Posted April 8th, 2013 @ 5:13pm in #General Nonsense
The Wall Street Journal asked my opinion on a few investment issues. I was happy to oblige.
Posted April 1st, 2013 @ 2:26pm in #General Nonsense
Update: Link fixed
Did you know that 50% of second opinions from doctors contradict first opinions? And did you know that 80% of the findings in medical literature are wrong?
I’m fascinated by a new company called Metamed that offers to be your personal medical researcher. For a fee of $200 per researcher per hour, with a $5K minimum, you can make sure the full force of science is on your side. Metamed analyzes the medical literature and tells you which study results about your condition are reliable and which are not. They assess the value of various diagnostic tests, and create a map of all possible medical correlations. It’s the sort of thing your doctor would love to do for you if he had the resources.
Metamed’s service is pricey, but the cost will probably come down as the process gets more automated. And objectively speaking, the service is already a bargain if your alternative is death by ignorance.
I saw in the news recently that the rate of growth for healthcare costs in the United States was slowing and no one is entirely sure why. I assume there are a number of reasons for the unexpected change, but my hypothesis is that the Internet is already unlocking the power of healthcare information for consumers. Personally, my healthcare process looks like this now:
Posted March 28th, 2013 @ 1:58pm in #General Nonsense
The famous Monty Hall problem in the field of statistics goes like this: Monty Hall is a game show host. You are given a choice of three doors. One has a car behind it, the other two have goats. If you pick the door with the car, you win it. Your odds are 1-in-3.
So you pick a door, but before it opens, Monty opens one of the other two doors to reveal a goat. He asks if you want to switch from the door you initially picked to the other closed door. Your brain says the odds are the same for any closed door, so you stay. But in fact, the odds are twice as good if you switch doors.
You can see the math of it here. But if you are normal, you’ll never reconcile in your mind how one closed door could have better odds than the other. If there are two closed doors remaining, how can the odds be anything but 50-50?
This reminds me of the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment in which a cat in a sealed box (presumably with air holes) exists in a state of being simultaneously alive and dead depending on the results of a randomized event happening inside the box. How can a cat be alive and dead at the same time? Math says it can happen, my brain says no.
The pattern recognition part of my brain is connecting the Monty Hall problem with the Shrodinger’s Cat thought experiment because both situations feel like proof that our brains are not equipped to understand reality at its most basic level.
Most of us accept the idea that math is a better indicator of truth than our buggy personal perceptions. Math doesn’t lie, but our brains are huge scam artists. The Monty Hall problem and Schrodinger’s Cat are examples in which our perceptions of reality and the math of reality disagree in a big way. It makes me wonder how much of the rest of my so-called reality disagrees with math without me knowing.
If I were programming a computer simulation full of artificial humans who believe they are real, I would need to take some shortcuts in creating their context and history. It would be nearly impossible to invent consistent histories for seven billion people spanning back to the primordial ooze. A far smarter approach would be to craft the history as you go, based on the present, in whatever minimum way is necessary to make all histories consistent.
For example, let’s say you learn that you are the grand winner of a lottery. At the moment you realize you are the big winner, history becomes limited to only the possibilities that got you to that winning moment. Before you learned you were a winner, the reality at the lottery headquarters was only a smear of possibilities - like Shrodinger’s Cat - where you were both a winner and a loser, just like everyone else. As soon as you learn you won, your history and everyone else’s harden to conform to it. No one else can perceive that they won the grand prize in that particular lottery.
If I were the programmer of this simulation that you call your reality, I would make the history dependent on the present just to streamline my work. All I need from my fake history is that it is consistent with all the other fake histories so there is no “tell” left by the programmer.
I realize the simpler explanation for my confusion about Monty Hall and Schrodinger’s cat is “Math be hard.” But I like the psychological freedom of feeling as though I am the author of my own history and not its bitch.
Here’s the cool part: I get to keep my interpretation of reality - in which my history is a manufactured illusion - until something in my present experience is inconsistent with that view.
Recently I heard of two senior citizens with mild dementia who became friendly at a senior care facility. Their fragile minds concocted an elaborate history of being childhood acquaintances that had found each other through fate. No one tries to dissuade them of this illusion because it works for them. They successfully rewrote their histories without any repercussions.
I wonder how often the rest of us rewrite our histories. Our only limitations are that our new histories have to be consistent with whatever scraps of history have already hardened.
Posted March 27th, 2013 @ 2:33pm in #General Nonsense
When my wife and I designed our home we got one of the rooms exactly right. The living room area has an L-shaped couch that opens to a fireplace on one wall and the TV on the other. It’s far better than the common practice of an ugly rectangular TV over a rectangular fireplace. Our windows are on both sides of the fireplace so there is no glare on the TV. And there are walkways on all sides of the couch so the living room eliminates the need for a hallway to connect rooms downstairs. Best of all, when we are facing the TV, Shelly can be nearer the fireplace, and that works for both of us.
That’s just an example of a perfect room setup. Obviously your ideal room setup would be different if you don’t have a fireplace or a TV. But it made me wonder if there is such a thing as an ideal room design for every given set of functionality and budget. Is there, for example, a perfect kitchen layout that has everything figured out? A perfect bedroom?
You often see rooms that can’t be furnished properly because furniture placement was an afterthought. The design of a room should start with the perfect arrangement of furniture and fixtures. I would think that for every budget and set of preferences there are a few furniture arrangements that stand out as the best. How hard would it be to catalog those best arrangements?
I imagine a time when a user can design a home simple by checking boxes on a long digital form. Questions for a living room might include:
1. Do you want a TV in this room?
2. Do you want a cozy reading chair?
3. Do you want a fireplace?
4. Etc.
Once the user selects all of his preferences for each room, he clicks a “shuffle” button and it spits out a house layout complete with external windows, doors, hallways, stairs, and engineering support structures. All of that stuff is fairly rules-based. If you don’t like the first design, click the shuffle button again. In every case, the rooms will have exactly the features you specified but arranged differently. And of course you can walk through your model in 3D mode.
You would also have to answer some questions about the orientation of the home on the lot, such as the location of neighbors, the street, and the sun. Just check the boxes that apply and hit the shuffle button.
I can imagine that each time you select or deselect a feature it automatically adjusts the total cost of building and maintaining the home. When you have the design you like, at the price you can afford, you click a button to send the whole thing out to bid for contractors. I can also imagine that clicking the “build” button sends the materials and cutting instructions to manufacturers and lumberyards that prepare all the building materials and deliver them to the site, appropriately labeled for the builder.
I would think the cost of the house would fall dramatically with this model, in part because you could shuffle rooms until you got the lowest cost that meets your needs. When an architect designs your home, you get perhaps two or three different looks from which to choose, and no idea which one is more expensive. Room placement makes a big difference in costs for several reasons:
1. Rooms that need plumbing should be near each other to reduce costs.
2. Orientation to the sun makes a huge difference in heating/cooling/insulation.
3. Some designs require fewer hallways, which saves space.
4. Some designs require more support structures, doors, windows, etc.
5. Some designs have ductwork issues.
Those are just some obvious examples of potential savings. You’d also cut your architect expense by 80%. And you’d save on labor and materials because the building materials would be measured and cut at the factory, including everything from lumber to floor tiles to carpet.
My observation is that the building industry is slow to innovate and fairly disorganized. Builders, architects, and materials companies are all their own little silos. So my guess is that the “shuffle design” program will originate in some sort of online game environment before it gets ported to the real world.
Posted March 25th, 2013 @ 2:06pm in #General Nonsense
Recently I heard that Valve, a highly successful video game company, has four hundred employees and no management structure. According to all reports, they make that model work.
I spent a lot of time trying to imagine working for a company with no management. How do they resolve conflicts, set priorities, measure performance, fire laggards, and all the rest? I couldn’t picture it working. Keep in mind that I earn my living by shouting that management is mostly worthless, yet even I couldn’t accept the idea that management is 100% unnecessary. I was skeptical.
My best guess was that the founders of Valve do plenty of managing, but perhaps it sounds cooler to say they don’t. Or perhaps the founders are bad managers and it just feels more comfortable to say they don’t even try. In any case, I was ready to pass judgment: The management-free company is bullshit.
But before I passed judgment, an inconvenient realization entered my brain: I’ve been working on a start-up for over a year and we have no management whatsoever. I’ll tell you more about the start-up in coming days. For now, the interesting part is that I never once - in the course of an entire year - noticed that we have no management until after I heard the story about Valve.
In our case, we have a group of people who have different skills and that seems to be enough. Our decision-making so far seems to follow a rational model that goes like this:
1. We discuss the question (by email or Skype).
2. Everyone gives an opinion or adds information.
3. The smartest choice becomes obvious to all.
4. The end.
That decision-making model might not work in your company if some of your coworkers are worthless. There’s always the one person in every meeting who keeps changing the topic, or doesn’t understand the issue, or insists he knows more than he does, or is bluffing to cover his ass, or is jockeying for a promotion, and so on. To put it in clearer terms: Management exists to minimize the problems created by its own hiring mistakes.
Valve says the secret of their management-free environment is hiring good people. That sounds right to me. We don’t have any weak contributors in our start-up so we have never felt a need for management.
One of the interesting aspects of better global communications, better access to information, and better mobility is that collectively it reduces the risk of making hiring mistakes. When employers were limited to hiring people who lived nearby, and the only information at their disposal was lie-filled resumes, every growing company would necessarily absorb a lot of losers. But now that entrepreneurs can hire the best people from anywhere in the world, we have for the first time in human history the ability to create teams so capable they require no management structure. That’s new.
I think the manager-free model only works for a business that has high margins and depends more on creating hits than cutting costs. The videogame business fits that model, as do many Internet businesses. And in both cases entrepreneurs can hire from anywhere in the world.
So here’s my summary: Management only exists to compensate for its own poor hiring decisions. The Internet makes it easier to locate and then work with capable partners. Therefore, the need for management will shrink - at least for some types of businesses - because entrepreneurs have the tools to make fewer hiring mistakes in the first place.
Management won’t entirely go away, but as technology makes it easier to form competent teams without at least one disruptive or worthless worker in the group, the need for management will continue to decline.
Posted March 21st, 2013 @ 3:48pm in #General Nonsense
In case you are wondering, this post is not a prank itself. But I acknowledge that it sounds exactly like one.
I think I invented this practical joke but you’ll let me know if you have heard anything like it. It’s very, very cool. Seriously, it will blow your mind.
The Set Up
Select a victim who is likely to believe the incredible bullshit that follows. It works well with kids because they can’t yet distinguish science from magic. But it’s fun for anyone with a sense of humor, especially the gullible ones.
It helps to have an accomplice who can nod and agree with the story you are about to tell, as if it had been in the news recently and all well-informed people know it.
Your story to the victim is that scientists discovered that mirrors made from certain types of sand don’t merely reflect light; sometimes they act as a window into a dimension that is similar but slightly different from our own. The most fascinating part is that the scientists devised a simple way to tell if your mirror is normal or a window to another dimension. Next…
1. Find a full-length mirror. Ask your victim to stand in front of it, about a foot away.
2. Explain that you will ask the victim to do three different motions in front of the mirror. If the mirror does everything the victim is doing, it is just an ordinary mirror. But if any of the three motions are not duplicated in the mirror, what you are seeing is a similar but slightly different dimension.
3. Ask the victim to keep his feet planted and turn at the waist - left, then right, then back. Note aloud that the mirror did exactly the same.
4. Ask the victim to keep his body still except for shaking his head back and forth as if saying “no.” Note aloud that the mirror did exactly the same.
5. Speculate that this might be an ordinary mirror, but there is one more test to be sure.
6. Ask the victim to put his nose about an inch from the mirror and keep his entire body still except for moving his eyes rapidly left-right-left several times in a row. Now ask the victim if his eyes in the mirror appear to be moving similarly.
Here’s the freaky cool part. The victim will see his eyes in the mirror appearing to stare straight ahead, unmoving, while in fact they are vigorously moving back and forth. This is an illusion, obviously, but it is so unexpected that the victim will be surprised.
The victim’s first reaction will be that he is seeing something impossible. That’s when you jump in with your explanation of the window to another dimension. Your accomplice should be nodding and confirming the story.
I’ve tried it a few times and it’s a lot of fun. Let me know if it works for you.
Posted March 19th, 2013 @ 2:25pm in #General Nonsense
Warning: This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy or opinion. It is not intended to change anyone’s beliefs or actions. If you quote from this post or link to it, which you are welcome to do, please take responsibility for whatever happens if you mismatch the audience and the content.Posted March 18th, 2013 @ 1:32pm in #General Nonsense
Several months ago I did a little experiment in which I tried to “sell” a business idea in return for equity in what I hoped would be the resulting start-up. It was mostly just an experiment to see if I could sell an unpatented idea. You might be wondering how that turned out.
The whole thing started because I had an idea that I thought could fundamentally change the foundation of civilization, in a good way. And it wouldn’t require any new technology; it’s a straightforward combination of existing systems. I guessed it would cost $10 million to get the idea off the ground,
I previously reported that the first well-placed VC-type with whom I spoke liked the idea a lot. But he wanted an indefinite amount of time to do further research, so I moved to the next investor who had expressed interest in hearing the idea.
The second investor was highly qualified too, and if you follow the technology industry you would recognize the name. He loved the idea and pitched it to his board. They liked it too. We reached a tentative verbal agreement and the investor sent me contracts to review. But before we executed the contracts the investor called to say there was a change in priorities on their end, caused by external events, and they wouldn’t be able to devote the necessary resources to the idea, so they offered to release it.
That’s where it stands now. I might circle back to it at some point.
At the moment I’m busy trying to launch a different start-up that my partners and I have been working on for the past year. This one is designed to solve one of life’s most common problems. Our goal is to save the world a million hours of wasted time. I’ll tell you more in a few weeks.
If you want a sneak peak, we’re looking for some volunteers to try the beta version. Just email me at dilbertcartoonist@gmail.com and I’ll send you the URL in a week or so when we’re ready. All I ask is that you give me your opinion on what you like or don’t like about it. And if you find a bug, I’d like to know about that too.
Posted March 15th, 2013 @ 1:37pm in #General Nonsense
Dogs need part-time jobs. Okay, hear me out on this.
A typical dog owner works all day while the loyal pooch is bored and waiting. That dog would like some stimulation too. But he still wants to be home when the owner gets there, so how about a part-time job for the dog?
My idea is that senior living homes would have a side business of boarding and - here’s the awesome part - training your personal dog to work with the seniors during the day. You drop off your dog on your way to work and pick him up after.
My idea is that the dogs could be trained for very specific duties, such as accompanying seniors for walks around the grounds. Someday motorized wheelchairs will be able to navigate like those driverless Google cars so seniors will be able to take long wheelchair adventures along special scenic wheelchair paths with their trained dogs as guides.
Dogs could also be trained to fetch seniors from their rooms for mealtime, to bring items back and forth, to carry purses and possessions, and generally act useful. The dogs would be happy and stimulated, the cost of boarding would be slightly discounted by the dog’s “wages” and everyone gets some stimulation. It’s a win-win-win.
On a related note, the ideal combination of businesses in the same location would include:
Posted March 12th, 2013 @ 2:22pm in #General Nonsense
Sometimes I think the field of management/success/leadership is nothing more than a confusion of correlation for causation. For example, I blogged recently that “passion” isn’t so much a cause of success as a result of success, and it grows as the success grows. Success can make anyone passionate about what they are doing. When the experts say we need passion to be successful, that’s mostly bullshit. What you need is energy, talent, hard work, a reasonable plan, and lots of luck.
Company culture is another area that I think the experts get backwards. The common belief is that you need a good company culture to create success. But isn’t it more likely that companies with awesome employees get both a good culture and success at the same time? A good corporate culture is a byproduct of doing everything right; it’s not the cause of success as much as the outcome. Success improves culture more than a good culture can cause success.
And how about that charisma thing? That’s important, right? Everyone says so. Look at Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison. Those guys have plenty of charisma so it must be important to success, we assume. But let me tell you what causes charisma: success.
I’m in a unique position to judge the success=charisma hypothesis because I slip in and out of famousness all day long. Cartoonists aren’t normally recognized, and when I walk into a room as a “normal” I exhibit no charisma whatsoever. I might even be absorbing some charisma that is already in the atmosphere. But when I enter a room at an event where people are expecting me in my capacity as a semi-famous cartoonist, suddenly I appear to have some charisma. I feel like Moses in a room full of water. Trust me when I say that if Steve Jobs had not been successful so young, he’d be known as the lying asshole who needs a shower, not the guy with the reality distortion field. Charisma is bullshit.
Today I was reading an expert’s opinion that companies get better results when managers learn to avoid micromanaging employees. But how do we know those non-micromanaging managers get better results? Wouldn’t it also be true that wherever you have the most highly capable employees - the ones most likely to create success - you have a boss who knows he can back off the micromanaging? One would expect more micromanaging in companies with untalented employees. So how do you know what causes what?
Consider the thousands of different books on management/success/leadership. If any of this were real science, all managers would learn the same half-dozen secrets to success and go on to great things. The reality of the business world is more like infinite monkeys with typewriters. Sooner or later a monkey with an ass pimple will type something that makes sense and every management expert in the world will attribute the success to the ass pimple.
How about the idea that every hourly wage slave should “act like an entrepreneur”? How do you think that would play out with Apple’s 50,000 employees? The unsexy reality is that everyone in the company can’t be creative risk-takers. Someone has to actually work. My guess is that Apple would fall apart if more than 5% of its employees acted like entrepreneurs. And maybe the tipping point is only 2%. Entrepreneurs are disruptive, rule-breaking risk-takers. A little bit of that goes a long way.
I first noticed the questionable claims of management experts back in the nineties, when it was fashionable to explain a company’s success by its generous employee benefits. The quaint idea of the time was that treating employees like kings and queens would free their creative energies to create massive profits. The boring reality is that companies that are successful have the resources to be generous to employees and so they do. The best way a CEO can justify an obscene pay package is by treating employees generously. To put this in another way, have you ever seen a corporate turnaround that was caused primarily by improving employee benefits?
The fields of management/success/leadership are a lot like the finance industry in the sense that much of it is based on confusing correlation and chance with causation. We humans like to feel as if we understand and control our environments. We don’t like to think of ourselves as helpless leaves blowing in the wind of chance. So we clutch at any ridiculous explanation of how things work.
My view is that success happens when you have a coincidence of talent, resources, and timing. One can explain the existence of successful serial entrepreneurs by the fact that once successful they gain resources, credibility, extra talent, contacts, and the opportunity to live someplace such as Silicon Valley where opportunities fall out of trees. You would expect that group of people to get lucky more often than someone just starting out.
Dilbert came to fame in the nineties when the working world was experiencing an unprecedented “bubble” of management bullshit. Every time a new business book became a best seller, middle managers across the globe scurried to buy a copy and started spewing its jargon. Eventually the sale of business books dropped off when, I assume, people realized there couldn’t really be 10,000 different sure-fire formulas for success.
But lately I’ve been feeling another bullshit bubble forming in the world. And I don’t mean only the financial markets, which are sketchy for lots of reasons. It’s just a feeling, but it seems to me that the management/success/leadership bullshit bubble is once again reaching full inflation.
Are you feeling the bubble too, or is it just me?
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