Three Deep Videos and a Roundup

October 26, 2011 By

I am not normally a big consumer of online video content, but in the last couple of months, I’ve watched three very significant videos that together have turned my mind into silly putty. They are incredibly fertile, thought-provoking and demanding without being merely stimulating in an infotainment/mindcandy sense. This is protein, not sugar.

They total about 6 hours, but if you choose to invest a clear-brained morning or afternoon, you will not be disappointed. You should find that you’ve leveled-up your thinking about a lot of stuff that we talk about frequently.

I am also posting a roundup of the last couple of months, since I am now blogging on enough different venues to justify some periodic aggregation.

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Thrust, Drag and the 10x Effect

October 25, 2011 By

If you are only used to driving cars, it is hard to appreciate just how huge a force drag can be. The reason is that drag increases as the square of speed, so an object will experience 100 times the drag at 300 mph as it does at 30 mph. Not 10 times.

In  Physics Can Be Fun, Soviet popular science writer Ya Perelman provided a dramatic example of the consequences of drag. With drag, a typical long-range artillery shell travels 4 km. Without drag, the same shell would travel 40 km.

Or 10x further. Which brings me to the famous 10x effect in software engineering.

If you haven’t heard of it, the 10x effect is the anecdotal observation that great programmers aren’t just a little more productive than average ones (like 15-20%). They tend to be 10 times more productive. A similar effect can be found in other kinds of creative information work.

Can you transform yourself into a 10x person? If you meet certain qualifying conditions (by my estimate, maybe 1 in 4 people do), I think you can.

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The Quest for Immortality

October 19, 2011 By

This is a guest post by Greg Linster, a graduate student studying economics at the University of Denver.  He blogs at Coffee Theory about things philosophical and shares aphorisms (almost daily) at Aphoristic Cocktails.  

The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death is the latest book by British political philosopher John Gray, and it explores the intellectual origins of the modern transhumanist movement in painstaking depth.  Be forewarned, the book is not exactly a cheery read.  However, Gray’s analysis is incredibly poignant and of utmost importance if we are to really understand what it means to be human.       

In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

In a world that has become increasingly secularized, I think Nietzsche presciently understood that science would become heralded as the new religion. Technology, not a traditional deity, would then become the natural place to look for a human Savior and the Singularity would signal the technological Rapture.

The scientific quest for immortality, however, can trace its roots back to the psychical investigations that began in the late nineteenth-century, and the storied history behind this bizarre pursuit to use science in order to cheat death is largely the subject of this book.

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The Gervais Principle V: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

October 14, 2011 By

At the heart of all tragedy, the Greeks saw a phenomenon they called hamartia: a fatal error born of unavoidable ignorance. Combined with a fundamental moral flaw, hamartia inevitably led on to destruction. For the Greeks, humans were cursed not just with mortality of the flesh, but also hamartia-driven mortality of the spirit. Hamartia was the Gods being Divine Jerks, randomly toying with human lives for their own pleasure, through cat-and-mouse games the latter could not hope to win.

Series Home | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | ebook

 

For the Greeks, any divine purpose, even subtly malicious randomness, in the ordering of the universe, was preferable to purposelessness. At least the gods cared enough to be cruel.

Nietzsche saw tragedy differently. For Nietzsche, God was dead and only the flesh was real. There was only the indifferent Great Bureaucrat of  the material universe, Chancellor Entropy, apathetically offering humans a form to fill out, with just one simple check-box choice: “death or booga booga?”

The Clueless disdainfully ignore the reams of fine print, and proudly check: death.

After trying, and failing to understand the fine print, the Losers cautiously check: booga booga.

Finally, the Sociopath frowns doubtfully at the form, and asks: “Can I speak with your supervisor?”

“Certainly,” says the Great Bureaucrat. “There’s some additional paperwork for that I am afraid. Just fill these out, and take them over there. Godot will be right with you.”

Welcome to the penultimate episode of the Gervais Principle series. The saga of two-plus years and 20,000-plus words of booga-booga that you have already endured is now winding its way to a tortuous conclusion.

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Tempo Review on BoingBoing by Cory Doctorow

October 13, 2011 By

Cory Doctorow has a thoughtful review of the book up at BoingBoing.

But I’ve just picked it up again, and finished it. Why? Because I kept on referring to it in discussions — all sorts of discussions. A critical analysis of a friend’s manuscript for a new book on security; a talk with my agent about the plot of an upcoming novel; a discussion of economics and bubbles; a practical political planning session for an upcoming debate at a party conference. Tempo had stimulated a lot of thinking for me, and I thought it deserved finishing.

So I’ve finished it, and while I very rarely bother to post about books that I can’t wholeheartedly recommend (see “life’s too short,” above), I find myself driven to post a rare mixed review. Tempo may be the most fascinating book whose thesis I couldn’t entirely grasp and whose author I couldn’t wholly follow that I’ve ever read.

Like many other readers, Cory appears to have found the book rather dense, but worth finishing.

New Forbes Blog, Economist Video

October 6, 2011 By

A quick heads-up on a couple of off-site items. First, I just signed on as a contributor at Forbes, and booted-up my new blog there, on technology issues. I’ve posted two pieces in two days (I don’t plan to maintain a daily-posting schedule, but I felt Steve Jobs’ passing deserves a reaction on any technology blog).

You’ll see some familiar ribbonfarm themes evolve in more focused ways on Forbes.  I am hoping to keep up a weekly schedule of posts there. They will be on the shorter side (for me). I’ll be aiming for 1000-1200 words at most, probably fewer.

Hope to see you in the comments there.

Second, the video of my talk on the Gervais Principle is now available on the Economist site. Now that I am writing in so many different places (here, the Tempo blog, the Be Slightly Evil list, occasional high-effort Quora answers, Information Week and now Forbes), I think I need to figure out some sort of roundup strategy. I’ll see what I can do. Perhaps a monthly roundup?

The Stream Map of the World

October 4, 2011 By
This entry is part 3 of 15 in the series Psychohistory

For most of the last decade, Israeli soldiers have been making the transition back to civilian life after their compulsory military service  by going on a drug-dazed recovery trip to India, where an invisible stream of modern global culture runs from the beaches of Goa to the mountains of Himachal Pradesh in the north.  While most of the Israelis eventually return home after a year or so, many have stayed as permanent expat stewards of the stream. The Israeli military stream is changing course these days, and starting to flow through Thailand, where the same pattern of drug-use and conflict with the locals is being repeated.

This pattern of movement among young Israelis is an example of what I’ve started calling a stream. A stream is not a migration pattern, travel in the usual sense, or a consequence of specific kinds of work that require travel (such as seafaring or diplomacy). It is a sort of slow, life-long communal nomadism, enabled by globalization and a sense of shared transnational social identity within a small population.

I’ve been getting increasingly curious about such streams. I have come to believe that though small in terms of absolute numbers (my estimate is between 20-25 million worldwide), the stream citizenry of the world shapes the course of globalization. In fact, it would not be unreasonable to say that streams provide the indirect staffing for the processes of modern technology-driven globalization. They are therefore a distinctly modern phenomenon, not to be confused with earlier mobile populations they may partly resemble.

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Mental Models and Archetypes Explained

October 3, 2011 By

I spent several thousand words in the book talking about mental models and archetypes, but this awesome satirical graphic conveys the essence of the idea in just one picture. From the Global Nerdy blog, though it apparently has a longer history and originally appeared in French first. Thanks to Jean-Luc Delatre for pointing this out.

Ubiquity Illusions and the Chicken-Egg Problem

September 29, 2011 By

I enjoy thinking about chicken-and-egg problems. They lead to a lot of perception-refactoring. Some common examples include:

  1. You need relevant experience to get a good job, you need a good job to get relevant experience.
  2. You need good credit to get a loan, you need to get loans to develop good credit.
  3. You need users to help you build a better product, you need a better product to get users.

This post is about one particular way to solve the problem, using what I call a ubiquity illusion. It is one version of what is colloquially known as the fake-it-till-you-make-it method.

Creating a ubiquity illusion is the most readily available method for solving a chicken-egg problem. It is, to be perfectly honest, not the best method. There are other methods that are superior, but they are generally not available to most people.

Ubiquity illusions are like the sculpture above (The Awakening, by J. Seward Johnson, photograph by Ryan Sandridge, Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution). It is actually five separate pieces strategically buried to give the impression of a much larger buried sculpture, of which three are visible above.

Let’s talk magic.

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The Milo Criterion

September 23, 2011 By

There is a saying that goes back to Milo of Croton: lift a calf everyday and when you grow up, you can lift a cow. The story goes that Milo, a famous wrestler in ancient Greece, gained his immense strength by lifting a newborn calf one day when he was a boy, and then lifting it every day as it grew. In a few years, he was able to lift the grown cow. The calf grew into a cow at about the rate that Milo grew  into a man. A rather freakish man apparently, since grown cows can weigh over  1000 lb.  The point is, the calf grew old along with the boy.

I have been pondering this story for a couple of years, and it has led me to a very fertile idea about product design and entrepreneurship.

I call it the Milo Criterion: products must mature no faster than the rate at which users can adapt. Call that ideal maximum rate the Milo rate.

It seems like a simple and almost tautological thought, but it leads to some subversive consequences, which is one reason I have been reluctant to talk about it. The most subversive effect is that it has led me to abandon lean startup theory, which is now orthodoxy in the startup world.

As a consequence, I have mostly abandoned notions like product-market-fit, minimum viable product, pivots and the core value of “lean.”  I only use the terms to communicate with people who think in those terms.  And I can’t communicate very much within that vocabulary.

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