[HN Gopher] The Paradox of Abundance
___________________________________________________________________
The Paradox of Abundance
Author : imartin2k
Score : 156 points
Date : 2021-01-12 13:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (perell.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (perell.com)
| fullstackchris wrote:
| > Gresham's Law, a finance concept which states that bad money
| drives out good money until only bad money is left. Gresham's Law
| can explain why the median consumer reads low-quality information
| online
|
| I disagree. I think it has way more to do with the fact that
| creating noise or uniformed posts, content, etc., even up to the
| point of sloppy journalism, is produced in such a higher quantity
| than good and information-rich sources just because it is easier
| to produce.
|
| "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by
| stupidity". Or, in this case, ignorance / laziness as a
| substitute or part of that stupidity.
| mrfredward wrote:
| >"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained
| by stupidity"
|
| We really need to stop using Hanlon's razor when discussing
| businesses at scale. It is a great rule of thumb for everyday
| people, who are much more careless than malicious. With
| business though, there is too much money to be made by being
| shady and then hiding behind plausible deniability to always
| give the benefit of the doubt.
|
| Outside hospital billing companies make mistakes all the time.
| It seems adequately explained by stupidity...until you realize
| the mistakes heavily tend in favor of overcharging. If the
| people who designed the system are benefitting from a
| systematic error, don't use Hanlon's razor.
|
| If a delivery driver leaves your package at the wrong house,
| it's almost certainly an honest error. If a near monopoly
| delivery service constantly loses packages while heavily
| advertising package insurance, then there might be a reason
| they aren't improving their internal processes. (this isn't in
| reference to anything, I made up an example that could be
| either)
|
| Anyway, off my rant and to your specific example: In the case
| of journalism...if clickbait headlines about stupid
| controversies outperform well written articles, then I have to
| think media executives know exactly what they're doing when
| they tell a journalist to bang out a dozen garbage articles a
| day.
| illwrks wrote:
| My theory is that it's a combination of too many graduates
| produced with a lower quality of skill, and the removal of
| editors and traditional information filters.
| simonh wrote:
| I think that's a distinction without a difference. Low quality
| coins and low quality information are both easier/cheaper to
| produce and so dominate. It's the same effect.
| kgwgk wrote:
| The point of Gresham's Law is that good coins are retired
| from circulation because they are worth more than bad coins
| even though their face value as money is the same. That's why
| you don't see many silver dollars being used to pay for
| groceries at the supermarket. If you have a silver dollar you
| don't mix it with the rest of your dollars.
|
| How does the analogy with online information work?
| [deleted]
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Bad content drowns out good content, perhaps? "...until only
| bad is left" is a bit of absolutism that we haven't reached yet
| on the tubes.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It seems that Gresham's Law does not fully apply here.
| Otherwise all high quality journalists would disappear.
|
| Gresham's Law in financial case is underpinned by two things.
| First, it is in core interest of every market player to pay
| with low quality money only; but it is not in interest of every
| reader to consume or even pay for low quality content only.
| Second, Gresham's Law only works when an outside authority
| forces you to accept bad money at the same value as good money;
| but there isn't really any equivalent of fiat money in
| journalism. You do not have to click on clickbaity articles at
| the same rate as on quality ones.
| pierrebai wrote:
| The problem with the conclusion is that it assumes identifying
| the healthy information is simple. Fewwilfully choose to be
| wrong. Everyone is convinced to be right. That is the true heart
| of the matter: the absence of self-doubt. (And, in many cases,
| even scorn to those who are not adamant about what they believe.)
|
| To take a topical example, people who believe Trump are doing so
| because they believe he is the source of truth. They chose him
| over others because they think career politicians are a power-
| hungry liars while Trump being an outsider is telling the truth.
| If you start out with this premise, then everything Trump
| supporters do and think makes sense.
|
| It has nothing to do with junk thoughts. It has to do with your
| fundamental beliefs and values.
| kashyapc wrote:
| Somehow I'm reminded of this classic 1841 quote by the Scottish
| writer, Charles Mackay, which sounds as fresh as ever:
|
| _" In reading the history of nations, we find that, like
| individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their
| seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what
| they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds
| upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of
| people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run
| after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more
| captivating than the first [...]_
|
| _" Money, again, has often been a cause of the delusion of
| multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate
| gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a
| piece of paper [...] Men, it has been well said, think in herds;
| it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only
| recover their senses slowly, and one by one."_
|
| -- from his book, titled: 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and
| the Madness of Crowds'
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > The parking lot was full of restaurants, but there were no
| healthy options.
|
| I've found one can find healthy options at most places. It's
| definitely not the easy path, but it definitely can be done. Plus
| for most people their weight issues could be mostly fixed by
| controlling calories. No, you won't get the instagram body that
| way, but you can be in the high-normal BMI range quite simply
|
| EDIT: ok, little caeser's maybe an exception. But here's an
| example from taco bell.
|
| https://www.tacobell.com/food/specialties/power-menu-bowl Add a
| diet drink or have water
| cafard wrote:
| One can argue that the abundance is an ersatz abundance, one of
| cheap goods substituting for time not available. Both parents
| work, home cooking is less manageable or less desirable. Child
| care is a task that rules out going to the gym or other forms of
| exercise. Etc.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| It's an interesting analogy: Our approach to an abundance of food
| vs. our approach to an abundance of information.
|
| Those who benefit from the food abundance seem to explore the
| variety of what's available. They have a wider range of food
| experiences and therefore a broader spectrum of choices.
|
| For food, it's
|
| The strip mall choices vs. 'farm to table'.
|
| What's the spectrum for information?
|
| Vox Clickbait vs. ?
|
| Growing up in the Midwest, every pear I ate was as hard as an
| apple. Typically picked before they were ripe and mom didn't
| ripen them. As an adult in California, the first fresh picked,
| fully ripened pear I ate was incredible. Juice dripped down my
| arm, potent pear flavor, sweet like ice cream. How does one have
| a similar epiphany with information?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > How does one have a similar epiphany with information?
|
| This is a hard problem. It's not like, with food, where you can
| go to an area where some kind of food is actually better and
| experience it (or not as easily). Even giving someone who's
| been on a poor information diet better quality content they may
| not recognize it or even accept it (in contrast to the extreme
| difference between a well-ripened pear and a still hard one).
|
| Culturally, an emphasis needs to be placed on better education
| with a focus on critical thinking. Individually, reading
| broadly and interacting with people of opposing views and
| differing cultures helps a lot. If you grow up in an insular
| community and are told, "The others are heathens", you will
| internalize it and find it difficult to appreciate their
| statements (whether fact or opinion or somewhere in between)
| and consider them. It also helps to become somewhat detached
| and critical of your own views, self-questioning (not self-
| doubt) and introspection allow you to start separating your
| _beliefs_ (opinions and interpretations of facts) from your
| _knowledge_ (the actual factual basis for beliefs, if it
| exists). Then you can start reforming your beliefs and better
| reflect on the beliefs and statements of others.
| deltron3030 wrote:
| > How does one have a similar epiphany with information?
|
| By becoming a paying subscriber. Gated content isn't tweaked
| for search algorithms and primitive human psychology and
| therefore always better (if it's not a scam).
| zzzeek wrote:
| this article reads like a bunch of personal anecdotes and off-
| the-cuff theorizing about subjects for which the writer doesn't
| really have any formal background, trying to hide behind the
| writer's good writing skills (indeed, this person's about page is
| that they run a writing course and it looks like they write about
| just about everything: "My essays cross between topics like
| travel, culture, media, marketing, and technology. ").
|
| We all have lots of off the cuff theories, anecdotes, and
| impressions of the world around us, that's great! I've got
| plenty. But I certainly wouldn't hoist them on everyone with blog
| posts, as though average informal musings about a random subject
| are adding some above-and-beyond value to the subject.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| > as though average informal musings about a random subject are
| adding some above-and-beyond value to the subject.
|
| The website is called perell.com... I mean, it's his own
| website/blog, so there's no "value" on it besides "I enjoy
| writting about stuff and make it public on my blog".
|
| I enjoyed his theories though.
| [deleted]
| nvilcins wrote:
| Pretty sure the axis should have the opposite labels in the
| (only) chart.
| failuser wrote:
| I think that's number of people per fitness cohort, the
| distribution matches the text. Is there empirical data to
| support it? I kind of doubt there is a second peak instead of
| the long tail.
| contravariant wrote:
| Pretty sure 'people' is not a sensible axis. Unless it's
| "number of people" but that doesn't seem right.
| motoboi wrote:
| I understood that is a distribution, not correlation. So, in an
| abundance context, you have the blue distribution, in scarcity
| you have the black.
|
| Not that I personally agree with this ideia.
| Geee wrote:
| Yep, I was confused for a minute.
| jessecurry wrote:
| Just wait until the author visits a small town where people grow
| their own food and raise their own livestock.
| ndr wrote:
| I imagine the author expects it will follow the scarcity-
| scenario. What result would you expect?
| pjc50 wrote:
| How many of those are really left in the west? There are plenty
| of places where people grow food and raise livestock .. which
| feed into the industrial distribution system. Small amounts get
| sold locally via the farm shop system (high quality/price), but
| overwhelmingly to be economically viable you have to be part of
| the "system".
|
| You get a bit of that with Scottish crofters, and I suspect
| some of the remoter parts of Eastern Europe are only loosely
| plugged into the Common Agricultural policy, but subsistence
| farming proper is _extremely hard_. And of course you can 't
| subsistence farm petroleum.
|
| Really the OP article should talk more about quality, and be
| slightly less surprised that in a market system high quality
| (food or information) is more expensive than low quality (food
| or information). And ask whether the consumers have the same
| price-quality mapping as the author.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Small amounts get sold locally via the farm shop system
| (high quality /price), but overwhelmingly to be economically
| viable you have to be part of the "system"._
|
| We have no problem getting most of our food locally, and as
| often than not it's cheaper than the grocery store; eggs,
| meat, vegetables (I'm in Canada, so not much fruit). I assume
| this is fairly common outside the urban centres.
| robochat wrote:
| This is an interesting article which feels plausible and close to
| my own experience - not that I consider myself to be one of these
| ultra people (nothing could be further from the truth). The
| internet contains a wealth of knowledge. However, this is also
| the extract same reasoning and rejection of the mainstream that
| leads people into believing conspiracy theories, trusting snake-
| oil salesmen or joining cults. The idea that the most people are
| sleepy brained sheep but that you can boldly find the hidden
| truth is an enticing lure. The key step then, is deciding who to
| trust to curate your inbox.
| unchocked wrote:
| What drivel - a story revealing the author's feelings of
| superiority due to a carefully controlled diet and fitness
| regime, then extended without rationale to the information arena,
| and finally leaving you at the footer with a pitch for a
| F.A.S.T.(!) writing class.
| nikodunk wrote:
| I liked the article, and didn't read it as super elitist. The
| ad at the bottom seemed pretty separate from the content to me.
|
| I do see how it could be read as superior if you really try
| (because he's juxtaposing fortunate elites with suffering
| average people), but my main takeaway was the clear thinking on
| the parallels between fast food and fast news, and the
| constructive suggestion that the same solutions might apply.
| teucris wrote:
| I felt a tinge of elitism as well from the article - not
| quite as much as OP but it was palpable. I think stems from
| the fact that the author is instructing the reader on how to
| be part of the elite class of information connoisseurs,
| rather than trying to fix the problem posed in a real way for
| everyone.
| fatnoah wrote:
| It reads very much like something written by people in that
| post-college, know everything time of their lives.
| josephjrobison wrote:
| I've witnessed this phenomenon too, and have been guilty
| myself. Any more writing on this concept that you've read?
| sneak wrote:
| > _The Explore Tab on Twitter is the most important newspaper in
| the world. It's littered with celebrity gossip and exaggerated
| political drama -- both of which yield a wide reach but
| incentivize empty content. And yet, as the Paradox of Abundance
| predicts, Twitter is also one of the world's top intellectual
| communities. It's the bedrock of my social and intellectual
| life._
|
| It's a real shame to think about the fact that the platform he so
| adores is heavily censored.
|
| I wonder what this means for the long term future of the global
| west.
| rimeice wrote:
| Very interesting article. I've been thinking mostly about the
| viral spread of _misinformation_, I like how the author extends
| that to _poor information_ and explains the slightly more subtle
| impact that has.
| dghf wrote:
| Not much of a paradox, is it? The more cheap, high-fat, high-
| sugar food is available, the more people will get fat.
|
| It's a truism masquerading as a profundity.
| C19is20 wrote:
| Agree with 'fat', but 'cheap.....high-sugar', does not
| necessarily produce fat.
|
| 200g of white sugar mixed with plain water will get you a long
| way on a bicycle. Carbs for the win.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| The average person doesn't just consume 200g of white sugar +
| water and go for a long ride, run, swim, or row. It's a cheap
| and unsatiating 774 calorie (per a google search) product
| which is then combined with a calorie rich _food_ (not
| beverage) to eventually sate the appetite. The food itself is
| often extra salty (if fast food) which entices the person to
| consume more of the calorie rich, unsatiating drink. And if
| the food is similarly high in sugar it is also unsatiating
| (compared to high fat or high protein food stuffs), which
| leaves the person eating even _more_ calories. If someone
| consumed 5 beverages of that sort a week, that would be an
| extra 3500+ calories (approximately enough to gain one pound)
| on top of whatever their food calories were.
| DSingularity wrote:
| No. People believe that the dynamics of "free markets" where
| people have choices of what to consume/purchase lead to ever
| increasing quality. The author is claiming a the paradox in the
| markets of food/information where this is not true -- abundance
| of choice ruins outcomes for most people while improving it for
| some.
|
| I believe he is correct.
| buran77 wrote:
| I think this sounds like a paradox for those who don't
| realize that the driving force in the market is profit not
| quality.
|
| Most of the options on the market are in a race to the bottom
| regarding price, with a tiny minority being in a race to the
| top regarding quality. In abundance competition makes cheap
| things get cheaper, and good things get better.
|
| The majority of the market will gravitate towards lower
| "price" and most options will target that, pulling down the
| median compared to scarcity. The smaller percentage of the
| population will afford to target the high quality thus
| pushing the maximum achievable higher than in scarcity.
| benlivengood wrote:
| > I think this sounds like a paradox for those who don't
| realize that the driving force in the market is profit not
| quality.
|
| Profit is the driving force in every rational market and
| the quality/price tradeoff is a huge factor in valuation of
| goods. A big problem is information asymmetry. Consumers
| must be experts on every product they buy while producers
| only have to be experts on the products they sell. Some
| consumers do not prioritize being experts on food and so
| undervalue nutritional/dietary properties and overvalue
| appearance, flavor, and convenience which require less
| expertise. A related effect is the paradox of choice making
| it difficult to judge the best value from a selection of
| seemingly identical products and this may also play a role
| in poor nutritional choices.
|
| The problem is excaserbated by mass advertising that
| promises foods are healthy or meet certain dietary
| guidelines while eliding the fact that the products should
| be eaten sparingly and not as a staple, or by directly
| advertising that a cheap food is shiny and yummy.
| buran77 wrote:
| > Consumers must be experts
|
| You're right, the reason I said "price" in quotes is that
| it's usually both intellectual and financial. Very few
| can afford to be experts and make the right choice, then
| pay for that choice.
|
| The confusion related to the driving force is that people
| imagine more choices means more competition, and this
| _must_ bring lower price _and_ higher quality. In reality
| profit is the driving force and profit can come just as
| well from low cost, low quality as from high cost, high
| quality. Abundance brings in a drift between these 2 ends
| of the spectrum, you get extreme low cost with low
| quality, and extreme high quality with high cost.
|
| Most people have no intellectual budget to afford
| identifying the correct option, or the financial budget
| to acquire it. This gets compounded and has some network
| effects so the more low price, low quality choices they
| make, the lower their chances of gaining the necessary
| budget to recover.
| mrkstu wrote:
| I think a middle ground is observable in where retailers
| choose to focus- Walmart is targeting 'price first'
| customers, Costco is targeting 'quality with value'
| customers, Whole Foods is (or at least was, pre-
| acquisition) targeting 'quality first and sometimes only'
| customers.
|
| Customers get to outsource the detailed choices to the
| retailers and the retailers enforces the desired
| quality/cost ratios on their suppliers.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Define quality. For most people for most of human history,
| more calories == more quality. It still tastes better most of
| the time.
|
| Then consider that people might not share your view of what
| quality is.
| dghf wrote:
| > People believe that the dynamics of "free markets" where
| people have choices of what to consume/purchase lead to ever
| increasing quality.
|
| _Some_ people may believe that -- extreme free-market
| libertarians being the most obvious example -- but I 'd be
| surprised if it was a majority view. There doesn't seem to be
| a consensus that food safety regulations are an unnecessary
| irrelevance, for example.
| watwut wrote:
| Author did not shown that "abundance of choice" caused people
| to gain weight or that it caused lack of healthy restaurants
| in that parking lot.
|
| Based on article, there was no healthy choice available.
| tgv wrote:
| It's only a paradox if you think abundance can't possibly be
| bad, or if you think that an abundance is the only way to
| counteract a shortage. Well, just wait until you're in an
| abundance of water.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Is this saying that inequality is inevitable from post-scarcity?
| because that's incredibly stupid.
| [deleted]
| willwashburn wrote:
| States within the US are an interesting example however. The
| timber lands of southern states (e.g. Alabama, Mississippi) are
| some of the most profitable in the world, yet you have some of
| the worst poverty. I'm also thinking of the coal fields of
| Appalachia. And off the top of my head, major oil and gas regions
| are also relatively poor (e.g. Texas panhandle, the Dakotas, the
| Louisiana petrochemical alley).
| NeuNeurosis wrote:
| This is called the Resource Trap.
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/resource-curse.asp
| stainforth wrote:
| I don't see any mention of how in reality its because the
| profits are cordoned off by a select few. Consider the Alaska
| Permanent fund - Appalachia and its industry could provide
| for its poor, but it doesn't.
| the-dude wrote:
| Being Dutch, I am surprised the article doesn't mention the
| _Dutch disease_.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
| [deleted]
| frabjoused wrote:
| I don't see this as any sort of law or pattern. Just a few
| cherrypicked observations shaped to validate his worldview.
| agumonkey wrote:
| > Americans are overweight, not because of scarcity but because
| of abundance
|
| He should have re-read that paragraph.
|
| Does someone understand the graph btw ?
|
| Also I do agree that this era is selling obesity in many forms
| and that the high frequency noise, flood, paradox of choice is
| unhealthy.
|
| There was an article (I forgot where sorry) which claimed that
| difficulty and depth was more in tune with how our system works.
| You don't progress by doing thousands of nanosteps. Maybe I'm too
| masochist but I think it works better. Deep moves, deep rest,
| repeat.
| novok wrote:
| I would contest that. If you dig more into it, you'll find the
| obesity crisis started around the late 70s with a change in
| dietary guidelines and medical guidelines saying basically 'fat
| & meat bad' and 'carbs good' along with the widespread
| introduction of vegetable oils, leading to too much insulin and
| other hormonal effects slowly increasing diabetes & obesity in
| our population.
|
| Read "The Obesity Code" if you want a more detailed description
| with a lot of links to papers and studies for more info.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I mean .. isn't that obvious that obesity goes with abundance
| ?
|
| I'd love to see an staring obese person.
| barrkel wrote:
| > _Does someone understand the graph btw ?_
|
| Yes. A market with decent products for a fair price bifurcates
| into mass-market crap and high-end boutiques. See my other
| comment - I think it's a correct observation.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I wasn't being sarcastic I tried to understand but only got
| confused.
| chrispeel wrote:
| I think the graph shows two probability distributions.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > In theory, a world of information abundance would bring the
| best to the top. Using a classic Econ 101 argument, competition
| should benefit consumers by improving quality.
|
| That argument makes a giant chasm of an assumption about the
| mechanism of the market.
|
| In fact, the main driver of the market is the profit motives of
| publishers and advertisers.
|
| Whilst it is true that one way to profit is to provide sustained
| long term benefit to consumers, that isn't the only viable
| business model. A competing model - short term appeal to
| consumers with long term negative health impacts - co-exists in
| the market and competes for attention and spending.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| What is "quality", though?
|
| Customers can crave things that harm them. For example, alcohol
| and drugs. An efficient market will provide them with whisky
| and crack for very low price, if this is what they want.
|
| Same with bad journalism. Internetesque clickbait is just
| another form of tabloid journalism, and tabloids usually sell
| really well. Daily Mail sells a lot more copies than Financial
| Times.
| [deleted]
| protonfish wrote:
| A great point. I would argue that the "quality" of
| information in this context is a measure of what people
| _want_ to hear, and has little to do with the accuracy or
| usefulness of the information. Using that definition, the
| overwhelming prevalence of misinformation appears to be
| exactly as predicted.
| [deleted]
| fullstackchris wrote:
| All true, and going even further, the sentences following that
| also falsly assume that most people _want_ to read the highest
| quality sources. Wrong. To use the author's reference to
| Twitter as an example, a lot of people, even very intellectual
| ones, use Twitter as just a way to "let steam out" so to speak,
| and other users only engage with content that charges them
| emotionally. Now adays we have days of rage, reaching major
| media coverage, based on trivial crap like the title of the
| First Lady to-be, or hell, even the picture taken for a frickin
| Vogue cover.
|
| Also as you said, the publishers and advertisers have a lot of
| the power, and they know exactly how to push the buttons of our
| human biases and clickbaity titles to get clicks, regardless of
| the quality of the actual things they are advertising.
|
| EDIT: I commented too quickly. The author quickly indeed
| verifies that the opposite is happening :)
| rkachowski wrote:
| the irony of decrying the journalistic pressure to pump out as
| many articles as possible - resulting in lower quality - and then
| promoting your own "FAST writing guide" after the article
| pembrook wrote:
| You can both complain about how a problem was created in the
| first place, AND sell solutions to help people navigate the
| problem at the same time.
|
| I don't see the issue.
|
| What I find ironic, is how much HN despises anybody who tries
| to make money from their work. There's a bizarre ideal here of
| the selfless internet "Mother Theresa," who exclusively works
| on open source projects and only shares things with the world
| out of passion.
|
| You could spend 3 years compiling research on an extremely
| valuable topic and publish it for free...but if you put a
| newsletter sign-up form on the page, somebody here will
| complain about it.
|
| Strange, considering HN is hosted by an entrepreneurship
| incubator.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "but if you put a newsletter sign-up form on the page,
| somebody here will complain about it."
|
| I have a freely accessible blog with 3500 subscribers, there
| is newsletter sign-up form at the bottom of every single
| article, and I haven't heard a single complaint about it ...
| people who actually like to read are a lot more reasonable
| than widely expected.
|
| Or perhaps the prevailing culture on HN is very, very
| different from the wider world.
| [deleted]
| benlivengood wrote:
| > You could spend 3 years compiling research on an extremely
| valuable topic and publish it for free...but if you put a
| newsletter sign-up form on the page, somebody here will
| complain about it.
|
| I think that comes from biased expectations. Any time I see
| an ad for something promising to be high quality I am usually
| disappointed by the actual quality. Conversely when a free
| thing is linked on HN and upvoted to the front page it is
| very likely to actually be high quality.
|
| Therefore my biased assumption for links on HN is that
| P(high_quality | asks_for_money) < P(high_quality |
| totally_free)
|
| I haven't recorded enough information to know how badly
| biased my intuition is.
| rkachowski wrote:
| The "solution" / service presented by the author would make
| the problem worse along the lines of the authors argument,
| that quality is sacrificed for fast article production. Your
| findings fall apart here.
| rubinelli wrote:
| In this case, the irony comes from selling a product that
| will probably make the problem worse by teaching people how
| to pump out articles faster and add to the information glut.
| amarghose wrote:
| That attitude here on HN boggles my mind. Almost every person
| I talk to about this site IRL mentions it. It's a defining
| feature of the community that no one likes.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| But who? Who are the right people?
| simonh wrote:
| I think a key component of Gresham's Law is being missed. It's
| not explicitly called out in the article and critics here saying
| Gresham's law isn't equivalent are right that the article doesn't
| solidly make the case, but I think there is a case to be made.
|
| High quality information and analysis is being sequestered behind
| paywalls. This is exactly equivalent to Gresham's Law, where the
| coins with higher material value are hoarded. High value
| journalism is being hoarded outside the free flow of common
| discourse.
|
| The torrent of low quality information and engagement driven
| 'content' makes it appear that there is an abundance of
| information. In fact in depth analysis, informed opinion and
| investigative journalism have always been expensive. Until
| recently most people would pay for it (newspapers, advertising
| supported news channels, paid cable) because there weren't many
| free information channels. This made it relatively cheap per
| consumer, because there were so many consumers of it.
|
| Now there's a torrent of social media and low value comment
| available free. This is the debased currency, and it absolutely
| is hurting old media style high value journalism, which is being
| hoarded behind paywalls. Readerships are contracting and so the
| price per consumer is getting driven up, so it ends up
| disproportionately in the hands of elites.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| This isn't an example of Gresham's law. Gresham's law effects
| decisions that are hard to evaluate before making and which have
| a price/quality trade-off. The bad drives out the good by means
| of the decision maker being unable to discern ahead of time which
| thing is good (and so making bad things is more profitable than
| good and soon no good things are made).
| tlb wrote:
| You may have a postmodern version in mind, but the actual
| Gresham's law doesn't involve any hard decisions. It says that
| when using coins made of precious metals, people will always
| spend the lightest coins they have. A perfectly rational and
| simple behavior that causes all the circulating coins to be
| underweight.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| This is still the same phenomenon. In your example it is the
| seller who has to decide to accept (or not accept) your
| currency and the buyer is incentivized to give the lowest
| value currency.
|
| To use the car salesman analogy, in your example the _buyer_
| is selling lemons and the _seller_ is deciding to buy.
| zug_zug wrote:
| After reading the wikipedia article, I agree. I don't see what
| the parallel could be for "good information" being taken "out
| of circulation" by hoarders (since it's non-fungible).
|
| Perhaps he intended something like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons, that can
| explain people pitching bad ideas as credible due to
| information asymmetry.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Source or references?
|
| This isn't how Gresham's law is typically discusses AFAIA.
|
| (It _is_ how I consider it, hence my interest.)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Looking like a "greek statue" isn't necessarily healthy -- you
| see so many steroid users fall down from heart attacks at a young
| age.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| I fail to see how looking like a greek statue means steroid
| use.
|
| Not sure how many roids the fit during Greek times had.
| ska wrote:
| This is true - the author asserts that there are more ultra
| healthy people now than at some point in the past with less
| abundance, but this isn't obviously true.
|
| This isn't about steroid use, there is some aesthetic
| popularity to body fat levels that are probably not actually
| healthy, as well as some pretty dubious dietary practice that
| also overlaps in practice with the same population.
|
| On the other hand the regular exercise part is clearly
| positive.
| hacker_9 wrote:
| arnold seems alright
| joncrane wrote:
| He's actually had multiple open heart surgeries.
| Moto7451 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the mental image the author is projecting is of
| someone with a low but healthy body fat percentage and high
| functional muscle. Getting huge, via steroids or otherwise,
| doesn't really match the motif of Greco-Roman sculpture.
|
| https://c.pxhere.com/photos/ac/d2/hercules_statue_greek_anci...
|
| Turning to the point on Steroids. I used to work out at the
| type of gym the author describes. People were mostly in Greek
| statue state (can't say I'm included) and did not appear to be
| on steroids. I moved away from the coasts and the gym next to
| my home clearly has at least a history of steroid use. Everyone
| is _gigantic_. The gym is near several schools with sports
| programs. The lifts are all very heavy. They do not look like a
| statue. More like a Marvel movie character. I'd be surprised to
| find much steroid use in the health focused gym world as no one
| really expressed the same values. They wanted to look good and
| live a long life. They were not looking to lift heavier and
| heavier or look like a walking mountain.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Right - this hopefully isn't too nit-picky because it wasn't
| the focus of the article, but this is probably more about the
| author's stereotypes about what is healthy versus what is
| actually healthy. If you look at the longest lived people in
| the world (e.g. blue zone people), they don't control their
| diet with "surgical precision", and they don't sculpt
| themselves in state of the art gyms, and they don't rely on
| sensors to tell them how their body is doing.
|
| They generally just eat a variety of simple foods in
| moderation, and perform low impact, longer lasting light
| exercises like walking or calisthenics.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My understanding is that those "longest lived people" are in
| places that had bad vital records to begin with or had them
| destroyed in a war and that the long lived people backdated
| their birth date to avoid the draft or otherwise cheat.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Wasn't the "oldest living Japanese person" discovered to
| have died several years previously when they went to give
| her an award? Possibly on multiple occasions?
| teddyh wrote:
| Yes: https://satwcomic.com/respect-your-elders
|
| " _Sogen Kato was believed to be the oldest man in Tokyo
| up until 2010 when officials finally entered his
| apartment and realized that he had died at the age of 79
| in 1978. His death had been kept a secret by his family
| who were collecting his pension. This lead to a huge
| search for all people over 100 years, and it turned out
| that Japan couldn 't document the whereabouts of 234,354
| supposed centenarians._"
| tylerjwilk00 wrote:
| Many people do what is easiest and feels good not necessarily
| what is best holistically in the long term. The case could be
| made that democracy on a long enough timeline starts to deform
| for similar reasons. This paradox is close to the Paradox of
| Choice [1] in that time and effort seem to be limiting factors
| for choosing the best outcome.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| barrkel wrote:
| I read this slightly differently, but I think it's the same
| mechanism. I wrote a fairly popular comment on it in 2017:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13306700
|
| Mass markets drive down median quality through price competition,
| while quality products move upmarket due to loss of scale.
| Instead of decent quality for a decent price, you end up with
| abundant dirt-cheap crap, and a few high-end boutiques, if
| they're even in your area / available for you to order from.
|
| The text of my old comment:
|
| The hollowing out of the middle ground seems to happen in most
| commoditized markets.
|
| Take meat. Used to be you'd go to the butcher for your meat, and
| you'd get a reasonably good product, from a butcher who knew
| where the meat came from, probably even the farmer who reared the
| meat. That was the way almost everybody got their meat, so the
| fixed overheads of having a butcher shop was spread over a large
| customer base.
|
| Move along a couple of decades. Supermarkets, with their more
| efficient logistics, eat into the meat trade. Butcher shops
| almost completely disappear. But supermarket meat goes through a
| longer supply chain with larger suppliers that have the
| efficiencies of scale to cope with the pricing power supermarkets
| have. The butcher shops that survive turn into boutiques, where
| their unique selling proposition is what used to be commonplace:
| that they know where the meat is coming from and probably know
| the farmer that reared it.
|
| The market bifurcates into two basic strategies, low price and
| high quality (see also Porter's Cost Leadership and
| Differentiation).
|
| The consumer who's willing to pay a little bit more for a little
| bit more quality ends up having to pay a lot more rather than a
| little bit more, because the pool of people who could spread the
| fixed costs of the higher quality is split - most go for the
| lowest priced product. There's a ratchet effect, where slightly
| higher quality products are, at the margin, increasingly
| expensive because there's no scale in that strategy: the more
| expensive they become the less uptake they get, which means they
| have less scale, which means they become more expensive.
|
| In some ways it's a collective action problem: what would be a
| better outcome for a large group of people can't really occur
| because individual actions can't sustain a stable state change.
| In other ways - many, if not most economists believe this - it's
| a better outcome overall, because more people get to use the
| bargain basement product.
|
| But I think people in the middle are usually worse off in
| commoditized markets.
| clairity wrote:
| in functional, competitive markets, you'd have a range of
| segmentation between price competition and quality competition
| (i.e., various differentiation strategies for diverse segments,
| not just one luxury segment). our markets are far from
| functional and competitive however, and we've let them
| consolidate in scope, power, and regulatory capture for far too
| long.
| wazoox wrote:
| Do functional, competitive markets really exist? The true
| nature of markets doesn't seem to be equilibrium, but brutal
| swings between various local optima (which generally are
| pretty mediocre overall).
| clairity wrote:
| markets are dynamic, but not so chaotic to swing brutally
| (among attractors), as you put it. certainly some markets
| are in that stage now, but certainly not all or even most.
|
| early on, markets tend to grow to an unsustainable number
| of participants, and then as participants figure out
| marketing and their own strengths and fits, they start to
| whittle down. in the best markets (for consumers; but that
| are also sustainable for providers), you'd have maybe tens
| of competitors (i.e., not 3 or 300), depending on market
| characteristics (like being capital-intensive or not, free
| cash flow restricted or not, etc.).
|
| the problem with our markets is that we've long given up on
| providing the right amount of regulation to maintain that
| consumer-optimum, which can be stable in isolation, but for
| which the highly dynamic politico-social context often
| destabilizes. so it takes work and vigilence to maintain
| the optimum, and we don't have that in most (all?) markets.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| This, the existence of Nash equilibria is practically
| guaranteed according to game theory. And of course
| switching implies frictional costs, activation energy, and
| so on in addition to the actual change. If we define
| "functional, competitive markets" to mean no strange
| equilibriums then they certainly don't exist on this
| planet.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > This, the existence of Nash equilibria
|
| Additionally there are a lot of assumptions that go into
| proving that markets have Nash equilibria, such as convex
| utility functions, and perfect information, which is
| often not true in reality.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Would a healthy market necessarily lead to incrementally
| ratcheted price/quality points? Seems like the barbell
| distribution has advantages (simplicity, plus reflecting the
| decline of the middle class that buys "somewhat nice" items).
| clairity wrote:
| that's a matter of definition i guess, but i'd say mostly
| yes, as a few competitors will go for a cost strategy,
| while others will differentiate. a decent (but not perfect)
| example is the laptop market. you have lenovo, hp, dell,
| acer, msi, asus, etc. mostly pursuing a cost strategy, with
| some differentiation efforts at the tops of their product
| lines, while apple (and perhaps razer) pursues a
| differentiation strategy. then you have a bunch of no-name
| companies also competing on price. you can buy a laptop for
| as little as a hundred bucks, all the way up to $5000 (and
| more).
| adverbly wrote:
| > ratchet effect
|
| First time I've heard of this term. Reminds me of what happens
| with house price inflation due to lower interest rates.
| leetcrew wrote:
| I'm not sure I necessarily see this as a bad thing. I'm happy
| to be able to buy the absolute cheapest version of stuff I
| don't really care about so that I can have room in my budget
| for high quality examples of the things I do care about. maybe
| I min-max my life to an unhealthy degree.
| legulere wrote:
| If you don't care for something then why even buy it? If you
| need something inferior quality will have an effect on your
| life. There are some things where quality differences are
| imperceptible though like sugar.
| leetcrew wrote:
| in general I try not to accumulate a lot of stuff, so as
| much as possible I try to just not buy the thing at all if
| I don't really need it. most of the stuff that I would
| theoretically buy the cheap version of I actually get for
| free from roommates moving out.
|
| one good example is furniture. I don't care about
| furniture, but I do need a bed, a couch, etc., so I just
| buy the cheapest reasonable pieces I can find at walmart or
| ikea. there's a good chance I might move far away in the
| next few years. when/if that happens, I'll just sell or
| give away all my current furniture and buy new shitty
| versions wherever I end up. I'll probably recoup a lot of
| the money by renting a smaller uhaul and not having to pay
| professional movers.
| sebringj wrote:
| People willing to spend gobs of money on a workout place tend to
| put gobs of effort looking better. The rational behind their
| fitness may not be health driven in the first place, rather
| social as well as their choice of foods but afforded by their
| circumstance. Our true motivations are not always aligned with
| the ideal but are conveniently substituted to present a more
| superior version of ourselves and in this article, seems to be
| unconsciously so.
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