> The hardness of the n-body problem isn't necessarily an expression of fundamental randomness rather than technical uncertainty. But one way or another, aren't they both an expression of the same thing?
No, they are not. Randomness is randomness, and uncertainty is uncertainty. It's entirely possible to be have bounded uncertainty about the amount of randomness in a contrived system.
> The more accurately I model these systems, the more their outcome (or rather the outcome of the abstract macro-system of which I become aware) becomes dependent on the few things I don't know
No. The accuracy of your model of a system has no effect on what influences the system.
The uncertainty in the outcome of your model depends on the uncertainty in the inputs, but that's axiomatic.
> to the point that simply the act of checking the accuracy of the prediction has an unpredictable effect.
If and only if your checking mechanism is part of the system. Now, every checking mechanism we're likely to deal with is part of the universe, but that doesn't make the universe nondeterministic, merely impossible to isolate.
> Modeling an n-body system in the physical universe exactly means modeling every piece of information in the universe. If you don't do that, the unknowns will multiply into significant divergence at some t, however distant.
Yes, modelling a deterministic system requires modelling a deterministic system. If you model it except for the influence of some parts, your results will be what the model would have been in the absence of those parts.
If you don't model everything, you won't model everything. This is not an argument in favor of nondeterminism.
> Quantum theory suggests that even if you did have a computer the size of the universe that didn't affect the universe, it is intrinsically impossible to make an accurate prediction.
That is one interpretation; there are a number of interpretations of quantum theory that are deterministic.
> At that point, it seems like splitting hairs to say "Yes, but it's still really deterministic." What "real" are you talking about? Certainly none that I have experience with.
Consider a system with only two values, which we'll call "N" and "time" for the sake of my sanity. We can imagine a purely deterministic system where N = time * 1000. We can also have a nondeterministic system where N = Nprev + (1000 +- 1). If our measurement apparatus can only measure N's value relative to the previous value with an uncertainty of 10, it will be unable to distinguish between the two systems. This does not imply that the systems are the same, and it is not splitting hairs to consider them different. The first is "really" deterministic, and the second is "really" nondeterministic.
If our measurement apparatus improved such that we could measure with an uncertainty of .1, we would be able to establish that the first system was consistent with both nondeterminism and determinism, and the second system consistent only with nondeterminism. Nondeterminism can never be epistemologically ruled out; this does not mean we should conclude that it exists in reality.
> So how does determinism become the default?
Because for all the cases where we have enough data and processing power to test, determinism has been shown to be consistent with the data. If that were not the case, it wouldn't be the default.
Besides which, earlier you asked about the 'fundamentally non-deterministic nature of the universe'. My point is merely that no such nature has been demonstrated, nor is there any evidence to suggest it. There could be - if things often seemed to happen without cause, there would be plenty of evidence of cases where determinism is inconsistent with data. The closest we get is with quantum measurements, and it's far from demonstrated that these are genuinely a case of non-determinism.
How is the system in an unstoppable slide towards feudalism? Is this the same feudalism I studied in European History, with the land-holders and vassals and all? If not, why are you using that word?
It's an observation about the universe. Yes, things about the size of his brain appear to to have deterministic behavior, but so do mountains, oceans, moons, planets and stars - which are, needless to say, nowhere near the size of his brain.
The appearance of "randomness" at very small scales can be explained as non-determinism, or as a deterministic effect of some property that we haven't yet detected.
The point being that the universe has not been shown to have a "fundamentally non-deterministic nature".
I don't think it was anywhere near offensive, but once people start loudly complaining about how offended they are, the conversation inevitably focuses on their feelings instead of our freedoms.
In the end, they will win. Either RMS will tone down to focus on the "real" stuff, or he won't, and his influence will wane in favor of more widely-acceptable voices. In this as in many other parts of life, watered-down moderates will be the only ones able to maintain relevance, and uncompromising advocates will be marginalized.
> Instead of being a 35 billion dollar company, they'd be a 3.5 million dollar company.
So if I'd said 100,000 servers, you'd argue that Oracle would be a $350,000 company, with maybe two employees? Heaven forbid they be 8-core servers (assuming per-core licensing) - I guess their workforce would be a leg.
It was a contrived example, and your extrapolation that Oracle's income would fall in direct proportion to how many servers their product was deployed to without their permission does not follow. In reality, their business would proceed almost exactly as it does today: they'd make a pitch, give a quote for however many servers the client needs, and many hours of consulting later, they'd bill the client. Their enforcement mechanism would be continued access to expertise and updates. Except when things get ugly and lawyers get called, this is what already happens.
I'm not familiar with Oracle's practices, but I think it's safe to assume that the vast majority of software vendors already deal with non-payment by stopping services before they go the legal route - if they go that way at all, given how expensive it can be for the far more numerous non-Oracles.
> It means that they would earn significantly less money.
This is incorrect, for the same reason that millions of song downloads don't actually suggest untold billions would have gone to artists in the absence of the downloads. It's just not true. People or companies that need a software vendor's expertise will pay for it; that fact stays true whether IP is perpetual, eternal, and physically impossible to violate, or totally absent.
Naturally, we went straight to the OT part. Fun.
Pharma is the other big IP problem that always comes up. And, yeah, the current business model wouldn't work, and there are tough problems - drug development is expensive, clinical trials are expensive, basic research is expensive (although already largely publicly funded, yet the fruits somehow end up privately owned again, but that's further OT...), and no one is willing to take that kind of risk unless they can get millions of relatively well-off consumers (read: middle-class Americans) to get their insurance companies to pay large amounts for the finished product for maybe 15 years. So first question: Why not 30? 300? Perpetual? 3 months? What data do we have that patents are a good way of funding drug research, and that the current patent length is anywhere near optimal? Why should different drugs be restricted for roughly the same period of time? None of these questions can be answered today, because the fact that pharma is funded by IP is a historical accident, not some kind of finely-balanced common-good formula.
And let's take a different perspective: we have entities that 'everyone' - not really, but close enough for our purposes - pays into, who in turn pay pharma companies above-production-cost prices for high-initial-cost drugs.
It really resembles a privately-run taxation -> R&D system, except with highly perverse incentives like high marginal profits on each new prescription you can get signed up. It's no surprise, then, that so much of the funding (insurance premiums) goes to PR instead of R&D.
No one is suggesting that we do away with pharmaceutical research, or fire all the scientists. But I would like it if there was no longer an incentive to spend my premiums to convince other people that they should have their insurance companies fund another cycle of PR campaigns, with however much R&D can be squeezed in on the side. That's not going to change without fundamentally changing how pharma is funded, and if it's funded by high-price drugs that cover the expensive phases, no matter how you slice it, the perverse incentives remain.
It's a tough problem. And I'm not averse to just keeping pharma patents until we some something else figured out - but let's not pretend that because scientists today are funded by a messy, inefficient system, they must always be so funded.
> And people like Brian Wilson, who are the studio genius types, but kind of shy and not big on the live thing?
And? To quote Foreman (from House): "I've got an uncle. He can spit a cherry pit 50 yards. He's working part-time at a lube shop. Life isn't fair."
Let's not pretend that many "studio genius types" are able to make a living on it now; whether we're talking music/movies/art, studio, live or whatever, all kinds of talented people can't make a living of it, IP or no.
But you can't make the argument that their situation would be worse without IP; we've never experienced it. I think it's worth a trial run. If it's a disaster, lesson learned. But there's a significant chance that it would not be a disaster, and I think there would be a lot of very clear benefits to society.
> One answer is to say "they wouldn't!". From there, you have to ask: would they still create? Probably, yes, but in a much more limited way.
We're already limited by IP. The proposition of IP is that the best way to encourage people to engage in creative works is to prohibit them from engaging in creative works that involve other people's creative works.
That seems ridiculous at face value to me. That's not to say I think it's universally false - reality is often annoyingly counter-intuitive that way - but it only makes sense when there's a dearth of people able and willing to engage in creative pursuits, or when disseminating ideas and works is prohibitively expensive. Both of those conditions may have been true a century or even arguably two decades ago - but not today.
It does bring babies and bathwater to mind, though. In the name of encouraging creativity, we prohibit particular forms of creativity.
It'd be one thing if we had good reason to think that it continues to have its intended effect - but we don't. On the other hand, we have lots of examples of unintended, negative effects that inevitably come with trying to impedance-match a reality full of cheap technology that can quickly spread information with a system that attempts to limit access "for your own good".
> It seems fairly logical to me that without IP, you'd have fewer "IP goods",
True. Strictly speaking, I don't think there would be any "IP goods" per se, just technological goods. But I think most businesses wouldn't be affected much at all - I could see, for example, a software vendor like Oracle continuing to do almost exactly what it does today, indefinitely, even in the absence of IP. Well, sans a bunch of lawsuits.
(Not to get OT, but inevitably someone's gonna ask "what stops their customers from buying 1 license and deploying on 10,000 servers?" Nothing, or maybe some sort of DRM - but that's not the point. Ultimately, access to updates would be Oracle's "teeth" for discouraging that behavior among their customers. So they'd fire a good subset of the legal department, and instead hire more developers to write new features in order to retain customers. Sounds like more resources allocated to creative, productive work to me.)
> although having actual numbers to plug in, somehow, would doubtless improve the discussion a great deal.
This is the biggie. IP has been around much longer than the transistor, and given the enormous potential upsides, it seems obvious to me that we should have gone on an IP 'sabbatical' maybe 10 years ago, just to see what happens. After all, it's entirely possible that the overall creative output of our society wouldn't be affected at all, leaving "just" the advantage of ridding ourselves of one more legal labyrinth.
But the best case is much more exciting - what if creative output rises dramatically? I certainly don't think we can rule it out without giving it a shot.
And sure, there's a worst-case too; maybe every job related to IP simply disappears and we end up with a generation of college grads with no jobs. Fine, it can be undone. I'm not morally opposed to IP - well, I guess I do find it distasteful - but I'm definitely morally opposed to wrecking the economy. No one's suggesting we just say "screw the baby" if it turns out IP is a good thing.
But right now, we just don't know, and we should find out. On balance, it's absolutely worth trying - so why haven't we done it already? Not that I'm actually asking, we all know that there's a long and dreary list of mundane political and human-nature reasons why it hasn't happened, and won't be happening anytime soon.
I did look at the readme. The client-side issue isn't a real problem. The fact that it's easy for computers to solve, on the other hand...
I get that it's a proof of concept, but it's a concept that doesn't work. You can't make recognizing a line easy for humans and difficult for a computer. The best you could do is introduce noise and make the line a shape that humans are likely to recognize... and bam, we're back at warped characters.
Hell, in it's current form it's entirely client-side; hardly seems like it should even count as a CAPTCHA. $(form).attr("action", $("#mc-action").val()) and you're done.
Even with server-side validation, it's still trivial to break; it only requires tracking a line through an otherwise blank image.
This is fundamentally unusable as a CAPTCHA, and can't be made significantly better. The whole point of a CAPTCHA is to be difficult for computers and doable for humans, hence stuff like warped characters and image categorization. Tracking a line against a blank BG is not difficult for a computer.
> The hardness of the n-body problem isn't necessarily an expression of fundamental randomness rather than technical uncertainty. But one way or another, aren't they both an expression of the same thing?
No, they are not. Randomness is randomness, and uncertainty is uncertainty. It's entirely possible to be have bounded uncertainty about the amount of randomness in a contrived system.
> The more accurately I model these systems, the more their outcome (or rather the outcome of the abstract macro-system of which I become aware) becomes dependent on the few things I don't know
No. The accuracy of your model of a system has no effect on what influences the system.
The uncertainty in the outcome of your model depends on the uncertainty in the inputs, but that's axiomatic.
> to the point that simply the act of checking the accuracy of the prediction has an unpredictable effect.
If and only if your checking mechanism is part of the system. Now, every checking mechanism we're likely to deal with is part of the universe, but that doesn't make the universe nondeterministic, merely impossible to isolate.
> Modeling an n-body system in the physical universe exactly means modeling every piece of information in the universe. If you don't do that, the unknowns will multiply into significant divergence at some t, however distant.
Yes, modelling a deterministic system requires modelling a deterministic system. If you model it except for the influence of some parts, your results will be what the model would have been in the absence of those parts.
If you don't model everything, you won't model everything. This is not an argument in favor of nondeterminism.
> Quantum theory suggests that even if you did have a computer the size of the universe that didn't affect the universe, it is intrinsically impossible to make an accurate prediction.
That is one interpretation; there are a number of interpretations of quantum theory that are deterministic.
> At that point, it seems like splitting hairs to say "Yes, but it's still really deterministic." What "real" are you talking about? Certainly none that I have experience with.
Consider a system with only two values, which we'll call "N" and "time" for the sake of my sanity. We can imagine a purely deterministic system where N = time * 1000. We can also have a nondeterministic system where N = Nprev + (1000 +- 1). If our measurement apparatus can only measure N's value relative to the previous value with an uncertainty of 10, it will be unable to distinguish between the two systems. This does not imply that the systems are the same, and it is not splitting hairs to consider them different. The first is "really" deterministic, and the second is "really" nondeterministic.
If our measurement apparatus improved such that we could measure with an uncertainty of .1, we would be able to establish that the first system was consistent with both nondeterminism and determinism, and the second system consistent only with nondeterminism. Nondeterminism can never be epistemologically ruled out; this does not mean we should conclude that it exists in reality.
> So how does determinism become the default?
Because for all the cases where we have enough data and processing power to test, determinism has been shown to be consistent with the data. If that were not the case, it wouldn't be the default.
Besides which, earlier you asked about the 'fundamentally non-deterministic nature of the universe'. My point is merely that no such nature has been demonstrated, nor is there any evidence to suggest it. There could be - if things often seemed to happen without cause, there would be plenty of evidence of cases where determinism is inconsistent with data. The closest we get is with quantum measurements, and it's far from demonstrated that these are genuinely a case of non-determinism.