anotherthrow
Sure, it's not a deductive proof that Blizzard is right and derpmeister is wrong, but it would be unreasonable to require such a thing.
> This is beyond my wildest dreams of what I expected to make.
Therefore the app creator did not have an accurate perception of what money he would make. Therefore he is a counter-example to your claim, and your claim is false.
First, They believe in rules to enforce everyone paying a bigger share, and are lobbying to bring that about. There's nothing inconsistent in doing that whilst not individually making a bigger voluntary contribution. One might think that one's efforts are far better spent lobbying for a general rule then individually donating.
Second, people like Buffett have commitments to philantropy that I think would easily count as making a bigger contribution.
>You've made this claim (thought without specifying why it's superior to the existing methods), and yet ignored the simple fact that a TIR post is just as bad, if not worse, then the post it replies to. At the very least, the post it replies to is at least, usually, on topic (Topicality is, of course, not the sole contributing factor to whether a comment is worthwhile).
I'm not ignoring that fact - it's just that I haven't accepted it. I agree that TIR posts do not derive value from adding valuable on-topic content. But I've suggested a way for them to derive value from another source. Given that, I don't accept the claim that they are just as bad as the posts they reply to. I thought (and still do) that the argument you were offering takes that as a premise. That's the point I made in the last comment, and I took it to be sufficient to show why your argument doesn't go through. I'm very much happy to be corrected if that's not the argument you had in mind.
The point about using existing tools/protocols is a different argument, and I think a good one. However, it doesn't bear on whether TIR posts are in themselves valuable or not - it only bears on the comparative value they have. Evaluation of that argument would require more knowledge than I have of the efficacy of different ways online communities enforce norms. Re the other points - I think there are interesting things to say about them, but I suspect that would take us off the central disagreement. I am however familiar with the other points about comment policy and downvotes etc... - I've used HN far longer than I've had this account. Whilst we're on issues of civility, I would say that suggesting comments come off as trolling, claiming people 'don't grasp' (which can mean 'don't understand'), and judging them on two sentence profiles don’t seem to me very useful. I was slightly brusque in claiming your comment was 'beside the point' - but did so to echo your comment.
I think I should point out that I don't commit to the claim that TIR posts actually are valuable - I just think it's plausible that they are.
Regarding this:
> If the comment is not worthy of being on HN, then it's also reasonable to conclude that most comments it sparks will be of equal or lesser value.
I don't see any reason to accept it, but even if it did we're talking about a specific subset of responses, and so I've presented an argument for why that subset would add value. This is not inconsistent with the general claim, and so your general claim does not do much in the way of response - it is beside the point.
Finally, 'adding value' is more than just 'sparking valuable comments'. Comments can add value without sparking valuable comments by, e.g. re-enforcing valuable community norms.
Although I started using HN a while ago, I would definitely count myself as someone who uses HN to get interesting stories after going through digg and then reddit (and I'm sure there are a lot of us here) but I'm strongly aware of the particular rules here and do find myself making more of an effort to converse in good faith / be less snarky.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_Act
'Many commentators have stated that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act’s repeal of the affiliation restrictions of the Glass-Steagall Act was an important cause of the late-2000s financial crisis.'
Here in the UK we had something similar with the 'big bang' of bank liberalisation in the 1980s, resulting in the City of London becoming the world's largest financial centre - and subsequent problems.
Whilst I'd look into History and Economic Theory, I wouldn't look to Cato Institute fellows for sensible views on this matter.
1. I wouldn't think for a second that Michael Portillo is a reasonable unbiased analyst here.
2. How do we prevent individuals from spending recklessly? Seems like government is going to have to play a large part in that story.
On (2), it's not an issue of blame, and personally I'm not interested so much in who to 'blame' - we're doing economics, not philosophical ethics. Rather it's an issue about what we do about it. Simply telling people to act differently is unlikely to be a sensible solution.
Then there's a legal point about whether one opens oneself to legal action for dominance when operating in certain ways over market segments - I think it's also true you can be. But I'm not that advanced in my legal training, so don't take a strong position on that.
Further, there are normative and moral issues about what should be the law, and what one should do in these cases - but discussing those would take a long time...
If that were true, wouldn't you expect economic and social mobility to be much higher?
Suppose I have good reason to believe you are unreliable in your testimony. If so, it's perfectly reasonable for me to assign low credence to your claims.
The other guy was basically suggesting we have a good reason to believe you are unreliable, as they were suggesting the effort you've gone to is indicative of a motivation that would make you biased, and therefore unreliable.
The correct response is not to engage in claims of fallacies, but to provide further reasons to believe your claims the audience can accept, or suggest you have other motivations. You've gone for the latter option here, but I have to say your option is not as it stands very persuasive.
This is not to say your claims are false. But it is to say that more work is needed to make then suasive.
Well, I don't know what you mean by 'cogent', as that's generally taken to be a property of arguments and not statements (there may be loser notions, but as I say you'd need to spell out what one you intended). However, the statement that 'Apple have a monopoly over Apple products' is a true statement, which is all that matters to establish the semantic point. It might be trivial, but it's trivially true.
If I might try a helpful suggestion, it seems to me your confusion is arising because you're thinking something like 'if x is a market segment, then x isn't a market'. But of course that doesn't follow, as one can individuate markets at different levels (more or less fine grained).
A market segment just is a market according to the dictionary definitions. And legally, a lot of EU competition law concerns exactly how one individuates such markets/market segments.
Can you draw out what you're claiming more?
When the auther starts going on about other people being losers, and him being a winner, because they do things he doesn't personally value, you start to wonder if he is really free from defining himself in contrast to the guys who excluded him years ago. Life isn't a competition like that.
There's a classic transformation you see a lot of high-functioning geeks go through when they leave school, and start earning more money, living more cosmopolitan lifestyles and meeting more interesting people than those they left behind - they flip around and start juding their ex-classmates negatively in just the way their classmates judged them. You see it a lot on places like reddit, and I think it comes through a little in this article.
That's false too. Predicting climate doesn't require predicting the weather. Compare: suppose you have a slightly biased coin - maybe 0.75 chance heads, 0.25 tails. I certainly can't predict the next throw, or the throw ten out - and without a hell of a lot more knowledge I'll never be able to. But I can be extremely good predicting the heads/tails ratio for sequences of throws in the future.
>Prove to me what is causing global climate change.
No, I can't do that, as I'm not an expert and this is a very complicated area. I suspect that nor are you. In such a situation, it's rational for us to defer to the body of expert opinion (although there are extremely interesting issues in decision theory and philosophy about how one should do so). Expert opinion is pretty unanimous about what is likely causing climate change, and there are no serious reasons to suppose bias. So let's defer to them.
This conditional is (obviously) false. Given your argument seems to rely on it, your argument is not sound.
On PhD programmes you're often dealing with people have been conditioned from an early age to view themselves as defined by effortless academic success - finding something hard, or accepting that there are interesting challenges outside academia can be very difficult.
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-Degree...
As a philosophy PhD, I find the Philosophy > Starbucks meme obnoxious, but it's especially silly when philosophy is amongst the best Art/Humanities degrees one can do from that perspective (particularly if one then goes on to do something like work for an international law firm for a while - the rather conventional switch I've taken).