Infected Mushroom $1
Xerographica $2
You can answer the same question with voting and/or donating*. To participate in the donating poll, make a donation to NS and reply to this thread how you want it divided between Infected Mushroom (IM) and myself. Please round your donation up (ie $2.99 -> $3) and make even dollar divisions (ie IM: $2 Xero: $1).
If you love this website, but needed a nice nudge to support it, then voila! Here it is! Plus, as an additional perk, you can use your donation to help judge the relative usefulness of IM and myself.
In case you were wondering, IM agreed beforehand to participate in this informal fundraiser. The reason why I chose him is because I personally find his thread topics to be useful. Basically, I see him as my closest competitor. So I figured it would be interesting to see how everyone ranks us by usefulness.
Naturally I’m especially interested to see how much difference there’s going to be between the voting poll and the donating poll. As some of you might already know, I believe that spending is better than voting at measuring usefulness. So I perceive that it’s a really big problem that we use voting to rank so many things… such as Youtube videos.
On Youtube I’ve recently been watching and enjoying the original Cosmos. In one episode Carl Sagan said that our “ancestors groped in darkness to make sense of their surroundings." This is certainly true, but not just of our ancestors. Prior to watching that episode I had been groping around Andrew Gelman’s blog where I discovered, thanks to a comment by Steve Sailer, a talk that Paul Krugman gave in 1996… What Economists Can Learn From Evolutionary Theorists. He said that…
[Evolution-minded economists] want to represent decisions as the result of some process of groping through alternatives, a process in which it may take a long time to get to a maximum - and in which the maximum you find may well be local rather than global.
Later in his talk he gave the example of how life solely consisted of unicellular organisms for several billion years. Why did it take so long for multicellular organisms to evolve and how, exactly, did they evolve? What if it had only taken them a billion years to evolve? How different would life now be? I’m guessing that we’d be much better gropers.
I sure wish that I was a much better groper… it took me over two decades to discover Krugman’s really enjoyable talk, which might be even more enjoyable than his 1997 article… In Praise of Cheap Labor. That article also took me way too long to discover. If you compare his article and/or talk to his recent articles then you’d notice that he really lost his loving feeling for markets. So from my perspective, Krugman went from being a terrific groper to being a terrible groper. His labor became a lot less useful to me personally. Does it matter how useful his labor is to me? Does it matter whether my labor is more, or less, useful to you than IM’s labor?
If it does matter how we perceive the usefulness of each other’s behavior, then it’s important to figure out whether voting or spending is a better form of feedback. My best guess is that spending is a much better form of feedback, so embracing it would transform us into a much better group of gropers, which would greatly improve our grasp of reality.
Here’s some useful reading…
10 Things You Don't Know about Yourself by Steve Ayan
A Hidden Promise in the Language Cells Use to Communicate by Carrie Arnold
A Marxist perspective on cancer by PZ Myers
Early Multicellularity by Brandon Keim
From Groups to Individuals: Evolution and Emerging Individuality by Johannes Martens
Homosexuality and evolution by PZ Myers
How Did Multicellular Life Evolve? by Charles Q. Choi
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Peter Kropotkin
The evolution of costly displays, cooperation and religion by Joseph Henrich
The False Allure of Group Selection by Steven Pinker
The Philosophy of Social Evolution by Jonathan Birch
And here are some useful passages from The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins...
Please discuss the following:
1. Does it matter how useful you are to us?
2. Does feedback improve cooperation?
3. Is voting or spending a better form of feedback?
4. Should donating polls replace banner ads and pop-ups?
What say you NSG?
[The donation poll last updated to include Xero's input]
*Previous donations cannot be applied to current donating polls