On Bets and Bullshit

Speaking of conversations, the economics blogosphere has recently erupted with a discussion that has been ongoing, at a much slower pace, for years. The subject is the effect of making a bet upon the kinds of claims one is likely to make. One side finds it inherently desirable to wager on your beliefs because it makes you put your money where your mouth is, discourages vagueness, and so on. The other side thinks the impact of this bet is overstated and perhaps even negative.

For my own purposes I’d like to collect the pieces of the conversation that I have managed to witness in one place.

Here we go:

What I love about this is how wonderful an illustration it is of the nature of conversations like these, which have existed long before blogs and the Internet and computers. None of the participants treat the subject as though it is occurring in a vacuum; all make reference to the larger conversation, making it easier for new spectators and participants to join in when encountering just one piece of it.

Finding the Right Conversations with the Right Information Diet

Rethinking my information diet has been an ongoing process for me since I read the book last year. A few months ago the approach I had arrived at was to completely chop off the head of the tail from my RSS feeds. This was much more of a relief than I had expected it to be, and I found that with the extra time and head-space, I could dig even deeper into the long tail.

But there were still things I liked about reading sites like The Verge. So I thought I could just check them a couple of times a day; the very thing that made them terrible to subscribe to—the fact that they would update dozens of times a day—meant I was unlikely to waste time going to a site that hadn’t updated since the last time I had been there.

This didn’t quite work for me either, though. A couple of things happened to get me to my current routine, which I’m pretty happy with.

First, I’ve been consciously controlling the amount of time I spend navigating the web and consuming short form content. I think it’s better to focus on something for long periods—whether it’s reading a book or essays, or writing, or even playing a video game—and then take in the web in controlled bursts.

The second thing that happened is that I started searching for a job back in April (and found one). A job search in the digital ad industry is very different in Manhattan than it was in DC. I talked to many different sorts of places, from publishers to data management platforms to ad networks. I learned a lot about the industry during the process, and realized that a lot more was going on than I had been aware of.

So when I started at Tapad, I decided to keep up with industry news.

Now, I don’t think that industry news is different from any other kind of news. But it keeps track of conversations that people in the industry are having about where things are headed. This does not mean that it provides any special insight into such matters. But it gives me a window into what people are talking about, right now, and helps me participate in that conversation.

A great deal of finding satisfaction in our relationship with the web and with technology is finding conversations that interest us, and people we enjoy having those conversations with. I’ve come to realize that an information diet is not just about what you consume but what conversations you want to pay attention to and participate in.

I like being a part of the conversations we’re having now about the role of technology in our lives, among many others. As such, I’ve brought the head of the tail content like The Verge, TechCrunch, and Boing Boing back into my information diet along with industry focused publications like AdExchanger, Ad Age, and AdWeek. However, I approach them in a much more controlled way than my long tail content.

I’ve found that Flipboard is a great way to accomplish this. There’s no unread count to stress out about. The UI is very pleasant and well designed. Each week day, before I leave for work, I spend about half an hour going through the latest from these publications. And that’s it. I don’t look at it again for the rest of the day. If someone on Twitter links to something from them that looks particularly interesting, I might click through. Often, I’ll just wait until the next day’s flipping.

Blogging has been an important way that I participate in the conversations that interest me for almost nine years now. That’s what the blogosphere is, really–a series of conversations overlapping to greater or lesser extent. It is part of a far more enormous digital conversation space which includes Twitter, Facebook and various other social media, chat clients, forums, and email.

It’s possible to have a healthy relationship with information. It starts with the question: what conversations do you want to be a part of?

A Second Chance

Her parents’ townhouse felt much smaller practically the first time she had visited after going away to college. So when Sarah got home from her internship every afternoon that summer, she would sit in the park across the street and read until dinner time. The park was the best thing about the old neighborhood; a small playground and field surrounded by townhouses on all four sides. It had been a wonderful place to grow up.

Someone was already in the bench she always sat in. As she approached, she realized with trepidation that it was Mark. She had heard that he had returned a few weeks ago, but this was the first time she’d seen him. She stood there, awkwardly for a moment, unsure of what she wanted to do.

He had been staring in front of him; whether at the kids playing in the playground or simply into space, she couldn’t say. He glanced at her and recognition was in his eyes, and then guilt. He looked back away. “Hey Sarah,” he said quietly, his voice hoarse. He glanced at the book in her hand. “Want me to leave so you can read?”

She looked him over as she considered this offer. He was unshaven and uncharacteristically pale. She had no desire to talk to him, after the way he had treated her and his family. But she had heard bits and pieces of what had happened to him, and part of her did feel sorry for the guy.

“No…you can stay, don’t worry about it,” she sighed. She sat across the bench from him, and began to read. Or tried to. They sat there in silence for what felt like an eternity but was probably no more than ten minutes before Sarah decided it was pointless to keep trying to read the same page over and over. “How are you?” she asked tentatively. He seemed mildly surprised that she had spoken.

“I’m OK,” He replied in a valiant but failed attempt to seem sincerely fine.

“Needed a little air?” she prodded.

“I needed to get out,” he conceded.

“It must be tough being back with you parents after so long,” she said. It must be hard living with people who know how badly you screwed up, is what she thought, but she hoped it didn’t come across. She wasn’t sure what she thought of him any more, but she didn’t really have any desire to antagonize him.

“No, they’ve been great,” he said, and this time his words had the ring of actual sincerity, “it’s more like…I need to start getting back out. I can’t hide behind them for the rest of my life.” Now she felt guilty. The guy was going through something. It was true that it was a situation of his own making, but he seemed to be really facing it.

“I get that,” she said, feeling herself relax a bit, “I’ve been coming out after work because these houses just don’t seem as big as they were when we were kids.” She smirked a bit, and was pleased to get a polite chuckle from him.

They sat in silence again for a few minutes, though a more comfortable one than the last.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last, his raspy voice barely above a whisper. She didn’t say anything to that, so he continued, “I’m sorry for the way I was to you.”

“What do you want me to say to that?” She asked coldly, suddenly remembering that he had been an asshole and he did make the stupid decisions that brought him to his present pitiful state.

“You don’t have to say anything,” he said, “I just want you to know that I know what I did, and I know it was shitty. And that I’m sorry. I’ve known you my whole life, and I treated you like a nuisance when you were trying to look out for me. I blew you off like you were nothing, when you’re the only good friend I’ve ever had. I’m not asking for anything, I just want you to know, I haven’t forgotten that I treated you like shit.”

She let out a long sigh, not looking at him.

“You fucked up,” she agreed.

“I fucked up a lot of things,” he said seriously.

“How did you think it was going to end?” she found herself asking in spite of herself, “How long did you think you could keep living like that?”

“I didn’t think,” he answered honestly, without missing a beat, “I ignored things like the future entirely. When I couldn’t ignore them, I drank until I could. But I was drunk most of the time, so it usually wasn’t a problem.”

“Oh Mark,” she said, sounding more sympathetic than she had meant to.

“You and my parents have always had your heads on your shoulders,” he went on, “mine was always somewhere up my ass. You know that!” she smiled in spite of herself.

“Now I feel like I’ve woken up and everything everyone else was seeing is so damn obvious,” he said miserably, “it’s like I’ve opened up a set of eyes that I didn’t even realized were closed, only it’s too late because we already crashed the…” he choked on his words and stopped.

“I keep crying,” he told her, looking away and blinking back tears, “even at the stupidest, most random moments. My sponsor said that that’s pretty common, at moments like these.”

She put her hand on his. He looked at her, surprised. She wanted to say that he had fucked up, but she was still his friend and she still cared. But she couldn’t quite find the words.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to.

“Thank you,” he said quietly, and meant it.

A Crucial Missing Element

Norman loved New York City, but sometimes he wished it wasn’t so damned crowded. You can get around Manhattan so quickly, if you can push your way onto a train. There are so many great restaurants to eat at, if you make it while they still have tables open. There are wonderful art museums like the MoMA, if you can stand all the people standing around you.

He wished he had it all to himself. And one day, he got his wish.

He noticed the quiet immediately. Even as far uptown as he lived, Manhattan was imbued with a continual noise of humanity and its machines. He tried to write it off. How could you notice quiet? He was probably just so used to it at this point that he couldn’t hear anything. Or maybe his neighborhood had never actually been all that noisy. Anyway, what other explanation was there?

He got dressed, gathered his things for the day, and made his way to the subway stop near his apartment.

Once outside, he could not rationalize the utter quiet and emptiness of the streets and sidewalks. Maybe there was some holiday going on that he had forgotten about? But even then he had never seen the area so completely abandoned. His anxiety grew—something felt very wrong about all of this. Still, he made his way down to the subway station, where three frustrated swipes of his Metro card and finally one successful one got him beyond the turnstile, as it had every day.

The station was just as empty as the streets had been. He waited five minutes—longer than he usually had to—and no train appeared, nor was there any sign of one in the tunnel. Ten minutes after that, his heart pounding in his chest, he walked back out of the station.

Walking down an utterly abandoned Broadway, he thought, maybe there was an accident. Maybe they sealed off the area entirely, and he somehow slept through the whole thing. If so, he would just need to walk outside of the sealed area to find a living city again. He did not worry about what would have caused such an unprecendented locking down of his neighborhood; instead, he clung to the idea that such a thing was possible to comfort him.

He wasn’t even halfway to midtown before he knew his theory was absurd, but he kept walking. He didn’t know what else to do.

When he got down to Chelsea, he was hungry, and tired of walking, so he walked into a restaurant he knew had food he would like. It had often been too crowded when he had attempted to go in the past, but just like everywhere else on that strange day, it was completely empty. This also meant that there were no waiters and no cooks, unfortunately. However, whatever happened must not have happened too long ago, because there was food on the tables. It was still good enough to eat.

But what could he do? He couldn’t eat every plate in the city before they went bad. In fact, he couldn’t even eat very many plates before the food everywhere started to go bad.

It did not take long to figure out that New York kind of sucks without people. For one thing, it takes people to cook food and run subway cars. But even if those people had been left by whatever had taken everyone away, it’s not like Norman could have paid all their salaries himself. Hell, he couldn’t pay for jack without the people who paid him to work for them!

He explored the abandoned shell of what had been America’s most populous city for a few days, out of morbid curiosity more than to obtain some sort of enjoyment. Then he walked his way off the abandoned island and went in search of people.

In Praise of Blogosphere

In 2004 I jumped into the world of blogging in a big way, both in the sheer amount that I read on a daily basis and my personal output in a widely-unread blog with a name only a pretentious 19-year-old could come up with. At that time, Very Serious Person that I was, I hated the term “blogosphere”. At a time when I was angrily arguing that the Mainstream Media was overrated and bloggers were the future, “blogosphere” seemed awkward and embarrassing. I tried to avoid using it, instead resorting to things like “blog ecosystem”. In the end, I relented, because it was clear that blogosphere was here to stay, and it began to feel even more awkward to be the only one not saying it.

Nine years is a long time in the cycle of media storytelling, to say nothing of technology and technological adoption. Nowadays you’ll still get the occasional scare piece to the tune of “Jesus Christ the Internet is nothing but one, big, angry mob of wide-eyed vigilantes!” but these are at least as likely to cover people’s activities on Twitter and similar social media as on blogs. For the most part, the role of the blog has been cemented and matured, within a larger (dare I say it?) ecosystem of social interactions and media platforms.

There is greater appreciation for the fact that a blog is nothing but one part of the greatly lowered barriers to entry into producing public content, and that non-professionals can and do contribute a great deal to the public conversation every day. Some of them have aspirations of becoming professional contributors to this conversation, but many do not.

As perceptions and usage of the blog have matured, there has been an increasing allergic reaction to some of the rhetoric of the early adopters. More than once I have seen friends I follow on Twitter complain about the term blogosphere and wish that its usage would cease.

I want to defend the much maligned blogosphere, and not just on the (very valuable) rule of thumb that if 19-year-old Adam Gurri believed it, there was probably something crucially wrong about it. Blogosphere was a term coined and adopted by people who were sick of the modes of conversation inherited by modern media from our mass media past. Bloggers who wrote about new media in the first half of the last decade were sick of bad fact-checking and baked in moral assumptions being hidden under the veil of a style of fake objectivity. Most of all, they were sick of people taking themselves too damned seriously.

That is why blogs writing about rather serious topics nevertheless took on silly or offensive names such as Instapundit or Sandmonkey. It’s why many posts that had ever increasing weight in the public discussion used an inordinate amount of profanity to make their points.

The equilibrium has shifted since then; now there are a greater number of professional outlets that have adapted their rhetoric to be less stilted and less objective, if still intended to be respectable. And the blogs that carry weight have, in my subjective perception, seemed to tone down the juvenile naming conventions and swearing in posts, to a certain extent.

Nevertheless, I like blogosphere because it has that overtly geeky, tongue in cheek side to it that I think is unlikely to become irrelevant in my lifetime. We could all stand to take ourselves a little less seriously.