Here’s an interesting cognitive science puzzle.

Seth is seeking a cognitive task which he can use to test how his brain is working.  He want’s something quick, something he can self administer.  But this is the part I find particularly thought provoking, he want’s something that the brain won’t learn how to get better at.

This is like one of those cryptographic puzzles.  He needs a puzzle generating black box.  The class of puzzles mustn’t be too hard and they need to have difficulty metric delivered with htem.  But, no matter how many of these puzzles the brain solves, it should never manage to learn anything about the class of puzzles the black box spits out.

I wonder if there is something deep there?

They can only sell fruits and vegetables at Boston’s Haymarket and there is a guy who wanders around and fines the occasional vendor who tries to put on something else.  I’ve seen people try to sell batteries, olive oil, cleaning products.  Around the corner from
Haymarket are the remains of the old fish market and one maybe two vendors occasionally show up there; selling only fish.  The stores the line the sidewalk adjacent to Haymarket are mostly meat markets.  They aren’t as tightly regulated and they put on a larger variety of goods.  No doubt you could write a whole book about history of the negotiation between all these vendors and their landlords, e.g. the market owners.

The homogeneity of the vegetable market is an interesting contrast to the shopping mall where the landlord, it seems, strives to maximize the heterogeneous diversity of the tenants.  No doubt the tenants prefer the absence of competition and I assume their leases spell that out explicitly.

I don’t doubt that the vegetable vendors prefer that Haymarket’s regulator stamps out the occasional attempt to change the rules of the game.  The homogeneity creates externalities that the can be observed at larger scale in other geographic concentrations.
Which is why the stifling nature of zoning laws tends to be pretty uncontroversial.  No doubt the folks who live in NYC’s fabric district are peeved when some innovator decides to open a clothing store.

It is a mystery to me why there are so few commercial malls with a homogenous rather than a heterogeneous collection of stores.  Of course there are examples.  Tourist trap malls that sell nothing but trashy collectibles.  Antique furniture malls, that seem take over failed malls.  And of course mall landlords to work to achieve some kind of homogeneity; filling their space with vendors whom will all appeal to the same demographic.  So maybe some of the mystery can be resolved by saying that the homogeneity is on either the buyer side, or the seller side.  Maybe you can’t get high producer homogeneity until you achieve a sufficient population density.

Nice example of how tit-for-tat is often exactly the wrong approach.

It’s a curious saying, “Render unto Caesar.”  Advice to the oppressed, give it up, accept what you can not change.  Don’t organize a resistance.  Don’t fight back.  Cave.  No matter that he’s evil, illegitimate, foreign, and couldn’t careless about your culture.  Of course in context the entire quote is about surrender “…and unto God the things that are God’s” so it is really pretty consistently in the give it up and submit school of philosophy.

But there are times when it’s probably good advise: fighting city hall, gravity, death and taxes, etc.

I’ve spent a lot of calories over the years declining to submit to Microsoft’s monopoly.  Even had some success in doing so.  But rolling the clock back I’m comfortable that I didn’t expend too much effort evangelizing that other people decline to submit to that Caesar.

That’s all water under the bridge, more or less, but this issue arises again and again.  A dominate commercial monopoly exercises their power in offensive evil ways and the choice arises, submit or sign-up for the extremely abrasive alternative of fighting or shunning the network?

What brings this all to mind?  Today’s example – Facebook v.s. Google

“People wondered if they’d have to have extra children to make room for all the stories.” — Terry Pratchett in The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents