
The Evaporative Cooling Effect - llambda
http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/#storycontent
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beosrocks
Last time this was posted
<[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665>](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665>),
Eliezer linked to a related article worth reading as well: Well-Kept Gardens
Die By Pacifism <http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/>

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tambourine_man
I was hoping for some thermodynamics awesomeness.

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dalke
I agree.

Here's one in lieu - the stillsuits in "Dune" could not work. They use
evaporative cooling ("Perspiration passes through it, having cooled the body")
but turning the evaporated water back into a liquid - which is condensative
warming - requires more energy than was needed to cool the person in the first
place.

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Retric
They could work assuming you had both an energy source and a heat dump. For
example the ISS could use a dehumidifier to collect sweat and process it
because it has large solar panels and can dump heat to space. However, as
described they are not going to work.

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hansef
Perhaps all this time spent worrying about getting into the inner sanctum
would be better repurposed making cool shit? Making smalltalk with the
Director of Design at Facebook isn't an end in itself.

This is one of the things which annoys me most about a certain strain of SF
startup culture: too much worrying that there's a holier of holies you haven't
managed to get into yet (Davos, seriously?) and not enough time nose down on
change-the-world problems.

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michaelochurch
Something I think the OP doesn't get is that this delineation into high and
low quality _people_ isn't useful anymore. It was, in a time when books had to
be copied by hand and almost everyone was illiterate, and when long-standing
reputations (built over centuries, carried through blood) mattered because
information traveled at 20 miles per day (if that) but that ended a few
centuries ago. Ideas and contributions matter a lot more.

For example, Davos and the Bilderberg Group are relics of a feudal era that
humanity is evolving out of. They don't belong in this century.

In fact, one of the most disappointing things about getting rich for a lot of
people is realizing that "rich people" actually aren't more interesting, more
creative, more intelligent, or even more energetic than people in general. Few
people will admit as much, but a lot of the desire behind social climbing is
the belief that "better" people hang out behind those closed doors. And yet,
in reality the people don't get worse or better as you climb. The average
quality stays (perhaps remarkably) the same.

The problem isn't, "How do we keep the hoi polloi out?" The whole point of the
internet is that you can't. It's, "How do we keep the average quality of
contribution high?" It shouldn't matter if those contributions come from a
European prince or an African peasant. It's a big world and there are a lot of
mind-bogglingly stupid rich, expensively-educated people, and an equally large
number of very intelligent poor people with no formal education.

To prove that "high quality" people can produce low-quality content, just look
at Autoadmit or some of the Wall Street-oriented career websites. These are
some of the most educated people in the world, and yet the quality of content
is very low. Or look at fucking UrbanBaby, which represents the average IQ
among the Manhattan upper class as 82 and a third.

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ColinWright
It's nothing to do with rich or poor, educated or not. It's all about the
quality of the contributions. Some people produce consistently high quality
contributions, and some people produce consistently low quality contributions.
That's what's meant by high quality and low quality people.

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jeffdavis
Facebook is not a community, it's a medium of communication. A sixth of all
humanity is not a very useful group for social purposes.

Calling it a community with warrens doesn't seem like a useful description, to
me.

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tsurantino
Isn't Facebook more of a paradoxical phenomenon? You go to Facebook to use
Facebook to communicate with people on Facebook. My point being that it's both
a community and a medium of communication at the same time?

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adewinter
You go on Hacker News to use hacker news to communicate with other users of
Hacker News.

This also works for every other website in existence, I think.

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jeffdavis
Hacker news is somewhat more of a community though, because it's a group based
on common interests.

Facebook is supposed to be for everyone, so it's not really a group at all.

