I didn't have an opinion on basic income before (though a while ago I came across http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/welfare-reform.html, which seemed interesting), and I didn't come away from the article and comment thread with an opinion on basic income, but I was very pleased to see a proposal for modeling ideas with computation.
It's also very nice to see an adjustment on that proposal with some new information. It wouldn't have occurred to me that making a chart look hand-drawn would be effective in implying less precision, but now I have a new idea I can try out for graphics demonstrating rough ideas.
I think Chris's tone can be blunt and read as unaccommodating, which may be distracting from the his points, but I think I prefer it to the overly casual tone many adopt when stating an idea. That tone isn't great for customer service but it's very helpful when trying to understand an idea and whether or not to accept it.
Also, it is important to base comments in fact. He accused people on both sides of innumeracy: "Like most political arguments, the discussion of a Basic Income borders on innumeracy. So I’m going to take the opportunity to launch into a far more interesting mathematical tangent, and illustrate how to use Monte Carlo simulation to understand uncertainty and make business/policy decisions. I promise that this post will be far more interesting to python geeks than to policy wonks. I’m just picking Basic Income as a topic to discuss since it showed up on hacker news yesterday and it’s a topic where I see basically no numbers whatsoever."
It's also very nice to see an adjustment on that proposal with some new information. It wouldn't have occurred to me that making a chart look hand-drawn would be effective in implying less precision, but now I have a new idea I can try out for graphics demonstrating rough ideas.
I think Chris's tone can be blunt and read as unaccommodating, which may be distracting from the his points, but I think I prefer it to the overly casual tone many adopt when stating an idea. That tone isn't great for customer service but it's very helpful when trying to understand an idea and whether or not to accept it.
Also, it is important to base comments in fact. He accused people on both sides of innumeracy: "Like most political arguments, the discussion of a Basic Income borders on innumeracy. So I’m going to take the opportunity to launch into a far more interesting mathematical tangent, and illustrate how to use Monte Carlo simulation to understand uncertainty and make business/policy decisions. I promise that this post will be far more interesting to python geeks than to policy wonks. I’m just picking Basic Income as a topic to discuss since it showed up on hacker news yesterday and it’s a topic where I see basically no numbers whatsoever."