They are a bit harsh, but I count myself among the strongly "free
software"
people he tweaked at the talk. His talk was excellent, certainly.
But his personal politics were definitely showing through, and that's
not always good.
> > 1) The whole dogs/wolves/humans analogy. Wrong. All of the
> > aforementioned animals are SOCIAL creatures. Presumably, the
> > "territoriality" he mentions exists to facilitate social interaction.
> > And that approach, although it doesn't fit his individualist
> > political views, fits better with his comments on the open
> > source development community, rather than some dubious
> > explanation of how animals are "hardwired" with an intuitive
> > notion of property.
>
> I think he meant it as a general example of both. Wolves aren't, by
> anyone's common understanding, considered "social" creatures. They travel
> in a pack, for security maybe, but when food is scarce they'll fight each
> other to the death over it, or for male dominance or for territory. There
> is, however, a certain "code" and a mechanism for marking territory that
> wolves respect, so that they don't all kill each other. Humans do the
> same thing, only much more formally with fences and property laws. I
> believe this is the trend to which he was referring.
I was there you know. I'm quite aware of the point he was *trying* to
make.
But the truth is, social animals don't stake claims to resources because
they
want to protect their right to control the resources. They develop
pecking
orders because they HAVE A FUNDAMENTAL NEED TO SHARE RESOURCES. This,
again,
fits in with the gist of the talk. HIS SPIN on the wolf
"territoriality"
fit better with his personal, individualist, libertarian politics,
rather
than the ethos of the Open Source community he was describing.
> > 3) The N^2 bit was worked a bit too hard. Handwavy. How is a
> > "control" hierarchy N^2 in complexity? It would seem that
> > any hierarchy is logarithmic in complexity by nature... the
> > proper model is a tree.
>
> No, becuase on many programming projects, each individual must communicate
> with every other individual... no groups ever function in a perfect
> hierarchical structure. (If we could, we wouldn't have problems with
> bureaucracies in the United States). If you need to know something about
> Joe's code, you don't send an email to the prog. manager and wait for a
> reply, possibly with second-hand muddled information, you send an email
> directly to Joe. Thus the n^2 communication network.
Right. On _programming_ projects. Still hand wavy, but certainly
believable.
What my criticism applies to is his anthro-politico-economic rant (the
nubile
young women part of the lecture -- "control scarcity economics" was the
term he used I think) -- and how that whole economy doesn't scale).
That
whole economy scales very well, its not N^2 as he would have us believe.
Or do you think the bureaucratic overhead of running the roman empire
was N^2?
-C
>
> -C.2
>
> _____________________________________________________________
> | Brian Carp | P.O.Box 202627 |
> | Yale University | New Haven, CT |
> | Calhoun College '01 | 06520-2627 |
> | 203-436-0471 | brian.carp@yale.edu |
> -------------------------------------------------------------
-- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Christopher Cantor Room 502, Dept. of Computer Science Yale University, P.O. Box 208285 New Haven, CT 06520-8285 email: cantor-christopher@cs.yale.edu phone: 203/432-0677 fax: 203/432-0593 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++