“Google has not displayed an ability to create the best tools for sharing knowledge. It is hubris for Google to think they should be a definitive source for hosting that knowledge.

“The long-term benefits of the Socratic method: In a study of 105 children 10 years old, teachers spent an hour a week for 16 months teaching lessons based on philosophical inquiry. These children showed significant improvements on tests of their verbal, numerical and spatial abilities. Their higher scores persisted two years later—while the lower-scoring control group were, in some cases, declining further.

“This is the paradox of age: younger people are more motivated to do things because more things are new, but they lack experience; older people have the experience so their designs are better, but they lack the motivation to do the parts they now feel are tedious and stupid.

“Experimental result: People held more extreme positions after they spoke with like-minded others. Liberals favored an international treaty to control global warming before discussion; they favored it far more strongly after discussion. Conservatives were neutral on that treaty before discussion, but they strongly opposed it after discussion.

The creation of enclaves of like-minded people also squelched diversity. Before people started to talk, many groups displayed a fair amount of internal disagreement on the three issues. The disagreements were greatly reduced as a result of a mere 15-minute discussion.

“Until you don’t have the skills to make an idea happen you are not in the place to make a plan.

“Most people don’t care about privacy, not at all. What people care about is being surprised. In fact, the people who most want privacy are almost certainly the worst possible customers: unlikely to click on ads. If I were running a web property, I’d work hard to attract the people who least want privacy and want to share their ideas with everyone else.

So far, big government and big business have gotten away with taking virtually all our privacy away by not surprising most of us. Libertarians are worried (probably with cause) that once the surprises start happening, it’ll be too late.

“Given perfect freedom people have a tendency to do just enough to make themselves minimally happy, even if greater happiness is ultimately attainable.

“You can say pretty much anything in any human language. Human languages differ not so much in what you can say but in what you must say. In English, you are forced to differentiate singular from plural. In Japanese, you don’t have to distinguish singular from plural, but you do have to pick a specific level of politeness.

Obviously, if your language forces you to say something, you can’t be concise in that particular dimension using your language.

“Programming is labour intensive, costly intelligence work. Why has there been so little progress in understanding it since Weinberg’s The Psychology of Computer Programming in 1971?