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gjm comments on What Curiosity Looks Like - Less Wrong
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I don't know on what basis you say that the expected utility loss is "effectively zero". There's a utility gain to the person who takes an illegal copy of the book instead of buying it, because they have more money that way. There's a utility loss (which I'd have thought is obviously approximately equal in general) to the people who'd have profited directly from the sale of the book: author, publisher, distributor. And then there are second-order effects, less localized and therefore harder to see and harder to assess, from (e.g.) the slightly reduced incentives for others to write, publish and sell books, the increased social acceptability of getting books in this way, etc.
It looks to me as if what we have here is: first-order effects that cancel out exactly when expressed in terms of money, and therefore probably cancel out approximately when expressed in terms of utility, and second-order effects that are hard to get a handle on but look clearly negative to me.
Could you justify your position further on this point?
As for the second claim, note that this also needs to be true to make your "doing something wrong" assertion correct -- and ought to be obvious to justify your having made it so baldly. I'm glad you agree that it isn't.
No one was claiming or suggesting that anyone should go straight from "I'd find it interesting to read that" to buying the book, without any consideration or weighing of consequences in between. So if my last sentence is equivalent to your main point, it seems to me that you were attacking a straw man.
You forget about the diminishing returns, though. An extra $20 would give much more utility to me than to a publishing house.
I think that's simply wrong. It would be right if the only difference between you and a publishing house were that the publishing house has more money, but of course that's not so. To a rough approximation, a publishing house is made up of lots of individuals. Much of your $20 will be distributed amongst them, and if they're on average about as well off as you are then this is roughly utility-neutral. Some of the rest will go into whatever larger-scale projects the publishing house is engaged in, which make use of economies of scale to get increasing returns in utility per dollar. (That's why there are corporations.)
And, of course, some of it will go to line the pockets of already-wealthy investors and executives. I agree that that bit is likely to show diminishing returns. But I see no reason to think that a transfer of $20 from you to the publishing house is a net utility loss, and just saying "diminishing returns" certainly doesn't suffice.
Surely the externalities of cutting down trees to make paper/burning fuel to power the printer/etc. are first-order effects which aren't cancelled out by anything obvious. Or am I missing something?
I'd consider them second-order effects. (Note: by "second-order" here I mean something like "less direct, more diffuse, and harder to evaluate", not "smaller". I appreciate that this is a bit woolly; perhaps the distinction isn't a helpful one.)
If I buy a car, I do not factor in the utility loss to the manufacturers of buggy whips.
The latter effect is by far net positive, as a much larger number of people can now gain access to much greater amounts of knowledge.
Books were being written long before IPR, they will continue to be written long after IPR. Culture will not stop being produced if stripped of legal protection.
Note the comment I was replying to:
Note the entirety of my reply that you replied to:
Note the last sentence of your reply to that:
There was absolutely no disagreement between us on that particular point; you seem to have generalised my statement far beyond what it actually said.
Also... we have wandered dangerously far into politics. (I am, ideologically at least, a supporter of the Pirate Parties.)
So much the worse for you. (Though of course you should also factor in the utility gain to everyone who benefits from advancing technology, etc. And of course in practice one often ignores everything but the first-order effects.)
However, I was not talking about anything remotely resembling the loss to buggy whip manufacturers when you buy a car. I was referring to the elementary fact that when you pay for something, the money you lose by paying for it goes to other people; what you lose, they gain.
For sure, and of course I neither claimed nor implied otherwise. I claimed only that if writing and selling books becomes less profitable, that will tend to reduce the incentive to do it.
But what you quoted here was not the entirety of your reply, in an important respect: "doing something wrong" was a hyperlink to library.nu. The existence and destination of a hyperlink are an important part of the content of the sentence that contains the link, no?
The fact that an issue has been taken up by a single-issue political party doesn't mean that discussing it constitutes wandering into politics. In any case, let me elaborate something I already said: I am not arguing here (1) that existing laws about "intellectual property" are any good, or (2) that it is always (or even usually) a Bad Thing to copy things illegally. I am saying only that there are not-obviously-crazy reasons why someone might prefer to pay for a physical book rather than copying an illicit electronic copy. They aren't all legal reasons, either.
Broken window fallacy. If they don't gain, someone else does.
Touche, I hadn't thought of that. So the entirety of my reply is:
But I still don't see how you can interpret that to mean: "There's something wrong with buying books, you should exclusively pirate them," which is what you seem to be arguing against.
Semantical dispute. Whether you call it 'politics' or not, my mind recognises it as an exclusively political issue, and, as such, is already beginning to die. For instance, if I hadn't jumped directly (although without consciously intending to) to the 'put down this political opponent' mode, I might've said 'the benefits of free knowledge to millions far surpass the monetary losses to a few thousand; if you think otherwise, it's probably scope insensitivity.' Instead I said....
... I guess I need to work on that.
I don't know why you keep repeating that, since both of us agree perfectly about it.
Huh? What does the broken window fallacy have to do with the fact that if I pay you $10 for a book, then my loss of $10 (and gain of a book) is exactly balanced by your gain of $10 (and loss of a book)?
I didn't. I took it to mean "A person's default way of getting a book they want to read should be piracy rather than purchase". And it seems to me that if you're going to make that claim then either you should be offering some sort of comparison of the two options, or else it should be obvious that piracy is the better option. Which I don't think it is, for (at least) the two reasons I gave: some people might value keeping the law in this respect, and some people might value having a physical book rather than an electronic copy.
OK, fair enough. I don't want to keep you arguing about something that impairs your reasoning.
(I'm sure "the benefits of free knowledge to millions far surpass the monetary losses to a few thousand" is a good argument for something but it's far from clear to me how it can be a good argument for, e.g., "when you see a book you're interested in you should generally make an electronic copy rather than buying it, even if that happens to be illegal". The latter isn't a matter of millions versus thousands, and it can only be made so by turning it into some claim about what everyone should do, and if really-truly-everyone follows that advice then it seems likely that the impact on people who write books will be large, at which point you can't negate the ensuing higher-order effects.)
Because most of what you've said seems to presuppose that it's false. I suppose I must be misunderstanding somewhere since you say you agree and haven't retracted anything, but I'm not sure what I'm misunderstanding. So let me ask a more specific question. Suppose I am a person who likes physical books much much better than electronic ones, prefers to stay within the law when possible, and wants authors and publishers and booksellers to get paid. And suppose that when I see a book I'm interested in, what I contemplate doing is buying it rather than getting a copy from library.nu or wherever. Am I, in that case, necessarily doing something wrong? If so, what? If not, are you going to retract your original statement or have I grotesquely misunderstood what it was meant to mean?
Every time you see a book that looks interesting? If that were true, then, as you said,
If not, then it's not a default. I'm guessing the default is, 'meh, it's probably not worth the money,' and this default is overridden on rare occasions by the other alternatives of 'I'm gonna buy it' or 'I'm gonna pirate it, ARRR!'
....After this, it's tempting to believe that this whole discussion was just a semantic dispute over the meaning of 'default', but that doesn't explain the last part of you first comment on this thread:
Which seems to indicate that you agree with my usage of 'default', so I'm still confused about where exactly the misunderstanding is.
Ugh, another irrelevant political argument from my side. Funny how I don't notice I'm replying to something other than the actual contents of the post until I have it pointed out to me. Hadn't realised quite how severe the mind-killing is.
I should probably just tap out of this discussion for a while now.
As I said: what I contemplate doing. Of course I often don't then buy the book. (But I do have an Amazon wishlist with over a thousand books in it.)
Looking over this conversation, we seem to have implicitly agreed that 'response' means thinking of something and DOING IT, instead of thinking of something and then rejecting it later. (I'm not sure I had that nuance in mind when I wrote it, but then the meaning kind of drifted in the ensuing conversation...)
And then I applied the exact same sense to 'contemplate'.
I'd still argue that your defaults are flawed. (If you don't buy most books you find interesting, why is that the first thing that your mind suggests when you encounter an interesting book?)
I expected the “DOING IT” link to go here instead.
Hadn't heard of it before. A very useful find.
I certainly haven't agreed (implicitly or otherwise) that "your default response to X is to think of Y" means that when X happens you actually do Y. As I said before, I took you to be talking about what happens in those cases in which you decide to actually get hold of the book (because if instead your meaning were "you often shouldn't bother getting the book at all" then (1) you were stating the obvious and (2) your link to library.nu was kinda irrelevant). Everything I've said has been based on that premise.
If you're now saying that your point was that actually literally thinking "I'm going to get that book" as soon as you find it interesting is silly -- well, yeah, it is, and it never occurred to me that anyone would think otherwise. My apologies if I've contributed to confusion here...
Ah.... we seem to have different models of what people do when they find an interesting-looking book. You're model is:
whereas my model is
So when I was talking about your response right after seeing the book, I was talking about the buy/pirate decision, which occurs later in the decision-making process for you.
Anyhow, I will restate my point as as 'If "buy it" is the first thing that your brain suggests to you once you've decided to get hold of a book, you're doing something wrong.'
But that one's just a nitpick. The more important takeaway is 'If you buy all or even a large fraction of the books you decide to get hold of, you're doing something wrong. (Unless the number of books you ever decide to get hold of is tiny.)'
Not if I have already read the book and you haven't, and not if I have less money (more specifically, I get more marginal utility per dollar) than you.
Yes, of course "exactly balanced" is true only when we reckon in dollars and books rather than utility. (The way I put it earlier in the thread was: "first-order effects that cancel out exactly when expressed in terms of money, and therefore probably cancel out approximately when expressed in terms of utility".)
Perhaps a good argument can be made that for most book-buyers a transfer of money from them to the publisher (and thence to the author, publisher's employees, etc.) produces a net utility loss. But (1) I still don't see that this has anything to do with the broken window fallacy -- I suspect that Anubhav thinks I'm making a more complicated point than I actually am -- and (2) it certainly won't do to look only at my loss of money and act as if the money has just disappeared into the void.
(#2 might be wrong for people who are close to being purely selfish. I agree that someone motivated only by self-interest can, to a good first approximation, pretend that money they spend simply disappears, and that some reasons for preferring legal purchase over illegal copying will have no force for such a person. I'm fairly sure that Anubhav isn't assuming pure selfishness; certainly many of his/her arguments seem to assume the reverse.)
But they're not exact even then.
Physical scenario: I pay you $10 and you give me a book. I lose $10, you gain $10. I gain the book, you lose it.
Your assumption holds so far. But now, consider...
Digital scenario (legal): I pay you $10 and you lease me a digital copy of the book. I lose $10, you gain $10. I gain a book, but you don't lose it, since my copy of the book was created (copied) as and when I ordered it, and you still have your copy.
Digital scenario (illegal/ legally free): I don't pay you anything and get a copy of your book. I lose no money, you gain no money. I gain a book, you don't lose a book.
On the whole (at least if you prefer digital copies and only consider first-order effects) it's a transfer of money that can be avoided and still have a net positive outcome. And as for the $10 you didn't pay to the author (publisher?) you can use it to pay for....
Wait, the author can use it to pay for something else too. You're right, this isn't the broken window fallacy; there is no destruction of value involved. It's still a pointless exchange of money though. (Assuming you're only interested in the contents of the book. If not, the exchange may or may not be pointless, but such cases are a minority.)
'his'. 'Anubhav' is an exclusively male name. </nitpick>
Digital scenario (legal, with DRM): I pay you $10 and you issue me a digital copy of the book, on terms that you can change at will. If you go out of business, I lose the book. If it turns out that you messed up your upstream licensing, I lose the book. If the book is banned by your government, I lose the book. If you decide to discontinue the service for business reasons, I lose the book. In some cases, if my computer breaks or if I upgrade it, I lose the book — at least until I spend an hour on the phone with your tech support convincing them to give it back to me.
Irrelevant, unless I'm confused. (Perhaps I am.) The claim I thought I was responding to is that one way in which buying a physical book is worse than taking a digital copy is that you have to pay for it and therefore lose utility; so I said why that utility is (roughly) transferred to others rather than merely lost.
I do, of course, agree that digital copying is fundamentally different from (legal or illegal) physical taking because it doesn't deprive anyone of the original. (This is one of the reasons why "intellectual property" is such a bad name for what it denotes.)
Thanks. (I did have a quick google and establish that it is a male name, but I didn't have enough evidence to rule out the possibility that it might be a female name too.)
But it's an excellent name in the sense that, for Lockeans, it is an obvious consequence of the right to property.