I'll just mention that if anyone needs a paper for LW related reasons, I (and others probably) will get it for you.
I appreciate and agree with the principle behind this post, but when a store wants to charge me for using the bathroom I either find a friendlier store or else I hand them the money with a smile and never buy anything from that store ever again.
There are certainly sources of knowledge that are not cheap to produce and which deserve our funding and our appreciation. But I am not going to give eg gated journals one cent more than I am absolutely forced to, and I consider it morally important to make attempting to profiteer off of other people's scientific research as unprofitable and unpleasant as possible.
Use fungibility. You want access to research, and you want knowledge to be more free.
So pay $50 for a book that will save you two dozen hours of research, and then spend a dozen of those hours writing blog posts and tweets telling other people exactly which easy steps they can take to promote open journals and so on. That accomplishes your goals a lot better than not paying for the book.
Or buy the journal article and upload it... you'd think there'd be better centralized pirated repositories of science by now.
The set of people who want journal access is very small compared to the set of people who want free movies, music or tv shows. Moreover, most of the people who will benefit from journal access are people who have university access. (Although there is an issue there that this is much more difficult for small schools.) So there's not that much market for it.
There are a lot more undergrads that want basic textbooks than there are people who want to read research papers.
I have a Bachelor's degree and I've never either had an open-book test in college, nor heard of anyone having one. (Though we did have a couple of "you may bring one A4 worth of your own notes" tests.)
So pay $50 for a book that will save you two dozen hours of research, and then spend a dozen of those hours writing blog posts and tweets telling other people exactly which easy steps they can take to promote open journals and so on. That accomplishes your goals a lot better than not paying for the book.
Or, if you don't happen to predict that evangelism is the optimal strategy in the context then you can use the dozen hours writing up blog posts or papers that directly convey knowledge freely.
I consider it morally important to make attempting to profiteer off of other people's scientific research as unprofitable and unpleasant as possible
Are you the same Yvain who wrote that consequentialism FAQ and that optimal philanthropy article? Surely the lesson from those topics is that it's not morally important to make your own life more difficult in service of "good causes" that are actually relatively unimportant.
Servers take resources to keep up.
No they don't!!
If you gave me a million scientific articles in PDF form that were previously unavailable on the open web, which could be redistributed without legal problems, then I would host them somewhere and pay for it until the day I die. The benefit to humanity is way bigger than the trivial cost to me, and I also gain some much needed geek karma :-) Are there any LWers who wouldn't do the same?
The overhead is minimal. One of the 'charities' I've looked at was JSTOR, which hosts many journals. Their hosting and ongoing costs are trivial - employee compensation eats the entire budget; and they make next to nothing on gatewayed articles:
Those are pretty trivial compared to the costs the researchers bear to run the journals, and they're not the reason that the pay journals charge so much for an electronic version. We're basically just dealing with vestiges from a time when publishers really were necessary; now, all that a journal exists for is to certify quality, which you don't need to pay a third-party publisher for.
Great post. Three points -
1) The calculation is even easier for people who have their income directly tied to performance or entrepreneurship... if you can get one good insight out of book, it's a net gain. Most of the highly successful people I know have spent thousands or more on books. I buy them like crazy, I just got 32 audiobooks during a big sale at Audible. Books are an amazing value.
2) You know that old quote "Information wants to be free?" It's actually only half the quote. Here's the whole thing Brand Stewart said -
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."
3) Please consider adding affiliate links to your post, either personally or for SIAI or another reputable charity? I know the conflict of interest thing, but you're just increasing Amazon's margins and leaving money for good causes on the table by not adding affiliate links. It's ridiculously simple to do -
Sign up here: http...
If you're willing to spend time reading a book, and value your time at a certain rate, its normally true that the cost of the book isn't that much compared to the value of the time spend reading it.
ebooks are usually much cheaper than physical books
Rarely true for secondhand older books, usually true for newer books or relatively rare older works (which unfortunately includes many academic books). I can often pick up secondhand books for literally pennies; I'm a newcomer to e-reading but not convinced yet that it's going to bring savings overall.
ETA: in case that's not clear, I think this post is missing a huge tip for efficient acquisition of words: secondhand physical books. It's worth saying because some people - I used to be in that number - have a hangup about buying used books. I've totally changed my mind on that, largely thanks to Amazon Marketplace. Riffling through stacks in a used book store holds no appeal for me, but looking up some title that looks interesting and seeing a copy on Marketplace for a euro or less, and buying it without even a second thought? Pure bliss.
Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis
Without getting into the legal or moral issues involved, there is a """library""" 'assigned to the island state of Niue', it's pretty damned good, and that's all I have to say about that.
One key cause of piracy left out of this analysis is the significant demographic of people who have internet but can't buy things over it. This usually describes teenagers in developed countries who have internet access, but don't have capital that they can freely spend on digitally purchased objects. The amount of young adults who actually have jobs is really falling in developed countries because of the promotion of internships and volunteering opportunities, which are easier to obtain than jobs and have equal or greater prestige. Even if they do have income, they may not possess credit cards. There's a good portion of this group that can't even drive to purchase things with cash. So every new possession they obtain by spending money, or rather getting an adult to spend/provide/transfer money, is a significant expenditure.
In this situation, knowledge becomes something it seems irrational to pay for, because it seems like it "should" be liberated. They might acknowledge that being able to understand physics better or win arguments has a value of $20 or $50, but they won't spend that when they could get a comparable result with an expenditure of time, even if said time is worth more than the money would be.
I agree with the main theme (that knowledge is often worth paying for), but you should be much more careful before advising technologies like Kindle which are heavily loaded with DRM and kill-switch. We all know how Amazon disabled all copies of 1984 from the Kindles once. The fact it was 1984 is a "funny" coincidence, but the point remain. Granting to a company (by itself, or because asked by a government to do so) the power to destroy all the copies of a book in the world in one click is not something we should do.
http://www.defectivebydesign.org/amazon-kindle-swindle explains it better than I do.
Until ebooks are respecting the rights and freedom we have with paperbooks (like a plain PDF do, but not a Kindle ebook), I would recommend to people to buy good-old paper books, even if they are a bit more expensive. Freedom is also worth paying for.
(Sorry if this is a bit out-of-topic, but it seems an important point to me; and yes I know that political arguments should be two-sided, there are positive aspects in Kindle and most ebooks, but I wanted to bring attention over a very negative aspect which is, IMHO, sufficient to overcome the positive ones).
Amazon removed one edition of 1984 due to it being sold by a company that did not have the copyright. Given how much backlash there was just over that, it is extremely unlikely that Amazon or any other major e-book provider will engage in any form of substantial censorship or removal of material. The risk does exist but it is so small as to not really need much attention paid to it.
A more substantial problem seems to be the great difficulty which one has in lending e-books. There have been some steps taken to handle this but they are still very suboptimal.
So I'd venture the following:
1) In the next three years Amazon will not remove any already sold products on the Kindle due to copyright concerns. 87%
2) In the next five years Amazon will not remove any already sold products due to political pressure. (95%). (This is one of the vaguer ones but I think it should be clear.
3) In the next five years Amazon will not remove any already sold products from the Kindle because the product has been determined to be libelous or blasphemous in some jurisdiction. 95%.
4) In the next five years Amazon will not remove any already sold products from the Kindle that date from before 1920. 99%
5) In the next five years Amazon will not remove any already sold products from the Kindle. 80%.
6) In the next five years Amazon will not remove any already sold products from my Kindle. 98%.
7) (Most relevant to this discussion). In the next five years Amazon will not remove any already sold textbook or copy of a scientific journal. 92%.
I'm willing to make 5-10$ bets on any of these claims at these odds.
In all these cases, the relevant way of testing will be media reports of the removal of the texts, or in the case of 6 by self-reporting. Obviously there'...
What do people think about hiring a tutor? Of course that is only available for relatively old topics that are more experiential learning than symbolic learning.
I've had a lot of trouble understanding and getting good at mathematical proofs, so in the next couple of weeks, I intend to hire a tutor to teach proof skill to me.
A good way of getting cheap textbooks is to use a price alert service that notifies you when the price of a new or used book drops below a certain price. When you don't need the text in a hurry, and would rather save money and buy used, that works well, because students often want to get rid of a textbook in a hurry and offer it for sale at far below the typical used price for that book. Those deals tend to go pretty quickly though.
Another good idea is to buy the previous edition, especially for texts that have many editions. When the 8th edition of a text...
After reading lots of research and many book excerpts, I learned that Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis (2010) was the best overview available on how the brain encodes value and makes decisions. But I couldn't find it for free.
Here's another place to look: I downloaded "Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis" from library.nu for free just now, as a 488 page PDF file. If you don't create an account, you can search for books and find pictures of the covers, but if you create an account they'll show you links that let you have files for the books. The format varies: usually PDF, sometimes mobi or djvu.
After reading lots of research and many book excerpts, I learned that Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis (2010) was the best overview available on how the brain encodes value and makes decisions. But I couldn't find it for free. I had a hunch that coming to understand the subject without reading the best overview available would take at least a dozen extra hours. The Kindle price for Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis was only $55. Easy choice: I bought it.
I'd love to hear more about this particular aspect of the process. That "hunch" b...
Allegedly, anyone can purchase a library card to the Austin Public Library which comes with the ability to remotely access many databases. Has anyone tried this? Are any of the databases of value, other than JSTOR?
Wikipedia, Google Books, and the Pirate Bay have trained many people to expect that knowledge should always be zero-cost. I used to feel that way, too.
I feel like this is an important point - knowledge is worth paying for, and anything worth paying for is worth getting for free (given that the costs associated with getting it for free don't outweigh the cost of paying for it in the first place). As you rightfully point out in the quoted text, when the free sources are more comprehensive and higher quality than the paid sources, it is easy to get confused.
Of course, you don't need a device to read books purchased from either store.
I'm not sure what you meant here. You certainly do need a device - worst case, your PC. Was it your intention to say that you didn't need a mobile device - Kindle or other?
(For me reading on a PC is not an optimal use of that time - I'd rather be writing or otherwise producing when at my desk, whereas reading in places where I can't write - on the tube, in the loo, on vacation, and so on - has always felt like a win. So far, I haven't found anything that beat physical books for that purpose, though I've recently decided to give e-reading a try.)
But, having some indication of their value, would you have paid to read The Sequences, if that was the only way? I hope you can see that would have been a good choice.
That is a GREAT question. I probably wouldn't have paid more than $40 if a few friends gave it a strong recommendation. For me to pay more than $100, I would have needed an overwhelming number of people I highly respected to have recommended it.
In retrospect, it's difficult to know how much money I think I should have been willing to pay - that is to say, the amount of money I would pay to...
My college librarian set me up with an account on a platform called Athens so I can access journals at home. This may not be possible everywhere, but it's certainly worth exploring. Athens seems to link together several resources, but JSTOR and Oxford Music Online are all I've used. I only have access to certain fields on JSTOR (music and Irish studies, mainly), but I would assume this is because that's what my college teaches; other institutions may provide different accesses.
It'll be tough, but I'd like to go all electronic sometime soon. The ability to search, tag, and cut is invaluable.
I find this article bewildering, but intriguing.
Education is valuable, money is (among other things) a token of exchange for value... Getting a good value for your time and tokens of value is a great plan.
Getting a good value for producing educational materials is hopefully not a primary incentive. But it is not an insignificant incentive.
I do acknowledge that it is a corrupting influence. One of my professors admitted in class that he revised his textbook every two years because the value of used copies of textbooks stayed too high for him feel like the ...
On the other hand, often, even in renaissance times, knowledge was guarded by guilds, families etc. Recently reading Alex Bellos' "Adventures in Numberland" he writes that Niccolò Tartaglia was the first person to solve cubic equations in europe, but refused to share the secret. Girolamo Cardano, begged Tartaglia, who eventually relented and in a roundabout way shared his secret but swore Cardano to secrecy. Cardano shared it with his secretary, Lodovico Ferrari, who improved on it to find the solution to Quartic Equations. Cardano had a dilemna ...
About that first paragraph, I usually was going to buy something anyway, but I want to buy it after I've used the bathroom, because who would want to carry their drink or whatever into a public bathroom?
The opportunity cost of spending hours on the Internet just searching for the best titles on my desired subject are quite high to me. Is there any process you use to minimize this time? I'm hoping for an autodidact forum that gives book recommendations for beginners, though maybe you simply search Amazon "Listmania"s for introductory books.
Academic library access seems to be much more restricted in the UK.
I can either:
Very good post. I have the benefit currently of being a university student and having access to an enormous library, plus a password that allows me to access free PDFs of articles from a dozen different databases. Once that's no longer true, I'll keep your suggestions in mind.
May as well just start a business around selling junior job positions. You could employ them to sell the jobs to other junior job-seekers. Law firms do it already, and I don't see any legal barriers to making it a core business activity. They get 'knowledge', you get cash. Wallah.
The problem is, that by letting people get away with the feeling that they have something which amounts to 'ownership' of a region of conceptspace, we are directly inhibiting one of the major possible mitigators to global existential risk. Their state-granted entitlement is not more important than the (even possibly marginal) increase in probability of continued existence of sapience throughout the cosmos.
Have you ever asked a store manager if you can use their bathroom and been told that you must order something first? Even if it's obviously worth $1 to not wet your pants, you feel a bit resentful about having to buy the Arizona iced tea. You're so used to using other stores' bathrooms for free that you actually considered not paying.
Wikipedia, Google Books, and the Pirate Bay have trained many people to expect that knowledge should always be zero-cost. I used to feel that way, too. I would try half a dozen techniques to get some set of highly compressed knowledge (a textbook or review article) for free, and if that failed, my brain felt a bit indignant, and I would move on to something else.
One of the most important lessons I ever learned about the neglected virtue of scholarship is this: Sometimes, knowledge is worth paying for.
How much do you value your time, and how much do you value understanding a certain thing? After reading lots of research and many book excerpts, I learned that Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis (2010) was the best overview available on how the brain encodes value and makes decisions. But I couldn't find it for free. I had a hunch that coming to understand the subject without reading the best overview available would take at least a dozen extra hours. The Kindle price for Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis was only $55. Easy choice: I bought it.
(As it turns out, Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis is one of the best books I've ever purchased, and much better than the next best thing — Handbook of Reward and Decision Making — so purchasing the book probably saved me several dozen hours.)
Anyone who has made it through The Sequences understands the value of knowledge. And the absurdly high value of The Sequences is not so much in their novel content as in their idea selection. You could have figured out most of what's in The Sequences yourself by reading lots of cognitive science and the best of physics and philosophy, but that would have required many years and highly developed rationality skills.
But, having some indication of their value, would you have paid to read The Sequences, if that was the only way? I hope you can see that would have been a good choice.
If you want to be a scholar, learn how to get knowledge for free. But if you can't find a high-value source of knowledge for free, don't give up just because you've been trained to expect that knowledge should be free. Remember that knowledge is worth paying for.
Let me finish with three tips for efficient knowledge purchasing.
There is no efficient way for an individual scholar to pay for access to journal article databases like JSTOR, ScienceDirect, Springer, or Wiley. But, you can go to the library of a major research university, sit down in their computer lab, and download hundreds of papers from behind paywalls onto your flash drive (or upload them to your Dropbox account).
In L.A., I kept a list of the papers I needed to download in Google docs and drove 40 minutes each way to the UCLA library once every two weeks. That costs time and money (for gas), but it was much cheaper than buying individual subscriptions to all those databases.
I also paid $100/yr for a non-student UCLA library card so I could check out books from the university, which had a much better selection of academic books (and a better interlibrary loan system) than the L.A. public library system.
Often, I need to read a few chapters from a very expensive textbook or academic book, but I can't find those chapters available anywhere online. Usually, recently released textbooks aren't available at my local libraries, either.
However, I have discovered a way to rent textbooks through the mail for only $15 each. (This is another secret of efficient scholarship: Get in the habit of feeling good about paying for efficiently compressed knowledge when you need to.)
Here's how it works. Textbook rental website Chegg.com has a 21-day 'any reason' return policy. Rent a book, read the sections you need to read (or photograph them for yourself) right away when it arrives, then return it. You end up paying only shipping and sales tax, which on a $120 book ends up costing between $10 and $15.
I've done this several times now, and it has worked every time:
When it comes to expensive academic books, ebooks are usually much cheaper than physical books. I usually find the lowest prices at Amazon Kindle or Google ebookstore, so those are my two default sources. Of course, you don't need a mobile device to read books purchased from either store.
A sampling of my recent ebook purchases:
Of course, sometimes a book is worth buying even if it's not available online, at a local library, via Chegg.com, or as an ebook. I recently bought Rationality and the Reflective Mind (2010) as a good ol' fashioned hunk of paper.
Lots of people ask me how my articles can be so scholarly. One reason is that I've learned how to do scholarship efficiently. Another reason is that I've learned that knowledge is worth paying for.