The Challenge of Consciousness - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/11/21/challenge-of-defining-consciousness/ <comment><USER3> I always point to David Chalmers when someone wants to understand the problem of consciousness. I like how casual he is about possible solutions and gives credibility to all the options (unlike eg. Daniel Dennett, who seems almost religious about how revolutionary his "there's no problem at all" approach is).

I really recommend this podcast in which Sam Harris talks with Chalmers about all the options currently in the game: [https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-light-of-the- mind](https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-light-of-the-mind)

One of the most promising theories (discussed in the podcast) assumes that consciousness is a fundamental attribute of reality, the other side of the coin (matter being the first one). Which leads to the conclusions, that consciousness is everywhere, but not as 'condensed' as in the brain. Seems crazy at first, but the more you think about it the more plausible it seems.

Here's a nice paper about it: [http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1668/2014...](http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1668/20140167)

Within this paradigm it starts to make sense to call the reality "The Mind", as some Buddhist schools do. There's also the crazy part, about how under some conditions it could potentially lead to experiencing other peoples' minds.

For the more adventurous, here's a talk by Culadasa, very experienced meditator and a neuroscience professor, in which he shares some thoughts about the problem and also some of these crazy experiences he had: [http://s3.amazonaws.com/dharmatreasure/150430-tcmc-- culadasa...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/dharmatreasure/150430-tcmc--culadasa-- dharma-talk.mp3)

<comment><USER4> EDIT: fixed stupid brain bug

Dennett's approach is absurd. Consciousness is _the only thing in the Universe_ that is self-evident in the strict sense. Everything else is at least second-hand stuff - see the brain in a vat hypothesis. To say that consciousness is an illusion is ridiculous; I can see how he gets there, but the conclusion is absurd. Somewhere along the way there's a mistake; no, I don't know where the mistake is, and I could not even begin to hypothesize. OP's article points out this predicament very well. It is a hard problem indeed.

> _One of the most promising theories (discussed in the podcast) assumes that > consciousness is a fundamental attribute of reality, the other side of the > coin (matter being the first one)._

I can hear the objections being raised already, but it's a neat promising step towards solving the hard problem. Suddenly the reducibility paradox vanishes.

It would also relieve another problem. If you can't trivially reduce consciousness to neural activity, then how is it coupled with perception? There would appear to be a gap between the sensory chain and the fact of awareness. And then for consciousness to work, it would already have to be everywhere (in a sense, possibly even a somewhat metaphorical one, or at least non-trivial). The assumption you mention solves this problem.

> _here 's a talk by Culadasa, very experienced meditator and a neuroscience > professor_

It's very, very hard to agree with Dennett, and it's getting harder the more you advance in the practice of meditation. As soon as you realize that you can peel off and disconnect layers upon layers of perception (external at first, then the many internal layers too), and also greatly reduce the waves of what is commonly called "thinking", while consciousness does not diminish but instead becomes at once more vivid and more stable, more calm and more intense, less connected to external factors but more broad - all that talk about "the illusion of consciousness" starts to look extremely suspicious. It's not perception, and it's not thinking; it can relate to these things, but it's fundamentally different. It can ultimately exist completely independent of inputs, either external (sensory) or internal (thoughts, mind activity in the trivial sense, even memory).

Don't just read about it. Go ahead and have the experience yourself. It changes a lot of perspectives. You don't even have to go all the way to the highest levels described in the literature - the intermediate stuff is revelatory enough already.

<comment><USER5> > To say that consciousness is an illusion is ridiculous

More likely, you simply misunderstand what is meant by "illusion". What is self-evident is that there are thoughts, and some of these thoughts are "I am experiencing X". It's naive to simply infer from that, that true subjective experience actually exists, just like it's naive to infer that water can break pencils simply because you can see it [1].

You should give Dennet more credit. He's almost certainly right, just like science proved in every other case humans thought they were special in the past. The closest analog of consciousness as a pseudo-mystical property that was eventually simply replaced by a scientific concept is "vitalism", which was eventually superceded by biology. Not by any proof that elan vital didn't exist, but by simple recognition that it was special pleading and provided no explanatory power whatsoever.

[1] [http://etc.usf.edu/clippix/pix/refraction-of-pencil-in- cup-o...](http://etc.usf.edu/clippix/pix/refraction-of-pencil-in-cup-of- water_medium.jpg)

<comment><USER4> > _What is self-evident is that there are thoughts, and some of these thoughts > are "I am experiencing X"._

Therein the problem lies. Equating consciousness with thoughts. It's vastly different. It can exist independently of "thoughts". It can exist independently of an "I". This can be verified as an experience.

At most it could be a very, very special kind of "thought", radically different from the rest.

<comment><USER5> > Therein the problem lies. Equating consciousness with thoughts. It's vastly > different.

Just because qualia seem "vastly different" to thoughts doesn't mean they aren't reducible to thoughts. This would make the qualitative distinction of qualia from thoughts an illusion, a false conclusion inferred from an incorrect perception.

<comment><USER3> There's a very distinct experience of being conscious and having completely no thoughts in the mind. To treat thoughts as some kind of basic element is a mistake that neither neuroscientist nor meditator would ever make. Look up default network mode and how it can be 'turned off'.

<comment><USER5> I think you're mistaking the utility of epistemically treating qualia on their own terms, with their fundamental ontological status. Just because reducibility may not be _useful_ in most cases of analyzing qualia as a phenomena reducible to thoughts, doesn't make it _untrue_ that they are reducible to thoughts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I promised myself I wouldn't follow the Chalmerian rabbit down the consciousness rabbit hole for a while (one eventually gets tired of being dizzy no matter how fascinating the reason). Every time I swear to myself that I'll give it a rest for a few months, something like this pops up on HN and it starts all over again.

Here's as far as I got last time. I'm almost certainly wrong, but hey, when it comes to consciousness, we know so little that being able to pinpoint why someone is wrong is still progress.

\- Time is real but not "absolute". The universe exists as a causally connected network of ever-present nows. We aren't "slices of the Minkowski spacetime" experiencing itself. That's a fantastic model of reality at certain scales, but it's not reality.

\- Ensembles of causally connected physical systems evolving in the now are "ontoglogically real" in the sense that something about them actually exists above and beyond their parts.

\- Certain evolving physical systems have "an interior". It feels like something to be the interior of such a system.

\- We don't experience the world, we experience being the interior of a certain kind of evolving physical system whose job it is to create, process, and manipulate representations. "We" at any moment are the interior of the gestalt representation of that moment.

\- Evolution selected and maximized interiority for a reason. It has a purpose. How it has a purpose I have no idea, and any solutions smack of dualism. However, the closest thing I have to a hypothesis that isn't completely crazy is that what we call "the physical" and "the mental" are simply two projections of some "actual" underlying structure that is something like a Hilbert space. If that's the case, then it's possible that putting the physical system into a certain state causes the interior of that system to "feel" something which, in turn, causes some kind of "pressure" on the physical again. I have no clue how this could work, but I do like the strategy of starting with the commonsensical but heretical idea that we wouldn't be conscious if evolution didn't find a use for that property, and then going from there.

Anybody else have any crazy thoughts so we can at least talk about why we're wrong about them?

<comment><USER7> What about the idea often proposed by Graham Hancock where consciousness is not generated in the brain but rather the brain is a sort receiver for it?

<comment><USER8> That's an idea with zero evidence and thus indistinguishable from fantasy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Most of the times I read about this subject I get the feeling that every person in the discussion is talking about different things.

For a prosaic view of consciousness I would recommend the book "Consciousness and the Brain" by cognitive psychologist Stanisas Dehaene. The experiments described in the book do, in my opinion, a good job in delimiting the problem and in facilitating accurate definitions about what conscience is.

We should start there, otherwise we are talking about how many angels can dance in the head of a pin (1).

(1) - Actually that problem has been solved already: [http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume7/v7i3/an...](http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume7/v7i3/angels-7-3.htm)

<comment><USER6> That's one reason why I've started using the term "interiority" to describe the bedrock "existence of a feeling of what it is like" phenomenon. It's the smallest word I can think of that still conveys the essence of the hard part of the hard problem.

Put another way, I'm of the belief (and I think Chalmers and many others share it) that if you can demonstrate to me that C. Elegans feels itself wiggling around, and you can show me why it feels anything at all and why it feels this way vs that way, then you have solved the hard problem. I could take your technical specifications for basic interiority (the solution to the hard problem) and then give you human-level reflective consciousness in a few years given a handful of engineers and sufficiently powerful hardware.

This isn't necessarily a popular opinion, though. I once read Julian Jaynes "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and was really frustrated that the author spent the entire book explaining how we became "conscious" by listening to one half of our brain talking to the other half. How much time did he spend trying to explain how there was anything doing the "hearing" to begin with? Nearly zero. Maddening.

<comment><USER5> > That's one reason why I've started using the term "interiority" to describe > the bedrock "existence of a feeling of what it is like" phenomenon. It's the > smallest word I can think of that still conveys the essence of the hard part > of the hard problem.

A more widely used term is "subjectivity".

> How much time did he spend trying to explain how there was anything doing > the "hearing" to begin with? Nearly zero. Maddening.

This seems like a common sentiment, but I'm not sure it's justified. You're already assuming the existence of a subject just because of an observation, but that needs justification. That belief is just an inference, a chain of thoughts sourced from a thought and yielding the final thought "I experienced X". The question is really whether that chain of inference is valid or fallacious, in which case subjectivity is an illusion.

I suggest reading some scientific attempts to account for subjectivity [1]. Our approaches to consciousness amounts to marvelling at a pencil sitting in a glass of water [2] and trying to figure out how water seems able to break and reconstitute the pencil, when we should really be developing the theory of light refraction. Like biology did to vitalism, all this mysticism surrounding consciousness will soon just fade into history.

[1] [http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...](http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full)

[2] [http://etc.usf.edu/clippix/pix/refraction-of-pencil-in- cup-o...](http://etc.usf.edu/clippix/pix/refraction-of-pencil-in-cup-of- water_medium.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You can cut off any part of the body and still have consciousness as long as blood, oxygen, etc reach the brain. That seems a little stronger evidence of causality than mere correlation. Still it could be, I suppose, that the brain does not hold consciousness, but is in fact merely an antenna to send and recieve consciousness... probably from a lab at NASA, via interactions with virtual particles, providing propellentless mental acceleration across space and time

<comment><USER11> And of course, there's occasionalism, which holds that the mind and the body (Including the brain) match up without the mind actually having a causal influence on the body at all.

I don't think this removes responsibility for actions though, because even if this is true, whatever we choose to do is still what our bodies do,so we can still choose our actions. Like how two superrational players of the prisoners dilemma can choose the action of their coplayer by choosing their own action.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12>
      How can the room I am sitting in be simultaneously out
      there and, as it were, inside my head, my experience? We
      still have no answer to that question.

Really? It seems quite obvious that events "out there" can affect what's going on "in here" (i.e. my brain) via sound, light, direct contact, etc.

Consciousness is a difficult problem, yes, but there's no need to make it seem even more difficult than it actually is.

<comment><USER6> I share your confusion with this part of an otherwise-excellent article. It was such a surprise to read it that I fear I'm missing something. It seems obvious that what we're experiencing isn't the world or any so-called "objects" in it, but a structured representation of the whole and its parts. The hard part is understanding why:

1\. Representations experience themselves at all

2\. Representations seem to feel different depending on their structure and relationships to other representations

Does anyone have a better interpretation of this paragraph that highlights the supposed mystery about our connection to "the real world"?

<comment><USER3> If you both want to see the mystery replace 'the real world' with 'noumenon' and read some Immanuel Kant. He wrote awfully lot about the 'supposed mystery' :)

BTW. your parent seems to mistake "inside" with "the brain" which seems like a category error.

"It seems obvious that what we're experiencing isn't the world or any so- called "objects" in it, but a structured representation of the whole and its parts." What do you mean by "the whole and its parts"? Do you mean that what we experience for our whole life is just a play of representations created by our mind? Because it seems to be the case. And when you think about it, it is as mindfucky as possible. It may be obvious for you (is it?), but most people act as if it were very far from obvious as in each action most of us attribute real, independent existence to most constructs of our minds that, under scrutiny, are completely arbitrary.

Once you understand that you construct the whole world, you also start to understand how many ways to construct it are there (Sapir-Whorf etc.). Once you understand how fundamentally these possible understandings may differ, you start to appreciate how arbitrary 'your world' is. And then you start to wonder WTF is 'real world'? What is 'out there'? Is there anything at all?

Just a loose association, but isn't your question a bit like asking "what's wrong with this picture" ? [http://personalpages.to.infn.it/~fiorenti/escher/pgallery.gi...](http://personalpages.to.infn.it/~fiorenti/escher/pgallery.gif)

On the other hand I understand your question perfectly. It's even hard to tell whether there is something strange about it or not.

<comment><USER12>
       BTW. your parent seems to mistake "inside" with "the
       brain" which seems like a category error.

I was just paraphrasing the article itself, which says "inside my head". I think it's pretty clear what this means.

<comment><USER3> Sure, fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Consciousness is the way your brain self corrects. That is my personal theory.

On a few time scales you brain makes plans. It uses beliefs and a model of the world to make those plans. It stores those plans and the actions it has taken. And then checks if actions had their intended effects, and if plans reached their intended goals. Updating its model of the world, its beliefs, and what useful actions are.

This is a constant process reflecting upon the current situation, and upon the recent past of actions and plans. It is like an observer observing itself. This is the root of consciousness, I think.

Probably abstract thinking and language, enough intelligence, and a theory of mind, leads to self awareness.

If this is correct, we can formulate some necessary parts for a system to be conscious:

* recognition of the environment * a model of the environment * ability to reason about actions, their consequences, and how to achieve goals * memory of past plans and goals and outcomes * a process of executing actions, making new plans, and learning from the outcomes

<comment><USER3> Self-awareness and consciousness are different things. Sometimes when you wake up you don't know who you are, where you are, what you are, but there is a conscious experience. Consciousness is much more fundamental than your level of reasoning allows to explain.

Here's a list of things that you are adressing and that are not dealing with the hard problem of consciousness ('easy problems'): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#Easy_problems)

<comment><USER13> An observer observing itself, would that not feel like something to the observer?

What you describe is when the observer is disconnected from longer term memory.

<comment><USER3> OK, let me rephrase my objection.

"This is a constant process reflecting upon the current situation, and upon the recent past of actions and plans. It is like an observer observing itself. This is the root of consciousness, I think."

Your description seems to fall under "the ability of a system to access its own internal states" and/or "the reportability of mental states" from the 'easy problems' section of the wiki pages I linked to.

Both could be possible without consciousness at all. We could imagine (or even program) a robot that in response to external stimuli modifies its state. It could also have second order algorithms, eg. it could check what state it's in and if it remains in the same state for too long, the state changes randomly. It would be the same as 'observer observing itself'.

This functional explanation in any way doesn't lead to the phenomena of consciousness, which would require the robot to have some specific first-hand 'experience' of the world and itself. That's the difference between the easy and the hard problem of consciousness.

<comment><USER13> Maybe this thread is not yet dead, seeing a reply a few hours ago. I did intent to reply, but life happened I suppose.

I am curious about your thoughts. Here is why I think it does address the so called hard problem:

The goals of these plans are evaluated by simulating the world and the body and future mental states. So the brain can measure, or "feel", the response, and thus judge the plans and compare them.

This constant self reflection and self prediction is what feels like something to the thing doing it. Why would it not?

\---

But in general I have some objection to the "hard problem".

We cannot proof something to be conscious. Probably we never can. The best we can do is find good proxies indicators of consciousness and good lower bounds for what can potentially be conscious, and what cannot.

But the opposite is also true, we cannot proof there is such a thing as the hard problem of consciousness. For all we know every program we have every written has had some kind of experience as it was running.

I agree it is reasonable to assume this is not the case. But I don't think you can proof this is not the case. Therefor the hard problem might, or might not, actually, be a problem.

<comment><USER3> To predict no 'feeling' need to be involved. You can have prediction without consciousness (any program that simulates some environment to check whether some condition will be met, eg. collision detection in 3d games) and consciousness without prediction (there probably are people with brain damages that are conscious, but have limited imagination capacities).

You can see color of red and don't predict anything at all, while still being consciouss. Predicting is just a narrow part of our conscious activities, however all of them are conscious.

So cosciousness is something much much more basic and fundamental than any high order cognitive function.

> We cannot proof something to be conscious. Probably we never can. The best > we can do is find good proxies indicators of consciousness and good lower > bounds for what can potentially be conscious, and what cannot.

We can't prove it because we have no idea what consciousness is, even on a philosophical level. Moreover if consciousness is basic property of reality, in a way parallel and coexisting with another property - matter, as panpsychists suggest, than it indeed would be impossible, as this dimension would be completely 'invisible' from the matter point of view.

When you're talking about 'proving' most likely you assume existence of some reproducible causal chain in the material, 'intersubjective' space. So you can't 'prove' consciousness in this paradigm by its very definition.

Of course one can insist to throw away any theory that's not provable in our paradigm, but does it bring us any closer to the understanding of consciousness? Also, is there anything inherently wrong with neutral monism or naturalistic dualism? These theories are not internally inconsistent, moreover they are also not inconsistent with anything current physics states - <USER2> just provide a wider view that at least somehow addresses the notion of consciousness.

<comment><USER13> It think you took predicting a bit too far and singular. It is not just predicting that is conscious, and it is more simulating or considering or even pattern matching.

This is what I think: Consciousness is continuously self observing past actions, past plans, actual outcomes, planning new actions and predicting future outcomes. That feels like something to the thing doing such a process, because practically all of those steps involve simulating/predicting/checking what something means to itself. Our brains do this because it is a self correcting mechanism.

> You can see color of red and don't predict anything at all, while still > being consciouss.

I don't think so, when you see that color, you cannot help observing its context, what it means, check if something needs to be done, etc. All that is what I meant with predicting. Maybe the color is of no significance, but the only way you figured that out was by "predicting".

\---

Even if consciousness is 100% material (as I suggest), we can not prove it exists in others. We don't need consciousness as another dimension for it to be improvable.

As a matter of fact, if it is another dimension, then our brains are "interacting" with that dimension. So the hypothesis predicts that certain configuration of matter can have some kind of interaction with that dimension. That should not be hard to proof.

But since we have no such proof, and more mundane hypotheses, we must conclude that the other dimension hypothesis is extremely unlikely.

Another line of thinking on the dimension hypothesis is this: we have brains as small as from C. Elegance with 300 neurons, to ants, 0.25 million neurons, to mice, 70 million neurons, to humans, 86 billion neurons. At which neuron count does consciousness come in? What if we simulate the full neurons of any of these, will it behave the same? Will it be conscious the same?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Riccardo Manzotti has some pretty cool Philosophical Cartoons on his site:

[http://www.consciousness.it/RM_Cartoons.php](http://www.consciousness.it/RM_Cartoons.php)

His "spread mind" site is great too:

[http://www.thespreadmind.com/](http://www.thespreadmind.com/)

As a "seeker" I sometimes wonder if he figured out something close to what nonduality teaches, only in a more technical language (ie. consciousnsss is not located inside anymore than it is outside, therefore somewhat blurring the lines between I and the world). I think his example of the rainbow is such a great metaphor.

Bernardo Kastrup has his theories as well with his whirlpool" metaphor but to me it sounds like it makes sense only to him, and I don't get much out of his metaphor. Whereas Riccardo's pointers are reminiscent of older teachings in that they really invite the reader to examine direct experience (Just my interpretation of his theory).

</comment><comment><USER15> A similar discussion that might interest some of you: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11956101](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11956101)

</comment><comment><USER16> According to the article, there are 85 billion neurons in the brain. Bill Gates has a net worth of 85 billion dollars. That's interesting I think. When I read 85 billion neurons I thought that's not really that much considering.... and I wonder how much Mark Zuckerberg is worth - then I Googled who's the richest and saw Bill Gates had 85B.

</comment><comment><USER17> Is this an ongoing series or something? It stops abruptly at the end...

</comment><comment><USER18> you can read the thread where I report what I consider to be basic truth about consciousness here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12878939](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12878939)

there are no challenges, and even simple numbers can be conscious. we have sequenced DNA today, you can download it right now: [http://www.sanger.ac.uk/resources/downloads/human/](http://www.sanger.ac.uk/resources/downloads/human/)

After downloading it go ahead and take a checksum.

within 500 years (a ridiculous overestimation) someone _will_ build a simulation that simulates (emulates) part of the brain that is described in that genome. Whether at full speed or one-tenth speed it will be done, and for test purposes someone might do it in a determinstic VM of sorts. They can take that checksum, let's say it's:

3ad235db427e566bbb31097c77882d20f30db779ff8f3896cb35bb43ebf76dd164e084109bf2bcb8a9ba1bc7477c1eeb3dfcf699bc3f8e7f4d96aceeaa080003

(That's an SHA-512 hash).

I'll tell you what I hashed. All I hashed was "I'm a brain".

Instead of a text string, within 500 years someone _will_ hash a VM that contains as much data as a human brain, _is_ human for practical purposes, and reports the same thing.

For me personally, this is beyond even discussion and I personally consider the matter closed. However, at hte HN link at the top of this comment I report a state of affairs under which I would be wrong. I don't consider it even worth thinking about though.

I don't consider any question around this area to be "open". We just have to accept what we deduced.

if you don't like it or don't agree with it, you can wait until someone simulates an adult brain reporting self-consciousness, and then you will be forced to say, "oh well, I was wrong."

There is no conceivable scenario under which I would have to say, "oh well, I was wrong." (Above, I outline such a scenario though. It's not going to happen.)

</comment><comment><USER19> Consciousness is a suitcase word, poorly defined. Instead of consciousness, how about we consider more clear notions such as perception, decision, reward, action, memory and attention - all of them developed through learning. Such notions can describe the "mind" completely. They are much more concrete, and are being investigated in AI (reinforcement learning).

We are just self replicating, self preserving processes. The main function is to maintain equilibrium in the face of entropy. We need food, water, shelter and companionship to survive. In order to get those, we need to learn to operate in the world and reason about it. It's nothing magical, just reinforcement learning and other kinds of learning - a little semi-supervised learning, for example, and a lot of unsupervised learning.

All this grand system exists for the sole purpose of protecting its existence. It protects its own life and self replicates, which is another kind of survival. Consciousness is that which protects the body, that is its sole purpose.

If you are not conscious in the morning, you don't drink and eat, and in 3 days you're dead. That's why you need to be conscious every day. That's the greatest miracle of consciousness. Our species would not exist without it. But it's better to work with clear cut notions, like perception, action and reward.

<comment><USER3> There's an easy and a hard problem of consciousness. You're addressing the easy one. These are technical terms, you can look them up.

<comment><USER19> The hard problem is "why do we have qualia?" and it is explained by neural nets. You input sensations and you get latent representations that are mapped into a space of possible representations. So all those ineffable perceptions are just values in this space of representations.

Thus, qualia appear by neural net processing of sensations, and are fed into a recurrent network that judges them moment to moment and updates its internal state, as well as perform actions. That is why we feel a stream of perceptions, not just separate moments.

Qualia appear to be irreducible because the mapping from perceptions to representations is nonlinear - even if we can duplicate it in neural nets, we still can't assign semantic value to each neuron and weight in the network. So it appears magical because it is of a level of complexity that exceeds the human working memory. But it is not so magical that we can't replicate it. We can recognize objects better than humans on certain datasets, and we have word embeddings built on huge corpora of text that are being used for translation. We can compute the "feel" of a word or image.

<comment><USER3> This explanation doesn't touch the hard problem. Please have a look at the 'easy' problems: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#Easy_problems) \- you're still within the functional mindset of these problems.

Are neural nets conscious of their representations? If not - why? What's the difference between neural net that has subjective experience of its intermediate representations and the one that doesn't? On a functional level it doesn't need any subjective experience, so why would it explain anything?

Attempts like this definitely give us some intuitions, but they are working around the hard problem without addressing it.

<comment><USER20> I never understand this 'qualia' problem. For me, it looks like it is not scientific at all due to occam's razor principle. Is there smth like Turning test for 'qualia'?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Create and Edit animated GIFs for short tutorials - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/atatomir/create-and-edit-animated-gifs-for-short-tutorials-425f <comment><USER2> Less sophisticated, but free and working: [https://www.cockos.com/licecap/](https://www.cockos.com/licecap/)</comment>


Huawei in talks to install Russian operating system on tablets - <AUTHOR> https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-huawei-russia-partnership/huawei-in-talks-to-install-russian-operating-system-on-tablets-for-countrys-population-census-sources-idUKKCN1VG1VJ <comment><USER2> This article doesn't really say anything: what is Aurora OS, how does it compare to existing Free and proprietary solutions, what architectures it supports? How are tablets going to be used (eg. taken along by field data collectors, will they use it exclusively or will people be allowed to input their own data thus providing even greater anonimity)?

Btw, if they are certain Russia has 147 million people, why the need for a census?

<comment><USER2> FWIW, a quick search tells me it's Sailfish OS based.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A site for learning Java - <AUTHOR> http://18.104.22.168/about <comment><USER2> Yeah, I'm not logging in through Facebook or my LinkedIn, lol.</comment>


Selfycart (YC S16) Turns Your Smartphone into a Self-Checkout Machine - <AUTHOR> http://themacro.com/articles/2016/08/selfycart/ <comment><USER2> Walmart tried this 4 years ago. Curious why they abandoned it.

[http://theweek.com/articles/472687/walmarts-scan--iphone- app...](http://theweek.com/articles/472687/walmarts-scan--iphone-app-future- shopping)

</comment><comment><USER3> Smart idea except grocery stores and other businesses thrive on long checkout lines since it's an opportunity for them to make extra sales from snacks, gum, etc. Think Fry's Electronics.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting that this seems to compete directly with QueueHop, another YC company. Good to see competition though</comment>


Would You Take This Bet? - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBX-KulgJ1o&feature=em-subs_digest <comment><USER2> I'd love to see those responses correlated against subjects studied, and qualification(s) achieved.</comment>


Paying for Popularity Can Be Fraud - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-11-19/paying-for-popularity-can-be-fraud <comment><USER3> This is the trick for popular restaurants/take-out food in NYC: Buy a really small shop so only 3-5 people can fit inside and the rest have to form a line outside. Then take orders and serve people really slowly so the line builds. Pick up the phone even if it doesn't ring and pretend you are taking orders, etc. Pretty much a textbook strategy. Food must still be good, but the anticipation from a long line makes it taste better and attracts a lot more customers.

<comment><USER4> I used to run club nights in the 2000s, where I'd take over a night at a club and do some kind of event, I'd ticket the door, so people would pay like $5 to come in.

Clubs always have a front and a backdoor..... I'd get 20-50 of my friends to line up, the security guy would know who's who... The line would move slowly, the person who went in, would go to the bar grab a small drink, and then exit out the back and re-join the line. The best part is, we would only have to do this for 20-30mins at max.

The queue would grow organically, and the security guard would start letting my friends in at a faster pace, and then slow it down once everyones in.. where we would all have a few more drinks.

With zero marketing I could fill a club by just making the line look big.. Here's the big kicker, the traditional marketing in the day (posters around town + getting people to hand out flyers at other clubs in the morning) cost MORE than just giving a couple free drinks to your friends who waited in line.

<comment><USER5> I know this works - it's the same reason restaurants fill window tables first - but I've never really understood why this motivates people: a huge queue is, without fail, a _massive_ turn-off for me.

I suppose popularity is interpreted as a signal of quality/excitement but, to me at any rate, it's usually a signal of boredom and frustration.

It works better with restaurants: I mean I want to see there's _somebody_ in there eating the food but if it looks too busy, I'm out.

<comment><USER6> I understand the feeling and mostly share it. But if you are wise about that, would I be mistaken in assuming you are also wise with your spending? Perhaps wiser than what the restaurant owners desire.

Therefore it's probably in their best (financial) interest to select for those who will look for popularity and happily blow away money on high-margin items on the menu.

<comment><USER7> I used to notice this in shops too, as a teenager. We had a sort alternative mini shopping zone, like a slightly upscale indoor market. As soon as me and a couple of guys went into any empty stall, within a couple of minutes other people would crowd in too. We'd then pick somewhere else and watch the same thing happen. Always amused us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tangential to the article, but on-topic to the title:

I saw the Dutch documentary #followme [0] the other day, about the _incredible_ fakeness of Instagram, where for a couple of dollars you can buy 1,000's of Likes / Followers. And everyone - up to the kids in high school - is doing just that, to buy popularity (the metrics have actually become the determining factor for real-life popularity for many people).

Apparently one of the big shots in this shady industry is a Dutch guy (multi- millionaire now), who manages tens of popularity-boosting websites directly or indirectly (and not only for Instagram). He caters to celebrities as well, who sometimes buy millions of followers. For these high-profile actions they arrange special events, according to the docu, like publishing 'fakish' news articles to established news sites (Forbes was mentioned) to coincide with the artificial boost in popularity.

This can be considered fraud too, as 'popular' users benefit from influencer marketing deals (free clothing, travel, tickets, money, etc.) and there is a continuous cat and mouse game between illegit popularity boosters and marketeers. Professional investigative companies jumping on this train to filter out the bad apples, etc.

[0] [https://www.instagram.com/tv/BqcnFY8gEgH/](https://www.instagram.com/tv/BqcnFY8gEgH/)

<comment><USER9> 3-4 years ago this would have been a huge opportunity for an emerging brand. Back then high level execs knew followers mattered but were not themselves on platforms like IG.

Now, everyone is aware of this. When doing influencer deals you get their story open rates and swipes. Everyone knows to look at the ratio of comments + likes to followers.

Kids who do this for their personal IG, certainly, get called out. A guy I used to work with bought around 10,000 followers and boosts all his posts to 500-700 Likes.

It's so ... obvious. Like bad plastic surgery.

Humans are funny.

<comment><USER10> "Everyone knows to look at the ratio of comments + likes to followers"

If likes can be fake then so can comments, right?

<comment><USER11> This was actually in the documentary too. There is a Russian site or app called Commenter, where you can buy positive on-topic comments. Also common practice to do this to e.g. boost some products in SMB webshops, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Somewhat related, it seemed like Netflix (and many others) was carrying out a similar strategy to inflate their number of subscribers to show investors, by allowing users to sign up for endless free trials through creating new email addresses. Only recently did they announce their banning of this come January, in an earnings call, IIRC, which I'm assuming is due to investors catching on and potentially being more skeptical following the recent drops in the NASDAQ.

Not to say that they don't offer a solid service of value, just that it seemed like they enabled this as a means of inflating their numbers for investors.

Random side note, people used to be able to do this with Seamless to get their sign up discount with any order, using a combination of creating a new email address, adding the new email address to a single PayPal account, generating a new Google Voice number associated with the new email address, and providing a random name. It appears they've picked up on it and have taken measures to prevent people from doing this. Might've previously allowed it for inflation reasons, but likely stopped due to their gain in momentum and it being too costly to allow with little to gain

</comment><comment><USER13> This is also why I think the idea of combating fake reviews is not really viable. I sell a widget for $20 with real costs of $8. I expect positive reviews will increase my ranking as well as purchase rate the order of let's say $5million+. I give my widget to 10,000 people on the condition that they agree to write a positive review for it. I just spent $80,000 (and then some change to get in contact with those 10,000 however) to make $5 million+. And those reviews are "real".

The whole point is that as we enter into an ever more connected world popularity of views start to mean less and less because "popularity" can be so easily faked. Imagine once there are bots that can compellingly market products (or ideas/politicians/etc) in language to the standard of a Tweet, which isn't exactly a high bar. Suddenly now you could have literally millions of "people" advocating for something that perhaps only a handful actually want or believe in. It's also perhaps presumptuous to imply that this technological milestone has not already been reached.

Even draconian ideas like trying to remove anonymity would likely do little to nothing since, as in the reviews example, people can simply be incentivized to play ball for what amounts to peanuts compared to the stakes for those doing the incentivizing.

<comment><USER6> This is the most positive thing I've read in a while. Perhaps we'll reach a point where it becomes ingrained in society that popularity in numbers actually means nothing. Quantities of shallow praises become worthless once the praises are indeed exactly equal to zero.

Then maybe our tribal instincts will kick back in and we as a society will return to seeking few but high quality praises, from people we trust and with whom we are connected on a human level—ie. deeper, multi-faceted connections.

<comment><USER14> There's a fool born every minute, so I doubt such knowledge will become common organically. Better yet, have a class on basic tropes used to manipulate your decisions aimed at teens taught at some of the free online universities (e.g. Khan Academy). I don't want to suggest rolling it into an actual high school class, because I don't think official regulated school classes are agile enough to handle the rapid change of the online landscape.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Heh I live near the Supreme store in nyc and every weekend without fail people start to queue up around the corner in the morning. Everything about this brand (down to its Logo which was "appropriated" from Barbara Kruger "I shop therefore I am") is about appropriating other designs. So they're essentially selling hype at huge markup via tiny store and line round the whole block. I see people stand in this line all day in the winter! Although some of them are enterprising individuals who re-sell these items at 500% profit

<comment><USER16> Supreme is one of the original new york streetwear lines, it's practically an institution. I used to work in that exact building for years and I couldn't disagree with you more. I think there is something really cool about the kids lining up to get a drop, if you go chat with them for a while, they know every supreme, who inspired it, and given the massive lines are usually always collaborations - why the collab is special. Given Supreme has been operating in the city for 25 years and not much has changed outside of the collabs they do, I don't think you're correct about them being "about appropriating other design". Even the Barbara Kruger comment is a huge stretch, inspiration and appropriation are not the same things.

<comment><USER17> The fact Supreme is 50% owned by the Carlyle Group, a massive private equity firm, is kind of a joke no? It's the total antithesis of what street/skate culture stands for.

<comment><USER16> Certainly Supreme is not a small company and their standard lines have huge huge distribution and are not particularly unique. The OP was referencing the lines outside of the Supreme store on Lafayette, this is _the_ supreme store regardless of the fact that there are _many_ supreme stores, the original supreme store in Manhattan releases limited one time short run series of Supreme only available at this store. This is pretty much the standard streetwear MO, regardless of how small or large, even folks like ader error who I believe are held by the founders yet have global distribution still drop original and limited in this manner, if I want one of their drops I have to pay someone in Korea to line for me or wait for it to arrive on the secondary market for some insane markup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sounds like most ICOs: the founders can buy their own supply at no cost, making all cryptocurrencies that ICO'd (Ethereum, EOS, etc.) inherently insecure and centralized.

This is why blockchains that distributed their supply via PoW work: you cannot buy your supply without proving you put in the work. The founder cannot fake hash power, so the distribution is "fair."

Despite everyone trying to "improve Bitcoin," I can count on one hand coins that didn't have a significantly worse distribution than Bitcoin, which makes them dead-on-arrival. This applies to coins such as Cardano and Nano as well whose distribution was insecure, making them inherently unsafe.

<comment><USER19> True. And because I haven't seen any proof that cryptocurrencies based on something else than PoW can work, I believe _they all need to be burned to the ground_. PoW cryptocurrencies are an environmental hazard.

<comment><USER18> That doesn't necessarily follow from what I said: my comment was strictly about the distribution of incentives. A PoS-based cryptocurrency can bootstrap a fair distribution through airdrops over PoW-distributed cryptocurrencies, sidestepping both the shortcomings of ICO distribution and the environmental impact of PoW coins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The article offers one example buried within its rant about private equities and crypto offerings

I thought that was funny

Basically all they had to do was disclose to investors that they were buying downloads. This can be done in a variety of ways such as mentioning a contract with the firm or service providers, and that is enough information for potential investors to look up the company.

<comment><USER21> Yes, but the whole point of buying eyeballs is to deceive investors. If you tell potential investors, "I have 14 million unique monthly users, but I pay for 13 million of them", they're just gonna stare at you blankly and not invest.

<comment><USER20> Thats why you dont word it like that

But you can do it compliantly, like some of the examples in the article did

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I though this was basically the main business plan on flippa, like an open secret. And I have even heard that some books on "new york times best seller list" are just books moving between warehouses to generate invoices.

<comment><USER23> > And I have even heard that some books on "new york times best seller list" > are just books moving between warehouses to generate invoices.

This probably doesn't help. The _"The New York Times Best Sellers"_ is a curated list. High sales don't guarantee a placing on the list.

This is not even a secret: When William Blatty sued the New York Times because _The Exorcist_ had only been on the list, he lost the case. The defense was that "the list did not purport to be an objective compilation of information but instead was an editorial product." [1]

[1] [https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_11409822?guccounter=1](https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_11409822?guccounter=1)

<comment><USER24> > _The Exorcist_ had only been on the list

Think you meant "had not been". p.s. Enlightening article, thanks.

<comment><USER23> I thought he sued because he was on the list only for a very short time when sales numbers justified a longer time. This is wrong and I should have written "had not been". Thanks for the hint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> You don't even need a "buddy". Because, if you know what you're doing, you can _be_ the buddy. Or thousands of them. Whatever it takes.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't understand where the "fraud" line is. I suspect many more don't either.

It's common knowledge that to get a good network startup going, you need to sock-puppet the hell out of it. It's common knowledge that Amazon is full of scam reviews. It's common knowledge that many Twitter followers are fake, or bots. It's common knowledge that Instagram pics are photoshopped-up.

So when you see a picture of an attractive person on Instagram using some product, go to your Twitter to see a famous person recommend it, then click over to Amazon to read raving reviews, is that fraud? Because that's how the web works. It's the same exact game, you just don't give the money directly to your buddy.

<comment><USER19> I think I have the opposite view from you. I see how this is not _technically_ fraud, but I don't understand _why isn 't it_. It should be. All the companies that engage in such practices can go to hell; I do my best to never do business with any that I know does that.

It's sad that lying to people and exploiting them is not only accepted, but considered a legitimate standard practice.

<comment><USER26> My view is that I don't understand. It looks like you do. Yay!

I will try to explain to you why I don't understand. Maybe you can help.

Computers are an extension of our brains. What I _think_ is happening is that people doing a whole bunch of immoral things online: lying, sock-puppeting, and so forth. But there's a not direct person-to-person link where money trades hands and the other person gets screwed. Instead it's much more subtle than that.

When you add it all up, yes, we agree, a lot of this looks like fraud to me. But maybe it's fraud in the moral sense and not fraud in the criminal sense? If I tell my Uncle Amit that his new suit looks good on him, even though it doesn't, then goes out and buys a dozen, is that fraud? What if 100 people he doesn't know participate in the same kind of lie only using a lot of different tech?

My point is that simple lying is not a crime. So it can't _all_ be a crime. And now I'm back to trying to figure out where the line is.

ADD: As I typed this, I noticed that my FB notification went off in one of my browser tabs. I click over -- and FB is notifying me of something it already notified me of. But got me to click! I'm seeing a lot of social sites doing this double-notification stuff. I understand about distributed databases, that there might be a reason for it. But after a while, this starts to look like a whiny, pathetic attempt just to get me back looking at more Facebook.

Is that fraud? How about when Facebook both shows more of my stuff and more of the people I interact with to me -- while we're all online together, hoping that we'll start interacting directly -- and staying on FB?

There's an enormous amount of this online. FB is only used here as an example. How about when you hellban people and they think they're typing comments into a forum but they're really not? You're directly taking their time and energy away from them by lying.

I hate all of this. I'm just not sure it should be a crime.

<comment><USER19> > _But maybe it 's fraud in the moral sense and not fraud in the criminal > sense?_

Yes, that's what I meant. It's not fraud in criminal sense, but it's definitely immoral - and I often find myself wondering, why some of those practices aren't considered legal!fraud?

> _But there 's a not direct person-to-person link where money trades hands > and the other person gets screwed. Instead it's much more subtle than that._

Sometimes there is. I complain a lot about dishonest ads and telemarketers, because in those cases there's a direct link - a telemarketer manipulates a poor person into buying stuff that they don't need, and that doesn't perform as well as advertised. That person is then left with mostly useless paperweight, less money for their real needs, and a sense of shame that makes it hard to admit they were duped. Yes, I know of such cases first-hand. There are degrees to this, and ultimately, it usually doesn't result in life- threatening problems, but then again me punching you and taking your lunch money also doesn't cause you more harm than hurt feelings and going hungry for the day.

Step above that are faked and bribed reviews. Again, one can say it's just noise, but then just imagine a person who needs an appliance, and can't afford to make a bad purchase. All this noise suddenly makes it very likely that whatever they buy will be crap, and they'll get an utterly suboptimal deal. I've been in that situation in the past, and though these days I can afford to pay premium and buy a branded product just to avoid dealing with this bullshit, most people I know can't, and thus shopping is often a lottery of regrets.

> _My point is that simple lying is not a crime. So it can 't all be a crime. > And now I'm back to trying to figure out where the line is._

Same as I do. It's a hard problem; doubly so if you include enforcability and cost/benefit into calculation.

\--

Come to think of it, maybe I'm just too sensitive about people's feelings? Maybe I mistakenly want to hold our modern civilization to much higher standards than warranted? Maybe it's still really a jungle, a dog-eat-dog world, and hoping for a society of friendly cooperation is too much?

<comment><USER26> Why don't you curse at people when you see them in the street? It's not illegal. Why are we nice to people at all?

I keep getting back to morals. We don't do a lot of things because we want to be good people, not because it's illegal.

I still don't know where the line is, but I've been convinced for some time that we need a common set of morals to hold ourselves and businesses to online. If nothing else, "The computer should never lie to me" is a good starting point. That is, whatever I perceive the computer to be telling me had better reflect what the programmers know. Anything else is bullshit. (And perhaps illegal)

<comment><USER19> > _Why don 't you curse at people when you see them in the street? It's not > illegal. Why are we nice to people at all?_

Right? But why do we expect ourselves to be nice, and other people to be nice, in direct interpersonal relationship, but we allow - hell, glorify - <USER2> malicious in business setting?

> _" The computer should never lie to me" is a good starting point. That is, > whatever I perceive the computer to be telling me had better reflect what > the programmers know. Anything else is bullshit. (And perhaps illegal)_

I very much like this idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm with it until "I sell 5 percent of the company to investors for $100 million and spend it on yachts."

Aren't investors going to notice that during the bankruptcy proceedings, the $100 million is nowhere represented among any assets of the company and the founder suddenly has 10 yachts? That wouldn't raise any red flags? Wouldn't you have to produce some sort of accounting records showing where the money was spent on salaries, office space, Facebook ads, etc?

I know there's a ridiculous amount of money sloshing around Silicon Valley, but I still find it hard to believe that $100 million is going to disappear and nobody is going to bother asking about where it went.

<comment><USER28> s/yachts/salaries

They're not _actually_ advocating buying company yachts. But a CEO salary? Sure. You can buy your yachts with that.

<comment><USER27> Sure, but nobody is going to be suspicious that you paid yourself $10 million/year while the company was losing money?

<comment><USER29> How much was Bezos making while Amazon was in the red? Or Jack Dorsey?

<comment><USER27> Amazon and Twitter eventually went public and made their investors umpteen billions of dollars, so I'm sure they don't care now.

If they had gone bankrupt instead, and Amazon was nothing but a static HTML page while Bezos was building his own marina I imagine someone would have been asking some questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When this was floated on Twitter the other day, a number of prominent VCs chimed in to say that due diligence would see this coming a mile away.

<comment><USER31> VC's always say that. I'm sure some do more than superficial due diligence, sometimes, but honestly I don't really believe them, at least not in the early stages. For companies at those stages I wouldn't be surprised if more than cursory DD had a negative ROI anyways.

<comment><USER32> Yep just look at Clinkle and (in particular) Theranos

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Fairly well know in old school business:

You buy a crappy house somewhere, and you sell it to a friend for a lot more. He might reciprocate, too.

You take your increased prices to the bank as evidence that you have more equity, which you use to back a loan.

You buy another crappy building.

<comment><USER34> > _You buy a crappy house somewhere, and you sell it to a friend for a lot > more_

This is an inefficient way to inflate asset values. What you'd actually do is put your garbage house in a special purpose vehicle (SPV), sell 5% of the SPV to your friend at a stupid price, get the SPV appraised based on that transaction, have the SPV take out a non-recourse secured loan based on that appraisal value, pay your friend back (plus something for him) and then jingle mail away.

The key is leveraging the cash your friend has to put in. That's the scarce resource.

 _Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice nor advice of any kind. Please don't do this._

<comment><USER35> It's surprising that the banks can be fooled by that, once you explained it it seemed so obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > _I pay my buddy $10 million to buy a million e-widgets from me._

> _My buddy pays me $10 million for a million e-widgets._

How does this part work? Is this real money changing bank accounts or just promissory notes/credit?

<comment><USER37> Generally the e-widgets will be on app stores or somewhere like Amazon so real money will have to move. On a smaller scale companies will often use Paypal to send people the full cost of the item after a positive review is posted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's a shame about the burger thing. If they'd found someone a bit savvy, they could have parlayed their fame into far more money than the cost of the tourist hordes, and been well places to either retire or re-set the business.

</comment><comment><USER39> Curious though: if I give a lot of money to a friend, don't I have to somehow report this to the IRS or something? And when he goes on to buy this stuff, doesn't he have to report somehow where all this money came from?

<comment><USER40> Businesses only pay taxes on net earnings, not on gross revenues. As long as you both do not show a profit you won't have tax liability.

<comment><USER41> Businesses still need to report all revenue, even if they're only taxed on the profit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> it is almost like people are too greedy to realize the con /s

<comment><USER43> Or they do realize the con, but they don't care because pure speculation works anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Pretty much most of marketing and nearly all of advertising then.

</comment><comment><USER45> Growth hacks can be fraud. No surprise there.

</comment><comment><USER46> Tangential, but I love when non-fiction writers have a strong writing style. I was about three sentences in when I thought "boy, this sounds like Matt Levine", and so it was.

<comment><USER47> Even the titles have a distinct Matt Levine flavor to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Isn't paying for popularity the basis of advertising?

<comment><USER49> They mean that it's fraud to mislead people by gaming their assumptions about performance indicators.

Specifically, they're saying that paying for one kind of popularity (e.g., sales of widgets or good reviews on Amazon.com) is fraud when that popularity is meant to trick people into believing that it implies a subtly different kind of popularity (e.g., sales of widgets from independent third parties or good reviews on Amazon.com from unbiased reviewers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Number 7 though... :)))

"I sell 5 percent of the company to investors for $100 million and spend it on yachts."</comment>


Why the banks collapsed and how a paper on Haskell can help stop it happening next time - <AUTHOR> http://paulspontifications.blogspot.com/2008/09/why-banks-collapsed-and-how-paper-on.html

<comment><USER2> A related paper by Nick Szabo: "A Formal Language for Analyzing Contracts" <http://szabo.best.vwh.net/contractlanguage.html>

Szabo's various other related papers: <http://szabo.best.vwh.net/index.html> and his blog at <http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/></comment>


This Hedge Fund Left Decisions to a Computer – And Made 19% - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-21/this-hedge-fund-s-computer-says-sell-japan-debt-after-19-gain <comment><USER2> This isn't super related to the article, but it reminds me of a chapter in Daniel Kahneman's _Thinking Fast and Slow_ on a similar subject that I wanted to share.

In this chapter, Kahneman recalls a study performed by Paul Meehl, who discovered that statistical algorithms trumped expert intuitions roughly 60% of the time, with the other 40% of cases resulting in draws. These analysis were performed across a variety of different fields including "violations of parole, success in pilot training, and criminal recidivism."

Meehl suggests that experts form inaccurate predictions due to their overconfidence and unnecessarily complex analyzation. Another possible reason is that humans are generally inconsistent when summarizing complex information. An example being "radiologists who evaluate X-rays as normal or abnormal contradict themselves 20% of the time when they see the same picture on separate occasions."</comment>


Boomtown, USA: An Historical Look at Fracking - <AUTHOR> https://notevenpast.org/historical-perspectives-on-the-fracking-boom/

<comment><USER2> The Oil City referred to is in Louisiana, not the more famous one in Oklahoma :) The one in Oklahoma had its post office closed in 1930. Road signs still tell you its name.</comment>


Show HN: Software Stickers Co – Simple Software Funding - ____Sash---701_ http://dev.softwarestickers.com <comment><AUTHOR> The idea may well be a good one, but this web page is so poorly conceived, that I doubt the organization that adopted it has the judgement necessary to guide its project to success. The nearly unreadable font is only the most obvious of its shortcomings.

<comment> ____Sash---701_ I'm open to suggestions, please email me at firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I emailed you last night with some suggestions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I like the idea of this but there's something not quite right.

When you look at the front page you see all projects have had $5 dollars worth of stickers purchased. [http://tinyimg.io/i/DfTAcu4.png](http://tinyimg.io/i/DfTAcu4.png)

But then you click through to purchase a sticker and the minimum purchase is actually $10. [http://tinyimg.io/i/saXcgTw.png](http://tinyimg.io/i/saXcgTw.png)

That feels a bit disingenuous and scammy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool! Would be nice to include a brief description of the materials type (Ex: glossy or paper) in the description of each sticker.

<comment> ____Sash---701_ On it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is actually a great idea - I've often wished I had accesss to tech stickers of this sort for my laptop

</comment><comment><USER5> Please add metric dimensions to the stickers.

<comment> ____Sash---701_ Will see if I can make that happen. Metric dimensions are available when viewing a stickers' page.</comment></comment>


Hello World - <AUTHOR> http://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/hello-world/ <comment><USER2> The design page is the most interesting place to look at: [https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/docs/de...](https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/docs/design.md)

<comment><USER3> Also worth mentioning is the excellent talk[0] given by Tobias Schottdorf at FOSDEM 2015 about the high-level design and impetus behind CockroachDB.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndKj77VW2eM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndKj77VW2eM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm the author of a distributed database, competing with them. Overall I'm refreshingly impressed with their design document. Which I am sad to say that most other databases don't come any where near thinking these things through except as an after thought - so I am glad to see they are making it their priority.

With that said, they seem to be assuming that their clock skew (ε) has a fixed maximum boundary which is incredibly disconcerting to me as it implies that in certain (rare and anomalous) network partitions that they'll get data corruption and fail.

I can see how they, coming from a Spanner background with atomic clocks, might assume this. But this assumption requires that their database cluster is always connected, within some heartbeat interval (which they mention) such that they can trust there exists a maximum bounded ε skew.

So while it seems like a dumb question, I honestly must ask a very trivial question: how does CockroachDB handle basic network partitions? I assume they have a good answer to this, but it needs to be clarified in order to answer the more important issue of anomalous partitions, like split brain. This might rip the crockroach in half, quite literally, meaning that all other "guarantees" they give get thrown out the window like linearizability and global consistency.

<comment><USER5> I believe that if a node in the consensus group exceeds ε clock skew, it will be kicked out of the group.

As far as network partitions go, a consensus must exist for reads or writes. If you don't have 3 out of 5 working correctly and talking to each other, then you are down.

<comment><USER6> That's correct, it's a consistent system and so the majority needs to be involved on mutating writes. Reads typically can read from one designated copy of the replica directly (bypassing Raft).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know this is a small gripe, but the name of the company (even though it makes sense) makes my skin crawl a little. The name does stick in my memory though, so I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

<comment><USER8> Let's be frank, it's a terrible, horrible name.

<comment><USER9> A counterintuitive name can be an excellent choice. Who would'a thunk you could name an airline "Virgin" and get it off the ground?

<comment><USER10> That case is different. Virgin started with music records and was already a huge brand by they time they launched the airline. They launched tons of products and all of them were called Virgin (mobile, cola etc).

May be a better question would be "Who would'a thunk you could name a record label 'Virgin' and get it off the ground?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love hearing about a database that decides to focus on replication and self- healing itself! It drives me nuts how most databases implement a data store and then leave all the complexities of sharding and replication as an exercise to the reader, who is busy trying to get other things done.

I've been looking for a database which does sharding and replication automatically and without throwing away any focus on consistency and transactions, so I figure I'm likely to use this in the future. I've struggled to try to find any others meeting these criteria.

<comment><USER12> There's a number of datastores that claim to shard and replicate automatically, with no worries for dev/ops/devops.

They've been lying. Never trust them.

Some datastores can actually do this, but performance per beefy server is less than you'd expect. You can use Riak but you have to write proper CRDTs. You can use zookeeper or etcd but those are for small amounts of configuration data, not for large amounts of customer data.

For all the datastores that claim to do everything automatically and have great performance, we can thank Aphyr for providing the proof that they don't live up to their promises, while we just suspect they don't.

I'd suggest trying to use a simpler model, and understand and accept its failure modes. Maybe your app has to go into read-only mode for a few hours if there's a server failure, etc.

<comment><USER11> >I'd suggest trying to use a simpler model, and understand and accept its failure modes. Maybe your app has to go into read-only mode for a few hours if there's a server failure, etc.

I'm fine with failure modes like that. I just want it to be automated. I don't want to come home from a trip and find that my database master has fallen over and the database slave has been patiently waiting for me to manually promote it for the last few days. I could probably rig up some cron jobs and shell scripts to automate this, but this is what I'm looking for something to do for me that's hopefully written by people smarter than me.

<comment><USER13> RDS MySQL does this, with a hot standby master and 60 second failover. Replicas too. Unless you were looking for free. That's a bit harder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14>
      "Today, we're launching CockroachDB for everyone. Use it. Build on it. Contribute to it!"

Does this mean it's more or less ready? The status in Github hasn't been updated in quite a while and lists it as Alpha with important parts like raft concensus still missing.

Can someone (preferably from the team) clarify the current situation?

PS.: CockroachDB is the only distributed DB that I would bet on going forward and being a solid base for a big distributed DB.

<comment><USER6> not quite ready yet, but the pace has picked up dramatically. We've begun work on the structured data layer and are whipping up a suite of extensive acceptance tests (load testing, performance metrics, ...) to iron out all of the performance issues/bugs that we don't want to be a part of the beta. Raft consensus, btw, is already implemented. We'll update the README shortly to give a more concrete estimate of the situation.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the answer, I appreciate all the hard work that is being done on the project.

So since you guys started working on the structured data layer, does that mean CockroachDB is going into Beta?

I can't wait to get my hands on a test setup even though it's probably going to take a long time before I can deploy it into production.

<comment><USER6> The plan is to get out of alpha as soon as possible. I'll leave it to the founders to throw dates around but we're working hard on getting the technical core on solid ground, and all the auxiliary stuff (UI, deployment, ...) required for beta is getting a lot of attention. We'll have hands-on deployment demos soon and if you follow the project in the coming weeks you'll probably get a good idea of where things are going.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been following the development of this project from the beginning and it has been very interesting to see how they've productized it. IIRC, they all used to work at Square (and before that in a startup called viewfinder) and started it on a hackweek.

<comment> brown9-2 They also invented GIMP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How does Cockroach Labs plan on making money, with regards to the free license? Do you plan on providing hosting and support?

</comment><comment><USER17> It's worth noting that they are backed by Google Ventures apparently: [https://twitter.com/GoogleVentures/status/606534505332154369](https://twitter.com/GoogleVentures/status/606534505332154369)

<comment><USER18> "Aside from Benchmark, Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and FirstMark Capital also participated in the round."

[1] [http://venturebeat.com/2015/06/04/peter-fentons-latest- inves...](http://venturebeat.com/2015/06/04/peter-fentons-latest-investment- is-a-database-startup-called-cockroach/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The Team page looks like a Silicon Valley promo.

</comment><comment><USER20> Using a bug name for a software product is an interesting strategy.

<comment><USER21> Not unusual:

Ant: [http://ant.apache.org](http://ant.apache.org) Wasp: [https://www.waspbarcode.com](https://www.waspbarcode.com) Hornet: [https://www.npmjs.com/package/hornet](https://www.npmjs.com/package/hornet)

<comment><USER22> Some of them are the good kind of bugs!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Man, these guys have a lot of stellar engineers with really strong backgrounds. They also have "free fridays".. which is crazy.

<comment><USER24> What's "free fridays"?

<comment><USER25> sounds like you dont have to work on Friday.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Opening line: _Databases are the beating heart of every business in the world_

Well that's not remotely true, is it? Not even close. Is it really a good idea to lead with something so obviously untrue? If you're trying to convince me of something (i.e. that this product is good), putting such a jarring, obvious falsehood right at the start is a bad idea. I'm wondering if they're deliberately spoofing their own seriousness, but I see nothing else in there to support that.

<comment><USER27> This line didn't bug me so much. Would you have been okay with something subtly milder? e.g. Databases are _at_ the beating heart of every business in the world

or even: Data is the beating heart of every business in the world.

<comment><USER26> Depending on how generous a reader is feeling, either still not true or a massive hyperbolic exaggeration that stretches the word "database" far beyond its actual definition; I'd wonder (in fact, I actually am wondering this) if they were living in some kind of bubble.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > Cockroach is a distributed key:value datastore _(SQL and structured data > layers of cockroach have yet to be defined)_ \- emphasis mine

I guess this is interesting, but distributed hard consistency pure K-V stores have been done before, Zookeeper, etcd, etc. It seems like the vast majority of the hard work is left to do. I don't want to get into naming arguments, but I wouldn't really call this a 'database' yet. It doesn't sound like you can do anything but a key lookup or range query currently, which is incredibly limiting for most real world applications.

I somewhat question the approach. e.g. why not figure out the hard part first? i.e. build the `SQL and data layers` on top of zookeeper or etcd then replace the backend to scale better? I would think this would get a lot more early adopters. As is, it's a very niche usage case that the alpha fills.

<comment><USER29> I suspect they _have_ figured out the hard part.

If you look at the documentation (eg., [1]), the design has been rather carefully thought out; it's just that they're implementing it from the bottom up.

According to their roadmap [2], they're aiming for KV functionality in 1.0 and aren't aiming for SQL until past version 2.0 (it's currently alpha).

Given the backgrounds of the technical people involved (including Google, as this project is inspired by Spanner), they should have a lot of experience with what they're trying to accomplish.

As for "done before", a core feature of Cockroach is true ACID transaction support, including snapshot isolation, something no distributed NoSQL database I know about supports. (ArangoDB does support transaction, but is mostly NoSQL in the sense of implementing a different query language than SQL.)

[1] [https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/docs/de...](https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/docs/design.md)

[2] [https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/wiki/Roadmap](https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/wiki/Roadmap)

<comment><USER28> > As for "done before", a core feature of Cockroach is true ACID transaction > support, including snapshot isolation, something no distributed NoSQL > database I know about supports.

Zookeeper has ACID transactions which I believe are linearizable (which trumps SI). The downside is the memory only working set, but given how cheap memory is, I'd still rather have a memory only Zookeeper with a rich query interface than a large storage data KV store with minimal query interface.

> ArangoDB does support transaction, but is mostly NoSQL in the sense of > implementing a different query language than SQL

What is your definition of NoSQL?

<comment><USER29> ZooKeeper is not a general-purpose database. I have heard of anyone using it as one, either.

> What is your definition of NoSQL?

I don't have one, and I think the term isn't terribly useful. But the whole idea of NoSQL started as an attempt to break free of the _relational_ aspect of SQL, because things like joins, strict schemas, foreign keys, and normalization were perceived as getting in the way of distribution. ArangoDB supports joins (but not foreign keys, because it's schemaless) and an SQL-like query language, which makes it a lot closer to an SQL database than something like Redis or Cassandra.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Great storytelling, accompanied by a call to action at the end... but right there at the end a big bold button (or link) is missing, you need to figure out that the tech details are from the menu. Make it simpler for the reader!

</comment><comment><USER31> [https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach](https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach)

"The highest level of abstraction is the SQL layer (currently not implemented)."

</comment><comment> ilya-pi Would love to see how it performs against Jepsen

</comment><comment><USER32> Arguably, the highest level of abstraction will be in the query language exposed to applications. Will it support SQL?

<comment><USER33> From here [0]: "The highest level of abstraction is the SQL layer (currently not implemented)"

[0] [https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach#architecture](https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach#architecture)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> As a consultant, how am I to ever push for this technology to clients and their developers?!

<comment><USER34> Just say 'I recommend we use this database from a bunch of ex-Googlers'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Well, at least users don't have to worry about open-source selling out...or do they?

<comment><USER36> [http://readwrite.com/2015/03/25/apple-foundationdb-github- cl...](http://readwrite.com/2015/03/25/apple-foundationdb-github-closed- source)

<comment><USER37> On that note, it's quite interesting how similar this is to FoundationDB.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I've been following this project for well over a year now. It's come a long way, has a long way to go still, but it's pretty exciting as an alternative to weak consistency stores available now.

<comment><USER39> Agreed. I'm in the middle of implementing one of the lesser DBs, and have all of the engineering ahead of me that requires. Unfortunately this doesn't look smart until 2.0, which is probably years away. Too long to wait for.

I can always scan-and-switch when it's ready.

</comment></comment><comment> noir-york Looks awesome! Can't wait for the alpha.

</comment><comment><USER40> I would be interested to see how it performs against the YCSB+T benchmark. Many claim SSI but very few achieve it.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm very happy to see that this is released under the Apache license.

</comment><comment><USER42> "Fast forward to the mid-2000s, when Google ushered in the NoSQL movement." ... Hubris? Fanboyism? Or not knowing history?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQL](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQL)

<comment><USER43> They're referring to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigTable](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigTable)

<comment><USER42> But google ushered in the era of NoSQL? Seems a bit of hyperbole.

<comment><USER44> Except it's not. Strozzi used the term to refer to a relational database that didn't support SQL commands, the first modern usage of the term NoSQL was used to describe the slew of databases that copied Google's bigtable approach. (CouchDB et al)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> bra-ket does it understand SQL?

</comment><comment><USER45> Proper title, please.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is what my brain messaged to me: [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

<comment><USER11> Overuse of that comic is a pet-peeve of mine. That comic is about standards, which the entire point is for everyone to agree on. That doesn't apply to all products in general! The point of a database isn't for everyone to use the same product. It's to store data. It's not ironic in any way that there are multiple competing database products! It's only standards that have any irony in that fact!

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'm getting a 503

</comment><comment><USER48> When I click on the image I am taken to this page. There seems to be no way to go back to the main page ...

[https://i.imgur.com/aZPWk6Q.png](https://i.imgur.com/aZPWk6Q.png)

<comment><USER49> Click the back button in your browser

<comment><USER48> Just thought it was quite bad UX design not letting me click the background or adding an X somewhere ... oh well.

<comment><USER50> That's just an image, though. It's not actually a page. And since you're on Firefox, the image is centered with a dark grey background, which imitates the common UI modal design pattern... but it's not.

Now why they would think to make that image a clickable link is beyond me...

<comment><USER51> It's a Wordpress default that images are links to themselves.

Why it's a Wordpress default is beyond me...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mimicking Boston Dynamics with Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/mini-raspberry-pi-boston-dynamics-inspired-robot/ <comment><USER2> That robot is so cute! Thanks for sharing. If I was the author I would not purposely evoke Boston Dynamics comparisons in the title, I get chills thinking about their headless monsters.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks fun, but of course this one is 100% manually controlled.

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome :) . Any chance of walking across sand dunes?</comment>


Student Loans May Be Driving the Tuition Explosion - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-09/why-is-college-tuition-rising-blame-student-loans-fed-says <comment><USER2> _The surging cost of U.S. college tuition has an unlikely culprit: the generosity of the government's student-aid program_

Unlikely?? Are you kidding me? Did we learn nothing from the 2008 housing bubble?

<comment><AUTHOR> The only people that still consider this unlikely, or otherwise try to hide from the obvious government inflation cause, are those with a vested stake in the status quo. That includes an awful lot of people, from university employees, to general educators, to most people on the left politically, to the US Government that prints $50 billion a year in profit from the debt scheme, to anyone connected to the college book industry, to anyone working in student loans in the private sector - millions of people have their livelihoods directly tied to perpetual government education cost inflation.

<comment><USER3> Corrupt regimes always get the intelligentsia on its side either via threat or in this case bribery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You don't say. This seems readily apparent to me.

<comment><USER5> I thought I misread the title or something and that this might be some novel thing. Isn't this basically established fact & common knowledge?

<comment><USER6> I call this 'the treadmill'. I don't know if its intentional or just a by product of greed but pretty much all 'gatekeeper' industries have financing the raises the end price of a product (Don't have car, can't get to work. Don't have an education, can't get a job. Don't have a house, live on the street). If this sort of loan was much more difficult to obtain imagine the change in the end cost of these items.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Government guaranteed loans driving a bubble?!

Good God, this man may be on to something.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if the root cause here isn't the almost unlimited availability of government student loans but how we're raising children.

Particularly in the developed world the trend seems to be that we raise children telling them the whole way that they're smart, they're amazing and they are entitled to pretty much everything.

The problem is we're complementing what children (ostensibly) _are_ rather than what they _do_. This is really damaging:

[http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/](http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/)

I remember seeing this:

[http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/24/pf/college/student- debt-1000...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/24/pf/college/student-debt-100000/)

Here's an example:

> Salvagin dreamed about being an actress, and even studied to be one. But she > has put aside her dreams, and has taken on two jobs -- as an executive > assistant at an advertising agency and at a nonprofit doing events -- to pay > off her debt load.

> She's managed to lighten it a little -- Salvagin graduated with $95,000 of > debt.

What possessed anyone (who obviously can't afford it) to spend ~$100k at a _private school_ to study _acting_?

Louis CK talks about entitled 20 year olds:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTaZkf4dih8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTaZkf4dih8)

> You know why, because you're 20. That's why. Because you're a 20 year > ____and you have no idea how the world works. Because you think you deserve > better. You think you 're too interesting a person to have a shitty job. > Every 20 year old that I encounter behind the counter gives me that look. > "This job sucks." Yeah, that's why we gave it to you. Because you're 20, > which is a mathematical guarantee that you have no skills and nothing to > offer anybody in the world. You're 20. For 2 decades you've been taking and > sucking up. Education and love and food and ipods. Just sucking it up and > judging it.

Is it really any wonder that no thought goes into how much earning potential you have before spending 6 figures on a private school to study art history?

<comment><USER9> It is depraved and cynical to suggest that the purpose of a college should be job-training. This is a wholly american idea, and a shitty one at that.

The purpose of college is to make one educated. If one wants to study art history, then one should study art history. One can easily build up skills on the side to complement one's education (I did programming on the side with my philosophy major and have a great job).

Ideally (and as it happens in civilized countries) the state should be paying for an education, and students should study just whatever they damn please. College shouldn't cost 6 figures in the first place.

<comment><USER10> I see things a bit differently, I feel that we don't have a god given right to study whatever the hell we want and require other people to pay for it.

I understand that some people have no interest in being productive members of society, and I don't own them; they own themselves and can make their own decisions and choices about their lives.

I'm happy that there is art in the world, and I support artists by buying art, and I think it is a shame that art isn't valued by society enough to provide a really outstanding living for all but a select handful of artists. However, that's the world we live in. I like to read science fiction novels occasionally. Should I expect others to pay me to do that? Of course not, I consider that my own choice and I limit how much I do of that to what I can afford to pay for out of my own resources.

Artists and art historians don't have a right to make me work to support them simply because the choices they make don't result in the life or education that they want. If they believe they can write a book or produce a piece of music that I will purchase more power to them. However, people (and universities) shouldn't go around saying "follow your bliss" or "study whatever looks like fun" and mislead them about where that course of action will end up.

A mathematician says "How do I prove that?", a scientist says "How do I investigate that?", a businessman says "How do I produce that?" and an art history major says "Do you want fries with that?".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Basically the excess profit obtained from a university degree is now being captured by external agents rather than the individual student. We should expect this to happen in any market which has reached maturity after a period of rapid expansion which higher education experienced from 1950 to 2000.

</comment><comment><USER12> It is the same mechanism as the mortgages that created the housing bubble -- an almost limited amount of credit with a 0% risk (in theory, not practice as we will soon see).

</comment><comment><USER13> I can't wait for Bloomberg's next expose, "Water May Be Wet."

But seriously, how can this be a surprise to anyone? Easy credit = increased demand (since people who otherwise would be unable to pay for the good can now afford it) = increased prices. This is an _obvious_ result of generous access to student loans, not a surprising one.

</comment><comment><USER10> Having spent many years attending universities and now sending two kids to university I observer that colleges and universities realize that tuition costs are no longer a major factor in students choosing one university over another. Cost is no longer a factor in the competition between colleges; they compete on amenities.

The universities have new luxurious dorms, outdoor swimming pools that look like Vegas resort pools with lounge chairs for sunning, large new fitness centers with indoor tennis courts, elaborate climbing walls, yoga and spin classes, etc. The universities simply raise their tuition to cover these expensive facilities. It's kind of like visiting one of the best health clubs you could imagine, except filled with beautiful people all your age and all looking for new relationships (or looking to hook up) and not having any parents around and having a free, really great cafeteria, and being told that being a member there for four, five, or even six years is going to be really fun (football games and parties, yay!) and finally being told that its not going to cost anything right now you can _just pay for it later_. During the sales pitch, you're told how good for you it will be and how you will come out knowing how to think and being given examples of all the people that were members of this club in the past and went on to do great things.

The evolution of universities into playgrounds for young adults has also had an impact on the educational choices begin offered. For example, universities now support large fine arts programs where students can work for years on majors where most will have no hope of obtaining meaningful employment in the field once they graduate.

I've been to a large "job fair" kind of event, except for there being no jobs, given by a very large university's college of Fine Arts--I went with a friend that was already a freelance musician at the professional symphony level who was going back to work on a graduate degree in oboe. The final, most memorable, talk was given by an alumnus of that college of Fine Arts which spoke about how one gets a job with a degree in music. The speaker related how difficult it was living in a shitty apartment in New York while playing jazz in clubs and how he finally after a few years started making a reasonable living by switching from playing bass to web-design. This was the best example the Fine Arts department presented of a "successful" graduate. By the way, my friend, the amazing oboe player, years later ended up selling her oboe in disgust and never played again.

All the schools are expensive now. With an exception of in-state schools, tuition at almost every university each of our kids considered was both high and practically the same across the board. Finally, although slightly off- topic, in my neighborhood children attend one of the very best public high schools in the country so the excellent and less expensive state university here is actually too hard to get into because admission there is based on class rank and doesn't take into account how much harder it is to be in the top 7% at the local public high school vs almost every other public high school in the state. It's possible to be admitted to Stanford but not make the 7% cutoff to get into the state University.

</comment><comment><USER14> i think correlation not causation

</comment><comment><USER15> In other news, gravity might be causing those apples to fall down.

</comment><comment><USER16> duh.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think that what's driving "the tuition explosion" is the declining demand for labor due to technological unemployment as it meets the social demand that people participate in paid work. It's not going to go away. Basic income would improve the situation, but we're still a generation away from attitudes changing.

The fact is that it's socially unacceptable to be unemployed for more than a few months, and so people who can't find jobs are then told to go back to school. This would be basically OK (with me, at any rate; but I have a stronger-than-average work ethic) except for the fact that, for some of them, it's on their fucking dime that they don't fucking have.

The price of social acceptability and the difference between having a chance at a career versus being written off as a loser forever is going to be very high, and will increase without bounds if the availability of credit increases in tandem.

A major part of the problem is that universities are no longer non-profit in any meaningful way. They have top administrators making high-six and seven- figure incomes, they evaluate professors based on their fundraising ability rather than their teaching or their contribution to the community, and the cling to the prestige of their non-profit status in order to keep for-profit education a ghetto because if it weren't that way, the likeness of movements on stage would embarrass them.

I don't know how to solve this. The demand for labor is so low in this world (or, perhaps, the supply is too high because society mandates that people work to have an income, being averse even in most liberal countries-- and not for bad reasons-- to redistribution) that people are now expected to do years of preparatory labor at negative pay.

<comment><USER18> Consider a profitable business. Its workers need X dollars to survive, and the company can sell goods for Y, where Y > X. If there are a lot of workers and they all negotiate individually with the company, standard competitive market theory says that they will end up charging about X for their services, as any worker will eventually be displaced by someone who is willing to accept a tiny bit less pay.

If the workers form a cartel, their rational policy is to charge about Y -- they cannot charge more than that without driving the company out of business.

Labor unions are basically such a cartel. When they were ascendant in the mid-20th-century, the American middle class was vibrant, there were lots of low-skill jobs which provided good income.

With globalization, the business can now simply move its operations to a country where workers are poorer, regulations on environmental and workplace conditions are laxer, and organization is illegal. This has two effects: X gets smaller, and wages become close to X.

Globalization has some good effects -- increasing the world's total wealth by letting countries specialize in what they're good at, and reducing the probability of conflict by making countries more interdependent.

But the part few people in our corporate-owned governments want to talk about is that the price of these good things is, in effect, redistributing much of the wealth generated by companies from workers to owners.

<comment><USER18> I do think that eventually automation will become the bigger threat. The end- game will be a point where robots and completely automated systems create all the food, clothing and shelter needed for all of humanity, and nobody _needs_ to work in order to maintain the infrastructure to provide for everyone's physical survival and a basic modern lifestyle.

In order to get to the end-game where nobody works, we will have to pass through a point where, say, 50% of the people have to work -- and it seems like determining which half works, and what sort of accounting is used to justify the non-working half's resource consumption, is a recipe for revolution. Because it's a point that's so far away from what our institutions and culture have been set up to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Student loans might be enabling the tuition explosion, but the need to have at least a masters degree to ensure a middle class lifestyle is driving the tuition explosion.

<comment><USER13> > _need to have at least a masters degree to ensure a middle class lifestyle > is driving the tuition explosion_

This is actually a function of student loans. Because higher education is accessible to a much larger portion of the population than it otherwise would be via easy credit, a bachelor's degree is no longer a differentiator. Hence the need for more advanced degrees to set oneself apart from other job candidates.</comment></comment>