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ChristianMarkson Levels of Excellence

I love platitudinous bosses. They never level up.

ChristianMarkson Source of the recent outagelet

A cute wordlet.

ChristianMarkson First job in a startup considered harmful

It's also good experience to immerse yourself in sulphuric acid, to better appreciate clear water.

ChristianMarkson Comcast vs. the Cord Cutters

Insulting if you asked me.

ChristianMarkson Comcast vs. the Cord Cutters

Putdown of others is a hallucination. For me there is the opportunity cost of dealing with unnecessary clutter or deciding what to watch and making time for it. I simply do not have the time. For me, TV has an irritating hypnotic effect I would prefer to avoid, and one way of doing this is to remove the possibility of exposure. I have said nothing about the quality of programming--that would be like reviewing a book I haven't read. But I suspect there must be something about the medium that leads to defensiveness just in case a nonviewer might be critcal of viewers generally.

ChristianMarkson Comcast vs. the Cord Cutters

Right. There is the principle--and then there is the question of controlling your environment, of cognitive self-defense. TV and the associated paraphenalia introduces clutter and extraneous cognitive load. And it does this out of proportion to exposure--for me, at least.

ChristianMarkson Comcast vs. the Cord Cutters

I'm a cord cutter. A cord cutter looking for the cheapest alternative, which is to consume no television at any price. It would be good to know how atypical that is.

ChristianMarkson Comcast vs. the Cord Cutters

Only my comment here was apt.

ChristianMarkson Comcast vs. the Cord Cutters

Why? I geniunely cannot stand television. I cannot force myself to watch. That goes for most films. It's smug to assert a preference and act on it?

ChristianMarkson Comcast vs. the Cord Cutters

Smug, presumptuous article. I cut my cord over a decade ago and have no desire to watch TV or Netflix (especially not to watch MPAA films) on the Internet. I have no interest in paying a "Comcast tax," and if that means no movies or Internet television, fine. TV is verboten here. A time sink with an infinite opportunity cost.

ChristianMarkson Internet troll study: Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, sadism

Since it hasn't been mentioned, here is Torkel Franzen's Internet Trolling Guide (I prefer to call it this; the actual title is How to make a nuisance of yourself in news):

http://web.archive.org/web/20070609085706/http://www.sm.luth...

ChristianMarkson Bitcoin transaction malleability: looking at the bytes

In that case, maybe publishing the addresses wasn't the most discreet thing imaginable. Still my "holdings" amount to a Starbucks card converted to BTC through an online service mentioned on HN. I wanted to motivate myself to become interested in Bitcoins, and thought that watching a miniscule amount might help, but the mischief around cryptocurrencies is demotivating. Cryptocurrencies should be regulated. Perhaps the Bitcoin will serve in the long run to address some rent-seeking behavior in the banking system. For now it's the Wild West.

ChristianMarkson Bitcoin transaction malleability: looking at the bytes

OK. The article mentions an unconfirmed transaction starting with 1Enjoy1...

ChristianMarkson Bitcoin transaction malleability: looking at the bytes

These are Bitcoin addresses. The hash for the first is 197c054e032f9b6b406625b49fcb2c429c0825633143d082bbbdbcd5fa368bd4

I do not know if it is modified. Neither of them are confirmed. (I converted my Starbucks card balance to a meager fraction of a Bitcoin. Since then my $7.21 has plummeted to $5.69.)

ChristianMarkson Bitcoin transaction malleability: looking at the bytes

Interesting. I have been "receiving" .00001 BTC from an address beginning with 1Enjoy (1Enjoy1C4bYBr3tN4sMKxvvJDqG8NkdR4Z). This has been ongoing since Feb 10. Another .00001 BTC unconfirmed showed up from another address starting with 1Sochi...

ChristianMarkson We made something. We use it. We love it. Apple rejected it

At least they could plot their feelings of rejection on the app Apple rejected.

ChristianMarkson Curse Of The Gifted (2000)

At least no one can accuse ESR of coasting on his native gift of bloviation. The man perfected his blowhard style more than 10,000 hours before that "it takes one to know one" email. (Which is why it's irritating when he's right.)

ChristianMarkson The Calculus Trap (2005)

Although I have a PhD. in mathematics, I found the field needlessly, gratuitously competitive--nasty even--and I left. Math education--another related subject which mathematicians often feel competent to pronounce upon--seems to be a mine field [1]. There are only a few thousand mathematicians who are paid to do mathematics--for the rest of us, the opportunity cost is almost infinite. This is, for me, the real disincentive: the light at the end of the tunnel is hardly more than a few photons.

[1] A double entendre. A mine field is a set with the standard field operations, which belongs only to the educator.

ChristianMarkson High-Speed Trading Isn't About Efficiency—It's About Cheating

An example of privileged, well-connected parties systematically winning asymmetric zero-sum games against the not so well connected.

I'll believe that HFT adds liquidity to the market when the typical retirement horizon is 15 milliseconds. HFT proponents seem not to (or pretend not to) understand diminishing returns where "adding liquidity to the market" is concerned.

ChristianMarkson I got fired after 2 weeks of being hired. Please help me understand something

Is this a high turnover place? I was working at a shop with 25 employees. After I left (I quit after a short time), seven other people left in the space of three months. For that year, sixteen people left. Abuse takes its toll.

ChristianMarkson Silicon Valley billionaires believe in the free market, as long as they benefit

correction: "have tended to avoid empirical questions in terms..."

ChristianMarkson Silicon Valley billionaires believe in the free market, as long as they benefit

Reference to 'economic injustice' is weak without identification of the morally relevant facts. For me the question is whether economic injustice (positively construed) is characterized by one group systematically winning asymmetric zero-sum games (or strategically equivalent games, meaning those whose payoffs differ by a positive affine transformation). This provides strictly more information than vague reference to "economic injustice", which can be dismissed as a normative judgment.

Whether the characterization holds is an empirical question. Whether one ought to condone the systematic winning of asymmetric zero-sum games is a further question. It is in my view rhetorically important not to cede the "value neutral" conceit of (many practitioners of) economics to conservatives. Unfortunately many non-conservatives seem to lack the economic and mathematical background (not to mention imagination--pardon the paralipsis) to turn the "value neutral" conceit on its head. The term "economic injustice" could stand further refinement by explicit mention of its positive, game-theoretic aspects. That involves characterizing, in game-theoretic terms, economic phenomena that game theorists and economists have chosen, for various reasons, not to study.

A philosophical attitude isn't particularly helpful here, if this means the unfortunate Anglophone tendency to limit philosophy to "patrolling the border between sense and nonsense." But the historical fact that game theorists have tended to study empirical questions on terms that can be addressed in game theoretic terms is not a reason to dismiss what might appear to a philosopher concerned with "conceptual analysis" as some kind of private, special language.

ChristianMarkson Silicon Valley billionaires believe in the free market, as long as they benefit

Let me attempt to disentangle them: You assume collectives (not only individuals) have rights.

No, I make no such assumption. The assertion that I do is not warranted. Since philosophers like to find inferences their interlocutors believe they have not made: locate this assumption. Rousseau's vocabulary of "rights" has not been particularly helpful.

I do not "infer" injustice. The attempt is to characterize positive aspects of it. It seems to be characterized by the systematic winning of certain games by one group against another, especially when the utility obtained by winning is population dependent for one group (the "winners") and not for the other group (the "losers").

A general prohibition against allowing one group to systematically win asymmetric zero-sum games against another group would be a normative principle. So would some elaboration of special exceptions.

incidentally, you use the term 'meaningless' too loosely. Under what philosophical theory does a formalization becomes meaningful depending on who agrees with its "underlying philosophy"?

ChristianMarkson Silicon Valley billionaires believe in the free market, as long as they benefit

I have revised the article at http://publicsphere.org. The normative value judgments are not hidden behind scientific seeming jargon. The normative value judgements retain the significance they have--however, they are inextricably entangled with certain positive phenomena, which should be explicated. Instead of denying the relevance of positive aspects outright behind philosophical seeming jargon based on a discredited fact-value dichotomy imported from British Logical Positivism into economics, find some positive reason they are wrong. I see no reason to privilege the normative aspects at the expense of the positive aspects--unless the intention is to prevent the discussion from rising above ideological debate.

ChristianMarkson Silicon Valley billionaires believe in the free market, as long as they benefit

Putnam has argued against a strict fact-value dichotomy in "The Collapse of the Fact-Value Dichotomy" and in a recently published book of essays edited by Putnam entitled, "The End of Value-Free Economics (Routledge INEM Advances in Economic Methodology)." Economic justice, theft and fraud are not strictly questions of moral values--this presupposes a spurious fact-value dichotomy. These notions have both normative and positive aspects; the positive aspects of these notions (and others, related to class dominance) can be captured in game theoretic terms--and should be.

In the Preface to Game Theory Evolving, economist Herbert Gintis suggested that the mathematical methods of non-cooperative (and cooperative) game theory developed by von Neumann and Morgenstern, Nash and their successors–Gintis among them–have the potential to elevate social and political discourse above ideological debate.

Gintis does not take the step of applying game theory to the topics under discussion--but neither have most of the comments here, with the expected result.

ChristianMarkson Silicon Valley billionaires believe in the free market, as long as they benefit

The "appearance" isn't at issue. The question of capturing some phenomena conventionally characterized as normative (usually by philosophers who want to maintain a strict fact-value dichotomy) is of empirical interest. The positive content of "theft", "fraud" and "economic injustice" can be captured within game theory in repeated games, specifically in repeated asymmetric zero-sum games. The vocabulary is standard in the literature, even if game theorists tend to ignore such questions. My motive is to suggest, pace economists and philosophers who insist that such notions ought to be excluded from positive economics altogether, that they do contain significant positive economic content and I intend to say what that is.

ChristianMarkson Silicon Valley billionaires believe in the free market, as long as they benefit

Nonsense. The free market ideologue lets the market solve all problems through the mechanism of price signals, and nothing else. Side deals in which one group systematically wins asymmetric zero-sum games against another group are excluded.

ChristianMarkson Silicon Valley billionaires believe in the free market, as long as they benefit

This kind of "free-market libertarianism" involves systematically winning asymmetric zero-sum games against labor: free for me, not for you [1].

[1] http://publicsphere.org/2014/02/02/the-asymmetric-zero-sum-g...

ChristianMarkson Chaos Computer Club files criminal complaint against the German Government

At least this story didn't devolve into dismissive conversation about irrelevancies, like the Snowden interview story. In that thread, discussants invented a new notion of "journalistic equivalence" under which mass media news coverage of remarks by Snowden that officials were calling for his demise was supposed to be somehow equivalent to substantive coverage of the main points of the interview. The "proof" of this was the so-called "Reddit takedown."

ChristianMarkson Poll: What is your level of education?

Math Ph.D. Continually turning down offers to do Linux system administurbation. Prefer programming.