Richard Stallman Was Right All Along
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 2nd Jan 2012 19:12 UTC
GNU, GPL, Open Source Late last year, president Obama signed a law that makes it possible to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects without any form of trial or due process. Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities. Initiatives like SOPA promote diligent monitoring of communication channels. Thirty years ago, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU project, and during the three decades that followed, his sometimes extreme views and peculiar antics were ridiculed and disregarded as paranoia - but here we are, 2012, and his once paranoid what-ifs have become reality.
E-mail Print r 49   · Read More · 181 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/jnh
Thread beginning with comment 502099
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Alfman
Member since:
2011-01-28

Neolander,

"To the contrary, big salaries have been shown to reduce intellectual performance and sense of morals as compared to smaller ones."

Interesting, however I wonder if that's a mere correlation or if there's causation involved?

One the one hand it's possible that the creative types spend more energy being creative and less energy trying to get promoted and controlling others, and so are less likely to earn a big salary.

One the other hand, it's possible individuals, as they earn larger salaries, feel a less compelling drive than their poorer selves had.

Edited 2012-01-04 15:38 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 2

Neolander Member since:
2010-03-08

For big and small salaries, the experiment I heard about was based on a classical psychology test called the candle problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Candle_Problem). Basically, they take a large group of persons and give each some amount of money to solve that problem. The intellectual performance is evaluated using criteria such as mean total time spent to solve the problem, and then statisticians look for correlation between salary and problem solving performance.

Now, as for interpretations, I'm sure that each school of modern psychology has its own ;) But it does seem to be a controlled enough experiment to offer valuable results as far as the intrinsic value of an incentive goes.

Edited 2012-01-04 15:54 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 1

Alfman Member since:
2011-01-28

Neolander,

Thanks for the links, I originally interpreted "salary" in your description to mean real world job salary, but I see that it means reward for completing a task within the experiment (it would be interesting to check for correlations with real world salaries also).

Unfortunately it's hard to tell (from the basic experiment given) whether the reward actually makes people perform worse, or whether the reward is merely distracting them. It may be that the experiment has more to prove about how humans perform under stress than how they perform with rewards. I'd like to see a few other variants:

1. Tell the subjects that after the test, they'll get to roll a dice to collect $ afterwards regardless of their performance on the test. This may indicate whether the subjects are preoccupied about the money such that it affects their performance, even though the performance has no bearing on the money.

2. Tell the subjects that they'll get paid regardless of the outcome. Who knows if this might affect performance as well?

3. Tell the subjects that they'll be electrocuted (or some other negative consequence) after the experiment if they don't perform well enough.

Reply Parent Score: 2

Read more of this thread... >
Neolander Member since:
2010-03-08

More details on this experiment here : http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

(I'm the first one tickled by his curious use of the "operating system" word ;) )

Edited 2012-01-04 16:11 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 1