Week 24
FT
Mr Kolton says that while there are five plausible candidates [from the Republican party ..] all the contenders think 2016 is probably their best chance. He says waiting until 2020 would be risky, as only three incumbent presidents [..] have lost bids for a second term since Herbert Hoover [..]
Party incumbency works better
Reps have a good chance this time (2016) but they will continue to have an advantage for 2020 against a President Hillary Clinton. Here is why: The model we shared previously looks at whether the incumbent party has been in power for more than 2 terms. The older model checks if there is an incumbent president in the race.
The modified model, let’s call it TfC2, works better than the original, TfC1. Here is the data for the TfC1. [geek] AIC on this data gives 84.6, on the other, 73.4, lower being better [/geek].
Example: TfC1 would say Bush I had an advantage in 1992, but TfC2 says he had a disadvantage because his party had been in power for more than two terms at that point. The fact that TfC2 performs better suggests that its assumptions make more sense, people tend to throw out the party in power (if there bigger advantages of course, they can keep them as well).
Funny story about this data / model - I was googling for political prediction models when I stumbled upon this piece of code on Github (coolest site ever!). I lifted the data from there, then realized later this person, whoever s/he is, tweaked the model / data from Abramowitz and made it better in the process. Serenpitious Google discovery!
Question
Any other models for prez prediction?
Yes
I actually had been on the lookout for prez polsci models for a while; Statistician Andrew Gelman has one in this book, I wrote to him about it, he said the code was lost, then I googled and found a lecturer who had code implementing Gelman’s model. He said he lost his code as well (dude!) and the page he listed it was literally gone, but I managed to recover it from Google Cache. Major digital archeology there… Here’s that code - it does state level prediction and uses poll data (as well as other variables) as its input. Gelman’s model is more complicated than TfC.
Book
The “unibody process” [Apple uses for its recent computers] is a blanket name for a number of machining operations. Machining in general has long been time- and labor-intensive. It relies on big, slow machines like drills and milling machines, but modern CNC machines have greatly sped up and automated the process.
“Machining enables a level of precision that is just completely unheard of in this industry,” said Jony [Ive].
How much of the process is automated is not clear, though at least part of the assembly is done by robots. While most Apple products have been assembled by hand by legions of workers, it appears the unibody process may enable the company to shift toward automated assembly.
“There’s a lot of focus on robotics and robotic control,” said a former mechanical engineer who worked as a liaison among ID, product development and operations, and spent months in the factories. The engineer declined to elaborate, citing confidentiality agreements, but said that many of Apple’s products are now primarily made and finished on CNC machines with robots moving parts between machining cycles.
“I have literally seen buildings where as far as the eye can see, where you can see machines carving, mostly aluminum, dedicated exclusively for Apple at Foxconn,” said Guatam Baksi, a product design engineer at Apple from 2005 to 2010. “As far as the eye can see.”
Ha ha
For some reason an image from The Matrix popped in my head. This place is like a .. Mac Matrix then? Or .. iMatrix?
More automation, good.
Question
What happened to Worf character in Star Trek?
He became less nationalist
Worf in ST TNG was a “Klingon nationalist” - he kept harping about Klingons, he was “loud and proud”, chest thumping so forth… But as ST evolved, so did its writing; by the time ST Deep Space Nine started, the character Worf, who was also in this show, realized he wasn’t exactly a Klingon anymore. Then his brother Kern (one of my most favorite ST characters) gets thrown out of the Klingon council, he is so ashamed he wants to commit suicide. Worf arranges his memory to be erased and asks a friend to take him to their house. Hilarous stuff.
So actually the TV land, major scifi shows were already going somewhere with this (less nationalism, little more realism), then 9/11 happened and fucked it all up. After this point scifi writing became unhinged, that’s how we ended up with shows like Lost which is mostly about bunch of confused people running around like chicken with its head cut off. Everyone is perplexed all the time, about something, they are like “wow! dude, you came out from behind that bush, I didn’t see you there man! That was so mystifying!”. So scifi went to the other extreme. Very odd.
Comment
Youth unemployment is falling down
Incorrect
Labor force participation rate for age group 20-24 (shown as quarterly average) says otherwise.
Participation (a.k.a. employment which is the opposite if unemployment) is on the down trend since 2001. Technology is the culprit.
Link: Making 9 Million Jobless Disappear
Question
But wouldn’t the new sharing economy fix these issues?
There are no guarantees
A lot of advances need to line up until people can generate reliable income in the new economy; and even then, there are no guarantees. We all know “I’ll sell my old shoes on eBay” argument won’t fly, you’ll run out of shoes, then what? Another case, there are examples of an Uber driver making $40,000/year driving people around, great, but then Uber is also looking into self-driving cars. “But then people can become car mechanics for those automated Uber cars”. Well, that’s 1 mechanic servicing, say, 10 cars; what happens to the jobs of 9 other Uber drivers who were displaced by technology?
Give people free money. Guy who thinks he is free market proponent keeps harping “but that’s a commie thing to do”. Milton Fking Friedman argued in favor of this solution, man.. Can you become more free-market oriented than Milton Fking Friedman? You can’t be.
TV is the new TV
Nice
I appreciate the defiant attitude.
News
Netflix viewing to surpass ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC by 2016.
.. but it is misplaced, I am afraid
Question
Why do people look at growth to judge a company’s success? Can’t they make do with what they have?
It is a signal
Growth, if not phony, can indicate the company’s structure for that point in time is good - otherwise they would not have been able to jump to that next phase, stretching themselves.
Starbucks grows, I see new stores in Germany, and you peer inside you see why - free Wifi, good customer service.. Few years back they would not accept ATM bank cards, I remember bitching about it to the baristas a few times -surely others did as well-, then boom; SB started accepting bank cards in a matter of weeks. There is another coffee store chain here, Einstein Cafe, their Wifi is cumbersome to use - hourly, u enter some user/pass combo, given to customers on a paper card - they nag customers if they don’t “buy anything” for a long time, and they ask you to buy something for another hour of Net use. And surprise - Einstein is not growing.
(I do like their rucola cheese baguette though… Mmmmm.. rucola cheese..)
Time-use surveys show that jobless prime-age people dedicate some of the time once spent working to cleaning and childcare. But men in particular devote most of their free time to leisure, the lion’s share of which is spent watching television, browsing the Internet, and sleeping [..]
Where are these “surveys”?
The author later makes some vague statements about basic income possibly causing tax revenue loss for the government. If this said “survey” is correct, it would have looked at jobless people, not at subjects who were receiving basic income. There is a difference.
The effects of basic income was researched throughly, based on experiments in Canada and US. The results are published by Hum, Derek, and Simpson, Wayne. No adverse effects have been found in terms of labor.
In other parts of the article the author contradicts himself - in one paragraph he talks about “jobless watching TV” then he talks about “having a job being necessary for dignity”. So these jobless people are watching bunch of TV, but are very sad about it? It makes no sense.
The culture code for work in US is WHO YOU ARE, code for money is PROOF (for having made it) [1]. So no matter what people are given, in order to get a better status, exercise their identity, people will work on something. The good part is they will be able to take more risks because of the social net. We will have more entrepreneurs, not less. Currently entrepreneurship in US is at 1 out of 10. This is higher than Europe, sure, but why can’t this number be 3 out of 10? Why not 10 out of 10?
“But will they work on useful stuff?”. Here is a counter-question: are ppl working on useful stuff now? Should pleathora of statisticians, machine learning experts focus on maximixing ad clicks on a fucking web page or an app? There is an insane amount of talent wasted, right now, on such projects.
Don’t even get me started on falling birthrates, working women not having enough children. When both or single parents are forced to work full-time for a reasonable lifestyle, can they be blamed for having less kids? Or no kids? It seems to me, what we propose is needed to even maintain the genetic diversity of humanity. MBTI Guardians (%40 of the population) will always marry, they are not the focus here, these are down-to-earth, by-the-book, logistics oriented folk, they’ll marry on time, settle down on time, have their 2.5 kids and their house, and live happily everafter. The focus is on SP, NF, NT types representing %60 of the population.
Closing note: I am sure there is a sweet spot of basic income level that will cover the basics, food, shelter, healtcare, but it will still compel people trying to get more money (because they’ll want PROOF). This is not rocket science. It is what needs to be done so more people work on rocket science.
News
[Paraphrasing] The economy contracted in Q1 2015, reaching 3% GDP growth seems unlikely.
Hmm
Our TfC prediction already took GDP growth 2% as 2016 prez prediction, and Bam’s net popularity at 0 – now it is -3. But these are small changes, GDP 2 or 3, net popularity 0 or -3, it doesn’t change the final prediction much. If net popularity was at Clinton levels, %19.5 in 2000, that would make a difference. But at least it is not at -37%, that is, Bush territory. Hillary’s predicted popular vote win is still between 43% and 52% (above %50 means sure win); she has brand recognition on her side, she can win.
Comedian
Bitch is the new black.
Ha ha
This line was from 2008, but still good.
The codes are from Clotaire Rapaille’s research, this is hard-core science, Rapaille has a process, the results are falsifiable, and used by the researcher himself to make lots of $$$ in the private sector.
Person X should do Y
Not all X for all Y
People are different; character advice needs to be tailored for the person. An advice could have been, for example, “be less selfish” - but there are ppl out there whose type is what we call More Me that need to be more selfish. MM ppl have with a tendency to always stay behind the curtain, help from a support position, to a degree where they lose their identity. They need to assert themselves more. There are others, such as the type High Horse (Putin’s type) who must support others, make it less about them, be less selfish.
Question
How similar are people?
Mmm
Anonymous: “We are all snowflakes, special, unique”.
Carl Jung: “We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life”.
Both of these statements are true. There are around 300 attributes we were able to analyze out of which everyone has a bag of 10 to 20. One person might have 10,20,30,.. another 5,15,25,30,.. The 30 is the same, hence “meeting ourselves in a thousand disquises” but the combination makes a person unique. Not many people carry the same combo, even when they do, there are genetic, cultural, other aspects that add to the differences.
But on general concerns, people act, in general, in a general kind of way.
Question
Do you support the BDS movement that aims to boycott Israeli goods.
Yes
BDS strikes at the heart of the Palestenian/Israel issue; Israel is technically in the Middle East, but it acts as though it isn’t. Since its inception Israel pushed people out of their homes, dealt with their discontent militarily, and built walls around them. Now, when it needs interaction it simply flies over these people to reach to sell / buy from the outside world. Well, that needs to stop. Boycotting Israeli goods is an effective way to do that.
To reiterate: we are for a one state solution in Palestine.
Google launches free streaming service, Play Music, in America
GOOG everywhere
If production these days is mostly about information, then whoever is best at this game will beat others - unless there are network-effect-barriers that can’t be crossed, i.e. Facebook. Streaming is all about information, and Google is master at moving / storing / analyzing information. They have their own DB product, their own app server infrastructure, plus there is programming know-how, major analytics knowledge. With that kind of basis, they can get into anything, really fast. No wonder Tim Cook is scared.
I think Google should get into banking… Here is a field that is nowadays almost entirely about information. Once there is that backbone to financial system, and Android smartphones on the front-end, all basis’ would be covered.
Jeremy Rifkin, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, 2011
Fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—are elite energies for the simple reason that they are found only in select places. They require a significant military investment to secure their access and continual geopolitical management to assure their availability. They also require centralized, top-down command and control systems and massive concentrations of capital to move them from underground to the end users. The ability to concentrate capital—the essence of modern capitalism—is critical to the effective performance of the system as a whole. The centralized energy infrastructure, in turn, sets the conditions for the rest of the economy, encouraging similar business models across every sector [..]
Three of the four largest companies in the world today are oil companies—Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, and BP. Underneath these giant energy companies are some five hundred global companies representing every sector and industry—with a combined revenue of $22.5 trillion, which is the equivalent of one-third of the world’s $62 trillion GDP—that are inseparably connected to and dependent on fossil fuels for their very survival.
Jeez
This is an insane concentration of money.
I’d assume these people would want to keep this power.
Financial Times
[On Napoleon] Sylvie Bermann, the French ambassador to the UK, recently had the brass to claim that political co-operation between Britain and France comes “within the context of the united Europe which was the Emperor’s dream” — although today, she added, this unity is forged by democracy.
Well, yes — if your idea of a united Europe is the wholly owned subsidiary of a militarist dynasty, with its brothers and sundry marshals on its thrones; a vast autocratic empire run by bureaucrats and from barracks, all financed by “indemnities” laid on the conquered as the bill for their own “liberation”; your masterpieces — Rubens, Veronese, Titian — hauled off to the Louvre in Paris, the only city fit to be the culture capital of the world; your manpower marched off to some godforsaken calamity in the Russian snows or the burning uplands of Spain at the snap of imperial fingers.
Habits such as centralisation and the unquestioned superiority of elites do indeed die hard.
That Napoleon, the supposed deliverer of liberty and equality, all wrapped up in the tricolour, was the mortal enemy of freedom there can be no argument. When in 1799, the 30-year-old general came to power through the coup of 18th Brumaire, there were 70 newspapers in Paris. Bonaparte said there was need for but one — the Moniteur, the official tool of his propaganda — and closed down all but a handful of lickspittle flatterers.
His police and spies were everywhere, deadening cultural life in Paris. Theatres were shut the minute they dared to perform anything that could be construed as critical of the regime. Napoleonic Paris was a showplace for grandiose architecture but the cemetery of independently conceived art and ideas.
Ah, sigh the Napoleonomanes wringing their hands and dabbing their eyes, liberty had to die so that equality might live. Unless, that is you were black or a woman. In 1802 Napoleon reinstated slavery; two years later he liquidated one of the Revolution’s most precious achievements: divorce by mutual consent. The Civil Code made wives more the prisoners of their husbands than in the old regime. They no longer had any right to their property in marriage and had to ask their husbands’ permission to take the stand in legal proceedings.
The empire was socially reactionary. It re-established the Catholic Church and fawned on any of the old aristocracy willing to “rally” to its autocracy. It kept careers open to talent, but the acme of everything — fortune, status, honour — was the army. Napoleon set the tone on the eve of his first campaign in Italy when he sounded like a pirate chief, promising booty: “Soldiers, you are ill clad, ill paid, I am going to lead you into the richest plains of the world where lie all of your glory and fortune.”
Militarisation spread like poison through French society. Education which had been inspiringly modernised by the Revolution surrendered to absolute uniformity of curriculum and the cult of uniform. Students were summoned to classes by the drum roll.
So when the French ambassador imagined that Napoleon and his regime were some sort of template for the EU she inadvertently put her finger on the problem. For the habits of bureaucratic centralisation, uniformity of regulation, the unquestioned superiority of administrative elites do indeed die hard.
Napoleon moved through Europe, shuffling boundaries and states as he went, oblivious to the histories, traditions, languages, customs and sentiments which were and are the warm pulse of national community.
Nationalism of course has the potential to be every bit as dangerous as bureaucratic despotism when it turns tribal, narrow and xenophobic.
[..T]he [Europe that is] one of a family of nations — sometimes harmonious, often discordant — would have left Napoleon cold [..] But then there was something inhuman about his brilliance, expended as it ultimately was entirely on himself.
Perhaps Chateaubriand put it most humanely when, despising the romance of the despot, he lamented that “gone are the sufferers, and the victims’ curses, their cries of pain”. Which is why it is right to raise a cheer and a glass 200 years on from Waterloo.
Dictators.. what are they good for?
I met someone from Luxemborg recently, he tells me when Napoleon invaded his country he did bunch of standardized s**t, such as he made people take a last name, if families could not his soldiers made one up. So there were lastnames such as bald, hairy, loud, idiot, etc. which are still around today. This made me think, these modernizers are so the same - Kemal of TR and his cohorts did much of the same thing in Turkland. His officials would assign people names such as bald, hairy, loud, idiot, in Turkese this time, and these names are also still around.
Anyway - the chronology of Napoleon state-building is interesting; because the centralization, standardization of the 2W arrived after Napoleon. Here is where our compatible-forces-finding-eachother explanation comes into play, no matter which part arrived sooner or later, what worked together formed a low-energy position from which there was no escape. It pulled societies in like a black hole.
Another example: Carl von Clausewitz. The famous military strategist / thinker fought in Napoleonic wars where -let’s be honest- he got his ass kicked, all six times. Then he sat down to write On War, published in 1832 which is mainly about beating Napoleon-style forces. It would be a hit right?
Wrong.. basically nothing happened, noone gave a hoot. It wasn’t until WWI and WWII military thinkers started remembering “who was that guy, Carl Clause-schmo-witz he wrote a book on this stuff, grand scale war?”. Then his work is remembered and this is how we ended up with total war - an idea whose time had come. It was but a small step to take from mass production, mass consumption, mass communication to end up in mass destruction.
In today’s decentralized, 3W world, Clausewitz is completely outdated obviously.
Jeremy Rifkin, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, 2011
I suspect at this juncture my American readers are asking, “What about President Obama?” Obama is the man who most reflects, in the public mind, the generational shift taking place in the world. The young president has confessed that the most difficult thing he had to give up on assuming high office was not his privacy but his precious BlackBerry. He surely would be attracted to the idea of a distributed and collaborative energy revolution patterned after the Internet model—right?
Obama has made green energy a part of his economic recovery plan. But when we look at the fine print, we see that his administration is even more deeply committed to bringing back nuclear power, offshore oil drilling, and experimental technologies to clean up coal emissions, allowing for a vast expansion of coal-fired power plants. And even his green economic recovery program is formulated more along the lines of centralized management and distribution of renewable energies than a distributed model, reflecting the top-down organizational thinking that governed the [second wave ..]
[It appears that t]he US team is playing a different game altogether—betting on the installation of giant, centralized wind and solar parks in the midwestern and southwestern states. The idea is to pass federal legislation that would mandate the creation of a super high-voltage grid that could send the electricity generated in these more sparsely populated regions back to customers in the more populated eastern regions of the country. The cost for creating the high-voltage grid would be spread among millions of electricity customers.
This centralized approach to harnessing renewable energy and distributing electricity has not gone over well with eastern governors and power companies. In July 2010, eleven New England and mid-Atlantic governors sent a letter to the US Senate’s majority leader, Harry Reid, and minority leader, Mitch McConnell, opposing the national electric transmission policy. The governors argue that centralizing wind and solar energy generation in the western region of the country “would harm regional efforts to promote local renewable energy generation . . . and hamper efforts to create clean energy jobs in our states.” The governors were particularly alarmed by the $160 billion price tag to create a national transmission corridor from the West to the East [..].
President Obama has been out on the political circuit talking up the need to replace a half-century-old servomechanical power grid with a digital, state-of-the-art smart grid and is pushing for thousands of miles of new power lines to meet America’s future electricity needs. But why would the president favor this centralized approach to organizing renewable energy resources that are, by their nature, broadly distributed and locally available?
Interesting
Has there been a change on this since 2011 I wonder?
There is also an excerpt in the book on Hillary Clinton, suggesting that she “gets it” better.
A. Toffler, The Third Wave
Out of [a] driving need for the integration of Second Wave civilization came the biggest coordinator of all—the integrational engine of the system: big government. It is the system’s hunger for integration that explains the relentless rise of big government in every Second Wave society.
Again and again political demagogues arose to call for smaller government. Yet, once in office, the very same leaders expanded rather than contracted the size of government. This contradiction between rhetoric and real life becomes understandable the moment we recognize that the transcendent aim of all Second Wave governments has been to construct and maintain industrial civilization. Against this commitment, all lesser differences faded. Parties and politicians might squabble over other issues, but on this they were in tacit agreement And big government was part of their unspoken program regardless of the tune they sang, because industrial societies depend on government to perform essential integrational tasks.
In the words of political columnist Clayton Fritchey, the United States federal government never ceased to grow, even under three recent Republican administrations.
Damn
That’s in billions of dollars BTW, meaning that 2,400 number is 2,400 billion, which is, 2.4 trillion. This spending has gone through the roof in a way that can’t be explained through population increase. It’s interesting that instead of spending money on these programs, simply giving the money out (at 2000 levels even) directly to people of 100 million would mean 12K per person / per year.
The mind blowing number is this though; 22 million government workers [see also FRED].
WSJ
Today’s open-office layouts or the obsession with meetings do not play to introverts’ strengths
True
People are different. It’s pointless to treat all employees the same. One-size-fits-all is a result of industrial-era thinking.
[Gartner] One-third of jobs will be replaced by software, robots, and smart machines by 2025 [Forbes] 63% of workers are “not engaged” at their jobs, and 23% hate what they do.
Interesting
33% of jobs can be replaced, and 23% ppl hate what they do. I believe there is an overlap between these segments.
Tech Guy
I quit the tech industry. This Friday, June 12, will be my last day at Yelp [..] It’s nothing to do with Yelp specifically. I just don’t care about Yelp’s problems, any more than I care about Uber’s problems or Yo’s problems or anyone else’s problems. They’re interesting for a while, but they’re also the same self-inflicted wounds everyone seems to deal with — why is this slow? why is this broken? how can we keep this old code limping along indefinitely without having to rewrite it? how does this thing a former employee wrote even work? They’re cute puzzles, and I can get into solving them for a while, but I don’t care about them. Because they aren’t my problems; they were just dumped in my lap, along with a canvas sack with a dollar sign on it.
Identification with the end goal is key
People like to feel that their contributions make a difference, in a way that jives with them. The optimal setup for this would be many small companies working on niche projects containing people who are passionate about what they do, and massive tech companies who already know how work at scale, and buy smaller companies strategically as they need to. It would be better if the small goes down to the size of person, who can work on his own or collaborate with others through open source mechanisms, inside or outside the money system (or being supplanted by the money system with a basic income). The rest is fluff. It’s the kind of stuff that noone wants to work on which means that noone probably should.
Isaac Asimov
Both [Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace] traveled to far places, observing strange species of plants and animals and the manner in which they varied from place to place. Both were keenly interested in finding an explanation for this, and both failed until each happened to read Malthus’s Essay on Population.
Both then saw how the notion of overpopulation and weeding out (which Malthus had applied to human beings) would fit into the doctrine of evolution by natural selection (if applied to species generally).
Obviously, then, what is needed is not only people with a good background in a particular field, but also people capable of making a connection between item 1 and item 2 which might not ordinarily seem connected.
Undoubtedly in the first half of the 19th century, a great many naturalists had studied the manner in which species were differentiated among themselves. A great many people had read Malthus. Perhaps some both studied species and read Malthus. But what you needed was someone who studied species, read Malthus, and had the ability to make a cross-connection [..]
But why didn’t [another person] think of it? The history of human thought would make it seem that there is difficulty in thinking of an idea even when all the facts are on the table. Making the cross-connection requires a certain daring. It must, for any cross-connection that does not require daring is performed at once by many and develops not as a “new idea,” but as a mere “corollary of an old idea.”
The Great Asimov
–
Isaac Asimov
[On isolation and creativity] My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. The creative person is, in any case, continually working at it. His mind is shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it. (The famous example of Kekule working out the structure of benzene in his sleep is well-known.)
The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.
Nevertheless, a meeting of such people may be desirable for reasons other than the act of creation itself. No two people exactly duplicate each other’s mental stores of items [..]
It seems to me then that the purpose of cerebration sessions is not to think up new ideas but to educate the participants in facts and fact-combinations, in theories and vagrant thoughts.
But how to persuade creative people to do so? First and foremost, there must be ease, relaxation, and a general sense of permissiveness. The world in general disapproves of creativity, and to be creative in public is particularly bad. Even to speculate in public is rather worrisome. The individuals must, therefore, have the feeling that the others won’t object [..]
If a single individual present has a much greater reputation than the others, or is more articulate, or has a distinctly more commanding personality, he may well take over the conference and reduce the rest to little more than passive obedience. The individual may himself be extremely useful, but he might as well be put to work solo, for he is neutralizing the rest [..]
For best purposes, there should be a feeling of informality. Joviality, the use of first names, joking, relaxed kidding are, I think, of the essence—not in themselves, but because they encourage a willingness to be involved in the folly of creativeness. For this purpose I think a meeting in someone’s home or over a dinner table at some restaurant is perhaps more useful than one in a conference room.
Probably more inhibiting than anything else is a feeling of responsibility. The great ideas of the ages have come from people who weren’t paid to have great ideas, but were paid to be teachers or patent clerks or petty officials, or were not paid at all. The great ideas came as side issues.
To feel guilty because one has not earned one’s salary because one has not had a great idea is the surest way, it seems to me, of making it certain that no great idea will come in the next time either.
Yep
Larry Page
When I was younger and first started thinking about my future, I decided to either become a professor or start a company. I felt that either option would give me a lot of autonomy—the freedom to think from first principles and real-world physics rather than having to accept the prevailing “wisdom.”
As Eric and Jonathan explain in How Google Works, we’ve tried to apply this autonomy of thought to almost everything we do at Google. It’s been the driving force behind our greatest successes and some impressive failures. In fact, starting from first principles was what got Google going. One night I had a dream (literally) and woke up thinking… what if you could download the whole Web and just keep the links? So I grabbed a pen and scribbled down the details to figure out whether it was really possible. The idea of building a search engine wasn’t even on my radar at the time. It was only later that Sergey and I realized ranking web pages by their links could generate much better search results.
Gmail started out as a pipe dream too. “And when Andy Rubin started Android a decade ago, most people thought aligning the mobile industry around an open-source operating system was nuts.
Over time I’ve learned, surprisingly, that it’s tremendously hard to get teams to be super ambitious. It turns out most people haven’t been educated in this kind of moonshot thinking. They tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what’s actually possible. It’s why we’ve put so much energy into hiring independent thinkers at Google, and setting big goals. Because if you hire the right people and have big enough dreams, you’ll usually get there. And even if you fail, you’ll probably learn something important.
It’s also true that many companies get comfortable doing what they have always done, with a few incremental changes. This kind of incrementalism leads to irrelevance over time, especially in technology, because change tends to be revolutionary not evolutionary. So you need to force yourself to place big bets on the future. It’s why we invest in areas that may seem wildly speculative, such as self-driving cars or a balloon-powered Internet. “While it’s hard to imagine now, when we started Google Maps, people thought that our goal of mapping the entire world, including photographing every street, would prove impossible. So if the past is any indicator of our future, today’s big bets won’t seem so wild in a few years’ time.
Question
In the movie Swordfish you said Thomas Jefferson is made to look like having shot someone on the White House lawn for treason. How?
Very expertly
The scene is like this: a rogue government puke (played by Travolta, portrayed as some sort of international vigilante, doing “what’s right”, making “though choices” as in bombing innocent civilians so forth) was in bed with a rogue US senator, who was the agent’s patron. But the rogue agent caused some headaches for him, so the senator wanted to take him out, the agent finds out, now wants to kill the senator, in this scene he is about to shoot him. This is where he says “TJ once shot a man on the White House lawn for treason”, the senator tries to reply in exasperation “now wait that’s different”, before he has a chance to finish, agent shoots him dead.
Now the movie did not officially lie, but the way the conversation is presented leaves the viewer thinking (who has no idea of this historical event I am sure), TJ probably did, in a little different way, but still, shot a man for treason, deciding on his own. Little they know Jefferson was simply performing a firing squads’ duties.
These neocons are sneaky.
Twitter User
After so many attacks based on Islam shouldn’t Islam the religion be blamed now?
Well..
Muslims are tired having to apologize whenever a few idiots do something stupid. Do Jews around the world have to apologize everytime Israel’s right-wing government engages in acts of terrorism against Palestenians?
Twitter User
But Israel’s government does not quote their religion while doing so, but these [so called] Islamic guys quote their religion for these actions.
Right
Because the guy who learned it through Islam for Dummies book is the final authority on religion.
Question
Here Asimov talks about a big discovery such as natural selection. In other posts you talk about “pathalogical incrementalism” and it is something to be avoided. But what Asimov presents sounds like an incremental thing.. What is the connection?
Aight
Here is the deal: the dirty little secret is, discoveries, new products, etc. no matter how influential, or how big, or based on incremental advances. Here is the distinquishing factor though: these big findings are incremental in action / implementation, but revolutionary in outcome. Darwin reads Malthus, he researched species’ differentiation, connecting them might take a big leap in terms of mental reorientation, but it is, semantically speaking, an incremental leap in terms of information / knowledge.
So, in order to make big discoveries, find big products, you are looking for some incremental advance in action (which they all are) that will give you the maximum revolutionary output. That is the right wording for it.
Self-driving cars: [geek] SLAM was solved probabilistically -the only solution- [/geek], laser sensors were around, accurate GPS info for street data was taken from Street View project, make some incremental advances in all, combine them, you get the Google Car.
This is obviously extremely hard to do. For any domain there might be hundreds of ideas that can be advanced and combined incrementally to give that revolutionary output. If it was easy everyone would do it, right? Creativity, willingness to look at things differently (so a multitude of combos can be judged and tried), starting from first principles [1] would be prerequisites IMO.
What we do not want is stuff that is both incremental in action, and also incremental in output. That is what people usually mean when they criticize “pathalogical incrementalism”.
Starting from first principles is necessary bcz let’s imagine for any given subject there are hundreds of ideas that are in various stages of advancement that form the information landscape of that subject. But the end points of some these ideas / advancements may not be in the right place, even based on what is currently known. They are at where some idiot thought they should be. The inventor should be able to sniff these out (because garbage in means garbage out), then, if necessary, starting from first principles, brings the endpoint to where it should be. Then, incrementally advancing that, combining it with something else, he can create the new product / new idea.
The climate is changing, but not sure if humans cause it.
Very funny
Your pope is saying exactly the opposite boy. Why don’t you pull ur head out ur ass and listen to what he is saying? This guy … this is one sneaky motherlover.. He is sending “warm messages” to climate change camp but at the same time he turns to the fossil fuel lobby and says “I will let you do whatever you want, because, hell, we are not the cause of global warming, are we?”.
F**in Jeb!