Eclectic Views

    
> But it is a disaster if people regularly have to tear
> themselves loose of their fellows to live right.

Something in me keeps thinking that's just what you have to do most of the
time in order to live right.
  

    
Not all groups to which people might belong are preferable to those same
people taken individually.
  

    
This morning while I was gargling with my cup of joe to go, I thought
about how some celebrities have signature tunes, you know where the
orchestra breaks into a few bars of some song when the celebrity goes
onstage to accept an award or walks onto the Leno set from behind the
curtain?  I thought, wouldn't it be cool if Presidents had their own
signature song?  And instantly I could see George II stepping forward
to deliver the State of the Union address while the orchestra breaks
into:

"...and all the monkeys aren't in the zoo
Everyday you meet quite a few..."
  

    
If I'd taken a sip just before reading that, I'd have spit it all over the
keyboard!  ;-)
  

    
Timing is everything they say.

My friend BeBop insists it must be Arlen's "If I Only Had A Brain."
  

    
So what about the Tragedy of the Commons?
  

    

Um.  I probably used that phrase <satyr>.  but I can't remember in what
context.

Basically, something that is not controlled as Private Property will be
decimated by the masses, sooner or later, because They Can.n

are we really going to discuss the Tragedy of the Commons??
  

    
Well, as I recall, that term originally refers to communal grazing land,
shared by anyone in the community with grazing animals.  Now grazing land
has a characteristic called its "carrying capacity" which is a rough
measure (depends on the weather) of how many animals of what kind (they
don't all eat the same things) it can support.  Exceed that carrying
capacity for long and the land will turn into a reasonable imitation of a
desert, leaving the soil vulnerable to erosion by wind and water, thus 
reducing its carrying capacity for a long time to come.

But the *tragedy* in the tragedy of the commons is that there's an 
incentive for individuals to do what, if enough of them do it, is bad for 
the community as a whole.  Each additional animal that any particular 
person puts out to graze increases their own net benefit, even though, as 
the number of animals approaches the carrying capacity, each additional 
one puts competition pressure on the others, and reduces the overall 
benefit.  So, if you had, for instance, two cows on the land when there 
was plenty of forage for all, you may need three or four to produce the 
same amount of milk when the land is nearing exhaustion.

So it's not because they can, exactly, but because it's to their 
short-term, individual benefit to do so, at the collective expense.
  

    

that is a stellar definition, satyr, of the Tragedy of the Commons.  Now why
were we discussing it?  I guess I could page back and see.....
  

    
The concept was originated by Garrett Hardin, a well-known ecologist,
in Science (a scientific journal) in 1968.   It's a very famous paper.

Here's a ref:

 <http://dieoff.com/page95.htm>
  

    

There are some good semi-text books on it, too.  When The Fish Are Gone is
one that one of my profs wrote, and The Text we used is The Question of the
Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources.
  

    
> Now why were we discussing it?

Just setting a topic out on the table, since the previous one seemed to 
have reached quiet spot, if not exactly a conclusion.  Tangentially 
related, not a direct continuation.
  

    

I think the Iraqi oil field run the risk of becoming A Commons.
  

    
> I think the Iraqi oil fields run the risk of becoming A Commons

No way am I going to graze any cows there, nosiree.
  

    
How about intellectual property as a commons.  Used to be that copyright
and patent protection was temporary...
  

    
The thing is, knowledge can't be depleted the way a field, a fishery,
or a forest can. I can take ideas from "In Praise of Folly" every day
of my life and there will be no fewer in it. In fact, if I publish my
readings and they are right, the number of ideas others can get out of
it is likely to increase. It took people a long time to figure that
out, and our whole system of scholarship and citation rests on it. 

What law-makers have to protect is not knowledge, nor owners of
knowledge, but creators of knowledge. Creators deserve a decent wage,
and are commonly cheated of it. Once creators have been paid, the
knowledge itself does not need protection, because it is enhanced, not
consumed, by use.
  

    
Public domain works are a kind of commons, but the fact that multiple 
people use them simultaneously without degrading them means that there 
are fewer ways for the grazing metaphor to shine much light, it would
seem.

Maybe if you are not talking about reading/viewing/listening but about
commercial adaptations, there is a chance for that dynamic to kick in.  
If three films of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream came out in the
same year, there might be a scarcity of viewers for all three.  Or perhaps
it would become a cult thing and everyone would have to see all three --
intellectual "property" is not much like real estate.

<hank> used to correct my use of the term and state that it is really only
a tragedy of an unmanaged or mismanaged commons.

If a group comes up with sufficient but not excessive guidelines and a 
way to enforce them, having a commons need not be a tragedy at all.
  

    
Wow, Coleman slips his post in ahead of mine with a similar point, and the
context of the rights and incentives for author/artists.
  

    
Actually, Gail raises an interesting point. When a movie covers a
classic book in a formulaic way, it does in some way degrade that book
in the common mind. It could be argued - in fact, I will argue - that
one of the chief functions of movies is to degrade books in just that
way, to take demanding ideas and images and cloak them thoroughly in
familiar commercial product, thus saving anyone the discomfort of
thought. Thus, a way has been found of degrading even the intellectual
commons, but not so thoroughly as to require regulation.
  

    

That's what Scorcese did to _Casino_, the rat!
  

    
Unfortunately, the Dumbing Down to the Lowest Common Denominator Team
now owns, dominates, and controls the Common Bandwidth.  The old 
"Battle of the Bandwidth" is bogus unless we retake the airwaves.
Knowledge is power.  Strained through corporate and Pentagon filters
it is usurped.
  

    
The movie, Solaris, which I liked quite a bit, didn't shy away from
tackling philosophical issues like identity: Can we really know someone
else? Can we really know ourselves? Could we in any meaningful way
apprehend an alien intelligence?

But it didn't do very well box office wise and a lot of people didn't
like it. Most people, I suppose, want movies to affirm their basic
sense of reality not challenge it. The intellectual S&M of critical
thought isn't to everyone's taste.
  

    
Mostly  I like to be entertained by movies, not be lectured to. But
the very best movies can be both entertaining and educational.
  

    
So, to readapt the idea of a commons as grazing land to fit the landscape
of intellectual property, the danger in overgrassing wouldn't be of it
turning into a desert, but into a thistle patch, perhaps even more
productive in terms of shear biomass, but not sustaining.

Sounds like there's various kinds of commons, some of which are 
depletable, others of which are not but may be degradable.

Other examples: radio spectrum, atmospheric composition, wild lands

Another is attention.  There's only so much (human) attention to go
around, and distraction is lately rampant, with many things that used to
occupy us getting short shrift.  This is not entirely a bad thing, of
course, since some of those things were terribly tedious, and to the
extent that they still require attention, an electronic ersatz version
frequently suffices.  But even in these cases we're being pried away form
direct experience with that on which we depend.
  

    
Is there a commons of attention?  I thought attention was something
individuals had to give.