Re: [tlug] [OT] Say _no_ to the Microsoft Office format as an ISO standard

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

emiddleton@example.com writes:

 > Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

 >> People *don't* say "no", however, precisely because the closed
 >> software, dependency and all, is better for their purposes than
 >> the open software.

 > Because there no information asymmetry? and we always make decisions on
 > the basis of what is best for us[1]?  I think both a lack of information
 > and psychology have a far greater role when it comes to software.

The information asymmetry is accounted for; people will discount for
uncertainty about closed source that can be resolved by opening the
source: it's worth less to them.

If you're talking about the fact that OSS doesn't buy TV ads to run at
the World Cup or the Superbowl, well, that's part of why proprietary
software is theoretically maybe a good thing -- to pay for telling
people about the product.  (I'm not saying all advertising is
informative; it's obviously not.  But to say that "people buy Windows
because they don't know about Linux" indicates that Linux needs to get
its shit together, scare up some revenue, and buy some persuasive ads
with it, not that people are making bad decisions.)

As for psychology, you'll have to say what you mean here.  I can
always simply say, "taking the person's psychological state and
process as given, we assume that what he thinks he wants is what he
wants, and as good liberals, we must accept his judgment that that is
good for him".  Obviously that position is too extreme, but if we look
at actual behavior, we find that most situations where people make bad
decisions can be accounted for by (1) a small fraction of actually
insane or cognitively impaired people and (2) information asymmetry.

So despite the enormous attraction of behavioral economics for people
who dislike conventional economics, the biases[1] that evidence
strongly suggests actually affect ordinary people (from the janitor to
the CEO) in real life are few and small.  The most important ones seem
to be second order (eg, the Allais paradox).  The Kahnemann-Tversky
"prospect" theory doesn't seem to have any behavioral predictions at
the market level that can be distinguished from ordinary risk
aversion, for example, although it is clearly verified by
introspection, and weakly confirmed in laboratory experiments.

Footnotes: 
[1]  That cannot be accounted for within "economic rationality".