The Paradox of Libertarianism

From the archives, Tyler Cowen writes

Libertarian ideas also have improved the quality of government. Few American politicians advocate central planning or an economy built around collective bargaining. Marxism has retreated in intellectual disgrace.

Those developments have brought us much greater wealth and much greater liberty, at least in the positive sense of greater life opportunities. They’ve also brought much bigger government. The more wealth we have, the more government we can afford. Furthermore, the better government operates, the more government people will demand. That is the fundamental paradox of libertarianism. Many initial victories bring later defeats.

Much like solar power, libertarianism "eats its own lunch."

Greenwald's TED Talk

It's from 2014, but I'm placing it here as a bookmark for myself. I think Glen is the most courageous journalist of our time.

https://theintercept.com/2014/10/10/privacy-matters-ted-talk/

Kasparov on Sanders

The eminent chess player writes

As long as Europe had America taking risks, investing ambitiously, attracting the world’s dreamers and entrepreneurs, and yes, being unequal, it could benefit from the results without making the same sacrifices. Add to that the incalculable windfall of not having to spend on national defense thanks to America’s massive investment in a global security umbrella. America doesn’t have the same luxury of coasting on the ambition and sacrifice of another country.

Who will be America’s America?

Read the whole thing. I am not sure if this if he's being overly critical of the Scandinavians, although I have also argued a similar point myself --- as far as I know, the only truly Scandinavian product I use is Skype.

Accreditation vs. Outcomes

Matt McFarland writes

Accreditors evaluate schools on factors such as their mission, finances, staff, quality of classes, student-teacher interactions and enforcement of a code of conduct. The process can take several years. It’s a way for schools to justify their worth and also find areas for improvement. 

Horn’s group wants to shift the focus to actual outcomes. Did the student master the course work? Did they find a job, or receive a salary boost? Are they satisfied with the program?

The larger context of the article claims that the classical education system is like bundled cable TV, while new bookcamp-like code academies are Netflix. I am uneasy about this analogy, because I don't think colleges and bootcamps actually deliver the same service, but I can see the logic.

Regarding the accreditation excerpt above, my suspicion is that if colleges were suddenly evaluated based on third-party tested outcomes, the number of admitted students would plummet relative to their current levels, and recruitment competition would become extreme.

The Publisher's Nightmare

Simon Oxenham writes

On September 5th, 2011, Alexandra Elbakyan, a researcher from Kazakhstan, created Sci-Hub, a website that bypasses journal paywalls, illegally providing access to nearly every scientific paper ever published immediately to anyone who wants it. The website works in two stages, firstly by attempting to download a copy from the LibGen database of pirated content, which opened its doors to academic papers in 2012 and now contains over 48 million scientific papers. The ingenious part of the system is that if LibGen does not already have a copy of the paper, Sci-hub bypasses the journal paywall in real time by using access keys donated by academics lucky enough to study at institutions with an adequate range of subscriptions. This allows Sci-Hub to route the user straight to the paper through publishers such as JSTOR, Springer, Sage, and Elsevier. After delivering the paper to the user within seconds, Sci-Hub donates a copy of the paper to LibGen for good measure, where it will be stored forever, accessible by everyone and anyone.

Quartz has a piece on this as well. I had never encountered this website, likely because I have always had pretty complete access through UCSB, then ETH, and now Waterloo. Some of the publishers mentioned in the article are large, profitable institutions, but not so large and profitable that they can fight this battle on foreign soil with impunity. I will predict that this database is not going anywhere.

Great Moments in Self-Rationalization

Matthew J. X. Malady writes

I decided to start the experiment at midnight on Thursday, December 31st. I’d ring in the New Year by logging off, then not use my phone, my computer, or any social media for a full seventy-two hours, coming back online at midnight on Sunday, January 3rd. 

... 

At the end of the experiment, I wasn’t dying to get my phone back or to access Facebook. I just wanted to get back to being better informed. My devices and the Internet, as much as they are sometimes annoying and frustrating and overflowing with knuckleheads, help me to do that. If getting outside and taking walks, or sitting in silence, or walking dogs, or talking with loved ones on the phone got me to that same place, I’d be more than happy to change things up.

You would have a hard time convincing me that "better informed" does not really mean "constantly stimulated."

The Strange Effects of Peer Review

Daniel Lemire writes

If you have not been subject to peer review, it might be hard to understand how peer comments can slow down researchers so much… and even discourage entire lines of research. To better understand the process… imagine that you have to convince four strangers of some result… and the burden is entirely on you to convince them… and if only just one of them refuses to accept your argument, for whatever reason, he may easily convince an editor to reject your work… The adversarial referee does not even have to admit he does not believe your result, he can simply say benign things like “they need to run larger or more complicated experiments”. In one project I did, one referee asked us to redo all the experiments in a more realistic setting. So we did. Then he complained that they were not extensive enough. We extended them. By that time I had invested months of research on purely mundane tasks like setting up servers and writing data management software… then the referee asked for a 100x extension of the data sizes… which would have implied a complete overhaul of all our work. I wrote a fifteen-page rebuttal arguing that no other work had been subjected to such levels of scrutiny in the recent past, and the editor ended up agreeing with us. 

Your best strategy in such case might be to simply “give up” and focus on producing “uncontroversial” results. So there are research projects that neither I nor many other researchers will touch…

 To quote an anonymous reviewer on a recent paper I submitted:  “The simulation system is too small. The algorithm should be tested on a larger system.”