Category Archives: Pop culture

Do Angel Investors Make Technology Shallow?

Posted on August 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

Just two days ago I wrote about super angels potentially crowding out VCs in the funding of technology companies, and I noted that this dynamic was mostly relevant to consumer internet companies rather than hardware companies. And I didn’t even mention biotech, medical device or energy companies, most of which take far more capital than even the superest of angels could provide.

Now, lo and behold, a former Gartner analyst comes out with an article about how Silicon Valley is too focused on consumer internet, on “the glitz and the superficial,” rather than on solving big problems, like medical and environmental ones. He notes that the new innovators in those areas are big companies, who are focusing their R&D budgets on these big problems with big markets, rather than entrepreneurs, who are focusing their energies on figuring out the best way to get you to “check in” at your local bar.

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Posted in Business, Pop culture, Technology

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Slate Magazine vs. Sarah Palin

Posted on August 6, 2010 | 2 comments

I had pretty much forgotten about Sarah Palin, or started to ignore the news items about her, and I had assumed that maybe she was holed up learning about policy or facts. But then Slate runs an article trying to analyze how she might come up with some of the wacky stuff  she says.  I read a quote like the one below, and it’s hard to see the issue as one of policy differences:

“Oil and coal? Of course, it’s a fungible commodity and they don’t flag, you know, the molecules, where it’s going and where it’s not. … So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it’s Americans that get stuck to holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here.”

I’m sorry, but regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, that makes no sense. Take Newt Gingrich: he is deeply conservative and I deeply disagree with him, but that guy could talk for a week straight and he would never say anything as idiotic as the Palin quote above. I want to be generous and assume that Palin isn’t stupid; that she just uses folksy idioms and is slightly misinformed. But I read what she says, I hear about the “refudiates”  and that generosity is hard to find. Can someone help me solve this conundrum?

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Posted in Politics, Pop culture

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Piling on Google

Posted on August 5, 2010 | Leave a comment

Om Malik has a great post today on Google’s utter inability to compete in the social media world, as evidenced this week by the company shutting down Google Wave, which was a complete flop, and the sad purchase of Slide for $200 million.

I recently posted about the risk that Google’s culture poses to its future success, and Malik makes the same point, noting that Google simply doesn’t have social media in its DNA. He says that algorithms can’t factor in empathy, which is another way of saying that hiring only engineers doesn’t guarantee future success.

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Thoughtbasket Goes Green

Posted on July 27, 2010 | 1 comment

Your humble correspondent has recently started writing for Ecopreneurist, a publication focused on clean and green businesses. You can read my first post here.

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Posted in Business, Pop culture, Trends

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Soccer Is Too Random for America

Posted on July 6, 2010 | Leave a comment

Like many Americans, I have been watching a lot of soccer during the World Cup. Also like many Americans, I won’t watch soccer again until the next World Cup in four years. Despite the popularity of youth soccer across the US, the game has just never really caught on as a spectator sport here.

A number of theories exists as to why soccer isn’t more popular in America — no timeouts for commercial breaks, not enough scoring, ridiculous faking of injuries, generally boring*, too European, etc. — all of which are probably true (I am drinking my own explanation Kool-Aid here). And there are, I’m sure, plenty of other good reasons, including my personal uber-theory of sports, which I will save for a later post, after I have trademarked its awesome parts.

But watching this World Cup I came up with a new idea. Relative to the big American sports, soccer is way more random; players don’t have as much control as they do in our sports. The players thus lack agency, which I use here in the philosophical sense: “human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world.” Americans like sports with heroes, and heroes require agency. All the great American sports narratives are abut players who took control (Babe Ruth calling his homer, Michael Jordan in the clutch) of their game. Randomness gets in the way of this control.

When I say that soccer players are not in control, I don’t mean this as a criticism. The guys in the World Cup are the best at what they do. But using your feet to move a ball is simply less precise than using your hands, as you do in football, basketball and baseball. Shots and passes regularly go awry in soccer; this is the randomness of which I speak.

For example, in Sunday’s game between England and Germany, at around 59 minutes a German player was breaking away. Although English defenders were closing in fast, the German had an open shot at the goal. He took the shot from not far outside the penalty area (ie. from 54 feet…pretty close) and yet he missed the goal by three feet. Why? Because kicking is not hugely accurate. Compare that to an NFL quarterback, who, even with giant players rushing in to clobber him, will rarely miss a 19 yard pass by three feet. Why? Because throwing is accurate. Note: I am watching the Uruguay vs. Netherlands game as I post this, and the same thing just happened.

True soccer fans probably like this randomness. And over time, the randomness will be evened out: even if players only make a fraction of their shots, the better team will likely take more shots, and thus score more by the end of the game. But Americans are far more Newtonian. We want action, then result. We prefer a narrative of consistent forward progress, not random fits and starts. We want our action heroes not to follow the flow of Brownian motion but to seize the day and execute, whether they are Peyton Manning or John McLane.

* I tried to find the brilliant bit from the Simpsons where the ball just gets kicked back and forth for about two minutes, fully encapsulating the American view of soccer, but the internet failed me.

THIS JUST IN: Check out this set of Get Fuzzy comics for a classic take on the American view of soccer as boring.

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Not Either/Or, But Both

Posted on June 30, 2010 | 1 comment

If you spend any time reading about current affairs, whether you read newspapers, magazines or blogs, you tend to see that issues are discussed in dualistic terms. Most authors say the matter at hand is the result of either X or Y: two oppositional explanations.

For example, in this Atlantic article about obesity in America, the discussion tends to fall in one of two camps: either X) the obese are weak-willed, or Y) the obese are victims of the US system of cheap corn subsidies and for-profit food companies with their manipulative marketing and clever chemists.

Or in this NY Times article about why the military is awarding fewer Medals of Honor, the reasons given are: either X) the nature of current war doesn’t create as much of the close-in combat that tends to lead to Medals of Honor, or Y) the military system that awards medals has become so risk averse and bureaucratic that someone in the chain rejects even worthy Medal of Honor recommendations.

I understand why authors do this; it’s easier to bundle complex systems into single narratives, and creating oppositional tension makes an article more interesting. But rarely in real life are there two mutually exclusive and oppositional reasons for something. It’s not either/or; it’s both.

Life is complicated, and in virtually all situations there are multitudinous reasons for any phenomenon. Take obesity: of course some people simply won’t restrain their appetites. But it’s equally obvious that the nexus of policies and food companies greatly increases the likelihood of people eating fattening food. X and Y. And there are plenty of other likely causes too.

This shouldn’t be a great revelation to anyone – “oh, you mean there usually isn’t one simple cause for everything?” – yet journalists and pundits continue to employ the binary analysis. Does this matter? I think it does, because popular dialogue ends up framing the debate. If all people ever hear about is either/or, then they will look for a single solution, which will inevitably be insufficient. If the public instead hears about both, then they will look for more complex solutions that can address the multiple causes, and which will be far more likely to succeed.

For example, take the ballooning federal deficit, please. Pundits and politicians would like you to believe that the cause is either too much government spending or tax rates that are too low. If the public buys into that dichotomy, then the public will assume that simply cutting spending or raising taxes will solve the problem. But it won’t. The problem involves both federal spending and insufficient taxes, and it will only be solved by addressing both causes.

Discussion matters because it ends up circumscribing actual policy. So let’s make sure our discussions are accurate, even if complicated, because life is complicated.

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Posted in Philosophy, Politics, Pop culture

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On Sacrifice: Eliot Spitzer, Moral Leader?

Posted on June 4, 2010 | Leave a comment

Disgraced New York governor Eliot Spitzer has a great article in Slate about how Americans have lost their commitment to shared sacrifice, referencing Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the exhortation to all Americans to work hard so that the soldiers of the Civil War “shall not have died in vain.” I know it’s ironic to be lectured on sacrifice by someone who couldn’t even sacrifice his own orgasm for the good of his family and his state, but he makes some excellent points.

Spitzer talks mostly about taxes and energy, discussing for example how reading the Gettysburg Address makes  investment bankers arguing for millions in additional compensation seem petty. But I would go further than Spitzer; the need for all of us to sacrifice to solve some pretty big problems could be extended from investment bankers to union members. Shared sacrifice should apply to those who sue for millions when they trip in the grocery store, those who are always looking for a government handout, those who hate sharing. During World War II women stopped wearing stockings because the silk was needed for the war effort. My guess is that we all have a metaphoric stocking we can give up for the good of the country.

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Amazon and the Future of Books

Posted on May 21, 2010 | 3 comments

A recent New Yorker article about book publishing in the era of Amazon Kindles and Apple iPads indicated that Amazon is thinking about cutting book publishers out of the loop completely and striking deals directly with authors. Such deals would allow Amazon to price e-books however they wanted and to provide more generous royalties to authors. Sounds great, right? Cheaper books and richer authors.

Sure, in the short run, for certain authors. But in the long run, this is a highly destructive strategy. Destructive for the book industry, and even for Amazon itself. What Amazon will do is poach the big name authors, the ones who don’t need publishers any more. John Grisham, Stephen King, Danielle Steel, and other authors of such stature can sell books no matter who publishes them. They can move to Amazon, bump their royalty rate from 15% to 50% and make a ton of money.

But the publishing business, like much of entertainment, uses the hits to subsidize the misses. Simon and Schuster, for example, reinvests the money it makes publishing Stephen King and uses it to find authors like Susanne Dunlap, who might be the next Stephen King. If the big authors leave their publishing houses to go to Amazon, then the publishers won’t have the money to find and support emerging authors. The publishers will likely go out of business.

This will be bad. Books entertain us, they teach us, they can be a way for a culture to bond over shared values. A society without new literature is not a society I want to live in. Moreover, this will be bad for Amazon in the long run. Eventually, Stephen King and the other big authors will die, and if the publishers are out of business, who will discover the new authors, the Stephen Kings of tomorrow? Nobody. Then Amazon’s book business will also die, since there will be no new books.

You might try to analogize this to the music business, with Napster disintermediating the record labels, but that analogy is flawed. New music can be absorbed quickly: listen to 2-minute samples of three songs and you’ll have a sense for a band. This is why new music is being effectively crowd sourced. But spend 6 minutes reading a passage from a new novel and you will have no idea if you will like the novel as a whole, or any other piece by that author. The current system of literary agents and publishing houses works to discover and nurture new authors. Moreover, the current system improves authors’ works by editing them. Most authors need editors, as the recently publicity about Raymond Carver’s editor has shown. In Amazon’s world, who will play that role?

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Economists: Incredibly Stupid for Smart People

Posted on April 27, 2010 | 1 comment

The New Yorker recently (I am perpetually 4-6 weeks behind in my New Yorker, so I consider the March 1 issue to be recent) profiled Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist and NY Times columnist. A section of this article made me realize that economists, despite being generally very smart and well-educated, are just incredibly stupid. And I say this as someone who was an econ major in college and very seriously considered going on for a Ph.D.

Krugman was exploring why there were geographic specialties in business: carpets produced in Georgia, cars in Detroit, technology in Silicon Valley, etc. This was an outgrowth of his work on international trade, for which he won the Nobel. He saw that once a company started in a place, an entire ecosystem built up in that place. Trained workers, relevant support businesses (eg. lawyers), and transportation infrastructure – all this tended to create an economy of scale which drew similar businesses to the area.

To this you undoubtedly say, as I did, “duh.” That theory just describes common sense. Which Krugman admits: he explained this idea to a non-economist friend “who replied in some dismay, ‘Isn’t that pretty obvious?’ And of course it is.” But Krugman was the first to mathematically model this common sense phenomenon. Before that, “because it had not been well modeled, the idea had been disregarded by economists.”

So just to be clear: even if a phenomenon is so obvious that my 16-year old nephew could figure it out, mainstream economists, all with Ph.D.s from Ivy League schools, choose to ignore it because a model for it doesn’t exist. No wonder the country just went through a financial crisis. We all knew there was a housing bubble. It was obvious to me and everyone I talked to that Starbucks baristas and migrant farm workers and cocktail waitresses can’t afford $750,000 homes. But the economists at Treasury and the Fed who were supposed to be watching this? Their models didn’t incorporate these sorts of housing hijinks, and so they ignored the gathering storm.

Economists: smart enough to understand Bayesian math, but too stupid to realize that meth heads can’t afford houses.

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Supreme Court Nominee is Political, not Legal

Posted on April 22, 2010 | Leave a comment

Dahlia Lithwick has an article in Slate lamenting that the icons of liberal constitutional law are not even in the running to replace Justice Stevens, and are invariably depicted as radicals, while the equivalent judges on the right are likely to be nominated as soon as there is another Republican president.

Lithwick seems to think that this disparity is somehow part of the legal community, but in fact it has nothing to do with lawyers or the law. This disparity exists because Republicans are simply better at playing the game than Democrats are. Republicans are cohesive, all staying on message and using the same talking points, while Democrats tend to be all over the map. In addition, Republicans are far more savage, willing use words like “radical” or “threatening” to describe candidates (mild-mannered law professors, for the most part) whereas Democrats are more likely to use words like “gosh, I’m just not sure I agree with that man.”

Lithwick asks “Why should conservative law students be moved and inspired by their legal rock stars while liberals are sent the message that theirs are outrageous?” as if law schools can somehow fix this problem. I hate to criticize Lithwick, since normally her writing is so good that I practically have a crush on her, but in this case she is missing the point. Law schools can’t solve this problem; voters can.

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Posted in Politics, Pop culture

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