David Karger

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• Commented on Crawling from the wreckage
  Recognizing that you often need rose-colored glasses to see silver linings, I'd like to think that 2018 is a year in which the people who need to fight all the shit that is happening began to wake up. The Democratic...
• Commented on Help Wanted at the Climate Policy Sausage Factory
  If you'd like to engage in this discussion more deeply I suggest visiting https://climatecolab.org/ which is a site run out of MIT for discussing ways to address climate change. It includes some neat tools for deepening the discussion, and runs...
• Commented on Eleven Tweets
  I'm hoping we can bring back the micropayments idea, and I've used funding from the Knight Foundation to create a prototype: http://tipsy.news/...
• Commented on A world-building puzzler
  This question interests me for two separate reasons. First, as an observant Jew, I'm subject to this no-writing restriction once every seven days. But I'm part of a religion that's deeply committed to rules-lawyering. Second, I work in information theory,...
• Commented on The Future Is Not American
  oops boas--->bias...
• Commented on The Future Is Not American
  I'm certainly in favor of better racial and gender balance in our movies, but arguably the kind of racially balanced cast we'd like to see is no more "realistic" about the future than a whites-only cast. I can't remember which...
• Commented on A question about the future of the world wide web
  I do think we can get there. Advertising won't go away because some people will prefer it to paying, but eventually there will be choices for those who don't want ads. Lots of current micropayment efforts have been described above....
• Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
  There's also Larry Niven's World of Tiers theory that everything beyond a few light years away is only a projected simulation of a large universe---if we're in a small one, there's no Fermi paradox....
• Commented on Ask the Author
  You recently expressed distaste for authors who assume the future will be too much like the present. Might not the emergence of ever-higher-fidelity recording mechanisms might act to "freeze" cultural evolution?...
• Commented on An age-old question
  I'm already sort of living the answer to your question. My long-term memory has been terrible since childhood (of which I remember almost nothing). Everything beyond a few years is quite blurry. It doesn't bother me much---I'm always more interested...
• Commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
  I understand your argument that you can't negotiate global contracts with a local distributor. But the money you get on signing is an advance on expected sales. The publisher expects to make back that advance---i.e., over time you'll earn more...
• Commented on A hypothesis
  In response to your final question, I would say that yes, it is appropriate to employ anti-hijacking methods. This is because hijacking is a risk that applies not only to the flight's passengers but also, as we saw on 9/11,...
• Commented on Commercial announcement
  Sorry if this is duplicative, but from your view of the publishing business can you say anything about why paper copies lag e-books by 9 months? Is that all production time, or is there a business motivation? I still prefer...
• Commented on A deceptively simple question
  The automobile industry shrinks to a tiny fraction of its current size, as the number of cars that has to exist at one time drops from 2 per household (with most sitting in the driveway) to 1 per person...
• Commented on Lies, damned lies, and popular beliefs
  The solution to ignorance is education. It's wildly optimistic, but I'm hoping that the new massive online education platforms, which are currently being used to teach traditional topics like science and history, will evolve to teach people the civics, politics,...
• Commented on A Bad Dream
  I'm in the camp of those who believe that the situation Charlie describes is not the intention of some "Ruling party" but rather the outcome of societal forces. One important force that has not yet been discussed is inertia. Any...
• Commented on Political failure modes and the beige dictatorship
  My hypothesis is that we have gotten too good at politics. Back when democracy was young, politicians used relatively naive strategies that left them at the mercy of the electorate. But as democracy has matured, there has been plenty of...