Been considering a MacBookPro for my next computer, feel most at home with macosx. Not Anymore.  Apple just lost another customer.

Among the 20 claims submitted [6] to the Federal Court and the International Trade Commission are patents for the seemingly straightforward “Object Oriented Graphic System,” the widely used “Unlocking a Device By Performing Gestures on an Unlock Image” and the brain-twisting “Method for providing automatic and dynamic translation of object oriented programming language-based message passing into operation system message passing using proxy objects.” Whew.
Interestingly, two of those (Nos. 1 and 3) predate the iPhone by more than a decade. Apple’s really reaching deep into its patent toy chest here.
I’m not a trademark attorney (thank god), and I truly believe people who invent groundbreaking technologies should reap the rewards — but not at the expense of stifling innovation elsewhere. Even if you created the first device that lets you make things happen when you smear your finger across a touch screen doesn’t mean that you should be able to prevent other folks from making a better way to smear. That is the beauty of open source [7], which Google embraced with Android [8].
Imagine how the automobile industry would have evolved if, say, Henry Ford managed to patent the steering wheel and the accelerator pedal, while Walter P. Chrysler owned the rights to the stick shift and the rearview mirror. Every time we climbed behind the wheel — er, inside the driver seat — of an unfamiliar car, we’d be starting from scratch.
Of course, there are companies who simply buy up patents on the open market and wait for an opportunity to pounce on somebody with deep pockets [9]. The fact that the U.S. patent system [10] still keeps trolls alive and well fed (especially those who line up at the trough in the Eastern District of Texas) is an ongoing disgrace.
Apple is not a patent troll by any stretch. It actually makes products people buy, and it filed suit in Delaware, not Texas. Still, it sends a chill through the air at precisely the time that mobile computing is getting really exciting [11] — in large part because Apple finally has some serious competition. And you get the feeling Apple’s lawyers are just getting warmed up.
via Apple vs. HTC: No matter who wins, we lose.

Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Memorial prize in 2002 for his work with Tversky, who died before the award was bestowed. In a lovely passage in his Nobel biography, Kahneman looks back on his deep collaboration with Tversky and calls for a new form of academic cooperation, marked not by turf battles but by “adversarial collaboration,” a good-faith effort by unlike minds to conduct joint research, critiquing each other in the service of an ideal of truth to which both can contribute.
via The Big Picture » Blog Archive » Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory.

So the movie’s thesis is that to be happy, we must self-deceive and embrace incorrect but inspiring far-view ideals, such love, friendship, altruism, laughter, art, and fiction. This thesis affirms a core ideal we seem desperate to believe: that common far ideals have little practical function. For example, we want to think that our loves of fiction or laughter are “true” loves, and do little to achieve base and personal purposes.
In fact of course our far ideals evolved to serve concrete, practical, and largely personal functions. A world without lies would still contain art, laughter, fiction, etc. – we’d just be more honest about the functions they serve. But that is a truth we dare not tell; we’d actually rather believe that most of our other cherished ideals are lies.
via Overcoming Bias : The Biggest Lie?.

No Offense Offends

By Robin Hanson · March 2, 2010 10:00 am · Discuss · « Prev · Next »

no offense – A phrase used to make insults seem socially acceptable.

On Facebook, Greg Benford said:

When I ignore requests for drinks, cupcakes, palm trees, etc. to take part Mafia Wars it’s not a statement about the folks who are enjoying such pursuits. If I accepted this invitation to play in a space fleet game (how cool is that?) I would never get anything done. It’s so easy to get distracted as a writer which is why I’m declining all these lovely invitations. Now back to work.

I responded:

You are making a good choice, but you can’t avoid the fact that your choice is also a statement about the choices that others make.

Greg often faces a choice between playing and getting work done, and he seems to usually respect more the choice to get work done.  When he sees other folks choose instead to play, surely he must infer a substantial chance that they faced a similar choice but made the choice he respects less.
via Overcoming Bias : No Offense Offends.

I tried explaining this to a friend and ended up in a big argument.  It’s hard to explain things. Communication among human and between animals are awesome when seen in this light.

What is Bayesianism?

50Kaj_Sotala26 February 2010 07:43AM

This article is an attempt to summarize basic material, and thus probably won’t have anything new for the hard core posting crowd. It’d be interesting to know whether you think there’s anything essential I missed, though.
You’ve probably seen the word ‘Bayesian’ used a lot on this site, but may be a bit uncertain of what exactly we mean by that. You may have read the intuitive explanation, but that only seems to explain a certain math formula. There’s a wiki entry about “Bayesian”, but that doesn’t help much. And the LW usage seems different from just the “Bayesian and frequentist statistics” thing, too. As far as I can tell, there’s no article explicitly defining what’s meant by Bayesianism. The core ideas are sprinkled across a large amount of posts, ‘Bayesian’ has its own tag, but there’s not a single post that explicitly comes out to make the connections and say “this is Bayesianism”. So let me try to offer my definition, which boils Bayesianism down to three core tenets.
We’ll start with a brief example, illustrating Bayes’ theorem. Suppose you are a doctor, and a patient comes to you, complaining about a headache. Further suppose that there are two reasons for why people get headaches: they might have a brain tumor, or they might have a cold. A brain tumor always causes a headache, but exceedingly few people have a brain tumor. In contrast, a headache is rarely a symptom for cold, but most people manage to catch a cold every single year. Given no other information, do you think it more likely that the headache is caused by a tumor, or by a cold?
If you thought a cold was more likely, well, that was the answer I was after. Even if a brain tumor caused a headache every time, and a cold caused a headache only one per cent of the time (say), having a cold is so much more common that it’s going to cause a lot more headaches than brain tumors do. Bayes’ theorem, basically, says that if cause A might be the reason for symptom X, then we have to take into account both the probability that A caused X (found, roughly, by multiplying the frequency of A with the chance that A causes X) and the probability that anything else caused X. (For a thorough mathematical treatment of Bayes’ theorem, see Eliezer’s Intuitive Explanation.)
There should be nothing surprising about that, of course. Suppose you’re outside, and you see a person running. They might be running for the sake of exercise, or they might be running because they’re in a hurry somewhere, or they might even be running because it’s cold and they want to stay warm. To figure out which one is the case, you’ll try to consider which of the explanations is true most often, and fits the circumstances best.
via Less Wrong: What is Bayesianism?.