Social Networking and Self-Regulation

the crippling problems inherent in the self-policing realms of Digg and Reddit

Posted Sep 28, 12:15 PM in economics, experiences, human nature, improvements, marketing, politics, postmodernism, social networking, unanswered questions


Social networking websites are the big thing right now, not just for armchair sociologists and online businesses, but also for academics. They serve as sort of a vacuum where you can observe interactive behavior from afar in a venue that didn’t even exist just a few years ago.

Two of the sites that get a lot of the attention are Reddit and Digg. These sites are not like Facebook or MySpace, in that they are not pages in which you create profiles for the purpose of having your peers come check you out and find out what music you like. They are essentially link portals that allow users to submit content (links) and allow users to comment on those submissions. They also give users the ability to “upmod” or “downmod” submissions to indicate, respectively, approval or disapproval of said submissions, comments, and links. It’s supposed to be an egalitarian means of aggregating a collective response of the userbase to a submission, and to show others how worthwhile a contribution might be, and to establish a feedback mechanism to the poster.

Keeping count of ups and downs encourages good comments and submissions, and can be seen as a preventative tool to keep out trolls, spammers, and people who say don’t make worthwhile contributions to the public discourse. And like the Roman gladiator battles of old, the idea is that a preponderance of upmods will spare the life of a well-written or interesting contribution, while downmods will effectively slay it, striking it from the viewing grounds.

In theory, it’s a very good thing. Over humanity’s existence, and particularly over the past 15 years, there has been a glut of information flooding into the public sphere at a rate that seems to only accelerate. It become increasingly necessary to more effectively filter what reaches our eyes in order to make our limited time more meaningful. In other words, there’s a lot of junk out there, and you don’t want to waste your time reading it; you want to get to the good stuff immediately (this attitude probably is problematic in its own way, but that’s a different story entirely). These social networking sites help you put mass consciousness to use in achieving that agenda.

For a while this was being considered as the way that private citizens were finally going to wrangle the big bad world wide web and all its anarchic tendencies; finally the masses would be able to collectively wrestle power away from the disproportionately powerful spammers and media corporations, and regain control of the discursive sphere that the internet was always meant to be.

Alas, the debilitating cracks have already formed in the foundations of this well-meaning institution.

Digg was working fine up to a certain point, where articles were being upmodded based on merit and interest, but this utopic system was eventually usurped by an organized network of users operating on a platform of quid pro quo, in which users would agree to upmod another’s comments and submissions in exchange for similar treatment to their own comments and submissions. These rogue networks expanded, using Digg’s proprietary “friend” system, in which a user can befriend other users and monitor each others’ activities with ease. Pretty soon, the entire front page of the site, which was once supposed to house an aggregated list of topics that the entire userbase considered important, was commandeered by people subverting the system through mutual backscratching, thereby annihilating the democratic ideals of the site.

To this day, despite 150,000,000 page views a month and thousands of content submissions per day, the same 20 people’s submissions make it to the front page every day. This, of course, basically makes Digg the equivalent of a mainstream media outlet that uses editorial discretion to filter content, except in this case, it is not exercising supposed meritocratic discretion (“what are the important issues of the day?”) so much as they basically just have a staff of 20 contributors who are going to automatically have their voices heard, while everyone else is basically forced into a consumption role.

So much for that.

It was then that we looked to Reddit to become the site that would cradle our highest democratic ideals. Many Digg users jumped ship to come to Reddit after being disgusted with the downward slide in content quality at Digg. But soon enough, Reddit too was destroyed— but not by the same system as Digg. It was leveled by a much more subtle and insidious form of cancer.

Reddit had always prided itself on being a more thoughtful and educated mass of users than Digg, always mocking Digg for its tendency towards childish humor and ad-hominem verbal sparring. Reddit, on the other hand, was a site that was sophisticated, and more prone to having mature dialogues about subjects that were served more by complex dialectics than verbal drive-bys. But ultimately, this user self-perception and self-selection, combined with the “modding” rights of all users created an ideological vacuum that threatened the very foundation of the site through its own exclusionary behavior.

To understand how this happened, it is relevant for us to first understand what happened in a more concrete sense.

At the moment I am typing this, the front page of Reddit is littered with anti-John McCain/Sarah Palin articles that seem to recite various sensational or seemingly biased positions against them. This is not in itself a problem, but as a supposedly non-partisan site, it has repeatedly been shown that anti-Obama submissions get downmodded into oblivion. Reddit is now essentially a clearinghouse for liberal rhetoric, where every single anti-Republican and anti-progressive screed on the world wide web can be found, being upmodded by users who are probably only reading descriptions of articles rather than full articles, and who are voting based on ideology rather than quality.

Spend a few minutes on the site, and you’ll see liberal comments regularly upmodded (or at least not downmodded), and you’ll see conservative comments downmodded like there’s no tomorrow— with no apparent value put on the complexity or discursive quality of the comment.

Remember, upmodding and downmodding are supposed to be reflections of user opinion on submissions. The issue here is that there are many reasons why users might not like an article, and without consistency in voting patterns, it descends into a meaningless mush of upmod/downmod numbers.

Therein lies the problem with this form of social networking. Upmods and downmods do not carry with them a single unique and transparent value. A downmod does not necessarily mean “I thought this comment was bad on the merits of its thesis”; it could mean “I disagree with you ideologically.” It could even mean “I don’t like this user,” or “I don’t like this user’s username.” All this tends to render whatever submissions are highly upmodded or highly downmodded to be of somewhat ambiguous import— which of course means that anything you are seeing (or not seeing) because of others’ value judgments is based on somewhat arbitrary rationale… which should, in turn, make you wonder why this is such a great medium for brokering dialogue. After all, what if you want to read well-written opinions of people whose ideas differ from the site’s mainstream?

An idealized situation would have separate measures for the any number of factors that might elicit someone’s approval or disapproval: well argued/poorly argued; convincing/not convincing; ideologically agree/disagree; spam/not spam; worthwhile contribution/not worthwhile contribution; stupid username/not stupid username, etc. With such a system, one could theoretically exhibit approval for a contribution on multiple levels but simultaneously disagree on other levels (and let others know it). In this manner, we could read an article that was well argued, but not convincing, that was largely ideologically disagreed with. But we can’t do that now. And that’s too bad, because it forces regular users into intellectual stagnancy. As sociologist Mark Granovetter suggests, it’s actually the people who aren’t in our immediate intellectual circle who are the ones who can teach us things. We already “know” what our ideological peers think.

Of course, this opens up a whole new can of worms because it relies on the ability of users to police themselves in what category of approval or disapproval they choose to give to submissions. Vindictive liberal users might angrily describe an eloquent and well-argued conservative post as “not worthwhile” simply because of their own parochial point of view. This is problematic, and unlikely to be resolved in any meaningful way.

Another reason why this is potentially troubling is because of intersubjective value judgments. What’s worthwhile for you does not match the threshold of what is worthwhile for me. Aggregated over a massive userbase, we’ll end up seeing a sort of middling effect that promotes submissions that basically hug the bottom rung of the ladder of quality. That is, we’ll end up elevating the sorts of things that the most people happen to agree are good. If you listen mainstream radio, read mainstream magazines, and watch mainstream television, you can see why this may not be such a great thing.

Will this ever see resolution? Will humanity’s mainstream be forever condemned to mediocrity in everything it engages in? Will our music, television, movies, literature, politicians, and now content portals all be mediocre? God, I hope not.

Comment [1]




On Self-Rationalization and Justification for Moral Lapses

We usually get what we want… somehow.

Posted Sep 7, 03:22 PM in business models, consumerism, economics, experiences, human nature, law, marketing, politics


Some time back, I was sharing an office with someone, and had a shelf next to my desk that I had placed a few books on. One day, I came in to find that the shelf had been moved next to the other guy’s desk, and my books had been tossed upon my desk, along with a note explaining why my officemate needed that shelf more than I did, and how I would be able to get another shelf from some other person in the office if I really needed a shelf (this, of course, invites the question of why he didn’t get the shelf himself from some other person to begin with).

The rationalization in his head followed this trajectory:

1) I want a shelf for my things.
2) There’s a shelf over there.
3) And it only has a few books on it.
4) Given that it only has a few books on it, clearly the owner doesn’t really need that shelf.
5) Given that he doesn’t really need it and I do, I really deserve that shelf more than he does.
6) It’s wrong for him to have that shelf when I need it so much more.
7) I’m just going to take the shelf since I will receive greater utility value than him.

You can see how such self-rationalizing logic has a way of subverting standard social norms such as “ownership” and “right to use.” I was somewhat bothered by this turn of events, but once I started thinking about it, I realized that such behavior happens all the time, and enters into some of our most proverbial ethical dilemmas.

The question of Is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed your family?, for example, is another similar ethical quandary that enters into our popular consciousness.

However, one of the most prevalent examples of this in recent times is the issue of music downloading through P2P networks. The tech-savvy youth of the world, on the whole, have absolutely no problem with downloading copyrighted music from the internet (full disclosure: I have also done it before). This is despite the fact that most of the same people probably recognize stealing items from local stores as morally wrong.

But, comes the argument, this isn’t really theft. In a theft, someone is deprived of an item because someone else takes it. Here, something is being duplicated so I have a copy and the original owner still has his copy.

True. Yet, one could make the same argument about stealing cable, and I have not heard anyone argue that this is morally sound. After all, there are cable companies who have large amount of fixed assets tied up in cable lines, maintenance, and other expenses that come part and parcel of delivering cable. If everyone stole cable, clearly the cable television system would collapse. Is the same not true for the music industry?

Well yeah, but the music industry hasn’t adapted to changes in the market and the way that consumers want to shop.

Maybe, but in every other sphere of the consumer economy, if consumers don’t like the way that a company does business, they simply don’t do business with them. Why is it that you feel justified in stealing property in this case? If you really want a new Ford car, but you really hate Ford dealers, how is it that you are justified in stealing a Ford from their property so as to bypass interacting with the dealers?

Look, I’ll admit that this does hurt the record companies, but you know what? They deserve it. Those suit-and-tie business guys are all about the money; they couldn’t care less about the music, and in fact they’ve have done everything in their power to destroy music! I support the artists, and the record companies just screw them over anyway. Artists only get, like, 10 cents on every CD sale anyway. They make their real money off of touring.

But what gives you the right to decide that the artist shouldn’t have that 10 cents per CD? Sell a million albums, and that’s a lot of money. Isn’t that their decision to make?

Artists who say that are just being greedy! They’re already rich and famous and now they want even more money! Can you believe these guys?

But that’s their job. Surely you’d want to be paid for things you took time to develop and sell, right?

No way! I’m above that. If I were an artist, I’d be happy that people were listening to my music and coming to my shows. It’s all about the art, dude.

Just because it’s ‘all about the art’ for you, doesn’t mean that it’s ‘all about the art’ for everyone. Would you still feel the way you do once you were depending on that income for your livelihood, and your continuing ability to fund that livelihood?

Of course! I’m not looking to make money off records. I’d make my money of touring, and connecting with my fans, and selling merchandise and stuff.

What if you didn’t want to tour?

But that’s how you make money.

That’s one way you make money. The other part is selling records. What if you only want to sell records and that’s all? And don’t you, as the artist, have a right to choose the channels through which you distribute?

Ok, let’s stop this right here. You can see where this is going. Ultimately, the P2P downloader in this conversation is finding ways to justify his decision to download music. He gives all kinds of rationalizations for it, from blaming the companies, to blaming the artists, to giving ideological reasons, to technical explanations of why it’s not bad.

Clearly, this argument was built backwards. The downloader started with the idea of I want to have free, unrestricted access to any music I want whenever I want. From there, he found ways to justify any behavior that led to him getting that. This involved dismissing valid counterarguments through insular and self-justifying means that, while they might apply to his own worldview, are not necessarily shared by those who he is taking from. Nevertheless, he is able to project this ideological view of “how things should be” onto the world, and then convince himself that what he’s doing is actually the valorous thing to do, bravely fighting against an archaic system that enslaves and rips off consumers— when all he really wanted was the music to begin with.

Thus, a base drive to get free music has now taken on an ideological bent and has morphed into some kind of jihadist war on record companies. The guy could just have just admitted he wanted the free music. Why bother blowing all that smoke? Well, he doesn’t realize consciously that he is blowing smoke.

Apologists have this same problem. They’ve decided that George Bush, or Hillary Clinton, or Alex Chiu, or James Dobson, or whoever is right. Now that they’ve come to this conclusion, they can no longer stop to evaluate events critically. Suddenly, they find themselves excusing all kinds of behavior that they would skewer someone else for; and not only will they overlook this behavior, they will defend it— passionately! After all, they wouldn’t want to admit that they were wrong about this person this whole time.

Strange thing, this cognitive dissonance.




Further reading:
Mistakes Were Made by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. Harcourt, 2007.

Comment [2]




How to Reduce the Complexities of Life to a Formula

and lose all meaning in the process

Posted Aug 25, 07:31 PM in economics, experiences, improvements


The following are some thoughts on an interesting discussion going on over here about “everyday utilitarianism.”

The idea described is that one could apply mathematical formulas involving marginal utility value and such to arrive at solutions for interpersonal problems of everyday life. In the given example, the author describes how you could use a formula he derived to determine whether you should be allowed to watch American Idol or whether your roommate should be allowed to use the television to play video games. By determining the utility value that each of you might receive from having your way, you can figure out what would be the solution that maximizes total enjoyment levels.

As dumb as it sounds, I have to admit that I’ve tried to use these sorts of formulas for real-world decision making in the past. For example, at a time when I was trying to choose between two job opportunities, I employed what I later discovered was a Pugh Matrix (AKA Quality Decision Matrix) to determine the optimal choice based on my own somewhat obscure sets of criteria and conflicting interests.

Sure, it gave me an answer, but in real life there are just too many factors to allow a major life decision to be made by a mathematical formula. For one thing, there simply is not room for all the possible inputs; you will miss important variables, and you’ll put in unimportant ones. You’re also likely to misjudge the marginal utility of all these inputs to you, and further, as Jonathan Haidt wrote in his excellent book “The Happiness Hypothesis,” we are often terrible judges of what our future selves would want. All this has a way of forcing you to second-guess the end answer that you’re given in a situation like this.

As humans, we’ve been thrown into this giant unpredictable chamber of life, and we desperately want to control it, optimize it, and best wrangle it to suit our needs. But we’re no good at it ourselves; no, there’s just too much variability for us to be accomplished at always making the right decisions. It’s for this reason that we look to things like computer dating websites, horoscopes, fortune tellers, and other such purveyors of “real answers” for assistance in making the “right” choices.

From our vantage point, we simply don’t have answers— but we desperately want them. The problem is that once we get the answers from these sources, we don’t typically have much confidence in them.

And why should we? When we are forced to make decisions, we typically have conflicting emotions, a battery of information that we need to make sense of, an understanding that we may be establishing some kind of precedent by our choice, and even the unsettling idea that our choices may be ones we have to live with down the road. Though for some it’s not as laborious as it is for others, serious decision-making is never easy.

So that brings us back to this website, where we are supposed to be using a utilitarian formula to arrive at the optimal quality of life situation for you and your roommate. It’s a great idea, to have a simple solution that would eliminate bickering and establish right-to-power heirarchies in a coherent, non-arbitrary fashion, but you’re not going to get it from this.

As I wrote in the discussion:

…[Unfortunately,] this methodology [requires] individuals to assess their enjoyment levels honestly, and with complete loyalty to the outcome as decided by the equation. In real life, we might expect persons to lie or misrepresent the level of enjoyment they claim they would get by having their way. In other words, this method assumes that individuals are committed to doing the ‘right thing’ as it applies to the goal of creating maximum enjoyment in the world, and having all participants enjoy the maximum enjoyment that they could receive in the long term. Realistically, I would tend to think that most people would try to maximize their own enjoyment instead of trying to maximize the pleasure of all, a motivation which subverts the ability for us to use a formula, since the formula depends on participants to act in a manner that does not necessarily secure their own interests before those of others.

As other voices chimed in, they brought in a number of other good points. Reader Mikey argued,

“How, exactly are you to measure how much utility you get from watching American Idol (at any time) versus how much utility he gets from playing videogames? …Intersubjective utility comparisons are epistemologically impossible.”

In other words, it’s not even possible in theory for you and your roommate to establish standardized values for your emotional responses to you each having your way. You might say that on a scale of 1-10, you want to watch your TV show, say, 7. Your roommate might want to play Halo 3 the same amount, but might give your his utility value an 8. It’s not possible to reconcile this because you can’t get into each others’ heads to do it.

He continues:

If there ever were some way to measure utility and your roommate actually was a utility monster [a person who derives much more pleasure from getting his way than you do], the proper utilitarian decision would look morally questionable (sacrificing all of your utility (and everyone else’s) for his proportionally greater benefit).

Another reader writes:

I find utilitarianism hard to defend. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that the world would be a much happier place if you ate George Bush. Straight utilitarianism would tell you to go right ahead. Most people who subscribe to utilitarianism therefore have additional principles they throw into the mix when rating different actions, but once you start to do that, you lose what I always thought was the main selling point – a less-arbitrary way to rate actions.

Well, back to the old method: sleepless nights tossing and turning.

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For the Love of Money

Why is wanting money a bad thing?

Posted Aug 24, 10:41 PM in business, economics, human nature


Having lived in now three liberal college towns (Berkeley, CA; Bloomington, IN; and Madison, WI), it becomes increasingly apparent to me that political liberals (of which I consider myself one, though definitely not one of the knee-jerk variety, and one who is very open to conservative ideology) have a very bad attitude towards money.

I hate to stereotype, but it’s a mindset that I’ve seen innumerable times in those who consider themselves on the political left, and one that no one is apologetic about. It’s considered crass and scummy to have a desire for money. I’m not denying that I myself carry the weight of this burden to some degree, but I’ve certainly loosened myself, particularly after having studied the role of business and commerce in the fundamental operations of the world.

Some people feel like it’s virtuous to not want money, and in fact to actively push it away. To such people, it’s at best selling out to go after money, at worst, it’s the most ugly possible stain on your very character. But let’s face it; we would all like to have a nice house, great vacations, health care, and good food. It’s hard to deny that we all want such things. The part that some people resist is the money part of the equation. Money of course, is the currency that we use to gain those things.

Alas, after having met greedy people, hearing about countless business scandals, and in general knowing about the ways in which money corrupts people, the indictment has come not upon the character of individuals and their personal responses to money, but the money itself. Money has become conflated with greed, confused with a lack of compassion, seen as the equivalent of misplaced priorities and the absence of decent character. To want such a thing is nothing more than a horrible scar on your name.

There’s good reason for this attitude; however, there’s also great reason why this attitude should no longer exist. Money in itself is a neutral force. It can do amazing things, it can do harmful things; but one thing is undeniable— it is the way to make things happen.

Sure, you could be a jerk like Ken Lay or Donald Trump, but you could also do something amazing like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. Some people would even argue that Bill Gates has done more for humanity than Mother Teresa (this refers to his endowment of billions of dollars in charity, and does not take into account the Windows operating system, which has caused untold damage towards humanity).

If you want to make the world a better place on a large scale, you’d better believe you’re going to need money. And, as a wise person once said, money won’t buy happiness, but a lack of money will definitely cause it. And in my opinion, it’s time money got the credit and respect it deserves. Even if that sounds crass.

Progressives often direct their political anger largely towards those who put “profits before people.” I don’t necessarily find fault with this logic, but the more the left continues to cultivate a negative attitude towards money and reject the idea that having it is anything more than a necessary evil, the more I believe it will actually shift power into the hands of those who have it, and know how to use it.

I’m certainly not saying that it’s okay to be greedy or that anyone should place money at the very apex of their priorities list, but to use an SAT-style metaphor:
“gasoline::car” as “money::life in the modern world.”

Something to think about.

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Dirt-Digging When Hiring Employees: Why You Shouldn't Do It

Unrealistic expectations, their limitations, and the dangers they promise

Posted Jul 28, 01:12 PM in branding, business, economics, experiences, human nature, human resources, marketing, social networking


The New Reality
I wonder if there are going to be any viable candidates for anything in the future. The accessibility of information on the internet as well as the general ease for one to post information to it, especially at a young age, has led few curious and tech-savvy individuals from the internet generation to have clean, unsearchable online slates. If you’ve observed the behavior of 8-25 year olds recently, I think you will make the reasonable assumption that people of this age group comprise the lion’s share of Facebook’s 36 million users, and MySpace’s 73 million users, and have made their mark online in many other arenas.

And what kind of comments are these people posting on the internet, that would reassure potential employers of this person’s quality? Here’s one from a person I’ll call Ashley Pinsky, 15, from MySpace.

OMG i was so fukced up last nite lol!!!

Granted, this is an extreme example, but not an uncommon one. That offhand comment will probably prevent Ms. Pinsky from ever becoming president. And the nature of the internet is such that this comment may not be easy to find in the future, but it’s never going away. Someone who wanted to find dirt on Ashley Pinsky will find that comment 35 years later, no doubt. It’s not like it was in the good old days, where your exploits and comments could be geographically contained, or confined to the memory of a couple people who overheard your off-color joke in the privacy of your living room. We live in a world of YouTube, digital cameras, hidden recorders, live microphones, and ill-considered internet confessions.



The Problem with Vividness
But in the wise and out-of-context words of Marge Simpson, as long as everyone is videotaping everyone else, justice will be served. Right? Right?

Wrong.

One of the big concerns we should have is our tendency towards misleading vividness. The following is an example, and one that is intended intended as a convenient analogy, not a political screed.

Think about the difference between the respective presidential bids of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, in particular the controversies. We only criticized George Bush for his long history of alcohol abuse and coke-snorting, but we skewered Barack Obama for attending a church that appeared to deliver hateful sermons. Aside from the respective gravity of these apparent violations of character (the weight of them essentially created by the media), there’s one thing that separates them significantly: one was documented on camera and the other was not. We could watch Jeremiah Wright on endless loop, in vivid detail, cementing our impressions of his “hateful” church and its link to Obama.

The Wright tape was so visceral and immediate that it was hard for it to not make an impression somehow— even though it literally represented 2 minutes of the church’s decades-long history, and there was no further proof of similar activity. But all we heard about Bush’s years, possibly decades of hard partying and drug abuse was that he was reputed to be a former cokehead and alcoholic. We had didn’t have 2 minutes of videotape showing Bush snorting lines or stumbling around drunk or emotionally damaging his loved ones. For that, Bush didn’t have to own up to anything, while Obama had to do a lot of dancing around. Due to the vividness, the Wright issue seemed much more real and immediate than the other, so we pressed it much more, and it played a much larger role in our mental construction of Obama’s character.1

My point is not to get into whether these controversies themselves are important to examine in a presidential candidate; instead, I want to explore the economics of hiring techniques which involve the use of vividness and “dirt-digging” to establish character, and the lack of foresight that companies and our electorate may be unwittingly entering into by engaging in such practices that forcibly marry vividness with significance.



No One is Who They Appear to Be at Any Given Time
Our immediate instinct is to say when we find dirt on someone online, or in photographs, or in videos that we use these occurrences as evidence, testimonials to someone’s personality. Did you see that photo of him drunk at a bar? He’s a loose cannon. We can’t possibly trust him with our industrial equipment, or have our clients find out that (outside of work) he behaves in an unprofessional manner.

The problem is that we ascribe too much meaning to these words and images when they come from an unprofessional environment. First of all, it should not come to a surprise to anyone that people behave unprofessionally when they’re not at work. To expect that they don’t is an unrealistic and fairly ridiculous expectation that, when you think about it, demands far too much of someone who is only human. People are not their jobs. They behave themselves at work because they have to. At home and in their leisure time, they feel like they should be able to let loose and be themselves. After all, why should they be evaluated on behavior that does not directly and demonstrably affect the quality of their work?2

This leads me to wonder whether our apparent demands for a sparkling personal history is the result of us actually wanting to hire “clean” individuals for reasons of productivity or wanting to hire individuals who can at least appear clean so as to not horrify outsiders. The difference is that the latter acknowledges the imperfection of humans and settles for someone who can keep his indiscretions private, while the other wants us to be held to unmanageably high standards all the time.

In fact, I doubt seriously that there are completely clean people in this country, or the world. It’s just that much of our ‘dirty’ behavior occurs without documentation. I’m sure that if we all were being filmed all the time for everyone to see, there would be no one out there without some unsavory event connected to their name. If it wasn’t some frowned-upon activity like drug or alcohol use, it would be something else like violence, sexual indiscretion, off-color conversations and asides, shady business dealings, rude behavior, subtle racism, or anger management issues. And it’s not like these people are bad people; we’re talking about isolated moments that would appear damning if documented and replayed— moments that actually permeate all of our lives constantly.

Indeed, what man or woman would not appear foolish, controversial, unreasonable, or perverted if monitored 24/7 and edited to exaggerate the most sensational segments of his day (which is essentially what so-called HR background checks do)? Producers of reality television shows know this. They know how to work Final Cut Pro to make a normal girl seem like a raving bitch, a decent guy into an aggressive, misogynistic hothead, and a neurotic, socially-maladjusted lunatic into Simon Cowell.

Presidential candidates aren’t allowed the normal lapses of speech or judgment that the rest of us are afforded because everything they say is constantly being deconstructed by pundits and played 300 times in succession on news networks, giving every offhand comment a hyperreal, set-in-stone weight that the original probably didn’t have. Just imagine how you or someone you love might come off if every act or word uttered were subjected to the laws of television news overanalysis— every moment of frustration, giddy delight, or agitation there for the world to judge you with. People who have never met you are now basing their perceptions of you on a two second loop of you getting irate at the guy who cut you off on the highway, and it’s been playing all day and night, making you look increasingly psychotic with every repeat. It’s exactly what happened with Michael Jackson and Britney Spears and countless other celebrities, and it unsurprisingly drove them both to madness. It would most likely happen to you too.

Underlying this fundamentally unfair depiction of you is that while you may have lost your cool for that two seconds, you don’t get credit for the nearly 18 hours of collected calm that you exhibited. Nobody’s watching that part. Therefore, you are branded with the scarlet letter of being the psycho who flipped out when someone cut him off.



How HR’s Enthusiasm for Dirt-Digging is Going to Come Back to Bite It
So far, my point in describing all this is not to excuse occasional idiocy, bad judgment, or the appearance of foolishness, out-of-control behavior, or low ethical standards so much as to universalize it. Knowing that our past mistakes are out there and none of us are truly free from them, the only possible outcome from gross and commonplace hiring practices that seek to find our documented dirt is that candidates who are more undocumented (and therefore more unknown) than their competition are the ones who are more likely to get the job. How? Let’s look at these two potential candidates of equal qualification:

Mike — Online research finds that he admits to drinking and womanizing; is prone to occasional off-color jokes; was once arrested for indecent exposure 8 years ago.

Jeff — online research finds absolutely no information, damaging or otherwise.

In the split second you have to make this hiring decision, the chances are you want to hire Jeff. But consider this unsettling truth for a moment: After looking over their backgrounds, you feel more comfortable with the guy you know less about. In fact, it is the absence of information about Jeff that makes you feel unjustifiably secure about hiring him. You don’t know Jeff’s dirt, and therefore you mentally assume there is none. But as science teaches us, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The idea that ‘Jeff must be clean because we did not find any dirt on him’ is clearly false, but it does not stop our conscious mind from elevating him in comparison to Mike.

The problem is, you can almost never be sure whether that decision is justified or not because you simply do not have the information you need to make a legitimate comparison. As it turns out, Jeff might be a) a serial murderer that makes Mike seem like a great guy in comparison, b) an alcoholic with strikes against him just as bad as Mike, or c) a wonderful, clean-cut young man. You simply do not know which, and you continue to base your hiring practices on prejudices built on vividness: You read that Mike got arrested once and drinks a lot, so you now prefer Jeff.

This tendency should bother you; you are favoring someone who has only earned preferential status by information omission rather than information addition. Your lack of knowledge about this individual, who you have chosen after making a faulty comparison with another candidate whose vivid background rubs you the wrong way, might very well result in a poor hiring match for your company, or even a very damaging personality getting the job.

All of which doesn’t mean a lick of difference to you if the only reason you are screening for dirt is to keep up your company’s appearance with outsiders, which in this context, makes your hiring focus seem awfully misguided. Maybe I’m going out on a limb here, but I doubt outsiders give a damn about your employees unless they are dealing with them directly, which again comes back to the question of why you should care about anything your employee does as long as it doesn’t affect his work.



If I Shouldn’t Screen for Dirt, How the Heck Should I Be Hiring?
Hiring someone is a big decision. It can cost a large company between $80,000 to $1,000,000 in training and loss of productivity to bring in new people. It’s not easy. Yet, typical HR departments don’t invest much time or energy in hiring, and tend to do things in ways that are easy rather than effective. Really what they they need is something to judge character on. Ideally, they’d have all the same quantity and quality information about everyone so they could make accurate comparisons. But they don’t. Instead, they look at your resume, ask you some dumb questions, maybe call a couple references, and then search for dirt on you. This automatically— and unfairly— favors people who script their interview responses and who are either careful to hide their dirt, who haven’t gotten caught, or who are lucky enough to not have been documented. This is a very dangerous trend in hiring.

I think that the ideal, but definitely not the most convenient, means of hiring should involve the following:



1. Of course, this wasn’t the only issue that separated the two. There were obvious divisions of racism, classism, and religious fears as well.

2. This is not to imply that we should allow bad behavior at work; order obviously needs to be maintained in a professional environment. It’s just that we need to accept that for most people, there’s a division between work and home, and one that hardly anyone wants bridged. After all, as I mentioned in a previous post, we are different people depending on our environment. Our receptivity to different stimuli differs in different places, which is why we don’t feel compelled to drink at work, but that same beer seems enormously inviting the second we step out the door.

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Lost Weekend: A Cautionary Tale about Missing the Point

Don’t overlook practical details in search of big things

Posted Jul 8, 03:00 PM in business, business models, economics, experiences, marketing, unanswered questions


A few days ago, I was attending my cousin’s wedding in Toledo, Ohio. While I was there, I was put up in a 4-star, $250-a-night hotel. Words like “4-star” are supposed indicators of quality and detail-oriented service. The funny thing is, I’ve stayed at many such hotels on business in the past, and I almost never find them living up to their supposed standards of quality. For $250-$400 a night, all the loose ends should be tied up; instead, what I almost uniformly find are a flashy exterior, a so-so in-house gym, and rooms with really nice furniture— and not much more. Those things are fine, but it’s the oversights that perplex me.

This hotel, for example— which was clearly the type of hotel that high-end business travelers were supposed to be staying at— had a sub-dialup wireless internet connection that literally required minutes for you to load simple pages like Google.com. It’s great that they had a beautiful hardwood desk that I could put my laptop on, but if I’m doing work, the desk just needs to be functional; it would be so much better if I could check my email without going into a coma. And this is not a flaw that I only noticed that this hotel; I’ve seen it in countless upper-crust hotels. How expensive could it be to fix this problem? If I’m paying $250 a night, at least give me more than a 1 bar signal. If annoyed business patrons can’t do their work, you’d better believe that eventually, they’re going to try staying somewhere else.

Other such bizarre oversights abounded at this hotel. The elevator wouldn’t allow you to push buttons to go to any floor unless you inserted your room keycard every time you used it. And the slot to put the card in was in the elevator, located in a place where you’d have to reach over strangers to put it in, and then elbow people in the face to get the card out again. The slot could have easily been placed on the outside of the elevator if this type of security was really necessary. Five-hundred wedding guests were annoyed all weekend by this ridiculous system that likely damaged their opinion of the hotel more than what was made up by the apparent offer of security.

Moreover, when I made it up to the 13th floor (I thought they stopped going to that floor!), the Executive Suite, the floors were rather unsightly and the wallpaper was straight-up peeling off the walls. I have no idea how much those high-powered, presidential rooms cost, but from the looks of their furniture and size, I’d have to say a pretty penny. And yet, the management has ensured that the first thing a patron would notice was that their $800 a night (or however much it cost) wasn’t going towards making the premises look and feel clean. The furniture was really nice, but there was too much conflicting visual stimuli. If you have oak-lined walls and crystal chandeliers, at least make sure there aren’t holes in the carpet and black stains everywhere. These have a way of eradicating the positive impression you get from the antique furniture.

Another strange recurring theme is that many of these expensive hotels don’t give you a complementary continental breakfast (AKA free donut). Yeah, perhaps this isn’t worth much, but it has a way of making people who sometimes stay at cheaper places like Red Roof Inn wonder what the heck they’re getting for their $300 a night. At least when I’m at Red Roof Inn, I can have a cup of orange juice and a cheese danish before I’m out the door, without having to endure a long sit-down meal that costs an arm-and-a-leg.

With the exception of having rooms that open into a hallway instead of opening to the parking lot, there’s little value that I can see in these expensive hotels, aside from the obligatory ego-stroking for your insecure corporate executives (though perhaps this is valuable?). The cheap hotels seem to be better at delivering real value for their $40-$75 a night. You get a comparably clean room, internet connections that almost always work better than those in expensive places, and well, a free donut.

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An Alternative B-School and Interviewing Strategy

It probably doesn’t work, so don’t try it. Also, it’s something that Hitler would do.

Posted Jul 1, 08:04 PM in economics, experiences, pictures, social networking


Before I started B-school many people told me, rather matter-of-factly, that it was going to be 2 years of partying. This, as it turned out, was not at all the case. Of course, my rationale for joining had absolutely nothing to do with this alleged reality; in fact, I do not really consider myself the type of person who thrives in party environments (and the fact that I wrote the previous sentence in that fashion probably attests to that).

Regardless, I understood from the very beginning that networking was going to be a big part— perhaps the biggest part— of the whole experience, and in fact, the foundation on which my future career would lay. This was made clear to me in no uncertain terms by any number of the school faculty, and especially career counselors. I bristled against this thought; what did they mean, networking was the central component of B-school? Was this whole B-school deal really as shallow as outsiders probably think it is? Is it really just a loathsome amalgamation of entitled white dudes who look like the guy below (and act exactly the way you think he does), getting high-powered jobs by kissing ass and joining old boys’ clubs, and then expecting their followers to do the same?

Well, yes and no, as I found out. During the process of the internship search that occurs in the second semester of classes, which for me was unpleasant and protracted (despite my eventual success), I immediately noticed how little having actual business acumen was a component of the screening process.

Sure, recruiters would routinely ask questions that posited certain business scenarios and asked us to respond to them, but like every other interview question they would bombard us with, they were almost uniformly ones in which genuine, candid answers were far less productive for us than giving scripted responses that came directly from the lamest, most pathetic job-hunting play book. Outsiders would be stunned by the level of artifice that was given by students and expected by recruiters in internship interviews.

Since I was 12, I have always known that I wanted to be a brand manager at ABC Industrial Manufacturing Corporation. There’s nothing I like more than hard work. I am an excellent team player, and have sought out leadership roles on cross-functional teams working in competitive industries. In five years, I want to be Managing VP of Finance at ABC Industrial Manufacturing Corporation.

Seriously now, who the hell says that in real life? Who even thinks it? Certainly not me. When people asked me where I saw myself in five years, I often said that I tended not to have such expectations of myself because the things I wanted had a tendency to shift, and what I wanted from the bottom of my heart today could very well not be the same as what I wanted two years from now. I don’t think that is unreasonable in real life, and I highly doubt that you would judge it against your friends if they said that. That said, I can see how it might rub someone the wrong way in an interview setting, given that their only means of evaluating our apparent quality was to take everything we said (no matter how incredibly lame) at complete face value. But the flaw is that they should not be using our words alone to understand us; the quality of a person should be judged by their moral and ethical fiber, their standards, their priorities, the way they treat the people around them, their goals for themselves, and how they see their place in the world around them. These were issues that were never approached in any meaningful way in any interview.

I was even called into career counselor’s office at one point for telling a recruiter that my eventual career goal was to enjoy my job thoroughly and to feel like I was contributing to something that I really cared about. “You are not being paid $100,000 a year to ‘enjoy your job,’” the career counselor told me, exasperated by my conduct. In retrospect, it was, perhaps, too fundamental, too naked, a fact to tell a recruiter. It must have really jarred with the sorts of responses other gave.

Yet, there is little doubt that many of my peers either knowingly or unknowingly felt the way I did, but others didn’t articulate it, or had less compunction about bending the truth as they saw it for a job (I don’t judge them for it, despite the way I phrased that; really, it is an issue of how one places his priorities).

Nevertheless, I felt so awkward to give these bizarre, inhuman responses that I couldn’t bring myself to do it (though eventually, I did have to craft answers that while they did encompass my feelings, also melded them tactfully with standard responses that perhaps deflected their ‘sore-thumb’ quality). As a result, I suffered pretty badly in interview after unsuccessful interview.

The weird thing was that I thought my resume was quite impressive; I felt that my candidness in my successes and failures would give me a humanistic depth that the fakers couldn’t achieve; I thought that being truthful in my answers and not exaggerating my accomplishments would be valued; and most of all, I was under the impression that being dignified and not being blatantly sycophantic towards my recruiters would be held in my favor amidst all the obvious shenanigans going on from my peers. Seriously, how could any self-respecting recruiters not feel utterly and completely embarrassed by the way these overzealous ass-kissers were gushing all over them in a such a labored and frenzied manner?

It just goes to show you: I do not understand the psyches of recruiters, apparently.

It was clear from the first week of interviewing season that the coveted jobs were going to ass-kissers, networkers (who were like ass-kissers but over a longer period), and cute, bubbly girls. These groups, to a very large degree, excluded people in my classes who I had viewed as actually thoughtful or insightful. This in itself was utterly maddening— although not entirely unexpected given that those three groups tended to have another quality that was valuable: boundless, if contrived, enthusiasm; something that was almost definitely less visible in the intellectual group. Nevertheless, how is it that business knowledge and intellectual curiosity be such a negligible part of the process? Should they not have been a crucial component of the interviews?

It soon became clear that ‘company fit’ was one of the little remarked-upon details that could make or break your case in the eyes of recruiters. If they couldn’t envision you as ‘one of the gang,’ or otherwise seeming like ABC Corporation’s sort of guy, you simply weren’t up to snuff. Given this, it’s not surprising that ass-kissers, networkers, and cute, bubbly girls comprised the bulk of the immediate hires. They had proven that they could conform to the standards of corporate America. No one needed to say ‘jump’ for them to say ‘how high.’ It was an implicit dialogue, and they understood it, and could play the game without being told the rules.

I began to believe at one point that I could, theoretically, employ a completely different strategy in school than the one that most of us at least paid lip service to; you know, the one where you do homework, turn in assignments, and try to actually learn something?

Instead of slaving over books; working on tedious, semester-long projects; and crunching numbers, one could instead hold regular parties at his house, inviting the whole school and buying beer for everyone. This could be supplemented with any number of seemingly genuine efforts to win over the respect, admiration, and general positive sentiments of other students; a feat that can be accomplished by being generous to classmates in whatever way one can think of.

It might be an expensive endeavor to do this in the short term. We’re talking about maybe two $50 kegs once a week multiplied by, let’s say 34 weeks a year for 2 years. That’s nearly $7,000 dollars on beer alone.

Regardless, at the end of the program, you’d have 200+ well-wishers whose opinion of you might be good enough that they would be willing to return the favor of all those downed beers by bringing you aboard their companies once all their oily tentacles had expanded into the far reaches of corporate America. And it wouldn’t just be one company that you’d have connections with; it would be dozens.

Now, theoretically you could leverage all these friendships to bounce around from company to company, pulling yourself ever higher up the corporate ladder. And because ‘fit’ is something that is something that is so integral to the hiring process, your company-internal buddies would no doubt pull strings for you to indicate that you were a good guy and should be brought into ABC Manufacturing Corporation. This was my thought after the first year.

Soon afterwards, I realized that this strategy probably would not work. Some— though certainly not all— of these first persons snatched up at the beginning of interviewing season returned to the second year of B-school with their tails between their legs, having embarrassed themselves somewhat on their jobs due to their collective lack of ability. Admittedly, I found some schadenfreude in this, but yet it irked me. Why would corporate hiring practices continue in this way despite what I could only presume was years of backfiring at least in some significant percentage of interns? No answer was forthcoming— short of the standard answer as to why corporate America continues to tread down misguided paths in every aspect of their businesses year after year: inertia.

However, I discovered that those who got jobs jealously sought to keep them, and made concerted efforts to build and preserve their reputations amongst co-workers. They would never do anything that might compromise their image, and would work hard at doing things that would strengthen it. For that reason, and that reason alone, the “party guy” strategy couldn’t possibly work. No one who had spent any time establishing their reputation in the eyes of others, or who was concerned about how others might view them would ever bring a party animal on board their company; it’s simply too risky. If the party employee doesn’t live up to the original employee’s recommendation, it’s the latter’s whose reputation at the company is damaged. And what could a friend possibly have to gain by bringing in party person, anyway?

It would be different with a close and respected friend, but there’s very little to gain by getting “party guy” into the company beyond doing him/her a personal favor. According to game theory, you have much to lose, very little to gain. Why bother?

I guess maybe it’s worth paying attention in class after all.

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The Food Supply Chain

a pictorial representation to ponder

Posted Jun 26, 01:14 PM in biology, business, business models, consumerism, economics, environment, marketing, operations management, pictures, politics, semiotics, sustainability



(click for a more detailed view)

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Bicycles are in Desperate Need of (R)evolution

and why companies should make it easy for people to adopt their products

Posted Jun 24, 11:55 PM in business, business models, economics, environment, improvements, marketing, sustainability


Here’s the problem, as I’ve elucidated on a previous post: bicycle companies have not given the non-user a strong incentive to switch from cars to bicycles. Bikes, as they are currently sold, lack all the subtle (and not-so-subtle) features that new users who are wanting to instantly make their bike their primary mode of transportation will want; features like easy locking, built-in LED lighting, stylish and lightweight baskets, and chains that don’t eat your pants. These are all features that are immediately obvious to people who don’t bike regularly, or who have just started biking on a more frequent basis.

I’m certain that bicycle manufacturers will find any number of reasons to throw up resistance for these ideas, and deny that making such features standard is a good idea. This will make the bike heavy, they will say. It will make the bike less customizable. It will make the bike most costly.

Yes, these are all fine old-school reasons to not do something, argued from the standpoint of people who are so integrated into the semi-elitist, extreme-sports culture of hardcore biking that they fail to see the need for this evolution for the mainstream. To them, it’s an “it-ain’t-broke-so-don’t-fix-it” sort of argument; if someone wants a light, why not let them choose what kind to get— if they want one at all— instead of installing a standard one in the bike?

Here’s why.

Think about it from another vantage point; take the computer industry: What kind of computer do people who do not know anything about computers buy? They buy Macs. Why should they buy Macs? They are more expensive, have less software, are less prominent in computing society, and they pretty much force you to buy all your hardware from a single manufacturer whose products cost significantly more than comparable PC products. These facts, on paper, do not sound like things that are going in Apple’s favor at all.

But what Apple does offer is instant usability, assurance that everything is going to work, standardized components, integrated hardware that is compatible with the other pieces of hardware within it, and a single sleek and aesthetically-pleasing package that doesn’t need much modification or adjustment before you can use it.

Windows users are plagued with problems, often having to spend ages with their IT guys getting their network up and running, fooling with network adapter drivers, Windows networking software, and hardware conflicts— while Mac users simply input their IP numbers, and are smooth sailing. Meanwhile, the Windows user is pulling his hair out.

This is an instructive analogy. Think about it. Make it easy for someone to adopt your product. Isn’t that obvious?

People just getting on the bicycle bandwagon don’t want to deal with taking their LEDs on and off every time they get on a bike. They don’t want to deal with their clothes getting ruined by a chain that apparently can’t be made to not destroy clothing. They don’t want to be condemned to carrying everything they brought with them everywhere they go just because the bike has no close-able, lockable basket. They don’t want to deal with their bikes being space hogs in their homes because the handlebars don’t fold. They don’t want to buy dozens of aftermarket components and install them all on a machine they don’t understand, hoping that they got the right ones and that they fit with their type of bicycle and frame size. They don’t want to have a Frankensteined bicycle bearing so many different companies’ products that their bikes look like they were cobbled together from scrap.

They want all that stuff taken care of beforehand because they don’t want to think about that! They just want to be able to ride with confidence, have all the accessories they may want right there (and have them easy to put on because they were designed specifically for the bike they bought), and they want to get on with their lives. They don’t want to tinker with a machine whose secrets are only privy to the technicians who sold them the bike. They just want to ride!

A smart bicycle manufacturer would recognize this immediately and build a modular, Mac-inspired bike that includes everything that someone who instantly wants the bicycle to be their main form of transport would want, and fixes all the dumb oversights that discourage them from adopting this technology right now. Yes, it will likely raise the price of the bike, but for many people, not wanting to deal with frustrations and being nickeled and dimed on accessories is more valuable than having a cheaper bike.

A bike like this could easy generate a great deal of brand cachet, high sales, and could earn a company an army of lifelong customers and bicycle enthusiasts. Seems like a great investment to me. So what’s the problem?

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Status Quo, Bicycles, and Innovation in Products that Matter!

Posted Jun 10, 11:29 AM in business, business models, economics, environment, experiences, improvements, marketing, sustainability


Status quo is there for a reason. People don’t like to change what they’re doing, and will find self-justifications for why they shouldn’t. This is true in many contexts; many of us have witnessed this in interactions at work, politics, and other social spheres. If someone is being forced by outside conditions to make a change in their consumption behavior or to purchase items that they weren’t planning on buying, they typically aren’t happy about it, and will find reasons to avoid doing it. That’s why companies that make high-involvement consumer products should really be proactive about finding ways to understand and address the dissatisfactions that consumers have about their products so that they can convert hesitating customers into excited, eager customers.

Case in point:

I was picking up my treasured Cannondale bicycle from Revolution Bike and Bean, a cool bike repair shop in Bloomington, Indiana, and was talking with the owners about bike sales. Brad, the owner, was commenting that sales had risen considerably over the past year. I remarked that they would probably be even better if bike manufacturers had spent more time examining how people who don’t regularly ride bikes respond to them when they first get on, and understand why many people who bought them stopped using them.

I’m a hardcore bike junkie, and even I have a huge list of complaints about bikes that are in need of being addressed. These aren’t things that will affect whether or not I actually use my bike, and may not affect the frequency either—but this is only because I have already adopted it as my primary form of transportation. For those who haven’t these are reasons why they may choose not to:

And then there are these problems that may be impossible to solve:

Bicycles are one of the most efficient forms of transport given the energy crisis and the increasing instances of obesity in our society, it is important for us as a society to encourage the use of bicycles (see this article on how obesity contributes heavily to global warming). To do so we must address the reasons why people do not use them, and encourage bicycle manufacturers to address these issues in their next generation vehicles. It’s in their own best interest after all.

UPDATE: I’ve continued my thoughts on the need for change in the bicycle industry on this post.

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