Peter Thiel, best known as a venture capitalist who made a bundle out of co-founding Paypal, is the author of a fascinating book about business: Zero to One (2014). The thesis is that it is relatively easy to improve on something that already exists. Thiel asks us to think of that as getting from one to two, or from two to four. But creating something new? a whole new industry? That involves operating at a different level. Consider Facebook . With this company and website already in the field, it was relatively straightforward for other entrepreneurs to vary what Mark Zuckerberg had done, and to create new, perhaps sometimes better, social networks. With the idea of a digital social network already in place, Jack Dorsey, the creator of twitter, was going from one to two. But Zuckerberg and the small group around him had gone from zero to one. Meet that challenge. Don’t imitate Zuckerberg. Learn from him. There's a difference. Now you don't need to r...
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The Federal Trade Commission seems to have reached a settlement with Facebook over privacy related issues that they two sides have been litigating since 2012. That, you will remember, was the midpoint of the Obama administration. The gist of that lawsuit was that Facebook had been making deceptive claims to its users about their ability to control the privacy of their personal data. It offered settings which were suppose to limit access to their data to those they designate as their Friends. But the same information is in fact made available to a lot of other parties, such as the developers of the apps those friends use. As a general rule, folk: if you aren't paying for something, you aren't the customer. You're part of the product. Facebook's whole business model depends upon SOMEBODY being willing to pay money for the data stream you generate by using the site for all the free fun in provides. The new settlement won't change that. Informational pri...
A fellow who shall remain anonymous here, whom I encountered on Facebook, made what appears to have been a theistic argument about the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs. I reproduce it in full below. Doesn't it strike you as ridiculously unlikely that that asteroid that struck the Earth 66 million years ago was so incredibly (and unlikely) propitious, fortunate and lucky for humanity, that it was ENTIRELY NATURALLY OCCURRING?....To me, it screams, "ARTIFICE!!!". Many other posters replied. Since this is my blog dammit, I'll reproduce only my own reply to that. (Recall that I'm a theist, though not one who allows that fact to drug my critical reasoning faculties entirely). Are you trying to use this as an argument for a supernatural designer and/or providential force? Or an idle statistical exercise? Or something else (maybe involving space aliens treating earth as a protected reserve or laboratory?) If this is intended as an argument for theism, a...
Praying the Gay Away Back in July 2015 I wrote, in my round-up of THAT recently completed SCOTUS term, about the Court's decision to deny cert in KING v. CHRISTIE. This left standing the decision of the 3d Circuit C of A upholding New Jersey's ban on"conversion therapy," that is, on giving the "pray the gay away" stuff the mantle of science. Two years later, there is another denial of cert to report in much the same situation. Again the Court preserved a legislative rebuke to such therapy by denying cert. http://www.reuters.com/article/usa-court-gayconversion-idUSL1N1I31A6 There was a shade of difference. The earlier case was presented as a "free speech" challenge, this one as a "freedom of religion" challenge. Since Hobby Lobby, the freedom-of-religion clause has been very chic in right-of-center circles. Personally, though, I thought that the earlier challenge had some prima facie plausibility, as I said at the time. I can...
In the Facebook group "anarcho-capitalism," one participant asked this: "Hypothetical: If I ran for political office on the platform that I ma an anarchist and that my ultimate goal is to end the government would you vote for me?" Among anarcho-caps there is of course a lot of distrust of the institution of voting as such, whoever is eliciting votes. So this is a natural question for the group. My own answer: No. I distrust the adjective "ultimate." Everybody is for all nice things "ultimately" even people who are doing quite nasty things now. Or especially them. All warriors are for "ultimate" peace, etc. And every Lenin or Chomsky will tell you he is for a stronger state but that since it will "ultimately" wither away, not to worry. Now, that was more concise than complete. There are contexts in which I don't distrust the word. There is some value to metaphysical/eschatological discussion of ultimates. But one is...
I'm a member of a facebook group devoted to the discussion of global warming. It was probably a mistake to join, since the discussion is quite jejune. Here is an example. A poster writes: "Prove that God is not responsible for global warming." Really? Assume theism [of some fairly traditional peoples-of-the-book sort] for the sake of discussion here. Now abstract a bit and consider ANY statement of the form "why is X happening?" where X is some observable event in time and space. Either you believe that "God so decreed" is an adequate answer or you don't. If you do believe that to be an adequate answer, then you have rejected empirical science altogether, because science is all about assigning observable causes to observable effects. On the other hand, if you do not believe that to be an adequate answer, and you press on for a better one, then you have accepted the scientific enterprise, and the challenge of the form "Prove th...
I belong to a facebook group on "Climate Change Discussion," and recently another participant, David, in that group offered the following reflection: As powder is heavier than air (aerosol), as demonstrated by the two year temperature reduction after Krakatoa and similar volcanoes erupted, doesn't that mean all geoengineering is pointless (as well as extremely toxic) as the powder can only stay in the air and block the sun out for the same period and then return to the status quo? If so why do Spice and the Gates Foundation spend millions or more researching it when we probably already know not only would it be a very short term effect but probably not enough chemicals in the entire world to carry it out? The kind of geoengineering David has in mind here provided material for a full chapter of McKenzie Funk's book, WINDFALL. Yes, there are ideas in some circles, among people who accept that climate change is both real and troublesome, that the best way to addr...
That headline may get me some clicks. A facebook friend recently shared these words of wisdom about our language, and I can't do better today than to quote them: The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of Franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore. The words are those of Stephen Fry, in THE ODE LESS TRAVELLED (2005).
Stefan Molyneux seems to be the hot new thing among young anarcho-capitalists. Not old fuddy-duds like me. He is the author for example of Universally Preferable Behavior, a book that attempts to expound a rationally impregnable (and secular) ethical system. I have not read that, or anything else of Molyneux's. I leave to those who have read it to pass on its merits. I do not rely entirely upon secondary sources, though. I did spend some time listening to one of his podcasts, the beginning of a comprehensive course on philosophy he offers here . That particular link leads you to a forty minute effort to introduce the subject matter of the remainder of a series. The gist of it, if I understand it at all, is that philosophy, in the sense in which Molyneux proposes to use the term for the duration of the course, the sort of philosophy he hopes to teach, is: a lot like empirical science -- indeed it is empirical science, writ large -- such that any inferences a ph...
One of my Facebook friends posted this exchange recently. I like it so I'll simply repeat it, with thanks to Leon Gettler and, behind him, to the Paris Review . Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do? Ernest Hemingway: I rewrote the ending of "Farewell to Arms", the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied. Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that stumped you? Ernest Hemingway: Getting the words right.
I'm thinking about the actor Morgan Freeman these days. It isn't that I've ever been a big fan,but he has crossed my radar lately in two ways that may be related. So let's talk about Freeman, in this post and in the next. Regular readers of my blogs know that I'm a devotee of the animated show South Park , the wisdom of which I have cited on issues like literary fraud and Ritalin. Anyway, the day after out recent presidential election South Park ran an episode called "Obama Wins!" Despite the simplicity of that title, the episode was a complicated one, involving stolen ballot boxes, a Chinese General, and Disney's recent purchase of the intellectual property of Star Wars . At a couple of points in the convoluted plot, an animated version of Morgan Freeman shows up to explain things to the regular characters in the series. Indeed, one of the regular characters comments on how Freeman does exactly this in his movie roles. Does he? Maybe s...
The transition from a private into a public company, the IPO, has become extraordinarily tricky for all but the few and the lucky. Facebook and BATS have recently given us examples of what can go wrong even FOR the few and the lucky! But consider medium-sized business, of a size where going public used to be not such a big deal. It is a huge and tricky matter today. SEC enforced decimalization and NMS had a lot to do with this, changing the dynamics of the world of trading into which an IPO plunges such a firm. Look at the decade before those changes, the 1990s. The average annual number of IPOs was 520. Had the rate remained the same as the size of the economy grew, one would have expected that in 2011 the United States would have had 950 such offerings. In fact, it had roughly only about 1/6th of that. The average number of IPOs annually since 2000 has been only 129. The dysfunction may, as Arnuk, Saluzzi , and a lot of other market-savvy people think,...