I spent a fair amount of my youth as a basement-dwelling video game addict. Much of that time was spent playing the dorkiest of genres: Role Playing Games (RPGs). They’re a kind of video game version of choose your own adventure, except without any choice.
I know, it impressed the hell out of the girls, too.
Anyway, today Google maps today brought me back to those days:
This story about hazing at US fraternities is pretty shocking:
“I was a member of a fraternity that asked pledges, in order to become a brother, to: swim in a kiddie pool of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen and rotten food products; eat omelets made of vomit; chug cups of vinegar, which in one case caused a pledge to vomit blood; drink beer poured down fellow pledges’ ass cracks… among other abuses,”
I went to a school that outlawed its fraternities almost a hundred years ago and had a common orientation week that sought (with some success) to accomplish some of the same things that more dramatic hazing does:
Hazing supposedly serves a deliberate purpose, of building solidarity. Psychologist Robert Cialdini uses the framework of consistency and commitment to explain the phenomenon of hazing, and the vigor and zeal to which practitioners of hazing persist in and defend these activities even when they are made illegal.[20] Cialdini cites a 1959 study in which the researchers observed that “persons who go through a great deal of trouble or pain to attain something tend to value it more highly than persons who attain the same thing with a minimum of effort.”
There is a trend in our society of becoming less tolerant towards deliberate infliction of pain. I’d argue that building solidarity is a good thing to a point, but that benefit is almost comically overshadowed by the costs of this kind of hazing.
In case your immediate reaction is to scoff at this liberal claptrap, think of this trend in the context of Gladiatorial games and crucifixion. Blunting our impulse for violence has made the world a better place.
“Yeah, but only up to a point!” you might respond. Sure, but that point is decided by generations to come. Who can predict how our grandchildren will react to stories of hazing?
At my alma mater, they tried to get by this by promoting some interfaculty rivalry. It’s silly to think back on this but defining my identity as a Commerce student necessarily put me in opposition to the Engineers. And for a time a part of me really bought into it. Not because it made sense but because I wanted to buy into it.
The search for solidarity as an unpleasant impulse in a pluralistic society, even when it isn’t pursued with violence. Think of this quote from Tyler Cowen:
Brink Lindsey said… that [voters] choose on the basis of the people they sympathize with. To which Tyler Cowen replied, “People vote on the basis of who they sympathize against.”
In the politics of affiliation, you can vehemently denounce 49% of the population if it stirs a feeling of solidarity among the other 51%.
Pete Warden didn’t ask us to square this circle, but he should have. Both quotes from his blog.
Our tech community chooses its high-flyers from people who have enough money and confidence to spend significant amounts of time on unpaid work. Isn’t this likely to exclude a lot of people too?
…I look around at careers that require similar skills, like actuaries, and they include a lot more women and minorities. I desperately need more good people on my team, and the statistics tell me that as a community we’re failing to attract or keep a lot of the potential candidates.
Appreciate the shoutout to actuaries and all, but isn’t the simple solution to encourage more education in this field?
Quote 2 comes from the comments to his first post:
I’m a female who majored in computer science but then did not use my degree after graduating (I do editing work now). While I was great with things like red-black trees and k-maps, I would have trouble sometimes with implementations because it was assumed going into the field that you already had a background in it. I did not, beyond a general knowledge of computers.
I was uncomfortable asking about unix commands (just use “man”! – but how do I interpret it?) or admitting I wasn’t sure how to get my compiler running. If you hadn’t been coding since middle school, you were behind. I picked up enough to graduate with honors, but still never felt like I knew “enough” to be qualified to work as a “true” programmer.
How is this possible? Even the people with degrees in field can’t code? And this isn’t the first time I’ve come across a story of Comp Sci graduates that couldn’t program.
Actuaries aren’t the best comparison because so much of Actuarial Science builds on pre-existing math knowledge and adds insurance and finance training. Coding is more fundamental. I’d say an actuary is to a .NET (or whatever) programmer what a generalized ‘math geek’ is to a ‘programmer’.
There’s only one way to learn to code, and it’s not the easy way. Like math, or any other language for that matter, you’ve got to sit down and crank away, learning from your mistakes; few could call themselves mathematicians three years after picking up their first calculators.
Of course, you don’t need to master the coding equivalent of calculus to be useful any more than you need to take integrals to do your taxes. But right now the whole programming ecosystem is starved of talent. Pete needs ninjas and everyone else needs front end web devs.
That means every kid should in the world should figure out whether they like programming or not in a middle school classroom.
Bold headline, non?
Well, have a rummage through these links and you tell me if this is a big deal.
First the economist gives us a story about patenting and medicine (may be gated). The bottom line here is that natural laws cannot be patented though there are some loopholes…
For example, a genetic mutation can identify patients who are susceptible to a given disease or treatment. The mutation is a natural occurrence, as is the reaction to the drug. But the invention comes in connecting the dots between these elements.
Which aren’t as big as everyone thought…
Stephen Breyer, writing the court’s opinion, affirmed that Prometheus’s patents claimed a natural law and would restrict further innovation. Administering thiopurines, observing the body’s reaction and offering dosing advice did not add up to a patentable process. “Einstein could not patent his celebrated law that E=mc2”, wrote Mr Breyer. Nor could Einstein have patented the observation by “simply telling linear accelerator operators to refer to the law to determine how much energy an amount of mass has produced.”
The biotechnology industry did not expect the ruling. It is now in a minor panic. Personalised medicine inevitably includes the application of natural laws. It is unclear which applications may be patented.
The Economist doesn’t seem to come down hard on either side of this debate, even though it has been mildly skeptical of patents in the past.
Patents are tricky buggers. Have a listen to a patent skeptic, Alex Tabarrok, talk to Russ Roberts about them. Most patents and trademarks (especially) lie somewhere between trivially stupid and economically radioactive. The one kind of patents that seem to promote innovation? Ones on drugs.
Clearly we need to find a way to research these natural processes. And now that the results may well be in the public domain (I’m not a lawyer but I realize that that probably isn’t strictly, or perhaps remotely, true – just grant it to me for a minute), who’s going to pay for the data collection, analysis, etc?
Well, let’s start with the data: the same Alex Tabarrok from that excellent Econtalk interview linked above points us to a fascinating study (abstract and writeup) where a doctor did this to himself (from the writeup):
Snyder provided about 20 blood samples (about once every two months while healthy, and more frequently during periods of illness) for analysis over the course of the study. Each was analyzed with a variety of assays for tens of thousands of biological variables, generating a staggering amount of information.
…The researchers call the unprecedented analysis, which relies on collecting and analyzing billions of individual bits of data, an integrative Personal “Omics” Profile, or iPOP.
…To generate Snyder’s iPOP, he first had his complete genome sequenced at a level of accuracy that has not been achieved previously. Then, with each sample, the researchers took dozens of molecular snapshots, using a variety of different techniques, of thousands of variables and then compared them over time. The composite result was a dynamic picture of how his body responded to illness and disease — and it was a number of molecular cues that led to the discovery of his diabetes.
Ok, so a battery of tests can give us BIG DATA on our bodies just at the dawn of the age of our ability to swallow it.
Let’s pretend I know what I’m talking about and imagine the possibility of Kickstarter projects for accumulating giant biometric databases and Kaggle competitions to work out what they mean?
Now there’s a charity I’d donate to!
Folks be getting all worked up about JK Rowling dissing intermediaries with her own ebook distribution channel.
She’ll probably make more money than she would going through Amazon, let’s say, but not a ton more. Do you imagine she’d actually swallow Amazon’s standard deal to put her books on their site? Of course not.
Superduperstars are always going to run their own show. Floyd doesn’t need a promoter any more than Jaden Smith needed to bust his ass at auditions.
Note that Floyd hasn’t signed any other decent fighters, Jaden hasn’t written a book divulging the secrets of succeeding in showbiz and Rowling won’t distribute any books of note other than her own.
The tables get turned all the time, relax. Incumbent specialists have nothing to fear.
An open letter to college admissions departments opens with this:
As a physics teacher who recently resigned from Loudoun County Public Schools, one of the wealthiest and fastest-growing public school districts in America, I urge you to altogether stop considering high school grades in your admissions process and decisions.
It’s a grim catalogue of the ways a decentralized grading system can be gamed. The bottom line is that, to those that care about such things, the advantages high grades can offer, in terms of lifelong opportunity and short term scholarships, are worth a LOT.
The average teacher has no counter to the force of that desire; it’s just a job for them, at the end of the day. For parents of a certain mindset, it’s life and death. If all it took to upgrade your kid from mid-tier to top-tier college was teaming up with him/her to make every teacher from K-12’s life a living Hell, would you?
In case you’re thinking it’s the teacher’s professional duty to resist this, consider what our author quit teaching to do:
The focus on grades is killing American education. In my book, “Full Ride to College,” I specifically teach students how to engineer their grades and exploit the weak correlation between grades and mastery, thus giving students a competitive advantage without the inconvenience of working hard and learning. While I consider this strategy to be a mockery of American education, it is also effective.
Remember that Goldman exec who quit via the NYT?
Here was my conclusion:
It’s either a book, a political appointment or his own hedge fund. Any other business and I’d say reality TV show.
Well, here’s today’s news:
Greg Smith, the former Goldman Sachs executive who resigned in spectacular fashion last week byblasting the firm in an Op-Ed page article in The New York Times, is now shopping a book proposal to major publishers in New York, several people with knowledge of the conversations said.
Now, I might have been pretty impressed with myself, except…
In meetings, Mr. Smith came across as mild-mannered, polite, spare with details but sincere, publishers said…
…timing may be a problem if the book is released later this year or next year, many months after Mr. Smith first leapt into the news.
“The book will likely feel dated,” an executive said. “It’s a story that had its moment.”
I gasped when I read that. It means a few things:
He actually burned his bridges without considering the long term consequences. Now he’s scrambling to capitalize on his 15 minutes of fame.
Except 15 minutes is REALLY short. He should have had a strong first draft of that book done to nail down the advance and publish in a couple months.
He should have had an agent with contacts in multiple media to maximize what he could extract from the ant-Goldman furore he’d create in the ex-ante best case scenario, which actually came to pass. You do this with non-scalable media interaction (talk shows, interviews, etc) until the scalable medium (book) is ready.
Even given that he effed all that up, he picked the wrong agent. He should have gone with an agent that told him all this and then scrambled to make up for lost time. This should have been his plan:
Somebody will give him the book with little or no advance, I’m sure. And he’ll probably publish it and it will probably suck because he’ll be firmly entrenched among the B and C players of the media world by then.
He obviously didn’t know it, but that op-ed opened the door for him to assemble an A+ team of media types. They would have made him famous and rich in ways only the American hype machine can.
But he didn’t even see the opportunity.
Memories have been traced to individual neurons:
MIT researchers have shown, for the first time ever, that memories are stored in specific brain cells. By triggering a single neuron, the researchers were able to force the subject to recall a specific memory. By removing this neuron, the subject would lose that memory.
I remember a marketing prof in University describe discounts, coupons and related tactics as marketing “crack”. Once you feel the rush of that top line boost, it’s hard to get off it.
Ultimately, though, you succumb to your addition. Crack saps your profits and destroys your business in all kinds of direct (lower/negative margin) and indirect (consumers begin anticipating discounts and so you cannibalize your own reg-price sales) ways. Some take it to silly extremes.
This is most common with scalable product businesses and I’ve seen it happening in real time with Rao’s tomato sauce.
This stuff is awesome. But it costs between $8 and $10 a jar. Lunatic prices for tomato sauce, if you ask me, but wow is it good.
Now you might ask how I know it’s so good if I recoil from spending so much on a jar of preserved tomatoes, olive oil and seasoning? Well I never spend $8 because it often and erratically goes on sale.
We normally buy Rao’s for about $4 a jar (and sometimes maybe for $6), which has happened three times in the last 8 months, if I remember correctly. Each time it happens we buy more: the last haul was 6 jars. Enough, perhaps to last us until the next sale.
Anyway, what about the effects on businesses that don’t scale as well?
Well, today I learned about another possible downside to top-line boosting strategies. This paper comments on the reputational effects of daily deal sites like Groupon:
Our analysis shows that while the number of reviews increases signi cantly due to daily deals, average rating scores from reviewers who mention daily deals are 10% lower than scores of their peers on average.
Wow. The abstract doesn’t go into detail on what they think the causal mechanism is here (or of any possible measurement biases – pbbt, like they would do that), but can it be true that Groupon destroys business quality?
The typical Groupon business is small and local, which means they are probably disproportionately reliant on the skill of a single owner and/or one employee. They can’t expand easily and they probably have limited physical space in the store. These things probably spell disaster when a horde of new customers come all at once.
hat tip dr data
I always cringe a bit when I hear of some politician or other trying to “spur innovation” or “create a ‘Silicon Valley’ in ______”. They clearly don’t know (or care?) what they’re talking about.
So I enjoyed an article in last week’s Economist on the topic:
But in the 20th century, as Britain’s trade swung away from the Atlantic towards Europe, the city got into the habit of resisting innovation rather than embracing it. Liverpool became a hotbed of militant trade unions, which hastened the decline of the shipping industry (by striking against containerisation, for example) and almost wrecked the municipal government.
Politicians want to affiliate with the prestige of successful entrepreneurs and cutting edge technology. But the bottom line is that they are constitutionally incapable of embracing the ONE thing that makes entrepreneurial culture tick.
Failure. Lots of failure. TONS of failure. Not just failure of nascent startups themselves, failure of incumbents, annihilation of jobs, industries and established patters of commerce and trade.
Protect last year’s champions (the current employers of all your voters) and you crush innovation.
My view is that innovation is the base case; it’s honestly a very natural thing for humans to do. It is stifled quite deliberately for fear of its consequences. The only pro-innovation policy, therefore, is to give up the power to stop it.
Not Unreasonable 