The Pinnacle of Civilisation

There’s a great quote that goes something along the lines of the following:-

“The man who first flung a word of abuse at his enemy instead of a spear was the founder of civilisation”.

The origins of the phrase might be in dispute (Freud?) but it jumped to mind when I saw this on Twitter earlier on today.

Historians Versus Economists

Tyler Cowen rarely disappoints in either the quality or quality of information and commentary that he generates. The man is a machine. And his recent post on the difference between how historians and economists view dangerous world events certainly made me think.

It’s an oversimplification but the argument appears to be that historians are likely to be far more negative than economists when it comes to assessing the importance of current events. Partly that’s because economists always have a belief in the ability of the economy to bounce back. Regardless of which shade of armageddon may be visited on a country or society, the power of financial incentives and the human desire to improve on any situation is such that, given a sufficiently long timescale, most economic disasters can be recovered from in full. For most, boom will inevitably follow bust and innovation is often forged out of necessity in the direst of circumstances.

But historians? These are people whose job it is to research topics in which the overwhelming evidence proves just how random (and often senseless) life can be. It is not difficult to imagine that the very same events that left a permanent scar on the course of world history may, with only the slightest of variation in circumstances, resulted in a completely different (and by implication, more positive) outcome. Think of an assassination: a missed shot, the early arrest of a suspect, inclement weather conditions, getting lost en route, a final change of a politician’s plans……the list goes on forever.

The revolutions started with such sudden violence could just as easily been avoided. As Cowen writes about historians:

“If you think about these questions enough, you can end up very nervous indeed. Historians have seen too many modest mistakes spiral out of control and turn into disasters.”
So which viewpoint is more likely to be the valid and/or useful one to take onboard?

The Value of Podcasts

I’ve been a heavy listener of podcasts for probably about five years or so. I remember the Let’s Talk Bitcoin podcast was essential listening back in 2013 as one of the fastest and most reliable ways to get up to speed with all manner of crypto news whilst walking to and from work. It soon became one of only a few podcasts over the past five plus years that’s occupied that hallowed position of being essential listening with no excuses for missing an edition.

Over the years, the subscriptions have varied (slightly – the list tends to get longer but few get culled entirely) but the appeal of the medium is, if anything, stronger than ever. Somehow choosing to listen to conversations rather than music whilst walking/running (something that only 6 or 7 years ago I would have laughed at), I can’t even hazard a guess as to how much content I’ve consumed as a result over the last 5 and a half years or so.

The signs are strong that the appeal of podcasts is continuing to build. Amazingly, I read that China’s podcast market is worth $7.3 billion (compared to $314m in the US). The reason seems to be because many podcasts in China are focused on paid subscriptions to educational programmes as opposed to the eclectic mix of conversation, entertainment, hobbies, news, long-form storytelling (and everything in between) that you find in the West.

Done correctly though, podcasts are incredibly powerful – as tools to inform, educate and entertain – but also, crucially, to help build communities. Outside of your immediate social circle and work, can you think of any other format where you’ll happily spend maybe a couple of hours a week listening to the same people that you don’t know – and what’s more keep coming back for more?

It’s fascinating to watch just how much power some of these very successful podcasts have – for the most part, power that is concentrated in the hands of the individual(s) who present and choose the content. It’s been responsible for something that’s been particularly interesting, the rise of movements as the Intellectual Dark Web, for example. Who honestly knew that the thing that was missing from the lives of millions of people around the world was in-depth lengthy discussions on the nature of politics, personal choice and science?

It really doesn’t matter whether you agree or disagree with their views. Because the reality is that their impact across the wider global populace is growing and – crucially – none of it is reliant on membership of a wider organisation that is vetting and homogenising the conversations that are taking place.

I’m calling it now – you’ll see a future President of the US come from a podcasting background in the relatively near future……

Content discovery still remains challenging for podcast listeners, mind you. The sheer quantity of data and variation in topics discussed in hour-long conversations make it a far, far tougher gig for an algorithm to successfully recommend podcasts that you’ll like based on your previous listens (although progress is starting to be made – for example Pandora’s attempt to map the podcast genome for precisely this purpose).

This year, I’ve been a guest on a few podcasts. Whilst some of the interviewers are far better to deal with than others, overall I can say that they’re pretty good fun. And there’s one thought that I keep coming back to ever since I read it on Twitter a while back:-

I can’t help but think this is true. Maybe there are just so many variables at play for a presenter during a podcast, the only thing that he or she can really focus on coincidentally happens to be precisely the one thing that will be guaranteed to make the content better, regardless of who the guest is – i.e. making sure that the conversation is natural and flows well.

The art of conversation is ingrained in most of us from an early-ish age. And during a conversation you have a huge amount of real-time feedback with which to guide/improve/save any conversation before it’s over. That’s very different to writing a blog post where you’re forced to rely for feedback on analysing the metrics after the event.

The Podcast Hitlist

Oh, and if you’re wondering, here’s where I get my regular podcast fix (I’ve left out the ones that I dip in and out of infrequently in favour of the ones that I’ve listened to the most):-

Darwin Sacked Via Twitter

Following on from my earlier post about a couple of things to consider when hiring, this tweet by Paul Graham touches again on the employment relationship. Graham is the founder of Y Combinator but crucially the author of some of the best long-form essays you’ll find online about all manner of things.

Whilst our modern communication platforms have empowered us, they have also created a great deal of what I think of as brittleness. Should we choose to flick the power switch, each and every one of us today has access to a megaphone that can reach across the world for free. Yet if you make a statement that is out of the familiar or accepted and you can expect to be scythed down online. What’s more, you may be held accountable for your statement or belief for many years to come.

I’m a strong advocate of the school of strong opinions, weakly held. You should try to think hard enough to have beliefs that you stand up for – yet never be too fixated to refuse to change them in the face of contrary evidence. Beating down innovative, wacky or counter-intuitive thought seems to be a road that’s fraught with dangers for the rate of our collective progress as a species.

There’s a risk of some of our most wacky ideas as a culture being suppressed – not by regulation but by a digital mob attack arranged via social media.

Perhaps we need to hope that the next Darwin isn’t using social media today.

You Are Your Own Employer

A post that isn’t mine tonight – but a classic from almost a decade ago that if you haven’t yet read it, is well worth a few minutes of your time.

It’s by Seth Godin in 2010 called ‘The World’s Worst Boss’.  And yes – that’ll be you.

“Even if you’re not self-employed, your boss is you. You manage your career, your day, your responses. You manage how you sell your services and your education and the way you talk to yourself.

Odds are, you’re doing it poorly.

If you had a manager that talked to you the way you talked to you, you’d quit. If you had a boss that wasted as much of your time as you do, they’d fire her. If an organization developed its employees as poorly as you are developing yourself, it would soon go under.”

It reminds me of another quote from Charlie Munger, who once remarked:-

“Whenever you think that some situation or some person is ruining your life, it’s actually you who are ruining your life. It’s such a simple idea. Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life. If you just take the attitude that however bad it is in anyway, it’s always your fault and you just fix it as best you can … I think that really works.”

So it’s all about taking responsibility really. Easy you’d have thought 😉

Two Thoughts on Hiring

I’ve come across a couple of different thoughts about the hiring process this week which I thought were worth adding here. Broadly speaking, they focus on culture and capacity.

First up is this gem:

Anyone who’s ever been involved in a hiring process knows this subconsciously. But next time you’re involved in selecting someone new for the team, it’s worth reminding yourself about the multiplier effect.

If you’re successful, the people you hire in the early days will end up being the ones who do all the hiring to build up their teams. And given that people tend to hire people who are similar, you’d better think twice before hiring an asshole – unless you want to spend many future meetings locked in with many more just like them. Like everything, there’s a Shakespearean quote that fits perfectly, in this case it’s found in the Tempest:

“Would’t had been done! Thou didst prevent me. I had peopled else this isle with Calibans.”

Second thought: is rejecting a job applicant for being ‘over-qualified’ a fundamental error?

We all know why this is perceived as a normal response to a CV that’s packed with qualifications. From the FT:

“The glib rejection hides a range of concerns including the fear that such applicants will be too costly (even if they protest they are ready to work for below their market rate); too snooty (despite their grovelling displays of humility), or too hard to please (notwithstanding their desire for one thing and one thing only: that job).”

But there’s some evidence that if you get it right, these are precisely the sorts of individuals who have a little spare capacity to do some hugely valuable thinking – perhaps about the way that the daily process of the job or team. Or perhaps that element of spare time is now spent on considering strategy and the bigger picture, something that’s exceptionally difficult for many who have been chosen to grow into the role and are consequently stretched to the limit of their existing talents.

Clearly it depends on the individual. Many would take the opportunity to spend time in less productive pursuits (aka skiving…) or be increasingly deafened by creeping boredom over time. But get the right person and it seems that the potential may be huge for the organisation as a whole to win big out of the arrangement.

And as an aside, I wonder how many people also use this as an excuse. Many of the most successful entrepreneurs I’ve known have had one thing in common – an insistence on hiring people far more talented than they are. Part of this comes from a rare ability to be able to accurately assess one’s own level of skills whilst remaining laser-focused on increasing the overall output and efficiency of their baby.

But for the rest? It’s often a convenient card to play when you’re concerned that you’re hiring someone that could have the skills to replace you. Human nature being what it is, most are simply happy to hire those that won’t challenge their ability to put food on the table.

 

The History of the Internet

For something that every single person that stumbles across this blog uses many times a day, remarkably small numbers of people actually know very little about the history of the internet. Or even how it works today.

The younger you are, there’s less of a reason to question why something’s there and how it started working – and whether that infrastructure and those reasons have changed over the years. Of course, there’s little need to sit and think about such weighty issues as what the difference is between the Internet and the World Wide Web when most of your day is spent together alone within the walled gardens of Facebook….

But for anyone who wants to find out a bit more however, I’d recommend reading ‘Tubes’ by Andrew Blum, a travel book with a difference – as the author travels to visit the physical manifestations of the internet today around the world and explores some of the history.

Another useful source to check out is the Internet Society’s history which you can download here as a PDF.

And finally if you’re more visual, check out the quick summary here: ‘A Brief History of the Internet‘. It’s all just a starter but it feels like the sort of modern history that’s somewhat under-appreciated in the wider scheme of things.

Spaced Repetition

Twitter’s great for random rabbit holes just lying in wait for the permanently curious. And one of the more interesting discoveries for me in recent weeks has been the thread that introduced me to the concept of spaced repetition:-

Put simply, the concept is that you learn more effectively by creating a bunch of flashcards that you then test yourself on regularly. If you remember easily, you don’t need to test your memory about it for while. But if you struggle, however, you are forced to revisit that card much more quickly, and more frequently – until it ends up in the first category.

So it’s a dynamic system that has a number of solutions out there to create digital, as opposed to physical, flashcards. Which brings the benefit that you can carry them with you wherever you are – plus you can check analytics directly in order to see how you’re progressing.

I’ll caveat this by saying that I have no evidence as yet as to how effective it is for my brain in particular. But I’ve started experimenting with Anki (although there are a few different options out there).  And I’ve not spent any real time diving into the science, but this method seem to be  more suitable for our human brains which store memories in an emergent, as opposed to planned way.

It seems that memories are not kept in a nice tidy database in your head by your brain. Instead, each one is stored where the brain sees fit, in an emergent manner. The memory itself gets stronger if the brain encounters it regularly and frequently.

So spaced repetition seems to me to fall into that category of deliberate practice. It appears to work more effectively because you are forced to work hard at remembering things throughout the process.

I haven’t yet worked out how I’m going to test this in practice but I’m up for giving it a try for a while and check out the results.

(Provided I don’t forget that I was planning to do this in the first place….)

 

The Inevitable Craziness of Surveillance, AI and Social Credit

Jaywalking is a funny thing. It doesn’t exist in the UK – in this country, pedestrians are expected to make their own judgements about whether or not it’s safe to cross a road. That’s pretty different to the US where in some cities, you can end up getting fined or detained for the heinous crime of, er, trying to cross a road on foot.

China has a similar approach to such blatant evildoing in public. Although the response is slightly different – hose down the miscreant to teach him or her a lesson….

Whilst amusing, it pales into insignificance when placed alongside the general direction of travel across China as it continues its journey deeper into a far darker dystopian and authoritarian future. It’s estimated that the country now has in excess of 200 million surveillance cameras tracking every move of its citizens.

It’s not simply the death of privacy and the chilling effect that such a burgeoning all-seeing infrastructure has on the freedom of individuals that’s the concern here.  It’s that this is far from being simply an ideological battleground. Instead, it’s reality today – as China has already introduced the Social Credit System which means that people with low scores can be prevented from travelling on planes and trains.

In other words, we’re seeing technology being used for totally different reasons. Instead of helping individuals in the pursuit of freedom, technology is being deployed as a system of control.

It’s turning into a one-sided battle as the Chinese government strives to manage society in a completely new way by pursuing a form of algorithmic governance.

For a taster, read this from the New York Times:-

“Last summer, the police put up cameras linked to facial recognition technology and a big, outdoor screen. Photos of lawbreakers were displayed alongside their names and government I.D. numbers. People were initially excited to see their faces on the board, said Guan Yue, a spokeswoman, until propaganda outlets told them it was punishment.

“If you are captured by the system and you don’t see it, your neighbours or colleagues will, and they will gossip about it,” she said. “That’s too embarrassing for people to take.”

Now if that doesn’t remind you of 1984, then I don’t know what will. Just watch this video – is this a system that you would live in out of choice?

I originally started this post to talk about one story in particular – the fact that cameras in Ningbo incorrectly captured the face of a famous successful CEO pictured on the side of a passing bus and interpreted it as an act of illegal jaywalking by her.

Cue much hilarity.  Until you start to consider the consequences. AI is still a long way from being reliable when it comes to these type of tasks. And the potential damage caused by such mistakes accelerates with every day that passes .

It’s rare to find an issue where you honestly can’t see both sides. Where even if you can’t agree with the other point of view as such, you can still find some form of merit in the opposing position. But I’m afraid this issue is one of those for me. It’s going to be fascinating to watch how this develops over the next 5 to 10 years. But for all the wrong reasons.

 

 

The Personal Runway Metric

When I was out speaking at an event tonight, one of the questions posed to us as panellists was what advice we’d give to students who are currently thinking of moving into the crypto/blockchain/startup world.

It reminded me of something I heard Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan say recently. It doesn’t answer the question as such but I do think it is relevant.

Balaji believes that arguably the single most important metric for life is something he calls your personal runway. As you can probably guess if you’ve spent any time in business, your personal runway is defined simply as the size of your savings divided by your burn rate (how fast your spend the money you earn).

Maybe it doesn’t sound that noteworthy. But it is – because it’s far easier today to reduce your burn rate by 5x than it is to increase your salary/net worth by 5x.

Reducing your burn rate is deterministic (i.e. it’s within your power and choice to do it immediately). Really want to reduce the money you spend by a factor of 5? Take that chance – and go move to a different country with a far cheaper standard of living.

So the combination of cryptocurrency and digital technology combined mean that it’s now becoming much easier to continue earning very high sums of money for your work despite basing yourself in a remote location that doesn’t require you to spend as much. The results? You can now do any or all of: save more money; start companies with less funds; and continue to work on the most interesting opportunities out there today.

Of course, human behaviour being as it is, many/most people won’t take that leap. But some will. And they’re the ones that will likely make the most of the opportunities that are out there.