In which I discuss a situation where people are wrong. ON THE INTERNET!

Almost everyone my age that I talk with on a regular basis reads xkcd either regularly, or semi-regularly. I also happen to think that most of the people that I talk to on a regular basis are a) intelligent and b) capable of critical thought. Thus, I think I can conclude that there is some merit to xkcd, supposing my claims above are true.

So, for reasons that I cannot determine, I have become fascinated with the website xkcdsucks. I don't know why and I can't stop reading it. Essentially, they complain about every single comic (every single one) and point out some flaws in it. Sometimes their claims are justified, for example this comic is pretty nonsensical, although it still has its charm. But the xkcdsucks post would have you thinking this comic is the worst travesty ever foisted on mankind.

Now of course, no one is forcing me to read their rants, but similarly no one is forcing them to read xkcd (and the forums as they often do), so I'm not too far off complaining about it. In particular, in their search to find something to complain about, they often completely misunderstand the comic. This is not so bad, but it makes me very cranky when opinions are passed off as facts.

As an example, let's take a look at this comic:
I think this comic is hilarious. Even if you have no idea who Russell, Whitehead and Godel are, I think it's still pretty funny. Now, let's take a look at the xkcdsucks rant about it (the title of which is the best part).

In all fairness, most of the post wasn't written by the regular poster, but it typifies the sorts of arguments used (except that it's more polite).

There are two arguments here. The first starts by attempting to liken this to classical self referential paradoxes like "This statement is false." The author then goes on to state that Godel wasn't the one who came up with lots of contradictions, Russell did. This may be true, and indeed this joke is kind of like the paradox that Russell is known for, but Russel was not the first to come up with these sorts of things, nor was he the last. For example, "this statement is false" comes from Aristotle's works. And certainly Godel did provide a doosie of a paradox, as we'll see shortly

The second argument is that there is no contradiction. The argument works like this: suppose the set of fetishes is finite. Then the answer "everything not on your list" is the same as saying "nothing." But this proof is silly. The comic's Godel says anything not on your list. If there are an infinite amount of things (which their certainly are if we allow for numbers to be things), then there will always be something that is not on the list, no matter how long the list is (unless it is infinitely long, and that's stupid).

So, the mathy criticisms are gone, let me point out why I think this comic is brilliant. Basically, it compresses Godel's incompleteness theorem into one frame. Godel's theorem says: given any sufficiently sophisticated set of basic axioms, there will be a contradiction. The contradiction that will arise is essentially exactly what Godel is saying, that you'll be able to create a statement that says "I am not in your system." This meant that the work that Russell and Whitehead were attempting (a complete acclimatization of mathematics) was impossible without introducing contradictions.

What really made me cranky about the critique was the line that says " And Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica contains rules explicitly designed to rule out the introduction of such paradoxes" The whole point of Godel's Theorem is that you can't do this.

All in all, my point is thus (and nothing on the internet makes me more cranky than this) if you're going to criticize something, you could at least make sure you're not wrong in a provable way. Having opinions is fine, but don't go making claims that can be shown to be wrong.

Is Piracy Theft?

I've been on the internet a long time, and it looks like that time has finally come, as it must for every netizen eventually. That time when I must give my thoughts on the problem of Piracy on the web.

I was spurred to do so by the recent Penny Arcade comic and post "A Cyclical Argument With A Literal Strawman". You don't have to read it, the part I am responding to is the underlying assumption that Piracy is an immoral act. Laying aside, for the moment, any arguments which are at their core, "morality is relative, and thusly does not exist." I will broadly allow morality to be a reflection of the core values of our society. So, murdering people is bad (typically, except in war) because as a species we think it is bad. Take whatever you think of as "moral" behaviour and ride along with that.

By piracy, I don't mean stealing a ship and sailing the seas looking for plunder, I mean copying distributing or receiving someone else's intellectual property, without their permission. Broadly speaking, this is theft, and therefore wrong. However, the advent of the digital age changes how piracy works. The OED defines theft as " the felonious taking away of the personal goods of another" (along with some other, irrelevant definitions). If I make a copy of a song, that hasn't directly taken anything away from the artist, so it isn't directly theft. However, under the usual assumptions of our capitalist system, I should pay the artist for their work, at a price they have set. If I do not do this, then I have cost them money.

The entire concept of western capitalism rests on the following idea: for any good, every person values that good some number of dollars. The vendor sells that good for some number of dollars, and if it is being vended for less than or equal to its value, a person will buy it. It is a simple idea we all understand and has served us tolerably well for hundreds of years.

Usually, the vendor selects a price based on 1) guesses about consumer's valuation of the good and 2) how much the good costs to make. But in the digital age, the good costs absolutely nothing to make. Instead, you have your initial cost of creation, and then everything else is profit.

Suppose, for example, I am making a video game. I have 100 employees. It takes them 100 hours each to finish it, and I am paying them $30 per hour. So, I have spent a total of 30x100x100 = $300 000 on making my game. If I sell my game digitally, then I have little to no extra cost per copy sold. Let us suppose that we sell the video game for $30, and we find 200 000 people who value that game as more than $30. Then they will all buy it, and we've made $300 000 in the process.

But suppose there are more people out there who value the game at $5. They wouldn't buy it at $30, but they would at $5. Under the assumptions of the capitalist system, they won't get to play the game (until the price drops low enough after enough time has gone by. Unless the game you made is Starcraft, and it never drops that low). So, we have all these people who would like to play the game, but not enough to pay the full price. Thus, the video game developer would never get any money from them anyways.

The central idea of piracy is to allow these people to play the game. It hasn't cost the developer anything, since they wouldn't have paid anyhow, but more people are able to play the game. One can also assume that occasionally someone who pirates a game will actually buy it if they like it. In this case, what the pirates are doing can hardly be seen as theft, since it takes nothing away from those who hold the copyright. Thus, piracy is not always an immoral action.

That said, many people pirate games/music/videos simply because they can. These people have the means and the ability to purchase the media, but choose instead to download it for free. This is theft, and is morally wrong. The only possible justification is that the entire copyright system is morally bankrupt, and thusly, it cannot be wrong to thwart it. That's a pretty dumb argument though, since firstly two wrongs don't make a right, and secondly, it's pretty hard to say that copyright has no redeeming value.

Content creators aren't dumb, and they know about the first group of pirates, but they care mostly about the second. Those are the ones who are the most vocal, and cause the most damage. I think I can safely say that the content industry cannot hope to prevail against this group. There has never ever to my knowledge been a successful stoppage of piracy. The pirates always get around any protective measures, and they always will.

And here is where we get to what the music industry has finally realized, as will the other industries eventually. Give up. You can't win against the pirates, so stop trying. Instead, offer easy to use, hassle free media with easily circumventable protection. I suspect it would actually boost profits, since you don't have to sink money into protecting your stuff.

The other issue is to address the first group of pirates. The people who want to use what you have, but don't want to pay the full price. Things like student pricing are a good idea, but it could be better. I'm not sure how, but if we could somehow figure out what everyone's valuation of a good was, and offer it to them at that price, maybe you could make even more money. Some kind of barter based system might be effective. The theories of economics that underpin our marketplace are ill suited to the digital world, and I think that instead of trying to change the digital world to fit our theories, we should really be changing our theories to fit with the digital world. After all, that is the point of a theory.

The problem with the whole debate over piracy is that each side accuses the other of immoral behaviour. Each side is justified in what they do, but neither side seems to understand that they're arguing different things. The pirates are arguing that the copyright system is flawed, and the content creators are arguing that piracy is theft. Both and neither are true, and I think it's high time we found a new way of looking at it.