Game Theory For Baby Names

[Ifreann]

Not even slightly relevant to the discussion at hand. Stop trying to dodge criticism of your own flawed arguments.

I've always found it amazing how Xero still responds to Gallo, literally everyone else who's been disagreeing with him since 2012 has either CTE'd or doesn't get responses out of Xero any more. Which is to say, Xero is very good at ignoring criticism.

Well we aren't spending money to criticise him, so it's to be expected that this is all in one ear and out the other, as it were.

[Forsher]

Organic results! But that's only because crowd sponsored (aka "market") results aren't available.

There's a quote I can't remember, it's about the way that people who advocate for change. When they fail inevitably the result is to blame the idea, not the people. I wish I could remember it because it's a great line and entirely apt here.

What do real people who actually exist want they're searching for internet results? They want to have the most "useful" stuff at the top. Everyone seems to agree on that. How is usefulness determined here?

Almost invariably the best way to understand usefulness as it applies to (internet) research is by "what the most people found answered their query". Personally I would say that the best way to do this is by working out which pages are visited when the search stops by the most people as possible. This means one of two things... this is the page which answered the query (solved the research problem) or the point where the searcher gives up. But also we know that useful things tend to get utilised by other people. Thus, they link them or talk about them. Some way of acknowledging this would be useful also. Naturally over time very useful things are going to get visited a lot and probably act as black holes, drawing people in with the gravity of their usefulness.

PageRank doesn't seem to quite work like this. Rather it's more interested in those last two bits... what gets a lot of attention and what gets referred to. The idea as I understand it is that if a popular page (measured in terms of the number of pages linking to it) refers to A, then A should get a lot of a search engine's attention (be ranked highly). Likewise, if a lot of pages refer to A, then a search engine should again rank A highly. If both, then A should be doing really well.

Where my idea is mentioned in that paper it seems to be in terms of the "common case". Compare: "what the most people found answered their query" with the paper's "all the students regularly use the Wolverine Access system, and a random user is quite likely to be looking for it given the query 'wolverine'. The fact that the Wolverine Access site is a good common case is not contained in the HTML of the page." Same idea, right? PageRank, it seems, is able to identify common cases... presumably what I describe above acts as a decent proxy for "where people stop". But let's investigate this common case idea a bit more, no?

PageRank can also represent a collaborative notion of authority or trust. . For example, a user might prefer a news story simply because it is linked directly from the New York Times home page. Of course such a story will receive quite a high PageRank simply because it is mentioned by a very important page. This seems to capture a kind of collaborative trust, since if a page was mentioned by a trustworthy or authoritative source, it is more likely to be trustworthy or authoritative. Similarly, quality or importance seems to within this kind of circular definition.

It's a fairly simple idea... people are people, which suggests that what a bunch of people find to be true of Site A is likely to also hold true for Person X, and Pages a₁, a₂, ..., a_N that make up Site A. In other words, a metaphor for how PageRank as good as any other we might derive is "PageRank models people". But PageRank is also able to be more personalised...

These types of personalised PageRanks are virtually immune to manipulation by commercial interests. For a page to get a high PageRank, it must convince an important page, or a lot of non-important pages to link to it. At worst, you can have manipulation in the form of buying advertisements(links) on important sites. But, this seems well under control since it costs money. This immunity to manipulation is an extremely important property. This kind of commercial manipulation is causing search engines a great deal of trouble, [ed.] and making features that would be great to have very difficult to implement.

Personalising the search engine's results through PageRank means that PageRank doesn't just model people, it models you. But critically to the claims made by Xerographica one of the motivations for doing this explicitly rejects price signals. Which, you know, makes sense.

Let's go back to where I started... why does "the most people" make sense as an understanding of usefulness? Well, we could talk about the wisdom of the crowd and a lot of research on that. We could talk about how the majority rarely answers a multi-choice question wrong. But I think the most intuitive way to put it is that we "smooth" out personal idiosyncrasies. I might be really interested in "iodised table salt" sold by homebrand but the generalised user searching "salt" isn't going to want to know that. They might want to know about what salt is, they might want to buy local salt or they might care about the movie. Idiosyncratic research is weeded out by the crowd. Results paid to achieve importance are frequently idiosyncratic... even if they're of great importance to a wealthy buyer, that's still true. If we get rid of idiosyncrasies, we get close to achieving something most like the researcher... and we also represent what the search term means in general.* And if we have more information about the researcher we'd thus like to chuck that in too.

Think about it... the perfect search engine would get you exactly what you're looking for given the information you give it. It is thus obvious that the most useful way of searching is to model searchers, especially a given researcher.

*I, for instance, don't care what Martian Joe thinks "mainlining" means, I care what people in general think it means.

People at the grocery store spend their money to help rank the products by usefulness. The results are not ordered "organically" (voting), they are not ordered by a small handful of sponsors, they are ordered by a crowd of sponsors (aka "market").

Completely wrong.

Surely everyone knows that the order of products on shelves very much does follow the sponsorship of a small handful of sponsors? There's a reason why new brands are almost always at the bottom, where it is behaviourally more difficult for consumers to purchase them. The layout of the shop in general is likewise ordered in a way that benefits a small interest... milk and bread tend to be far apart from other basic goods to induce the shopper to traverse the entire supermarket to do the "basic shop". This opens up many more opportunities for a product to get into the brain and thus increase the chance of being purchased.

Hey... modelling people again... actual people. Strange...

Right now a certain amount of money is spent on meat. We can guess it's quite a bit. So we'd say that meat is highly ranked. Is this ranking determined by voters? Nope. Is it determined by the meat industry? Nope. It's determined by the millions and millions of people who regularly buy meat. Whenever they buy meat they help to sponsor its high rank.

What would happen if more and more people became vegetarians? Then meat would drop lower and lower in the rankings. This means that less and less resources would be used to supply meat.

Which manifests in supermarket organisation by making the meat section look more like the foreign foodstuffs section (i.e. from big to small).

The entire point of rankings is to determine how society's resources are used/distributed/allocated/divided.

Er, no?

Price signals are thought to achieve a particular allocation but their point is naked self interest.

Have you read Larry Page's paper about PageRank? If so, then you would know that he says absolutely nothing about crowd sponsored results. In other words, he says absolutely nothing about market ranking. He doesn't say, "We considered the market ranking system but we concluded that it is obviously inferior to the democratic ranking system." Can you imagine if he had actually said that? I think that perhaps maybe a "few" economists might have said something.

I doubt it. Economists don't look anything like the way you "model" them Xero. Your chief flaw is to imagine them as complete morons. I know quite a few economists... they're not morons. Specifically, they almost certainly would recognise that some situations demand different methods of allocation. Hell, economists have investigated optimal voting systems for juries.

Larry Page got the PageRank idea from scholarly citations. Each citation is essentially a vote. The theory is, the more votes a paper receives, the more useful it is.

There aren't a lot of options here... and they all have super serious implications.

A. democratic rankings = market rankings (we could replace all spending with voting)
B. democratic rankings > market rankings (we should replace all spending with voting)
C. democratic rankings < market rankings (we should replace all voting with spending)

Say we're playing a sports tournament. You and I are each captains and all the other participants are lined up in front of us and we'll alternate choosing team members. We'll play a soccer match, a basketball game and some cricket.
We've got Lebron James, Steve Smith and Lionel Messi (among others) in front of us and we have to choose the best team we can given the same team will play all the games (obviously with substitutions).

I wouldn't choose Lebron James over Lionel Messi for my soccer team. I would choose James over Messi for my basketball team. If I could I'd actually choose myself over both of them for the cricket (I am almost certainly better than either of them) but I'd pick Steve Smith over me.

Where are your propositions now, Xero? No-where and nothing: horses for courses, my friend.

Of course my best guess is that the correct answer is "C".

That's a terrible guess.

If this guess is truly correct, can you fathom the sheer amount of attention and other resources that have been seriously misallocated by the substantial misranking of countless scholarly papers, webpages and politicians?

For me, the fact that we use market ranking for food, computers and a gazillion other important and necessary things is all the evidence that I need to be seriously sceptical about alternative forms of ranking.

It's really not.

What about you? Are you seriously sceptical about market rankings? That's fine. Let's put our heads together and try and devise a way to directly compare market ranking and democratic ranking.

Market allocations aren't even the best allocations for some of the things they are actually used for... which is why privatisation has such a terrible track record.

[Xerographica]

Right now a certain amount of money is spent on meat. We can guess it's quite a bit. So we'd say that meat is highly ranked. Is this ranking determined by voters? Nope. Is it determined by the meat industry? Nope. It's determined by the millions and millions of people who regularly buy meat. Whenever they buy meat they help to sponsor its high rank.

What would happen if more and more people became vegetarians? Then meat would drop lower and lower in the rankings. This means that less and less resources would be used to supply meat.

Which manifests in supermarket organisation by making the meat section look more like the foreign foodstuffs section (i.e. from big to small).

The entire point of rankings is to determine how society's resources are used/distributed/allocated/divided.

Er, no?

Price signals are thought to achieve a particular allocation but their point is naked self interest.

Imagine if people spend less money on meat. This means that...

A. more resources will be used to supply meat
B. less resources will be used to supply meat
C. the same amount of resources will be used to supply meat

[Xerographica]

I created the OP. Am I supposed to give myself feedback on it? "Self, I definitely see some room for improvement... "

I'll be blunt, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that you don't self-analyse and self-evalaute. Explains a lot, actually.

So in your preferred system everybody simply gives themselves feedback on their work?

[Xerographica]

Did you just watch the first episode of "Offspring" on Netflix?


(Image)

Besides bidding for babies we could also bid for countries...



In addition to bidding for babies and countries, we could also bid for spouses...

No, totally, the only true expression of value for love is if you pay for it. If you're not paying for it, you don't mean it. I can attest to this, I've gone on a date, got back home and comfortable and then said 'hey, I really like you, I'll pay you $50 for sex' and generally I've been slapped in the face with '$50, what the fuck are you talking about, jesus..' and then they've left.

I clearly should have offered more.

If a woman told us that she loved flowers, and we saw that she forgot to water them, we would not believe in her "love" for flowers. Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love. - Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

Love is a function of sacrifice. No sacrifice, no love.

It should be obvious that love and sex aren't the same thing. But there should definitely be a website or app where people can browse profiles and input their willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA) for sex. If I input a WTP of $50 for a lady, and she inputs a WTA of $1,000 for me... then no deal. But if her WTA is $50 or less... then yes deal. The point is that everybody is willing to have sex with anybody for the right price.

[Salandriagado]

Which manifests in supermarket organisation by making the meat section look more like the foreign foodstuffs section (i.e. from big to small).



Er, no?

Price signals are thought to achieve a particular allocation but their point is naked self interest.

Imagine if people spend less money on meat. This means that...

A. more resources will be used to supply meat
B. less resources will be used to supply meat
C. the same amount of resources will be used to supply meat

Any of the above, depending on the situation.

[Xerographica]

Imagine if people spend less money on meat. This means that...

A. more resources will be used to supply meat
B. less resources will be used to supply meat
C. the same amount of resources will be used to supply meat

Any of the above, depending on the situation.

So there's no relationship between how people spend their money and how society's resources are used?

[The Two Jerseys]

Which manifests in supermarket organisation by making the meat section look more like the foreign foodstuffs section (i.e. from big to small).



Er, no?

Price signals are thought to achieve a particular allocation but their point is naked self interest.

Imagine if people spend less money on meat. This means that...

A. more resources will be used to supply meat
B. less resources will be used to supply meat
C. the same amount of resources will be used to supply meat

Imagine that people spend less money on meat. This means that...

A. People are buying the same amount of meat, but the purchasing power of the dollar has increased and that $15 steak now costs $10
B. People are buying a smaller amount of meat because they're economizing due to an economic downturn, but they'd still love to have a good steak once a week if they could afford it
C. People are buying a larger amount of meat because there's an excess supply that's driving the price down, and only a fool wouldn't take advantage of a "buy one steak get one free" sale

Now, which scenario does your "spending = demand" theory say is the gospel truth?

[Xerographica]

Imagine if people spend less money on meat. This means that...

A. more resources will be used to supply meat
B. less resources will be used to supply meat
C. the same amount of resources will be used to supply meat

Imagine that people spend less money on meat. This means that...

A. People are buying the same amount of meat, but the purchasing power of the dollar has increased and that $15 steak now costs $10
B. People are buying a smaller amount of meat because they're economizing due to an economic downturn, but they'd still love to have a good steak once a week if they could afford it
C. People are buying a larger amount of meat because there's an excess supply that's driving the price down, and only a fool wouldn't take advantage of a "buy one steak get one free" sale

Now, which scenario does your "spending = demand" theory say is the gospel truth?

There either is, or isn't, a correlation between...A. how people spend their money and B. how resources are used.

[Forsher]

Imagine if people spend less money on meat. This means that...

A. more resources will be used to supply meat
B. less resources will be used to supply meat
C. the same amount of resources will be used to supply meat

This response neither disagrees with anything I just said nor addresses your linking a paper which, as can be seen in the quotes I used, quite plainly disputes the conclusions you tried to use it to support.

I'll be blunt, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that you don't self-analyse and self-evalaute. Explains a lot, actually.

So in your preferred system everybody simply gives themselves feedback on their work?

In most cases, self-reflection and introspection is seen as a good idea.

If a woman told us that she loved flowers, and we saw that she forgot to water them, we would not believe in her "love" for flowers. Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love. - Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

This guy has clearly never met people. What a stupid thing to say.

If a woman forgot to water flowers but greatly enjoyed going to botanic gardens and private gardens, sniffed flowers encountered in day to day business, had a house full of pictures of flowers, wore floral patterned clothes and kept vases... Goodbye, Mr Fromm... if you ever said anything of interest, the evidence before my eyes says that's wrong. Hey, wait a minute...

[Kavagrad]

I'll be blunt, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that you don't self-analyse and self-evalaute. Explains a lot, actually.

So in your preferred system everybody simply gives themselves feedback on their work?

Firstly, "your preferred system" means nothing. Economic system? Social system? The debate you're creating here affects both, so be more specific. Right now you just look like you're continuing to try and deflect. I mean, you are, but don't make it that obvious.

If you're not willing to evaluate your ideals once in a while, you're unlikely to evolve beyond the state of a raving ideologue. The world is full of subtleties and matters of practicality that you seem to avoid addressing, not to mention that turning your unborn child into a vehicle for corporate advertising in a way that affects them for life is child abuse, and the system you propose provides easy opportunities for exactly this.

The point is that everybody is willing to have sex with anybody for the right price.

Yeah, no.

[Salandriagado]

Any of the above, depending on the situation.

So there's no relationship between how people spend their money and how society's resources are used?

Quit the strawman. I mean precisely what I said.

[Xerographica]

I've always found it amazing how Xero still responds to Gallo, literally everyone else who's been disagreeing with him since 2012 has either CTE'd or doesn't get responses out of Xero any more. Which is to say, Xero is very good at ignoring criticism.

Well we aren't spending money to criticise him, so it's to be expected that this is all in one ear and out the other, as it were.

None of you spend any money to rank the criticisms by usefulness. Ideally it should be impossible for me overlook the most useful criticisms. Right now it's very possible. This is because I have no idea which criticisms are the most useful to the group.

If I think about it, then it feels abundantly absurd that I have to explain the point of seeing and knowing the demand for things. It's hard to get the supply right when nobody sees or knows what the demand is.

An acquaintance comes over for dinner and you serve him a bunch of meat. Turns out that he's a vegetarian. In other words, he doesn't at all demand meat. Which is why it's problematic to supply him meat. It was a simple failure to communicate. You should have asked the guy if he was a vegetarian? He should have volunteered this information?

Nobody's behavior is really that helpful when the demand isn't seen or known. This should be the most obvious thing in the world.

[The Two Jerseys]

Imagine that people spend less money on meat. This means that...

A. People are buying the same amount of meat, but the purchasing power of the dollar has increased and that $15 steak now costs $10
B. People are buying a smaller amount of meat because they're economizing due to an economic downturn, but they'd still love to have a good steak once a week if they could afford it
C. People are buying a larger amount of meat because there's an excess supply that's driving the price down, and only a fool wouldn't take advantage of a "buy one steak get one free" sale

Now, which scenario does your "spending = demand" theory say is the gospel truth?

There either is, or isn't, a correlation between...A. how people spend their money and B. how resources are used.

There is, and the current supply & demand model is very good establishing that relationship.

But your system is based on "spending = preference", so which of the scenarios I presented is true? Do people actually want more meat, less meat, or the same amount of meat?

[Forsher]

Imagine that people spend less money on meat. This means that...

A. People are buying the same amount of meat, but the purchasing power of the dollar has increased and that $15 steak now costs $10
B. People are buying a smaller amount of meat because they're economizing due to an economic downturn, but they'd still love to have a good steak once a week if they could afford it
C. People are buying a larger amount of meat because there's an excess supply that's driving the price down, and only a fool wouldn't take advantage of a "buy one steak get one free" sale

Now, which scenario does your "spending = demand" theory say is the gospel truth?

There either is, or isn't, a correlation between...A. how people spend their money and B. how resources are used.

Call me a hopeless optimist but I feel both Salandriagado and The Two Jerseys are being overly pedantic here. Obviously Xero's talking about sustained patterns believed to continue into the future in real terms. It's be absurd to say anything else, right? However, they have an important point. It is not a simple relationship of "less money is spent on [thing] means less resources will be devoted to [thing]"... and nor is it a simple relationship of "less demand means fewer resources".

If the demand for meat falls the meat industry will likely try to restore that demand through advertising. That means that they will likely devote more resources to the allocation of meat, and likely limited changes will be experienced in terms of the actual production of meat (e.g. similar numbers of animals, similar numbers of farms). As anyone with more than a year of economics education will tell you, things change on a large scale with time. You probably miss this because all you seem to do is read isolated texts and have never had an introduction to the field as a whole.

It's also pretty obvious that in the real world the relationship between expenditure on a product and the resources going into the sale of the product are mutually influential. More spending on meat likely reflects strategies put in place to sell meat, and changes in expenditure are used to assess supply chain decisions. But as Salandriagado and the Two Jerseys argue the underlying interests are more real than just expenditure. Divergent quantities (from expectations) are likely to create handwringing and are probably even more likely to provoke responses from suppliers than monetary changes.

[Galloism]

An acquaintance comes over for dinner and you serve him a bunch of meat. Turns out that he's a vegetarian. In other words, he doesn't at all demand meat. Which is why it's problematic to supply him meat. It was a simple failure to communicate. You should have asked the guy if he was a vegetarian? He should have volunteered this information?

Nobody's behavior is really that helpful when the demand isn't seen or known. This should be the most obvious thing in the world.

Obviously, what you should have done is gotten thousands of unrelated people who don’t know either of you to bid on what you were going to serve him for dinner, and when you got meat and he didn’t like meat, accuse him of ignoring public demand.

[The Two Jerseys]

An acquaintance comes over for dinner and you serve him a bunch of meat. Turns out that he's a vegetarian. In other words, he doesn't at all demand meat. Which is why it's problematic to supply him meat. It was a simple failure to communicate. You should have asked the guy if he was a vegetarian? He should have volunteered this information?

Nobody's behavior is really that helpful when the demand isn't seen or known. This should be the most obvious thing in the world.

Obviously, what you should have done is gotten thousands of unrelated people who don’t know either of you to bid on what you were going to serve him for dinner, and when you got meat and he didn’t like meat, accuse him of ignoring public demand.

Or he could have made his demand known by telling us that he was a vegetarian in the first place.

In which case we would then serve him meat anyway, because he didn't give us any money so obviously he didn't really mean it.

[Galloism]

Obviously, what you should have done is gotten thousands of unrelated people who don’t know either of you to bid on what you were going to serve him for dinner, and when you got meat and he didn’t like meat, accuse him of ignoring public demand.

Or he could have made his demand known by telling us that he was a vegetarian in the first place.

In which case we would then serve him meat anyway, because he didn't give us any money so obviously he didn't really mean it.

He should have outbid the Internet. The fact that he didn’t is his own fault.

[Forsher]

None of you spend any money to rank the criticisms by usefulness. Ideally it should be impossible for me overlook the most useful criticisms. Right now it's very possible. This is because I have no idea which criticisms are the most useful to the group.

This is ludicrous.

Say practically everyone has been talking about criticisms of pragmatarianism on forum called forum.pragmatarianismisdumb.net or something similarly inventive and decided that Venusian Jo has made the most useful critique. This was determined (although the methodology is, as everyone non the forum agrees, completely daft) by having everyone pay money towards their favourite critique. The forum has put all the money in a publicly viewable bank account to prove that they've actually done this. They've then sent Venusian Jo over to NSG in order to make the "most useful critique of pragamatarianism", you've read it and then not responded at all. And the forum of anti-pragmatarianism (population = global population - 1) can't do anything about it.

Meanwhile a bunch of mercenaries read your posts and feel particularly aggrieved by pragmatarianism. Their criticism is very, very simple, i.e. "taxes should be paid half now, and half on delivery". It's not a very good criticism. However, these mercenaries decide to doxx you, break into your house and stick a gun to your head. One of them is a bit nuts and even stabs you with a "this is a knife" kinda knife. Their criticism just became very hard to ignore.

Ranking the "worth" of criticisms does absolutely nothing towards making the criticism more or less ignorable. At best, all it can do is point out that there is a strong criticism of pragmatarianism (assuming a fit for purpose ranking method is used, so... not the one used by forum.pragmatarianismisdumb.net), which might make people think twice about engaging with you. But, and here's the thing, the sort of rational intellectually honest person who'd have that response has it based on the situation we experience now.

If I think about it, then it feels abundantly absurd that I have to explain the point of seeing and knowing the demand for things. It's hard to get the supply right when nobody sees or knows what the demand is.

An acquaintance comes over for dinner and you serve him a bunch of meat. Turns out that he's a vegetarian. In other words, he doesn't at all demand meat. Which is why it's problematic to supply him meat. It was a simple failure to communicate. You should have asked the guy if he was a vegetarian? He should have volunteered this information?

Nobody's behaviour is really that helpful when the demand isn't seen or known. This should be the most obvious thing in the world.

You have no idea what demand is, though, so I don't care about what you think the concept means in the real world... let alone your endless parade of contrived and trivial situations. And that's despite having been told it for years, repeatedly.

[Xerographica]

Imagine if people spend less money on meat. This means that...

A. more resources will be used to supply meat
B. less resources will be used to supply meat
C. the same amount of resources will be used to supply meat

This response neither disagrees with anything I just said nor addresses your linking a paper which, as can be seen in the quotes I used, quite plainly disputes the conclusions you tried to use it to support.

I'll try again. People at the grocery store use their money to help rank the products by usefulness. The more useful a product is, the more resources it can use.

Is this how Google's PageRank works? No. People use their votes (links) to help rank the pages by usefulness. The more useful a page is, the more resources (ie attention) it can use.

Spending and voting are completely different things. So they can't be equally good at allocating resources.

At the grocery store you have to decide how you divide your dollars among all the products. This naturally forces you to prioritize. You have to decide which products are truly most useful to you.

On the internet... do you have to decide how you divide your votes/links among all the pages? Obviously not! You have unlimited votes/links. So there's absolutely no need to prioritize. You do not have to decide which pages are truly most useful to you.

So what difference does it make that nobody on the internet has to decide which pages are truly most useful to them? It means that all the pages are really wrongly ranked. This means that society's attention is severely misallocated. It means that everybody knows who the Kardashians are but barely anybody understands the point of seeing and knowing demand. Barely anybody understands the point of prioritization. These really aren't the only things that nearly everybody overlooks. But it's not like I can list all the important things that nearly everybody overlooks.

Voting and spending are completely different things. They can't be equally good at allocating resources.

[Xerographica]

So in your preferred system everybody simply gives themselves feedback on their work?

Firstly, "your preferred system" means nothing. Economic system? Social system? The debate you're creating here affects both, so be more specific. Right now you just look like you're continuing to try and deflect. I mean, you are, but don't make it that obvious.

If you're not willing to evaluate your ideals once in a while, you're unlikely to evolve beyond the state of a raving ideologue. The world is full of subtleties and matters of practicality that you seem to avoid addressing, not to mention that turning your unborn child into a vehicle for corporate advertising in a way that affects them for life is child abuse, and the system you propose provides easy opportunities for exactly this.

I said "feedback on their work". Clearly I was talking about work. Or does nobody work in your preferred system? My preferred system is the market system. In the market system, everybody uses their own money to positively reinforce the most useful work. Ok, now your turn. Go ahead and describe how, in your preferred system, the most useful work is identified and reinforced.

[Forsher]

I'll try again. People at the grocery store use their money to help rank the products by usefulness. The more useful a product is, the more resources it can use.

An assertion. A baseless claim. A lie. Call it whatever, it's not a truth, it's not an evaluation and it's not an argument. This is just not worth listening to.

Is this how Google's PageRank works? No. People use their votes (links) to help rank the pages by usefulness. The more useful a page is, the more resources (ie attention) it can use.

A gross over-simplification.

Yes, in some cases, the more useful a page is, the more it get linked. Like a blackhole it draws people in and references to it get made. But sometimes very useful things never get very much attention. Quite often, what happens is more like this: the more "useful" a linking page is, the more useful things it links to become.

Usefulness and popularity are related, but neither are intrinsic. As I said, PageRank seems best understood as an exercise in modelling. And search bestness definitely seems to be an exercise in modelling.

Spending and voting are completely different things. So they can't be equally good at allocating resources.

That's completely illogical. Watching the Ashes and packing boxes are completely different things. One is an inactive leisure activity, the other is an active job. Both, however, can occupy a whole day equally well. Woah, woah, woah.

Naturally, we'd already talked about this. You ignored that you were outright wrong then too. And that was in this thread!

At the grocery store you have to decide how you divide your dollars among all the products. This naturally forces you to prioritize. You have to decide which products are truly most useful to you.

On the internet... do you have to decide how you divide your votes/links among all the pages? Obviously not! You have unlimited votes/links. So there's absolutely no need to prioritize. You do not have to decide which pages are truly most useful to you.

Maybe this should be a clue to you that the supermarket analogy doesn't have anything particularly relevant to say about internet research? Just a thought...

So what difference does it make that nobody on the internet has to decide which pages are truly most useful to them? It means that all the pages are really wrongly ranked.

Why? How?

This means that society's attention is severely misallocated. It means that everybody knows who the Kardashians are but barely anybody understands the point of seeing and knowing demand. Barely anybody understands the point of prioritization. These really aren't the only things that nearly everybody overlooks. But it's not like I can list all the important things that nearly everybody overlooks.

You haven't told me why going to the shops to buy some stuff is the same as browsing the internet looking to find an answer to a question.

What's particularly weird is that for the most part there are clear limitations on the number of links one can make/use. It's a time consuming activity to find them and to rank them. This is why search engines are so popular (or, well, why Google is). After all, they basically let us find a whole bunch of links really, really quickly. And if the search engine has a good idea of what we're actually after we don't have to do any more work. You clearly haven't thought very much at all (not at all, in fact) about what usefulness means here... and clearly haven't read what I had to say about it just before. Do try and keep up, Xero.

Voting and spending are completely different things. They can't be equally good at allocating resources.

I've said it three times, and what I say three times is true ~ pseudo-quote from The Hunting of the Snark, a nonsense poem.

Nonsense as in "non-sense".

[Xerographica]

Ranking the "worth" of criticisms does absolutely nothing towards making the criticism more or less ignorable.

What do real people who actually exist want they're searching for internet results? They want to have the most "useful" stuff at the top. Everyone seems to agree on that.

When it comes to webpages, here are your assumptions...

1. It's useful to have the most useful pages at the top
2. Voting is needed to determine how useful a page is

But when it comes to criticisms, here's your assumption...

1. It's useless to have the most useful criticisms at the top

Why, exactly, is it useless to have the most useful criticisms at the top... but it's useful to have the most useful pages at the top?

[Forsher]

Ranking the "worth" of criticisms does absolutely nothing towards making the criticism more or less ignorable.

What do real people who actually exist want they're searching for internet results? They want to have the most "useful" stuff at the top. Everyone seems to agree on that.

When it comes to webpages, here are your assumptions...

1. It's useful to have the most useful pages at the top
2. Voting is needed to determine how useful a page is

But when it comes to criticisms, here's your assumption...

1. It's useless to have the most useful criticisms at the top

Why, exactly, is it useless to have the most useful criticisms at the top... but it's useful to have the most useful pages at the top?

Horses for courses.

[Xerographica]

At the grocery store you have to decide how you divide your dollars among all the products. This naturally forces you to prioritize. You have to decide which products are truly most useful to you.

On the internet... do you have to decide how you divide your votes/links among all the pages? Obviously not! You have unlimited votes/links. So there's absolutely no need to prioritize. You do not have to decide which pages are truly most useful to you.

Maybe this should be a clue to you that the supermarket analogy doesn't have anything particularly relevant to say about internet research? Just a thought...

The efficient allocation of land depends on knowing the usefulness of apples, oranges, artichokes, wheat and a gazillion other things. In other words...

How land is divided among apples, oranges, artichokes, wheat and a gazillion other things depends on their usefulness. For example, no farmland is allocated to poison oak. Why not? Because it isn't useful.

Now let's think about the internet. To some extent land is a relevant resource. But by far the most relevant resource is ATTENTION. The major concern is how to allocate attention.

What does the efficient allocation of attention depend on? It depends on determining the usefulness of all the different webpages. Just like we don't want to waste any farmland on poison oak, we don't want to waste any attention on pages that are the equivalent of poison oak.

The efficient allocation of resources depends on determining the usefulness of things.

Do you dispute any of this?