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CC6+

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008

December 16 marked six years since the release of the first Creative Commons licenses. Most of the celebrations around the world have already taken place or are going on right now, though San Francisco’s is on December 18. (For CC history before 2002-12-16, see video of a panel recorded a few days ago featuring two of CC’s founding board members and first executive director or read the book Viral Spiral, available early next year, though my favorite is this email.)

I’ve worked for CC since April, 2003, though as I say in the header of this blog, I don’t represent any organization here. However, I will use this space to ask for your support of my and others’ work at CC. We’re nearing the end of our fourth annual fall public fundraising campaign and about halfway to our goal of raising US$500,000. We really need your support — past campaigns have closed out with large corporate contributions, though one has to be less optimistic about those given the financial meltdown and widespread cutbacks. Over the longer term we need to steadily decrease reliance on large grants from visionary foundations, which still contribute the majority of our funding.

Sadly I have nothing to satisfy a futarchist donor, but take my sticking around as a small indicator that investing in Creative Commons is a highly leveraged way to create a good future. A few concrete examples follow.

became a W3C Recommendation on October 14, the culmination of a 4+ year effort to integrate the Semantic Web and the Web that everyone uses. There were several important contributors, but I’m certain that it would have taken much longer (possibly never) or produced a much less useful result without CC’s leadership (our motivation was first to describe CC-licensed works on the web, but we’re also now using RDFa as infrastructure for building decoupled web applications and as part of a strategy to make all scientific research available and queryable as a giant database). For a pop version (barely mentioning any specific technology) of why making the web semantic is significant, watch Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web.

Wikipedia seems to be on a path to migrating to using the CC BY-SA license, clearing up a major legal interoperability problem resulting from Wikipedia starting before CC launched, when there was no really appropriate license for the project. The GNU FDL, which is now Wikipedia’s (and most other Wikimedia Foundation Projects’) primary license, and CC BY-SA are both copyleft licenses (altered works must be published under the same copyleft license, except when not restricted by copyright), and incompatible widely used copyleft licenses are kryptonite to the efficacy of copyleft. If this migration happens, it will increase the impact of Wikipedia, Creative Commons, free culture, and the larger movement for free-as-in-freedom on the world and on each other, all for the good. While this has basically been a six year effort on the part of CC, FSF, and the Wikimedia Foundation, there’s a good chance that without CC, a worse (fragmented, at least) copyleft landscape for creative works would result. Perhaps not so coincidentally, I like to point out that since CC launched, there has been negative in the creative works space, the opposite of the case in the software world.

Retroactive copyright extension cripples the public domain, but there are relatively unexplored options for increasing the effective size of the public domain — instruments to increase certainty and findability of works in the public domain, to enable works not in the public domain to be effectively as close as possible, and to keep facts in the public domain. CC is pursuing all three projects, worldwide. I don’t think any other organization is placed to tackle all of these thorny problems comprehensively. The public domain is not only tremendously important for culture and science, but the only aesthetically pleasing concept in the realm of intellectual protectionism (because it isn’t) — sorry, copyleft and other public licensing concepts are just necessary hacks. (I already said I’m giving my opinion here, right?)

CC is doing much more, but the above are a few examples where it is fairly easy to see its delta. CC’s Science Commons and ccLearn divisions provide several more.

I would see CC as a wild success if all it ever accomplished was to provide a counterexample to be used by those who fight against efforts to cripple digital technologies in the interest of protecting ice delivery jobs, because such crippling harms science and education (against these massive drivers of human improvement, it’s hard to care about marginal cultural production at all), but I think we’re on the way to accomplishing much more, which is rather amazing.

More abstractly, I think the role of creating “commons” (what CC does and free/open source software are examples) in nudging the future in a good direction (both discouraging bad outcomes and encouraging good ones) is horribly underappreciated. There are a bunch of angles to explore this from, a few of which I’ve sketched.

While CC has some pretty compelling and visible accomplishments, my guess is that most of the direct benefits of its projects (legal, technical, and otherwise) may be thought of in terms of lowering transaction costs. My guess is those benefits are huge, but almost never perceived. So it would be smart and good to engage in a visible transaction — contribute to CC’s annual fundraising campaign.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source, Politics, Prediction Markets, Public Domain, Public Goods, Semantic Web, Wikipedia | 6 Comments »

Futarchist Voter Guide

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008

Four years ago I used play money contracts traded at the Foresight Exchange to provide a Futarchist Voter Guide (though I didn’t call it that). This U.S. election cycle relevant real money contracts are traded on Intrade.

The first set was instigated and subsidized by Peter McCluskey. Two have attracted a fair amount of interest and seem to be informative. They have consistently indicated that a Democrat will result in a smaller (but still approaching US$1 trillion!) increase in the US federal government debt over one year and a smaller number of US troops in Iraq. (The others, regarding the movement of oil and interest rate futures on election day, have shown no difference between expected election outcomes.)


Above: Expected increase in US Government debt between 30 Sep 2010 and 30 Sep 2011 if party wins US presidency.


Above: Number of US troops in Iraq on 30 June 2010 if party wins US presidency.

Note that briefly in early September the contracts indicate lower debt and fewer troops in Iraq with a Republican candidate. I suspect this is due to McCain’s brief surge following the GOP convention — the implied outcomes above depend on election winner contracts, and with a much lower volume, presumably take awhile to fully respond to rapid shifts in election outcome expectations.

A second set of relevant contracts instigated by Polimetrics have unfortunately attracted almost no trading and probably tell us nothing. Note however they also reflect the brief McCain surge, at which point they implied a greater than 100% chance of growth, low unemployment, and lower crime with a McCain win. They have since reverted to showing essentially no difference between Obama and McCain. Note that each series only starts when there have been trades.


Above: Percent chance that economic growth averages 2.5% or more for 2009-2011 if individual wins US presidency.


Above: Percent chance the US unemployment rate is less than 5.0% at the end of 2011 if individual wins US presidency.


Above: Percent chance the number of violent crimes committed in 2010 is lower than the number of violent crimes committed in 2007 if individual wins US presidency.

Peter McCluskey has automatically updated pages showing implied outcomes for each set of contracts given their latest trades.

(I intended to make a page with frequently updating graphs, but got lazy when Peter published the aforementioned pages, and only collected the data until now, which is available in a spreadsheet.)

Addendum 20081103: See a slightly expanded version of this post at Midas Oracle.

Posted in Economics, Politics, Prediction Markets | 3 Comments »

October and beyond

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Friday (tomorrow) I’m attending the first Seasteading conference in Burlingame. I blogged about seasteading four years ago. Although the originators of the seastead idea are politically motivated, I’d assign a very low probability to them becoming significantly more politically impactful than some of their inspirations (e.g., micronations and offshore pirate radio, i.e., very marginal). To begin with, the seasteading concept has huge engineering and business hurdles to clear before it could make any impact whatsoever. If the efforts of would be seasteaders lead to the creation of lots more wealth (or even just a new weird culture), any marginal political impact is just gravy. In other words, seasteading is another example of political desires sublimated into useful creation. That’s a very good thing, and I expect the conference to be interesting and fun.

Saturday I’ll be at the Students for Free Culture Conference in Berkeley. You don’t have to be a student to attend. Free culture is a somewhat amorphous concept, but I think an important one. I suspect debates about what free culture means and how to develop and exploit it will be evident at the conference. Some of those are in part about the extent to which political desires should be sublimated into useful creation (I should expand on that in a future post).

October 20-26 I’ll participate in three free culture related conferences back to back.

First in Amsterdam for 3rd COMMUNIA Workshop (Marking the public domain: relinquishment & certification), where I’ll be helping talk about some of Creative Commons’ (I work for, do not represent here, etc.) public domain and related initiatives.

Second in Stockholm for the Nordic Cultural Commons Conference, where I’ll give a talk free culture and the future of cultural production.

Finally in Gothenburg for FSCONS, where I’ll give an updated version of a talk on where free culture stands relative to free software.

In December at MIT, Creative Commons will hold its second technology summit. Nathan Yergler and colleagues have been making the semantic rubber hit the web road pretty hard lately, and will have lots to show. If you’re doing interesting [S|s]emantic Web or open content related development (even better, both), take a look at the CFP.

More than likely I’ll identicate rather than blog all of these.

Posted in Blogs, Creative Commons, Open Source, Politics, Prediction Markets, Public Domain, Semantic Web | 2 Comments »

Fooled by common interest

Friday, June 6th, 2008

Lew McCreary, writing on the Harvard Business Review Editors’ Blog, covers two of my favorite topics (prediction markets and nipping stupidity in the bud) with How to Kill Bad Projects:

Project owners creatively spun results for political reasons—mainly to prevent funding from being yanked. Consequently, there was a gaping disconnect between the project people down at ground level and the business leaders farther up the food chain when it came to understanding how projects were actually progressing. The leaders tended to think things were going much better than they actually were.

The problem of corrupted information flows stayed with Siegel and ultimately led him to found his current company, Inkling Markets, a software-as-service venture aimed at helping companies conduct successful prediction markets. What does a prediction market have to do with eliminating spin? Siegel sees an opportunity to produce higher quality decision support in businesses by tapping anonymous input “from people who aren’t normally asked their opinions, in samples large enough to filter out individual agendas.”

In the case of an internal prediction market, employees might be asked to weigh in anonymously (wagering a sum of token currency) on a statement like this: “The Voldemort Project will meet all of its defined performance targets by the end of 2008.”

Unfortunately, the post includes just a bit of its own stupidity (emphasis added):

While many are naturally captivated by the black-swan-finding potential of prediction markets, another sweet spot may be their use as a form of institutional lie detection—guaranteeing the integrity of internal reporting and keeping the progress of business initiatives transparent.

What the heck is he talking about? I have never heard of anyone claiming that a prediction market could find — to the contrary, a black swan is almost by definition something a prediction market will fail to signal — the knowledge does not exist to be aggregated. Chris Masse quoting Nassim Taleb:

If, as Niall Ferguson showed, war bonds did not forecast the great war, it was a Black Swan

Now prediction markets and black swans both have something to do with prediction and probability, but they’re otherwise ships passing not in the night, but on opposite sides of the globe — with one in the night.

DRM strikes me as another example of people fooled by common interest, in this case of cryptography and censorshipcopyright enforcement. Both have something to do with preventing someone from getting access to information. That doesn’t make one a tool for the other (in either direction). Of course that knowledge was distributed, but apparently not visibly in the right places, resulting in lots of bad projects.

Via Inkling.

Posted in Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves, Prediction Markets | 4 Comments »

Bob Barr candidacy fails market test

Monday, May 26th, 2008

I was going to post this at Midas Oracle, but there seems to be a software problem there [fixed, edited version posted there], so I’ll post here, with added vitriol and pejoratives I would not have used there.

Yesterday at about 5:30PM EDT the Libertarian Party (U.S.) nominated ex-Congressperson Bob Barr for temporary dictator. Barr’s nomination does not appear to have been certain — it took five rounds of voting, including two rounds where he tied for first and one in which in placed second.

So what do the relevant prediction markets make of this new information? Is Barr a contender, a potential spoiler, or irrelevant?

At Intrade, PRES.FIELD2008 has attracted no trades since May 22, three days before Barr’s nomination. We didn’t need a market to tell us a Libertarian Party nominee would not be a contender, nor help the chances of another non-Democrat and non-Republican.

The idea that Barr could be a spoiler is not completely ridiculous on its face (Barr and Wayne Allen Root, his running mate, are both recent ex-Republicans). However, PRES.DEM2008 has attracted no trades since May 24, the day before Barr’s nomination, while PRES.REP2008 did not trade between 18 hours before the nomination and over 3 hours after.

I think we can conclude that traders believe Barr’s nomination will have no impact on the outcome of the U.S. temporary dictator election. And, sadly, that volume on Intrade is pathetic.

It should be no surprise that traders dismiss the impact of the Libertarian Party’s choice. The last time they nominated a marginally credible candidate — in , another (then) ex-Republican ex-Congressperson, Ron Paul — they received 0.5% of the total vote.

Regarding the Libertarian Party generally, I can’t say it much better than Tim Lee:

Ultimately, I wish the LP would just go away. The structure of American elections dooms third parties to perpetual failure and obscurity, and that, in turn, creates a vicious cycle where the most talented activists and potential candidates go elsewhere, causing the party to be even more out of touch and politically tone-deaf in the next election. But given that the party is going to nominate somebody, Barr was probably the best choice. He’s a reasonably credible candidate, he’s got decent media skills, and so far, at least, I haven’t seen him take any positions that I strongly disagree with (since his road-to-damascus conversion in 2006, anyway). But I don’t plan to support his candidacy because while he may be the least-bad option on this November’s ballot, he certainly isn’t the kind of person I want associated with libertarianism. And every vote he gets will mean more visibility for the embarrassing candidate the party is likely to nominate in 2012.

Posted in Peeves, Politics, Prediction Markets | No Comments »

Of course Obama is elitist

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

So are Clinton and McCain. They all consider themselves worthy of the temporary dictatorship.

If I took a more sanguine view of the U.S. presidency I would demand only elite candidates. The most abominable, I mean powerful, person in the world had better be the smartest and wisest possible person available.

The alternative to demanding an elite is demanding a demagogue. It never fails to stun and embarrass me to see the preponderance of discourse demanding the latter, while politicians comply by running away from any charge of elitism while reveling in demagoguery.

This weakness is one reason I try to only follow electoral races in highly digested form, though it is hard to avoid reading headlines, thus this post.

Posted in Peeves, Politics, Prediction Markets | 4 Comments »

Table selection, HSA, LugRadio, Music, Photographers, New Media

Monday, April 21st, 2008

A few observations and things learned from the last eight days.

Go to a page with a table, for example this one (sorry, semi-nsfw). Hold down the control key and select cells. How could I not have known about this!? Unfortunately, copy & paste seems to produce tab separated values in a single row even when pasting from mutliple rows in the HTML table (tried with Firefox and Epiphany). Still really useful when you only want to copy one column of a table, but if you want all of the columns, don’t hold down the control key and row boundaries get newlines as they should rather than tabs. (Thanks Asheesh.)

I feel really stupid about this one. I’ve assumed that a (US) was a spend within the year or lose your contributions arrangement, but that’s what a Flexible Spending Account is (I have no predictable medical expenses, so such an account makes no sense for me). A HSA is an investment account much like an IRA, except you can spend from it without penalty upon incurring medical expenses rather than old age. You can only contribute to a HSA while enrolled in a high deductible health insurance plan, which I’ll try to switch to next year. (Thanks Ahrash.)

I saw a few presentations at LugRadio Live USA, in addition to giving one. Miguel de Icaza’s on (content roughly corresponding to this post) and Ian Murdock’s on were both in part about software packaging. Taken together, they make a good case for open source facilitating cross polination of ideas and code across operating system platforms.

Aaron Bockover and Gabriel Burt did a presentation/demo on , showing off some cool track selection/playlist features and talking about more coming. I may have to try switching back to Banshee as my main audio player (from Rhythmbox, with occasional use of Songbird for web-heavy listening or checking on how the program is coming along). Banshee runs on Mono, and both are funded by Novell, which also (though I don’t know how their overall investment compares) has an .

John Buckman gave an entertaining talk on open source and open content (including the slide at right). My talk probably was not entertaining at all, but used the question ‘how far behind [free/open source software] is free/open culture?’ to string together selected observations about the field.

Benjamin Mako Hill did a presentation on Revealing Errors (meant both ways). I found myself wanting to be skeptical of the power of technical errors to expose political/power relationships, but I imagine the concept could use a little hype — there’s definitely something there. The talk made me more sensitive to errors in any case. For example, when I transferred funds from a money market account to checking to pay taxes, an email notice included this (emphasis in original):

Your confirmation number is 0.

Zero? Really? The transaction did go through.

Tuesday I attended the Media Web Meetup V: The Gulf Between NorCal and SoCal, is it so big?, the idea being (in this context pushed by Songbird founder Rob Lord; I presented at the first Media Web Meetup and have attended a few others) that in Northern California entrepreneurs are trying to build new services around music, nearly all stymied by protectionist copyright holders in Southern California. I really did not need to listen to yet another panel asking how the heck is the music recording distribution industry going to use technology to make money, but this was a pretty good one as those go. One of the panelists kept urging technologists to “fix [music] metadata” as if doing so were the key to enabling profit from digital music. I suppressed the urge to sound a skeptical note, as investing more in metadata is one of the least harmful things the industry might do. Not that I don’t think metadata is great or anything.


Wendy Seltzer / CC BY

Thursday evening I was on a ‘Copyright 2.0′ panel put on by the American Society of Media Photographers Northern California. I thought my photo selection for my first slide was pretty clever. No, copyright expansion is not always good for the interests of professional photographers. The other panelists and the audience were actually more open minded (both meanings) than I expected, and certainly realistic. The photographer on the panel even stated the obvious (my paraphrase from memory): new technology has allowed lots of people to explore their photographry talents who would otherwise have been unable to, and maybe some professional photographers just aren’t that good and should find other work. My main takeway from the panel is that it is very difficult for an independent photographer to successfully pursue unauthorized users in court. With the sometime exception of one, the other panelists all strongly advised photographers to avoid going to court except as a last resort, and even then, first doing a rational calculation of what the effort is likely to cost and gain. The best advice was probably to try to turn unauthorized users into clients.

Friday evening I went to San Jose to be on a panel about New Media Artists and the Law. Unlike Thursday’s panel, this one was mostly about how to use and re-use rather than how to prevent use. This (and some nostalgia) made me miss living in Silicon Valley — I lived in Sunnyvale two years (2003-2005) and San Jose (2005-2006) before moving back to San Francisco. Nothing really new came up, but I did enjoy the enthusiasm of the other panelists and the audience (as I did the previous day).

Staturday I went to Ubuntu Restaurant in Napa, which apparently does vegetable cuisine but does not market itself as vegetarian. I think that’s a good idea. The food was pretty good.

I’ve been listening to Hazard Records 59 and 60: Calida Construccio by various and Unhazardous Songs by Xmarx. Lovely Hell (mp3) from the latter is rather poppy.

Posted in Creative Commons, Intellectual Protectionism, Music, Open Source, P2P, Peeves, Prediction Markets, Semantic Web | 4 Comments »

Most important political news of the day

Friday, January 4th, 2008

I’m fairly satisfied with the results of last night’s Iowa caucuses, though I wish the loathsome Edwards had done poorly enough to drop out. (By the way, although I stated my preference for Richardson and effectively for Obama a few days ago, I had forgotten that I already did the same back in March).

Far more important and satisfying is the launch of real money presidential decision markets today. Hooray for Peter McCluskey! I’m sure I’ll have much more to say about this.

There were play money presidential decision markets in 2004.

Posted in Politics, Prediction Markets | 4 Comments »

Bill Richardson > /tmp/dictator

Saturday, December 29th, 2007

I endorse for temporary dictator of the U.S. jurisdiction. His positions on executive power seem acceptable, his overall domestic policies and record as governor of New Mexico are better than most politicians (i.e., not abominable), and his foreign policy is not insane. Regarding the last, Richardson outlines his principles in this video.

True, ’s more radical foreign (and general) policy is mostly closer to my preferences than Richardson’s. However, in spirit and delivery, Richardson’s foreign policy is a viable and positive alternative to interventionism, approximately the Wright thing, in contrast to Dr. No’s.

And Richardson is in theory electable, while Paul is not. Traders are probably correct in giving Richardson essentially zero chance of winning the Democratic nomination at this point, but they are certifiably insane to give Paul even a smidgen of a chance of winning the GOP nomination (currently about 7%), let alone the dictatorship (4%).

I also think that to the extent the Paul campaign gives some libertarians (entirely false) hope of revolutionary change for the better through electoral politics, the campaign and whatever success it has is a bad thing. It makes me sad to see libertarians impoverish themselves by sending a “moneybomb” to a hopeless electoral campaign.

However, I probably would not have bothered to tack on this anti-endorsement of Paul had I not seen this excrement from his campaign.

Paul is also a religious kook (but then so is every candidate, of one sort or another). At least Barack Obama admits doubt, which I’d challenge any other candidate to do. As Richardson doesn’t have any chance of nomination, this post is effectively an endorsement.

Via Freedom Democrats and Sheldon Richman.

Posted in Apartheid, Peeves, Politics, Prediction Markets | 6 Comments »

Blog search putrefying

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

I’ve complained before here that blog search stinks and isn’t getting better. Now I know why — in addition to blog search being a difficult and expensive service to run — there isn’t much demand. The blog search focused sites I mentioned in the “stinks” post each seem to have gained no traction since then, excepting Technorati, which itself is constantly rumored to be troubled.

A TechCrunch post on traffic at various Google properties finally gave me a clue and an inclination to look at my past posts on blog search. Click through to see a graph showing that Google Blog Search barely registers.

To end on a positive note, perhaps blog search is a good use case for , as it isn’t economic for a centralized entity to do well. This reminds me, whatever happened to various ?

…

Only tangentially related to blog search, I really like Chris F. Masse’s post on blogs vs. newspapers, in which Wikipedia sits at the top of the ecosystem:

So the real winner is Wikipedia — a news and knowledge aggregator… using anonymous volunteers. But Wikipedia is only an information aggregator… it feeds on both media and blogs to gather the facts. Wikipedia is the common denominator of knowledge —not the primary source of reporting. Just like prediction markets feed on polls and other advanced indicators.

Posted in Blogs, P2P, Peeves, Prediction Markets, Wikipedia | No Comments »

Go Antigua!!!

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

The dispute between the U.S. and Antigua jurisdictions over the former’s is one of the most interesting happenings of the past few years. I’ve been meaning to write about it for about that long but haven’t had much more to say than what you see in the post title. Antigua correctly sees the U.S. as restraining trade and has obtained favorable rulings at the World Trade Organization.

(actually the jurisdiction of ) is seeking the right to suspend enforcement of U.S. copyrights as an alternative remedy. Unfortunately this sounds way more interesting than it is, except possibly for its precedent. The latest ruling only allows the suspension of US$21 million worth of intellectual protectionist obligations, a trivial amount that will itself be subject to radically different interpretations considering how difficult and arbitrary the valuation of nonrival goods can be (the RIAA’s ridiculous valuation of shared audio files is exactly a case in point). Even had Antigua’s request for US$3.44 billion not been cut down by about 99.4% the result would have been largely academic.

I have sub-golf level interest in horse racing, poker, or other gaming-oriented gambling activities. So why is this case so interesting? There is or David vs. Goliath aspect, but mostly I really want to see U.S. gambling prohibitions go down in flames, both because they are a tool for arbitrary censorship and control in much the same way copyright is and because they are a barrier to use of .

The world will route around this U.S. stupidity, but at great loss, not least to Americans.

Posted in Economics, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves, Politics, Prediction Markets | No Comments »

Bond prices on historical and contemporary civil war outcomes

Sunday, November 18th, 2007

Did Johnny Reb have a Fighting Chance? A Probabilistic Assessment from European Financial Markets (PDF) by Kim Oosterlinck and Marc D. Weidenmier looks at Confederate gold bonds traded in Amsterdam from August 1863 through the end of the war, taking bond price (probability of repayment) as the probability of Confederate victory (meaning survival as an independent state that could service its debts).

A very interesting new window on history, one that is crying out to be applied to other situations were a government faces an existential threat, as the authors point out:

Although this study has focused on the American Civil War, the methodology employed in this paper could easily be applied to several other historical or modern day episodes to provide some insight into the evolution of victory probabilities during a period of civil war/revolution. The methodology might be particularly interesting to apply to a communist revolution given that Marxist regimes generally repudiate a country’s debt obligations and do not recognize international capital markets. For example, it might be interesting to know the evolution of victory (defeat) probabilities during the Spanish Civil War or the Cuban Revolution of the 1960s. Another possibility is to use the technique to estimate the probability that the thirteen colonies would win the American Revolution. The methodology could also be extended to estimate the probability of a victory by Germany during World War I or the Nazis during World War II. Applying the methodology to the world wars would be more complicated given that it is not clear whether the recovery value of the war bonds would be zero in the event of a defeat. We leave these items for future research.

What do bond prices say about contemporary Iraq? I don’t see any nice graph over time, but apparently current prices imply an 80% chance of default over the lifetime of one issue (through 2028), and apparently the “surge” hasn’t improved bond investor outlook.

Interesting, but survival of a government willing to repay past debts is way too coarse for most policy decisions and the probability of various policy decisions are not disaggregated. For these reasons prediction markets contingent on policy implementation and electoral outcomes are badly needed.

Via Robin Hanson.

Posted in Economics, Iraq, Prediction Markets | No Comments »

Peer producing think tank transparency

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

Hack, Mash & Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency from the looks like a reasonable exhortation for the U.S. jurisdiction government to publish data in so that government activities may be more easily scrutinized. The paper’s first paragraph:

The federal government makes an overwhelming amount of data publicly available each year. Laws ranging from the Administrative Procedure Act to the Paperwork Reduction Act require these disclosures in the name of transparency and accountability. However, the data are often only nominally publicly available. First, this is the case because it is not available online or even in electronic format. Second, the data that can be found online is often not available in an easily accessible or searchable format. If government information was made public online and in standard open formats, the online masses could be leveraged to help ensure the transparency and accountability that is the reason for making information public in the first place.

That’s great. But if peer produced (a more general and less inflammatory term than crowdsourced; I recommend it) scrutiny of government is great, why not of think tanks? Let’s rewrite that paragraph:

Think tanks produce an overwhelming number of analyses and policy recommendations each year. It is in the interest of the public and the think thanks that these recommendations be of high quality. However, the the data and methodology used to produce these positions are often not publicly available. First, this is the case because the data is not available online or even in electronic format. Second, the analysis that can be found online is often not available in an easily accessible or searchable format. Third, nearly everything published by think tanks is copyrighted. If think tank data and analysis was made public online in standard open formats and under open licenses, the online masses could be leveraged to help ensure the quality and public benefit of the policy recommendations that are the think tanks’ reason for existing in the first place.

Think tanks should lead by example, and improve their product to boot. Note the third point above: unlike , the output of think tanks (and everyone else) is restricted by copyright. So think tanks need to take an to ensure openness.

(Actually think tanks only need to lead in their domain of political economy — by following the trails blazed by the movement in scientific publishing.)

This is only the beginning of leading by example for think tanks. When has a pro-market think tank ever subjected its policy recommendations to market evaluation?

Via Reason.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source, Peeves, Politics, Prediction Markets, Public Domain, Semantic Web | 3 Comments »

Knowledge migration

Saturday, October 13th, 2007

Two points riffing off Paul Graham’s Why to Move to a Startup Hub (alternate titles: Why to Move to the Startup Hub or Why to Move to Silicon Valley). Probably more obvious, but it’s a theme of this blog:

Immigration difficulties might be another reason to stay put. Dealing with immigration problems is like raising money: for some reason it seems to consume all your attention. A startup can’t afford much of that. One Canadian startup we funded spent about 6 months working on moving to the US. Eventually they just gave up, because they couldn’t afford to take so much time away from working on their software.

(If another country wanted to establish a rival to Silicon Valley, the single best thing they could do might be to create a special visa for startup founders. US immigration policy is one of Silicon Valley’s biggest weaknesses.)

I suspect a jurisdiction would have to include far more than just startup founders in such a program to have any noticeable impact. But it’s not a bad sentiment. Even on purely nationalistic grounds, any jurisdiction (and especially large ones like China, India, Brazil, and Russia) ought to allow unlimited skilled immigration, preferably permanent, including citizenship.

Graham also points out the importance of specialized knowledge, emphasis added:

Boston investors will admit they’re more conservative. Some want to believe this comes from the city’s prudent Yankee character. But Occam’s razor suggests the truth is less flattering. Boston investors are probably more conservative than Silicon Valley investors for the same reason Chicago investors are more conservative than Boston ones. They don’t understand startups as well.

West coast investors aren’t bolder because they’re irresponsible cowboys, or because the good weather makes them optimistic. They’re bolder because they know what they’re doing. They’re the skiers who ski on the diamond slopes. Boldness is the essence of venture investing. The way you get big returns is not by trying to avoid losses, but by trying to ensure you get some of the big hits. And the big hits often look risky at first.

I’ve been meaning to do a post on the below for awhile but don’t have a whole lot to say, so I’ll use this tangent: New business practices and models have a whole lot going against them, even if superior to existing practices in theory — nobody has experience making them work. I suspect this applies to peer production in spades. Building up a critical mass of knowledge about how open source works has been slow going and still has a long way to go, and I’m fond of speculating that open content/free culture is a decade or two behind free software. Prediction markets are obviously in the same boat, and futarchy is far out to sea.

And so is every useful business, social, political, or other change (but keep in mind that some things don’t work, even in theory).

By the way, a startup considering a move to Silicon Valley should make the decision with the aid of prediction markets.

Via Tim O’Reilly.

Posted in Apartheid, Creative Commons, Economics, Open Source, Prediction Markets | 1 Comment »

The most bizarre sentence I’ve read today

Saturday, April 21st, 2007

Tyler Cowen just linked to a comment left by Robin Hanson on this blog. I agree with Cowen’s comment left on the same post here: “Robin is awesome, enough said.”

Hanson’s writing never disappoints, even when he’s claiming that medicine is useless (the statistical argument is strong).

On the other hand Cowen is one of my most eagerly read bloggers (and semi-frequent provider of fodder for my comments), but sometimes Cowen says the darndest things, like this from the post linked above:

The very reason we resort to a firm, rather than the market, is to build consensus and morale, not to forecast the truth.

Consensus I’ll buy, as shorthand for lower in-firm transaction costs. Morale? He’s got to be kidding (note that the only instance of “morale” in the Wikipedia article on is immediately followed by “-damaging”).

Cowen continues:

Prediction markets would tend to break down firms, but of course they still can flourish in Arrow-Hahn-Debreu space.

My guess is that in the short term adoption of prediction markets will favor firms that have access to specialists needed by early adopters to succeed and layers of management that can be made redundant without immediately threatening the authority of the top, i.e., large firms.

I have no idea what Arrow-Hahn-Debreu space is, other than that it has something to do with . If I had to take a wild ignorant guess at the import of “but of course…” I would say it is arguably a tautology.

Posted in Blogs, Economics, Peeves, Prediction Markets | 1 Comment »

The Probabalistic Estate

Saturday, April 21st, 2007

Chris F. Masse points out an article describing Bill Moyers’ Buying the War, to be broadcast April 25, in which many “top” journalists admit to being completely bamboozled by patriotism and the security state after 9/11. Willing fools include Dan Rather, former CBS anchor, and Walter Isaacson, former president of CNN.

My favorite article excerpt:

[E]ditors at the Panama City (Fla.) News-Herald received an order from above, “Do not use photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties. Our sister paper has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening emails.”

“Patriots” are the most likely domestic terrorists, right after the security state itself.

What if there were prediction market tickers for invasion outcomes running in the “footer” (I have no idea what the bottom of a TV screen is called, so I’ll borrow terminology) of the CBS newscast and CNN, or daily prices and inferred probabilities alongside newspaper stories?

Would the traders have been as stupid in aggregate as the journalists?

To make sense of the post title see and this.

Posted in Iraq, Peeves, Politics, Prediction Markets | 1 Comment »

Invention versus innovation

Monday, April 16th, 2007

Will this post get Chris Masse to stop bothering me for a promised post on invention vs. innovation?

Many people have written on this, a few recent links, not all precisely relevant to the question.

One way of putting it is that six billion people generate a huge number of ideas, some number of which could be called inventions. Most are hopeless (the inventions; the people at least manage to survive for a time). Most of the rest are not actively pursued. The only way to test whether an invention is hopeless or useful is to attempt to deliver it at scale. So innovators (think of them as idea entrepreneurs, or whatever) both figure out which inventions are not hopeless and deliver the useful ones at scale. Innovators create all of the surplus, inventors do little more than breathe.

I’ve had an idea in my head for a few years that Masse recently mentioned in passing (not the moronic one he has recently written at length about). Have I done anything with the idea? No. Without implementation the idea is worthless.

Read Robin Hanson’s short The Myth Of Creativity article. Excerpt:

What society needs is not more creativity or suggestions for change but better ways to encourage people to focus on important issues, identify the most promising ideas, and tell the right people about them. But our deification of creativity gets in the way.

Do read the whole thing. Hanson’s target is slightly different than mine.

Before Masse calls me a fan-boy again (I don’t mind), I’ll pose the obvious question: how much of an innovator is Hanson? He’s clearly a fantastic ideas person, but ideas don’t matter. He seems a more productive innovator than the average academic, but that bar is probably very low.

A recent and very apropos Seth Godin post on Meeting Needs spurred me to finally write this. Godin:

Almost no new idea meets the needs of shareholders and CEOs. That’s because most of all they need predictability and apparent freedom from risk. This is why public companies are almost always on the road to disaster. They flee from change in order to do what they think is meeting the needs of those constituents. They fight changes in laws, policies, technologies and markets because their CEO (especially) wants a nice even flight pattern while he racks up big time options.

Shrink wrap software feels safe. Secure. Supported. Beyond reproach.

But…

It turns out that open source can do a brilliant job of meeting their actual needs (lower overhead to install and maintain, higher productivity to use, more stable over time) but the problem is that apparent needs (playing it safe, making your boss happy) almost always get in the way. Until it’s too late. When it’s too late, the competition has leapfrogged you.

Godin also mentions blogging, read the full post. One could substitute prediction markets for open source or blogging. Put that in your marketing pipe and smoke it, Mr. Chris Masse. :-)

Posted in Economics, Open Source, Peeves, Prediction Markets | 14 Comments »

iCandy, Patented !

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007

Tom Evslin says Apple Fails to Reinvent Telecommunications Industry:

Steve Jobs claims that iPhone will “reinvent” the telecommunications sector. Wish it were so but it ain’t!

The design of the phone – no hard buttons, all touch on screen, sounds like everything we expect from Steve and from Apple: it’s all about the GUI and that part’ll be fun. But the business relationship is as old school as it can get: exclusive US distributorship through Cingular
…
Short term this is a good tactic for Apple because it protects the iPod franchise for a while. Long term I think it’s terrible strategy. It invites an endrun from someone who IS willing to reinvent the industry or simply allies themselves with a Cingular competitor.
…
Remember how wonderful the Mac GUI was? But it only ran on machines from Apple. Remember how crappy Windows was at first? But it ran on machines from everyone and their brother. And now there’s Linux – even less restricted – running on anything that moves. Tell me again why it makes sense to have a phone that runs only on a service from at&t (in the US).

Like other Apple products, the is eye candy (ugly to me), but not revolutionary.

It looks like the FIC Neo1973, showing at CES, due to ship this quarter for US$350, running the platform (presentation), will be more in the right direction — unlocked and open for developers. Andy on the openmoko list has a very early comparison.

The Neo1973’s big missing feature, at least initially, is apparently Wi-Fi, due to a lack of open drivers. As a late adopter of gadgets, I can wait. I acquired my first and only mobile phone in 2003, and it’s easy on the eyes.

That said, I’d really like Portable online by 2010 to be true:

This claim is judged YES if and only if, by January 1, 2010, in any state with more than 5 million inhabitants, at least 25% of the adult population are “portably online”. A “state” can be a country or a member state in a federation.

Read more for how “portably online” is defined (the contract was written in 1995). My current guess (and the market’s; last trade at 30) is that without a more significant revolution than we’re seeing the criteria won’t be met before 2010, but not terribly long after.

OpenMoko via Jon Phillips. Second word in post title refers to a silly slide found at Engadget.

Posted in Computers, Open Source, Peeves, Prediction Markets | 5 Comments »

I support advertising on Wikipedia

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007

Wikimedia Foundation is over halfway through a . I hope that when you give you leave the following public comment:

I support advertising on Wikipedia.

Evan Prodromou summarizes a completely unwarranted controversy regarding a matching fund (bottom of page):

All fine so far, right? But a small logo in the donations notice — seen by non-logged-in users on every page of every WMF site — was considered by many Wikipedians and other WMF editors as dangerously close to the line on advertising — or over it. There have been several prominent users who have left the project because of it.

I’m not sympathetic with these folks; in fact, I’m in solid opposition. I think that Wikipedia’s huge amount of Web traffic is a resource that the Foundation is squandering. Traffic like Wikipedia’s is worth tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue per year. That’s money that could go to disseminate free (libre and gratis) paperback pocket encyclopedias to millions of schools and millions of children, in their own language, around the world.

It’s irresponsible to abuse that opportunity.

I strongly agree and will repeat exactly what I said during last year’s Wikimedia fund drive:

Wikipedia chief considers taking ads (via Boing Boing) says that at current traffic levels, Wikipedia could generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year by running ads. There are strong objections to running ads from the community, but that is a staggering number for a tiny nonprofit, an annual amount that would be surpassed only by the wealthiest foundations. It could fund a staggering Wikimedia Foundation bureaucracy, or it could fund additional free knowledge projects. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has asked what will be free. Would an annual hundred million dollar budget increase the odds of those predictions? One way to find out before actually trying.

In somewhat related news, Mozilla just reported 2005 financial information, showing 800% revenue growth:

In 2005 the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation combined had revenue from all sources of $52.9M. $29.8M of this was associated with the Foundation (both before and after the creation of the Corporation). The bulk of this revenue was related to our search engine relationships, with the remainder coming from a combination of contributions, sales from the Mozilla store, interest income, and other sources. These figures compare with 2003 and 2004 revenues of $2.4M and $5.8M respectively, and reflect the tremendous growth in the popularity of Firefox after its launch in November 2004.

The combined expenses of the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation were approximately $8.2M in 2005, of which approximately $3M was associated with the Foundation. By far the biggest portion of these expenses went to support the large and growing group of people dedicated to creating and promoting Firefox, Thunderbird, and other Mozilla open source products and technologies. The rate of expenses increased over the year as new employees came on board. The unspent revenue provides a reserve fund that allows the Mozilla Foundation flexibility and long term stability.

An advertising-fueled Wikimedia Foundation could fund dozens of much needed Mozilla Firefox sized projects. And many Creative Commons (which just successfully completed its much more modest annual funding campaign) initiatives. :)

Update: Welcome Slashdot readers. The major objection to ads on Wikipedia takes two forms:

  • Advertising is profane.
  • Advertising would compromose Wikipedia’s neutrality.

A common response to the first is that those who don’t like ads can run an ad blocker. Easier still, those who don’t like ads can log in — there’s little reason to display ads to logged in users, who probably generate a tiny fraction of pageviews. But I don’t think either of these responses will satisfy this form of the objection, as it is basically emotional. Some people object to the knowledge that ads exist, even if not experienced personally. I suppose these people don’t use search engines. It’s a wonder they can stand to use the net at all. I discount them completely.

The second is completely unrealistic. How would third party text ads, e.g., via AdSense, compromise neutrality? There’s simply no vector for an advertiser to demand changes and zero reason for Wikipedians to comply. Wikipedia is not a small town newspaper beholden to the local department store, not even close. It isn’t even Slashdot, which as far as I can tell has not been compromised by years of running ads. To people with this objection: show me a community site that has gone astray due to advertiser influence.

Sponsors, “being managed by Wikipedia staff (like in newspaper ads, i.e. no uncontrolled 3rd party feeds)”, as suggested by Kuba Ober, are far more dangerous than third party ads, because then there is a vector between advertiser and someone with power at Wikipedia.

There may be an opportunity for Wikipedia to completely rethink and remake advertising, or merely compete in some fashion with what some are calling Google’s near monopoly, but now it would make tremendous sense to use AdSense or Yahoo! or both — and I suspect Wikipedia could manage to keep a greater share of revenue than a normal web publisher. Rick Yorgason mocked up what AdSense would look like in the place of the current fundraiser’s donation banner.

Slashdot commenter jklooserman summarizes objections from Wikiproject no ads:

  1. Wikipedia’s philosophy is non-commercial
  2. Ads put at risk Wikipedia’s principle of Neutral Point of View (NPOV)
  3. The information that constitutes Wikipedia is wealth for the community

I don’t see “non-commercial” in any form on the Wikimedia Foundation home page. I do see this, in large text:

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.

The next line, all bold, asks for help in the form of donations.

Much more money, hundreds of millions, would speed the arrival of that world and fulfillment of that commitment.

As above, there is no realistic scenario for ads undermining neutrality on Wikipedia.

The third objection strikes me as a non-sequitur. In any case, the point of obtaining more resources would be to increase the wealth of the community — of all human beings.

jklooserman also pointed out that there’s a category of Wikipedians who think that the Wikimedia Foundation should use advertising. Add it to your user page if you agree.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Open Source, Peeves, Prediction Markets, Public Goods, Wikipedia | 95 Comments »

Dangerous Optimism

Monday, January 1st, 2007

I never got around to commenting on responses to the 2006 Edge Annual Question — “What Is Your Dangerous Idea?” — as most were uninteresting, not dangerous, or simply lame.

It must’ve been the question, as this year’s responses — to “What Are You Optimistic About? Why?” — make for good reading. I’ll excerpt a few that resonate with themes I go on about.

Steven Pinker on The Decline of Violence:

Even the mass murders of the twentieth century in Europe, China, and the Soviet Union probably killed a smaller proportion of the population than a typical hunter-gatherer feud or biblical conquest. The world’s population has exploded, and wars and killings are scrutinized and documented, so we are more aware of violence, even when it may be statistically less extensive.
…
My optimism lies in the hope that the decline of force over the centuries is a real phenomenon, that is the product of systematic forces that will continue to operate, and that we can identify those forces and perhaps concentrate and bottle them.

James O’Donnell says Scientific Discoveries Are Surprisingly Durable:

But the study of the past and its follies and failures reveals one surprising ground for optimism. In the long run, the idiots are overthrown or at least they die. On the other hand, creativity and achievement are unique, exciting, liberating—and abiding. The discoveries of scientists, the inventions of engineers, the advances in the civility of human behavior are surprisingly durable.

Clay Shirky on Evidence:

We will see a gradual spread of things like evidence-based politics and law — what is the evidence that this expenditure, or that proposed bill, will have the predicted result? The expectation that evidence can answer questions about the structure of society will discomfit every form of government that relies on sacrosanct beliefs. Theocracy and communism are different in many ways, but they share the same central bug — they are based on some set of assertions that must remain beyond question.

Jamshed Bharucha on The Globalization of Higher Education:

We are all better off when talent is realized to its fullest—even if it crosses borders.

I didn’t count, but I think the subject mentioned most often was climate change, with solar power as the thing most were optimistic about. My favorite take on climate change was Gregory Benford on Save The Arctic:

So: despair? Not at all. Certainly we should accept the possibility that anthropogenic carbon emissions could trigger a climactic tripping point, such as interruption of the gulf stream in the Atlantic. But rather than urging only an all out effort to shrink the human atmospheric-carbon footprint, my collaborators and I propose relatively low tech and low expense experiments at changing the climate on purpose instead of by mistake.

If we understand climate well enough to predict that global warming will be a problem, then we understand it well enough to address the problem by direct means.

There are also several good entries on health, life extension, and also networks-will-change-publishing — but my, isn’t the last relatively boring?

One last favorite, on human enhancement, Andy Clark on The End Of The ‘Natural’:

Second, the biological brain is itself populated by a vast number of hidden ‘zombie processes’ that underpin the skills and capacities upon which successful behavior depends. There are, for example, a plethora of such unconscious processes involved in activities from grasping an object all the way to the flashes of insight that characterize much daily skilful problem-solving. Technology and drug based enhancements add, to that standard mix, still more processes whose basic operating principles are not available for conscious inspection and control. The patient using a brain-computer interface to control a wheelchair will not typically know just how it all works, or be able to reconfigure the interface or software at will. But in this respect too, the new equipment is simply on a par with much of the old.
…
In sum, I am optimistic that we will soon see the end of those over-used, and mostly ad hoc, appeals to the ‘natural’. May we all have a thoroughly unnatural New Year.

A highly agreeable toast.

…

Many of the responses contain very rough predictions, reminding me of prediction registries, an idea Robin Hanson has said would obtain 80% of the benefits of prediction markets (I doubt the number is that high) and also promoted by David Brin. I think prediction markets and registries are almost entirely complementary.

I like Brin’s point that “One advantage of registries is that they can be involuntary.” A pundit can only avoid inclusion by effectively not making predictions (which may include being wishy-washy and imprecise). I conjecture that DiscourseDB (I mentioned previously) is a model of what a prediction registry would look like — just imagine cataloging “will” rather than “should” opinions, and add evaluation.

…

I’m surprised that none of the responses (I could have missed one) took the (unintended?) bait offered by combining the 2006 and 2007 questions: Is optimisim dangerous?

That depends on the subject of optimism. I think people tend to be dangerously optimisic about the outcomes of authoritarian processes, including both obvious societywide authoritarianism and conscious decisions made by individuals, but dangerously pessimistic about decentralized processes, including listening to external advice at the individual level.

Via Boing Boing, Marginal Revolution, or EconLog, all of which appeared in one batch of feed updates.

Posted in Apartheid, Health, Peeves, Politics, Prediction Markets | 1 Comment »

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