Do Rational People Exist? - <AUTHOR> http://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/do-rationalists-exist/ <comment><USER2> >They behave more like ideal economic actors.

I believe the author is making the mistake of equating the " _rational_ " in " _economics ' rational actors_" to be people who choose _wisely_. The type of wise choices that most of society would agree to lead to positive outcomes.

My understanding is that formal economics is using "rational" as in "rational choice theory"[1]. It's a specific _term-of-art_ that's different from the everyday usage of "rational." It's not some positive measure to satisfy a global optimum. A "rational actor" is simply someone who reliably arrives at the same consistent choices given the knowledge and preferences he happens to have. If a consumer chooses CocaCola over water even though soda's sugar content causes obesity and teeth decay, the consumer is still classified as "rational" even though it looks like a suboptimal choice within the bigger picture of healthy living. Economics' rational choices satisfy a _local optimum_ (consumer's imperfect preferences) and not a global one.

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

<comment><USER3> Yes, that's basically correct. To an economist, you're rational (modulo some technicalities) if

        (a) when you have to, you can always decide which of two things
            you want more (yes, it's OK to want some things equally),

        (b) whenever you want A more than B and B more than C, then
            you want A more than C, and

        (c) whatever you say you want (or think you want) your behavior
            actually reflects (a) and (b).

If you're not rational in this sense, please stay indoors, or at least refrain from trading with bearded men in tweed, because a perfectly scrupulous economist will take you for everything you're worth by giving you exactly what you want. :P

For details, see these lecture notes [0], particularly the axioms of choice theory on slide 4. (Or take a micro theory course!)

0\. [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-03-microeconomic- the...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-03-microeconomic-theory-and- public-policy-fall-2010/lecture-notes/MIT14_03F10_lec03.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Problem is, few people are actually like this. Behavioral economics have demonstrated that humans are vulnerable to hyperbolic discounting, which is irrational. Because what I want for myself now is different from what I want for myself next week. Telling people who are vulnerable to this to stay indoors is roughly the same as telling everyone to stay indoors.

Personally, I think the initial question is ill formed. It would be like asking, "do tall people exist?" Although now that I read the article, what the author is really answering is the question of whether rationality along different tests is correlated. That is, is there a common underlying variable. How fascinating.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure hyperbolic discounting is all that irrational.

Example from Wikipedia illustrating hyperbolic discounting: "For instance: "Would you prefer a dollar today or three dollars tomorrow?" or "Would you prefer a dollar in one year or three dollars in one year and one day?" For certain range of offerings, a significant fraction of subjects will take the lesser amount today, but will gladly wait one extra day in a year in order to receive the higher amount instead."

To me, the biggest risk is the counterparty risk that you'll never see the other person again. I myself would take $1 today from someone I've never met over $3 tomorrow, because I'm quite skeptical they'd even show up. Of course, the chance a person shows back up 365 vs. 366 days from now is pretty much identical, so I'd take the $3.

<comment><USER6> I agree with your thoughts on hyperbolic discounting.

Maybe I'll be dead next year. Maybe I just don't trust you.

Probabilistic reasoning is a tricky business. Also, I can reason about the likelihood that the store is going to have a loaf of bread tomorrow because we have experience dealing with that every day. The kind of scenarios concocted by economists are quite odd. Rarely is a stranger just giving you money with no strings attached.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From my personal experience: If one is able to dig deeply enough, for what I guess to be something like 90% of the population, there is a level where people just declare "I feel that way" and there is no logic, nor even the barest respect for rationality. What's more, these feelings are very often used to justify the arbitrary bad treatment of others who are deemed to be "wrong" or "inferior."

All of these feelings have some "rationalization" as window dressing, but ultimately, it comes down to irrational feelings of tribal affiliation. This invariably comes out in politics and professional life.

We're goddamned grunting, screaming apes who have the ability to occasionally surpass our primitive nature and are well suited to being organized into groups. The vast majority of us do not have the intellectual integrity to hold consistently to a set of rational principles to the nth degree. In the end, our feelings hold sway, and our empathy often fails.

Prejudice is a part of our very nature, and it comes out all the time. There is no need for it to be attached to race or gender, and our society doesn't equip us with the intellectual tools to recognize it at the substrate level. Rather, our present societies are organized _around_ it.

<comment><USER8> If you are on the receiving end of the abuse it does get easier to see it for what it is. If the collective asserts your inferiority you don't have a lot of options besides from thinking for yourself.

At the same time it is much harder for those most favored by the community to reject the special treatment... if not impossible.

I like how you point out that race, gender and sexual preference are just extreme examples. I was sort of stuck there but it indeed seems to extend to the color of the nail polish, the brand of clothing, the choice of OS, political preference..... and pretty much everything else.

I hope this topic doesn't change hn into reddit. (just kidding)

<comment><USER9> Watch this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM4Xe6Dlp0Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM4Xe6Dlp0Y)

<comment><USER8> lol, her whole life directed for her to the point she can point at her picture and say "that isn't me".

Sam Berns would be the other extreme.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36m1o-tM05g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36m1o-tM05g)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Okay, so there's a lot to break down here and a lot of conflations taking place.

At a base level we can understand, I know people in my life who seem more "rational" in general than people I know who I would describe as more "emotional". In this sense, you can think of "rational" thinking as any thought-pattern that activates the cortex -- roughly speaking, the region of the the brain associated with higher-order and abstract thinking.

On a more nuanced level, the author seems to be making a case about capital-R "Rationalism", as espoused by communities like Less Wrong, Effective Altruism, capital-L Libertarians, and the singularity wonks. In this, I feel like the author is making a huge conflation that I feel is kind of misleading and rather insulting to people who don't buy into one small communities ideas about cognitive bias and logical fallacies.

Often times, "evidence" of "irrational" behaviors, as displayed for example in the Linda problem and the Wason task, typically fail in that the askers don't understand language or how it's typically used. There are loads of people that have a rational bent that will get these problems wrong, simply because they don't put too much thought into it, or they're trying to answer a question linguistically, rather than purely "Rationally".

I have a lot of theories as to why LessWrong / Libertarian types develop this inflated sense of self importance about their "Rational" outlook of the world, but it's pedagogical, and probably insulting to those involved, so I'll leave it for another day.

<comment><USER11> Are Libertarians rational?

I see absolute primacy given to ownership from people who live on land seized from Indians.

A belief in enforcement of contracts on people who didn't sign them, namely people born after the agreements were made.

The claim that utilities such as sewage and water supply would be better served if there were countless duplicate sewage systems in each city owned by different companies.

The assertion that the current ISP throttling issue would be fixed by eliminating the FCC.

The claim that the problem of the commons does not exist.

So, I humbly submit, that the claim to rationality is not the same as its possession.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A much better question than "do rational people exist" would be "do people generally behave in a rational way?" Who cares if I'm not 100% rational all the time. As long as people in general tend towards rationality then it makes sense to talk about 'rational people.'

</comment><comment><USER13> downvote me if you wish but honestly the rationality movement seems like it is more interested in being elite than anything meaningful. If all the rationality movement can provide as a measure of success is just higher performance on some silly tests designed by psychologists to essentially trick you with wording then I would want nothing to do with it.

<comment> vertex-four Unfortunately, one of my social IRC channels - one which used to revolve primarily around respect for emotions - got invaded by a certain well-known rationalist Internet community. Immediately, where channel operators hadn't been required for the past four years, they were left having to enforce simple rules on the new people, which they inevitably argued against. Every other week, there are serious issues involving violation of social etiquette.

Now, this isn't a problem with "aspies", as some might think. The channel, before this, had a remarkably high concentration of people with aspergers, and some with autism. This is a problem with people who honestly do not see emotions as a thing that they should care about. That is the rationalist movement at its core, for all they talk about, from my perspective.

<comment><USER14> Please elaborate; I would like to know more about this incident.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the most important thing to consider here is that these logic questions they use to test "rationality" are awkward word puzzles, and the test reveals more about how well people can work out what's being asked than their underlying rationality. The fact that most people would jump onto the "bank teller and feminist" option in the conjunction fallacy test is because the question as posed contains mainly feminist-related ideas, and so the brain's natural tendency is to jump to the answer containing the word feminism. That's less about rationality and more about how attuned are you to the likelihood that the questions you're being asked are worded in a tricky way.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I think the most important thing to consider here is that these logic > questions they use to test "rationality" are awkward word puzzles

They aren't. Have you looked at the CRT questions? There's nothing tricky about them, the challenge is simply _actually checking your answer_. And if it's 'just' a word puzzle, why is the correlation with IQ so low? And why does this sort of rationality inversely correlate with screwing your life up in various ways (see the research discussed in my comment in OP)? That's an odd thing for an 'awkward word puzzle' to do.

> The fact that most people would jump onto the "bank teller and feminist" > option in the conjunction fallacy test is because the question as posed > contains mainly feminist-related ideas, and so the brain's natural tendency > is to jump to the answer containing the word feminism.

You know that was the very first criticism leveled against Kahneman & Tversky's conjunction fallacy results and they long ago showed that other wordings gave the fallacy too?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's unfortunate that, as a person interested in puzzles, I've seen almost all of the common tests for rationality, lack of bias, etc., etc. So I have little to no way to assess whether I would pass these tests, because, for example, I first saw the "A bat and ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?" puzzle when I was in grade school.

Has anyone published research-level assessments that I _didn 't_ see decades ago?

<comment><USER12> How is basic problem solving a test for rationality? Artists and serial killers and the mentally ill can learn to count.

<comment><USER14> Doing pretty well at basic reasoning skills has a lot to do with good decisionmaking, in that it's required.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The article has an unstated assumption that being more rational is better. While clearly there are benefits to less biased thinking, there are also drawbacks that are supported by research.

Martin Seligman wrote a book called _Learned Optimism_ that deeply explores the issue of optimistic vs. pessimistic explanatory styles. To oversimplify, when something bad happens to a pessimist they tell themselves it is permanent, personal, and universal, whereas optimists tell themselves it is temporary, impersonal, and specific. When something good happens, the two groups do the opposite.

Here is an excerpt from the book about the unfortunate evidence that depressed people have fewer cognitive biases. Snipped/edited for length:

 _There is considerable evidence that depressed people, though sadder, are wiser.

Ten years ago Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson, then graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, did an experiment in which people were given differing degrees of control over the lighting of a light. Some were able to control the light perfectly: It went on every time they pressed a button, and it never went on if they didn't press. The other people, however, had no control at all: The light went on regardless of whether they pressed the button.

The people in both groups were asked to judge, as accurately as they could, how much control they had. Depressed people were very accurate, both when they had control and when they didn't. The nondepressed people shocked us. They were accurate when they had control, but when helpless they were undeterred: they still judged that they had a great deal of control.

[...]

These have been consistent findings over the last decade. Depressed people -- most of whom turn out to be pessimists -- accurately judge how much control they have. Nondepressed people -- optimists, for the most part -- believe they have much more control over things than they actually do, particularly when they are helpless and have no control at all.

Another kind of evidence for the thesis that depressed people, though sadder, are wiser involves judgments of skill. Several years ago, Newsweek reported that 80 percent of American men think they are in the top half of social skills. They must have been nondepressed American men, if the results of Peter Lewinsohn, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, and his colleagues are valid. These investigators put depressed and non-depressed patients in a panel discussions and later had the patients judge how well they did. To what extent were they persuasive? Likable? As judged by a panel of observers, depressed patients weren't very persuasive or likable; poor social skills are a symptom of depression. Depressed patients judged their lack of skill accurately. The surprising finding was from the nondepressed group. They markedly overestimated their skills, judging themselves as much more persuasive and appealing than the judges thought they were.

[...]

Overall, then, there is clear evidence that nondepressed people distort reality in a self-serving direction and depressed people tend to see reality accurately. How does this evidence, which is about depression, tie into optimism and pessimism? Statistically, most depressed people score in the pessimistic range of explanatory style, and most nondepressed people score optimistically._

So basically the research is suggesting that unbiased thinkers tend to be more pessimistic and depressed than people who irrationally distort the world into being better than it actually is. What a bummer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't see how depressive realism refutes the various correlations and observations in OP...?

> So basically the research is suggesting that unbiased thinkers tend to be > more pessimistic and depressed than people who irrationally distort the > world into being better than it actually is. What a bummer.

How is that wrong? Suppose you looked at lottery winners and successful entrepreneurs; no doubt they are optimistic and risk-seeking. Does that mean optimism and risk-seeking and playing the lottery would make everyone better off...?

<comment><USER17> > I don't see how depressive realism refutes the various correlations and > observations in OP...?

The purpose of my message was not to refute any of the article's claims, but rather to challenge the unstated assumption that people who avoid cognitive biases are necessarily better off.

For example the article asks where there is a "hyper-rational elite." This is implying that people who avoid cognitive bias are better than everyone else. As I said before, I think that rationality has lots of obvious benefits, but there are also benefits to irrational optimism.

<comment><AUTHOR> > but rather to challenge the unstated assumption that people who avoid > cognitive biases are necessarily better off.

But you haven't. Maybe depressive realism is better for getting things done - if, you know, you can get the 'realism' without the 'major mental disorder' part. (And why didn't you consider manic-depressive disorder? If being optimistic is so great, surely being manic is even greater...) Pointing to a literally diseased example doesn't raise much of a challenge at all.

<comment><USER17> I find it somewhat ironic that the people who are most staunchly advocating the superiority of rationality in their replies to my post are displaying the greatest cognitive bias by advancing a position that no one has offered any empirical evidence for.

And just to clarify, I wasn't even arguing that optimism is _better_ than rationality. I am only calling into question the assumption that it is necessarily _worse._

In other words, the article (in my opinion) assumed that R > O always. I wanted to challenge this assumption that argue that R <?> O. I am not arguing, as some people seem to suppose, that O > R always.

> Maybe depressive realism is better for getting things done - if, you know, > you can get the 'realism' without the 'major mental disorder' part.

Maybe, but that is pure speculation that has no support.

Seligman's book offers a fair amount of evidence that optimists out-perform pessimists (the latter is not the same as being depressed, though they are correlated) in many areas of life.

> And why didn't you consider manic-depressive disorder? If being optimistic > is so great, surely being manic is even greater...

Again, pure speculation. "More of a good thing is always better" is not a principle you can reasonably assume.

<comment><AUTHOR> > In other words, the article (in my opinion) assumed that R > O always. I > wanted to challenge this assumption that argue that R <?> O. I am not > arguing, as some people seem to suppose, that O > R always.

So, you don't have evidence for it, you don't believe it, yet you're going to argue aggressively for it and call me biased to boot. What distinguishes your comments from garden-variety trolling?

<comment><USER17> > So, you don't have evidence for it

If by "it" you mean "O > R always", then no, I don't have evidence for it nor do I believe it. What I do believe and have a whole book of evidence for is "not (R > O always)". That is what I am arguing for, and have been from my very first message.

My opinion of "not (R > O always)" would only be controversial if you believe that "R > O always". But "R > O always" has no evidence supporting it (at least none that anyone has presented or that I am aware of).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Really not a fan of the current gray font color trend. -_-

<comment><USER19> At least we managed to answer the question "do irrational people exist?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Rationality" is overrated. Our lives are not pure economics, thank goodness. A purely rational person would likely not experience any joy or love. But if they were capable of doing so, they wouldn't opt to pursue those things because they would need to spend time doing research into each economic decision they made.

<comment><USER20> This is commonly known as the Straw Vulcan Fallacy. If a course of action leads to less total utility (including fun, happiness, etc.) then choosing that course of action is irrational. This obviously includes overanalysis.

For one data point, I stopped attending the NYC Less Wrong meetup (through which I happen to know the author) when I met my wife (through said meetup) and decided I'd had enough of the sex, drugs, and roc^H^H^Hstrategy games lifestyle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I suspect people with asperger's are often 'more rational'.

</comment><comment><USER22> No. Next.</comment>


Full-featured websites, quicker than ever before - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bevry/docpad

<comment><AUTHOR> For anyone interested, here's the direct link to the screencast:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvQCXDWh7Wg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvQCXDWh7Wg)

And the list of currently supported skeleton applications:

[http://docpad.org/docs/skeletons](http://docpad.org/docs/skeletons)</comment>


Are Writers Powerless to Make a Living in the Digital Age? - <AUTHOR> http://publishingperspectives.com/2010/11/are-writers-powerless-to-make-a-living-in-the-digital-age/

<comment><USER2> A couple of key bits: "If somebody can actually get their kids through college writing for screens, for e-books, then the thing is working," said Lanier. "If they can't, it isn't."

Well, it's working for Joe Konrath[1], Randall Munroe[2], Felix Salmon[3], and others. They've got very different models, but each has company for theirs. (Not that it's easy to break in, but it's also really hard to break in to traditional publishing.) It's very strange to say that people can't make a living writing on line, while ignoring the folks who are actually doing it.

Worse is this: "If the future is one in which writers are not paid, then it also is one in which writers lack clout. And if it's a future in which writers lack clout, then what we have is a lack, basically, of an intellectual middle class. Instead we have a sort of volunteer intellectual class, which in terms of clout starts to resemble peasants."

What gives writers clout, at a social level, is that _people are reading their stuff, and taking it seriously_ , for reasons that may have nothing to do with the size of their paycheck. In the tech corner of the world, The GNU Manifesto and The Cathedral and the Bazaar are both essays that had a huge influence, and not because of how much either author got (belatedly) paid. Or, to be a bit of a homer, for a minute, you can't really judge pg's influence by his royalties on Hackers and Painters. I'm not sure he could live well off the royalty checks --- but I'm pretty sure no one cares.

What is a future like in which most authors of book-length texts need a day job? More like the present than one might think. Most authors need one already.

[1] <http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/> \--- online novelist; paid content

[2] <http://xkcd.com> \--- online cartoonist; free content, paid swag

[3] <http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/> \--- the blog is his job

<comment><USER3> I think Lanier's point (better articulated in the book) is not that there are no examples but that what examples there are don't scale up to match what is (arguably) being lost. How many opportunities are there to replicate those examples, and how independent are they really from earlier models?

It's like when people talk about technological disruption in the music industry and point to Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails pricing experiments as evidence that everything is going to be OK: it's a positive sign, but it's not really proof of anything. Disruption works to the benefit of some and the detriment of others, but it's still unclear that this balances out in a desirable way. Would literature suffer if authors had to sell t-shirts to survive?

Without some relatively reliable model the future looks like one where everyone who wants to eat has to scramble to find a new business model and pray that it doesn't get devoured by an established player, a mob of pirates, or one of those pesky "disruptive" startups. To the HN crowd, this seems like business as usual. From the perspective of content creators of any kind this looks like a giant content-devouring blob that occasionally ejects a nickel if you utter the right incantations.

<comment><USER4> But was it really ever different?

Throughout history, writers, painters, artists, have always had a hard time coming by. Even the ones that are very popular now, retrospectively. It was never a "reliable business model" to rely on creative persuits. If money is your sole incentive, it's better to chose something else.

Surely, there are some that get really popular (either because they are talented or get noticed some other way) and can live from the proceeds. Some even get crazily rich (write an Harry Potter). But those are a small miniority.

Technological disruption, or different capitalization models haven't really changed this basic fact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lanier is one of those bewailing the end of the artistic class... yet this is a class that thrived essentially on the scarcity of knowledge - making their produce have value. Now that this scarcity is being removed through innovation - they claim that their 'special' insight is going to be lost.

Meanwhile - the artists continue to shack up ever closer with 'big content' and their IP lawyers... a group toward which all their romantic cliches espoused the most profound hatred.

in depth counterpoint:

[http://reviewsindepth.com/2010/11/the-social-network-the- end...](http://reviewsindepth.com/2010/11/the-social-network-the-end-of- intimacy-and-the-birth-of-hacker-sensibility/)

<comment><USER6> > yet this is a class that thrived essentially on the scarcity of knowledge - > making their produce have value.

Could you explain more? If this class only transmitted knowledge without insight from the enlightened to the ignorant, I could see your point.

The intellectual class has been permeable for a long time. Even in the very old days, a gifted boy from a humble background could become a man of the cloth, making a good livelihood while pursuing his intellectual interests. Reading and writing was in short supply for most of the Middle Ages, but by Shakespeare's time many boys and girls received a solid basic education, if only "small Latin and less Greek".

The university system of the twentieth century created an academic class that unfortunately became nigh-synonymous with intellectuals. But people like that are paid employees who don't depend on writing for the general public. Lanier must be referring to another kind, the proverbial struggling writers. Maybe I'm blinded, but I certainly don't see how they rely on a general scarcity of knowledge to provide value!

<comment><USER7> I would replace scarcity of knowledge with scarcity of information/media in general and expand this to the entire media industry.

For years television companies paid top dollar for content so that they could create crowds for their advertisers. Because there were very few people capable of even reaching a large crowd (ie: there were large distribution barriers), there was, relative to now, a scarcity of media in this arena.

Provided you got the right distribution, it didn't really matter what you put out there because there were so few people capable of operating at scale (again this goes for all industries, from Hollywood to journos). I did a lot of consulting for Time Warner about 2 years ago, and one of the things I heard their executives say over and over again was "We think there will always be a market for our premium content." They fundamentally failed to understand their business model: they thought it was providing high quality content to build crowds for advertisers, while in fact it had nothing to do with the content (the content was just the means, not the ends). In this sense Google is their prime competition (same ends, far cheaper means), and is absolutely eating their lunch.

The other thing they didn't understand is that people simply don't have the hours in the day anymore. If 10 years ago you watched 10 hours of television a week, it's likely you now spend some portion of that on Facebook, youtube, blogs or some other media outlet that we consider "user generated." This hurt television more than the industry thought it would, again, due to the the fact that they were winning in distribution much more than quality, like they thought, and because as advertising approaches a zero-sum game linearly, the prices grow exponentially. Now that it is easier to capture the long tail cheaply, and to more directly target consumers, what traditional media companies have offered (the distribution mechanism) is no longer valuable. As a content filter, the publishing houses have always been crap, they just didn't know it.

The industry optimized years ago for this inability to hit the long tail: the information provided is extremely abstracted in order to provide mass appeal. Taking NYTimes as an example, general news source dominance led them again to optimize for what they THOUGHT was quality winning: they hired the best journos they could find, instead of industry experts with writing skills. When blogs allowed these industry experts to easily distribute their own work, the middle man was removed. Now these companies are so big and have optimized everything from their recruiting processes to their syndication for this model: high quality journos, high quality content. They are too big, and it's become very difficult for them to pivot.

This phenomenon is easily transferrable to almost all media industries, and is the general "cheapening" (I would call market-readjustment) of the value of media. It turns out people have more specific taste than the media industry gave them credit for (or was able to serve), and now that these specific tastes are easily served, the general, abstracted versions of these media have lost tremendous value.

Hope that makes sense, /rant.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the long post!

That makes a lot more sense. I would say it's less that there was a scarcity of media in the past and more that there is now an unprecendented and almost inconceivable overabundance of media. People gorge themselves on crap and have no remaining appetite to savor delicacies. But that might just be my provincial and elitist 20th century point of view. Anyway, we seem to basically agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _"Bloggers couldn't find that themselves," he said, "because they're corrupted, or they couldn't afford to spend the time."_

Actually, I'm pretty sure that bloggers have known about the Koch brothers for many years. The reason this guy had to wait until the _New Yorker_ wrote about them might be that this guy doesn't read anything that isn't in the _New Yorker_.

EDIT: Changed the wording a bit. As Daffy Duck used to say: "pronoun trouble".

<comment><USER2> Counterpoint: some of the best reporting on the nuts and bolts of the subprime mortgage mess, while it was happening, was by a semi-retired mortgage broker pseudonymously blogging as "Tanta", who never got paid a dime for it. When she died, she was mourned by everyone from Tyler Cowen to Paul Krugman.

The pseudonym was because, if her cancer ever went into remission, she wanted to be able to get a job, and she thought it might be a handicap to have (quite rightly) savaged just about every major company in the industry. The announcement of her death was the first most of her readers had ever seen her name --- Doris Dungey.

EDIT: Counterpoint to Lanier, that is. Sorry 'bout that.

<comment><USER8> The fact that this comes labeled "counterpoint" makes we worry that I've screwed up my writing. I think this _was_ my point. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mkr-hn I think some people mistake the ease of filling niches for the decline of art. It's not that art is on the way down, it's that more niches can be filled profitably with the audience made available by the Internet. Great art is a niche now. It's in the pie, but its slice is smaller. The people reading the "junk" either wouldn't care about the great art, or they would look at both.

I think this sort of pushback was inevitable when the digital publishing revolution people talked about for decades finally happened.

</comment><comment><USER9> Start a blog.

My sister started a blog and after 3 years was making $200k/year. Not saying every blog or every topic will make this much, but it's certainly possible to make a good living as a blogger.

<comment><USER10> The majority of for profit blogs aren't great reading because they are constantly trying to put something new out even if they don't have anything interesting to say. I though the Coding Horror blog improved a fair bit when Jeff no longer had to rely on it for a living and just made the occasional post.

I like the idea of using a blog to build up a following which you then sell some more organised a long form content to in book/ebook form, similar to 37 signals although best results would be to not just recycle the blog content.

<comment> mkr-hn That's a failure of model and motive. You can make six or more digits posting drivel, or you can make a comfortable middle-upper middle class living with a quality-focused posting schedule.

I'm going for the latter with my own blog, and I try to encourage it when possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Powerless? Hardly. The problem is that current business models for rewarding writers (in the emerging distribution format) are either broken, or they have not yet had enough time to mature.

Although it's a bit "dated" (2005), I think the implications explored in _Epic 2015_ are pretty interesting insofar as the traditional writer -> editor -> publisher model is going.

<http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/epic2015>

</comment><comment><USER12> Write to promote, or write on commission. <speculation> Most of the intellectually valuable literature didn't make money anyway. </speculation>

</comment><comment><USER13> He clearly has some conflicting views here,"The walled garden thing can't last forever...Apple and Amazon can be publishers within the universal system. But they can't have monopoly channels."

This might be a nice idea, but aren't Apple and Amazon directly competing right now? How is it that they are both holding a monopoly on ebooks? People like choice, if there really were one massive distribution system I would worry that it would become the new monopoly.

<comment><USER14> People have this notion that if you create a digital application or product and don't want it to be shared without your consent, that you have a monopoly over it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Both programmers' and artists' work can be reproduced at the twitch of a `cp -a`. You don't see those goddamn Ruby hipsters up in SF complaining about compensation.

</comment><comment><USER16> No. Work on commission. Publish in serial format. If you're popular, you can demand an advance or a retainer.

Lest we forget, many great authors (Dostoyevsky and Dickens) published their novels in serial form.

</comment><comment><USER17> Writers will be fine. In fact it will make it easier for writers to make a living as more of the share of income goes towards entertainment. Copywriters can make a goldmine in the digital age.

Writers don't define civil society. Get off your high horse and start writing content people like. Look how much money 37 Signals makes from writing.

</comment><comment><USER18> 'Writers' and 'writing' as in English literature, fiction, drama, 'belle lettre' are nearly dead. For some exceptions, might sell some romance novels or screen plays and write 'news' drawing on morality plays and formula fiction.

Otherwise, broadly, first-cut, essentially the whole pile from Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, ..., Dickens, James, to the present and their goals, techniques, values, and traditions are dead economically, intellectually, culturally, educationally -- kaput.

Why? Still in simple terms, they never made it into the 20th century with its standards of information safety and efficacy from mathematics, physical science, medical science, engineering, medicine, and law of the early 20th century. E.g., for learning about people, f'get about Shakespeare, ..., and just read clinical psychology. Or, don't read 'writer' Henry James and read his brother psychologist William James instead.

The 'writers' didn't have to know much and, instead, wrote 'art' as in the 'communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion'. For the reader, it was vicarious, escapist, fantasy, emotional experience entertainment, not useful information, not anything solid even about the emotions of real people.

So, 'literature' is now for light entertainment. No one would try to do anything serious -- design an airplane, drug, computer system, bridge -- using the techniques of literature.

In the recent past, for media, the content was still from "the medium is the message". So, could pass out content, one size fits millions. Such content had to be of such broad interest and, thus, so superficial that it could be from a 'writer' who actually didn't know much about the subject.

Commonly a reader who actually knows something about subject X when reading work of a newsie about X sees right away that the newsie understands next to nothing about X and gets a lot wrong.

Now in great contrast, for each narrow topic, there are many experts who, as on Wikipedia, HN, Stack Overflow, eGullet, various blogs and fora, can, just for fun, write material of much higher quality for free and do.

So there are over 100 million blogs tracked by Technorati and some unknown, large number of long tail Web sites so that the focused content is far beyond the old, one size fits millions.

Yes, 'literature' is gathering dust on the library shelves and otherwise nearly dead. We are losing nothing of any value. It should have died over 100 years ago. RIP.

And we are losing something dangerous that has profoundly hurt our democracy for over 150 years: We're losing the work of the newsies who just gush their emotions and otherwise distort and manipulate to grab people by the heart, the gut, and below the belt, always below the shoulders, never between the ears, and pretend that they are contributing to an 'informed electorate'. They've been building a massively, deliberately un/misinformed electorate with consequences -- the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the 1929 market crash, the Great Depression and, thus, WWII, the Cold War, the Viet Nam war, the Great Recession, and more. I will leave details as an exercise. Hint: The Civil War started before Lincoln even took office and from essentially only the deliberately deceptive, inflammatory work of the newsies.

There's an important word about 'fiction': It ain't true. Then, even if in some case by accident it is true, there's no evidence, certainly no proof. It's junk best left on the scrapheap of history from long, ignorant, efforts in the struggle to build civilization.

The newsies have been among the most dangerous, destructive, and contemptible people in our democracy.

<comment><USER19> You don't read Shakespeare to "learn about people". There's nothing in Shakespeare that could be replaced by a clinical psychology text.

Yes, art is not "useful information" if you're regarding useful information as something you get out of a published mathematics paper.

And what is a "newsie"? I didn't understand the section about "newsies" since it's unclear what those are, or what they have to do with literature.

This line especially

> it was vicarious, escapist, fantasy, emotional experience entertainment, not > useful information, not anything solid even about the emotions of real > people.

makes it seem as if you don't understand the concept of "art", and want everything to be super literal and technical and devoid of any emotion. I can't imagine why.

<comment><USER18> A 'newsie' is someone who writes for a newspaper or other news service. Since in literature we are supposed to play with words, the meaning should be clear enough! Actually it was from 'The Maltese Falcon' where the Bogart character said that a newie took a gun from the thug and he, the Bogart character, made him give it back! There the newsie was likely someone selling newspapers!

I like art, but I deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise English literature.

I like art well enough to be wildly in love with a large fraction of everything in music from Vivaldi through Rachmanioff.

<comment><USER19> What is it about English literature that you dislike?

I ask because I'm a programmer who's trying to develop an understanding and interest in all the "art" and "culture" that I've previously ignored. This includes learning the history and theory of things such as painting, music, and literature. If there's some easy failure of literature that I'm overlooking I'd like to know about it.

<comment><USER18> Just as simple entertainment, we are supposed to 'identify' with the characters, etc. When that works well, say, in a good movie, then okay. But it's not very serious as art.

For the art part, we're supposed to get something from the text, story, content, etc. But there is little there but the content from the words; I take those words at something like face value; then I consider the content from those words and nearly never like it. Or, I like classical music a lot, but the words in English literature are a poor substitute. Although parts of English literature try to have 'musical words', to me the music is wildly inferior, So, I can't like English literature as music. So, I see nothing there to like.

Next, I see a lot to object to: I see people getting into trouble from doing foolish things, To me, that's not good in any sense.

Next, English literature was pushed down my throat when I wanted to study math, physics, music, etc.

Next, the claims that Shakespeare is so 'great' are to me basically lies. The claim is not at all self eviden, and no serious attempt is made to make such a case. So, English literature looks like a self-perpetuating academic flim-flam that wastes the time of students as warm bodies to give employment for people pushing the flim-flam,

Maybe 300 years ago English literature was comparatively good, other things considered. Maybe it was pursued by the rich in England so now taught so that the rich won't have a 'special advantage'. I believe that it is long past time just to stuff it.

A serious review of how to write a movie script would be more welcome.

<comment><USER20> > Next, the claims that Shakespeare is so 'great' are to me basically lies. > The claim is not at all self eviden, and no serious attempt is made to make > such a case.

[http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/shakespeare- word...](http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/shakespeare-words.htm)

Isn't classical music just a bunch of people playing a boring melody on strings and then you read the program guide and it tells you it's meant to symbolize a meadow with a river running through it?

<comment><USER18> Shockingly, I will try to explain how music works. First I will explain the language of music that actually you already know quite well. Second I will explain how art such as music can appeal strongly to people. Third, I contrast with literary art.

Language of Music.

There is a 'language' in music. Actually you must know a lot of the language quite well. You learned the language if only because of the hours or so a day you have been exposed to music via TV, radio, movies, and more. By hearing the music in this language, you have picked up the language.

In simple terms, the language has some sounds that correspond to and somehow express emotions. That is, for each common emotion, there are some sounds that express it. For the common emotions, people know some corresponding sounds very well.

To get started with the language, play something just one note at a time on just the white keys on a piano. Start on C, play some other notes, and end on C. Then what you will hear is that some emotional experience starts, continues, evolves, and develops, and then ends.

Why do you hear this? Because starting on C and playing just on the white keys you will hear that the music is just in the key of C major. You know the key of C major very well, will know that the music is all in C major, and will recognize when the music gets back to C and seems to end. Indeed, in much early music, it gets back to C too often and sounds boring and then, from hitting C too often, irritating. That is, each time the music hits C it seems to stop; so, each few notes the music seems to stop, and that's about as much fun as a car that goes down a road but stops each few feet. Why did the music return to C so often? Because the composer was not very good and couldn't think of anything better to do.

So, start on C, go through this and that, and end on C. Due to the language you have learned, the return to C sounds like the music 'resolves'.

Then for the goes through this and that, if get away from the white keys, then things sound different. Why? Because your ear has been very well trained to hear leaving C major. Leaving C major can add variety to the this and that in the middle. So, when you get back to C, the resolution feels stronger.

For more in the language, playing more than one note at a time is 'polyphony' and offers a stronger beginning than just C itself, more variety during the this and that, and stronger resolution as we end. You have already learned these things as you learned the language.

The variety of polyphony is large and permits sounds that are fairly clearly like anger, frustration, happiness, tension, anticipation, and, of course, resolution.

E.g., if play two notes together that are close in frequency, then the sound is harsh and strident. So, the sound can represent anger, tension, or danger. You won't miss this part of the language for even an instant.

E.g., for anticipation, the note one lower than C is B, and it is in frequency close to C, that is, only a semi-tone lower. When the music plays B, you anticipate, correctly from the thousands of hours of music you have heard, that next the music will play C and 'resolve'. If the composer does not play C next, then he can delay the 'resolution' and keep you 'hanging' and strongly continue the this and that part. Actually, you know this very well. So here is some musical language you understand for 'anticipation'.

Then for Exercise 1 in Composition 101 to create some extended musical experience, start with something with a little tension, add this and that with a lot of tension, anticipation, etc., and then resolve and end.

There's some advertising music that does this effectively in just 21 notes: To be more explicit, as you play on the white keys, starting at C and going up (in frequency, to the right) you will play D, E, F, G, A, B, C -- easy enough to remember.

Well the first seven notes are C, D, E, C, D, B, C. I will put after each note the number of beats:

C 1, D 1, E 3, C 1, D 3, B 1, C 3.

Wonder of wonder, for some music trying to sell soap or some such to millions of TV viewers, it starts on C, uses just four notes, and ends on C. We're talking really simple musical language here: Anyone who doesn't know that much musical language won't have money enough to buy the soap anyway!

Then next seven notes are

D 1, E 1, F 3, G 1, E 3. F 1, D 3

So, these seven notes are much the same as the first seven except start just one note higher, on D instead of C. So, starting higher, there sense is that something has progressed. Since these seven notes do not end on C, the music seems not to be over and the viewer is left hanging, that is, listening for more, just as the advertiser wants.

The last seven notes are just the same as the first seven and end on C just as the ad ends thus resolving the music.

There is a little more: In the first and last seven notes,

C 1, D 1, E 3, C 1, D 3, B 1, C 3.

the first two notes are short and, thus, rise quickly; this is as if something was starting and helps get the attention of the viewer. The next three notes sound like a sigh and make the viewer comforted and more relaxed. The last two notes return to C with a nice resolution, especially since the B lets the viewer anticipate the C and, thus, follow along. All in just seven notes.

Hearing this you wouldn't miss the musical language.

A good musician with even just a violin, can add other elements of musical language, you readily recognize, with loudness, vibrato, brightness, harshness (press harder with the bow and play closer to the bridge), urgency (play faster and start notes suddenly instead of gradually), etc. Net, a good violinist can use musical language elements you already know well and, thus, be very 'expressive'.

For larger collections of instruments, can get much more in variety that can represent other emotions. Some of these representations are widely and clearly understood, and some, say, from some new music, are not. So, yes, there is a musical language, and some of it is widely understood and some is not.

In the end, in my view, classical, non-programmatic music is not so difficult to describe: The musician has an emotional experience that goes through various cases of this and that. So, he writes some music that roughly represents that.

If the music is 'good', then it is 'general' (sometimes people say 'universal'), that is, does well representing more emotional experiences than just the one the musician had and for many listeners seems to represent an emotional experience they have had, likely different experiences for different listeners.

One of the better approaches to reaching many listeners is to represent a person's yearning, typically for emotional security, and then struggle against obstacles with lots of variety during the struggle and finally resolution or victory. That is, everyone want emotional security, and nearly everyone has had struggles and pursued them with energy, frustration, anticipation, success, setbacks, etc.

My favorite example of such music is the solo violin piece the Bach 'Chaconne'.

The Appeal of Art and Music.

There is a fact about people and art: If people see some of their stronger emotions about some of their experiences displayed in front of them, then they like it, maybe because it confirms to them that they are not alone in such emotions. E.g., it can be that all 1000 people in the concert hall have had similar emotions.

People can also like music that displays emotions about experiences they have not had but would like to.

In movies, the effect is more particular: The music can combine with the film to suggest the intended emotion and, thus, make it easier for a viewer to 'get' what more specific emotional experience is intended to be communicated. E.g., in 'Star Wars', the 'Imperial March' clearly represents some power obsessed, brutal, militarism; a viewer can get that message from the music right away although just from the story it takes longer! That's part of why John Williams got paid the big bucks!

Tough to listen to the Brahms 'Lullaby' and not get the feeling of a mother's love for her child: There is a lot of gentle stroking and comforting sighing in that music! Similarly for 'Silent Night' which I caught on to well at about the age of three.

Tough to listen to the beginning of Beethoven's 5th symphony and not get that 'there's heavy stuff going down'. Lots of people have experienced heavy stuff.

Tough to listen to the Beethoven 6th symphony and not feel something like seeing a pastoral scene, say, a meadow with a stream flowing through it if only because this is programmatic music complete with bird calls.

So, programmatic music is a two edged sword: First, due to the program, it is easier to understand. Second, due again to the program, it is less general so that listeners who have not had, or don't want to have, the experience of the program won't like the music.

I know; I know; you had music lessons in the fourth grade, and the teacher told you none of this. Sorry 'bout that!

Literary Art.

For literary art, for me it is too specific: For the situations and corresponding emotions being presented, mostly I have not been in such a situation and even when I have very much both my thinking and emotions were very different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Of course you are attacking the messenger instead of the message. Maybe that's what all true, deep down, committed, card-carrying English majors do!

Thanks for confirming my suspicions about Shakespeare! Teachers for six years, four in high school and two more in college, not counting the drooling Shakespeare fans for decades on PBS, told me that he had such great insight into people, e.g., manipulation, duplicity, self-deception, gullibility, ambition, collusion, loyalty, disloyalty, conspiracy, etc. Good to know that actually he didn't know anything at all about clinical psychology; that's just what I always believed!

So, finally you dusted him off: There's nothing there at all!

In my unique world of subtle hints, clues, creative ambiguity, hidden references (all that good literary stuff), a 'newsie' is someone who writes for a newspaper or other news service. Now, now: In not being willing to 'understand' 'newsie', you are insisting on being thoroughly literal. You must have had a heck of a time with nearly everything in English literature! Since in literature we are supposed to play with words, the meaning of 'newsie' should be clear enough!

Actually 'newsie' was from 'The Maltese Falcon' where the Bogart character said that a "crippled newsie" took a gun from the thug and he, the Bogart character, made the newsie give the gun back! There the newsie was likely someone selling newspapers! A big Shakespeare fan like you should be able, along with many millions of movie fans, to understand the vocabulary in an old Bogart movie! I'm open to still better insults for the target set, hopefully something really contemptible.

I like a good movie, but I know that it doesn't mean anything.

I like art, but I deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise English literature. The teachers kept leaning back in their chairs, gazing at the ceiling, transporting themselves to old maid English literature teacher nirvana, and going all ecstatic about how "great", "the greatest writer who ever lived", he was, etc. May I have the airsick bag, please, right away? Oops, I guess in this classroom they are all gone; BYOB.

I like art well enough to be wildly in love with a large fraction of everything in music from Vivaldi through Rachmaninoff. I like it enough that at a late age, with too little talent, got a violin, took lessons, and made it through Bach E major Preludio and most of the Bach Chaconne, especially the center D major section. I still needed to practice parts of the Beethoven and Brahms concerti and the Massenet 'Meditation' from Thais.

To me some really nice music is

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts5t_5HeECE>

So, that's the Charles Laughton character, or me, lusting after the young Maureen O'Hara character!</comment>


OpenVBX – A Web-Based Open Source Phone System for Business by Twilio - <AUTHOR> http://www.openvbx.org/ <comment><USER2> The interesting thing that stood out to me is seeing a product built by Twilio (even if it is open source and probably needs work to be fully business ready). I remember seeing before that Twilio explicitly won't build business products to not step on potential users (they just want to offer the API to build the apps). This seems like something that would definitely exist from a vendor.

<comment><USER3> Most platform providers can't/don't resist the temptation to clone the most lucrative apps built on their platform.

<comment><USER4> Amazon AWS is a great example of this to a pathological degree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If this looks useful to you, you might also want to see Anveo and their visual call flow editor. The UI isn't quite as polished, but it's been around quite a while and has a lot of features and integration points. It's not open source...runs on Anveo's servers.

Couple of screenshots:

[http://www.anveo.com/features/images/variable_sample1.png](http://www.anveo.com/features/images/variable_sample1.png)

[http://www.anveo.com/features/images/callflowsample.png](http://www.anveo.com/features/images/callflowsample.png)

Edit: No association with Anveo other than being a customer. There are very few services that provide a drag/drop IVR or call flow builder with very low end pricing, so I thought it worth mentioning.

<comment><USER6> I'm also a customer and sorely disappointed there is no API for the call flow. It'd be really neat to call my number, press some keys, enter a PIN, and add the caller ID to a huntgroup, for example.

but, can't do that. or anything else. must login and edit call flow manually. :(

<comment><USER7> Another Anveo customer here...

Have you looked at the Anveo API documentation: [http://www.anveo.com/api.asp](http://www.anveo.com/api.asp)

Particularly Call Flow variables?

[http://www.anveo.com/api.asp?code=apihelp_callflow_presetvar...](http://www.anveo.com/api.asp?code=apihelp_callflow_presetvariable&api_type=)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm just happy to see that development is picking back up. It was stagnant for a while, and I'm interested to see how quickly they iterate now.

</comment><comment><USER9> Presumably there is deep reliance on Twilio's API. This makes it rather less attractive to everyone who isn't/doesn't want to be a Twilio customer.

Isolating the Twilio API the same way that many PHP apps isolate their database API would be a great move -- then other services could supply their adaptor library, and there would be a much wider base of people interested in developing and using it.

<comment><USER5> >>Presumably there is deep reliance on Twilio's API

There is, but the api itself uses fairly generically named, and well documented methods and arguments. Being that there's not really a industry standard, I don't see that they are deliberately trying for some kind of lock in.

The path to create an adapter for say, Plivo, seems clear enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So, how is different from the other two posts sent like... 5 years ago?!

Hacker News new | threads | comments | show | ask | jobs | submit | from mpermar (98) | logout

OpenVBX 0.83 Released (openvbx.org) 1 point by dmor 2032 days ago | past | web | add to buffer

OpenVBX 0.77 Release (openvbx.org) 3 points by dmor 2105 days ago | past | web | 1 comment | add to buffer

<comment><USER11> From [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645)

      "If a story hasn't had significant attention in about the
       last year, reposts are ok. That's been the policy for a
       while..."

Also probably worth mentioning that you work for Tropo, a Twilio competitor: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10822982](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10822982)</comment></comment>


WhatsApp Web - <AUTHOR> http://blog.whatsapp.com/614/WhatsApp-Web

<comment><USER2> I am very impressed with WA first cut at a web interface. The login is simply genius and the interface is clean and minimalist.

When revealing it to my friends in a Whatsapp group some where very curious and hesitant to know if the service is more vulnerable that it's now has a web service.

I initially assured them that is practically the same it being on any other platform, however I had some doubts myself.

Thought Id open it up to HN... IS whatsapp now more vulnerable with the new web interface?

</comment><comment><USER3> Further discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8924600](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8924600)

</comment><comment><USER4> Doesn't work in Chromium. :-( I know Firefox has some WebRTC limitations but I thought Chromium was enough. I suspect ignorant browser-detection.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've wanted this for a long time. Anyone know why they can't offer it on Apple?

<comment><USER6> (Warning: totally uninformed comment ahead.)

IIRC, whatsapp is built on xmpp/jabber, which makes me think their web client uses WebRTC to connect to the service. WebRTC is supported fully natively on Android, but not on iOS. Specifically, Safari does not support it yet.

It's possible that this will work on iOS chrome but not iOS safari.

<comment><USER7> Is WebRTC not browser to browser? Think websockets would be better suited for this problem.

<comment><USER6> Yes but you can't use all featuers in all browsers as far as I know. WebRTC in this case would be used to connect to TURN/STUN servers.

Again, no clue what I'm talking about. But I suspect the ability to support in-browser TURN/STUN handshakes is what's holding ios back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> the app is not working on s5 as of now no way to get to the web mode in app...

<comment><USER9> You may need to update the app on your device.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Concrete.css, a simple and to the point CSS microframework - <AUTHOR> https://concrete.style <comment><USER2> The irony of a css "framework" that says it's built for "lightness" and then immediately recommends the single biggest cause of weird page display for people on slow connections: a web font.

</comment><comment><USER3> 's/lighness/lightness'

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed, thanks Chris !</comment></comment>


IBM Watson Tone Analyzer - <AUTHOR> https://developer.ibm.com/bluemix/2015/07/16/ibm-watson-tone-analyzer/ <comment><USER2> My initial impression is it doesn't seem analyze groups of words very well. It will pick emotional words out of the middle of a sentence and apply the emotion to the whole text, when the context of the sentence changes the meaning of the word.

Quick example, "I hate your guts and I hope you die." \-- Hope is picked out and noted as cheerful.

<comment><USER3> my frustrometer project, which does the same thing and predates this by a few years (albeit less flashy), at [http://frustrometer.com/](http://frustrometer.com/) can handle that fine.

I didn't finish all the build out, because I got really cold feet in the early pitches ... moved on to other things

should I get back on this? It's always so hard to tell if discouragement is a true representation or just people being internety. I also grossly lack self confidence. I don't know if I need pills, therapy, or what.

<comment><USER4> Keep building it. Especially if it interests you. It interested you enough to start it in the first place! Just don't build it with the expectation that you'll garner fame or fortune.

I imagine a lot of people could use some kind of OSS sentiment detection, even if it's not perfect.

Try therapy before pills

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like it's doing emotional classification. Seems more geared towards a single word approach versus strong contextual classification.

The synonyms for acknowledge on their example are not very good.

Here is a link to the demo to test it out yourself. [http://tone-analyzer- demo.mybluemix.net/](http://tone-analyzer-demo.mybluemix.net/)

</comment><comment><USER6> It doesn't deal with negation very well – the phrase "I have never had a sad day with you" is marked as negative because it contains the word "sad".

<comment><USER7> I also noticed this, and it seems like a pretty big flaw. It analyzed one of my emails as very confident because it saw the words "clear" and "sure", but in context, they were used in the phrases "None of this is clear to me" and "I am not totally sure"

<comment><USER8> We are working on dealing with negation. Our next update will have this capability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think IBM really inspired people with Watson, but they have failed to productize it and now they are using "Watson" as a marketing label for any A.I. related technology at all -- be it something very good that they started work on years ago (Speech Recognition) or something really bad that they aquired like AlchemyAPI.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's interesting and I will keep it bookmarked for occasional use, but the classification into emotional, social and writing tones seem very arbitrary. At least part of the problem is that it seems to be working on single words, most of which are weighted more toward one classification or another based on aggregate use rather than any real context. Tools like this rarely seem to do any analysis at the phrase level, even though phrases of two or three words often contribute significant substantive or structural context. This is odd considering that we already have techniques for identifying statistically improbable phrases as intermediate lexical units (often used for detecting plagiarism).

Is anyone aware of work going on in this area? I'm quite interested in lexical analysis, but I'm wary of investing a lot of time just to reinvent the wheel.

<comment><USER5> Yeh there is a lot of work going on in this area... check out all these lectures and the papers they cite.

[http://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabus.html](http://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabus.html)

There is a race to create a virtual assistant and do question answering.. the big players are IBM Watson, Apple w/ Siri, Google, Microsoft w/ cortana, facebook M, and Amazon Echo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there a way to 're-tone' a message, eg: making someone sound more aggressive?

Seems like the logical progression, if not full outright automatic generation of messages.

<comment><USER12> I've found that playing back a recording at 90% speed can make speakers sound strangely hostile and sarcastic...

<comment><USER10> Heh. Makes sense, as people tend to speed up their speech when they're nervous, and become nervous in response to deliberate speech modulation of the sort you describe.

To the GP I'm sure you could 're-tone' many messages, but as presented here the results would likely be unsatisfactory. Doing so effectively would require second- and third-order analysis and now you're getting into Hard Problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can see a more advanced version of this being deployed as part of automated admin packages for commenting sites such as reddit and HN. Any comments of sufficiently negative tone gets auto-downvote/hidden/flagged, etc.

In fact I wouldn't be surprised if it's already part pf the internal tooling.

</comment><comment><USER14> Saying:

You are a retarded goat.

Is apparently a positive sentence.

<comment><USER15> Take out the "a" and it is.

<comment><USER16> 'you are a nice asshole wanker' is also marked as cheerful and agreeable. I guess it has no clue about sarcasm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I kind of like it how the example on this page is helping someone make their email more harsh, when it's already using exclamation points and starting sentences with "but" and is already heeps of negative.

"We can't blame the economy" is passive aggressive, but it gets coded as green.

Not being passive aggressive is good, but perhaps writing the sample email in a way that makes people want to work for this person would be a good idea instead.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure what you mean "It gets coded as green". It doesn't consider an entire statement, it considers word choice.

Similarly, it says that green means that it's placed in the "writing tone" evaluation category, in that it tries to determine whether the writing comes across as analytical, confident or tentative. More like instructions or analysis and less like judgment or conversation.

It's better to look at the demo in a different way. I mean, if I put your post into the analyzer it tells me that it's impassioned, and of that it's not very cheerful. If I put mine in, it looks very matter of fact. It's more analytical and matter-of-fact.

The two posts imply that kind of difference in tone, and it's pretty cool to see.

It's got a way to go, but trying different examples is interesting.

<comment><USER17> I mean that they are building a tool and the primary example is showing a typical passive-aggressive business email and the user is trying to make it worse.

This is a strange reason to write a tool, and perhaps symptomatic of the corporate culture that sought to produce it.

Teaching people to be nicer would be more interesting, and it's clear it is not dwelling on the right elements since it neglects to detect the overall tone of the email as being problematic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not suggesting that watson is good enough as-is (or anytime soon), but the implications of a truly reliable polygraph machine would be huge.

</comment><comment><USER20> I found IBM Watson to be wonderfully competent at absolutely nothing.</comment>


Lending e-books - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/10/steal_book

<comment><USER2> Frankly I don't see any indications that the trajectory of electronic book sales will go differently than music and movies. Same insanely anti-customer pathological obsession with turning sales into "licenses," same obsession with DRM, same outcome: the illegal edition is quite likely to become the more consumer-friendly version.

Today people torrent individual albums and movies, or perhaps a trilogy, or a collection of all the albums of a single band. Given the incredible efficiency of text compression, it is entirely conceivable that soon people might be faced with the decision to rent for $10 a non-shareable copy of a single book, or to just download in one shot, "all books released electronically in english, ever [mar 2011 edition]".

</comment><comment><USER3> The fact that you aren't buying the e-book, but instead paying the fee for a very restrictive _licence_ , needs to be made much clearer to e-book users.

This would mean Amazon and Barnes & Noble using the wording 'license this book' instead of 'sell', 'sale', 'purchase' or 'buy'; instead of a price, you pay a fee.

Nudges, and informed consumers, FTW.

<comment><USER4> Why not just word it as "Read this book"? You pay $X to read the book, you can't lend it, copy it, re-sell it -- just read it (and re-read it if you want).

<comment><USER5> That'll probably result in less conversions for Amazon (compared to "Buy this book").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree with many of the article author's points. However, I am also extremely aware that I typically pay under half the price of the physic book for e-books. Given that paying authors, editorial and production staff is often the most significant cost in producing a book I feel like it's a trade-off.

I'm giving up some rights I'd like, for much lower cost item. For the most part I'm ok with that.

Obviously if there was a better option for lending ebooks I'd take it.

</comment><comment><USER7> So unnecessarily restrictive!

Does anybody have any online resources they can point me to that details the legalities of lending physical or electronic books?

Thanks.

<comment><USER3> in what/which jurisdiction(s)?</comment></comment>