Tag Archives: business

Book List: 2019Q2

I'll call this the Wizards & Cryptarchs, Frauds & Revolutions Edition —or— "What I've been reading when I'm not prepping for lectures and wrestling with toddlers."

Cover of Ellen Ullman's "Life in Code"

Life in Code, Ellen Ullman

When Ullman sticks to psychology, writing about what's like to be dealing with code, she is brilliant. No one communicates what it feels like to code as well as she does. When she expands the scope to sociology, she is mediocre. I can get that brand of techno-cynical, socialist dirigisme in any magazine on the newsstand. ((Here I'm not using "socialist" as the generic critique of any left-leaning idea that it is sometimes sloppily deployed as. Ullman is a former member of the Communist party; she has self-identified as a socialist.))

This is a collection of previously published essays. The good ones are great, the others are worth reading but not special. They were published over the last several decades, so merely seeing which themes and topics aren't addressed — social media is conspicuously absent from earlier discussion of the internet — is interesting in itself.

Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, Dan Harris and Jeffrey Warren with Carlye Adler

I found this a little too squishy for my tastes, with its "everything can be meditation if you do it right" thesis. I'm saying this as someone who struggles in my meditation practice, so I completely get the strategy here. They want to provide a gentle on-ramp to get non-meditators to give it a shot. I've got nothing against that as a goal or a strategy, but I'd still like a little more discipline from meditation instruction. Meditation isn't supposed to be (too) easy. (What worth doing is?)

Nevertheless, this was pretty good. I've recommended it to my wife, because I think she's a good target audience, much like Dan Harris' own wife. I think she'll appreciate the way different chapters cover various objections to starting a meditation practice (I can't find the time; it's self-indulgent; etc.).

I especially liked the way the authors framed how you should respond when you notice you're "doing it wrong" while sitting: not "shame on me; you're doing a bad job meditating" but "good job for having the self-awareness to notice you're getting distracted."

Cover of "The Dark Forest"

The Dark Forest, Cixin Liu

This is the sequel to Three Body Problem. The first 40% or so of this volume was very slow, but the remainder picked up speed. My chief complaint is that there were no new ideas introduced in the first portion. The translator has changed between the first volume and this one, which may have also contributed to the torpid pacing. (I read TBP some months back, so I can't remember the specifics of what might be different in the translation.)

I'm not sure exactly how to say this, but Dark Forest struck me as being very "Chinese" — the focus on ideological purity and morale in the population, the interest in political affiliations amongst industry and the military, etc. It was interesting to read for that perspective alone.

Dark Forest revolves around what I think of as a Hari Seldon-esque view of social science that I always find off-putting. I'm tempted to say this is another element that is a result of Liu's Chinese heritage, but it crops up so often in SciFi that I can't do that. (I think the actual cause is that many SciFi authors who like physics want history & sociology to be as rigorous and reductionist as physics is.)

A Little History of Philosophy, Nigel Warburton

Every chapter of this brief book is about one important philosopher from history. Warburton does a good job of tying them all together into a single thread. It's nothing ground breaking, but makes for a pretty good introduction/refresher. I enjoyed listening to it on dog walks/commutes, because the structure was very digestible: I could listen to one chapter (ten or twelve minutes?), do some learning, and then move on to a different book on a different topic. I don't think I would have been in the mood currently to plow through four hours of Intro Philosophy lessons if I couldn't chunk it up like that.

I first heard of Warburton as the host of the Philosophy Bites podcast, in which he interviews other philosophy professors about their work. I haven't listened in a long time, but I still recommend it. The serious-but-approachable style he uses in that podcast carries through to this book.

No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind, Daniel J. Siegel & Tina Payne Bryson

I had the same reaction to this that I have to most of the business books I've read: there's a kernel of good information here, but the authors spend twice as long convincing me of how relevant and useful the advice is as they do just giving me the advice. I think they also play a little fast-and-loose with neuroscience for my taste. I didn't notice anything egregiously wrong — and I think they do know what they're talking about — but it felt like they were trying a little too hard to layer on scientific respectability by giving folksy descriptions of brain science.

Nevertheless, there's some pretty good advice here. I think it's difficult to write a book about discipling all kids between the ages of 2 and 18. Maybe my opinion on that will change once mine get out of the toddler stage.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away, Bill Bryson

This is a collection of newspaper columns that Bryson wrote for an English paper after he moved back to America in the 90s. It's about what you would expect from a newspaper humorist. It's never as good as Bryson can really be, but it's pleasing in a homey, comforting way.

It was also nice to have an audiobook I could listen to where each chapter was only several hundred words. I could listen to one of these while knocking out a chore when a more complicated piece of narrative or non-fiction would be difficult to digest in four or five minute chunks.

The comparison of dealing with the Social Security Administration compared to the British immigration authority was the highlight for me.

Grave Peril, Jim Butcher

This is the fourth of Butcher's "Harry Dresden" novels. If you liked the first three, you'll probably like this. You'll probably like it more actually; Butcher seems to be getting better as a writer at this point in his publication history. Honestly I wasn't really paying enough attention to this book to be able to put my finger on why or how.

The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi

This is the first in a trilogy about posthuman gentleman-thief Jean le Flambeur. I first read it years back (October 2014), and decided to re-read it before picking up volumes two and three since it was dense with weird concepts and novel vocabulary and allusions. (Cryptarchs! Exomemory! The Engineer-of-Souls! The Dilemma Prison! The All-Defector!) Even the second time through, I found it difficult to keep up with what was happening, since Rajaniemi gives little to no exposition to introduce you to all of the wonderful concepts and terms. Still, this is recommended for its creativity.

A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

Cover to "Wizard of Earthsea"

I first read this when I was probably 10, and again in college, and now again when I'm 35. It not only holds up, I think I like it more.

It's extremely refreshing to read some fantasy that doesn't feel the need to bulk up to 800 pages with descriptions of the dishes at every feast and the heraldry of every noble family.

This is one of the books that I'm really looking forward to reading as a bed time story when the wee ones are old enough for "real" stories. ((By "real" I mean "not finished in a single sitting."))

I can not recommend this enough if you haven't read it before.

Here's some of the Daoist-flavored aphorisms from Wizard of Earthsea that I wrote down this time around:

  • Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience.
  • The wise needn't ask, the fool asks in vain.
  • For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.
  • To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

I've been leaning on that first one really hard with the two previously-mentioned toddlers in the house right now.

Pushing Ice, Alastair Reynolds

This is the second Reynolds books I've read in as many months, and I am a full-on convert now. So much fun.

The preface is set several tens of millennia in the future, and seems to give away what is going to go wrong for our protagonists in the present. The adventure comes from figuring how exactly things go wrong and how they deal with it. Then as you reach about the mid-point of the book or slightly after you realize that that disaster was only the first part of the challenge and things get much weirder than you imagined.

Like House of Suns, Reynolds captures the immensity of space and its psychological impact in a way that few other scifi authors have.

My only complaint is that most of the story takes place in a society of a couple of hundred people, but it seems to have the economic and social structure of a much, much larger population. Would a couple of Dunbars worth of people really be able to support restaurant entrepreneurship, as Reynolds mentions off-hand?

Cover of "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou

Bad Blood, John Carreyrou

I devoured this over the course of a couple of plane rides. It has gotten tons of praise, all of it deserved. I'm not sure what to add.

I have no earthly idea how so many investors and partners would not demand to see a working demo of Theranos' capabilities. I really cannot conceive of agreeing to back a system without being able to compare it to a baseline. "Sounds great. Here's two blood draws from twenty people. You take half of each pair and I'll send the other to a conventional lab. I'm so excited to see how well they match up!" Is that so hard? I don't think I would even take a second meeting — to say nothing of investing nine figures — without seeing the results from that.

Maybe I'm an outlier since so much of what I do day-to-day is about replication? Maybe this is hindsight bias on my part? Maybe I would be just as hoodwinked by Elizabeth Holmes' reported charisma?

A lot of Theranos' success is keeping the scam going was because so many of the insiders who saw through things were bullied into remaining quiet. Many of those who did want to blow the whistle were unable to exfil evidence. Would society be better or worse off if more people had the tradecraft to get the relevant documents out of places like Theranos? I'm guessing this would be a net negative since it would also allow more industrial espionage, more insider trading, etc., but the people who are motivated to do such things also have the motivation to learn how to get away with them, whereas it's the innocent potential whistleblowers who have never thought of a more advanced way to smuggle/maintain data besides "forward it to my personal email account" who are left without tools.

The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples, David Gilmour

Cover of "The Pursuit of Italy" by David Gilmour

This was a history of Italy-as-a-concept rather than Italy-as-a-geographic-region or Italy-as-a-nation-state. As Massimo d'Azeglio said after the Risorgimento: "We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians." The existence of a single country called "Italy" is highly historically contingent, and The Pursuit of Italy explores that contingency.

I had thought this was primarily going to be about the unification process of the Risorgimento, since I had heard it quoted so heavily in a podcast on that topic. ((Talking History: The Italian Unification.)) Gilmour actually covers much more ground, both before and afterwards. The book continues all the way up to discussions of contemporary politics, including Berlusconi, the Northern League, etc. I think I actually found the period preceding and following unification to be more interesting, as those chapters were more about culture than politics.

One take-away is that almost every Italian political leader since unification seems like a fool, including those with massive public monuments scattered across the country. (Exceptions: Garibaldi seems like a tactical dunce but strategically sharp and extremely charismatic, as well as principled. Mazzini also seems intelligent and principled, but he spent most of his life in exile as persona non grata and has not been fully retconned into the pantheon of Italian founding fathers.) Other than those two, the rest — Cavour, Victor Emmanuel, almost every minister in the 20th Century — look like fools. Even Mussolini seems to have bumbled his way into dictatorship.

Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe

This is another book that I've read multiple times before, but probably not since I was twelve or so. I listened to big parts of it while dealing with some severe jet lag, waking up at 3am or so and then drifting back to sleep to the rhythms of narration about herding goats and defending against cannibals.

I was expecting this to be, shall we say... "un-modern" in its philosophy and tone seeing as how it's now exactly three centuries old. And while Friday's eager subservience no doubt puts this on many campus' Index Librorum Prohibitorum, I was actually surprised by the proto-moral-relativism and non-interference that Crusoe adopts toward the natives. There's also a ton of good lessons in here about the nature of wealth, desire, satisfaction, deserts, etc.

Cover of "The Book of Kells" by Bernhard Meehan

The Book of Kells, Bernard Meehan

I didn't read the Book of Kells itself since it's (a) in Latin and (b) so ornate it is nearly unreadable, but Meehan's book about that Book. It has wonderful illustrations throughout, and they are cross-referenced throughout the text in a very clever and unobtrusive way. The Book of Kells is one of the pinnacles of the early Western manuscript tradition, and I love it as much for its numerous imperfections as its elaborate decoration. As a calligrapher I do wish that Meehan talked a bit more about the letterforms as opposed to the illustrations, but I understand that's not something most people would be interested in.

I read this in advance of a trip to Ireland, where I went to see the exhibit of the original manuscript at Trinity College Dublin. I didn't pick this out for any particular reason, Meehan's book just happened to be the one book at my local library on the subject. It also happened to be the one book that the gift shop at Trinity was selling about The Book of Kells, so I suppose that means it's pretty authoritative?

by jsylvest Posted on 12 July 2019
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Book List: 2018Q4

Cover of Colin Tudge's, "The Tree"
Colin Tudge, "The Tree"

The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter, Colin Tudge

Exactly what it says on the cover: all about trees. This was exceptionally well organized. As an amateur woodworker, the first few chapters were particularly helpful to sort out all of the different common and trade names and how they relate to actual species. (Short version: it's a total ontological train wreck.) This book felt exceptionally well outlined; the organization of such a broad topic was very easy to follow. My primary complaint is that I listened to this as an audiobook, which made it difficult to stop and do image searches on some of the weirder species that were lovingly described.

The last 10% or so shifts from positive to normative, which is considerably weaker. For example, Tudge advocates that more buildings should be built of timber rather than steel and concrete and also that the price of timber ought to rise. These may both be desirable, but he gives absolutely no acknowledgement that these goals are in conflict. He also sets up urbanization/industrialization as being in opposition to growth of forests, without addressing the Kuznets curve phenomenon of reforestation.

Overall, highly recommended.

Pyramids, Terry Pratchett

I've never not loved one of Pratchett's Discworld novels. This is no exception. It's not one of the best, but even mediocre Pratchett is wonderful.

How To Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie

You already know about this book. I put off reading it for years, figuring that it was all common sense that I already knew. And frankly, it kind of is. But there can be tremendous utility to being told things you already know. It might not teach you something profoundly novel, but it will likely help you realize when and how to put into practice the things you know.

It's been re-edited several times over its eight decades, and the result seems a little mixed up. Most especially, some of the examples seem drawn from very different points in time, which would be a positive if they were more clearly tagged. As is, it was difficult to get the right context for the interactions being described.

There was also plenty of horn-tooting about how useful different people have found Carnegie's instruction, but the amount of self-back-atting was actually less than I've found in the few other business/self-help books I've read.

Overall I think this book has become under-rated by virtue of being too often over-rated, if that makes sense. Read it.

Cover of Travis Corcoran's "Causes of Separation"
Travis Corcoran, "Causes of Separation"

Causes of Separation, Travis Corcoran

This is a sequel to Corcoran's Powers of the Earth, which I recommended last quarter. If you are interested in moon bases, AI, uplifted dogs, anti-gravity, augmented reality, anarcho-capitalism, etc. then you will probably like this. The psychological profile of the protagonist continues to be well done, but the antagonists are still a bit of a travesty.

Robopocalypse, Daniel Wilson

Hard to recommend. A co-worker tells me there is a very interesting twist in the sequel, which I will not reveal. It was a decent enough action book with killer robots, but since becoming a parent I have a much harder time being excited about dystopic fiction in which bad things happen to children. Wilson leans on that heavily to create drama, which ends up feeling artificial.

The Strange Library, Haruki Murakami

I don't even know what to say about this. It's a very, very weird and discomforting magical realism story. It reminded me mostly of the sort of proto-horror folk tale that the Grimm Brothers would have been told.

Cover of Bill Bryson's "In a Sunburned Country"
Bill Bryson, "In a Sunburned Country"

In a Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson

Bryson is always delightful. This is a travelogue of a couple of trips to Australia. As usualy, Bryson uses this frame as a jumping off point for whatever weird bits of history he finds interesting. Perhaps because Australia doesn't yet have that much known history ((No offense to the aboriginal population. Obviously there's been people in Australia for a long time, but they haven't left behind much historical record. Australia probably has the highest ratio of "weird pre-historic forests and strange rock formations" to "palaces, art museums, and other structures in guidebooks" of anywhere.)) he also includes a lot of natural history, with a particular emphasis on all of the weird and deadly fauna to be found. (Six foot long earth worms! Jellyfish with enough neurotoxin to kill an ox! ((Which is a total mystery, because they eat krill. What do they need with that much chemical warfare firepower?)) )

One take-away was just how inept the British colonization and exploration was. I'd give you more colorful examples, but the one that comes to mind is establishing the first colony (incidentally a penal colony) with exactly zero people who had ever farmed before. I think they had one guy that was briefly an assistant to a gardener and put him in charge of food production.I was expecting violent-but-hyper-competant Victorians but Bryson's telling is a lot more clueless-and-bumbling. It left me honestly shocked that such doofuses built an empire upon which the sun never set.

You Suck: A Love Story, Christopher Moore

This is a sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story. It was a fine distraction, but I don't have strong feelings about it.

The Hard Thing about Hard Things, Ben Horowitz

Recommended for people interested in the software business.

This was suggested to me as a general purpose business advice book. It's fairly good along that dimension, but Horowitz is really only talking about software start-ups. For instance, he discusses the problem to scaling at one point, and explicitly states that the only thing holding you back is hiring more developers and sales people. He is (rightly) unconcerned with the factors that influence growing other businesses, like suppliers, real estate, distribution channels, etc.

More people should write books like this though. I want less memoirs about how brilliant the author is, and more advice based on the challenges that people have survived.

As an aside, this exchange between Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen that was quoted in the book stood out:

Marc Andreessen attempted to cheer me up with a not-so-funny-at-the-time joke:
Marc: "Do you know the best thing about startups?"
Ben: "What?"
Marc: "You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find the lack of sleep enhances them both."

As I commented on twitter, this makes the rise of interest in Stoicism in Silicon Valley either intensely ironic or completely inevitable, but I can't decide which. It's also a good encapsulation of why I haven't been interested in doing the start-up thing in California: no terror or ataraxia for me please; give me some nice even ataraxia.

Cover of Marc Levinson's "The Box"
Marc Levinson, "The Box"

The Box, Marc Levinson

This is an excellent history of the shipping container. This seems like too humble of an object to need it's own history, but that is very far from correct.

The most striking thing to me was the shocking speed with which containerization swept the industry. We like to think things like smartphones or social media are unique for their incredibly rapid uptake, but their spread is hardly unparalleled. Levinson details multiple ports where containers went from essentially zero traffic to a majority in a year or two. Competitors, regulators and trade unions were caught completely unprepared for the pace of change over and over.

The other take-away was the ineptitude of almost everyone involved in post-War shipping: the Interstate Commerce Commission, trade unions, shipping lines, the railroads, the Pentagon, standards bodies — not a single one of them acquits themselves well. To take just one example, ISO set out to establish standards for shipping containers, and invited every interest group they could think of except the only two companies in the world that were already using shipping containers. Because who needs actual experience, right?

Malcolm Maclean — the originator of containerization — is as close as this story comes to having a hero, and even he seems more like someone who took lots of crazy risks that just happened to pay off rather than someone who really knew what he was doing. (After selling off SeaLand, his legitimately world-changing shipping business, to R.J.Reynolds, ((Because a cigarette company owning a shipping line is totally something that makes sense in the world of mid-century corporate conglomerates.)) he experienced a string of business failures, which cements my opinion that he was luckier than he was wise.)

Royal Assassin, Robin Hobb

Assassin's Quest, Robin Hobb

These are the second and third books in Hobb's "Farseer Trilogy." I think both are better than the initial title, Assassin's Apprentice, as they have more psychological depth. What I appreciate is that the main characters face actual moral conundrums. Most fiction, are perhaps especially more fantasy, presents the protagonist with a clear choice between doing what is difficult-but-right and what is easy-but-wrong; Hobb's characters have to juggle competing imperatives and make for difficult decisions with no right answers.

My only complaint is that Assassin's Quest is as long as the first two books together. It should probably be two separate volumes. There is actually a pretty natural breakpoint in the story line about half-way through, so it would not surprise me if this was initially planned as a quartet and the final two installments were smashed together.

How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Answers, Sarah Bakewell

This is part biography, and part work of philosophy. It's an excellent combination. I was struck by how much 16th century France seemed like 21st century America in many respects. Definitely recommended.

There was a tiredness and a sourness in Montaigne's generation, along with a rebellious new form of creativity. If they were cynical, it is easy to see why: they had to watch the ideals that had guided their upbringing turn into a grim joke. The Reformation, hailed by some earlier thinkers as a blast of fresh air beneficial to the Church itself, became a war and threatened to ruin civilized society. Renaissance principles of beauty, poise, clarity, and intelligence dissolved in violence, cruelty, and extremist theology. Montaigne's half-century was so disastrous for France that it took another half-century to recover from it—and in some ways recovery never came, for the turmoil of the late 1500s stopped France from building a major New World empire like those of England and Spain, and kept it inward-looking. By the time of Montaigne's death, France was economically feeble, and ravaged by disease, famine and public disorder. No wonder young nobles of his generation ended up as exquisitely educated misanthropes.

The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis

The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis

The Great Divorce reminded me of a theological version of Games People Play. It was interesting enough, but not that impactful.

The Abolition of Man, on the other hand, was excellent. This is also a book that feels like required reading for the beginning of the 21st century, despite being several decades old. I listened to an audio version of this, and will probably need to read a physical copy before I could offer any detailed analysis.

by jsylvest Posted on 24 January 2019
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Marketing to Algorithms?

Toby Gunton :: Computer says no – why brands might end up marketing to algorithms

I know plenty about algorithms, and enough about marketing. ((Enough to draw a paycheck from a department of marketing for a few years, at least.)) And despite that, I'm not sure what this headline actually means. It's eye catching, to be sure, but what would marketing to an algorithm look like?

When you get down to it, marketing is applied psychology. Algorithms don't have psyches. Whatever "marketing to algorithms" means, I don't think it's going to be recognizable as marketing.

Would you call what spammers do to slip past your filters "marketing"? (That's not rhetorical.) Does that count as marketing? Because that's pretty much what Gunton seems to be describing.

Setting aside the intriguing possibility of falling in love with an artificial intelligence, the film [Spike Jonez's Her] raises a potentially terrifying possibility for the marketing industry.

It suggests a world where an automated guardian manages our lives, taking away the awkward detail; the boring tasks of daily existence, leaving us with the bits we enjoy, or where we make a contribution. In this world our virtual assistants would quite naturally act as barriers between us and some brands and services.

Great swathes of brand relationships could become automated. Your energy bills and contracts, water, gas, car insurance, home insurance, bank, pension, life assurance, supermarket, home maintenance, transport solutions, IT and entertainment packages; all of these relationships could be managed by your beautiful personal OS.

If you're a electric company whose customers all interact with you via software daeomns, do you even have a brand identity any more? Aren't we discussing a world in which more things will be commoditized? And isn't that a good thing for most of the categories listed?

What do we really care about: getting goods and services, or expressing ourselves through the brands we identify with? Both, to an extent. But if we can no longer do that through our supermarkets or banking, won't we simply shift that focus it to other sectors: clothes, music, etc.

Arnold Kling :: Another Proto-Libertarian

2. Consider that legislation may be an inferior form of law not just recently, or occasionally, but usually. Instead, consider the ideas of Bruno Leoni, which suggest that common law that emerges from individual cases represents a spontaneous order, while legislation represents an attempt at top-down control that works less well.

I'd draw a parallel to Paul Graham's writing on dealing with spam. Bayesian filtering is the bottom-up solution; blacklists and rule sets are the top-down.

Both of these stories remind me of a couple of scenes in Greg Egan's excellent Permutation City. Egan describes a situation where people have daemons to answer their video phones that have learned (bottom-up) how to mimic your reactions well enough to screen out personal calls from automated messages. In turn marketers have software that learns how to recognize if they're talking to a real person or one of these filtering systems. The two have entered an evolutionary race to the point that people's filters are almost full-scale neurocognitive models of their personalities.

by jsylvest Posted on 29 May 2014
Posted in Business / Economics, CS / Science / Tech / Coding | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Some Long Overdue Book Reviews

More Money Than God Cover
"More Money Than God," Mallaby

More Money Than God, Sebastian Mallaby

Excellent. Far too many general audience finance books are written at what I think of as a newspaper reading level. (Defining even the most basic terms, assuming the reader is intimidated by any math as complicated as calculating a percentage, feeling the need to frame everything in a protagonist/antagonist arrangement, etc.) This is way, way better than that. There's an appropriate mix of the human element in there. The more factual stuff is covered well without needing resorting to lots of technicalities. (I have other books for that.)

It's hard to draw large conclusions from this book. One that comes to mind is that hedge funds seem to fail (either catastrophically, or in the more prosaic sense of failing to deliver the expected alpha) when they stop being hedge funds, where "hedge" is the operative word.

This book also made me start thinking more about the connection between financial risk and ecological monoculture. Trading strategies seem to have a discrete lifespan. Traders seem to underestimate how their strategies will be affected by being in a crowded field of other people with the same strategy. LTCM is a good example. Their system worked very well for a while and then crashed and burned. Is it that the system was actually bad all along, or was it great when they were the only ones doing it, and terrible when everyone else in the market was copying them and putting on the same trades? I don't think you can judge a strategy in isolation; you need to consider it's utility in both crowded and sparse niches.

PanicCover
"Panic," Lewis

Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity, Michael Lewis

Very well curated. File under: "nihil sub sole novum," "the more things change," etc.

I think the only piece I would have left out, IIRC, was the Paul Krugman one. But that has more to do with being utterly exhausted at trying to reconcile vintage 1990s Krugman-the-Scholar with late model Krugman-the-Demogogue.

Saga #5
Saga #5

Saga, Volume Two, Brian K Vaughn + Fiona Staples

Saga is still absolutely brilliant. The story and art are both outstanding. Comics needs more Space Opera. The genre cries out for a visual medium, but the budget required to do something like this in film would be off the charts. Only James Cameron gets the opportunity to try something like that. (Although after Pacific Rim maybe del Toro will get the chance too. Or perhaps Neill Blomkamp if Elysium rakes in enough. Sign me up for some widescreen baroque space opera directed by either of them.)

HackersPaintersCover
"Hackers and Painters,"
Graham

Hackers and Painters, Paul Graham

I read most of these essays back in undergrad but it's great to revisit them. It's interesting how the things that have stuck in my mind aren't the major theses of the essays, but little asides and trivialities. Every CS student and programmer should read this. I think it would also make a good read for the family members, managers, etc. of those people too: anyone who wants to understand how we think and see would benefit. Even when I read Graham discussing completely non-technical subjects (e.g. adolescents and popularity) there's something in his method of analysis which resonates with me as distinctly hackerish. On the flip side, it's nice to have someone else in the computing community who is interested in Art. I would need a whole Paul Graham-level essay to unpack this, but I think there's an unfortunate degree of antagonism between the geek and art tribes.

Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett

This is one of my favorite Discworld books so far. I didn't realize going in that the focus of Pratchett's satire here is not just academia but also soccer/football culture.

The War of Art, Steven Pressfield

Too superstitious and mystical, but I think there are a lot of overlaps between the way scientists (and especially doctoral students) work and the way writers and artists work. Learning about how various writers (e.g. Neal Stephenson, DFW) work has helped me to be a better researcher.

A Red Mass for Mars, Jonathan Hickman + Ryan Bodenheim

A little hard to follow the plot, but absolutely gorgeous. Hickman consistently turns out books that are so visually different from most comics. Here there's a great contrast, similar to what he did in Pax Romana, between the stark black inking and the luminous aquarelle of the backgrounds.
Red_Mass_for_Mars_p7

by jsylvest Posted on 12 October 2013
Posted in Business / Economics, Reviews | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Reading List for 16 July 2013

Evan Miller :: Winkel Tripel Warping Trouble or "How I Found a Bug in the Journal of Surveying Engineering"

All programming blogs need at least one post unofficially titled “Indisputable Proof That I Am Awesome.” These are usually my favorite kind of read, as the protagonist starts out with a head full of hubris, becomes mired in self-doubt, struggles on when others would have quit, and then ultimately triumphs over evil (that is to say, slow or buggy computer code), often at the expense of personal hygiene and/or sanity.

I'm a fan of the debugging narrative, and this is a fine example of the genre. I've been wrestling with code for mapping projections recently, so I feel Miller's pain specifically. In my opinion the Winkel Tripel is mathematically gross, but aesthetically unsurpassed. Hopefully I'll find some time in the next week or so to put up a post about my mapping project.

Irene Global Tweets WInkel Tripel
A screenshot of a project I've been working on to map geotagged tweets.

Kevin Grier :: Breaking down the higher ed wage premium

wage premium by major
Wage premium and popularity of majors

File under "all college degrees are not created equal" or perhaps "no, junior, you may not borrow enough to buy a decent house in order to get a BA in psych."

Aleatha Parker-Wood :: One Shot vs Iterated Games

Social cohesion can be thought of as a manifestation of how "iterated" people feel their interactions are, how likely they are to interact with the same people again and again and  have to deal with long term consequences of locally optimal choices, or whether they feel they can "opt out" of consequences of interacting with some set of people in a poor way.

Mike Munger :: Grade Inflation? Some data

Munger links to some very good analysis but it occurs to me that what is really needed is the variance of grades over time and not just the mean. (Obviously these two things are related since the distribution is bounded by [0, 4]. A mean which has gone from 2.25 to 3.44 will almost certainly result in less variance here.)

I don't much care where the distribution is centered. I care how wide the distribution is — that's what lets observers distinguish one student from another. Rankings need inequality. Without it they convey no information.

Marginal Revolution :: Alex Tabarrok :: The Battle over Junk DNA

I share Graur's and Tabarrok's wariness over "high impact false positives" in science. This is a big problem with no clear solutions.

The Graur et al. paper that Tabarrok discusses is entertaining in its incivility. Sometimes civility is not the correct response to falsehoods. It's refreshing to see scientists being so brutally honest with their opinions. Some might say they are too brutal, but at least they've got the honest part.

Peter McCaffrey :: 5 reasons price gouging should be legal: Especially during disasters

McCaffrey is completely right. But good luck to him reasoning people out of an opinion they were never reasoned into in the first place.

I do like the neologism "sustainable pricing" that he introduces. Bravo for that.

I would add a sixth reason to his list: accusations of "price gouging" are one rhetorical prong in an inescapable triple bind. A seller has three MECE choices: price goods higher than is common, the same as is common, or lower than is common. These choices will result in accusations of price gouging, collusion, and anti-competitive pricing, respectively. Since there is no way to win when dealing with people who level accusations of gouging, the only sensible thing to do is ignore them.

Shawn Regan :: Everyone calm down, there is no “bee-pocalypse”

Executive summary: apiarists have agency, and the world isn't static. If the death rate of colonies increases, they respond by creating more colonies. Crisis averted.

Eliezer Yudkowsky :: Betting Therapy

"Betting Therapy" should be a thing. You go to a betting therapist and describe your fears — everything you're afraid will happen if you do X — and then the therapist offers to bet money on whether it actually happens to you or not. After you lose enough money, you stop being afraid.

Sign me up.

by jsylvest Posted on 16 July 2013
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An Untold Stories Tax?

Carnivale - Season 2HBO canceled Carnivàle, a serial show with deep mythology, after two of a planned six seasons. The remainder of Creator Daniel Knauf's story was never told.

The AV Club :: Daniel Knauf tells us his plan for the end of Carnivàle

AVC: Have you ever considered trying to do it as a novel or a comic book [of the remaining story line]?

DK: Constantly. Yeah. Marvel, we had it all set up. At one point, they wanted to go forward and do a series of graphic novels, and they just couldn’t turn the corner with HBO. Since then, yeah, I’ve considered it. But one of the things that makes me a little crazy about Hollywood is, they’re idiots when it comes to their contractual stuff. If I write a novel, it’s like Random House publishes the novel, copyrights it, but when you do business in Hollywood, they say, “Everything in this thing, in all forms, in all potential forms invented and uninvented…” The language is draconian! “…throughout the universe. We own everything in your head. We own everything.” And it’s like, “If you own everything, at least exploit those rights, please. Could you please exploit the rights? And if you’re not going to exploit the rights, can I at least have them back, so I can exploit them?” It’s just a silly way of doing business. [...]

It didn’t make sense to spend $3.5 million an episode. So let’s do a graphic novel. Let’s tell the story!” But they’re on to other toys now. It’s like doing business with that kid down the street whose parents give him really bitchin’ toys, and he’d just leave them broken in the backyard. It makes me crazy, Hollywood.

I think you could make an analogy to Georgist taxation here, or perhaps more generally Gobry's argument in favor of the French wealth tax.

If property ultimately derives from mixing your labor with things, it's not unreasonable to suggest that people have an ongoing responsibility to continue doing so. If you hold some property, most especially land, you may have a responsibility to society to put it to productive use. (We're talking about theory here, not practice. The arbitration of what counts as responsible, productive use is nearly impossible in practice and so even if you had such a responsibility in theory it is likely best if that responsibility is never legislated into reality.) Gobry's argument is, briefly, that capital gains taxes discourage people to put their resources to use, while wealth taxes do the opposite. In essence, capital gains taxes makes it more expensive to put your resources to work, so people do less of that. OTOH if you're going to loose %1 of your accumulated resources anyway to a wealth tax that gives you reason to put your resources out in the world to try to get them to grow more than the amount you'll lose.

If a studio owns the rights to further adaptations in other media, do they have a responsibility to society to actually use those rights? Land may be a special case of property, because people aren't making any more of it. Or so I gather the Georgists, the Diggers, etc. would say. But people aren't making any more Carnivàle either. That idea can only be invented once, only to be owned by one person, just like a particular acre of land. Does that put an extra responsibility on HBO to do something with it? If an owner of arable land has a onus to see it cultivated, does the owner of fecund IP have a similar onus to see it reified?

I have absolutely no idea how you would actually structure this as a policy. Doing so in a way that wouldn't put the actual tax burden on the creators rather than studios would be harder yet. Even so, I think it's an interesting way to look at the ethical responsibility of content owners, if not a way to structure their legal responsibility.

by jsylvest Posted on 19 March 2013
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Reader

Google is shutting down the Google Reader service, as you may have heard.

I am not happy about this, but I'm also not throwing fits about it. I spent more time in my Reader tab than any other by a huge margin. I'm sure there's some other service out there that will fill the void. Google is also being pretty considerate about this: they're giving users several months warning and they've made tools available to export your subscription data.

RWCG has had a couple of posts taking the wind out the sails of all the people who are tearing out their hair and rending their garments and casting the evil eye towards Mountain View. Overall I think he's on the right track, but this post doesn't quite line up for me:

RWCG | Crimson Reach | Google Reader: The end of the ‘free’ era

How dare Google shut down a service I made heavy use of for years and years and paid nothing whatsoever for! [...] I wonder if this event marks the end of the ‘free’ era. You know the free era, it’s the era where this was the prevailing business philosophy:

1. Drive competing services out of business with a free service (subsidized by a profitable product).
2. Cancel free service.
3. ???

Actually no, that’s still snarky. It’s more like this:

1. Company gives away something for free.
2. People like it and use it.
3. This makes people think the company is cool. Their friend.
4. When it goes public, they buy its stock, cuz it’s so cool, and everyone they know uses and likes it. Surely that’s gotta mean something, stock-wise.
5. People continue to use the free thing and come to not only rely on it but expect it as their birthright.
6. ...
7. Profit?

According to this philosophy, giving away cool stuff for free was the wave of the future. It’s what all smart, cool companies did. Only backward knuckle-dragging idiots couldn’t figure out how this added up to a business model. Economic realities were no longer reality.

I think he's short-changing the business potential of a product ("product"?) like Google Reader. There's no direct line between "make Reader & give it away free" and "profit," but this approach still has some uses.

1. Yes, it makes people think you're cool and friendly and not-evil. Many firms do things for that reason alone. They spend billions on things way outside their core competencies just so people think they're cool and friendly. Isn't that the entire point of the "Corporate Social Responsibility" fad?

Google paying its employees to create Reader is in it's wheelhouse; it makes sense. Far more sense than, for example, Chrysler paying its employees to lay bathroom tile in poor neighborhoods.

2. Providing services like Reader makes Google look cool to people generally, but more importantly it makes them look cool to geeks. It's a punchline that a firm's number one asset is it's people, but that's pretty true about Google. They can do what they do because they get the pick of the litter of hackers.

I went to career fair my CS department sponsored a month or so ago. The line for the Google table was literally out the door. Most people in my graduate program are angling for academic jobs. Google is one of maybe four private companies that people will be impressed you're interviewing with.

3. Projects like Reader not only motivate applicants, they motivate employees.

Talent and productivity are extremely unevenly distributed in coders. The best are many orders of magnitude better than the median; the bottom decile (conservatively) have negative productivity. You usually don't get the best by offering them orders of magnitude more money, you get them by giving them cool problems to work on.

If you're excited about spending some time developing X, there's a good chance Google will let you do that. (At least in comparison to if you were working at Initech.) What's more, there's a chance Google will roll out X to millions of people, like they did with Reader. I can't stress enough how big of a motivator that can be.

4. Google's strategy for a while has been that anything they do to make people want to use the internet more is good for them, because they capture a dominant slice of the ad revenue online. More people spending more time online is better for Google, period. Reader fits into that. That's not a strategy that will work forever, or for many (any?) other companies. It can also be used to justify a lot of wasted "investments." But it's also true.

5. Google lives and dies off of data. Reader could have been generating that for them. I have no idea how much they actually learned from people's reading habits, if anything, but it had the potential to be a goldmine.

If you can predict people's age, race, religion, political party and drug use only using publicly available "likes" on Facebook, what could you do with my online reading habits? (Answer: sooooo much.)

I have no idea if it was a good idea or a bad one for Google to shut off Reader. I'm skeptical, but I realize I have none of the facts. I can't imagine it would cost that much to keep it running as is, especially compared to their other projects. I'm not sure what better use they have for the resources they're redeploying. I'm curious that they didn't even try to make it ad supported. Hell, I would have even paid directly to keep using it, and I pay for approximately zero online subscriptions.

Again, I don't know what they know. But I do know that "there's no revenue from this free product; let's shut it down" should not be the beginning and end of this decision making.

by jsylvest Posted on 14 March 2013
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Netflix, again: HBR misses the point

I don't intend for this blog to be nothing but commentary about Netflix. I promise. But this is the intersection of business and technology and art, so it's got my attention.

HBR :: Grant McCracken :: Will Netflix Flourish Where Hollywood Failed?

So does Netflix have an edge? Is there any reason to think they can flourish where so many have failed? The apparent answer is data. Netflix has lots and lots of data. They know what we watch, when we watch, where we stop watching, where we repeat a scene, where we reach for the fast-forward button, and most critically, when we break off and move on. They know which movies sell well at 8:00 on a Friday night and which ones we like to watch on Sunday afternoon. They can surmise which directors, writers, and stars produce the most watchable entertainment. They have magnificent data.

(1) Yes, data is their edge. (2) They don't need to make better content than everyone else. They just need to make content good enough to give them bargaining chips when they strike deals with other content makers and distributors.

And that's a tragedy. Netflix has so much data that they are going to be tempted to climb into the creative tent and start offering "advice."

This is almost exactly wrong. Or not wrong, but useless. Producers are constantly offering "advice." The difference is that Netflix's advice will be based on numbers, while other producers' advice is based on sophistry and illusion. ("Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Consign it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.")

They can claim to know exactly what works and what does not. Well, sorry, no. Knowing that something works leaves us a long way from knowing why something works. And this leaves us a long way from knowing how to reproduce it in another movie. The only thing this data can be absolutely sure to produce is arrogance. We have seen this mistake before.

Yes, they can claim to know exactly what works and what does not and why. Or they could not. There's nothing inherent in a quantitative approach that rules out epistemic humility. In fact, there's much to quantitative reasoning that makes it more humble. When's the last time you saw someone run a t-test on an executive's intuitions or gut feelings?

This means that whatever the data say, Netflix cannot tell a director, "We need a fight scene here." And it really can't say, "We need a fight scene at the 14-minute mark." Doing so, will not only drive creatives away, but viewers as well. As Henry Jenkins has said, viewers are newly sophisticated and critical. They can see formula a long way off. They can see plot mechanics the second they hit the screen. And the moment this happens, they are off.

Hold on a minute. Why would you assume that Netflix's results would be more formulaic than the traditional Hollywood approach? Humans can only sort out cause and effect when there are a couple of moving pieces. Computerized pattern recognition can do so in much more complicated environments. Doesn't it stand to reason that Netflix's discovered patterns will be more complex, and therefore less formulaic and noticeable, than the patterns that intuition- and tradition-guided producers hew to?

Netflix, therefore, will have to temper their itch to intervene. Naturally, we are not talking carte blanche here. We are not saying that we take any artist and turn them loose. Because we know a great deal of capital has been squandered by creatives keen to prove how artistic and avant garde they are. No, what we need are culture producers who are — in the language of Goldilocks — "just right." They need to be able to tell a story and obey some of the story-telling conventions even as they do new and interesting things to break and bend those conventions. Only then will painters paint and patrons watch.

The advice in this post true for every company producing creative output. It's masquerading as being specifically about Netflix. It's not only more general than it's made out to be, it's arguably less applicable to Netflix than to their competitors.

I'm also more than a little weary of critiques being made against numerical decision making without any consideration of the faults of the non-numeric decision making it's displacing.

by jsylvest Posted on 14 February 2013
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Netflix Marathon

Tyler Cowen :: Will marathon viewing become the TV norm?

On Friday, Netflix will release a drama expressly designed to be consumed in one sitting: “House of Cards,” a political thriller starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright. Rather than introducing one episode a week, as distributors have done since the days of black-and-white TVs, all 13 episodes will be streamed at the same time. “Our goal is to shut down a portion of America for a whole day,” the producer Beau Willimon said with a laugh.

Ad-financed shows — still a clear majority of viewing — may prefer to have impressions from the ads spread out over weeks and months rather than concentrated in one long marathon sitting.

On the other hand, when watching an hour long show — or even a half-hour — I routinely see the same ad multiple times. Not ads for the same product or service, but the very same advertisement. I am sure there is a lot of literature about the trade-offs between repetition and staleness to doing this. (Note to self: ask about this at the next marketing quant lunch.)

house_of_cards

Cowen continues:

Furthermore the show itself relies more heavily on an effective and immediate burst of concentrated marketing, with little room to build word of mouth and roll out a campaign with stages.

Yes, you lose word-of-mouth, but you also lose the inevitable week-to-week decay as people drop out of the viewership pool. Most TV shows show a remarkably consistent exponential decay in viewership. It's not at all clear to me that the gaining from WOM and the losing from audience decay is preferable to having neither.

This is being framed as a contest between watching 13 episodes in one day and watching them over four months. My wife and I have been watching one episode of "House of Cards" every day or so. I think this middle ground may be a better solution than either extreme. A two week roll-out keeps viewers focused and concentrates marketing, but doesn't roll the dice on one big push.

Note that Netflix has an advantage that other outlets don't: they can continue to advertise the show for free through their service. This won't drive new members to subscribe, but I think they benefit even when existing members watch the show. True, it doesn't boost revenue, but racking up higher viewership both makes it easier for them to create high-quality shows in the future, and it strengthens their in-house productions as a bargaining chip when negotiating with other content producers and distributors, which I think is the real value of "House of Cards."

One media market which is still highly serialized and has clearly not come to grips with the implications of that is comics. Here is just one recent piece about this. People have been fretting over the serialization-vs-collection transition and the friction it causes since I started reading comics six years ago, and they don't seem any closer to resolving the tension.

PS "House of Cards" is very highly recommended. I haven't had a show I was this excited about binge-watching in a couple of years.

by jsylvest Posted on 14 February 2013
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