[Noisebridge-discuss] an interesting potentiometer failure mode (tin whiskers!)

Danny O'Brien danny at spesh.com
Sat Dec 22 04:42:35 UTC 2012


On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 3:46 AM, Taylor Alexander <tlalexander at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's been lots of interesting articles over the past year. I'd seen these
> before, as I have many articles. Of course not everyone has seen them, but
> the same could be said about many, many things posted on the internet. All I
> asked for was why the OP felt like sharing them. She posted them without
> making any effort to explain why she thought they were worth putting in my
> inbox. If the articles were new, posting them would make sense - we could
> assume that the author wanted to call out attention to something urgent. But
> when something has been kicking around the web for a year, the author seems
> to be assuming that we didn't already know about it. I guess my point was:
> "Explain why the F you post something when you post something, don't just
> link us to old articles without saying why". Not to be combative, but to
> encourage more thoughtful posts.
>

Taylor, if  you have a belief model that people are "putting things in
your inbox", you've already put two more emails in around a thousand
people's inboxes which are just rhetorical questions that you can't
really expect the first person to answer. (I don't actually have that
model, which means I can share #3.)

More widely, you're not going to win that fight here. Basically you
have two historically successful options here: mailing to say
something about Noisebridgey things that people may not have heard of,
or saying *lovely* things about people you love. Everything else turns
into troll and heartbreak, believe me.

That said, if you want to be rude or have a fight, we can arrange a
duel for the honor of your inbox at Noisebridge, if you like.

ObFactual:
Actually, I'm reading this really intriguing book at the moment called
"Institutional Revolution"
http://www.amazon.com/Institutional-Revolution-Measurement-Emergence-Governments/dp/0226014746
which has this universal theory about why we went from
almost-incomprehensible-from-a-modern-perspective institutions like
aristocracies, duelling, and paid-for naval commissions to more modern
institutions in a short period of time.

The author, Douglas Allen argues that the old institutions existed
because of the impossibility of accurately measurement human behaviour
vs the confounding effects of nature. I.e, you couldn't actually tell
whether someone was say a good and reliable servant, because for all
the things that they had control over, there were far more things that
they had no control over than the modern era, and no measurement
mechanism for determining the difference. He then goes on to argue
that a lot of the weirder institutions from our perspective were
actually economically sensible attempts in response to this.

Duelling was one example -- the aristocracy, he claims, developed
because of the challenges of establishing trustworthy and non-cheating
individuals when the Monarch/State was depending on them to conduct
actions on its behalf. The solution was to evolve a social institution
where "aristocrats" had to sink an incredible amount of hostage
capital --- investment that was no good for anything but being
recognised as a 'good aristocrat' -- so that if they did cheat, they
lost a huge investment that could not be recouped anywhere else.
Duelling was one of the ways of guarding entry to this group: by
requiring 'good aristocrats' to always respond to a duel, aristocrats
were required to demonstrably be willing to risk their life in
pursuance of aristocratic values, which meant they were committing
even more to depending on their good name within a narrow social
enclave.

I'm reading this because I was interested in the challenges of
environments where people choose not to measure or survey individual
behaviour, and alternative models to discourage cheating or
free-riding. Which is why I think that Noisebridgians should now have
a policy of challenging people to duels for the slightest perceived
infraction.


>
> On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 3:28 AM, Robert "Finny" Merrill
> <rfmerrill at berkeley.edu> wrote:
>>
>> I found them interesting.
>
>
>
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