It’s oft forgotten that U.S. intellectual property constructs were created not purely for the natural rights of individual creators, but as an incentive for public benefit: “to promote the progress of science and useful arts”.
It was common in the late 18th century to provide a rationale for the passage of a law, but the law itself by its very passage becomes legitimate irrespective of whether it fulfills its stated purpose. The rationale doesn't restrict the scope of the law, it's simply a belt onion: there because "it was the style at the time".
Courts have ruled that the justification in the Second Amendment, of establishing and protecting "a well-regulated Militia", does not bind the amendment to apply only to the establishment and protection of a body designated as the militia (e.g., the National Guard).
Similarly, IP laws need not "promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts" to be legitimate. If Congress passes IP laws to protect large cartels with no public benefit, and maybe even public harm, those laws are in full force and 100% constitutional.
I don't claim that original intent has any bearing on copyrights/patents being enforceable or legitimate. Similar to the 18th Amendment vs. the Volstead Act, the Constitution merely authorizes the power to the state, while specific laws of Congress handle the details.
I'm making the upstream normative claim: so long as we have intellectual property (there are certainly moral and practical arguments against it), laws passed by Congress should reflect that intent: that temporary artificial monopolies also carry positive externalities to society at large. While incentives for creation are certainly part of that story, I think there is a strong case for reforming that balance: shortening copyrights, limiting/eliminating patents on software and business methods, and strengthening fair use and consumer rights.
> does not bind the amendment to apply only to the establishment and protection of a body designated as the militia
It does, but only because US code says that there's two militias. The organized militias (the National Guards), and the unorganized militias consisting of every able bodied man 17-45. Since the 14th amendment was written later, that bit of code is now interpreted to mean all adults.
That's not the interpretation used by the Supreme Court in D.C. v. Heller:
> The Supreme Court held:
> (1) The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Pp. 2–53.
> (a) The Amendment's prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause. The operative clause's text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms. Pp. 2–22.
If you read the decision, it actually is the interpretation used by the Supreme Court there. You can actually see this in the next bullet that you cut off
> (b) The prefatory clause comports with the Court's interpretation of the operative clause. The "militia" comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. The Antifederalists feared that the Federal Government would disarm the people in order to disable this citizens' militia, enabling a politicized standing army or a select militia to rule. The response was to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms, so that the ideal of a citizens' militia would be preserved. Pp. 22–28.
You can also see this clearly in US v. Miller, where sawed off shotguns were allowed to banned only because they had no military use (at the time). The unorganized militia must be allowed to use military weapons, which is why you can still go out and buy all sorts of crazy stuff like miniguns if you have enough money.
In the US, copyright protection is automatically granted as soon as a protected work is fixed in a tangible form[1], so it's not possible for the Library of Congress to store all copyrighted material.
The article has some great examples of risks that were hyped out of proportion to their true severity. Should these things be considered? Yes. But only a little. If you halt programs completely for tail risks you'll never get anywhere.
Modern examples, IMO, are:
- Kessler Syndrome
- Trying to prevent an asteroid hitting the earth
- Nuclear war making the entire earth uninhabitable
In the documentary The Man Who Saved The World, Stanislav Petrov travels to meet Kevin Costner, his favourite actor, at home. Costner asks him, if he hadn't acted as he did, how many people would have died. You expect him to say, 50 million, or something. He says, everyone. Everyone on earth would've died. It's a chilling moment. (And there's been a lot more than that one near miss.) What kind of crazy species are we that we build a system that when it malfunctions (as it did that day) seems likely to kill everyone on the planet?!
Now I read on HN that the danger of nuclear war is hyped out of proportion to its true severity, and should be considered only a little. Sorry, maybe I misunderstand. I have read a similar thing on HN a few times though, people that seem to think nuclear war really would be no big deal at all.
But it always seems weird to be how some people are so worried to the point of obsession about global warming without apparently ever giving a thought to the ever-present risk of full-scale nuclear war—something infinitely worse. (Well, hardly "war", just a flurry of button-pressing for a few minutes.)
Nuclear war (especially during the cold war, when we had much more warheads than now) would absolutely be a big deal and a horrible mass death, but it would not have ended humanity.
Like, if there's a scale of catastrophic events that goes from 0 to 10 where 0 is no big deal and 10 is human extinction, then the worst events humanity has ever seen are somewhere below 1 on that scale and absolutely horrific mass death is something like 2/10 - because the gap between the damage required for that and damage required for extinction is so much larger than the gap between no big deal and worse mass death than we have ever seen. Arguably the worst damage that life on Earth has seen is the dinosaur-ending asteroid, and IMHO a fraction homo sapiens (though perhaps not our civilization) could survive even that. A full scale USSR-USA exchange in 1960s might perhaps kill most people in the northern hemisphere and perhaps cause a nuclear winter decreasing crop yields with an associated famine - but if just a fraction of people in South Asia and Africa and South America survive the famine while the North nukes themselves to radioactive glasslands, that's very, very far from extinction.
Killing half of humanity would literally be an unprecedented level of horror, but it would not end our civilization; killing 90% of humanity would likely end our civilization-as-we-know it but would not end our species, that would bring us to the population level that Earth had in 1700s; and killing 99.99% of humanity would definitely destroy our civilization but it would "just" push back our population growth to the numbers we had ~70 000 years ago - horrific for every individual, but still not an extinction event.
And, in particular, I also think that nuclear winter is another one of these over-hyped scenarios. If you do the napkin-math it doesn't really work out.
Nuclear war will probably result in every major metropolitan area in the participating countries being obliterated. But I'm willing to bet that non participating countries will survive with their civilization intact. Especially countries with high food security that can deal with total collapse of international trade.
Every action carries that risk somewhere in its very long tail. You have to assess the likelihood of the bad event occurring, and there is a point where it is so unlikely that it need not be considered at all. I don't think humanity is quite stupid enough to knowingly release its Ice-9 just yet.
> If you halt programs completely for tail risks you'll never get anywhere.
If your tail risk is the end of civilization then it doesn't matter how small the probability. You'd be fucked with certainty on any long enough timeframe.
Some tail risks are to large to take. Eventually your number comes up.
I think you mean "probability" rather than severity. The severity of setting the atmosphere on fire is extreme, but the probability turned out to be vanishingly small. Or perhaps you mean risk, probability times severity. Which also turned out to be negligible for the events in the article.
Some other hyped risks: -
- Artificial General Intelligence
- CRISPR gene editing
- Gain-of-function work with viruses
I have no way of assessing the risks, and there is a lot of hyperventilation in some circles
It's just that a name is a case-sensitive string. If you said 'france is having a heatwave', 'FrAnCE is having a heatwave', or 'FRANCE is having a heatwave', I would be confused.
It has some criticism, but IMO this is a very simple and effective method. And there are better ideas out there too.
I think we can even build a mechanical machine (like out of buttons connected to stamps/ink) that can create valid threeballots. That way you don't have to explain the instructions.
Approximately half the math textbooks I study from basically do this already. It works very well, but IMO mostly because the questions are not easy. You actually have to stop and think for a few minutes before moving on.
The problem is that directly in front of a microwave antenna, power output is on the KW order of magnitude. This is like standing in front of a microwave oven with the door open - in a few seconds you will have severe burns.
This is interesting because I work with professional mathematicians and they are the exact opposite. They always start off with a semi-formalized idea and play with it a lot before trying to hone in on something formal. And conversely they have absolutely no problem listening to / thinking about non-rigorous ideas. They also do excellent work, so I would say this is a positive trait wrt productivity.
One way to shorten the time is to constantly increase hospital capacity, so that in each month lets you infect more people. Especially if plasma donations turn out to work to reduce severe cases.
Another way is to separate young people from old people more effectively. Then you might be able to permit 1m young people to be infected each month with the same hospital budget we have today
That's assuming that the only two outcomes of a SARS-2 infection are "dead" and "completely recovered". There are case reports of young and otherwise healthy adults who survived SARS-2, but where a CT shows the lung tissue mostly obliterated. Sure, they survive, but running a marathon or going on that diving vacation might be a sudden death sentence for them.
I hope we can get actual studies soon because the anecdata is scary to me. I hope these stories only make news because they are rare not just because it happens to be a celebrity:
It's a relatively natural consequence of the fact that doing work creates value. One of the things you can work towards is creating more workers (by creating more humans, or better efficiency, or robots). Because these processes are basically exponential, you expect to see constant neverending growth.
The only real physical limit to productivity is our energy input. When we create things, we use energy and time to turn raw materials into useful stuff. Today most of our energy comes from the plants we eat (ie the sun) and from the ground. But we are not close to using even a small fraction of the energy that the sun gives us, so there is still lots of room to grow.
It used to be that LoC submission was part of the deal with copyright, but somehow we forgot that and important history has already been lost.