Scott Adams' Blog

Bed Sheet or Ghost?

Posted November 4th, 2013 @ 7:23am in #General Nonsense

After reading the comments to my post titled “How to Build a Country,” I am left wondering if the intense backlash to “central planning” represents a valid opinion or if it is more of a psychological condition.

If it is a psychological condition, it is one I’ve often seen. It is the inability to distinguish between an analogy - which could be a component of a valid opinion - and something that simply reminds you of something else.

For example, if you see a bed sheet blowing in the wind on a clothesline, it might remind you of a ghost, and that would be perfectly normal. But if you think the sheet might later haunt you because of its similarity to a ghost, you probably have a psychological problem.

Likewise, when my idea of planning a city from the furniture up reminds you of Stalin and Chairman Mao, you might be suffering from a condition that just feels like an opinion to you. I want to assure you that there is no danger from Stalin, Mao, or the bed sheet. You are simply reminded of them.

Keep in mind that any newer city in this day and age is centrally planned, from the road layout to the sewer systems to the water supply. And there is always some sort of planning commission approving new construction. If you are lucky enough to live in such a planned community, you’ll be happy that you can easily get from one place to another and find parking. If you live in an older city, such as Washington DC or Boston, you know it’s a nightmare to get from A to B.

I’ve lived in three planned communities. There was an apartment complex that was planned from the ground up. There was a housing development the size of a small city. Then there was a townhouse development I lived in for several years while building the house I live in now.

Do you know what was terrible about all of those “centrally planned” communities?

Nothing.

The cost of the homes was probably half of what it would have cost an individual to build from scratch, and they had all the safety and convenience features you would need. I could quibble about closet space, and the availability of guest parking, but that’s exactly the sort of thing you can fix with better central planning. If there were no centrally planned government building codes, developers would screw the living daylights out of home buyers who don’t even know what questions to ask.

When it comes to building a home or even a modern city, central planning is how it is already done, and it is the only sensible model. The alternative to central planning is unambiguously stupid. No intelligent human believes you get a better result by letting people do whatever they want with their homes, streets, and sewage. If you do believe that, you are once again confusing the bed sheet with a ghost. Political freedom - which we all want - is not an analogy to home building. If you give people the freedom to build whatever homes they want, you don’t get something awesome like democracy; you get a shantytown nightmare.

Keep in mind that the planned city I described would have numerous different models of homes, just as current developments do. And no one would be required to move to this city. It would compete with every other open society on earth as a desirable place to live.

My post on building a city from the furniture up is about better central planning. Central planning itself is a given. There is no rational alternative. I’m only suggesting that technology would allow an amazing leap in livability if we plan correctly, and I think a company such as Google would do a better job than a government entity when it comes to planning .

And if you see a bed sheet and that reminds you of a ghost, that isn’t an opinion.

What’s Up?

Posted October 30th, 2013 @ 4:34pm in #General Nonsense

Why is everyone in a grumpy mood today?

How to Build a Country

Posted October 30th, 2013 @ 8:14am in #General Nonsense

Suppose you wanted to build an entire country from the ground up. How would you start?

I’d start with the furniture.

When you design a home, you first figure out what furniture arrangements you like, and how the kitchen is laid out. That tells you what shape and size the rooms have to be. Next you imagine what tasks need to be accomplished in the house and you layer on the functionality. For example, you make sure there is storage in the garage, and that the laundry room is near the master bedroom. And you want the sun orientation to be a big part of the planning.

Once you have individual rooms designed, the next step is figuring out how they flow together. And from that you get a good idea what the outside of the house looks like. Once the house is done you can start doing some city planning. You’d want bike paths and dog parks and fun places for neighbors to gather. You might ban cars from the city entirely.

Now let’s assume your planned city has free Internet and everyone is connected. And let’s further imagine that a big player such as Apple or Google is behind the venture. Everything from your lights to your grocery shopping would be managed by smartphones. Every citizen over the age of 10 would have one.

The biggest potential of this planned city springs from universal Internet access. Once you have every citizen online, you can move all billing, voting, and government services online. And anyone could take any online class from home. There’s a lot you can do when you have 100% Internet penetration.

Now that you have the perfect city design you can duplicate it until you form a nation. You might need to put this nation on barges on the ocean, or perhaps you buy some land from a country that has extra. Perhaps you pay taxes to the host country in return for military protection.

You could design your government from scratch. The Internet probably makes some new forms of government feasible, such as a direct democracy, as opposed to a republic, for issues that aren’t especially complicated.

Pick any frustration from you current life and you can imagine how a planned country would make it better. Commute too long? Fixed. Cost of living too high? Fixed. Childcare too expensive and inconvenient? Fixed. Don’t have time to exercise? Fixed. Too much crime in the neighborhood? Fixed. Drunk drivers? None. Healthcare? Universal and inexpensive because your doctor consultations are via Internet.

At tax time, every adult gets an email that says “This is what you earned and this is what you paid.” Done. You never have to see an accountant.

It’s hard to imagine a problem that couldn’t be fixed or improved by a country that is planned from the furniture up and has universal Internet connectivity.

I could imagine an existing country authorizing these “start-up” cities within their own borders, as test beds. After twenty years, whatever is working in the test cities gets implemented countrywide.

Designing a country from the furniture up would have been impractical twenty years ago. To do this sort of thing right, you need high end CAD software and the ability to visualize everything from the furniture to the street layout in 3D. You need smartphones. And you need a fiber optic Internet connection to every home.

My larger point is that I think the future will include cities planned from the furniture up. And that era will see enormous economic activity. Living the old way, in legacy communities, will feel like camping compared to the cities of the future.

I would be surprised if planned cities are not being discussed somewhere within Google.

My new book is How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. It’s my best work.

I’m in the Club!

Posted October 28th, 2013 @ 10:16am in #General Nonsense

Strangers on the Internet often accuse me of being egotistical. I will stipulate that I say and do things that give people that impression. No argument there.

I had to look up the word “egotistical” to make sure I knew what it meant. Some of the definitions involve selfishness, and that’s probably not what people have in mind with me. Then there’s the part about talking too much about oneself, which, as it turns out, is about half of my job description, so that probably isn’t the root problem. My best guess is that I fall into the part of the definition of egotistical behavior involving my “unduly high opinion” of myself.

That’s where it gets interesting.

Just to put things in context, my new book is called How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. It’s a full public confession of my incompetence across a broad range of human endeavors. I’ve failed at more things than most people have even tried. And that’s not even counting my personal life. I’m also short, bald, and near-sighted. My Dilbert fame came well after my self-image had been hardened, so I perceive the minor celebrity part of my life much the way an observer would. I couldn’t integrate that stuff with my self-image even if I tried.

But my question of the day is this: Is egotistical even a thing?

If we use the “unduly high opinion” of oneself as the base definition, how does a third party judge what is unduly and what is the right amount? Who among us is sufficiently perfect and wise as to pass judgment on the worthiness of another human?

Answer: No one

So the interesting thing is that you can only be accused of egotistical behavior by someone who has such an unduly high opinion of himself that he thinks he can stand in judgment of your value as a human while simultaneously knowing your private thoughts about your self-worth. You’d need to be enormously egotistical to label someone egotistical. There’s no getting around it.

So, if you think I’m egotistical, I accept the invitation to join your club of judgmental egomaniacs. It sounds fun. And if it’s not too much to ask, I’d like to be the only one who gets to talk.

 

Hey, I’m on Cute Overload

Posted October 24th, 2013 @ 11:36pm in #General Nonsense

Video Interview of Me on Forbes

Posted October 23rd, 2013 @ 11:18am in #General Nonsense

Bestselling author Carmine Gallo interviewed me about my new book for Forbes. I can’t stand watching myself on video so let me know if I did anything embarrassing. The backdrop is my office. I’m probably sitting in that same chair right now.

The interview is here.

Ask Me Anything - today (10/23) 4 PM EST

Posted October 23rd, 2013 @ 11:04am in #General Nonsense

I’ll be doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit at 4 PM EST today (10/23/13).

That’s 1 PM for my California friends.

You can find it by going to this link when the time comes.

I expect some haters so it should be fun.

Have I mentioned that I have a new book.?

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

Posted October 22nd, 2013 @ 9:59am in #General Nonsense

Obamacare - Side Bets

Posted October 18th, 2013 @ 8:37am in #General Nonsense

I don’t know anything about Obamacare except that it’s so complicated there’s no point in an ordinary person trying to understand how it will all turn out. And evidently the people who try to understand Obamacare come to different conclusions about whether it will destroy civilization or simply help some people who need it.

But interestingly, I’ll bet there will someday be an objective way to look back and say, “That worked,” or “What the $#%@ were we thinking?”

For example, economists will someday calculate that Obamacare cost X number of jobs, or perhaps even created jobs, or it was a drag on GDP of X dollars, or perhaps helped GDP. And we’ll know how many people got health care, especially preventive healthcare, that otherwise might not have. I think economists can calculate the economic value of preventive healthcare. In other words, I’m fairly sure that in ten years we can say Obamacare worked, overall, or it was a huge mistake.

So who is up for some side bets on Obamacare?

I’m sympathetic to the opinion that introducing a huge, complicated, government-run program is just asking for trouble. On the other hand, the Adams Rule of Slow-Moving Disasters says everything will work out.

As a reminder, The Adams Rule of Slow-Moving Disasters says that any disaster we see coming with plenty of advance notice gets fixed. We humans have a consistent tendency to underestimate our own resourcefulness. For example, the Year 2000 bug was a dud because we saw it coming and clever people rose to the challenge. In the seventies, we thought the world would run out of oil but instead the United States is heading toward energy independence thanks to new technology.

Obamacare is a classic slow-moving disaster. Absent any future human resourcefulness, it just might be a nightmare. But my money says that clever humans will figure out how to tame the beast before it triggers the collapse of civilization.

If betting were legal, I’d bet $10,000 that in ten years the consensus of economists will be that Obamacare had a lot of problems but that overall it was neutral or helpful to the economy. I base that hypothetical bet on The Adams Rule of Slow-Moving Disasters, not on the scary first-year state of the law. And I reiterate that I know next-to-nothing about the details of Obamacare. I’m just working off of pattern recognition.

The armchair economist in me thinks there is a solution to the problem of some folks thinking Obamacare will be a disaster and other people thinking it will not. Simply create an online market in which the opposers can buy “insurance” from the supporters. In other words, a hardcore Tea Partier could pay $1,000 now to insure against future Obamacare calamity to his own net worth. An Obamacare supporter would accept the $1,000 and put in escrow $10,000 as a payout in the event that Obamacare heads to the worst case scenario. This idea needs work, but the idea is that opposers and supporters could place insurance-like side bets.

Which way would you bet? And keep in mind that you know as little about Obamacare as I do.

The Karma Hypothesis

Posted October 15th, 2013 @ 9:19am

About a year ago I blogged that I was trying to “sell” an idea to a venture capitalist. The experiment involved asking publicly (here) if a venture company would give me 5% equity in a start-up for doing nothing but describing a good idea. For qualified investors, I would describe the idea, and if the first said no, I would work my way down the list. About a dozen investors with varying resources and experience asked to hear the idea.

It shouldn’t be possible to sell an unpatented idea because the world rewards execution, not ideas. Everyone has good ideas. Good ideas have no economic value. But this particular idea seemed special, at least to me. It’s a lever-that-moves-the-world type of thing. Could this particular idea have been an exception?

Two highly qualified investors heard my idea and both liked it enough to want to pursue it. The first gentleman wanted more time to study the opportunity before committing, and he couldn’t say how long that might take. So with his permission, I moved to the second investor. The second investor ran it by his board and everyone liked the idea a lot. But before I could sign the investment documents, the investor backed out because of unrelated business events that were going to absorb his company for some time.

During the time I was shopping that idea around, I was writing my new book that comes out October 22^nd (How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big) and working with partners on an entirely different start-up that also launches in beta this month. I was stretched thin. And so the best and most important idea I have ever had has been sitting on a shelf.

I decided to free it today, and maybe make the world a better place.

The Karma Hypothesis is that releasing this idea to the world will put me in a good position with the universe when my book comes out and my start-up launches in beta any day now. I could use some good luck. And if karma isn’t a real thing, I hope the idea will make the world a better place because I’m part of that too.

What follows is the idea I tried to sell. I hope someone implements it.

The idea is to combine online education with evolution and capitalism. Give me a minute to explain.

Imagine you take any standard education class and break the lessons into small, well-defined chunks. If the class is geometry, for example, one chunk might be a lesson on the Pythagorean Theorem and nothing else. These chunks would be standardized and published on a platform that allows anyone to “teach” that chunk. Simply submit your video lesson to the marketplace the same way an author submits work to Amazon.com (only easier). Over time, the best “chunks” of lessons get voted to the top. That way a student could take a geometry course that is taught by dozens of different teachers, one best-chunk at a time.

What’s in it for the teachers of these chunks is a piece of the action, the same way Amazon pays authors and publishers. The teacher who has the most hits on a chunk of lesson becomes a best seller and makes a fortune. The fiftieth best teacher for that same chunk makes next to nothing.

I won’t fully define the revenue model here, but I’m assuming that corporate training would be the biggest money-maker at first. For public education, the system would act as a paid tutor substitute at first, to supplement traditional classes. As online education starts to outperform human teaching (a trend that has already started) then the revenue model might change to public funding in some areas and a complete replacement of physical classes. For now, don’t get hung up on the revenue model; there are several ways to go with that, including an advertising model.

As a student, you might prefer learning from different instructors and in different ways than normal folks. If you don’t like the geometry course as it is taught by the creators of the best-selling chunks, you can weave your way through the course using other filters. For example, you might have one preferred instructor who doesn’t rank high but you prefer his style. You could follow his chunks through the course. Or if you don’t understand a particular lesson chunk, you could quickly sample some other instructors to see the same topic chunk from other angles. Everyone has a different learning style. Some students might want chunks with more repetition, more visual aids, or more auditory reinforcement. Once you find what works for you, you can filter your online classes for that style.

You would also be able to select instructors based on how well students who watched their lesson chunks performed on standardized tests. That gives students the option of following the most effective teachers even if they aren’t best sellers for whatever reason.

Up to now, online learning has been little more than video footage of a teacher doing his thing as if teaching a class in person. Common sense tells you that you would get a better result with a team of developers that included a great writer, a great graphics designer for visuals, and perhaps a professional “reader” of the lesson who has no teaching experience at all but is engaging on camera. This is similar to how books are made now; it often takes a team of researchers, editors, and designers to create one bestselling book. I can tell you that the books I write would be quite shitty if the only way you could experience them was watching me on camera reading my first drafts. That’s what online teaching looks like now. Imagine how good each lesson chunk could someday be if crafted by a team of experts and allowed to compete with all other lesson chunks for the same best seller spot. Think of it as rapid evolution for ideas on how to teach particular topics. The fittest ideas would survive and climb to the top.

I also imagine that the system would not have the normal copyright protection for intellectual property. Teachers would be free to steal ideas from competitors and improve upon them. That’s what would make the system evolve so quickly. The good stuff would be copied immediately.

I imagine this system as an online platform for education that is in some ways similar to Amazon, at least in scope and depth. For the first several years you could expect the online courses to be somewhat worse than in-person classes. Still, there would be an economic value at the early stage because people can’t always attend classes in person. Over time, better and better online learning chunks would evolve as motivated teams of developers try for best sellers. You would also have quirky loners creating homemade videos of lesson chunks and in some cases totally nailing it. They would become stars the way book authors sometimes emerge from obscurity. Teachers would become celebrities.

How good could online training become compared to live teachers? My guess is that it could be about three times more effective in the long run. Remember, you’re comparing the best online classes in the world to the average physical classroom. It doesn’t take much evolving for the best of one thing to be better than the average of another. Experience tells us that online education will someday surpass even the best in-person classrooms. My model of a lesson chunk marketplace gets you there faster, and probably better.

One of the biggest weaknesses of online teaching now is the notion that the person on camera needs to be a professional teacher. That seems limiting. Some students might respond best to a younger person with charisma who has no teaching background but is good on camera. Some students might prefer male teachers and some might prefer female. What I’m saying is that the existing model of plucking a favorite teacher from Stanford and filming him yacking leaves a lot of potential behind. What are the odds that this one teacher’s personality and approach is a fit for most students?

Now imagine that someday traditional college degrees become obsolete. Perhaps in the future someone trusted such as Warren Buffett could define the class chunks that in his opinion form the perfect business education. A student could graduate with a “designer degree” that is, in effect, the Warren Buffett Business Degree. Employers would salivate over someone with that training.

One can imagine layering on all kinds of features to this online teaching system. I might want to chat with other students taking the same courses, or I might want to arrange study dates with locals. Assume all of those features are part of the system.

This idea is a lever that moves the world because education is the single most important driver of the economy. A little bit of improvement in education is a huge deal. The evolving-chunk marketplace for classes could get us a lot of improvement over the next decade. It could be a real game-changer. And given the skyrocketing cost of college, this could be a big deal for narrowing the income inequality gap.

So that’s my idea. Please steal it.

And if you enjoy looking at things in new ways, you might like my new book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. The Wall Street Journal did a good job on an excerpt that is getting a lot of attention this week. And you can pre-order here.