Upvote for Aggregation Innovation

When discussing the internet--a topic both accessible and interesting--most people seem to have some pet analysis that they deploy regularly, steering the conversation to a place where their favorite conversational lines can flourish. One that I hear often is that the internet has progressed along a sort of dialectic. First, early content-creators provided info for the masses. Next, as costs plummeted (due to better technology, infrastructure, and user interfaces) the masses became content-creators themselves, causing an explosion in the amount of information available on the web. I'm talking about the rise of things like social networks, blogging, and Wikipedia. The third trend, which is supposed to be happening now, is innovation in methods for sorting through that crush of information. The best example would be Pandora, but stuff like Stumbleupon and Google+'s "circles" idea also illustrates the demand for information-filtering and -structuring services.

This model is fun and useful, especially when thinking about the explosive popularity of sites like reddit. Now, any attempt to analyze, define, characterize, or label the multifarious and sublime reddit is ultimately doomed to failure, but it's a start. Reddit is possible for many reasons: the existence of free image and video sharing websites, the hyperlink navigation system, its prodigious size and diversity, its non-invasive design and style, sheer inertia and luck, etc. But the most critical ingredient in reddit's success is its total reliance on a wildly undervalued aggregation innovation: the upvote/downvote system.

Every hour of every day, thousands of people are submitting content on reddit--pictures, videos, links, discussion comments, interview questions, whatever. Every topic imaginable is represented, but for simplicity's sake let's focus on just pure humor, which plays an outsize role for most users. All of this content is presented as a massive list, with multiple nested threads. Users then vote on the material, registering approval with an upvote and disapproval with a downvote. The votes are then aggregated, pushing popular content up in the rankings, while burying unpopular content. What results is basically a hyperactive cultural laboratory driven by a sped-up Darwinian variation-and-selection process where only the best content makes the front page.

A lot of what reddit pushes to the front page is silly, but that's only because what's silly is what people want. The upvote/downvote system is just a highly effective mechanism for producing desired outcomes based on the preferences of users. In r/funny we have what is probably the single-most reliable source for high-quality humorous material in the world. In r/aww we have a shockingly effective cuteness delivery vehicle. For a subreddit with a more specific or empirical purpose, such as r/whatsthisbug, we basically have a real-time, interactive, micro-Wikipedia.

By virtue of this sped-up Darwinian selection process, reddit is a fabulous resource for social scientists: by looking for regularities in submissions that do well or poorly, we can identify interesting psychological biases or preferences in the user base. A good example of this is reddit's consistent interest in objects and animals that coincidentally take on human characteristics (i.e.machines that look like faces, animals making complex emotional expressions, etc.). Keeping in mind the long history of humans finding human-like agency in ridiculous things, reddit provides the richest dataset for testing hypotheses dealing with this question.

The consensus of scholars who study different methods of aggregation seems to be that all have certain strengths and weaknesses. We have elections, with different voting systems that favor certain types of candidates. We have wikis. We have markets, which can be understood as preference-aggregating institutions, their outcomes relying on the informational role of the price signal. Prediction markets are an interesting subset. The upvote/downvote mechanism has only just emerged as a serious alternative, yet already it has demonstrated astounding outcomes on a wide variety of topics. It is utterly devoid of any rigorous intellectual attention, but that will surely change as more and more applications are discovered and adopted by successful organizations.

Note: some might consider the rise of smartphones and the mobile internet (and thus its fusion with other technology like gps, photography, and videography) the fourth "macro-trend" in the internet's historical narrative. Perhaps, but my guess is that once some reboot of the Grafedia idea becomes fabulously successful (just wait), we'll instead see smartphones as just the first step in a more general process of blending the real world with the internet (augmented reality technology like Google Goggles is advancing rapidly).

Information Nexus

1. Six Rules For Dining Out (more here)
2. Beautiful Mathematics Documentary
3. Will Wilkinson on Health Care
4. Rap News: Yes We Kony
5. A Delicious Takedown of Senator Olympia Snow

Deep Analysis of a Silly Thing

Science fiction is really effective at presenting social and philosophical concepts to the reader in an interesting and easy-to-digest manner, and the recent spate of highly intellectual articles about The Hunger Games is a great example. Matt Yglesias evaluates that fictional world through the lenses of economic theory and political economy. Michael Lewis gets into the mathematical aspects of the lottery system, and considers the contenders' behavior via a game theoretic model. But the most provocative article concerns the social justice dimensions of the book and movie:

"The clear problem with this isn't that girls will want to hold out for a Prince, but that it might foster the illusion their value is so innately high that even without pretty clothes or a sense of agency a Prince will come find them. Sleeping Beauty and Snow White are worse: they don't even have to bother to stay alive to get their Prince. 

The Hunger Games has this same feminist problem.  Other than the initial volunteering to replace her younger sister, Katniss never makes any decisions of her own, never acts with consequence-- but her life is constructed to appear that she makes important decisions."

This agency-based critique is interesting, but sort of looses its teeth once you consider the standard it sets up. Think about most action movies, especially those starring your typical white male lead. The only reason those guys survive the whole two hours is because of constantly recurring dumb luck. What is the exciting "just-in-time" moment if not a deus ex machina? Characters in action movies are constantly making vital decisions that run counter to the probability, but always survive. The fact that action heroes succeed due to random luck and not their decisionmaking ability or personal qualities reveals the illusion of their agency also.

Luckovich

Is the TSA Just Security Theater?

The Economist hosts a week-long debate on the topic. Bruce Schneier says yes:

"An even more meaningful response to any of these issues would be to perform a cost-benefit analysis. These sorts of analyses are standard, even with regard to rare risks, but the TSA (and, in fact, the whole Department of Homeland Security) has never conducted them on any of its programmes or technologies. It's incredible but true: he TSA does not analyse whether the security measures it deploys are worth deploying. In 2010, the National Academies of Science wrote a pretty damning report on this topic.

Filling in where the TSA and the DHS have left a void, academics have performed some cost-benefit analyses on specific airline-security measures. The results are pretty much what you would expect: the security benefits of most post-9/11 security changes do not justify the costs."

The Art __ Video Games

The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. recently opened a new exhibition: The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect. It runs through September, then goes on tour. I arrived with high hopes: most regular consumers of video games have for years recognized their merit as an artistic medium, and it's great to see a real art gallery concur. Furthermore, flaunting the most artistic aspects of the highest-quality games is a great way to re-introduce the rapidly-changing industry to a wide swath of older non-players who often seem to define all video games by their shittiest, most addicting and violent elements. Unfortunately, I walked away sorely disappointed.

The show is basically divided into three sections. First, an introduction to the medium and a brief justification for the exhibit's existence. This area is eclectic and contains some cool concept art and quotes from game designers. Next, viewers have the opportunity to actually play some games: huge screens and modified controls are set up for legends like Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros., as well as more recent games like Flower. The final section, which comprises most of the exhibit, is a series of identical kiosks, one for each major game system (Nintendo, Xbox, etc.). A touchscreen lets the viewer watch game clips and listen to a brief analysis using a hand-held telephone speaker. Each kiosk sports four popular games from the system, one each for the following categories: 'action', 'target', 'adventure', and 'tactics'.

On the face of it, the exhibition suffers from three basic defects. First, there exists a strong focus on the gameplay mechanics and technical details of games, rather than on their artistic aspects. Innovations in graphics resolution and context-sensitive control schemes are interesting, but not really relevant. Compounding this is an unfortunate desire to provide mainly representative samples of games. Due to the restrictive nature of a gallery show, viewers are only able to get a small taste of a game relative to its length and richness. But instead of having this taste draw from the best, most artistically sophisticated moments of a game, we're supplied with boring screenshots and clips from mundane parts. And here's the thing: the best video games simply can't be broken down like that. People play for the peaks of enjoyment--the boss fights, the cinematic cutscenes, the particularly quirky or detailed rooms or characters. Incidentally (though perhaps not), these peaks also tend to be the most 'artistic' in the classical sense, and were unfortunately mostly absent from the exhibit.

This brings me to the second point: the poor use of the gallery format to showcase the artistic aspects of video games. Generally speaking, it's best to let the art do the talking in any show, which means limiting intervention to decisions about the order of works and to small white informational  plaques with vacuous blurbs. For art forms specifically designed with the gallery show in mind, this works pretty well. Visual artists want to differentiate their work, and so galleries are filled with a diverse assortment of art--paintings of different sizes and shapes, sculptures, etc. The problem comes with gallery shows consisting of art never designed for the gallery. If the exhibition topic is visually homogeneous (say, video games played on simple television screens), there exists a design challenge: how to convey the art's diversity and richness to the viewer? This exhibit certainly failed that challenge, and in spectacular fashion (20 identical plastic kiosks, really!?). There's great scope for exploring the capacity for gallery space to amplify the artistic value and diversity of video games, but instead the exhibition muted the artistry through dull homogeneity. Imagine the sublime voice acting of Bioshock booming through the gallery corridors, or the cinematic cutscenes of Blizzard enjoyed in a darkened theater setting. Many modern video games are filled with screenshots of such visual heft that they almost scream out to be displayed on a massive wall in some gallery, but instead we get tiny television screens.

Thirdly, the general failure of the exhibit to demonstrate the artistic aspects of video games is due in large part to the way it is organized conceptually. Essentially, the gallery is a list, compiled using two dimensions of analysis: time (past to future) and gameplay emphasis (action, target, adventure, tactics). Although employing a chronological structure is understandable for contextual reasons, I take issue with the equal weighting of each historical period. Frankly speaking, video games today are much more artistic than they were in the past. With access to higher informational content and processing power, there is simply more space for artistic pursuits within games (as well as non-artistic pursuits; video games are much longer now). As such, more gallery space should have been spent showcasing modern games. On a related note, as the video game industry has grown in size and prestige, its games have changed dramatically. We have games-within-games, narrative-based games, multiplayer games, sports and simulation games, etc. All of this complexity confounds and renders meaningless the categories used by the exhibition kiosks. Older, less complex games adhere to these categories better, but it begs the question: why, in an exhibition purportedly featuring the artistic value of video games, do we have an organization scheme driven by gameplay mechanics?

This brings us to the real conceptual problem: the muddling of the different dimensions of value of video games, preventing the distinctly artistic value to shine through. Usually when an art gallery picks some obscure topic traditionally considered non-artistic and does a show, it works pretty well. That's because the topic's other dimensions of value are relatively boring. Take motorcycles, for example. Say I wanted to do a show about the art of motorcycles. You can imagine it: exquisitely detailed and creative paint schemes, strange metalwork, etc. The show would probably be good, in part because it would be focused squarely on the artistic stuff. Motorcycles have other dimensions of value, but no museum-goer much cares about the safety, transportation, speed, or comfort of the motorcycles. But here's the problem for video games: their other, non-artistic dimensions of value are really interesting. Gameplay mechanics is interesting! The difficulty balancing and camera angle setup and controls stuff are really fascinating and worthy of thoughtful inquiry also. But that stuff isn't artistic per se, and shouldn't have dominated an exhibition marketed as showcasing the art of video games.

The bottom line seems to be this: the relation between the idea of art and the video games themselves was vague and confusing. The show had some good bits, but overall it seemed more suited to a 'history of video games' classification than anything else. So what would a more conceptually sound exhibition look like? Without trying to define what art really is, there seems to be an important distinction between the art in video games, and the art of video games. This distinction can best be described as a continuum, going from existing artistic categories to novel artistic categories. Let me explain. First, video games showcase a wide variety of art from many existing media (music, architecture, interior design, story, etc.). Second, video games allow the player to experience this art in new ways (musical cues based on player decisions, exploring the architecture of a virtual building, etc.). Third, video games also create new artistic categories (immersiveness, storyline linearity and replayability, etc.). There's certainly quite a lot of nesting within this continuum (many video games contain short films, which are themselves collections of other media), and I don't think it's possible to draw a strict line between any level. It's not clear what cinematography actually is, but it's a useful concept and over time the public has accepted it as a legitimate dimension of artistic value. Perhaps it's too big a job for a single art exhibition, but it would be great to see a show starting with areas like 'architecture in video games', or 'the music of video games', then gradually moving on to higher-level stuff like 'storyline interactivity' or 'multiplayer experience' in later rooms. And then you could get into the artistic movements...

Calories Are Not Just Calories

"Another way to view the connection to the Black Swan idea is as follows. Classical thermodynamics produces Gaussian variations, while informational variations are from Extremistan. Let me explain. If you consider your diet and exercise as simple energy deficits and excesses, with a straight calorie-in, calorie-burned equation, you will fall into the trap of misspecifying the system into simple causal and mechanical links. Your food intake becomes the equivalent of filling up the tank of your new BMW. If, on the other hand, you look at food and exercise as activating metabolic signals, with potential metabolic cascades and nonlinearities from network effects, with recursive links, then welcome to complexity, hence Extremistan. Both food and workouts provide your body with information about stressors in the environment. As I have been saying throughout, informational randomness is from Extremistan. Medicine fell into the trap of using simple thermodynamics, with the same physics envy, and the same mentality, and the same tools as economists did when they looked at the economy as a web of simple links. And both humans and societies are complex systems."

That's philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from the new section, 'On Robustness and Fragility' in the updated edition of The Black Swan. It's a bit jargon-heavy, but goofy neologisms are a signature trait of Taleb's, and probably constrains original thinking less compared to other more stylistically-traditional authors. It's just a taste of what's to come in his forthcoming book 'Antifragility,' which extends the ideas in Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan into positive territory, rather than just negative (e.g. discussing what we can and should do, rather than just what we can't and shouldn't). Expect fascinating sections on economics, philosophy of biology, epistemology, medicine, and nutrition.

For a further preview, check out this great EconTalk interview with Taleb. I'm especially excited to get Taleb's full take on the potential health benefits of fasting, especially after reading this great cover story in Harper's.

They're All a Bit Crazy, But...

Andrew Sullivan endorses Ron Paul for the GOP presidential nomination. He's for Obama in the the general election, but has some good points.

Ramirez

Whither Our Technological Utopia?

At fairly regular intervals it seems I stumble across someone writing about the importance of the humanities--and that math and science and economic growth are muscling their way into everything, to the detriment of human flourishing. This thesis was best articulated by C.P. Snow in his classic essay The Two Cultures, and more recently Mark Slouka's spectacular essay Dehumanized: When Math and Science Rule the School. The trouble, we're told, is the jettisoning of humanistic study for its own sake in favor of economic growth and national competitiveness as the sole ends in public life.

Yet in the past few years I've noticed something strange. More and more math, science, and technology advocates are making essentially the same argument for their own side: that the monolithic goal of economic growth is stripping from the world the intellectual justification of their pursuits. The wonder of science and technology has always been felt most strongly through big, paradigm-shifting advancements, and for whatever reason their frequency has declined lately. Peter Thiel addresses some of these issues in his sprawling essay The End of the Future; Neal Stephenson, in his essay Innovation Starvation, bemoans the loss of inspirational national projects and critiques the current mood in science fiction.

A recent Scientific American article suggests that NASA, with its vague ambitions and neutered horizons, should repurpose itself to identify dangerous asteroids and develop defenses against them. While this is certainly a worthy goal given the costs and benefits, such a change would give me pause. Must NASA have a specific, clearly measurable goal? Is a vague and open-ended mandate not what inspires and defines the agency? Perhaps I'm just a softie--a big asteroid project might be better than no project at all.

Power Players: Daniel Kahneman

Most of us are probably familiar with behavioral economics, which studies how and why human behavior deviates from the assumptions held by classical economics (e.g. the rational actor). Probably fewer are familiar with Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who, along with Amos Tversky, helped launch this interdisciplinary field. Despite having tremendous influence, most of his ideas have been interpreted and popularized by others. The demands of marketing and originality have thus built up a rather large corpus of Kahneman-boosting material, each highlighting a specific facet or application of his work. All the more enticing, then, when his first book for the lay public, Thinking, Fast and Slow, was released in late 2011.

Instead of simply identifying some small gap in the popular literature, Thinking, Fast and Slow is essentially a grand synthesis of behavioral psychology and economics: Nassim Taleb's focus on randomness and biases in epistemology (The Black Swan), Roy Baumeister's research into self-control (Willpower), Ian Ayres' thoughts on intuition and expertise (Super Crunchers), Cass Sunstein's theories on risk assessment (Risk and Reason), and Richard Thaler's conclusions about the normative implications for public policy (Nudge) all receive attention. Kahneman weaves these aspects together with storytelling, experimental accounts, and interactive games to articulate one simple theory: that human decisionmaking is governed by two systems, one fast, emotional, and unconscious, the other slow, calculating, and deliberate. Even with a high level of familiarity with these topics, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a great book to read, if only because it's written by the master himself. The few biographical bits scattered throughout the book are really interesting, describing Kahneman's work as a young psychologist working for the Israeli military.

Check out a great interview with Kahneman here, his fantastic TED Talk here, and a superb book review by the great Freeman Dyson here.

Information Nexus

1. Are You an Internet Optimist or Pessimist?
2. Christopher Hitchens on Dying
3. The Future of Punctuation
4. Best Analysis I've Seen on the European Debt Crisis
5. 45 Most Powerful Photos of 2011

Quote of the Week

In his “Republic,” Plato put forward the ideal of a state ruled by intellectuals who combined comprehensive theoretical knowledge with the practical capacity for applying it to concrete problems.  In reality, no one has theoretical expertise in more than a few specialized subjects, and there is no strong correlation between having such knowledge and being able to use it to resolve complex social and political problems.  Even more important, our theoretical knowledge is often highly limited, so that even the best available expert advice may be of little practical value.  An experienced and informed non-expert may well have a better sense of these limits than experts strongly invested in their disciplines.  This analysis supports the traditional American distrust of intellectuals: they are not in general highly suited for political office.

But it does not support the anti-intellectualism that tolerates or even applauds candidates who disdain or are incapable of serious engagement with intellectuals.   Good politicians need not be intellectuals, but they should have intellectual lives.

Gary Gutting, from a superb blog post at The Stone.

Imagining a Maker Revolution

This week's Economist magazine has a fantastic overview of "makers", describing some of the key technologies and businesses involved in this potentially paradigm-shifting (or destroying) movement. Sharing many similarities with open-source software, the maker movement is essentially open-source manufacturing, and is often grouped together with nanotechnology, synthetic biology, quantum computing, fusion power, and environmental sustainability as a potential tech trend that could lead the developed world out of its current innovation stagnation.

So what might happen if a huge chunk of consumer goods suddenly shifted production from factories to individual households? First let's consider the cultural response. There's no doubt free-market cheerleaders praise the Schumpeterian idea of 'creative destruction'--in the abstract. But when it comes to the individual industries at risk of being 'creatively destroyed', they tend to fight tooth and nail for survival: protecting themselves with political concessions and acquiring regulation, and by insulating themselves from competition through collusion and creating barriers to entry for new firms. We see a great example of this currently with the battle over SOPA, a proposed internet censorship bill.

Now, I'm certainly no strong adherent to communist philosophy, but parts of its critique of capitalism explain pretty well the elite response to disruptive innovation. Most new technologies or business practices might eliminate small industry segments, but nothing more. In these cases free market cheerleaders stay relatively passive. But if there are changes on the horizon that threaten big moneymaking in any systemic way, we see opposition. The internet was successful in changing the world in part because of its rapid development, and also because no one saw it coming. Economic revolutions that are obvious and occur slowly (environmental sustainability, say) provide plenty of time for capitalists to defend the status quo.

So let's bring it back to the maker movement. I could see a big backlash occurring by elites: "it will crash our consumption-based economy because people won't have to buy stuff anymore! Not to mention the job losses in retail and manufacturing! And has anyone really considered the threat to national security! Terrorists could be making guns and bombs right down the street from where your kids have little league practice!"

On the other hand, I'm not so sure small-scale distributed manufacturing would really be as disruptive as many predict. Even with a 3-D printer in every home, I doubt a very large proportion of people would tinker and design much. Outside of a small core of devoted amateurs, most of the blueprints for stuff would probably still come from big-name brands. Does anybody really think Lego would disappear if it wasn't manufacturing its own plastic blocks? Among rich-world companies, the shift away from manufacturing to ideas and marketing has been occurring for some time due to globalization. At this point it doesn't really matter where stuff gets made; high schoolers will always be willing to pay a little extra to print out hoodies with the trademarked Abercrombie logo on it (intellectual property rules would become really important under a maker revolution, but that's a topic for another blog post).

But this brings me to my last digression: a maker revolution's impact on developing countries. If the rich world no longer needs anyone to make its stuff, then what happens to the developing world? There are two likely development paths. First, the collapse of labor demand might arrest growth for some time (natural resource extraction would still be a source of growth, although with distributed production various cradle-to-cradle resource streams would likely develop in the rich world). Second, the developing world could chart a novel development path. When a country develops necessarily affects how a country develops, and just as Africa has leapfrogged on telecommunications using cell phones, so too might distributed production allow poor households to jump directly into relative material wealth. I'm not sure what will become of this intriguing movement, but generally the easier it is for creative people to turn ideas into tangible reality, the better.

Inside the Black Box

I recently saw Margin Call, a new film offering a fictionalized account of the 2007 market collapse. The movie takes place almost entirely within the Manhattan trading offices of a faceless financial institution presumed to be a major player in the unregulated mortgage-backed securities market. The action starts when a junior risk analyst discovers that the company is exposed to catastrophic losses, setting off a crisis mode within the management team. With disaster imminent, the firm faces two awful choices: be the first to sell off as many toxic assets as possible (directly causing a crash but ensuring the company's survival), or doing nothing and waiting until some other firm sees the danger and starts its own fire sale. As you may have guessed, there's not much of a choice.

The film is technically well-executed, with a great cast and an energetic pacing, but its main strength is in the sheer number of interesting questions and concepts packed into each scene. Chiefly among them is the inherent tension between the interests of the company and its employees. Throughout the film, there are two distinct narratives: one concerning the survival of the firm, and the other focusing on the economic "survival" of the individuals working there. The former is a linear narrative unfolding over the course of the whole movie; the latter is more interesting in that each major characters' precarious situation is only revealed gradually and in sequential order, moving up the layers of corporate hierarchy.

We start with the lowly risk analysts and traders. Then on to the department and floor managers. Then the division heads and VPs. And finally, after an artful build-up, the almost mythical CEO is revealed. At every level, the higher-ups are portrayed as living embodiments of the corporate will. Only after the attention shifts up a level do we see their very human predicament and the harsh incentive structure forced upon them which induces such misanthropic behavior. If the institution needs something to be done and an employee won't do it, then they're out. And someone new comes in who will.

Margin Call seeks to muddy the moral waters of the 2007 crisis in a most delightfully challenging way--by confounding the culpability of the rich one percent banksters we love to hate. To cite a classic example: assume one manages to balance a pencil straight up on its eraser. Obviously it will be precarious, and will soon topple. How shall we best assess causation in this example? In one approach we could  identify the particular wind gust that finally tipped the pencil from its perch. In reality, however, this situation is best explained by stating the obvious: that the pencil was tenuously balanced and obviously would soon topple, in one direction or the other. To blame a particular wind gust would be foolish. Its the system that counts.

Other topics explored include equality, the moral deserts of Wall St. traders and executives, and the work/play balance of life. It's a great movie, check it out.