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How do you get a high verbal IQ, boundary-testing, 10-year-old child not to swear? Saying "don't swear" causes him to gleefully list words asking if they count as swear words. Telling him a word counts as profanity causes him to ask why that specific word is bad. Saying a word doesn't count causes him to use it extra amounts if he perceives it is bad, and he will happily combine different "legal" words trying to come up with something offensive. All of this is made more difficult by the binding constraint that you absolutely must make sure he doesn't say certain words at school, so in terms of marginal deterrence you need the highest punishment for him saying these words.
In response to
Open thread, Feb. 23 - Mar. 1, 2015
binding constraint that you absolutely must make sure he doesn't say certain words at school
What would happen if he did say those words at school? Would they expel him? Does he know what the consequences of saying those words at school are, and does he think these consequences are insufficiently bad to act as an effective deterrent?
In response to
The morality of disclosing salary requirements
There are other options. Especially in cases where requiring this is illegal, forging such a proof may be an option. Or, answer "If I give you proof that my previous salary was X, I will precommit to only accept this job if you pay at least X + 20%".
I don't get what you're getting at.
Pricing is a well-studied area. Price discrimination based on time and exclusivity of 'first editions' and the like is possible, but highly dependent on the market. Why would anyone be able to sell an item with a given pricing scheme like 1/n? If their competitor is undercutting them on the first item, they'll never get a chance to sell the latter ones. And besides there's no reason such a scheme would be profit-maximizing.
Why would anyone be able to sell an item with a given pricing scheme like 1/n?
On downloaded, digital goods, this would be simple.
If their competitor is undercutting them on the first item, they'll never get a chance to sell the latter ones. And besides there's no reason such a scheme would be profit-maximizing.
Please see the numerical example in this comment
this reduces the total gains, but any seller who does it would outcompete sellers who don't
Why would the dynamic-price seller outcompete other sellers who are making more money?
Besides, he would have the classic takeoff problem -- this first items would be (relatively) very expensive and nobody will buy them (the flat-price sellers are selling the same thing much cheaper).
I imagine the following:
Suppose 2 movies have been produced, movie A by company A and movie B by company B. Suppose further that these movies target the same audience and are fungible, at least according to a large fraction of the audience. Both movies cost 500 000 dollars to make.
Company A sells tickets for 10 dollars each, and hopes to get at least 100 000 customers in the first week, thereby getting 1000 000 dollars, thus making a net gain of 500 000 dollars.
Company B precommits to selling tickets priced as 10 f(n) dollars, with f(n) defined as 1 / ( 1 + (n-1)/150000 ) , a slowly decreasing function. If they manage to sell 100 000 tickets, they get 766 240 dollars. Note that the first ticket also costs 10 dollars, the same as for company A.
200 000 undecided customers hear about this.
If both movies had been 10 dollars, 100 000 would have gone to see movie A and 100 000 would have seen movie B.
However, now, thanks to B's sublinear pricing, they all decide to see movie B. B gets 1270 000 dollars, A gets nothing.
In response to
Open thread, Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2015
Sublinear pricing.
Many products are being sold that have substantial total production costs but very small marginal production costs, e.g. virtually all forms of digital entertainment, software, books (especially digital ones) etc.
Sellers of these products could set the product price such that the price for the (n+1)th instance of the product sold is cheaper than the price for the (n)th instance of the product sold.
They could choose a convergent series such that the total gains converge as the number of products sold grows large (e.g. price for nth item = exp(-n) + marginal costs )
They could choose a divergent series such that the total gains diverge (sublinearly) as the number of products sold grows large (e.g. price for nth item = 1/n + marginal costs )
Certainly, this reduces the total gains, but any seller who does it would outcompete sellers who don't. And yet, it doesn't seem to exist.
True, many sellers do reduce prices after a certain amount of time has passed, and the product is no longer as new or as popular as it once was, but that is a function of time passed, not of items sold.
Does quantum nonlocality count as not being real physics?
I was unclear, of course it is real physics. By "real" I mean simply something that occurs in reality, which quantum nonlocality certainly does.
Quantum nonlocality - despite being named "nonlocality"- is actually local in a very important sense, just like the rest of physics : information never moves faster than c.
Real physics is local.
Where are you getting this from?
Every single physical theory that is currently considered fundamental is local, from general relativity to quantum mechanics.
I dislike the wikipedia article on the subject, it gives far to much credence to the fringe notion that maybe there is a way to exploit entanglement to get faster-than-light information transfer.
The quantum nonlocality article is much better, it correctly points out that
it (quantum nonlocality) does not allow for faster-than-light communication, and hence is compatible with special relativity.
In response to
The Unique Games Conjecture and FAI: A Troubling Obstacle
Real physics is local. The graphs, to the extent that there are any, are embedded in metric spaces, have small upper bounds on the number of edges per vertex, are planar, .... generally there is plenty of exploitable structure beyond the pure graph-theoretical problem. This is why I do not think hardness results on abstract graph-theoretical problems will be a great obstacle for practical problems.
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I make the following prediction : the transfiguration exercise of ch. 104 foreshadows the possibility of safely transfiguring a certain kind of explosive, that relies on containing several components that will explode upon contact. The ch. 104 exercise tells us that containment chambers can be formed first, and their contents afterwards, such that the bomb will not accidentally explode during transfiguration.