEM?
EDUCATION WILL REMAIN THE SAME
Higher education filters us and produces signals. It does not teach us very much. And that’s just what the evidence says. There is very little chance that higher ed will be replaced by technology. Technology is not a high enough cost to perform any filtering, and if it was high enough cost, then people wouldn’t use it.
THE EXAMPLE OF FLIGHT SIMULATORS
Pilots joining the armed forces usually must have a considerable number of hours in at-home flight simulators to compete against their entry level peers. Technology may have the same effect on entry into those institutions. Technology may be the way we ACTUALLY LEARN SKILLS instead of are filtered and sorted, and stamped with approval for signalling purposes. But it is unlikely that without the high cost of education, the personal associations that form in educational institutions, the cultural conformity and behavior that comes from working in a college environment, meeting expectations of the professor, and cooperating with peers, that individuals would learn what businesses actually hire them for: not their knowledge, but their ability to understand, solve and execute problems regardless of industry in which those problems occur.
UNIVERSITIES ARE VALUABLE FOR FILTERING NOT FOR TEACHING
In that sense it matters very little what we learn at university. We are being schooled in the one thing that matters: problem solving and execution without supervision. Because, the human pay scale is determined by the degree of supervision, or lack of it, that is necessary to perform different levels of work given decreasing amounts of known information about how to do it.
For these reasons, technology CANNOT REPLACE the classroom. It is not what we learn but how we learn and how hard the assignments are (from social sciences in the trivial, to computer science, economics, mathematics and physics at the difficult end).
College is an obstacle course for testing and eliminating performance. It doesn’t teach you much, we don’t remember much, we don’t apply much, and we won’t even apply it if we have the opportunity to. (see Caplan)
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-22 08:10:00 UTC
(secret)
Veronika plays Civilization and just about any game like it she can find. :))
Nerdy girls rule. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-22 06:58:00 UTC
THE CAPABILITY CURVE – HUMOROUS VERSION
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-22 06:54:00 UTC