Ben Casnocha: The Blog

Links From Around the Web

Assorted links:

1. The greatest strength of America is the people who want to live there -- its diversity and immigration.

2. 25 minute video presentation from Michael Clemens on why we should support immigration of all forms, and debunking the myths around illegal immigration.

3. Best photos of 2009 from the LA Times.

4. How to prevent a sneeze if you feel one coming on.

5. A restaurant that splits the bill to show what each person ordered. Brilliant.

6. The right minimum wage question.

7. A matrix breaking down leaders by four dimensions: highly educated, not highly educated, central planning, and decentralized.

8. Kurt Vonnegut's writing advice.

9. One way to debunk a thinker or writer: the stuff that's good isn't new, and the stuff that's new isn't good.

Brad Feld and Paul Kedrosky: "This Shit Is Really Messy"

That's Brad Feld in a video dialog on bloggingheads.tv with Paul Kedrosky, in the short clip excerpted below, referring to entrepreneurship. (Speaking of messiness, it's also the image -- a mess -- that Tyler Cowen thinks best describes most people's lives.) Brad and Paul have a 40 minute conversation about the macro dynamics of the venture capital industry, the IPO market in 2010, immigration reform, and why VCs and entrepreneurs sometimes talk past each other.

I'm helping Robert Wright expand bloggingheads, a reliable source of stimulating video content, to include business folks, so let me know what you think of this conversation.

Merry Christmas

Loyalty: An Overrated and Dangerous Virtue

The term "loyalty" often carries with it the connotation that it is unconditional. For this reason, loyalty is an overrated and sometimes dangerous virtue.

Loyalty is better viewed as a phenomenon of other traits and virtues: trustworthiness, empathy for fellow humans, investing in a relationship in good times and bad, variations of the golden rule, etc. These are constitutive virtues of loyalty. For example, fidelity is its own virtue. You should be faithful in a relationship. To describe this concept, I say use the word "fidelity" and not "loyalty."

The Bush Administration was criticized for prizing loyalty over competence. You had a place at the table so long as you were strongly loyal to the President. Ron Suskind wrote a book about Paul O'Neill and the Bush administration titled The Price of Loyalty which documented the uncurious and unquestioning habits of a loyal cabinet.

Nor should loyalty trump independent moral judgment. I do not believe in unconditional love or sticking with someone through thick and thin to an indefinite point. If my brother started raping and murdering people, I would call the police.

Bottom Line: Better to employ more precise words to describe the positive virtues in a person than the broad and potentially dangerous "loyal."

(thanks Dave Jilk, Ben Abram, and Cal Newport for their feedback on this idea.)

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I first started thinking about "overrated virtues" when I read Alec Baldwin tell Vanity Fair that the most overrated virtue is patience.

Book Review: Norwegian Wood by Murakami

Given that Japan is among my top three favorite countries in the world -- I hope to live in Tokyo someday -- it seemed important that I get cracking on the country's most famous living novelist: Haruki Murakami.

I started with Norwegian Wood. It's his widely-acclaimed and most-read work. I enjoyed it very much. It is about loneliness, love, and 1960s Japanese youth, and Murakami writes about all three themes masterfully and in a voice that's absolutely unique. For the most part I was engaged and entertained all the way through, and started re-reading when I reached the end.

I will not try to add to the large body of critical analysis; I will simply post below some of my favorite grafs and sentences. Emphases mine.

The paragraph that resonated most for me due to my glaring lack of experience dealing with death:

By living our lives, we nurture death...What I learned from Naoko's death was this: no truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning.

I enjoyed this description of New Mexico, which furthers my unexplainable love affair with a state I've spent almost no time in:

I had gone to Santa Fe to interview a painter and was sitting in a local pizza parlor, drinking beer and eating pizza and watching a miraculously beautiful sunset. Everything was soaked in brilliant red -- my hand, the plate, the table, the world -- as if some special kind of fruit juice had splashed down on everything.

What the protagonist wanted to tell his crush when they had sex, but couldn't:

I am having sex with you now. I am inside you. But really this is nothing. It doesn’t matter. It is nothing but the joining of two bodies. All we are doing is telling each other things that can only be told by the rubbing together of two imperfect lumps of flesh. By doing this, we are sharing our imperfection.

Lovely sentences:

“Sleep came and carried me into a mass of warm mud.”
“I felt exhausted, desperate for sleep, but it simply refused to cooperate.”
“I realize all I can put in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect thoughts.”
"Midori responded with a long, long silence -- the silence of all the misty rain in the world falling on all the now-mown lawns of the world."

What You're Really Trying to Say...

I once heard a story about Larry Summers’ management style when he was president at Harvard. In faculty meetings Summers would frequently cut off whoever was speaking to say, "So what you're really trying to say is..." Being told "what you’re really saying" can be annoying. Um, no, actually that’s NOT what I’m trying to say.

The challenge with Summers, the story goes, was that most of the time he really did re-phrase their point in clearer and more succinct terms. It really was what they were trying to say. Hence his reputation as a brilliant man but indelicate manager.

I want to stress, per Paul Graham, this story is not just about articulateness. Clear communicating is clear thinking. To be able to describe an idea more clearly than someone else means the idea itself exists more clearly in that person's mind.

Finding a Person's Idiosyncrasies Charming

A friend, in an email about idiosyncrasies, writes to me:

You get stressed out about not sleeping enough and give me secondhand anxiety. You always try to fit in just one more email before leaving for a meeting. You get hungry at the oddest times and must eat immediately. But I also weirdly like these things about you.

Amy Batchelor once told me something very wise about relationships: the key to liking someone over the long run is loving and appreciating their quirks. What someone else may find annoying, you must find endearing.

A good litmus test for when a relationship is coming un-done is when you start to be annoyed by the other person's long-running idiosyncrasies.

Inequality and Perceived Social Mobility

The leading presidential candidate in Chile, Sebastian Piñera, has proposed increasing the money the government gives to poor families to pay for school tuition. Like school vouchers in the U.S.

When this issue came up in a recent lecture I attended on Chilean politics, there was audible disapproval from people in the room. A French woman said that such policies create inequality in the education market and lead to greater income inequality in society at large. A Swiss and German nodded vigorously as the French woman spoke.

Europeans tend to focus on inequality. Latin Americans, too. Inequality is one of the top issues being debated right now in the Chilean election season.

Americans, on the other hand, by and large are not very concerned with inequality. Sure, it comes up and people talk about narrowing the gap. But deep down I don't think most policy makers and pundits think it's a core problem in a society. We continue to glorify the rich to a remarkable extent.

Why the contrasting views? It comes down to differing perceptions of how possible it is to go from poor to rich. If you believe there's a high level of social mobility in a society, you're not as bothered by a gap. If you think moving up the ladder is nigh impossible, it is a very big problem indeed, because it means the poor are stuck at the bottom, oftentimes due to rotten luck at birth.

Historically, Latin America has been a place where your last name weighs heavily on your success. "Meritocracy" is not the first word that leaps to mind when thinking about the rich and successful in the region. Europe, too, has a legacy of aristocracy and old money.

The American idea however is about the self-made man; the man who pulls himself up by his bootstraps and in a lifetime goes from very poor to very rich thanks to his own industriousness and imagination. There is a belief held by natives and immigrants alike in Horartio Alger stories. Social mobility in the States is not as great as people think, research suggests, but perception trumps all, right? A national narrative embedded in a culture commands a magnetic pull over everyone.

Bottom Line: How worried you are about inequality is driven in part by how much social mobility you think there is in society. Europeans and Chileans (and probably other Latin Americans) generally worry more than Americans about inequality because they do not perceive their societies as being as meritocratic and as amendable to upward social mobility.

(thanks to Pablo Gonzalez for helping brainstorm this post)

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The inequality in Chile is inter-generational. 30-40 year olds are rich, 50-60 year olds are comparatively poor. This is an important distinction. See this paper (in Spanish) by economist Claudio Sapelli for more.

Also, check out Will Wilkinson's self-recommending paper titled Thinking Clearly about Economic Inequality. In the summary he says, "There is little evidence that high levels of income inequality lead down a slippery slope to the destruction of democracy and rule by the rich."

Peter Thiel on Baby Boomers and Bailouts

Peter Thiel did a 25 minute video interview on Big Think, a wonderful site if you're looking for video brain food. He answered questions from Scott Summers, Will Wilkinson, Arnold Kling, and others. Embedded below. Full text transcript is available on the page. Some excerpts:

On a decreasing appetite for bailouts:

With respect to Dubai, the basic mistake people made was they assumed that it was all part of the United Arab Emirates. Everybody was in the same boat, Abu Dhabi had lots of money, and they would help Dubai out. In reality, Abu Dhabi was probably quite resentful of the shiny and glittering and fake city known as Dubai and when push came to shove didn't really want to give them more money. And I think that kind of emotional or political or social phenomenon is going to be much more widespread and the question that will come to the fore in the next few years is will Germany bail out Greece or Spain, or Italy, or Eastern Europe? Will the responsible people bailout those they deem to be less responsible? If General Motors goes bankrupt again, will it get a second bailout? Will there be a second bailout for the banks? Will there be a second stimulus bill? I think the answer to all of these things is, no.

On thinking about what the world will look like in 20 years rather than six months:

There have been many people ask many questions about whether the recession will end with the 'U' or 'L' or a 'V' shaped recovery and sort of a lot about the tactical questions, you know, how high is the employment rate going to go, is it ticking down, is things turning a corner. I tend to think the really important questions are not about the next six months, but are about the next 20 years. The next six months is driven by the financial system liquidity, what central banks do, what they don't do. The next 20 years are driven by science, technology, a set of questions that are very different from the ones people are focused on.

On his least favorite economist:

My villain in economics is clearer. I believe the villain is Keynes and there was a Keynes line that in the long run we are all dead. Whether or not that is true, I believe that in the long run Keynesianism will be dead and that the problem with never thinking about the long run is that in the long run, the short run becomes the long run. And I wonder whether the crisis of 2008-2009 was not just a crisis about finance or about technology, but also a crisis about short run thinking and it was a point in time where short run thinking had run out and there was no more time to think about the short term and that actually a lot of long term problems we have been putting off and deferring had finally come home to roost.

On his favorite thinker overall:

My favorite thinker remains a French philosopher named Rene Girard. He developed an account of human nature in which one thinks very hard about the question of imitation and the role it plays in the ways in which culture and societies form.

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Here are my past posts on Thiel. Here's my post of icons / heroes.

One Quote Does Not Belong

I just found myself on a Facebook profile page of a random guy and when I scrolled to the Favorite Quotations section, screenshot below, I started laughing uncontrollably.

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Muscle weakening, to me, is a good litmus test for humor. At the present moment I do not know whether I will have the strength, for example, to move the mouse and press the "publish" button.

Recall the Jan Helfeld interview of Congressman Peter "Shut the Fuck Up or I'll Throw You Out the Window" Stark -- after watching I was unable to open the disposable soap package in my hotel room, so intense was the humor-induced muscle weakening.

Tweet of the Day

"I always sing, even though I never know the words to the song. I like this as a metaphor for how I live my life, too."

A perfect life metaphor indeed. It's from Melissa Sconyers.

The Perils of Youthful Fame (Tiger Woods Edition)

Bill Simmons on Tiger Woods and the effects of fame during one's formative years:

Did we underestimate the effects of fame in his formative years on Tiger? Become famous at an early age and invariably you "mature" into someone who can't remember anything other than being famous. Most (if not all) of your interactions are with people who are impressed by you or want something from you. You don't have to win anyone over. You don't have to work on being a better person, or funnier, or nicer, or anything. You don't want to make new friends because you can't tell if any prospective friends want to be friends because you're who you are, so you end up gravitating toward other famous people, most of whom are just as messed up as you. You can get away with almost any indiscretion and be forgiven. Your only responsibility is to stay yourself, but you became this twisted, self-aware version of you without even knowing it. And that's when the trouble starts.

Right. One problem with youthful fame in general is that it makes you risk averse at a time in life when you are supposed to be taking risks. Child stars who stumble in adulthood may do so because they did not acquire life lessons usually obtained in conventional youth, when the cost of failure is low and thus benefits of experimentation (of all sorts) are high.

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Robin Hanson once asked Tyler Cowen whether increased influence and fame through his blog has made him less interesting and weird. Robin thinks it has. Here's Clive Thompson's piece in Wired about the Age of the Micro-Celebrity: fame dynamics are at work even on a very small scale.

Keepers of Private Notebooks

Joan Didion writes about people who keep and carry notebooks with them wherever they go:

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

Journalists always have a notebook with them -- to record impressions or jot down that perfect opening sentence for a future story. It is the first dumping ground of their ideas. It's a physical artifact of their curiosity.

It's always good to see journalistic instincts in non-journalists. Yesterday I met with a technologist who, in the first five minutes of our dinner, pulled out a notebook to make notes. It was a terrific first impression on me.

Here's my post analyzing pros and cons of taking notes in an informal lunch/dinner meeting. Here's my post on the importance of capturing your fringe-thoughts. Moleskine notebooks are in-style but I prefer spiral ringed notebooks of equivalent size because I can clip a pen to it easily.

(thanks Steve Dodson for pointing out this essay)

The Ideal Mix of a Start-Up Advisory Board

In the early days of a start-up forming an advisory board can be a great way to formalize and regularize the feedback you receive from experts.

I think an ideal advisory board contains big names with no time (whose name, by association, offers credibility in the sales or fundraising process) and no names with plenty of time to give you specific advice.

Among the no names who actually give you advice, I think an ideal mix in the early days emphasizes customer-centric folks -- people with deep knowledge of the market you're selling to. Perhaps even potential customers themselves!

The opposite of customer-centric advisors is "random business experts." These are folks who are smart and experienced but don't have specific experience in the niche your company is going after. They don't have relevant experience in the exact market you're playing in.

On day 1 of a start-up, perhaps 80% of the advisory board should consist of customer-centric folks, and 20% "general" experts.

As a company matures so does its understanding of the mind of its customers. And newer, different issues arise, and the composition of the company's supporters and advisors evolves accordingly.

That's why you see many publicly traded companies' boards of directors filled with general business experts and executives from different industries. But you never see start-up boards filled with random big-shot attorneys or CEOs of companies in unrelated industries.

Bottom Line: The most effective start-up advisory boards seem to consist of big names with no time, and no names with plenty of time, and the no names have deep, specific experience in the specific customer niche of the start-up.

10 Easily Implementable Life Problem-Solving Strategies

I'm a big fan of litmus tests, heuristics, rules of thumb (here's my wiki with hundreds of rules), and anything else that can help me make a quick decision when there's too little time or too much indecisiveness.

Colin Marshall posted 10 "easily memorable and implementable life problem-solving strategies" that are really stellar. I've excerpted all the heuristics below. Read each one.

• "Would I respect me?" I supposedly ask myself this about either my life in general, as a tool for broader self-assessment, or about a specific action I'm contemplating taking. Pro: straight to the point. Con: too much wiggle room — where's the line between what's respectable and what isn't?


• "What benefits my future self?" I've found no better way to battle the bad habit of foisting tasks and undesirabilities onto the Colin of a few days from now than to identify what I could do next and automatically choose whatever benefits my future self most — or harms him the least, anyway. Pro: eases the dealing-with of future unforeseen developments, both positive and negative. Con: what if present Colin gets hit by a bus, leaving nobody to collect my future-self benefits?


• "Find the thin end of the wedge." This is stuff of folk aphorisms about thousand-mile journeys begun by single steps, camel noses poking inside tents and what have you. Meaning: daunting tasks are made more doable than they seem by isolation of the small ones that precede or collectively constitute them. Werner Herzog, discussing the task of assembling an entire cast of little people for Even Dwarfs Started Small, put it eloquently: "One dwarf would tend to know another." Pro: makes hardish stuff not so hard, at least perceptually, which is half the battle anyway. Con: could potentially get me under more onerous obligations than I can foresee.
  
  
• "Barf it out, then clean it up." A friend quoted her journalism teacher as saying this, and I've since adopted it as a pithy reflection of the broader phenomenon that the sole path to non-suckage winds through the treacherous woods of suckage. I must therefore make peace with producing something sucky and then iterate that initial product until it achieves decency. The trick is avoiding discouragement by that first piece of suckiness. As a writing principle, everyone knows this — you pound out the rough draft, then do the real writing, which is rewriting — but I submit that it's applicable across all pursuits. Pro: it's the only way to create good things, I suspect. Con: risks incentivizing producing crappier than I have to, at least to start. A worse initial effort might make fruitful iteration tougher.


• "Can I fail at this?" It's like Raymond Chandler said: there is no success without the possibility of failure. Therefore, something I can't fail at is also something I can't succeed at. I can fail at conducting an interview, writing an essay or making a video. I can't fail at meandering around the internet in search of "neat stuff to read." In a recent tweet, I defined procrastination "the temporary displacement of tasks at which it is possible to fail with tasks at which it is not possible to fail." I suspect I'm less far off the mark than ever, especially regarding why procrastination is not a productive tendency.


• "Always produce." Hat tip, of course, to Paul Graham. Operating under the mandate of always producing something, no matter if it sucks, isn't fully formed or doesn't match my vision, drives away the seductive demons of fantasization whose mission is to keep me thinking about doing stuff but never actually doing it. Thinking about doing something doesn't help, and in fact probably un-helps. You might have noticed Nike's successful employment of their own version of this heuristic. Pro: easy motivator, addresses a hugely common issue. Con: could lead to a life-threatening miscalculation or two.
  
  


• "What's the deadline?" Even when solidly in the actually-doing-stuff phase, I find my stuff rarely reaches actual doneness in the absence of a hard end date. Because how do I identify "doneness," anyway? I can always keep noodling away on a project, telling myself it's incomplete, if I never need to hand it in. This has the ancillary effect of preserving the precious mythologies of B.S. one builds about one's own brilliance. ("Oh, but it would've been awesome if I'd had more time!") Hence the importance I've come to grant the skill of adhering to self-imposed, sharp-edged rules. I have set a deadline of 11:30am on this post, for example, because I otherwise risk spending all day on squirrely retoolings. It's happened before. Pro: prevents life from being overtaken by unending boondoggles. Con: how to know exactly where to set the deadline?


• "What are the rules?" Though this is perhaps my interest in conceptualism talking, it seems to me that nothing interesting ever gets done or made without rules, whether imposed by the creator or by the creator's circumstances. I find "drive across country without using a freeway" more interesting than "drive across country," "write a novel without using the letter e" more interesting that "write a novel," "make a movie for ten grand" more interesting than "make a movie." Crude examples, but you get my meaning. This has all been said before, but more in terms of creativity being truly sparked by limitations, necessity being the mother of invention, things opened up by way of closing them off, etc. I like to think of it as arbitrarily setting down the first element and taking it as given, using it as a structure on which to build the rest of the work. (Then, if you like, remove the structure.) Pro: makes the first steps easier. Con: encourages stunts, though stunts aren't necessarily worthless.


• "What am I doing now?" I often fall victim to the delusion that circumstances will be somehow be more advantageous in the future, so that's when I'll really bear down on my work. Of course, conditions are never so much more suitable when the time actually comes, or at least they're not as perfect as I'd perhaps assumed they'd be. So if I want do something or be a certain way, I try to cut off any line of thought that terminates in my having convinced myself that I'll act on my intentions in the future. If I'm serious about it, it'll be reflected in what's going on right now, at the present moment. There's no such thing as ideal conditions. Pro: prevents excessive pipe-dreaming. Con: sounds superficially like a mindset some flake on Oprah would peddle.


• "What's the hardest thing I can do?" Again, my hat tips to Paul Graham: "This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what's the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it." What more could I add? Pro: helpful when choosing between defined options. Con: the usual problems about the very act of option definition, plus, how do you define "hardest"? Also, it might lead into pointless exercises in frustration.

The Selfishness of Public School Teacher Unions

Troy Senik writes about California's problems and talks in passing about how the public school teachers' unions have the state by the neck. Read it and weep:

Perhaps the most vexing labor organizations are the teachers' unions. These groups were the driving force behind Proposition 98, locking in mandatory spending on public education without regard to any other fiscal considerations. But that's only where their transgressions begin. In 1992, the California Teachers' Association — by far the most powerful teachers' union in the state — blocked a ballot initiative to promote school choice in the Golden State by physically intimidating petition-signers and allegedly placing false names on the petitions. When asked about his union's opposition to the measure, the CTA president responded: "There are some proposals that are so evil that they should never even be presented to the voters." And in 2000, when testing results revealed that two-thirds of Los Angeles public schools were ranked as failures, the president of the United Teachers of Los Angeles announced that his union would accept a proposal for merit pay only on "a cold day in hell."

The result of the teachers' flight from responsibility has been unadulterated dysfunction. In Los Angeles schools, one out of every three students drops out before graduation. And a research team from the University of California, Riverside, recently concluded that by 2014 — the year all students are required to be proficient in math and English under No Child Left Behind — nearly every elementary school in the state will fail to meet proficiency standards. Yet despite the atrocious performance of California educators, it is nearly impossible to fire an incompetent teacher (the percentage of California teachers terminated after three or more years in the classroom is just 0.03%). For example, in a May exposé on the Los Angeles Unified School District, Los Angeles Times reporter Jason Song revealed: "The district wanted to fire a high school teacher who kept a stash of pornography, marijuana and vials with cocaine residue at school, but a commission balked, suggesting that firing was too harsh. L.A. Unified officials were also unsuccessful in firing a male middle school teacher spotted lying on top of a female colleague in the metal shop, saying the district did not prove that the two were having sex."

But no matter how egregious their misconduct, California's public-school teachers can always skirt the consequences. With 340,000 members statewide, the California Teachers' Association is perhaps the most powerful interest group in state politics. In 2005, for instance, the organization spent nearly $60 million to defeat ballot measures aimed at bringing more accountability to California schools. And when budget agreements get hashed out in meetings of the state's notorious "big five" (the governor and the four legislative party leaders), the CTA is treated like an unnamed sixth party to the talks. It's no wonder, then, that despite having some of America's lowest-performing schools, California's teachers are the highest paid in the nation.

Trenik doesn't even touch the idiocy of tenure.

It's unfortunate that public school teachers are often portrayed as selfless martyrs, the guard-bearers of our children, when in fact they are selfish economic actors who look out for their own interests. Sure, the prison guards are similarly spoiled. But they make no bones about being anything other than self-interested prison guards.

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Here's the in-depth L.A. Times piece on how it's basically impossible to fire teachers in LAUSD. Here's the New Yorker just a few months ago on New York City's battles with unions, where some teachers are being paid more than $100,000 to sit in a room and do nothing.

Reason is the Steering Wheel. Emotion is the Gas Pedal.

Good decisions require a mix of dispassionate, rational analysis and emotion.

Though we often hear of emotion and passion clouding the decision making process, research shows that feelings help us make better decisions. Specifically, emotions aid decisiveness. Humans who have suffered damage to the part of their brain responsible for emotions are prone to crippling indecisiveness.

Here's a metaphor I came up with that conveys the mix: reason is the steering wheel, emotion is the gas and brake pedal.

When you get in a car, you first need to decide where to go. You need to think clearly and objectively about the best route. Once you've decided on a route, you need to press the gas pedal at different intervals to move forward, to go faster, or to slow down and come to a stop.

Suppose you brainstorm a new business idea. You want to think about the idea clearly and assess honestly the pros and cons, market size, competitive landscape, etc. You don't necessarily want your emotional side to dominate this assessment process. Once you've decided you want to pursue an idea, dreams of success and emotional excitement enable you to press the gas pedal and put in 12 hour days.

If the business is headed for the gutter, and you need to take immediate action to right the ship, emotions such as fear of failure and embarrassment will accelerate the actions prescribed by a rational cost-benefit analysis.

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I frequently have to remind myself that good decisions can have bad outcomes. Also, I'm still unsure of the role of intuition in good decision making, but I agree with Auren that it's better to trust your gut when it tells you not to do something.

Quotes of the Day

"Just a few centuries ago, the smartest humans alive were dead wrong about damn near everything. They were wrong about gods. Wrong about astronomy. Wrong about disease. Wrong about heredity. Wrong about physics. Wrong about racism, sexism, nationalism, governance, and many other moral issues. Wrong about geology. Wrong about cosmology. Wrong about chemistry. Wrong about evolution. Wrong about nearly every subject imaginable."

-- Luke Muehlhauser

(via Eliezer Yudkowsky)

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"The public's conception of new ideas: Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Obvious." - Lant Pritchett.

Things I See in Chile

I'll be living in Santiago, Chile for a little while. I'm here to learn Spanish, explore a new culture and country (as a resident more than a tourist, a longtime goal), and pursue some professional projects.

Why Chile? As Spanish-speaking countries go, if you value security, political stability, and a professional/modern business culture, your options are Spain, Costa Rica, Uruguay, or Chile. I liked Chile the best. I'll explain why later.

I've been here for two weeks so far and intend to semi-regularly post observations, lessons, and stories from Chile. I hope they will help improve my (and your) understanding of what's going on in Latin America today and offer insight on the experience of living abroad. Thanks for bearing with me through the miles and months ahead.

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Six random observations / lessons so far:

1. An entrepreneurial culture? Economically speaking Chile has been a success in Latin America. At current trajectories it will be the first LatAm country to join the club of first world nations. But for the next stage it needs to rely less on natural resources and more on knowledge-based industries. The government is offering an incredible set of incentives for tech entrepreneurs to locate in Chile. Yet incentives are not enough. To spur entrepreneurship and attract knowledge workers there needs to be an entrepreneurial culture. How the heck do you develop an entrepreneurial culture?

2. The Election. The first round of presidential elections are in a couple weeks. It's striking that the issues being debated are generally high on on Maslow's Hierarchy. When people start complaining about the hours the park is open, you know a country has taken care of the basics. In other words, people are starting to debate intangible social issues since the basic functions of government work correctly. For example, the country has finally gotten around to discussing rights for homosexuals. Remarkably, it's about whether gays deserve civil union rights, not marriage. The Catholic church influences this conservative agenda, of course. (For the same reason, abortion is illegal regardless of circumstances (such as rape) and divorce only recently became legal.) The candidates are also debating how to deal with economic inequality -- I will address this in a future post.

Bottom line: The Presidential election in Chile is important inasmuch as the president has a lot of power in the political system. Congress doesn't have much say on the budget, for example. However, it's not an important election in the sense that none of the candidates proposes changing the successful status quo very much.

3. No Hablan Inglés. Chileans speak little English, say both the studies and my experience to-date. Sparse is signage in English and it's basically impossible to acquire English-language print media. I almost never hear English spoken on the street. The government is apparently trying to remedy this. A population that doesn't speak English is a population disadvantaged in the global economy.

4. I'm Learning Spanish.

• You don't go to Chile if your only goal is to learn Spanish. First, Chilean Spanish is arguably the fastest spoken on the continent. Second, Chileans use higher-than-average slang and colloquialisms. Third, they rarely pronounce the endings of their words. Some ex-pats have told me that they can barely talk with Chileans in Spanish but they have almost no problem in a place like Costa Rica or Guatemala or even Mexico.
• Fortunately, because there's so little English spoken, I get plenty of opportunities to mess up my Spanish when speaking with locals. When I do speak English here, it is usually with other gringos learning the lingo in Santiago. I've discovered that when I talk to another American in Spanish, it's always an interesting conversation. Every sentence a challenge! To find that right word or translation! It's been funny switching to English with someone and thinking, "Gosh, this person is actually quite boring." When learning a new language, everyone speaking your target language becomes interesting.
• I've noticed myself be more aware of my body and body language. When words are difficult to come by, body language must be used to express ideas.
• Speaking Spanish for awhile and then switching to English feels like picking up a light bat in baseball after warming up in the on-deck circle with the heavy bat. It's so light and easy!
• The feeling of learning a word and then later hearing it used by locals. I like this feeling.

5. We Love American Pop Culture (Even if We Don't Like America). Latin Americans harbor some of the fiercest anti-Americanism I've encountered. (I haven't noticed this one way or another in Chile; I suspect Chileans are average in this respect.) Some of it is justified: the U.S. foreign policy record in Latin America is pretty terrible, recent projects in Colombia and elsewhere notwithstanding. Yet, as ever, American pop culture continues to dominate the air waves. In the metro stations, there are always music videos from American artists singing English-language songs. Last night, Miley Cyrus' "Party in the USA" was playing -- most of the video is her dancing provocatively in front of an American flag. The Chileans around me watched the TV in the subway station, entranced. At the restaurant I went to tonight for dinner nobody spoke a lick of English, and yet the TV was playing a "Greatest Hits from the 80s" compilation of American music videos. At the gym, American movies are always shown on the TV.

6. Chile Needs Green-Tech Entrepreneurs. Locals are obsessed with conserving energy, turning off lights, etc. I've never seen so many green-friendly lightbulbs. Apparently they've been popular in Chile for years; only recently have they infiltrated the U.S. Chile has very little natural energy itself and it hates having to import it from Argentina. If you're an energy entrepreneur, consider doing business here.

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When I arrive in Santiago, I first note the sanity of the airport. There is no illegal taxi operation to speak of. You can tell a lot about a country by the sprawl of taxi touts.

My first day I spend at Plaza de Armas. It is a grand old square with stunning architecture and offers world-class people watching opportunities. The sun gently baths my back as I people-watch. People watching is not just entertainment. I learn so much. 20 minutes of sitting and observing a pack of teenagers brings the ideas of peer pressure and groupthink to life: the teen girls are constantly mirroring each other in the way the walk, flick their hand, or get excited. They are all dressed the same, too.

I find a gym near my house. ¿Habla ingles? I ask the woman working the front-desk. A momentary lapse of self-confidence in my Spanish. No. Hablame. she replies. She knows the routine. So I ask her in Gringo Spanish about the gym and prices. It is a successful conversation, and when I walk to the next gym that I had researched online I first ask the front desk lady, ¿Hola, cóma está? and the conversation proceeds apace. Day by day, by day by day.

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I see couples making out everywhere. On the subway. In parks. On the street. Everywhere: lips touching. A culture where kids live with their parents until marriage pushes sexual activity out into the public. I see men in plazas yelling religious enunciations until their throats literally give out, as everyone sits around half-listening. I see every person who walks past me as a potential pick-pocketer even though most everyone in this country is sweet and hospitable. I do not see anyone taller than me, ever.

50% of the Stuff I Do is Bad

"For me, 50% of the stuff I do is bad, and that’s just going to be the way it is, and if I can’t accept that then I’m not cut out for this. The trick is to know what’s bad and not let other people see it."

— David Foster Wallace in an interview with Hugh Kennedy and Geoffrey Polk of Whiskey Island Magazine published in 1993. (via this tumblr which has many quotes from DFW and other literary figures.)

Here's my old post Try More Stuff Than the Other Guy (the law of large numbers of entrepreneurship). Here's my post on increasing your number of at-bats.

Here are my posts on David Foster Wallace.

"Let's Just Add Some Virality"

A terrific post by venture capitalist Josh Kopelman on why marketing and customer acquisition plans are strategic and core to a business and not something you put off until the product's ready to ship. I especially agree with his point about the buzzword "virality." Building word-of-mouth doesn't come by wishing it so or "sprinkling" on some magic ingredient at the end of the product development process...

It happens all the time.  I’m meeting with an entrepreneur, who is telling me about a really innovative product idea for a consumer website.  And I’m liking it.  We’re going back and forth on product ideas.  And before I know it, we’re approaching the end of our meeting.  I then ask them, “So, how are you going to acquire customers.”  And that’s when it happens.  That’s when I realize that they’ve spent all their time focusing on the product/site, and aren’t nearly as innovative when it comes to their customer acquisition plans.  They view marketing as something they can “bolt on” afterwards.

The most disappointing answer is when they say “Oh, we’ll just make it viral.”  As if virality is something you can choose to add in after the product is baked - like a spell checker.  Let’s imagine the conversation at the marketing department of the wireless phone companies.  “Let’s see.  Should we spend $4 Billion on advertising this year…or should we just make it viral?”.

Virality is something that has to be engineered from the beginning…and it’s harder to create virality than it is to create a good product.  That's why we often see good products with poor virality, and poor products with good virality.  The reason that over $150 Billion is spent on US advertising each year is because virality is so hard.  If virality was easy, there would be no advertising industry.

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Here's a video message from a Twitter spokesperson on how they think about their users. Important viewing for any Twitterholic.

It happens all the time.  I’m meeting with an entrepreneur, who is telling me about a really innovative product idea for a consumer website.  And I’m liking it.  We’re going back and forth on product ideas.  And before I know it, we’re approaching the end of our meeting.  I then ask them, “So, how are you going to acquire customers.”  And that’s when it happens.  That’s when I realize that they’ve spent all their time focusing on the product/site, and aren’t nearly as innovative when it comes to their customer acquisition plans.  They view marketing as something they can “bolt on” afterwards.

The most disappointing answer is when they say “Oh, we’ll just make it viral.”  As if virality is something you can choose to add in after the product is baked - like a spell checker.  Let’s imagine the conversation at the marketing department of the wireless phone companies.  “Let’s see.  Should we spend $4 Billion on advertising this year…or should we just make it viral?”.

Virality is something that has to be engineered from the beginning…and it’s harder to create virality than it is to create a good product.  That's why we often see good products with poor virality, and poor products with good virality.  The reason that over $150 Billion is spent on US advertising each year is because virality is so hard.  If virality was easy, there would be no advertising industry.

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Here's a video message from a Twitter spokesperson on how they think about their users. Important viewing for any Twitterholic.

Elitism vs. Populism in Politics

Since the beginning of time political theorists have debated the relationship of power between the elites and the masses. Plato talked about it. Jefferson and Hamilton argued about it. Adams was wary of an overly democratic democracy; Paine championed the everyman. Contemporary thinkers have weighed in. Bill Buckley famously said he's rather entrust the U.S. government to the first 400 people in the Boston telephone directory than the faculty of Harvard. A few months ago an editor from the Wall Street Journal told me he believes an illiterate Afghan has a "horse's sense" for what's right and therefore can make the right choice at the voting booth.

I am less instinctually trustful of the common man. There is a worldly wisdom that comes from walking the earth, but it's hardly sufficient to be an informed voter or ruler. I sooner put my lot with the well-educated elite.

If your car is broken, you want a mechanic who possesses elite knowledge. If you're going to get surgery, you want an elite surgeon -- someone whose knowledge of the matter far surpasses the average Joe.

Shouldn't you want the same out of the people in government? Yes, with two qualifications.

First, elites should rule but be able to be replaced by the masses. This is why we have a republican form of government.

Second, the ruling elites need to be humble. One reason why elites are more dangerous in politics than in the narrow sphere of car mechanics is that they can widely exercise unbridled ambition. The Obama cabinet is stacked with elites -- very smart individuals. And they are probably trying to do too much. They are too ambitious and too confident in their ability to direct and organize events. It's tricky because ambition and talent tend to go hand-in-hand. In politics we need the rare talent who'll be very humble once in office.

Elitism, by the way, has come in all sizes. Some of America's finest leaders did not possess elite educations or ex ante high brow status, but rather were in an elite category in terms of their fundamental decency and perseverance. George Washington and Harry Truman come to mind. It's unlikely we'll see this type of elitism in the future.

I've read two main concerns about elites in politics.

There's first the Sarah Palin View. She sees the common man as a better representative of the aesthetic ideals of Americana, and thus more fit to participate in the democracy. She will crack jokes about latte drinking, New York Times reading, sushi eating elites who are "out of touch." I believe Palin's dislike of elites is fundamentally stylistic not substantive. She disrespects George Will and Maureen Dowd, even if Will shares some of her policy beliefs.

Then there's the Arnold Kling View. Arnold's wariness of elites stems from their substantive failures in the past and policy tendency toward state control. He's disheartened by elites' failures: he sees "mostly harm in the way educated elites have exercised power...from Vietnam to the current economic crisis." He agrees that the common man's ignorance can be dangerous, yet he also notes the danger that can come from over-confident elites:

The gap between what one knows and what one thinks one knows may be higher in the ranks of the elite. The result is supposedly-clever government interventions, introduced with excessive confidence, leading to disastrous results.

Bottom Line: I share Arnold's conclusion: "I think that the best solution to the elitist/populist dilemma is an elite with humility. Don't let the mob rule, but at the same time don't let the elite get too sure of itself."

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The "people" are stupider than you might realize. Here's Robin Hanson reminding us of this fact. Here's Bill Maher doing the same. Nick Shulz dubbed the following Summer's Law, after Larry Summers' utterance: "THERE ARE IDIOTS. Look around."

The Intrapreneur's 10 Commandments

If you find yourself in a big company, you can still be "intrapreneurial" -- a term that refers to entrepreneurial activities in an otherwise non-entrepreneurial environment. Here are 10 Commandments of the Intrapreneur:

1. Come to work each day willing to be fired.

2. Circumvent any orders aimed at stopping your dream.

3. Do any job needed to make your project work, regardless of your job description. (BC: Or, as Eric Reis puts it: "In any situation it is your responsibility, using your best judgment, to do what you think is in the best interests of the company. That's it. Everything else [in your job description] is only marketing.")

4. Find people to help you.

5. Follow your intuition about the people you choose, and work only with the best.

6. Work underground as long as you can - publicity triggers the corporate immune mechanism.

7. Never bet on a race unless you are running in it.

8. Remember it is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.

9. Be true to your goals, but be realistic about the ways to achieve them.

10. Honor your sponsors.

A gentler version is here, both I think are attributed to Gifford Pinchot.

Adjectives to Describe Impressiveness

On British novelist Zadie Smith's new collection of essays, entitled Changing My Mind, reviewer Ella Taylor writes:

Taken together, they reflect a lively, unselfconscious, rigorous, erudite and earnestly open mind that's busy refining its view of life, literature and a great deal in between. Delightful, painful and spontaneously funny...

Lively, rigorous, erudite, unselfconscious, earnestly open-minded, delightful, painful, spontaneously funny: not a bad set of adjectives.

I am always interested in how you can describe really talented people. "Smart" has been overused to be devoid of meaning. The most original and descriptive adjective from the above list is: unselfconscious.

Here's my review of Smith's On Beauty.

Blogs As Filters for Interestingness

Justin Wehr, a research assistant in behavioral health economics, blogs about posts-he-would-write-if-he-had-time. It's a smattering of interestingness:

A good question to ask anyone: "What don't you know, but wish you did?" [BC: Another good question to ask: What have you learned in the last year?]

Since discovering how to play audio faster (I am typically playing podcasts at 1.7x speed), it seems my comprehension has actually improved. Why might this be, and how can I test it?

Music is deeply personal and important to people, but at the same time it is incredibly boring to hear about other people's music preferences. Why is that?

Why don't retail stores (particularly Wal-Mart) generate revenue by allowing companies to put advertisements around the store?

Near death experiences. They have a fascinating history and are surprisingly common: 8 million people in the U.S. report having had one. Testable evidence for existence of the soul? There are many interesting studies on near death experiences and Duke even has a journal devoted to the subject.

Laughter, religion, and sleep: The three most puzzling things to psychologists.

Is productivity spiritually important as Marty Nemko suggests or just another form of hedonistic pleasure?

People should be paid for their attention on the internet. How can that be arranged? 

From this post alone it's pretty easy to tell that Justin would be a fun guy to have dinner with. Blogs are excellent filters in this respect. It's near impossible to write an interesting blog and be an uninteresting person.

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Speaking of interesting people, here's Stan James on how the complexity of a user interface evolves to meet a user's expectations. Compare the iPod of 2000 to the iPod of today. Here's Clay Shirky on the business model for local bookstores and the role they play in the community.