Knowledge is Worth Paying For

I'll just mention that if anyone needs a paper for LW related reasons, I (and others probably) will get it for you.

I appreciate and agree with the principle behind this post, but when a store wants to charge me for using the bathroom I either find a friendlier store or else I hand them the money with a smile and never buy anything from that store ever again.

There are certainly sources of knowledge that are not cheap to produce and which deserve our funding and our appreciation. But I am not going to give eg gated journals one cent more than I am absolutely forced to, and I consider it morally important to make attempting to profiteer off of other people's scientific research as unprofitable and unpleasant as possible.

Any knowledge worth paying for is worth liberating.

Great post. Three points -

1) The calculation is even easier for people who have their income directly tied to performance or entrepreneurship... if you can get one good insight out of book, it's a net gain. Most of the highly successful people I know have spent thousands or more on books. I buy them like crazy, I just got 32 audiobooks during a big sale at Audible. Books are an amazing value.

2) You know that old quote "Information wants to be free?" It's actually only half the quote. Here's the whole thing Brand Stewart said -

"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."

3) Please consider adding affiliate links to your post, either personally or for SIAI or another reputable charity? I know the conflict of interest thing, but you're just increasing Amazon's margins and leaving money for good causes on the table by not adding affiliate links. It's ridiculously simple to do -

Sign up here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/

Click "get a link" when signed on the relevant page.

Use that link instead of the link without the affiliate. Doesn't change functionality for readers/users at all.

Seriously, I might buy that Foundations book you recommend, I'd much rather $1 or $2 to go your way or the way of a charity you respect. Sure, it's a tiny bit of money, but in scale it adds up.

If you're willing to spend time reading a book, and value your time at a certain rate, its normally true that the cost of the book isn't that much compared to the value of the time spend reading it.

ebooks are usually much cheaper than physical books

Rarely true for secondhand older books, usually true for newer books or relatively rare older works (which unfortunately includes many academic books). I can often pick up secondhand books for literally pennies; I'm a newcomer to e-reading but not convinced yet that it's going to bring savings overall.

ETA: in case that's not clear, I think this post is missing a huge tip for efficient acquisition of words: secondhand physical books. It's worth saying because some people - I used to be in that number - have a hangup about buying used books. I've totally changed my mind on that, largely thanks to Amazon Marketplace. Riffling through stacks in a used book store holds no appeal for me, but looking up some title that looks interesting and seeing a copy on Marketplace for a euro or less, and buying it without even a second thought? Pure bliss.

Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis

Without getting into the legal or moral issues involved, there is a """library""" 'assigned to the island state of Niue', it's pretty damned good, and that's all I have to say about that.

One key cause of piracy left out of this analysis is the significant demographic of people who have internet but can't buy things over it. This usually describes teenagers in developed countries who have internet access, but don't have capital that they can freely spend on digitally purchased objects. The amount of young adults who actually have jobs is really falling in developed countries because of the promotion of internships and volunteering opportunities, which are easier to obtain than jobs and have equal or greater prestige. Even if they do have income, they may not possess credit cards. There's a good portion of this group that can't even drive to purchase things with cash. So every new possession they obtain by spending money, or rather getting an adult to spend/provide/transfer money, is a significant expenditure.

In this situation, knowledge becomes something it seems irrational to pay for, because it seems like it "should" be liberated. They might acknowledge that being able to understand physics better or win arguments has a value of $20 or $50, but they won't spend that when they could get a comparable result with an expenditure of time, even if said time is worth more than the money would be.

I agree with the main theme (that knowledge is often worth paying for), but you should be much more careful before advising technologies like Kindle which are heavily loaded with DRM and kill-switch. We all know how Amazon disabled all copies of 1984 from the Kindles once. The fact it was 1984 is a "funny" coincidence, but the point remain. Granting to a company (by itself, or because asked by a government to do so) the power to destroy all the copies of a book in the world in one click is not something we should do.

http://www.defectivebydesign.org/amazon-kindle-swindle explains it better than I do.

Until ebooks are respecting the rights and freedom we have with paperbooks (like a plain PDF do, but not a Kindle ebook), I would recommend to people to buy good-old paper books, even if they are a bit more expensive. Freedom is also worth paying for.

(Sorry if this is a bit out-of-topic, but it seems an important point to me; and yes I know that political arguments should be two-sided, there are positive aspects in Kindle and most ebooks, but I wanted to bring attention over a very negative aspect which is, IMHO, sufficient to overcome the positive ones).

What do people think about hiring a tutor? Of course that is only available for relatively old topics that are more experiential learning than symbolic learning.

I've had a lot of trouble understanding and getting good at mathematical proofs, so in the next couple of weeks, I intend to hire a tutor to teach proof skill to me.

A good way of getting cheap textbooks is to use a price alert service that notifies you when the price of a new or used book drops below a certain price. When you don't need the text in a hurry, and would rather save money and buy used, that works well, because students often want to get rid of a textbook in a hurry and offer it for sale at far below the typical used price for that book. Those deals tend to go pretty quickly though.

Another good idea is to buy the previous edition, especially for texts that have many editions. When the 8th edition of a textbook is going for $80 used, you can often get the 7th edition used for ridiculously cheap (like $10 or $15), and the previous edition was often released just a few years ago (some texts have a new edition every few years) and has only minor differences.

After reading lots of research and many book excerpts, I learned that Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis (2010) was the best overview available on how the brain encodes value and makes decisions. But I couldn't find it for free.

Here's another place to look: I downloaded "Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis" from library.nu for free just now, as a 488 page PDF file. If you don't create an account, you can search for books and find pictures of the covers, but if you create an account they'll show you links that let you have files for the books. The format varies: usually PDF, sometimes mobi or djvu.

After reading lots of research and many book excerpts, I learned that Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis (2010) was the best overview available on how the brain encodes value and makes decisions. But I couldn't find it for free. I had a hunch that coming to understand the subject without reading the best overview available would take at least a dozen extra hours. The Kindle price for Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis was only $55. Easy choice: I bought it.

I'd love to hear more about this particular aspect of the process. That "hunch" bit seems really tricky to me, because I'm never entirely clear what's going to be useful or not. My impression is that marginal differences in information value are usually small with occasional jackpots, and a person generally can't tell if something is a jackpot without the kind of access that they'll have had to pay for. Sometimes its to the point where I can read an entire work and only notice that it was good or bad six months later, based on usage and update patterns in the aftermath of having read it.

This makes me very curious how you estimated the dozen "saved hours" to compare against the $55. Also, I'm curious how you estimated the value of the understanding to determine that it would be worth more than a dozen hours in the first place, if that was the best you could do, especially relative to all the other things you could be working on that functioned as opportunity costs?

Allegedly, anyone can purchase a library card to the Austin Public Library which comes with the ability to remotely access many databases. Has anyone tried this? Are any of the databases of value, other than JSTOR?

Wikipedia, Google Books, and the Pirate Bay have trained many people to expect that knowledge should always be zero-cost. I used to feel that way, too.

I feel like this is an important point - knowledge is worth paying for, and anything worth paying for is worth getting for free (given that the costs associated with getting it for free don't outweigh the cost of paying for it in the first place). As you rightfully point out in the quoted text, when the free sources are more comprehensive and higher quality than the paid sources, it is easy to get confused.

Of course, you don't need a device to read books purchased from either store.

I'm not sure what you meant here. You certainly do need a device - worst case, your PC. Was it your intention to say that you didn't need a mobile device - Kindle or other?

(For me reading on a PC is not an optimal use of that time - I'd rather be writing or otherwise producing when at my desk, whereas reading in places where I can't write - on the tube, in the loo, on vacation, and so on - has always felt like a win. So far, I haven't found anything that beat physical books for that purpose, though I've recently decided to give e-reading a try.)

But, having some indication of their value, would you have paid to read The Sequences, if that was the only way? I hope you can see that would have been a good choice.

That is a GREAT question. I probably wouldn't have paid more than $40 if a few friends gave it a strong recommendation. For me to pay more than $100, I would have needed an overwhelming number of people I highly respected to have recommended it.

In retrospect, it's difficult to know how much money I think I should have been willing to pay - that is to say, the amount of money I would pay to prevent the information from the Sequences from being deleted from my mind (with no hope of recovery or finding the Sequences again), or from being switched to a timeline in which everything was as similar as possible but I'd never read the Sequences (and would never be able to). My guess is that I would pay something on the order of $50,000-$100,000. I wonder if this is abnormally high.

What would you pay? And adjust for anchoring, if possible.

My college librarian set me up with an account on a platform called Athens so I can access journals at home. This may not be possible everywhere, but it's certainly worth exploring. Athens seems to link together several resources, but JSTOR and Oxford Music Online are all I've used. I only have access to certain fields on JSTOR (music and Irish studies, mainly), but I would assume this is because that's what my college teaches; other institutions may provide different accesses.

It'll be tough, but I'd like to go all electronic sometime soon. The ability to search, tag, and cut is invaluable.

I find this article bewildering, but intriguing.

Education is valuable, money is (among other things) a token of exchange for value... Getting a good value for your time and tokens of value is a great plan.

Getting a good value for producing educational materials is hopefully not a primary incentive. But it is not an insignificant incentive.

I do acknowledge that it is a corrupting influence. One of my professors admitted in class that he revised his textbook every two years because the value of used copies of textbooks stayed too high for him feel like the investment effort of writing it paid off, compared to the costs of revising it, and pushing the new version as the text in similar classes in other universities. (He apparently is prudently ethically prohibited from making a profit by requiring it in his own classes.)

On the other hand, often, even in renaissance times, knowledge was guarded by guilds, families etc. Recently reading Alex Bellos' "Adventures in Numberland" he writes that Niccolò Tartaglia was the first person to solve cubic equations in europe, but refused to share the secret. Girolamo Cardano, begged Tartaglia, who eventually relented and in a roundabout way shared his secret but swore Cardano to secrecy. Cardano shared it with his secretary, Lodovico Ferrari, who improved on it to find the solution to Quartic Equations. Cardano had a dilemna which he eventually solved, though Cardano felt betrayed.

The problem seems to be akin to the one faced by the pharmaceutical industry, inventors need sufficient renumeration, and protection from intellectual theft, but society needs transparent, acessable information.

About that first paragraph, I usually was going to buy something anyway, but I want to buy it after I've used the bathroom, because who would want to carry their drink or whatever into a public bathroom?

The opportunity cost of spending hours on the Internet just searching for the best titles on my desired subject are quite high to me. Is there any process you use to minimize this time? I'm hoping for an autodidact forum that gives book recommendations for beginners, though maybe you simply search Amazon "Listmania"s for introductory books.

Academic library access seems to be much more restricted in the UK.

I can either:

• Visit the university where I have alumni privileges, but spend most of the day travelling
• Pay significant sums of money (eg £225.09 http://www.ull.ac.uk/library/privres.shtml) for access to a more local library. In cases like this you often don't get access to online resources such as journals.
• Some local academic libraries seem to have "do we like the look of you" policies where you can get an external membership by being convincingly in need of knowledge. I've not tested this option.

Very good post. I have the benefit currently of being a university student and having access to an enormous library, plus a password that allows me to access free PDFs of articles from a dozen different databases. Once that's no longer true, I'll keep your suggestions in mind.

May as well just start a business around selling junior job positions. You could employ them to sell the jobs to other junior job-seekers. Law firms do it already, and I don't see any legal barriers to making it a core business activity. They get 'knowledge', you get cash. Wallah.

The problem is, that by letting people get away with the feeling that they have something which amounts to 'ownership' of a region of conceptspace, we are directly inhibiting one of the major possible mitigators to global existential risk. Their state-granted entitlement is not more important than the (even possibly marginal) increase in probability of continued existence of sapience throughout the cosmos.