prior probability

About five years ago, we blogged about Mike Gatto, a California State Assemblyman who had set up the world’s first “Wiki-bill” in order to enable private individuals to help draft an actual law. It turns out that California is not the leader is in this field: Taiwan is! The Republic of China on Taiwan, the official name of the Island of Taiwan, has been experimenting with multiple forms of “digital democracy” since 2016. (The Taiwanese government even has a cabinet-level “digital minister”: Audrey Tang, pictured below.) According to this fascinating and detailed report by Chris Horton, a journalist based in the city of Taipei, Taiwan has used two online discussion platforms to crowdsource some of its laws–one is called Pol.is; the other is vTaiwan. Mr Horton’s report, which was published in The MIT Technology Review on 21 August 2018, explains how these two platforms work, and he also assesses their strengths and weaknesses. In brief, these platforms have generated novel solutions to some intractable problems, such as how to regulate Uber and online alcohol sales, but the recommendations generated by these platforms are not binding on the government. (But is the non-binding nature of these platforms a feature or a bug?)

Are you still searching for evidence of Facebook’s anti-competitive behavior? Then do I have news for you! A British parliamentary committee conducting an inquiry into Facebook’s anti-competitive business practices recently released a treasure trove of secret Facebook documents, including internal communications from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. According to this report by Brian Feldman, “There is not anything particularly outrageous or damning in the emails, but collectively they point to a company whose priorities were self-preservation, revenue generation, and fear of being exposed for dubious privacy practices. It is a far cry from the benevolent, touchy-feely, global-community messaging that Facebook has pushed over the years.” One example of Facebook’s hypocrisy is its treatment of Vine, a once popular video-sharing app that allowed users to share six-second-long looping video clips. According to Feldman’s report, Mark Zuckerberg himself signed off on a measure to destroy Vine: “On the app’s launch day, Justin Osofsky, a Facebook vice president, proposed shutting down Vine’s ability to access Facebook’s friends API [application program interface]. This [tactic] made it difficult for users to find their Facebook friends within Vine, kneecapping the app’s ability to grow–and compete with Facebook. Zuckerberg’s response: ‘Yup, go for it.'”

That is the title of this short paper by Christopher Balding (@BaldingsWorld) describing a recent low-level but illuminating encounter he had with the Chinese legal system. (Check out Professor Balding’s fascinating Twitter feed here.) Below the fold is one excerpt from Balding’s paper that we found especially poignant: Continue reading →

We’ve blogged about this Yuletide topic on a previous occasion, but now check out the enormously entertaining and enlightening video below in which our friends and colleagues Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, both of whom teach economics at George Mason University, debate the economics of gift giving:

As you may already have heard by now, a federal judge in Manhattan sentenced Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former ad hoc attorney and personal confidante, to three years in “Club Fed.” Mr Cohen had previously pled guilty to four separate criminal charges:

1. Tax evasion during tax years 2012 to 2016;
2. Making false statements to a bank in 2015;
3. Making illegal campaign contributions in support of Mr Trump’s campaign for president in 2016; and
4. Making false statements to Congress in 2017.

Bonus Questions: (a) What about the way more serious lies John Clapper told to Congress and to the North American public on 12 March 2013? Why isn’t the former Director of the U.S. National Security Agency being charged with the same crime? More bonus questions below the fold: Continue reading →

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, was launched on 15 January 2001, and according to this history of Wikipedia (via, where else, Wikipedia, of course!), the English version of this wonderful website (en.wikipedia.org) now contains almost six million articles. (See table below.) If these six million articles were published in book form, they would comprise over 2,500 print volumes of the old-school Encyclopædia Britannica, an imaginary tome of Borgesian proportions! By comparison, the print edition of the actual Encyclopædia Britannica contains only 64,900 articles in 32 volumes, a mere drop in Wikipedia’s proverbial bucket. Also, notice how the number of Wikipedia articles has grown at a fairly constant rate since 2005. When will this growth rate slow down or level off? In the meantime, should we call this constant growth rate “Wales-Sanger Law” in honor of Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, the co-founders of Wikipedia?

Source: Wikipedia

Meet the new boss; same as the old boss! Decree 349, one of the first laws signed by Cuba’s new president dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel when he assumed power in April 2018, went into effect on 7 December 2018. (Here is the full text of the law, in Spanish.) Under this draconian decree, all artists are prohibited from operating in public or private without prior approval by the government. Individuals or firms that hire artists without prior authorization can be punished, and artists who work without prior approval can have their materials confiscated or be substantially fined. Below the fold is Amnesty International’s strongly-worded condemnation of this humiliating restriction of artistic freedom in Cuba: Continue reading →

Science fiction writer William Gibson is reported to have said, “The future is already here–it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Be that as it may, check out the short videos below the fold explaining two futuristic Google projects: a fleet of self-driving cars called Waymo and a self-learning artificial intelligence program called AlphaZero: Continue reading →