Rationality Quotes Thread July 2015

elharo

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

You seem to interpret "progress" as "lower prices" :-)

While I think that Clarity is misunderstanding Peter Thiel (Thiel says that a potential monopoly is the carrot that drives a lot of innovation; Clarity wrongly interprets this as "monopolies drive progress"), the question of monopolies and progress is complicated. The two major examples that come to mind are Bell Labs (run by AT&T) and IBM (in the 1950s - 80s era).

While I think that Clarity is misunderstanding Peter Thiel (Thiel says that a potential monopoly is the carrot that drives a lot of innovation; Clarity wrongly interprets this as "monopolies drive progress")

I read Thiel to be making the second argument as well, because monopolies have capacity to make the profits necessary for major R&D spending, as well as the capacity to benefit directly from major R&D spending. No individual commodity producer making zero economic profit has an incentive to invest in better methods of producing thei... (read more)

0CCC11y

I see how it can look like that. But no, they are two related but seperate effects of a healthily competitive market. [...] That is a statement that I can agree with. (And I wouldn't count a severely dominant player as a monopoly; a dominant player can drive a lot of progress as the smaller fish frantically try to find a way to one-up it and pull in customers)

4g_pepper11y

Assuming you are referring to IBM's mainframe business, they did not really have a monopoly; they were just a dominant player. Competitors at that time included Amdahl, Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data, Honeywell, General Electric and RCA. Amdahl even offered products that were compatible with IBM's mainframe offerings and could run software developed on/for IBM.