I believe this is what they call “throwing good money after bad“:
She’s making so little money with a college degree, she’s considering returning to school for her master’s.
And don’t even get me started on how a BusinessWeek writer has absolutely no clue what ROI is.
Seth Godin discovers that stamps.com is trying to scam him out of money and asks:
How is that a sleepy, conservative organization like the postal service ends up licensing its brand to a company that can’t resist every honey pot scheme and opt out technique in the book?
I probably would have guessed something the lines of “their monopoly gives them little incentive to treat their customers well” or “they’re desperate for revenue in a changing industry” or “what do you expect from the same organization that expects me to donate food to my mailman letter carrier every year?”
Godin (whom I generally adore, by the way) suggests instead that
There’s something about the mechanics and arms-length nature of the web that just begs companies that know better to treat people in a way that they’d be humiliated to try face to face.
This might even be true, although one also could make the opposite argument that the arms-length nature of the web makes it easier to treat people well, which everyone knows is plenty challenging in person (at least for me).
The Sunlight Foundation has set up Elena’s Inbox, a site that makes it easy[er] to browse through the dump of Elena Kagan’s Clinton-era emails.
However, it looks like they’ve certainly held something back. Can it really be that she sent no emails containing “lol” or “rofl” or “omg“?
How on earth can you write an entire article about the growing “market power” of Chinese women looking for husbands without even mentioning China’s severe gender imbalance?
People throw away a lot of coffee cups. That was the motivation behind the BetaCup Challenge, a competition to create a more “sustainable” alternative to the disposable coffee cup.
If I’d found out about the competition while it was going on, I might have entered my “dig paper cups out of the trash and re-use them” idea, but I guess it’s kind of late for that, since they’ve announced the winner:
The Karma plan: A chalkboard at the coffee shop will chart each person who uses a reusable mug. The tenth person to order a drink with a reusable cup will receive his or her drink free. By turning a freebie program into a communal challenge, Karma Cup would create incentives for everyone to bring reusable mugs. (After all, the more people participate, the more free stuff is given away and the more likely you are to get something free.) That, in turn, would eliminate rather than simply redesign the nefarious disposable cup.
It’s pretty clear that the inventors of this idea (as well as the judges) have never worked retail, or they’d know the Hobbesian depths that consumers will sink to in order to get free stuff. The “Karma” plan is a recipe not only for barista-customer arguments, but also for chalkboard-stalking and line-cutting and fistfights. A better name might be the “There Will Be Blood” plan.
More interesting is the claim in the Fast Company article: “After all, the more people participate, the more free stuff is given away and the more likely you are to get something free.” It’s interesting because it doesn’t make any sense. The likelihood of getting something for free depends on two factors: whether you bring a reusable cup, and where the chalkboard count stands.
The first doesn’t depend on how many people participate — the decision to bring a reusable cup is (presumably) yours alone. The curious thing is that (in the absence of fistfights and line-cutting) the second doesn’t either. The relevant criterion is the “previous mug count,” which runs from 0 up to 9. If it’s 0 when you arrive, you move it to 1. If it’s 1, you move it to 2. And so on, and then if it’s 9 (which makes you the tenth customer), you get your coffee for free and it resets back to 0.
Now, as long as there are no fistfights and line-cutting, there’s no reason why the mug count should favor any number over the other. When you go to Burger King and they give you a number on your ticket, you should be just as likely to get a number ending in 0 as a number ending in 5, no matter how many customers are going through the place. So you should get a number ending in 0 about 10% of the time.
If we ignore strategic (i.e. fistfight) considerations, the same should be true of the mug count. It should be 9 about 10% of the time, which means that (if you bring a mug) you should get your coffee free about 10% of the time. This is true whether one customer out of 20 brings a mug or every customer brings a mug. (Obviously, if no one brings a mug the count will be stuck at 0 all day, but even if you’re the only customer who brings a mug, you should still get every 10th cup free.)
The big caveat again is that there are no fistfights. Probably, though, what happens is that you get lots of chalkboard-stalkers who hide in the restroom until the count reaches 9 and then cut in line to get a free coffee. In this case it’s easy to imagine that, unless you are one of the line-cutters, the chalkboard count will almost never be at 9 when it’s your turn to purchase.
However, the basic idea is good — psychologically a 10% chance of saving $2 is more exciting than for sure saving 20 cents. Accordingly, a superior implementation (from a fistfight perspective) might involve a random 10% chance of getting your coffee free when you bring your own mug. This would get rid of the incentives to cut in line, hide in the bathroom, and punch people. Plus, that way they could let you make your own mark on the chalkboard, which is better for both baristas (who won’t have chalky hands while they’re preparing your coffee) and customers (who like writing on the chalkboard because it reminds them of Coach Wickman’s geometry class).
It just needs a catchy, Eastern-religious name. I’m thinking “Samsara.”
Don’t get me wrong, I like data mining as much as the next guy, and without your help I might never have realized that “People who like Reason magazine also like Rand Paul” and that 13 of my friends like something called “Burn Notice.”
Nonetheless, for some reason your latest doesn’t ring true to me:
Here is what I suspect happened. About a year ago there was a brouhaha involving a pro-market op-ed piece the Whole Foods CEO wrote. Some people on the left called for a boycott of the stores, and in response a number of people “liked” Whole Foods on Facebook to show support.
My guess is that the Facebook “supporters” of Whole Foods are disproportionately those who liked the op-ed piece, and that Sarah Palin is indeed popular among that crowd. In this case the people who “like” Whole Foods on Facebook seem to be not representative of those who like Whole Foods in real life.
There are various opinions and debates over the “proper” roles of government, but I’m pretty sure that combing the Indian Ocean to find a missing 16-year-old who’s sailing around the world by herself in order to break a world record isn’t one of them:
Abby Sunderland’s family was talking with U.S. and international governments about organizing a search of the remote ocean between southern Africa and Australia, family spokesman Christian Pinkston said.
[...]
“We’ve got to get a plane out there quick,” said Pinkston, who was in close contact with Sunderland’s family in Thousand Oaks.
“They are exhausting every resource to try to mobilize an air rescue including discussions with the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Coast Guard and various international rescue organizations,” he said.
I hope the girl is OK and everything, but the State Department and Coast Guard better send the bill to her family, not to the rest of us.
I live in a city that’s full of Obama supporters. (The two notable exceptions are me and the guy in front of me on the freeway the other day with three different Dennis Kucinich stickers on his car.) And so during the 2008 elections I had ample opportunities to ask questions about why people supported him.
“Aren’t you concerned,” I would often ask, “that he doesn’t have much useful experience running anything? Is being a law professor and a Senator really useful preparation for being chief executive of Leviathan?”
“I see what you’re saying,” they’d inevitably answer, “but look at the streamlined, coolly effective campaign he’s running. That’s all the evidence I need of his executive skills.”
Accordingly, now that his executive skills are coming into question due to his perceived lack of leadership on the BP oil disaster, I humbly suggest that he demonstrate leadership by returning to his roots:
The webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal today covers one of my favorite topics: Game Theory and the Social Contract.
The game theory, unfortunately, is not done very carefully. Here’s the Prisoner’s Dilemma setup:
| RAT OUT | REMAIN SILENT | |
| RAT OUT | Both get 1 year in prison | 1 goes free, 2 gets 5 years |
| REMAIN SILENT | 2 goes free, 1 gets 5 years | Both get 6 months |
In this table, player 1 chooses the row and player 2 chooses the column. If both REMAIN SILENT, both get 6 months in prison. If each RATS OUT the other, both get 1 year in prison. And if one RATS OUT and the other REMAINS SILENT, the rat goes free and the mute gets 5 years in prison.
Here’s how the comic summarizes things:
So, even though [the bottom right corner] is the best choice, the perfectly rational people pick [the top left corner].
Now, the bottom right corner is emphatically not the “best choice.” For starters, given our setup, we’re not choosing a corner. One person chooses a row, and (completely separately) one person chooses a column. There’s no way to choose a corner, and therefore there’s no “best choice” of corner.
But let’s ignore this nitpick and assume he said “best outcome.” Even this isn’t true. Player 1 would be better off with the top right corner, and player 2 would be better with the bottom left corner. This would seem to disqualify the bottom right corner as being “best.” What he probably meant to say is that it’s better than the top left corner, which happens to be the “rational” (i.e. dominant strategy equilibrium) outcome.
In fact, this is the point of the prisoner’s dilemma: no matter what the other player does, your best choice is to RAT OUT, and so the outcome when “rational” people play is the top left corner. Which is worse for both players than if they’d both REMAINED SILENT. Hence the dilemma. “Everyone act rational” doesn’t always lead to optimal outcomes.
The comic then tries to apply this model to morality. The “great ethicists of history,” it turns out, have been trying to convince people to pick [sic] the bottom right corner. (As mentioned above, we’ll assume that the comic really means that they’re trying to convince people to pick STAY SILENT.) The utilitarian Bentham is pictured trying to convince people that the bottom right corner is utilitarianly awesome. And the damnitarian Jesus is pictured trying to convince people that the top left corner will land you in hell for eternity.
In short, each is trying to artificially change the payoffs of the game. Bentham is trying to convince you to that you should care about the total time spent in prison by both players, not just the time spent by you. It’s easy to see why this is an uphill battle. (Furthermore, all this does is turn the game into a pure coordination game with three different equilibria, one of which is still [RAT OUT, RAT OUT]. Smooth move, Bentham!)
Jesus, on the other hand, is (according to the comic) trying to convince you that the payoff in the top left corner is actually more like infinitely many years in prison. Since game theory doesn’t do well with infinite payoffs, this actually results in a game with no equilibrium, which seems like kind of a dick-ish thing to do. However, it seems weird to condemn someone only if both he and his opponent RAT OUT. A more reasonable Lord-of-the-Universe thing to do would be to give you hugely-negative payoff whenever you RAT OUT, regardless of what your opponent does. And in that case it’s a dominant-strategy equilibrium to keep your mouth shut. (Unfortunately, Jesus ruined his “ethicist” credibility by insisting that the same infinite punishments also apply to people who commit the prisoner’s-dilemma-unrelated “crime” of not accepting him as their personal savior.)
Independent of our ethicists, the game we’ve described is not a particularly compelling model of morality. Life contains plenty of “cooperate or defect” situations, sure, but for the most part these situations occur repeatedly with the same cast of characters. Imagine that you and I play the above-described game day after day after day. (You’ll probably have to change the payoffs to involve money or pain or something, since playing a “go to prison for a year” game every day doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Just make sure to keep the same strategic structure and relative payoffs.)
It turns out (thanks, Robert Aumann) that when you repeat the prisoner’s dilemma indefinitely, suddenly ratting out isn’t so rational. Imagine that I’m willing to KEEP SILENT for as long as you do, but if you ever RAT OUT then I’ll start RATTING OUT for the rest of time. It’s not hard to see that if you adopt the same strategy, we can land in the bottom right corner over and over and over again, because the one-time payoff from defecting would be vastly outweighed by the ensuing sequence of top-left outcomes. As long as we’re describing repeated interactions, there’s not a lot of a problem.
Another criticism of this line of modeling is that many situations where we’d normally think to apply “morality” are unilateral ones, not strategic ones. “Thou shalt not kill,” “thou shalt not steal,” and similar rules are all decision-theoretic prescriptions, not game-theoretic ones. The Prisoner’s Dilemma (and game theory more generally) describes situations where the outcome to me depends both on my decisions and on yours. But (for example) my decision whether to steal from you is not typically co-mingled with your simultaneous decision whether to steal from me. My decision whether to steal from you probably has more to do with the (implicit or explicit) “social contract” that society has in place.
(Of course you could construct a Prisoner’s-Dilemma-flavored model in which every day you and I decide whether to rob each other, but you’d have a hard time convincing me that your model was in any way a representation of the actual choices and incentives that each of us faces in today’s world.)
In fact, there are some pretty interesting game theoretic considerations
Once upon a time I wasn’t much of a writer. In high school I wrote crappy requisite five-paragraph essays about T.S. Eliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald and The War Against Northern Aggression, but they were unimaginative and mostly aimed at satisfying the teachers’ expectations.
In college I went out of my way to avoid writing-heavy classes, although for distributional reasons I had to take a few. In each case I produced passable-but-unexceptional term papers. I’m sure if I dug them up today I’d find them terrifically embarrassing, on account of both style and content. (Also, I’m sure I printed them using really ugly fonts that were popular back in the 90′s.)
Many years later I found myself full of opinions, and so (as was the fashion) I started a blog to force my poorly written harangues on the world. Eventually I became aware of its poorly written nature, and I deleted it. I repeated this harangue-awareness-deletion cycle several times. (One could plausibly argue that I’m currently in the “harangue” step of another go-round, but if one is polite one won’t.)
In addition, approximately 10 (!) years ago I started a LiveJournal. Although today people think of LiveJournal and picture a bunch of Russians and 15-year-old emo kids, back then LiveJournal actually consisted mostly of 15-year-old emo kids. My LiveJournal at first was terrible, really terrible, which you’d be able to see if I hadn’t at some point become aware of how terrible it was and deleted most of it.
Over time, though, I sort of “found my voice,” and I started getting fewer and fewer “please become aware of the poorly-written nature of your journal and delete it!” comments and more and more “please tell us more humiliating stories about your social life!” comments. All the while I became practiced in the twin literary techniques of making stuff up and referencing things that had happened on “Charles in Charge” as if they’d actually happened in real life.
Eventually I went out and took a UCLA Extension “Introduction to Fiction Writing” class, taught by Noel Alumit, who writes acclaimed novels about being gay and Filipino. “Where better,” I asked myself, “to learn how to write acclaimed novels about being gay and Filipino?” I had few expectations for the class, but Noel was an excellent teacher, and I ended up enjoying the class quite a bit. I produced a mawkish short story about a boy who likes to play baseball but is no good at it, which my classmates all seemed to enjoy. (My girlfriend at the time initially refused to believe I was the author of something so sickeningly earnest.)
After I moved to Seattle, I took a Hugo House “Improv for Writers” course, which launched me on a 2-year detour away from writing, during which I performed a lot of really bad improv and also tricked my friends into watching a lot of really bad improv.
Eventually I realized that I wasn’t enjoying doing improv, and I walked away. (I took the rule of three with me.) This left me with a bunch of spare time, which I immediately filled with books. Every time someone mentioned a book to me, every time I read an interesting book review, every time a blog I read endorsed a book, I’d go online and add it to my library queue.
Once a week or so, I’d go to the library with huge shopping bags full of overdue books, and I’d come home with a dozen or so new ones. I never ended up reading most of these, of course, but it kept me entertained. And then one day I read The Book That Changed My Life.
This was John Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise. I don’t know that anyone else can make such a claim, except maybe Hodgman himself. As I mentioned last time, my literary arsenal consisted mostly of the “writing factually about things that didn’t actually happen” trick. Before The Areas of My Expertise, it never occurred to me that one could squeeze an entire book out of this trick. After The Areas of My Expertise, I knew that I had to.
But still I needed something to write about. I had a half-finished novel about religion sitting on my hard drive, so it seemed the natural choice. Also, I liked to tell myself, it was a subject I knew plenty about, and whatever I didn’t know I could figure out from the internet.
I started out by writing the Preface. I wrote it, and edited it, and wrote some more, and edited some more, and eventually (maybe around the time I came up with Nancy Drew Blood) I realized I had something that I thought was really, really funny. And at that point I had no choice but to finish the book.
Historically I haven’t been good at finishing things. I’m fantastic at starting things, but I usually lack sticktoitiveness. Fortunately, it was a really slow time at work, and rather than worrying that someone might realize I was unnecessary (which is what I probably would have done if I hadn’t had a side project to work on), I just spent a lot of days going home early and writing. (After a while I became necessary again, and after that the writing proceeded much more slowly.)
I came up with a pretty good outline, based largely on the related principles that (1) unexpected categories are funny, and (2) mutually non-exclusive categories are funny. At that point it became a matter of just putting flesh on the bones.
That makes it sound easy, but coming up with 258 pages of mockery and Scott Baio references is hard. I spent most of my free time working on the thing for months and months and months. And finally, when the book was about 75% done, I decided I was ready to unleash it on the world.
Some friends of mine were organizing the BIL conference and asked if I wanted to give a talk. This seemed like a great time to unveil the book. (It would have been better if the book were finished and for sale at that point, but you have to work with what you have.)
The problem was that the talk was only supposed to be 15 minutes. My first version of the talk involved about 100 slides, which I decided was about 6x too many to fit into 15 minutes. I triaged my jokes and used all my Presentation Zen skills and somehow got down to about 75 slides, and then I just spent the entire plane ride practicing talking really, really fast.
The talk itself seemed well received, and I got lots of questions about when the book would be available. So I set myself to finishing it.
At the same time, I realized that I should start thinking about how to get it published. I searched the web for “how to write a book proposal” instructions, which I used to craft a proposal and send it to various literary agents whom I also found by searching the web. I never got a response from any of them.
Also whurley put me in touch with a literary agent he knew. Since this was a friend-of-a-friend introduction, I got responses to my emails, although they revolved around the theme of “yeah, I can’t sell this book.”
Finally, I emailed a bunch of ought-to-be-sympathetic authors asking if they could help. The only one who responded was Michael Shermer, who opined that I’d never get my book published by a “reputable publisher.” Times were tough for publishers, he pointed out, and their willingness to take a chance on an unknown first-time author in a saturated genre was pretty nonexistent.
This all left me sort of in a jam. I had a mostly-finished book that I thought was pretty damn good. And yet I couldn’t get anyone in the publishing industry to even respond to my mail.
(To be continued.)
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