Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

A while ago I finished the fourth book of George RR Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series, entitled A Feast for Crows. Like the previous three books, I did enjoy it. But this one seemed to move slowly and there were lots of distracting throwaway subplots. And again, none of the characters can get a break; I think they are all cursed like the tragic families of Greek mythology.

A strange thing with this book is that it only includes about half the characters from the previous books. The author notes that this was necessary because the length of the book was already too long. He could either tell half the story for all the characters (with a “To be continued…”) or tell the full story for half the characters.

I’m not sure what the better method of the two is, but I think most people would have preferred that both books would be released at the same time. The less wait, the better.

So with the story slowing down, half the characters missing, and the doom and gloom plot, this one wasn’t as good as the previous ones. When the next volume is released, I’ll probably just get it from the library instead of rushing to buy it immediately.

Last week I finished A Storm of Swords, the third book in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. Like the previous two books in the series, this book has plenty of murder, betrayal, and intrigue. Again there is very little resolution to the plot; every time a main character is killed, it seems like two more jump out to prominence.

A friend of mine told me the other day that these books are going to be turned into a series on HBO. Each book will take place over a season of shows, so there should be plenty of time to tell the story. My worry with this and all book-to-screen conversions is that they are either horrible or awesome. In this case, the book spends a lot of time with the characters thinking, so either the TV show either needs to have narration from the characters point of view or maybe have the characters thoughts voiced for the viewer (like J.D. on Scrubs, but sinister).

Also, I really like how each chapter of the book is told from a different character perspective and I think it would be cool if the TV episodes retain that type of point of view. Given the great things I’ve heard about HBO dramas like Rome and Deadwood, I think that this series should be pretty good. Of course, since I don’t have HBO, I’ll have to wait to buy the DVDs.

Again, I’d recommend the book. This one seems to have a bit of a slower pace in the second half of the book, while some important portions seem rushed. Also, some of the subplots in this installment seem a little unnecessary and the series continues to be a bit depressing as the main characters keep dying. Maybe I’ll try to read something a little uplifting before finishing the next book in the series. :-)

For my birthday (way back in November), Crissy’s parents gave me a very large and generous gift certificate to Barnes and Noble. And finally, after neglecting it for a few months, I used it and bought myself a very belated birthday gift:

• Lord of the Rings Box Set (Extended Editions) - The extended versions of this trilogy was been on my “want” list for a long time and when Barnes and Noble emailed me a 15% any item coupon, it seemed like a no brainer to get it. Of course, I now feel the need to seriously upgrade my tv and sound system in order to fully enjoy the movies. :-)
• Gandhi (Anniversary Edition) - I learned about this edition’s recent release from a “products you may be interested in” email from B&N. Since it had a really good sale price (woohoo!) and I remember the movie being excellent, I ordered myself a copy. And it’s another data point to support those “products you may like” emails.
• Sir Thomas More’s Utopia - I’ve read lots of discussion, never the original work, about More’s fictional island society where everything is uniform through the country’s many cities; whether it’s religion, customs, or education. The island has no concept of wealth, and everything is distributed equally with all property being communally owned.
• Plato’s Republic - “What is justice, and why should we be just, especially when the wicked seem happier and more successful?” are the central questions to this classic. This work is considered one of the greatest works ever produced for it’s profound impact on Western thought. If you ever watched me debate (NFL Lincoln Douglas) in high school, you would know that this is one of my favorite topics to discuss. Senior year, all my cases used “justice” as a core value, regardless if I assigned to be for or against the resolution. :-)
• Aesop’s Fables - a lot fables have similarities across cultures and religions, so I’m looking forward to comparing the stories of Aesop’s Fables with the stories in my copy of the Panchantantra.
• Machiavelli’s The Prince and Other Writings - this is another work that I’ve read lots about, but haven’t really taken the time to read thoroughly. I generally disagree with Machiavelli’s assertions about human nature and the “ends justify the means” political philosophy, so I’m excited to learn about more it.

The books that I bought are part of Barnes and Noble’s Classic Series. They are a nice package with the original work and lots of supporting material (biographies, discussions, and comments by other authors). Plus they have good binding, most have a hard cover, and they all have a low price.

The downside to this purchase is that it significantly increases my “to read” list. And, since the books I borrow from the library generally get read first (they need to be returned in 3 weeks after all), who knows when I’ll get around to reading these. :-)

When it first came out, I added Freakonomics to my “to read” list, but I never got around to it. Recently, the book was featured on Beauty and the Geek (the beauties had to read it and then interview the author, Steven Levitt). So I figured, if it’s good enough for them, it’s a solid part of pop-culture, so I should at least take a look at it. :-)

Unfortunately, like most of the books that are on the top 10 lists for non-fiction or business, the book had some interesting anecdotes, but not that much substance. A lot of the stuff really boiled down to common sense; which is disappointing because the book is supposed to answer lots of life’s mysteries by asking the right questions and drawing connections.

Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point) endorses this book and is quoted on the cover saying, “Prepare to be dazzled.” While it must have really helped Freakonomics sales by getting Gladwell’s fan-base to buy this book, after reading through it, I was left undazzled. And I had spent so much time preparing for “dazzlement”. :-)

One of the big things that bothered me about the book was the ridiculous amount of self-promotion. Every chapter started with an excerpt of an article lavishly praising Levitt. Technically these parts were written by the co-author, but hiring someone to sing praises about you is just silly. Plus, I’m already reading the book, there’s no need to continually sell yourself, unless you’re afraid that your content won’t stand on it’s own.

Levitt asserts that he uses advanced statistics (regression analysis) to separate out all the variables; this process, he says, allows him to bypass the old adage, “Correlation doesn’t imply causation”, to actually finding the causes. For example, he asserts:

If you both own a gun and have a swimming pool in the backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.

I’m not doubting his analysis, I’m sure that if you do run the numbers to model all the occurrences of a child being in the same house with a pool and a gun, the pool is more dangerous. But that being said, a truer comparison would be with the instances where the child is using with both.

I would venture a guess that in Levitt’s data set, the child was using the pool orders of magnitude more often than the child was using the gun. So Levitt’s analysis is comparing the “risk of a child using a swimming pool” vs “the risk of a child being in a house that happens to have guns.” It’s slightly disingenuous because the conclusion implies the comparsion of usage between the two.

In any event, it’s still remarkably enlightening data that directly challenges most people’s conceptions of guns. After all, most parents would be perfectly happy with their kids swimming at a friend’s house, but would be uneasy about sending their kids to friend’s house where their parents have guns locked up.

One thing Levitt discussed was the role of hype and emotional manipulation, rather than using logic and reason, to convince people of something (which fits in nicely with my last post on Global Warming):

An expert must be bold if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into conventional wisdom. His best chance of doing so is to engage the public’s emotions, for emotion is the enemy of rational argument. And as emotions go, one of them — fear — is more potent than the rest. The superpredator, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, mad-cow disease, crib death: how can we fail to heed the expert’s advice on these horrors when, like that mean uncle, telling too-scary stories to too-young children, he has reduced us to quivers.

Fear is a powerful force; fear of the imminent and uncontrollable is even worse. That’s why people are more scared on airplanes then when driving cars (lack of control in the airplane). It’s also why people are more scared of terrorism than a much more probable future death from heart disease.

Levitt’s big idea in the book, the idea that got him on all the talk shows to advertise his book, was his claim that the legalization of abortion caused a drop in crime 20 years later, since all the unwanted babies would have likely been criminals. All I can say is “Bah!”. His data supporting his assertion was lacking at best; his footnotes often referred to his own works or other pop-nonfiction.

Plus regression analysis isn’t without it’s own limitations. Unless Levitt’s model can predict trends in data other than the data used to create it, it is of limited value. And nowhere in the book am I led to believe that’s the case.

Also the book is full of pseudo-intellectualism. For example, when discussing the moral outcry on his conclusion about crime and abortion, he says,

If morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.

Huh? That doesn’t even mean anything! Especially since his so-called “economics” at times depend on faith as much as morality does.

The book also had a discussion about raising children and if smart parents will have smart kids. The whole discussion is full of interesting correlations. Kids with lots of book at home tend to do better school. But is this because of the books themselves, or because parents with books at home are more likely to value education? Or is it because if you have books you’re likely more wealthy and thus have access to better education?

Ultimately it’s hard to tell. It’s like an old post I wrote about home-schooling: are home-schooled kids doing better at tests because of the home-schooling or is it that they tend to be part of the set of kids that are more likely to have parents that value education?

Anyway, Freakonomics is a quick read and has some interesting stories in it. I’d say to get it from the library. Don’t buy it; it’s not that thought-provoking and the shameless self-promotion will make you a little ill.

Last week I finished reading A Clash Of Kings, the sequel to A Game of Thrones. As I said before, this series came highly recommended, and it still hasn’t disappointed me. A Clash of Kings picks up right where A Game of Thrones “ended”. I put “ended” in quotes, because while I did reach the end of the physical book (there weren’t any more pages) , but the story didn’t get wrapped up that much.

Again, this book has lots of extremely well developed characters and lots of plot twists and turns. The characters mostly fall into the “gray” between good and evil, so you don’t always not whether to root for or against a character. And a few times, when you think you have a character figured out, you get proven wrong.

And it, for the most part, continues to be realistic (relative to the genre). And the story continues to be suspenseful since we only get bits and pieces of the story and background. In lots of other books, the whole background circumstances are clearly laid out, so you can easily predict what’s going to happen.

This book did move a bit slowly. The individual chapters are still very engaging, but the overall plot didn’t progress that much. I keep hoping that at least one character will resolve nicely and “ride into the sunset”, but no such luck so far. I’m very curious to see how this all wraps up eventually.

One thing that is starting to bother me is this feeling that the scale is not quite right. The armies involved range from 10,000 to sometimes over 100,000. I’m not sure the land mass described would actually be able to support that many people given a medieval era technological base. I know, it’s a really nerdy thing to be bothered by, but “I am what I am”. :-)

So, in case it wasn’t obvious, it you liked the first book, I’d strongly recommend the this one.

Based on Jamie’s and few other friends’ recommendations, I read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. I found it to be a pretty interesting and fast read, with lots of good anecdotal evidence. But I noticed that the anecdotes weren’t always followed with thorough explanations or proofs. So I often found myself muttering, “Correlation doesn’t imply causation.”

The book is written in a very readable and accessible way, but sometimes is overly repetitive or presents irrelevant info. As lots of people have pointed out in the Amazon.com reviews, the very well known idea of yawns being contagious takes pages to explain while repeating the word “yawn” many, many times. The irony, though, is wonderful. :-)

The main premise is that “ideas” can be spread as “viruses”. This in itself is a pretty old and established concept (for example, it’s an important part of Snowcrash). After all, if viruses are spread with people coming into contact with each other, and ideas are spread by people coming into contact with each other, it seems to follow that they would have similar characteristics.

Gladwell’s points are that an epidemic needs the following:

1. The right Few: In spreading an idea, you need the right people: the “connectors” and “mavens” that can spread the idea.
2. Stickiness: The idea needs to be sticky or memorable.
3. The right Context: The idea needs to be presented in the right context.

Again, these ideas are nothing new or special. But the “anecdotes” in the book are generally pretty interesting.

The first section about the “Few” has the same information presented in Never Eat Alone: some people are more connected than others (the Connectors), some people know lots of things (the Mavens), and some people are good at selling ideas/products (the Salesmen). Apparently Ferrazzi read Tipping Point before writing his book. :-)

From this idea, came the usual conclusions: the rich get richer since they know the right people to get things done, etc. Gladwell also talks a lot about how people influence others, including both verbal and non-verbal communication and talks about some relevant studies.

For Stickiness, Gladwell had a long discussion about how the children’s shows Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues were developed. There was lots of good information on early childhood development, techniques for measuring retention, and general childhood education. While I find the subject matter very interesting on its own, these ancedotes didn’t directly address the issue at hand. I was left with knowing that’s important for your idea to be “sticky”, but not much else.

Lastly, Gladwell discusses the power of context; specifically how the environment can affect people’s actions. His main examples are crime rate drop in New York City during the ’90s and various experiments with normal people acting as prisoners and guards.

Gladwell explains that NYC crime drop had a lot to do with how enforcement of small laws (like graffiti or subway tolls), changed the environmental context so that there was less of a crime-filled feeling around the city. While this is certainly part of it, I think the explanation in Freakonomics is much more thorough (I’ll write about it later). Also, the experiments Gladwell mentions are interesting, but are mostly well known ones that would part of any Psychology 101 textbook.

Overall, I thought Tipping Point was a good read and worth getting from the library. I wouldn’t buy it, as I don’t plan on reading it again. While the main ideas are straight-forward and aren’t new, the anecdotes are interesting and worth thinking about.

I recently finished reading George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. This series and author were highly recommended to me by a number of friends (including Jason) and I wasn’t disappointed. The books has a complicated plot, excellent characters, and enjoyable writing.

The plot is similar to the actual War of Roses, where an already fractured kingdom falls into a complicated war over the throne. Since this is set in medieval times, most of the participants are armies of feudal lords that unite under common cause, but there still squabble and jockey to come out on top.

Martin presents a plethora of characters, yet they are all well developed and very realistic. A lot of good authors say that they don’t write stories; rather they create characters and settings, put them together, and see what happens. I think that this is applicable here. Martin’s characters very real, and the reader sees their both their virtues and short-comings.

Because the numerous characters are true to their attributes, the plot takes lots of twists and turns. I enjoyed this a lot more than the traditional “good” vs “evil” of the genre. That style is much too simplistic and far from realistic. In this Martin’s book, even the “good” characters do lots of stupid and evil things, because they too are just human.

I also really liked the lack of cliched elements of fantasy. There aren’t any “noble elves” or “cantankerous dwarfs”. This added to the already gritty, medieval feel of the book to give it a very realistic feel. Plus, lots of characters die. While it’s disappointing to see a good character get killed, it’s realistic. The feudal times weren’t a fairly tale — like most fantasy books would have lead you to believe — it was an incredibly bloody and horrible period of history.

The writing is also good. I particularly enjoyed how each chapter is from a different character’s perspective. This reinforces the “shades of grey” feel of the book. You get to see how each character feels and reacts to the same circumstances and this gives a much greater and enjoyable perspective to reader.

I very much enjoyed reading it and am looking forward to reading the next one in the series. I definitely recommend it! :-)

I thought I’d add a few more thoughts about The Long Tail. After all, it’s been almost 4 months since reading it, so I may as well take some time to discuss it thoroughly. :-)

The long tail is full of niche markets. For the most part, these markets always existed, but they stayed small as it was hard for them to find their customers. One of the presents I got for my birthday was a new dreamcatcher. I had left my old dreamcatcher at home while I was in college and its ownership was promptly taken over by my little sister. So I needed a new one.

I got my original one at Four Corners Park more than 15 years ago. Crissy was able buy the new one by searching for online stores using Google and then completing the transaction online. This shows how the supply/demand bottleneck for niche goods has decreased tremendously. Fifteen years ago, you would have to drive to Navajo country to find an authentic dreamcatcher, now just a few clicks from your desk and it gets delivered to your door.

Obviously we have a lot more choices nowadays; previously, the only things you could buy easily were mass market. Now, as a result of the shift, a product can be successful without being a hit that is stocked in all the retail stores. For example, not everyone wants a dreamcatcher, but there’s enough of an aggregate demand to support a number of small businesses.

One of the keys here is how much easier it is to match a buyer with a retailer. Before choices where pre-filtered by store, now choices are post-filtered by user ratings and features like “people who liked this also bought these”. Helping a a customer find a product has always been profitable. For a time, the TV Guide was more profitable than the actual networks. Now the key is focusing on an individual consumer and helping him find a particular product that is well suited for him.

Despite all this, the idea of “hits” and “mass market” product won’t go away. People are gregarious by nature and want to be part of a crowd. I’m convinced that American Idol’s success is more about people wanting to be able to talk about it with their friends and enjoying their ability to affect the outcome, rather than the actual technical merits of the show.

A few months ago I read Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail since it was recommended by many friends. While it wasn’t the earth-shattering, flip traditional economics upside-down book as some people claimed, it still presented some new-to-me ideas. I say “new-to-me” because apparently these ideas been out there a while, and this was one of more recent renditions. When I was discussing this book with my dad, he mentioned that he heard the same concept of long tail retail presented at a conference about 20 years ago.

The long tail is the common name for the “power-law tails”. Basically, in the graph here (stolen from Wikipedia), the green part of the graph represents a group of items that have a very high amplitude, while the yellow (the long tail) represents the group of items with a low amplitude. The key here is that the frequency of the low amplitude items can, in aggregate, be greater that the head of the distribution.

Let’s use music as an example. Imagine that you graph all CDs sales by artist, a mainstream artist like Bon Jovi sells lots of albums, so he would be in the green part of the graph. A lesser known group, like Bambi’s Apartment, is part of the tail of curve, since they would have fewer sales. Anderson’s theory is that if you take all the sales of all the lesser known bands, it is more than all the sales of the popular ones.

It used to be if you wanted to buy anything you would need to go to a store. The store acts as a middle-man and “pre-filters” your choices. Since the store has only limited shelf-space, they will only stock what sells a lot. So it would be profitable for them to stock a Bon Jovi CD, since lots of people want them. For Bambi’s Apartment, it would be not as profitable, so it would not be stocked. As a result, nearly everything we brought was mass market.

Now with online commerce, much of that limitation is gone. We can find a lot more variety of products online compared to in the stores. This opens up a whole new set of the products that we didn’t have before. The old 80/20 rule says that 20% of the products account for 80% of the revenue. The items available in a store represent the “20%”. Now with online commerce, we have access to the remaining “80%”.

This change in shopping is very similar to the introduction of the Sears catalog. Around 1900, the Sears catalog was over 300 pages, offering customers far more selection and value (usually 50% cheaper) than any retail store could.

The important points with online and the old catalog sales model is that a lot of the additional costs of retail are essentially zero. Obviously there are no physical stores to build or salesmen to hire. The merchandise is shipped either direct from the manufacture or from a large central factory, so there isn’t a need for regional warehouses and a team of MBAs to manage the whole pipeline.

If your national inventory is in one central warehouse, it now becomes profitable to sell lower volume items. Suppose there was a CD that would sell 1 copy a week nationally. If you are Target there is no way you would stock this item, since you would need one in every store so that you can find that one customer. Plus this would take already limited shelf space away from an item that does would sell more. But if you are Amazon.com, you can have one CD in one of your warehouses and be able to cover any potential consumer. So selling these long tail items is now profitable.

All these barriers (retail space, middle-man overhead, etc.) represented a barrier to entry for new products. Stores wouldn’t want to take chances on something that wasn’t already proven to be successful. Now as this bottleneck between supply and demand decreases, not only do you get more sales on long tail products, but you also get demand moved from the head to the tail . This is because consumers can now buy niche products in place of mass market products. For example, in the past if you needed to buy a CD, you would need to choose from one in the store, now you can buy something else online, instead of the one in the store.

This idea also generalizes to almost all industries. The immediate examples are Amazon (retail goods), iTunes (music) and Netflix (video rental). In advertising you have Google, which provides a venue for small businesses to affordability and efficiently advertise in the online market. These businesses are in the long tail of advertising buy because the traditional print and media advertising business is too expensive and inefficient for small businesses.

So in a nutshell, that’s the idea of the Long Tail. It seems to be one of the big buzzwords right now. If you are going to be writing a mission statement, I would definitely include the words “long tail”. In fact, here’s a freebie mission statement: “Realize upward revenue stream dynamics through utilization of the long tail paradigm shift, valuing the customer, and leveraging our core competencies.” :-)

Though the book is very repetitive at times, it still presents some really important concepts and seems to be a bellwheter in the business world right now.

I came across this article advertising a new book, Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality. From what I can tell, this book seems to be very similar to don’t think of an elephant. The very idea of “Unspeak” seems to be similar to “Framing”.

The basic idea is that you need to phrase your argument in a way that it sounds really good: for example, “The Patriot Act”. Regardless of its actual content, it seems like if you don’t support it, you hate your country.

But it can go a lot deeper than this. Consider Kennedy’s famous line:

“Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

This is Milton Friedman’s response to it:

Neither half of that statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. “What your country can do for you” implies that the government is the patron, the citizen the ward. “What you can do for your country” assumes that the government is the master, the citizen the servant.

This didn’t make much sense to me. After all, how can two seemingly opposite statements have the same nuance (of the individual being subservient to the government)?

Since it was Milton Friedman, and not a stupid crackpot commentator, I spend sometime looking at this. At first glance, we have the following two statements, with Friedman’s analysis:

1) “Ask what your country can do for you” (Government is the patron, Person is the ward)
2) “Ask what you can do for your country” (Government is the master, Person is the servant)

Once I wrote it this way, I saw there is hidden variable here: the person doing the asking (i.e. the actor). In this case either “you” or the “government” can be doing the asking.

So there are two more options that need to be added to the above list, making the full list something like this (with what Friedman’s opinion likely would be):

1) Person asks, “What can my government do for me?” (Government is the patron, Person is the ward)
2) Person asks, “What can I do for my government?” (Government is the master, Person is the servant)
3) Government asks, “What can you do for us?” (Person is the patron, Government is the ward)
4) Government asks, “What can we do for you?” (Person is the master, Government is the servant)

[At first I thought there would be 8 options, since the sentence "X asks, 'What can Y do for Z?'" has three variables and each variable has two choices (i.e. 2x2x2 = 8). But, in this case, if Y is "the person", then Z must be "the government" and vice versa. So effectively Y = not Z, so there are only two variables with two choices each (i.e. 2x2=4).]

Kennedy presents only two of the four possible options: a false dilemma. (A good example of a false dilemma is, “You’re either with us or against us.”)

I think the subtlety here is that the person asking is the one that needs something. Thus, generalized a bit, it seems that the one being asked is the the provider — the patron or the master.

A free-market advocate like Friedman would have probably preferred option (4), where the government works for the people.

I don’t know if the speech was intentionally written with in mind. My guess is that the speech-writer’s cognitive frame didn’t include options (3) and (4).

Maybe it’s over-analysis. But it’s really scary to think about all these tools of persuasion, how often they are used, and how they affect how we think.