Many people say they are too busy to learn much, or learn well. And don't have time to read books.

These same people typically don't know how to speed read. Why not? If time is the issue, why not learn speed reading and then read more? Because they are lying and the real issue is they don't want to read or learn.

Regardless, I want to discuss some aspects of how speed reading works.

The most powerful form of speed reading is RSVP. It's easier to see what it is than explain – click here. You see 1 to 5 words at a time and the computer updates them quickly.

It's very reasonably achievable to read twice as fast with RSVP compared to regular book reading. So you can read a book in 3 hours instead of 6 hours. You don't have to read many books to pay back the time invested in learning to use RSVP. Actually the time investment is pretty near zero – the best way to learn RSVP is to start using it at speeds only a little faster than your normal reading (and I'd recommend 3-4 words appearing at a time to start with, not 1), and work your way up as you practice. Since you learn while reading, it doesn't cost you any time if you were going to read anyway. It starts saving a little time right away, and a lot more later.

Reading costs resources other than time. For example, if you use RSVP to read twice as many books, and you buy your books from Amazon, you'll have to pay Amazon twice as much money. But books are cheap, I hope you'll forgive this "problem" with RSVP.

Using RSVP software requires e-books. If you have a paper book, you can't read it with RSVP. This is the biggest difficulty with RSVP due to DRM. E-books like Kindle books are easy to get and exist for many, many books. And they are typically cheaper than paper books. The problem is when trying to prevent you from giving copies of the book to your friends (or strangers), they also try to prevent you from reading the book in anything but their official software (which doesn't support RSVP). To read a book with RSVP, you need it without copy protection. So you have to read from a limited pool of free books, or use torrents or book download websites, or use software to remove the DRM. This is not hard, but unfortunately you can't just get started reading any book from Kindle in 5 minutes. It might take you a couple hours to set up DRM removal software, or half an hour to find a book downloading website or get a torrent program.

Buying e-books and removing the DRM so you can read them in your own choice of software is completely reasonable and moral. If you don't distribute the books to others, you aren't doing anything wrong. You pay for the book, and then read your book, that you own, with the software of your choice. That's it. What's wrong with that? Nothing. It also offers the best selection of books available. People should learn how to do this. It isn't very hard.

Mental Energy

So with RSVP you read a book in 3 hours instead of 6 hours. Is that harder or easier, once you know how? Easier. It leaves you less drained, less fatigued, less mentally tired. But how much easier? Since you spend half as much time reading, does that mean it takes half as much mental energy? No. For every hour using RSVP, you get more mentally tired than one hour of regular reading.

With RSVP, you get less mentally tired per page read, but more tired per minute of reading.

A rough estimate is that while you're saving 50% for time, you're only saving 25% for mental energy.

Say regular reading finishes 100 words in 100 units of time and uses up 100 units of mental energy. Then RSVP would read 100 words in 50 units of time and use up 75 units of mental energy. This is a good thing.

Busy People

Let's hypothetically suppose that RSVP used up 125 mental energy units instead of 75. Then you'd be saving time but spending more mental energy per word. Would that be good?

Certainly not for everyone. But for a lot of people, RSVP would still be very useful in that scenario. People who are low on time would still use RSVP to save time. They'd be effectively trading some mental energy for some time. They'd be converting one resource (mental energy) into another (time). If they are low on time, doing a conversion to save time is useful.

Most people, including most "busy" people, only use a fraction of their mental energy each day anyway. They've got a lot to spare. (Many will lie and say otherwise. The issue is not that they are too mentally fatigued to think more, it's really that they don't like thinking, so they say they are mentally fatigued to excuse their choice not to think much.)

But real RSVP saves both time and mental energy. That makes it such an amazing deal. It'd ridiculous that very few people use it. This is a good example of how people make huge mistakes which makes their quality of life dramatically worse.

The only real reason not to use RSVP is if you don't read. Which would be a big mistake, but for different reasons. Thinking and ideas are important! But I won't go into that here. If you want an explanation, you can read Philosophy: Who Needs It or ask at the Fallible Ideas Email Discussion Group.

Different Types of Mental Energy

There's different types of mental energy. If you get tired from reading and are too mentally fatigued to read more, you can usually still do something else, including listen to an audio book. But they aren't totally different: if you can normally comfortably read for 5 hours in a row, but first you get really tired from playing chess for 10 hours, you'll find you run out of reading mental energy faster. All that chess used up the majority of your reading energy. All sorts of different types of mental energy are linked significantly but not entirely – using one uses a lot of the other, but running out of one often doesn't completely run you out of the other.

One consequence is that if you're using mental energy for other parts of your life, and you add in some reading, this is not a zero sum game. Every bit of mental energy going to reading does not mean less mental energy for other tasks. Maybe two thirds of the mental energy for reading has to be subtracted from other tasks, but one third is a bonus.

Audio Books

Audio books make speed reading even more convenient than text books. Lots of audio book software already has an option to turn up the speed. Unfortunately a lot of software only lets you listen at 1.5x or 2x speed, even though a skilled listener can listen at 2.5x or 3x. (A lot of audio books are read very slowly, significantly slower than regular slow text reading.) Please be careful because some software labels 1.5x speed as "2x" and 2x speed as "3x". This mislabelling includes the software from Apple and Amazon (Audible). You can easily test this by playing something at "2x" for 1 minute (using a clock) from the beginning, and then see how far along you are – 90 seconds or 2 minutes in.

Audio book selection is limited, but this can be fixed with text-to-speech software such as Voice Dream Reader. (I use the "Paul" voice.) Text-to-speech software now works extremely well. The only problem is if you buy a book on Kindle with DRM, you can't read it with your own choice of software, like we talked about before. That means no RSVP and also no text-to-speech. Unless you remove the DRM, which isn't that hard.

Some people worry that text-to-speech software is harder to understand than human speech. This may have been true in the past, but it is not true today. Actually, text-to-speech is better and easier to understand at high speeds because it's 100% consistent about pronunciation and pacing. Not every single word is pronounced correctly, but most are, and they are always pronounced the same way, and you can still understand it (and if you're really bothered, you can tinker with it and fix how it pronounces words).

How do audio books compare to RSVP and regular reading? Using the same numbers as before where regular was 100/100/100 and RSVP was 100/50/75, audio book speed reading would be 100 words in 75 time using 40 mental energy (audio books without turning up the speed would be more like 100 words in 150 time using 35 mental energy, there's really no good reason to do that. once you're good at this, if you're tired you can just turn the speed down from 2.5x to 2x or something like that, and it feels very easy, there's no reason to use 1x speed).

Audio books are a great way of reading, even though they are slower than RSVP, because they are less mentally draining and still pretty fast. And it's basically free to learn to listen to audio books at higher speeds: just turn it up a little at a time and you'll learn while reading without any separate practice or training or lessons.

The other great thing about audio books is you can easily mulititask. You can easily listen to an audiobook while walking somewhere, while on public transit, while driving, while exercising, while showering (with speakers instead of headphones), or while eating. It works with some other activities too, such as playing video games, though that can require some skill if it's a hard game. Whereas to multitask an audio book with exercise basically requires no skill, anyone can do it right away.

TV and Movies

TV and movies can be watched at higher speeds to save time. Again you can learn this gradually while doing it, so it's basically a free skill that saves a huge amount of time for zero downside. The speed you can watch something depends on factors like how fast they talk and whether they have accents. But once you are good, you can watch most TV and movies using from 2x to 2.5x speed, while being completely comfortable and relaxed. And getting up to being comfortable at 1.5x speed comes pretty quickly and is still fast enough to save a lot of time.

Boredom

Another advantage of speed reading, speed listening and speed watching is that it increases the amount of interesting stuff you engage with per minute. It makes the book or show effectively have denser content, so it's more interesting. All the good parts are packed closer together. This is especially valuable if you need to read something for a school class but it's kind of boring. It makes stuff less boring, more interesting. It's also great if you're bored and have trouble finding enough interesting stuff, because it will change some books and shows from too boring to worthwhile.

Skimming

There's other types of speed reading, but I think most of them are inferior to RSVP and there's no reason to use them. Most other methods of speed reading are designed to work with paper books, but the fact is software is more powerful and superior to paper books. And a speed reading method that utilizes software (RSVP) is superior to one that doesn't.

However, there is a notable form of reading, which is sort of speed reading, which is great. It's called skimming. If you don't need to read every word, don't! This can be a lot faster than even RSVP if you can skip over half the text. And there are plenty of reasons to take a look at something but not read all of it. That's really useful. You might want to see what it is and see if you're interested, but instead of just reading the beginning you skip ahead. A great way to get a sense of a book is to go to a chapter that sounds interesting, read a few paragraphs, skip a few pages, read a few paragraphs, skip a few pages, etc. It's better to adjust what to skip, when, depending what you read though, don't just turn pages thoughtlessly.

RSVP turned up to a really high speed has some similarities to skimming. Both are really fast, and in both cases you miss stuff. What are the main differences? With very fast RSVP, you don't miss any sections of text. Say you're trying to find out if the author addresses a particular counter-argument. He might do that in one paragraph somewhere in the middle of the chapter. If you skim, you could easily miss that paragraph. If you use very high speed RSVP, you'll see every paragraph and you won't miss it. If you're reading too fast you might not understand it, but you'll see the topic and stop and then read that paragraph again.

If you ever want to say something like, "the author doesn't cover topic X" you need to read every sentence, even if very quickly so you don't understand every detail perfectly. But most of the time you don't need to say things like that, and it's no big deal if you miss something, so skimming is great.

I think both skimming and very fast RSVP are underrated. People will try too hard to finish the whole book, or something like that. But a lot of books you can just quickly go through the best parts, look for parts of particular interest to you, etc, and miss a bunch, and you get more value for your time/effort than if you read the whole book.

Books don't have a totally consistent level of quality, and not all the material is equally interesting to you. For most books, the less good parts are not as worthwhile to read for you as just reading one of the better parts from another book (even if that second book is, overall, less good or less interesting to you). Since you aren't going to read all the interesting books – you won't run out – don't hesitate to go through a book quickly. If you can get 75% of the value from the book in 50% of the time, that's absolutely wonderful and you should be thrilled and move on to the next book and do the same thing with it too.

I started reading the French economist Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850). So far it's enjoyable – he's good at economics and has a fun writing style (even though it's a translation and he wrote a long time ago). This part struck me as particularly fun: The Bastiat Collection, Part 1, "That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen", Chapter 7, "Protectionism" begins:

Mr. Protectionist (it was not I who gave him this name, but Mr. Charles Dupin) devoted his time and capital to converting the ore found on his land into iron. As nature had been more lavish toward the Belgians, they furnished the French with iron cheaper than Mr. Protectionist; which means, that all the French, or France, could obtain a given quantity of iron with less labor by buying it of the honest Flemings. Therefore, guided by their own interest, they did not fail to do so; and every day there might be seen a multitude of nail-smiths, blacksmiths, cartwrights, machinists, farriers, and laborers, going themselves, or sending intermediaries, to supply themselves in Belgium. This displeased Mr. Protectionist exceedingly.

At first, it occurred to him to put an end to this abuse by his own efforts: it was the least he could do, for he was the only sufferer. “I will take my carbine,” said he; “ I will put four pistols into my belt; I will fill my cartridge box; I will gird on my sword, and go thus equipped to the frontier. There, the first blacksmith, nail-smith, farrier, machinist, or locksmith, who presents himself to do his own business and not mine, I will kill, to teach him how to live.” At the moment of starting, Mr. Protectionist made a few reflections which calmed down his warlike ardor a little. He said to himself, “In the first place, it is not absolutely impossible that the purchasers of iron, my countrymen and enemies, should take the thing ill, and, instead of letting me kill them, should kill me instead; and then, even were I to call out all my servants, we should not be able to defend the passages. In short, this proceeding would cost me very dear, much more so than the result would be worth.”

Mr. Protectionist was on the point of resigning himself to his sad fate, that of being only as free as the rest of the world, when a ray of light darted across his brain. He recollected that at Paris there is a great factory of laws. “What is a law?” said he to himself. “It is a measure to which, when once it is decreed, be it good or bad, everybody is bound to conform. For the execution of the same a public force is organized, and to constitute the said public force, men and money are drawn from the whole nation. If, then, I could only get the great Parisian manufactory to pass a little law, ‘Belgian iron is prohibited,’ I should obtain the following results: The Government would replace the few valets that I was going to send to the frontier by 20,000 of the sons of those refractory blacksmiths, farriers, artisans, machinists, locksmiths, nail-smiths, and laborers. Then to keep these 20,000 custom-house officers in health and good humor, it would distribute among them 25,000,000 francs taken from these blacksmiths, nail-smiths, artisans, and laborers. They would guard the frontier much better; would cost me nothing; I should not be exposed to the brutality of the brokers; should sell the iron at my own price, and have the sweet satisfaction of seeing our great people shamefully mystified. That would teach them to proclaim themselves perpetually the harbingers and promoters of progress in Europe. Oh! it would be a capital joke, and deserves to be tried.”

So Mr. Protectionist went to the law factory. Another time, perhaps, I shall relate the story of his underhanded dealings, but now I shall merely mention his visible proceedings. He brought the following consideration before the view of the legislating gentlemen.

And the proposal was a variation of the broken window fallacy. Or as Bastiat usually talks about it, the issue of the seen and the unseen. All the commerce in the French iron industry resulting from protectionism is seen when evaluating the proposal. The lost commerce in other industries, due to people having to pay more for iron – and therefore buying less of other things – is not seen.

If you're interested, read the rest of the chapter, and perhaps more, in the free book.

Jihad Watch has run this headline:

Obama: Iran has “no aspiration to get a nuclear weapon” because “it would be contrary to their faith”

Pamela Geller has a similar headline:

Obama: Iran Won’t Pursue Nuclear Weapons Because It’s ‘Contrary to Their Faith’

I don't like Obama and don't normally defend him. But this is false, and scholarship comes first. Obama says enough bad things, there's no need to misrepresent what he said and take quotes out of context. It isn't helping anything. It hurts our cause to get things wrong.

The truth needs to come first, and attacking the left second. Attack them when they're actually wrong, not just as a universal policy. And pay attention to the truth so you know when they're wrong, instead of just assuming they always are. Please.

What Obama actually said was, paraphrasing: Iran claims to have no nuclear aspirations because it'd be contrary to their faith, and if Iran is telling the truth about this then they'll be happy to accept Obama's political deal.

Obama didn't say it'd be contrary to their faith for Iran to get a nuclear weapon, nor did Obama say Iran won't try to get a nuclear weapon. The Jihad Watch and Pamela Geller headlines make both of those false claims.

Obama saying Iran claims something that may or may not be true, and Obama believing it himself, are completely different.

Obama was actually careful to emphasize that it was just Iran's claim. Obama used the phrases, "And if in fact what they claim is true" and "if that is true" and "But we don’t know if that’s going to happen." Three times in one paragraph, Obama made it clear that he was talking about Iran's claims which may or may not be true. Yet Jihad Watch ignores that and lies about what Obama was saying.

Here is the full paragraph that Jihad Watch is talking about, which Jihad Watch is well aware of (they included this text at the end of their article):

And if in fact what they claim is true, which is they have no aspiration to get a nuclear weapon, that in fact, according to their Supreme Leader, it would be contrary to their faith to obtain a nuclear weapon, if that is true, there should be the possibility of getting a deal. They should be able to get to yes. But we don’t know if that’s going to happen.

As you can see, in an epic scholarship fail, Jihad Watch and Pamela Geller grossly misrepresented what Obama said.

Update: I contacted Spencer and Geller by blog comments, twitter, and email. Except Spencer's email button is broken. My blog comment made it through moderation at Jihad Watch, but at Geller's site it isn't showing up and new comments on the post have been approved after mine, so I may have been censored (to make matters more confusing, her blog software is buggy and sometimes reports a post has different numbers of comments in different places, and my comment showed up on the sidebar as a new comment even when it wasn't visible on the post and the link didn't work). Spencer and Geller were at their computers tweeting and it's been hours, and it hasn't been fixed yet. This kind of thing is urgent because most readers see posts when they are new. So after waiting, I just tweeted David Horowitz too, and let them know with the Front Page Mag contact form. Someone better care. I'm going to lose a lot of respect for them if this isn't fixed. I will update again if anything happens.

Update 2: It's the next day and nothing has improved. I think my comment on Geller's cite was censored. My comment on Jihad Watch was flamed by two people. Nothing has been fixed. This is very sad.

Update 3: I've lost hope. No error correction. Very sad. David Horowitz and associates are now on my Scholarship Watchlist. Someone should fact check them with the same format I used for Ann Coulter (and also the regular way of checking things you find suspicious).

Update 4: When reading a new article, I noticed Geller's site says this above the comments:

Comments at Atlas Shrugs are unmoderated. Posts using foul language, as well as abusive, hateful, libelous and genocidal posts, will be deleted if seen. However, if a comment remains on the site, it in no way constitutes an endorsement by Pamela Geller of the sentiments contained therein.

My blocked post did not have foul language, and it wasn't abusive or hateful, and certainly not genocidal. So what happened to it? The site policy is a lie.

Update 5: 2018-06-20

A few years later I had Robert Spencer's attention on Twitter and had a couple small, positive interactions. He was paying attention to various critics and repeatedly asked them for actual quotes to back up their negative claims about him. So I linked him to this post which explains a genuine error of his with a quote. He responded once to deny there was any error and then ignored me after that:

Sorry, those quotes look like...quotes to me, and represent the news item accurately.

David Deutsch posted this story in January 2000 to the public Taking Children Seriously email list. The subject line was "academics". I later wrote my own Anna story. One criticism of DD's story is that it overvalues school, formal education and academics.

---

Eliana WestEmmer asked:

After visiting the "Puzzling Parenting" stuff, I went to the TCS site and read Sarah's wonderful article about math(s).

https://web.archive.org/web/20030224180925/http://www.tcs.ac/Articles/SLMathPhobia.html

It got me wondering. I am imagining a kid, no -- a family of three kids. The kids are, um, 10, 12 & 15. The parents have resisted the urge to push academics on them. They have not done any academic math(s). They play video games, chat on the internet, build lego stuff, build tree-houses, etc.

Would somebody write for me a description of life from here on? Tell me a story, that includes the 15 year old becoming a scientist. I am just having trouble picturing them starting math so late... Would somebody help me with this idea?

And later:

The concern is genuine. Without knowledge, how do we come to be who it is we are "meant" to be? And is there not a point, developmentally, where it can be "too late"?

NO. I am sure it can't be "too late."

What I really want is a way to picture life from here for, say, the oldest one (15, was it?). Does she begin with fractions and decimals

Maybe. Probably not.

and work her way up to algebra, then calculus?

Calculus is almost certain to follow, rather than precede, algebra, yes.

Does she start at the local community college

Quite possibly.

in remedial classes?

No, in normal classes.

What does such a life LOOK like?

Well OK, if you really insist on knowing, I'll tell you. I know all the details except her name, so let's call her Anna.

Sometime this year, Anna's previous interest in Lego, treehouse-building, the internet and computer games will all come together and draw her attention to a major TV documentary about how stunts are arranged in movies. She will start building such stunts in the garden, each more ingenious than the last, using all sorts of props and filming them on a video camera. One day, a physics teacher will walk past and see her doing this. Calling to her to give her advice about how to balance a particular arrangement of planks, he will inadvertently cause her to fall fifteen feet onto the grass, fortunately causing only a broken toe.

Anna will have to wait three hours for treatment in the emergency room, which could have been excruciating (because the slightly addled person waiting on her left suffering from chronic whiteboard-marker poisoning will be a mathematics teacher eager to plug the gaps in her home education), but in the event, it will pass quickly because she will get into conversation with the fascinating person waiting on her right, a huge lady called Agnes. Turns out Agnes' ex-husband used to do stunts in Hollywood and she used to help him before she found out about some of the other stunts he pulled -- but that's another story. Anyway, now she owns three successful cafes in town and has just bought two more and wants to go up-market. She's been talking to an advertising agency about making a series of ads for the local TV. She hasn't liked any of their ideas so far, but soon finds that Anna is bubbling with great ideas for how to advertise high-class restaurants using movie-like stunts. Agnes will be surprised and delighted to hear that Anna actually has videos of several stunts she has arranged single-handed (with a little help from her little brothers) and will tell her her to drop by at her office next say.

Next day Anna will hobble along to Agnes' office above one of her restaurants, currently being re-fitted with the new up-market decor. Agnes will love the videos, and will commission Anna to design five stunts for the new series of ads, and execute them for the TV people. Anna will earn three thousand dollars for this, but think no more about it until six months later when the advertising agency will offer her a similar job, albeit for only $500. She will accept, because even though it's a lot of work and the materials alone will cost almost that much, she will enjoy it enormously. The following week, someone will let the agency down and they will phone around in desperation for anyone they know who can do a firework display. Anna will never have done such a thing, and technically it's illegal, but she will agree to step in to help them out. Not only will the display be a great success, but Anna will meet and fall instantly in love with ... the computerised timing device that the agency gave her to time the fireworks. She will ask if she can borrow it, and for the next year it will spend far more time in her garage than at the agency, for she will think of more and more ways to use it to do wonderful stunts, and also special effects. She will also start editing her movies on the agency's professional computerised editing system.

One day in the cutting room, she will meet a pro who is engaged in a science documentary. He will be a mathematics graduate -- who has forgotten all the maths he ever knew and will now be spending all his time filming animals mating. So they won't talk about maths but she will show him how to hide some of the more repulsive aspects of his footage using a difficult timed transition on the editing machine, and in return he will introduce her to his boss, whose next documentary will be about the NASA robots that will one day explore Mars. Anna will be hired as a technical assistant on that documentary, and will dazzle everyone with the exciting stunts she will think of to demonstrate how these robots will behave on Mars. The boss will offer her a permanent job on the team, but she will refuse, because while at NASA, she will also have helped one of the astronomers out with making a promotional movie designed to persuade the government to fund more infra-red satellites. The problem will have been how to display, in an eye-catching and persuasive way, the complex data that demonstrate why such satellites are better than ground-based telescopes. Anna will succeed at this so well that she will have persuaded herself too. She will spend the next two years working for one of NASA'a subcontractors, first in the publicity department, then designing user-interfaces for satellite ground stations, and then even some aspects of the satellites themselves.

All this will involve a lot of interactions between herself and astrophysics graduate students, but slowly the attraction of satellites will wear off, and she will realise that her real love is *theoretical* astronomy. She'll read a book about calculus, do a six-month adult-education course in physics to fill in the gaps in what she's picked up, and then apply to take an undergraduate degree in astronomy, complete it a year ahead of time and then be accepted for a PhD in quasar structure. At that point she will officially become a SCIENTIST.

Meanwhile she will have had two children with the NASA astronomer (who will have left astronomy to become an internet millionaire and failed miserably, but will by that time be blissfully happy again as a home maker), and she will worry that the children won't achieve anything in life unless they have a good grounding in the basics, especially mathematics, but for some unaccountable reason the ungrateful little wretches will be digging their heels in and refusing to listen.

-- David Deutsch
http://www.qubit.org/people/david/David.html

http://blogmaverick.com/2014/04/02/high-frequency-trading-and-proof-that-the-sec-approach-to-insider-trading-is-completely-wrong/

SEC sux

http://blogmaverick.com/2013/10/26/that-awkward-moment-on-the-witness-stand-when-the-sec-asks-me-about-the-lakers-and-i-get-to-quote-randy-galloway/

SEC lawyers harassing billionare and wasting his time by interrogating him in court trying to find out what a blog post is

with serious stakes

jfc :(

and the govt lawyer doesn’t get it. blogs posts too complex.

http://blogmaverick.com/2012/09/17/the-cure-to-our-economic-problems-2/

not bad. says fix for economy is entrepreneurship, not small tax policy adjustments

2012 cuban:

This administration has failed us in terms of transparency. Transparency , IMHO was a key feature of what I hoped for when I voted for Obama in 2008.

being an obama voter does put his “who cares about the tax rate” thing in a scarier light

like i could see Howard Roark not caring what the tax rate is

but when it’s cover for being left-wing then :((((((

and i do disagree with cuban that tax rate has no effect on behavior

it has limited effect on behavior b/c most ppl focus on specific life roles and stick with those, tax rate be damned

they are more interested in their social role than economic efficiency

but it matters for ppl who aren’t just single-mindedly paying huge sacrifices and costs in pursuit of an (often bad) goal

http://blogmaverick.com/2012/10/11/my-opinion-on-the-governor-romney-tax-plan/

i like this one

http://blogmaverick.com/2012/04/18/the-greatest-business-risk-you-dont-know-about-your-business-will-be-sued-over-patents/

begins

Your business is at risk. For a lot of money. No matter what type of business you are in, you are susceptible to a patent infringement lawsuit. The worst part about this risk is that there is nothing you can do to protect yourself.

talks about that a bunch. argues his point. ends with this:

What can you do as a small business person to protect yourself ? Honestly, nothing beyond complaining to your Congressperson. The only option I have found is to buy into companies that aggressively sue over IP. It is a hedge against patent law. Put another way, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Sucks, but there aren’t any other options that I can see.

what do you think of this hedge strategy? :/

http://blogmaverick.com/2011/10/14/my-soapbox-advice-to-the-ows-movement-and-then-some/

oh god Cuban’s understanding of economics is pretty bullshit

Shareholders , whether they own shares directly or through mutual funds or pensions do not live in a corporate vacuum. Their lives are impacted by far more than the share price of a stock. Every layoff in the name of more earnings per share puts a stress on the economy, on the federal, state and local governments which is in turn paid for through taxes or assumption of government debt by….wait for it.. the same shareholders CEOs say they want to benefit.

suppose that firing some people saved a company $1,000 but did harm to the economy of $100,000.

is that in the best interests of the shareholders?

yes b/c that harm to the economy is divided over a hell of a lot of people, while the benefit to the company is divided over way fewer people. (more than 100x fewer).

if i own 1% of the company, and i'm 1 person out of 300,000,000 in the US economy, then i'm up $10 - $0.03 = $9.97. And look at how little difference the damage to the general economy made to me.

you can try to argue some other factors affect the math a little bit. sure. but the math isn't even close. since it's not a close call at all, small adjustments won't change the result.

running your company to make sacrifices for the general good is not self-interest. it’s altruistic suicide.

and that's even with exaggerated made up numbers that are super favorable to what Cuban is saying.

with real numbers, it’s more like you fire someone to improve your company and that’s a good thing. your company does better so it does more business with other companies and it’s an overall win in addition to being a win for your company individually.

it’s good for the person being fired, too. who the hell wants to work a job where they are creating less value than their salary? who wants to be lied to that they are creating value when actually they are a leeching moocher who is destroying value by going to work everyday? all those hours they spend working, and their boss decided to be “nice” by lying to them that they were being productive, when actually they were spending a large part of their life destroying wealth, and he wanted to be “nice” by having them continue doing that?

for more on this topic read _The Virtue of Selfishness_ by Ayn Rand. Chapter 4, *The “Conflicts” of Men’s Interests*

I have a simple question. Why are profitable companies laying off people ? I can see if a company’s survival is at stake. If payroll can’t be met. If debt can’t be paid. Then layoffs are a necessary evil. Even if companies have created cash flow deficits through their own mistakes, that’s the nature of business. Mistakes are made. What I have a problem with is that discussion of executive pay never includes whether or not the executive has been good enough to pre empt or prevent layoffs.

Executives are not stupid. Usually. They recognize that killing off employees can juice a stock price. Even in this market. Which in turn can juice the value of their options and compensation. At the companies I run, we have cut raises, put a freeze on hiring, done what we need to do, but we have done all we can to avoid layoffs. Why ? Because its the right thing to do. Its the patriotic thing to do. I’m selfish enough and arrogant enough to think that maybe if I pay attention to the big picture that I can impact the big picture.

he wants to sacrifice capitalism for what he thinks is a noble cause.

and no one stands up to him.

but i will.

his vision here is IMMORAL. it’s MEAN. it’s UGLY. it’s BAD. he couldn’t pay me to do things this way. it’s too awful.

what he's talking about, in real terms, is tricking people into wasting their lives. they slave away 8 hours a day trying to produce and be a worthwhile productive part of society. people try so hard to earn their place and feed their family.

how would they feel if they found out they were spending 8 hours a day working but it was all a dirty hoax. really they were moochers on welfare. but people were afraid to hurt their feelings, so no one told them. their boss, instead of telling them about a problem, covered it up so they never had a chance to solve it.

isn’t that fucking awful?

that is the concrete real-world meaning of what Cuban is talking about.

treating people so DISHONESTLY is not kind. it’s mean and rotten as all hell.

the world has plenty of idealists willing to sacrifice things like money to ideals. like Cuban.

what the world needs is people with brains, willing to sacrifice poorly thought out “ideals” to reasoned consideration.

yes there are some short-sighed decisions made which are mistakes. that happens. that isn't the issue here. no one is against trying to think through the long term where there's enough predictability to do so. that's hard and important and everyone tries to do it well. Cuban uses short sighted decision as a false alternative to attack. the fact is short sighted decisions can happen with Cuban's approach or mine, and wise longer term thinking is alos possible with both. time horizon isn't the issue. the issue is when Cuban wants to keep people from being fired whether they are productive or not because he thinks keeping someone in an unproductive job, so they don't switch to a better situation, is somehow a moral imperative (when it's actually a great dishonest evil that prevents better allocation of people where they would be useful and happier being productive. Americans don't want to be turned into charity cases, and have this kept a secret from them.)

remember that math we did above? basically the only thing that will change the result is if the benefit to the shareholders is actually approximately zero or negative. that's it. in those cases, all of what Cuban is saying is irrelevant. if firing someone loses the shareholders money directly, there isn't any debate. yes mistakes get made sometimes, but they are just individual mistakes, not a systematic problem.

Cuban talks about the case where a CEO is shortsighted and is doing something that loses money for the shareholder directly, and tries to use that as his argument to deal with the case where a CEO decision does make the shareholders money in the direct sense but arguably maybe hurts the economy or is bad in some other vague way. and he tries to say, choose altruism over profit, choose other factors over profit. but then a lot of his argument has to do with how sometimes CEOs make mistakes by not accurately forecasting the future well enough and seeing all the angles. but it's uncontroversial to try not to make mistakes that directly lose shareholder money, that's such an easy target. and Cuban tries to use arguing against the easy target to prop up his argument on the controversial topic, which is the case where firing someone does benefit the company individually but (in Cuban's view) harms society/the-economy in a more collective vague way.

what cuban wants, it's clear enough, is to not fire some people who are being unproductive (not even fire them after exhausing some other options like paycuts or retraining – obviously sometimes a person is unproductive today but you can adjust something and fix it, firing isn't your first resort). but a large chunk of his argument isn't about that case that matters, which is dishonest.

I thought I might comment on this post (writing a concise version of my main point here) but then I read at the bottom:

Comments are closed.

Why close the discussion? wtf? lame.

I have tweeted to Cuban asking why he's blocking further discussion. I do not expect a reply but I like to give people a chance and twitter is the contact info he makes available (not email, and not blog comments on this post). I will update this post if he replies.

http://blogmaverick.com/2011/09/20/my-top-10-things-our-federal-government-should-do-and-more/

I can tell you that dealing with the costs of overwhelming bureaucracy was always a far greater problem than taxation [the context here is businesses, not individuals]. Why ? Because taxes come AFTER PROFITS. The price of dealing with bureaucracy, patents, professional fees and of course competition had a far nastier impact on their ability to succeed than tax rates.

Good point. There's some details where this isn't true, like sales taxes on things you buy for the business. And income taxes raise the salary you have to pay people, which costs businesses money before they get into profit. And if you tax profits it has differential impact on different industries and their ability to attract capital and provide adequate return on investment to compete with alternate uses of that capital, so there is an economic inefficiency in how it biases what industries get how much capital. And some other stuff. But yeah this is important and is roughly accurate regarding taxes on the profits of businesses.

http://blogmaverick.com/2010/08/20/the-stock-market-is-still-for-suckers-and-why-you-should-put-your-money-in-the-bank/

remember that issue earlier about whether taxes determine behavior?

But I do know that I have continued to add to my cash balance or sovereign debt from around the world (that I have owned for a while now and has been profitable and is very, very liquid.) The stocks I still own for the most part pay me a nice cash on cash return, or I have owned them for a long, long time and have more in gains than I want to pay taxes on.

he's changing his behavior regarding what stocks to have his money invested in, cuz of tax reasons.

http://blogmaverick.com/2010/08/25/the-best-investment-advice-you-will-ever-get/

3. Cash Creates Transactional Returns. What does this mean ? It means that you should analyze what you spend money on over the course of a year. You will get a better return on your money by being a smart shopper and taking advantage of cash, quantity or other types of discounts than you will in the stock market. Saving 15pct on the $1k dollars worth of items you know you will absolutely spend money on is a better return on your money than making 15pct in a year on a $1k investment because you don’t pay taxes on it.

Here Cuban advocates most people change their behavior due to how taxes work.

http://blogmaverick.com/2011/08/10/an-idea-for-the-economy-that-will-freak-out-a-lot-of-people-but-could-be-fun-to-discuss/

This post is about a scheme where the Government loans money to companies to create jobs.

If these companies could use capital well, why don't they get it from for-profit lenders? Since when is the government good at judging what companies can use capital well? ugh.

http://blogmaverick.com/2012/03/09/am-i-a-homophobe/

I’m the last to be politically correct and the last thing I am trying to be here is politically correct. I honestly don’t give a shit what you think about me. But I think being the person I want to be includes not blurting out throw away jokes about sexuality, race, ethnicity, size, disability or other things people have no say in about themselves.

First, that is kinda politically correct.

More important, this is the usual claim that sexual orientation isn't a choice, it's completely outside of someone's control and responsibility. Where is the argument for that assertion? As always, there is none.

So I was watching Capitalism Died for Your Sins on the David Horowitz Youtube channel. it mentioned positively the book The Genius of the Beast.

based on the title, which calls men beasts, i expect it to suck.

so i go to amazon to check out the reviews and see what the book is like. i am of course in the market for good books about capitalism. i like horowitz and friends, and they write good books and articles. so i figure giving it a chance on amazon is a good idea. it won’t take long.

so the first thing i read is:

Is global capitalism on its last legs? Is the era of American leadership over? Has the West begun a decline into a new Dark Age? Does American civilization deserve to survive? These are the unnerving questions raised by the Great Crash of 2009.

jesus fucking christ no.

you know that stupid saying “there are no bad questions”? yeah, it’s stupid. here’s some really bad questions.

and asking them not over something like obama getting elected by millions and millions of fools in the best country on earth. which is scary if you think about how many people are how foolish. he’s a pro-terrorist anti-semitic communist, and millions voted for him, and a lot of that voting is because he’s evil, not in spite of it.

but anyway, no jesus fucking christ some govt-caused economic stumbles are not the last legs of capitalism. no this does not indicate that other countries are somehow better at this stuff (sadly they aren’t). no we don’t deserve to die for giving home loans to poor blacks and stuff like that. no wasting billions of dollars on a bailout and stuff won’t cause a new dark age.

this is so ridiculous. these are not the questions anyone good would be asking and answering. they’re a super bad way to look at the problem situation. they are not designed to set up good answers, they don’t lead into good discussion.

This book presents a radically new answer, insisting that global society has only begun to realize its full potential.

fuck you that isn’t new. see e.g. Ayn Rand. if you’re gonna be a “radical[]” for capitalism, don’t spit in the face of Ayn Rand by pretending she didn’t exist. jfc.

btw how do you do quote edits when ur omitting something? like normally if u wanna change a word ending, like cooked -> cooks, you could write “cook[s]” as a quote of “cooked”. but how do you change cooked -> cook and indicate it? do u just bracket the whole word? see my empty brackets after radical above. not sure best way to handle. thots? so far this aside seems more interesting than the book.

Author Howard Bloom argues that there’s a hidden mandate beneath the surface of capitalism: "It’s struggling to whisper and rumble its message to you and me. That hidden imperative can lift us from economic crisis, can make us a leader in the next-generation economy, and can dramatically upgrade our ability to empower our fellow human beings." Bloom sees crisis as opportunity, opportunity for the whole human race.

the fuck?

and i smell altruism.

and mysticism. and collectivism.

ok let’s skip ahead to user reviews.

I admit I bought this thinking it had been written by Harold Bloom, the Harvard literary don. So I was surprised when I began reading Genius of the Beast and came up against this writer's hyperbolic style, a style which would be familiar to any advertising copywriter.

Bloom is described somewhere in the multiple blurbs all over this book as a marketing genius, and that's what I'll happily take him as. As a revolutionary thinker? His argument boils down to "Technology will save us", nothing I haven't read anywhere before.

oh look, maybe it wasn’t new after all.

this review doesn’t explain the content tho. onward.

As other reviewers have written, Howard Bloom's "The Genius of the Beast" is unorganized and haphazardly written. It is also full of errors, stretched analogies and made up word jumbles (secular genesis machine?!?).

the phrase “secular genesis machine” sounds pretty crap to me too.

As far as errors are concerned, the book has a complete misunderstanding of biology which Bloom claims helps to explain the cycle of boom/bust in a human economy. I'm a biologist, so these errors jump out at me, and I shudder to think about the number of errors in the rest of the book that I didn't pick up because they related to other fields of expertise. For example, Bloom goes on for an entire chapter about the Dictyostelium slime mold, yet continuously calls it a bacterium (which it is not, and is like writing about dogs and calling them snails). He also has no idea about the biological role of microtubules inside the cell, yet uses their inherent dynamic instability (but a small bit of their cellular function) to try and explain worldwide economies. These and his honeybee and evolution analogies show that he has no understanding about these topics besides what he managed to glean from reading one or two magazine articles about them (including references in the back to primary literature doesn't mean he read or understood them).

i’m liking this reviewer! fuck you and your citations-are-scholarship approach, bro.

and reviewer gave what are to all appearances totally legit details about slime mold. that really smells like a correct criticism. and i like his comments about scared of the errors in fields he doesn’t know, that’s a great point to be thinking about. and i like his attitude to citations in the back don’t mean much.

Mr. Bloom may have a modern-day classic in this book. He has managed to perform a work of consilence on the history of man (life, really) and provide insight in the how's, what's, where's, and why's of capitalism and how we treat customers and each other. I must admit as a newcomer to Bloom's work, the first 130 pages left me wondering, "where is he going?”

oh man even the positive review trashed the first 130 pages. (and he writes like a total asshole. perhaps it’s not a coincidence that signs so far were pointing to the book being written like an asshole too). 130’s a lot of pages. and wtf is consilence?

oh dear god it gets a lot worse right after that tho:

Bloom provides an extraordinary grasp of machinations and implications of capitalism, warts and all [...] Strongest recommendation!

fuck you, capitalism has no warts. if you come away from a book on capitalism thinking it has warts and the book agrees it has warts, fuck that book.

i’m convinced now. book sucks. done.

I discussed epistemology and cryonics with Aubrey de Grey via email. Click here to find the rest of the discussion.

Aubrey did not reply further.

Note my last email to him began by saying:

If you want to stop talking, or adjust the terms of the conversation (e.g. change the one message at a time back and forth style), please say so directly because silence is ambiguous.

He answered this with silence.

I think that's pretty unreasonable.

I don't really want to write comments on the content of the conversation. It should speak for itself. (And in a fair way with back-and-forth discussion, rather than just me talking.)

But I did want to comment briefly on attitude to discussion.

You can read some of my thoughts on this topic in my Paths Forward essay. I think Aubrey is blocking discussion and preventing there from being paths forward. If he's mistaken, and it's a big deal, how will he find out when he simply leaves various criticisms unresolved and unanswered? If some of the epistemology he doesn't know is true and important, how will he ever find that out while not understanding it, not asking enough questions to understand it, and not having a refutation of it (by himself or anyone else)?

I think it's very important to address rival ideas. Either personally or by outsourcing – it's fine to use someone else's writing in place of your own, as long as you take personal responsibility for its correctness, as if it was your own. If a criticism of your position is not addressed by anyone (in public writing that's exposed to public criticism, comments, question-asking, discussion, etc), then it really ought to be addressed not ignored. Aubrey neither addresses various Popperian ideas (such as the refutation of justificationism), nor does he know of any writing by anyone else which addresses it. Yet he rejects it and stops pursuing it, without having any answer to it. This is not symmetric. The Popperian ideas I'm advocating are exposed to public criticism but are not currently refuted by anything. My ideas meet all challenges; Aubrey's don't; and Aubrey stopped discussing, leaving it like that without changing his mind.

Constructor Theory by David Deutsch

The paper omits DD's contact information (i.e. email), which I think is really bad.

The theory of computation was originally intended only as a mathematical technique for studying proof (Turing 1936), not a branch of physics. Then, as now, there was a widespread assumption – which I shall call the mathematicians’ misconception – that what the rules of logical inference are, and hence what constitutes a proof, are a priori logical issues, independent of the laws of physics. This is analogous to Kant’s (1781) misconception that he knew with certainty what the geometry of space is. In fact proof and computation are, like geometry, attributes of the physical world. Different laws of physics would in general make different functions computable and therefore different mathematical assertions provable.

This prestige-seeking reference to Kant isn't useful. Few readers will know what DD's talking about, and he doesn't even try to explain. It doesn't add anything.

It's there as a social convention, both to gain prestige and because just starting by saying "in fact my position" is frowned on. But if you say "Kant was wrong. In fact my position" somehow that's seen as better, even though it's worse. The Kant thing helps disguise the asserting-rather-than-arguing.

But this supposed deficiency is shared by all scientific theories: Tests always depend on background knowledge – assumptions about other laws and about how measuring instruments work (Popper 1963, ch. 10 §4). Logically, should any theory fail a test, one always has the option of retaining it by denying one of those assumptions.

The ideas that make up background knowledge can be assumptions, but don't have to be. They are often pretty good ideas which are argued and explained, rather than being assumed.