The Freakonomics Approach to Decision Making
November 18, 2022
It is predictable an economist like Steven Levitt would apply statistics to the process of making life’s big choices, but one may be surprised at the simplistic solution he has deduced. Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, hosts the “Freakonomics” podcast. Freethink explains how a “‘Freakonomics’ Study Offers Simple Strategy for Making Tough Decisions.” The study had each participant make a binary choice, to make a change or not, with a coin toss and report back. Levitt found a trend in the results. Writer Stephen Johnson reports:
“Most surprising were the results on well-being. At both the two and six-month marks, most people who chose change reported feeling happier, better off, and that they had made the correct decision and would make it again. ‘The data from my experiment suggests we would all be better off if we did more quitting,’ Levitt said in a press release. ‘A good rule of thumb in decision making is, whenever you cannot decide what you should do, choose the action that represents a change, rather than continuing the status quo.’ The study had some limitations. One is that its participants weren’t selected randomly. Rather, they opted in to the study after visiting FreakonomicsExperiments.com, which they likely heard about from the podcast or various social media channels associated with it. Another limitation is that participants whose decision didn’t play out well might have been less likely to report back on their status after two and six months. So, the study might be over-representing positive outcomes. Still, the study does suggest that people who are on the margin of a tough decision — that is, people who really can’t decide which option is best — are probably better off going with change.”
Perhaps. Johnson concludes with an old trick for checking your gut instinct that also involves a coin flip? Go ahead and toss that coin, then see which side you find yourself hoping it will land on. Will either of these methods really point to the best decision? Is Mr. Musk using them to inform decision making at Twitter? Are the results reproducible?
Cynthia Murrell, November 18, 2022
TikTok eCommerce: Will It Work in the US?
November 18, 2022
Douyin, TikTok’s predecessor and home-nation counterpart, made a very fruitful decision to emphasize e-commerce in 2020. As owner ByteDance sought to export that success via TikTok, however, the effort has been less lucrative. In an effort to understand why, Rest of World‘s Rui Ma takes a step back and examines “How TikTok Became and e-Commerce Juggernaut in China.” One key factor was live stream shopping events, an arena Douyin dominates despite entering a year after rival Kuaishou and several years after e-commerce titan Alibaba. The interloper chose to focus on brands themselves and smaller sellers instead of major influencers whose audiences could evaporate with a single PR blunder. Ma considers:
“So how does Douyin actually make money from livestreaming e-commerce? If you guessed ‘by commission,’ you would only be half-correct, as the platform actually charges very little — typically 1%–5% of sales value, depending on the category of goods being sold. The take rate is low, partly because of the stiffly competitive environment, and partly because this helps boost turnover as more sellers are encouraged to use the platform. But in order to succeed, most of those sellers will have to pay Douyin in other ways, via different forms of advertising. Sound familiar? That’s right — much like how Amazon sellers pay to show up in top search results, Douyin allows you to advertise your live stream in users’ feeds. TikTok has just one option for creators to have paid posts (straightforwardly called ‘Promote’). But Douyin has at least two more, targeted towards boosting the live streams of business accounts. Together, these are believed to be a significant revenue stream for Douyin, and presumably, still part of the playbook TikTok hopes to bring overseas. Since Douyin requires live stream e-commerce transactions to be completed on the platform instead of being redirected elsewhere, this all forms a ‘closed loop,’ where the user never strays from the app. It’s the ideal flywheel, and the envy of platform companies everywhere.”
Then there is Douyin Partners, an imitation of Alibaba’s Taobao program. Third-party partners will set up and operate a seller’s account, from advertising strategy to storefront to logistics. We are told ByteDance has not yet tried to insert Partners into TikTok. Why did step one, the livestreaming e-commerce approach, fail in Europe and the US? We are not sure, but it does not look like ByteDance is ready to throw in the global aspiration towel just yet. Stay tuned.
Cynthia Murrell, November 18, 2022
Google and Crypto: Solana Should Anyone Ask
November 18, 2022
I read “Google Cloud Just Became a Solana Validator.” The article explains what Google has chosen to reveal to those who follow the company via “real” journalists; namely:
Google’s cloud computing division Google Cloud announced on Saturday that it’s now running a validator on the Solana blockchain, and will soon add features aimed at welcoming Solana developers and node runners.
No big deal. Amazon has blockchain-related services and a handful of patents pertaining to its digital currency inventions. No big deal either.
The write up says:
Google Cloud also announced it’s now indexing Solana data and adding it to its BigQuery data warehouse, a move that will “make it easier for the Solana developer ecosystem to access historical data.” The feature will launch in the first quarter of 2023, Mittal said. Mittal added that Google Cloud is bringing its credits program to “select startups in the Solana ecosystem” with up to $100,000 in Cloud Credits available for applicants.
Ah, more functionality.
What’s not in the write up? How about deanonymization functionality?
Stephen E Arnold, November 18, 2022
Confirming a Fundamental Law of Online: Centralization Is Emergent
November 17, 2022
The author of “Scaling Mastodon Is Impossible” did not set out to provide evidence of this fundamental Arnold Law of Online: Centralization is emergent. The law means that when someone creates an online service, traffic flow or whatever one calls what happens online causes centralization. The idea is that centralization is cheaper and somewhat easier to maintain than the “let many flowers bloom” approach to development. (Hello, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Twitter. You have an advantage. Why not use it to your advantage?)
The article about Mastodon states:
Decentralization promotes an utopian view of the world that I belief fails to address actual real problems in practice. Yet on that decentralization wave a lot of projects are riding from crypto-currencies [1], defi or things such as Mastodon. All of these things have one thing in common: distrust. Some movements come from the distrust of governments or taxation, others come from the distrust of central services.
As the essay creeps to its conclusion, I spotted a gem of observation; to wit:
Wikipedia for all it’s faults shows quite well that a centralized thing can exist with the right model behind it. The software and the content is open, and if WikiMedia were to fuck up too much, then someone else could step into place and replace it. But the risk of that happening, keeps the organization somewhat in check.
If the author is correct, the future of online may look more like Wikipedia. Possibly? There is another Arnold Law of Online to consider:
Online services lead to monopolization.
This means there will be new Amazons and Googles in the future. Emergent does not mean good, however.
Stephen E Arnold, November 17, 2022
Academic Publisher eLife Shifting to Peer Review Model
November 17, 2022
The racket, er, field of academic journalism has needed a shakeup for quite some time. Will this be the move that does it? Science reports, “Journal Seeks to Upend Scientific Publishing by Only Reviewing—Not Accepting—Manuscripts.” The non-profit, online-only eLife hopes the change will offer readers more nuance than the traditional accept-or-reject dichotomy. The free-to-read journal used to charge writers $3000 if it accepted and published their paper. Writer Jeffrey Brainard relates:
“Under the new approach, eLife will charge authors $2000 if they accept the publisher’s offer to have a submitted manuscript undergo peer review. Regardless of whether the critiques are positive or negative, the manuscript and its associated, unsigned peer-review statements will be posted online and be free to read. If the author revises the paper to address the comments, eLife will post the new version.
Since eLife was founded in 2012, it has tried other innovations. In 2020, for example, it started to require all submitted manuscripts be published as preprints. Abandoning the ‘accept’ stamp is a logical next step, says eLife’s editor-in-chief, biologist Michael Eisen of the University of California, Berkeley.
Eisen, who co-founded the open-access Public Library of Science journals in 2003, says the detailed critiques written by reviewers that eLife recruits are its main contribution to the scientific process. The reviews, he says, are ‘more nuanced, more informative, and more useful to the community than our thumbs-up or thumbs down publishing decision.’ He also argues that the new model will speed up a peer-review process that at other journals is often opaque and slow because it can involve multiple rounds.”
The plan is similar to a practice already put into place by open-research platform F1000Research, which allows readers to review manuscripts posted by researchers. Eisen, however, expects to offer higher quality critiques on his site. Some details are still being ironed out, including how to decide which papers to invite for review. The new policy is to be implemented in January 2023. Researchers funded by the NIH will be glad to know they can declare a reviewed manuscript the final version of record, allowing it to be indexed by the PubMed search engine (a funding requirement). Ultimately, says Eisen, the new approach will push the publisher to the background and researchers’ work to the fore. We wonder how other academic journals feel about that philosophy.
Cynthia Murrell, November 17, 2022
With Mass Firings, Here Is a Sketchy Factoid to Give One Pause
November 17, 2022
In the midst of the Twitter turmoil and the mea culpae of the Zuck and the Zen master (Jack Dorsey), the idea about organizational vulnerability is not getting much attention. One facet of layoffs or RIFs (reductions in force) is captured in the article “Only a Quarter of Businesses Have Confidence Ex-Employees Can No Longer Access Infrastructure.” True to content marketing form, the details of the methodology are not disclosed.
Who among the thousands terminated via email or a Slack message are going to figure out that selling “insider information” is a good way to make money. Are those executive recruitment firms vetting their customers. Is that jewelry store in Athens on the up and up, or is it operated by a friend of everyone’s favorite leader, Vlad the Assailer. What mischief might a tech-savvy former employee undertake as a contractor on Fiverr or a disgruntled person in a coffee shop?
The write up states:
Only 24 percent of respondents to a new survey are fully confident that ex-employees no longer have access to their company’s infrastructure, while almost half of organizations are less than 50 percent confident that former employees no longer have access.
An outfit called Teleport did the study. A few other factoids which I found suggestive are:
- … Organizations [are] using on average 5.7 different tools to manage access policy, making it complicated and time-consuming to completely shut off access.
- “62 percent of respondents cite privacy concerns as a leading challenge when replacing passwords with biometric authentication.”
- “55 percent point to a lack of devices capable of biometric authentication.”
Let’s assume that these data are off by 10 or 15 percent. There’s room for excitement in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, November 17, 2022
Post Pandemic Blues: Tablets and Chromebooks Struggle
November 17, 2022
Might smartphones make some devices irrelevant? We learn from The Register that “Tablet, Chromebook Shipments Come Crashing Down.” The article examines IDC’s report of third-quarter shipments. It states a mere 38.6 million tablets were shipped between July 01 and September 30, a decline of almost 9% since the previous year. Only Huawei grew its sales as demand escalated in China and Russia, where sanctions barred the way for Western tech. Writer Paul Kunert reports:
“Apple saw sales decline 1.1 percent to 14.5 million, according to IDC estimates. Samsung was down 4 percent to 7.1 million, Amazon fell 8.1 percent to 4.3 million, Lenovo shipments dropped 36.6 percent to 2.7 million, and Huawei grew 2 percent to 2.4 million. In its results filed late last week, Apple said iPad sales to end users were up 21 percent to $8.3 billion in Q4 of its fiscal ’22 ended 30 September despite supply constraints. IDC tracks sales into the channel, hence the difference in the figures. Chromebook shipments fell at a far faster rate, down 34.4 percent year-on-year to 4.3 million devices. This was the fifth straight decline for this sector of the PC industry. The downward trajectory began in the US, which accounted for 70 percent of global shipments. … IDC placed Acer as market leader with shipments of 1 million, albeit down 23.8 percent on a year ago. Dell shrank 19.9 percent to 900,000 units, HP was down 26.8 percent to 800,000, Lenovo plunged 54.8 percent to 700,000, and Samsung was down 37 percent to 300,000.”
Researchers point out Chromebook sales spiked during the pandemic as students connected from home, so its decline is simply a return to normal levels. As for the rest, a tough economy was likely at play. Apparently one can endure a slightly smaller small screen when fuel and groceries are difficult to afford.
Cynthia Murrell, November 17, 2022
Math: Who Needs It to be a CEO? Answer: Maybe FTX?
November 16, 2022
Let me be clear. I don’t think much about crypto. One outfit pitched me to invest in a way for lawyers to transfer a deceased client’s digital currency to the heirs. Nope. Don’t care. Another eager young MBA wanted me to get involved in a deal offering investors shares in virtual cows. Nope. Really didn’t care.
Nevertheless, I find the ups and downs, ins and outs of the crypto world interesting. I enjoy learning how specialist firms deanonymize crypto transactions. The idea of putting a bad actor in front of a judge makes me happy. However, listening to a crime analyst suggest that more than 50 percent of digital currency transactions are related to illegal activities makes me some what sad.
I absorbed the information in “‘The Bottom Has Dropped Out’: Study Confirms Fears of Growing Learning Gaps.” Let’s assume the data in the article are close enough horseshoes, which is the modus operadi today I believe. The write up says:
In the earliest weeks of the pandemic, researchers associated with NWEA made two jaw-dropping predictions. The first — that school closures would lead to lower math and reading scores — has been borne out over and over since then. The second — that the already broad range of academic levels within classrooms would yawn wider — has now been confirmed.
The article grinds through data which make one thing clear: Quite a few students cannot do math particularly well.
I found this statement in the estimable publication The Daily Mail’s article “Harry Potter Fan Ex girlfriend 28 of Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Bragged She Only Needed Elementary School Math to Be CEO of His Start Up, Despite Being Propped Up by Funds from His Failed Sister Crypto Exchange” fascinating:
The write up states:
Ellison [the alleged friend of FTX’s founder] disliked common trading safeguards such as stop-loss orders, a way of capping losses and reducing risk.
Yep, grade school math. I think that going forward more exciting things will surface. Oh, one plus one equals two, not one plus one equals a Mississippi River flow of money. A magic wand is real too. Wave it an a million people will be really happy.
Stephen E Arnold, November 16, 2022
Google and the News Industry: Now That We Have Won, Do You Our Want Help?
November 16, 2022
I read a remarkable essay cum PR piece called “Google Collaborates with News Industry to Combat Misinformation.” I am not a very good reader, maybe third or fourth grade level on good days. I think the essay in the Connecting with Google Blog means, “Now that we have decimated real news, we at Googzilla want to help you.” I immediately thought about the Marshall Plan. Google’s approach seems to be a somewhat GenX approach to what strikes me as an old-fashioned problem.
The write up says:
Our work at the Google News Initiative supports both journalists and fact-checking organizations doing the work to fight misinformation.
Hmmmm. I can search YouTube and find information which strikes me as hitting all the boxes: Propaganda. Check. Misinformation. Check. Disinformation. Check. Reformation of factual material. Check. Content violating one or more laws. Check.
The essay continues:
Our goal is to strengthen digital skills and provide new ways for journalists to verify sources, fact check, and explore different forms of storytelling.
I would humbly suggest that the “goal” is to generate advertising revenue, minimize the impact of numerous anti-trust and related legal actions, and retain a firm grip on the digital dog leash that publishers are allowed to wear; for example: Site traffic. Check. Location information about individuals. Check. Email scanning. Check. Opportunities to receive Google outputs. Check.
The essay adds:
Misinformation is a critical issue, and it cannot be solved by one organization alone. We are constantly seeking new ways to partner with the leading fact-checking organizations globally and are incorporating best practices into our products. There’s more to do, and more to come. Our third Fighting Misinformation Online event will take place in Brussels on November 29, 2022, a forum for those working across sectors to come together to tackle misinformation.
Yep, humble words. Plus it includes an advertisement for itself.
Pure Google. Check.
Stephen E Arnold, November 16, 2022
Ethics Cause Developer Burn Out. Ethics? Ethics?
November 16, 2022
It is undeniable that AI algorithms are programmed with biases, because of limited datasets and their developers’ obliviousness. To learn not to be “racist,” AI algorithms need to be exposed to diverse datasets and be corrected when they make a faux pas. The MIT Technology Review says AI developers are experiencing severe burnout trying to be “ethical”: “Responsible AI Has A Burnout Problem.”
There is a huge demand for ethical AI algorithms, but the workers who develop them are dealing with psychological and physical problems. These workers are feeling undervalued and burning out almost as quickly as social media content moderators. People who work with AI ethics must cover a wide range of issues:
“The role of an AI ethicist or someone in a responsible-AI team varies widely, ranging from analyzing the societal effects of AI systems to developing responsible strategies and policies to fixing technical issues. Typically, these workers are also tasked with coming up with ways to mitigate AI harms, from algorithms that spread hate speech to systems that allocate things like housing and benefits in a discriminatory way to the spread of graphic and violent images and language. “
AI ethicists are challenged every day they are forced to work on a project that injects negativity into their lives. While they face backlash from their bosses and the public online, they are also disrespected by their fellow AI developers. These developers are mostly engineers, who are not known for their great social skills.
Another problem is the neck-breaking pace AI advancements are made. Companies are chasing the next big thing. They are also not hiring competent employees who can work together. All these issues combine into high turnover and burnout.
Margaret Mitchell, a former Googler, founded and co-led its Ethical AI team. She burned out after two years in AI ethics. She quit her Google job and left for an AI startup. While change starts at the top of any company, her quote says it all about how companies handle burnout: “The only mechanism that big tech companies have to handle the reality of this is to ignore the reality of it.”
This quote also describes the general working life in the US.
Whitney Grace, November 16, 2022
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