Throughout the week, I read a LOT of online articles. What follows are the two I found most interesting:

The Doomsday Invention, via The New Yorker—A portrait of Nick Bostrom, the futurist-philosopher at Oxford who is so mired in the future that the present is meaningless to him:

Bostrom had little interest in conventional philosophy—not least because he expected that superintelligent minds, whether biologically enhanced or digital, would make it obsolete. “Suppose you had to build a new subway line, and it was this grand trans-generational enterprise that humanity was engaged in, and everybody had a little role,” he told me. “So you have a little shovel. But if you know that a giant bulldozer will arrive on the scene tomorrow, then does it really make sense to spend your time today digging the big hole with your shovel? Maybe there is something else you could do with your time. Maybe you could put up a signpost for the great shovel, so it will start digging in the right place.” He came to believe that a key role of the philosopher in modern society was to acquire the knowledge of a polymath, then use it to help guide humanity to its next phase of existence—a discipline that he called “the philosophy of technological prediction.” He was trying to become such a seer.
“He was ultra-consistent,” Daniel Hill, a British philosopher who befriended Bostrom while they were graduate students in London, told me. “His interest in science was a natural outgrowing of his understandable desire to live forever, basically.”

Why People Keep Saying, “That’s What the Terrorists Want”, via Harvard Business Review—here is a quick lesson about how and why people attach their own emotions to explain the actions of other people:

How is everyone so savvy when it comes to knowing what terrorists want?

One explanation comes from a cognitive bias called correspondent inference theory. It was developed in the 1960s and 1970s by the social psychologist Edward Jones to explain the cognitive process by which an observer infers the motives of an actor.

The theory comes from the foundational work of Fritz Heider, the father of attributional theory. Heider saw individuals as “naïve psychologists” motivated by a practical concern – a need to simplify, comprehend, and predict the motives of others. Heider postulated that people process information by applying inferential rules that shape their response to behavior. In laboratory experiments, he found that we tend to attribute the behavior of others to inherent characteristics of their personality — or dispositions — rather than to external or situational factors.

Comic Explodes the “DNA Is Just Source Code” Metaphor—via MIT Technology Review:

Throughout the week, I read a LOT of online articles. What follows is the one I found most interesting (along with a political speech and short documentary):

How The Mad Men Lost The Plot, via Financial Times—This article is about marketing, the ineffectiveness of “brand engagement” and the residing power of old media. I’ve always been curious about how/why advertising works and this take is refreshingly honest. I mean, no WAY are Google and Facebook ads so effective that they can justify those companies finances! Truth is, building sales by targeting previous customers isn’t a great way to build your user base:

Sharp’s first law is that brands can’t get bigger on the back of loyal customers. Applying a statistical analysis to sales data, he demonstrates that the majority of any successful brand’s sales comes from “light buyers”: people who buy it relatively infrequently. Coca-Cola’s business is not built on a hardcore of Coke lovers who drink it daily, but on the millions of people who buy it once or twice a year. You, for instance, may not think of yourself as a Coke buyer, but if you’ve bought it once in the last 12 months, you’re actually a typical Coke consumer. This pattern recurs across brands, categories, countries and time. Whether it’s toothpaste or computers, French cars or Australian banks, brands depend on large numbers of people — that’s to say, the masses — who buy them only occasionally, leave long gaps between purchases and buy competing brands in between.

If you work for a brand owner, the implications are profound. First, you will never increase your brand’s market share by targeting existing users — the task that digital media performs so efficiently. The effort and expense marketers put into targeting their own customers with emails and web banners is largely wasted; loyalty programmes, says Sharp, “do practically nothing to drive growth”. What seems like a prudent use of funds — focusing on people who have already proved they like the brand — is actually just spinning wheels.

The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions, Abraham Lincoln—I’ve been enjoying reading American political speeches lately, and Lincoln is widely regarded as the finest speech writer who ever lived. This early speech of his, written in 1938 when he was a 28-year old lawyer, had some particularly interesting passages in it. It covers themes like the corrosive nature of unjust laws, and the timeless question every young generation has to ask: namely, how to best use the advantages previous generations fought to gain and pass on:

“In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American people, find our account running under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them; they are a legacy bequeathed us by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed, race of ancestors.”

Throughout the week, I read a LOT of online articles. What follows are the two I found most interesting:

Someday, Tech Will End Our Dumb Two-Party System, via Wired.com—Drew Curtis, founder of the irreverent news website Fark.com, offers his perspective on running a (losing) campaign for the Kentucky gubernatorial seat. Regardless of how the race turns out, he’s a smart and engaged citizen who deserves to be listened to:
Most politicians start with a theory, and then use that to determine their policies. For example, candidates are routinely asked to weigh in on charter schools. Most start by stating their theoretical approach—I’m broadly in favor of or opposed to charter schools. That immediately tells voters where you stand, but it does nothing to find actual solutions. As soon as you’ve signaled which camp you belong to, both sides start yelling at each other, accomplishing nothing.

I always tried to answer questions on issues pragmatically, either: 1) I’ve seen an implementation that works and we should copy it or 2) I have yet to see an implementation that works but do you have one you could share with me? If you read a campaign 101 primer it will tell you not to do this, but I found that voters responded very strongly to this strategy. It allowed people who didn’t agree 100 percent with my viewpoints to realize that even though we weren’t entirely aligned, all ideas had a place at the table. Any idea that was provable was worth looking at, regardless of the source.

The good news is, if you understand technology at all, you have access to new tools and ways of thinking that might change the discussion around public policy. For example, in northern Kentucky there’s an argument around tolling on a proposed bridge between Kentucky and Ohio. One idea is to charge locals $1 and everyone else $5. Right now, everyone is arguing about who should be considered local—how far out are we talking? My solution is to use technology to decide. Offer transponders and give drivers the opportunity to buy them. People who drive over the bridge regularly will pick them up. (I have a transponder for Chicago even though I don’t live there, because it makes my twice-yearly visits much more manageable.) Others can get charged a higher rate using license plate photo technology, like they have in Denver. Throw in Los Angeles-style fast lane surge pricing on top of this. Then turn all the tolls off once the bridge is paid for.

The advantage here is you get a huge leg up on the career politicians by demonstrating you’re thinking outside of the box, when in reality you’re just taking decades-old technology and applying it to government. Which I guess actually is thinking outside the box from a public sector perspective.

The Value of University, via The Economist—Not only does this article provide different results than most college ranking lists, it also gives a detailed breakdown of how they arrived at their results: 

A well-known economics paper by Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger found that people who attended elite colleges do not make more money than do workers who were accepted to the same institutions but chose less selective ones instead—suggesting that former attendees and graduates of Harvard tend to be rich because they were already intelligent and hard-working before they entered college, not because of the education or opportunities the university provided.

On September 12th America’s Department of Education unveiled a “college scorecard” website containing a cornucopia of data about universities. The government generated the numbers by matching individuals’ student-loan applications to their subsequent tax returns, making it possible to compare pupils’ qualifications and demographic characteristics when they entered college with their salaries ten years later. That information offers the potential to disentangle student merit from university contributions, and thus to determine which colleges deliver the greatest return and why.

The Economist’s first-ever college rankings are based on a simple, if debatable, premise: the economic value of a university is equal to the gap between how much money its students subsequently earn, and how much they might have made had they studied elsewhere. Thanks to the scorecard, the first number is easily accessible. The second, however, can only be estimated. To calculate this figure, we ran the scorecard’s earnings data through a multiple regression analysis, a common method of measuring the relationships between variables.

Data Mining Reveals the Extent of China’s Ghost Cities and Facebook App Can Answer Basic Questions About What’s In Photos, via MIT Technology Review—The first of these articles is about the deserted infrastructure built up during China’s ill-founded real estate boom (perhaps a symptom of that inflated growth rate that crashed and caused that market scare here in America a few months back). The other one details an impressive technological breakthrough: a computer program that can recognize what is happening in a picture. Combine this with Facebook’s face recognition algorithm and you can know what everyone is doing all of the time.