Adventures in Capitalism

Chris Yeh Is Making His Primetime TV Debut

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 04:51:00 +0000

Next week, Mental Samurai, a new television show hosted by Rob Lowe, will be making its debut in the Fox Tuesday night lineup, right after MasterChef Junior.

Yours truly will be one of the Season 1 contestants. I might be making a cameo appearance during the season premiere, but I will definitely be playing a major role in Episode 7, which airs on Tuesday April 30.

You probably have questions. Fortunately, I have answers!

Q: What is Mental Samurai?

A: It's a televised competition (apparently, I'm not supposed to use the term "game show") from the same company that produces American Ninja Warrior (ANW). It's essentially a mental version of ANW's physical obstacle course, with similar dynamics. Competitors (almost slipped and typed "contestants") have five minutes to answer 12 questions correctly. If they miss a single question, they're eliminated. But it's a lot less painful than losing your grip and falling into a pool of water. Of course, this is television, so they strap the competitors into a giant robot arm, and swing them around wildly to disorient them between questions.

Q: How did you end up on the show?

A: Five years ago, my sister (who used to work in the entertainment business) forwarded me an email from a new televised competition looking for "America's Brightest." Since I had a book (The Alliance) coming out, I figured I could use the extra publicity, and I applied. I did a number of Skype auditions, but nothing ever came of them because the show never got beyond the concept phase. But, the casting director who worked with me mentioned me to the Mental Samurai casting team, and they reached out to me. Many, many Skype auditions later, I got word that they had cast me for Season 1 while I was in New York on the book tour for my next book, Blitzscaling. Ironically enough, I had just made an unexpected cameo on CBS This Morning that morning (thanks Gayle King!) so I guess I was having a "good TV day." (I also randomly ran into Dwight Howard and Ringo Starr at my hotel that week.) The timing was tight; we filmed the show during the only half-week I had free that entire 6-week period (the rest was filled with book tour activities and all the stuff I had deferred in the run-up to the release of Blitzscaling).

Q: When can I watch this show?

A: Tuesdays at 9 PM on Fox, right after MasterChef Junior. Never before in my life have I rooted as hard for Gordon Ramsey. I want a good lead-in!

Q: What was it like on the set?

A: It was grueling, with a lot of late nights and early mornings. We weren't allowed to have access to our phones or computers, and we had to spend most of our time waiting around in various uncomfortable lounges. We even had security escorts when we went to the restrooms. I guess America takes the integrity of its televised competitions very seriously!

That being said, I enjoyed the experience a great deal. My fellow competitors were a phenomenally accomplished bunch, both in life, and on the competition circuit. They included two memory champions, a three-time Jeopardy champion, a former major league baseball player, and an astronaut. One competitor was a Miss Florida runner-up, champion power lifter, and Harvard Medical School graduate--talk about disparate talents!

One of the crew even mentioned that our shoot was a lot more interesting than the ANW shoots. "You guys are talking, playing games, singing songs....the Ninjas just sit around and say things like, 'I'm going to crush it out there!'" (We actually had to get special permission from the production lawyers to play Cards Against Humanity.)

Q: Did you get to meet Rob Lowe?

A: Only while I was strapped into the chair and competing. But the competitors all got a chance to chat with Rob before starting their run. And yes, he is really handsome in person. I think Rob was probably a bit distracted though; the Dodgers were in the World Series when we were shooting, and Rob is die-hard fan.

Q: Can you tell me who wins?

A: Nope, all of us signed a bunch of contracts saying we couldn't reveal anything about the outcomes of the show. The penalties for breaching those contracts are HEFTY.

Q: Why did you do this?

A: I love trying new things. Besides, you know I love the spotlight. What spotlight am I likely to get that is brighter than a national television audience? I just hope I don't make a fool of myself.

Q: Where can I watch the previews of the show?

A: It's a sign of the times that the show's Facebook Page is far more up to date than its website. If you have a sharp eye, you can spot me a couple of times. I'm the only Chinese-American guy on the show, so I'm hard to miss.

Q: What can I do to support you?

A: I'm glad you asked! (Or more precisely, I'm glad that I asked me on your behalf!) Of course you should watch the show and tell your friends and family to do the same. Hey, how often does someone from the startup world go on a televised competition where he or she is strapped into a giant robotic arm and flung about while bantering with Rob Lowe?

But the other key thing is that I would like to hold a big watch party on April 30. I'm looking for pointers to good venues to hold such a party, media partners to publicize the event, and corporate sponsors (since I'm still a cheap bastard and don't want to pay for it myself). If you have any good ideas on these fronts, let me know! Or if you have other great ideas, also let me know!

UPDATE (3/18/19):
I'll be watching the premiere (Tuesday March 19, 9 PM, on FOX) from Dan Gordon's in Palo Alto. Stop by and hear me comment on the show and dish dirt on my fellow contestants!

UPDATE (4/18/19):
The details for my April 30 watch party are set! Come party in Palo Alto! Get your tickets here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chris-yehs-mental-samurai-watch-party-tuesday-april-30-8-pm-tickets-60644821293

Help fight cancer, get my time

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 05:32:00 +0000

On Sunday, I will once again be participating in Cycle for Survival, a great charity that raises money for rare cancer research.

100% of the money you donate goes to fund cancer research.

And as an added bonus, I'll give some of my time to the donors.

Here are the different tiers of reward for 2019:

$50: I'll reply to an email
$100: I'll jump on a 20-minute phone call with you
$500: I'll take you out to lunch in Palo Alto
$2,000: I'll hold a 1-hour webinar, topic of your choice, for your organization
$5,000: I'll deliver a 1-hour keynote speech at your local Bay Area event
$10,000: I'll deliver a 1-hour keynote speech at your US-based event. You also have to cover travel costs.
$25,000: I'll deliver a 1-hour keynote speech at your event, provided the US State Department hasn't issued a travel warning for your location. You also have to cover travel costs.

Help a good cause, and help yourself!

The Mischaracterization of Harvard Business School

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Sun, 06 Jan 2019 21:14:00 +0000

When Vanity Fair ran its recent piece, “The Miseducation of Sheryl Sandberg” by Duff McDonald, a number of friends sent me links to the piece, asking for my reactions to his criticisms of her and my alma mater, Harvard Business School, which he described as producing “corporate monsters” who “lack a functional moral compass”. I have always been quite open about and proud of my time at school (for a while, when I had more time, I even ran a blog called “Ask The Harvard MBA”) so I resolved to read the article with an open mind and then offer my reactions.

After reading the article and revisiting some of my experiences at HBS (more on this later), my conclusion is that McDonald mischaracterizes and misinterprets both the general approach of the case study method, and the specific case of “The Parable of the Sadhu”. It is certainly possible and probably valuable to write a thoughtful critique of how Harvard Business School influences the moral compass and ethical practices of its alumni. This isn't it. Whether McDonald's misinterpretation is genuine or malicious, I cannot say, but it is definitely shoddy journalism.

There are many parts of the piece that illustrate McDonald's biased view of Harvard Business School's attempts to help its students engage with ethics, but one of the clearest appears in his discussion of “The Parable of the Sadhu”. Here is what McDonald writes about this famous ethics essay (which is also used by organizations such as the Red Cross):

“McCoy was on a trip to the Himalayas when his expedition encountered a sadhu, or holy man, near death from hypothermia and exposure. Their compassion extended only to clothing the man and leaving him in the sun, before continuing on to the summit. One of McCoy’s group saw a “breakdown between the individual ethic and the group ethic,” and was gripped by guilt that the climbers had not made absolutely sure that the sadhu made it down the mountain alive. McCoy’s response: “Here we are . . . at the apex of one of the most powerful experiences of our lives. . . . What right does an almost naked pilgrim who chooses the wrong trail have to disrupt our lives?”

McCoy later felt guilt over the incident, but his parable nevertheless illustrated the extent to which aspiring managers might justify putting personal accomplishment ahead of collateral damage—including the life of a dying man. The fact that H.B.S. enthusiastically incorporated said parable into its curriculum says far more about the fundamental mindset of the school than almost anything else that has come out of it. The “dilemma” was perfectly in line with the thinking at H.B.S. that an inability to clearly delineate the right choice in business isn’t the fault of the chooser but rather a fundamental characteristic of business, itself.”

“The Parable of the Sadhu” was part of the curriculum during my time as well, but I believe that McDonald misinterprets the teaching goal of the case. His misinterpretation deviates so far from the actual words of the essay that I believe that it is quite possible that McDonald never bothered to read the very text that he places at the center of his argument, which would represent irresponsible clickbait journalism.

McCoy wrote his essay to illustrate the importance of having a moral compass, since moral dilemmas can present themselves unexpectedly, and in conjunction with a variety of conflicting imperatives.

First, the way McCoy encounters the sadhu is that a group of four backpackers from New Zealand finds the holy man lying on the ice, then carries him back and dump him on McCoy's expedition, arguing that since his expedition has porters and Sherpas, they are better able to care for the invalid. The New Zealanders then press on. McCoy's expedition clothes the sadhu, and McCoy, worried about his history of altitude sickness, hikes on ahead, leaving a friend and a Sherpa to deal with the sadhu. He learns later that after a Japanese expedition refused to lend their horse to transport the sadhu, and after the Sherpa guide decided that the porters didn't have time to transport the sadhu all the way to safety and catch up with the rest of the expedition before the snows melted and made the path impassable, that the porters had carried the sadhu as far as they though prudent (within 500 feet of a shelter hut) and left him there, now conscious, clothed, and with food and drink.

Already, we can see that this is a more complex question than McDonald relates, and that McDonald minimizes the actual help provided. But the real difference is that McCoy devotes the majority of the essay to examining the moral failings that led to the potential death of the sadhu, rather than “justifying putting personal accomplishment ahead of collateral damage.”

McCoy actually writes about the dilemma from a variety of ethical lenses, which leads him to conclude the opposite of what McDonald ascribes to him. For example, McCoy writes:

“Real moral dilemmas are ambiguous, and many of us hike right through them, unaware that they exist. When, usually after the fact, someone makes an issue of one, we tend to resent his or her bringing it up. Often, when the full import of what we have done (or not done) hits us, we dig into a defensive position from which it is very difficult to emerge. In rare circumstances, we may contemplate what we have done from inside a prison.”

Are these the words of a man trying to justify his decision based on personal accomplishment? Or of a man trying to get MBA students to realize that failing to consider the moral implications of their actions can lead to severe consequences?

McDonald's approach is to cherry pick a few passages to support his argument, rather than fairly representing the text which he criticizes. McCoy's argument is that ethical dilemmas present hard choices, can come at any time, and that if you're not prepared to engage with them, you may end up making decisions without realizing it, or that when individuals in a group refuse to take personal responsibility, the entire group may end up shirking theirs.

In fact, McCoy even explicitly states the point of his essay in its conclusion:

“That is the lesson of the sadhu. In a complex corporate situation, the individual requires and deserves the support of the group. When people cannot find such support in their organizations, they don't know how to act. If such support is forthcoming, a person has a stake in the success of the group and can add much to the process of establishing and maintaining a corporate culture. Management's challenge is to be sensitive to individual needs, to shape them, and to direct and focus them for the benefit of the group as a whole.”

I find it hard to square what I see as the meaning of McCoy's words with McDonald's interpretation, which is that “the “dilemma” was perfectly in line with the thinking at H.B.S. that an inability to clearly delineate the right choice in business isn’t the fault of the chooser but rather a fundamental characteristic of business, itself.”

In contrast, I interpret McCoy's words as saying that businesses and leaders have a moral obligation to support individual employees, rather than pushing all moral responsibility to the individual level. That may indicate that the individual isn't solely responsible or at fault, but that is the opposite of saying that there is no right answer, and that all choices are morally equivalent.

Indeed, had McDonald actually read “The Parable of the Sadhu,” he might have been able to use its teachings to illuminate and underscore Facebook's ethical failures in a fairer and more convincing way.

If you asked me how Harvard Business School influences the ethics and moral compass of its students, I would answer that it tries to get them to grapple with different situations and ways of thinking in an attempt to help them be more explicit and thoughtful about those ethics, but that it doesn't try to prescribe a single way of thinking or tell you the right answer. In that sense, it is no different than any other great college or university. Sometimes, its graduates leave as ethical paragons with high-performing moral compasses. Sometimes, its graduates go on to infamy, like Jeff Skilling. McDonald's own alma mater is the University of Pennsylvania, from which he earned a Finance degree, a distinction that he now shares with President Donald Trump.

So About My Prediction Last Year That Bitcoin At $16,000 Was Ripe For A Crash

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Sat, 08 Dec 2018 00:08:00 +0000

A year ago, I wrote a blog post entitled "Bye Bye Bitcoin Bubble", in which I compared the popular cryptocurrency to prison mackerel, and wrote:

"As I write this, Bitcoin just past (sic) $16,000 in value. I would bet any amount of money that on December 7, 2018, the price of Bitcoin will be below that value."

The blog post made the rounds on HackerNews and Twitter, and a variety of people sprang up offering to bet me money.

I frantically tried to find a lawyer to help me structure the bets, and finally found a Las Vegas firm with expertise in gambling law AND cryptocurrency to confirm that I could do so legally. At that point, I went back to the people who said they wanted to bet me. This was weeks later, and Bitcoin had already dropped to around $13,000. No one was willing to place any bets, though no one cited the price of Bitcoin for their decision to not follow through.

Sadly, rather than being $50,000 richer (the amount I was willing to bet) all I can do is take an Internet victory lap and say, "I was SO right, and you were SO wrong."

Here were the people who responded to my original tweet with Bitcoin bullishness and criticisms of my intelligence:
@BitcoinBhoy @Hodlayheehoo @dbrizzy80 @georgepf84 @tracyarciaga

Here are people who expressed interest in betting but never followed through:
@qihu00 @ericsports @Bitcoin_Shill

Here are people I DMed with about betting, but never actually was able to bet with:

@jimmysong, who went the farthest towards making a bet with me, but ultimately didn't
@cryptocharlesh who was willing to make a longbets.org bet with me (which I was unwilling to do because I wanted to make money, not donate to charity)
@haralabob, who was game, but who is really rich and wasn't interested in a mere $10,000 bet.

Same for @scottwalker99, who immediately offered to bet me $1,000,000, but wasn't interested once I capped bets at $10,000 per person.

I want to give a special final mention to @allnewsfor, who wrote: "Btw the internet will remember if you are too scared to back up your empty words with action"

I hope that applies to those who refused to bet me as well!

How I Think About Christine Blasey Ford's Accusation Against Brett Kavanaugh

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Wed, 19 Sep 2018 01:30:00 +0000

I have witnessed a lot of men (and curiously enough, no women) in my social circles, including a number of good friends, saying that the Senate should not consider Christine Blasey Ford's accusation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh held her down, groped her, and tried to take her clothes off in 1982, when she was 15 and he was 17. To save some time, I'm going to lay out what I think here in what I hope is a balanced and open-minded manner. Of course, this being social media, I suspect things will go off the rails, but I feel an obligation to try:

1. The core issue here is the question of whether or not to believe a claim of attempted sexual assault. (Note that the accepted legal definition of sexual assault includes groping, even through clothing; penetration is not required for sexual assault to occur.)

2. Research indicates that the rate of false accusations of sexual assault are between 2-6%, roughly in line with all other crimes. (Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/false-sexual-violence-assault-rape-allegations-truth-rare-international-day-for-the-elimination-of-a8077876.html) So the baseline is that allegations of sexual assault should generally be considered credible. This is not a presumption of guilt; clearly, crimes should be tried in a court of law.

3. I have had at least one friend who was false charged with sexual harassment; fortunately, he was able to prove that the allegations were false, concocted by a male professional rival who wanted to harm his career. I have had a number of other friends who were charged and admitted to their behavior. I feel badly for them and their families, because these admissions severely impacted their finances and careers, but the charges were true. One friend is currently accused I think the acccusations are exaggerated and likely false, but he did employ others who may have acted in ways that were borderline at best. My personal experience is, that even in Silicon Valley, which is about as left-leaning a places as you can find, the majority powerful men who are accused of harassing behavior tend to end up confessing.

4. The circumstances of the current situation magnify the stakes. Any woman who charged a potential Supreme Court Justice with sexual assault could expect to face a gantlet of private investigators, attacks from the press aligned with whatever part the nominee belonged to, not to mention deranged attacks and death threats on social media. Note that this kind of partisan attack is employed by both sides; the liberal press allowed Bill Clinton to get away with sexual assault because he was on their "side." A number of so-called feminists defended behavior on his part that they would otherwise mercilessly attack, simply because of political expediency and partisanship. Given the high costs of making such an accusation, it doesn’t seem likely that a woman would do so lightly.

5. The fact that the accuser is an anti-Trump activist, wore a p---y hat, and marched against Trump, simply puts her in the majority of educated women in the Bay Area. I doubt that many of those women would be willing to lodge a false accusation simply for political reasons. Conversely, if those characteristics would lead a woman to lodge a false accusation, why is there only one accuser?

6. The fact that there were two boys in the room and both denied the incident doesn't mean that it didn't happen. It doesn’t seem likely that the alleged criminals would be eager to confess. This logic would seem to imply that if a woman is alone with more than one man, and she accuses them of assault, and none of the men confess, that the world should consider her testimony false simply because 2+ > 1. I don’t think that is a logical or persuasive argument, and it is also the plot of the movie “The Accused”.

7. It’s also important to note that the other man alleged to be in the room, Mark Judge, is a conservative writer whose work has appeared in The Daily Caller and The American Spectator, and who wrote a book, “Wasted” about his life as a teenage alcoholic. From a political perspective, this means he would tend to support conservative causes, and that as an alcoholic, his memories of those times could be considered suspect.

8. Christine Blasey Ford described the sexual assault during a session with her therapist in 2012. Those notes record that Blasey Ford described being attacked by students from “an elitist boy’s school” who later became "highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington." Her therapist’s notes from 2013 indicate that Blasey Ford felt she was still dealing with a “rape attempt” from her teenaged years. Blasey Ford’s husband Russell Ford has said that in 2017, she named Kavanaugh as the main perpetrator, and expressed concern that he might someday be nominated to the Supreme Court. In other words, there is written evidence and corroborating testimony that Blasey Ford had been talking with others about the incident long before the nomination process.

9. Some people criticizing Blasey Ford for not reporting the incident to her parents at the time. That strikes me as the logical action for a gilr to take in 1982. She managed to escape, and she had little to gain by admitting to her parents that she had been at a party with older boys who had been drinking. In 1982, reporting that a drunken boy held you down, groped you, and might have eventually raped you had you not managed to escape, would be unlikely to prompt any action by law enforcement. Today, things are different, and I think that is a good thing.

10. Some people are arguing that the statue of limitation on sexual assault has expired in this case. They are correct. The statutes of limitations for sexual assault in the state of Maryland are as follows: before an underaged victim turns 25 for civil actions, 1 year for misdemeanor sexual assault, no limit for felony sexual assault. Unless this was considered felony assault (which it doesn’t seem to be under Maryland guidelines) there is no basis for criminal action. However, Brett Kavanaugh is not being tried in a criminal court, and is not facing punishment or jail time. The question, rather, is whether he should be confirmed to a lifetime appointment as a Supreme Court Justice. Statutes of limitation do not apply.

11. Blasey Ford contacted the Washington Post, Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, and Senator Dianne Feinstein in July. She had already decided not to come forward for many of the reasons I described above when the story leaked that Feinstein had a letter which she was not sharing with her fellow Democrats. After her accusations became public, she decided she had nothing to lose from coming forward. Her actions are not "last minute."

12. It is possible that Feinstein held on to this letter to unveil it as a “September Surprise” to derail the nomination. That is uncivil, but not illegal, and does not have any bearing on the validity of the accusations. It’s a cynical but savvy political power play, much like the nuclear option (first invoked by Democrats during the Obama Administration), or refusing to hold confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland (Mitch McConnell's action, which allowed the appointment of Neil Gorsuch).

13. Kavanaugh had 60 people write in support of his character. The alumnae of Blasey Ford’s school are producing a letter in her support with even more signatories. Neither is dispositive; they are simply PR moves.

To summarize:
• Yes, Democrats are playing politics.
• However, the base rate on sexual assault accusations, and the circumstances involved, lead me to conclude that the accusation is credible
• The Senate should hold hearings on this topic. If the administration doesn’t think it can get Kavanaugh confirmed, it should pick a different nominee (probably a woman). This accusation is about Kavanaugh; the administration has the ability to nominate other candidates and get a different Federalist Society-approved justice confirmed.

The core questions I’d ask those who want to ignore the Blasey Ford accusation are the following:
• If the accusation was true, would you vote to confirm? If so, say so publicly and explain your position.
• Do you believe, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Blasey Ford is lying, especially given the prior written notes?
• Do you believe that, in general, sexual assault accusations against men in America are generally truthful?
• If your daughter was 15, would you leave her alone at a party with an intoxicated 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh?

I think there’s enough doubt here that either the Senate should hold hearings about the Blasey Ford accusation, or the Trump administration should pick another nominee.

Just Start

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 16:10:00 +0000

The following two arguments are both plausible approaches to accomplishing something:

1) Just start working, and figure it out along the way.
2) Make a plan, and work on the important things.

There are times when "just start" works best, and there are times when "make a plan" works best.

But I'd be willing to bet that in the majority of cases, "just start" delivers better results than "make a plan."

We all have a natural tendency to procrastinate, and "make a plan" feeds into it.

How many people have you known who make careful plans about how they're going to start going to the gym or change their diet to lose weight? And how many of those people succeeded?

It's far too easy to look up yet another article on the internet, or to spend time researching which tool to buy.

If you can clearly articulate why making a plan would be better, and it's a airtight case, go ahead. But make sure you set a time limit on your planning.

But in most cases, you should just start.

Awareness, Control, and Acceptance

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Wed, 12 Sep 2018 16:12:00 +0000

We're often tempted to ignore our animal nature. In our hubris, we believe that our culture and habits trump the billions of years of evolution that have led to this point.

That's a mistake.

As individuals, we're better off acknowledging our animal nature, not to blindly accept it, but to make conscious decisions about how to manage it.

For example, our modern life is very different when it comes to awareness, control, and acceptance of the world around us.

For most of human history, we lived in small bands. The only people we ever encountered were the people in our immediate surroundings. This meant that awareness, control, and acceptance were clear and aligned.

Awareness: I'm aware of the things I can see, smell, and touch in my immediate surroundings.
Control: I can control the things that I can reach with my hands.
Acceptance: The things I can't reach with my hands, like the clouds that bring rain, are the province of gods and spirits, over whom my control is limited, and whose vagaries I must simply accept.

Contrast that with our modern world.

Awareness: I'm aware of everything I read on the Internet or see on television. I know the intimate details of the lives of people I'll never meet, and events in places I'll never visit.
Control: I can communicate with anyone in the world, and can theoretically influence far more people than I could ever meet face to face.
Acceptance: I have the ability, and hence the responsibility, to be aware of every thing that is happening in the world, and to express an opinion and take action about it (even if it's just a hashtag).

The issue is clear. In comparison to the world for which we've evolved, our awareness is vastly greater, and we have the possibility of control, which means that unless we consciously think about it, we lack acceptance.

This may be one of the reasons that the religious tend to be happier in modern society; they at least have a doctrine that leads them to greater acceptance of the world around them.

But leaving everything in the hands of spirits and gods is also a suboptimal approach. As George Bernard Shaw put it, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." (Per our modern society, I should note that a contemporary version would say "reasonable man or woman") Progress often depends on a lack of acceptance, even though in most cases, that lack of acceptance causes discontent and unhappiness in those who feel it.

You should make conscious decisions about what to accept, and what to attempt to change. For example, if you oppose the actions of the Trump administration, you don't have to accept it, but you do have to make a conscious decision about what you will do if you attempt to change it, whether it is donating to get out the vote efforts in battleground states, or a more personal effort.

Even when you make these conscious decisions, you may end up disappointed. The world doesn't guarantee that it will fix all your problems (even if presidential candidates sometimes do). But you'll be able to soothe that disappointment by knowing that you evaluated your options and chose the course of action that had the best chance of effecting change, rather than blindly accepting the world as it is, or simply feeling discontented and not doing something about it.

Doing the Impossible

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 16:48:00 +0000

I'm a realist. I only set out to do the impossible when I know, based on past experience, that I can do it.

What amazes me are the people who set out to do the impossible without any basis for their confidence. They usually fail, but on those few occasions when they succeed, they can change the world.

To quote the famous Apple commercial, "Here's to the crazy ones...."

The Trump Cheat Code

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 14:21:00 +0000

Old-school videogames often had a cheat code--a special sequence of actions that, when entered, would make your game avatar invincible. Cheat codes weren't particularly sporting, but they made it much easier to win a game.

Donald Trump has found a cheat code for our current national politics, and he seems content to use it every week.

Here's the cheat code:

Donald Trump has targeted a specific group of voters who resent and distrust the mainstream media. This means that when that media criticizes him, those voters loyalty to him increases.

The reason this is a cheat code is that while it is very hard to get good publicity, it is trivially easy to get bad publicity. All it takes is a single threatening tweet to spark several days of critical covfefe--er, coverage.

When Donald Trump threatens North Korea or Iran, or seems to offer sympathy to white supremacists, he sparks a wave of (justified) criticism that just seems to make him more popular with his base.

The side effect is horrendous geopolitical risk, but that doesn't seem to deter Donald Trump one iota.

I believe that the best way to invalidate this cheat code is to focus the criticism of Donald Trump on concrete, pocketbook issues that directly affect his supporters. It is easy for them to support Donald Trump when his actions harm others, or cause harm in the future. It will be harder for them to support him when, say, his trade war with China causes massive layoffs in their town.

Trust Makes Our Lives Better

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Thu, 05 Jul 2018 01:11:00 +0000

On America's Independence Day, it's worth considering the role of trust and distrust.

Distrust caused the British government to pass laws to better control its colonies.

Distrust caused a political contest to turn into a shooting war.

Trust allowed the various states to come together.

Trust allowed the Americans to grant George Washington the power to fight that war...and Washington repaid that trust by preventing a mutiny by his underpaid, underappreciated army.

One of my wishes for my country is that its various factions find ways to trust each other...and live up to that trust.

When we don't trust each other, opposing sides become extremists.

To me, this is clearest when it comes to the issue of gun control, but the same applies to abortion.

In the case of gun control, the pro-gun-ownership forces try to fight almost any regulation, fearing that any compromise will eventually lead to gun confiscation.

In the case of abortion, the pro-abortion forces try to fight any restriction on abortion, fearing that any compromise will weaken Roe v. Wade and lead to prohibition.

The same dynamic applies to the opposite side of both these issues.

I think that many, if not most Americans, like me, would prefer compromise to extremism. But the more the opposing sides distrust each other, the more extreme their rhetoric and actions, the more they distrust each other, the more intractable the problem becomes.

I don't believe that polarization inevitably increases. In American history, we have often been at loggerheads, including the Civil War, but we have always come back together. As we celebrate Independence Day, I think a worthy way to honor those who have fought and sacrificed for our freedom is to try to build a nation that they would want their heirs to live in, rather than engaging in behavior that ends up trying to pull it apart.

A Principled Argument for 2nd Amendment Rights

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Mon, 14 May 2018 01:02:00 +0000

I tend to be a supporter of increased gun legislation. I don't own a gun, I didn't grow up with guns, and I don't believe I've ever even held a gun or been present when one was fired. So from a practical and personal standpoint, I would prefer to minimize private gun ownership.

However, I also recognize that there are other legitimate points of view. I've often engaged in conversations with friends who are staunch defenders of their Second Amendment rights. These are smart, thoughtful people, and their arguments go far beyond the standard arguments that I find easy to discount (e.g. guns make us safer, guns are necessary to prevent a totalitarian government).

One of these friends, who has to remain anonymous because expressing his opposition to gun control threatens his livelihood (he has lost clients and business over such political disagreements, and thus his wife has asked him to refrain from jumping into the fray), recently made a very compelling argument, which I will share here.

This argument hasn't persuaded me to change my mind about my preferences, but it illustrates how it is possible to have a principled and rational argument for Second Amendment rights.

Every day, an average of 10 Americans die because of a wholly preventable evil. That's about 3,500 unnecessary deaths every year. About 1 in 5 of the victims are children, aged 14 and under. This affliction disproportionately kills African-Americans, who are affected 5.5 to 10 times as frequently as whites.

What is this plague on our society? Water recreation.

Most of these deaths occur in swimming pools, though a majority of adult drowning deaths occur in rivers, lakes, and oceans. Aside from am extremely small number of deaths attributable to those with seizure disorders drowning in bathtubs, these deaths were the result of people voluntarily deciding to put themselves in harm's way.

Amazingly, water recreation likely accounts for the loss of more innocent American lives than guns.

In 2015, the CDC recorded 13,286 gun homicides. This is much higher than the number of drownings, but doesn't account for the little-reported fact that the vast majority of victims of gun violence have a criminal record.

There isn't a lot of research on this topic (partly due to the NRA's efforts to de-fund such research), but I was able to find a couple of articles from mainstream sources (e.g. not right-wing propaganda) that cite the homicide data recorded by the City of Milwaukee.

The Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission is a non-partisan government organization that includes community organizations on its executive committee. Its goal is to identify and recommend ways to reduce the homicide rate in Milwaukee, and where implemented, its methods have been shown to reduce homicides 52% (versus 9.2% in control sites). Its Founding Director, Dr. Mallory O'Brien, is an epidemiologist who has worked on violent injury prevention for nearly 25 years, including at Harvard and Duke, and has received awards from the FBI and Department of Justice. In other words, if we can trust any data, it is the MHRC's data. You can read more about the organization, including its detailed reports and data, here:
http://city.milwaukee.gov/hrc

The MHRC data shows that between 2012 and 2015 (the most recent four years of data), between 76% and 85% of homicide victims had a criminal history (2012: 80%, 2013: 76%, 2014: 86%, 2015: 83%). In 2011, 62% of homicide victims (gun or otherwise) had at least six prior arrests.

While Milwaukee is not necessarily representative of the entire country, the general narrative is that innocent victims of gun violence are more likely to live in urban centers where they might get caught up in a criminal crossfire. For the sake of argument, let's just simplify and assume that 75% of gun homicide victims have a criminal history.

It's important to note that no one "deserves" to be killed, and that some people who have criminal histories are the victims of biased or otherwise flawed police work. According to the FBI, 73.5 million Americans have been arrested for a felony at some point in their lives, which represents a little under 23% of the U.S. population. I doubt that all of those people are career criminals.

However, it is also the case that the majority of Americans have never been arrested (including me, and probably you). If we apply the 75% figure to the CDC gun homicide data, we can extrapolate that about gun violence claims the lives of about 3,300 "innocent" (i.e. no criminal history) Americans each year.

In other words, if you are an American that does not have a criminal history, swimming pools and water recreation are probably a bigger threat to your life than gun homicide. (Unfortunately, I do not have data on what proportion of drowning victims have a criminal history to make it a true, apples-to-apples comparison.)

One could reasonably make the argument that if we are willing to tolerate about 3,500 drowning deaths per year as a necessary price to pay for enjoying swimming and other water recreation, that we might also be willing to tolerate the 3,300 innocent gun homicide victims per year as a necessary price for Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights.

I still support reducing the prevalence of guns in the United States (our gun murder rate is 25X that of a basket of 22 similarly-wealthy nations), largely because I don't have any personal reason to value gun ownership, but it's worth considering how you would feel if you heard that the government was going to criminalize swimming pool ownership, or prohibit the use of recreational boats? Would you fight for your rights, even though you knew that exercising those rights led to additional deaths each year?

Why America Is Lucky Donald Trump Was Elected President

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Sun, 18 Mar 2018 01:41:00 +0000

It's no secret that I'm not a fan of President Donald Trump. I think that he is lazy, ignorant, incompetent, and as a result, a danger to our country and our world. But I think it is entirely possible that we may someday look back upon his election as lucky accident that strengthened the United States of America.

What do I mean?

In a word, Donald Trump is cowpox.

In the late 18th century, smallpox was one of the deadliest plagues that humanity had ever faced. Smallpox was so deadly that it is estimated that it accounted for 10% of all deaths, and over 20% on cities where it more easily spread. Even those that survived were often disfigured for life.

Oddly enough, however, one group of people seemed to be immune: milkmaids.

The British physician Edward Jenner hypothesized that the milkmaids were resistant to smallpox because many of them contracted cowpox, a much less virulent and deadly disease, from the cows that they milked.

In 1796, he tested this hypothesis by inoculating his gardener's eight-year-old son, James Phipps, with cowpox pus from a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes, who had in turn had been infected by a cow called Blossom. After Phipps developed, then recovered from a mild fever, Jenner exposed him to smallpox and found that he too had become immune to the disease. To prove the efficacy of his approach, Jenner made 20 different attempts to infect Phipps with smallpox, all fortunately unsuccessful.

Being used as a guinea pig for experiments with the most deadly disease known to man seems like it would be beyond the call of duty for a doctor's gardener, let alone his young son, but Jenner did end up giving James Phipps, then grown, and his wife and children a rent-free lease, so there is that. When he was 34, Phipps attended Jenner's funeral in Gloucestershire.

Donald Trump is cowpox--a messy but non-fatal infection that may end up inoculating the country against a far greater threat.

Donald Trump is a terrible president, but thanks to his remarkable incompetence, he has inflicted relatively little harm on the country. Yes, he has encouraged racists and bigots, discriminated against Muslims, wreaked havoc on long-standing bipartisan projects like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, largely because of his complete lack of understanding of and regard for truth and complexity. He has had a corrosive effect on political discourse, both because he has no regard for traditions and norms, and because the hatred he has engendered in his enemies has caused many of them to become deranged themselves, and to traffic in the sort of hyper-partisan truthiness that ought to inspire disgust in all.

But, at least to this point, he has not caused irreparable harm. The only actions he has taken which cannot be undone by a future president are to appoint Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court (a fact, which, while maddening to Democrats and constitutional scholars alike, should rightly be attributed to Mitch McConnell) and to sign a tax bill (which should rightly be attributed to Paul Ryan). And these actions are both actions than any Republican president should be expected to take, and which Trump did not assist, but rather generally hindered. As for his various executive actions, one might disagree with his chosen appointees (many of whom are incompetent and/or corrupt) or policies (many of which seem to ignore reason), but he is well within his constitutional rights to make these choices. Our republic works because we should all respect the process, even if we disagree with the results. Many of those who rage against the imperial presidency as wielded by Trump were conspicuously quieter when Barack Obama made policy via executive order, a tradition which stretches back to the dawn of our nation.

If you want to see a true case of smallpox, turn your eyes to Russia, which is holding its presidential election today. After the inevitable results come in, Vladimir Putin will have won another six-year term, which means that A) Putin will have ruled Russia for this entire millennium to date, having taken over for Boris Yeltsin on December 31, 1999 and B) he will be in striking distance of Josef Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union from roughly 1927 (when he removed his rival Trotsky from the Central Committee) to his death in 1953. And while the Russian constitution prohibits Putin from running again, I will happy bet money that when 2024 rolls around, if Putin is still in power, the Russian constitution will be amended to remove that barrier.

In comparison to Donald Trump's cowpox, Vladimir Putin is true smallpox--virulent and deadly. Trump blasts his enemies on Twitter with impotent threats; Putin has them assassinated with deadly poisons. Trump's cronies try to enrich themselves with favorable treatment; Putin simply takes what he wants, and if an oligarch defies him, has him arrested and his property confiscated.

The rise of Donald Trump demonstrates that today's electorate is susceptible to the charismatic appeal of a would-be authoritarian "virus," but his election is the very thing that is producing the antibodies to help us fight off future infections. I would argue that you can trace a direct line from Donald Trump's election to a host of social changes such as #MeToo and #BoycottNRA and the fall of figures such as Harvey Weinstein.

If we had elected an American Putin in 2016, things might very well be very different. We should remember that America is far less vulnerable to a would-be dictator than Russia in 1999. Among other things, America is the world's longest-lasting democratic nation, with a centuries-long history of rejecting would-be tyrants like Huey Long and Joseph McCarthy. In contrast, Russia has experienced roughly eight years of democracy during its entire existence. But I'd rather not take that chance.

America is lucky that Donald Trump was elected president. He has exposed the hidden racism, sexism, and authoritarian leanings that have always been there, and the country will be stronger for it long after he has left the Oval Office, thanks to an energized and activist citizenry.

Background Reading:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin

Be Civil

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 19:17:00 +0000

Regardless of where people lie on the political spectrum (graph?), one thing I find remarkably unappealing is when people treat those who disagree with them with angry contempt.

Since doing so doesn't persuade or change minds, I fear that people behave that way because deep down they don't believe in their own worth, and feel the need to belittle others to make those feelings go away.

This is a vicious cycle; pretty soon, the only way people can feel good about themselves is to fight with others. And that means, paradoxically, that someone who behaves in this way craves two audiences: Those who agree and reinforce their bad behavior, and those who disagree and provide fodder for a self-esteem boosting fight.

If you agree with my take, I believe the right response is to model civil behavior, even when you are attacked.

Selfish and Giving

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 07:10:00 +0000

One of the paradoxes of my personality, which I think is actually a strength, is that I'm selfish and giving.

I'm selfish in that I'm quite aware of my self-interest, and frequently take actions to better my self-interest.

I'm giving in that I genuinely want to help people, and are quite happy to share my good fortune with the people in my life.

This combination may seem paradoxical, but I would argue is stronger than either trait alone.

The purely selfish are experts at losing friends and alienating people. The purely giving are often pushovers who destroy their own lives.

By balancing selfishness and generosity, I seek ways to create massive value, but am then willing to share it with the deserving.

Email Product Ideas: Inbox100 and InboxNow

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 19:21:00 +0000

Random Product Idea #1: Inbox100. It's an email inbox where it has a hard upper limit of 100 messages. Once you hit 100 messages, until you archive or delete some current messages, no new emails come in. This forces you to deal with emails rather than allowing them to pile up. And the instant you deal with emails, you get the positive reinforcement of seeing new emails appear. You would probably still need to allow the user to search emails, even the ones not being shown, so that the user could look for super-important, super-urgent emails.

This leads me to Random Product Idea #2: InboxNow. It's an email inbox where it only shows messages that are less than 12 hours old (because presumably you have to sleep). This forces you to deal with emails rapidly, or they disappear.

Bye Bye Bitcoin Bubble

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 21:49:00 +0000

It's all about the mackerel.

In the American prison system, prisoners use packages of mackerel as a medium of exchange because 1) the supply is inherently limited because prisoners can only buy 14 "macks" per week, and 2) no one wants to eat it.

In other words, prisoners collectively decided to use a useless item as a medium of exchange and store of value because its supply was inherently limited. Sound familiar?

In a real sense, Bitcoin is even more useless than prison mackerel because at least prison mackerel is used to process transactions. Bitcoin is barely used as a means of settle transactions; all the action is in speculative investing.

As I write this, Bitcoin just past $16,000 in value. I would bet any amount of money that on December 7, 2018, the price of Bitcoin will be below that value.*

Everything about the situation just screams bubble. I'm very bullish on blockchain, but Bitcoin?

Now, just because a medium of exchange lacks any inherent value doesn't mean that it's doomed to crash. Gold remains a valuable (though bad) investment even though its usefulness as a conductor and jewelry material doesn't justify its price. But gold also has millenia of history as a valued medium of exchange, a luxury Bitcoin does not.

In contrast, mackerel became a prison currency because the prior currency, the cigarette pack, ended up getting banned by the prison system in 2004, which means its history is barely a decade old. Which is why it wasn't surprising when the value of the "Mack" crashed at one prison:

"I'll never forget the day where the macks lost all their value almost overnight. Someone had a huge amount of money macks and they got confiscated and the administration left them sitting in a bucket. They essentially introduced hyperinflation. They flooded the market with money macks."

Bitcoin prices have been rising because speculators are buying Bitcoin in hopes that prices rise further--the greater fool theory. During my current trip to Japan, Bitcoin has risen from $10,000 to $16,000. Not coincidentally, I was pitched two different ICOs at an event where I spoke.

Inevitably, Bitcoin is going to hit a limit as the market runs out of greater fools, a point that I think is fast approaching, and some of the big holders (the Winkelvii?) will sell, flooding the market, and setting off a downward spiral.

There's even a catalytic event--on Monday, the Cboe will start trading Bitcoin futures, meaning that people will finally have a chance to bet against the currency, once again proving that Trading Places is both one of the funniest and most educational movies of all time.

I'm off to buy some futures contracts!

* UPDATE: Someone must have posted this to Hacker News, because it went viral. Scott Walker even offered to bet me $1,000,000. I admire his conviction, though I disagree. But he does make a good point that I'm not *really* willing to bet any amount of money; I just didn't think someone would offer to bet me $1,000,000. Therefore, I'm going to cap the bets I take at $10,000 per bet.

** UPDATE: I have received legal assurance that this doesn't count as illegal gambling, provided no money is "pooled" up front, so it's game on!

*** UPDATE: It is now December 7, 2018, and the price of Bitcoin is $3,368. Alas, none of the people who tweeted at me or offered to bet were willing to follow through by the time I got legal clearance from, I kid you not, a Las Vegas law firm with specialties in gambling law and crypto law. I'll just have to satisfy myself with listing their Twitter handles here:

People who responded to my original tweet with skepticism:
@BitcoinBhoy @Hodlayheehoo @dbrizzy80 @georgepf84 @tracyarciaga

People who expressed interest in betting but never followed through
@qihu00 @ericsports @Bitcoin_Shill

People I DMed with about betting:
@jimmysong, who went the farthest towards making a bet with me, but ultimately didn't

@cryptocharlesh who was willing to make a longbets.org bet with me (which I was unwilling to do because I wanted to make money, not donate to charity)

@haralabob, who was game, but who is really rich and wasn't interested in a mere $10,000 bet.

Same for @scottwalker99, who immediately offered to bet me $1,000,000, but wasn't interested once I capped bets at $10,000 per person.

I want to give a special final mention to @allnewsfor, who wrote: "Btw the internet will remember if you are too scared to back up your empty words with action"

I hope that applies to those who refused to bet me as well!

Adventures in Tokyo

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Wed, 06 Dec 2017 21:03:00 +0000

I'm currently in the middle of a week-long trip to Tokyo where I'm speaking about my books and meeting with startup and finance folks on behalf of the Women's Startup Lab. While I'd been to Tokyo once before, in 1982, I was so young then, and the city has changed so much since, that it's really been like visiting for the first time. Here are some of the adventures and observations from my time in the land of the rising sun:

Story Time: My visit to the Tsukiji Fish Market.

One my first morning in Japan, I found myself awake at 3 AM (which is 10 AM California time) and started catching up on phone calls. During one of those calls, I was strongly urged to go check out the Tsukiji Fish Market and its famous tuna auction, which takes place at 5:30 AM. Fortunately, the Women's Startup Lab founder, Ari Horie, was both awake and willing to indulge my quixotic desire. Little did I know that it would become an object lesson in entrepreneurship.

You see, what I didn't realize is that Tsukiji had just announced that it was not going to be allowing non-professionals to visit the auctions from December 1 through mid-January. And of course, I was going there on December 4.

Tsukiji is an accidental tourist attraction; it's a commercial fish market for fisherman and wholesalers, with millions of dollars changing hands every day. So when we arrived, there was no entrance or signs. I believe the assumption is that anyone who has a legitimate reason to be there already knows where to go and what to do.

Were I by myself, I probably would have skulked around the perimeter, and ended up slinking back to my hotel room. Fortunately, I was with a real (and Japanese-speaking) entrepreneur. "Follow me, and don't make eye contact with anyone," Ari said. She then began striding purposefully into the dark, industrial-looking complex, which, I should point out, was covered with signs that read things like, "Do not enter. Unauthorized personnel not allowed."

We made our way without having any idea where we needed to go, dodging both security staff (each time we saw an officer, we changed direction to avoid him) and the ubiquitous electric cards that zoom everywhere at about 20 MPH, carrying boxes and whole fish. Each cart had a semi-circular metal cow-catcher to absorb impacts, and a distressing number were dented and worn. I suppose I should be glad they weren't blood-stained.

Eventually, we made our way to the center of the complex, where, by peering under partially raised garage doors, we could just make out the preparations underway for the tuna auction. Whole flash-frozen tuna were being lined up for inspection by an army of Japanese men with wicked-looking fish hooks.

Again, were I by myself, I would have contented myself with saying, "Well, I guess I got to see the fish! Pretty cool. Now I'd better get out of here before they catch me and beat me to death with their hooks." Ari had other ideas, walking along the building until she found a door marked, "Do Not Enter" which opened when she tried it.

Once inside, we got a much better look at the tuna, laid out like a giant set of fishy chess pieces all over the concrete, ice-strewn floor. That's when Ari went up to a fisherman and began speaking with him in Japanese. After about 5 minutes of conversation, the fisherman reached into his pocket and gave us two paper badges to put around our necks. I found out later from Ari that she had told the fisherman that I was a very important visitor from Silicon Valley, who had come to Japan to observe the tuna auction. The fisherman told her that you weren't allowed in the building without a badge, so she simply asked if he could give us some badges. She told me that she had addressed him with the traditional rural Japanese honorific for "father," appealing to the ingrained parental instincts of any older Japanese man when addressed by a younger woman or girl.

Now armed with official badges, we got to wander the entire fish market while waiting for the auctions to start. (Ari purchased both a fresh giant scallop and a 1-pound block of fatty tuna, which I then stuffed into my jacket pockets) It was astounding to see the variety of fish, from fugu to live octopi (I felt bad for them). I watched blocks of tuna being trimmed to perfection, then being misted to glistening perfection via spray bottle like a Hollywood star being prepared for a close-up. I watched eels being slaughtered, with their heads jammed on a metal pin on a cutting board so that they could be properly filleted.

Once the auction started, the sounds of ringing bells and constant sing-song auction chanting filled the air, and fishermen hurried about with hooks, loading 400-pound tuna onto wooden carts to be carried off to market stalls, high-end restaurants, or to be whisked to the US on cargo jets. At one point, a security noticed us (which was hard not to, since Tsukiji is essentially 100% Japanese men, with no women or non-Japanese to be seen anywhere) and told us (Ari told me later) that we had to leave. So we left the room, circled around to the other side of the auction, and re-entered.

All told, we watched the three different tuna auctions, then found the actual tourist-accessible part of the market and had a breakfast of fine sushi at 6 AM. The fish was very fresh and very delicious.

The moral of this story is that even in Japan, the most orderly and rule-following nation I've ever seen (more on this later), an entrepreneur who won't take no for an answer can still work wonders.

Japan: Land of Detail

Japan is the cleanest, most orderly place I've ever visited, and I've visited Singapore:

I still haven't seen a single piece of litter on the ground. This fact is even more astonishing because there literally are no garbage cans anywhere. Ari told me that the lack of garbage cans reminds people that they are responsible for their own trash. If this were America, there would be litter everywhere, as people said, "Fuck it," and chucked their trash whenever no one was looking. In Japan, it simply means that people will carry their trash until they get home to throw it out.
The busy parts of Japan are as crowded as Manhattan, but the experience is totally different. Everything is clean and polished. The crowds of people move purposefully, obey all the traffic signs, and make barely any noise. I eventually realized that the thing that seemed to be missing the most was the constant sound of honking and cussing that characterizes Manhattan.

Even the most minor thing is crafted with incredible care.

The first thing Ari and I did after getting through customs was to visit a Japanese convenience store for snacks. I selected a tuna roll, which cost about $1. When I opened the packaging, I was surprised to find that the rice and seaweed were carefully separated by a layer of plastic; when you want to eat a roll, you open the package, and roll the rice into the perfectly sized and aligned sheet of seaweed. The result is a satisfying crunch when you eat the roll that would be impossible if it were presented, as it would be in the US, completely assembled, which would lead to soggy seaweed.
As I've already posted on Facebook, the instant coffee in my hotel room is a marvel of craft. Rather than a cumbersome paper pouch or a sealed K-Cup, poured into a styrofoam cup, the coffee package folds out with origami-like precision to precisely fit the delicate, fine bone china cups provided in my hotel room. It makes instant coffee somehow elegant and refined!
At my various meetings, my hosts presented me with coffee and tea. Instead of the American system of a heatproof disposable cup with a cardboard sleeve to prevent burns, the Japanese way is to have disposable cups that fit into a plastic adapter that holds the cup, protects the drinker's hand, and offers a handle so that you can grasp the cup with a few of your fingers and drink your tea in a civilized and genteel manner rather than barbarically holding a cardboard cup with your whole hand.
After my talk, I was presented with a present--a special fruit package, which, when opened, proved to hold the most beautiful grapes I had ever seen, and a whole cantaloupe. The grapes were all clustered perfectly on a single stem, were large and perfectly ripe, and were somehow perfectly clean and dry and ready to eat. It wouldn't surprise me if they were hand washed and dried with tweezers. They were delicious. Later, I found out that the fruit package probably cost $100-200.

Here are few of the final quirks and observations that either amused, impressed, or horrified me.

Years of reading Cracked.com gave me the impression that all of Tokyo looked like a cleaner Blade Runner, with brightly colored lights illuminating a neon wonderland where all the women dressed as schoolgirls while Hello Kitty ruled from on high like a fierce overlord. For the most part, Tokyo looks like a much cleaner, much more elegant, much more Japanese Manhattan. Though we did visit Shibuya one night, and it did look like a neon wonderland that rivaled Times Square for garishness. That was the night we went to a trendy "meat sushi" restaurant with pictures of horses on the menu. I did not partake.
At one point, I visited a very traditional bank. The lobby was titanic in scale, and had an army of uniformed receptionists who all looked and dressed identically. When I went up to my appointment on a higher floor, I encountered a secondary lobby with its own army of uniformed receptionists, who would stand and bow any time any employees walked past. I still haven't figured out when I'm supposed to bow, so I just bow anytime everyone else does and hope for the best.
People keep taking me to eat non-Japanese food. I've already had Chinese food twice! The food is excellently prepared and delicious, but I feel like I'm visiting Japan to enjoy Japanese culture, not Chinese or American culture. That being said, not everything translates precisely; I saw New England Clam Chowder being advertised in a supermarket, complete with its traditional topping of mounds of cheddar cheese. An Irish pub advertised its traditional beef salad.
Tokyo may be considered an expensive city, but restaurants are much cheaper than in the US, and tipping is not allowed. We had a dinner in a high-end tempura restaurant at the top of a luxury office tower, complete with plenty of sake, and the total bill was about $50 per person. I had a quick-service sashimi dinner for about $10. On the other hand, nuts are expensive as hell (I guess they're all imported), and there is no peanut butter!
I feel like a hulking giant in Tokyo. Everything, including the food, is designed for people who are much smaller. I can only imagine what it is like for someone like Ben Casnocha, who makes me look tiny in comparison. I found the taxis cramped, and my large American gluteus maximus spilled out of some of the chairs. Once, I noticed that an elevator was rated for 1,000 kg/15 people. In America, it would be 2,000 pounds/10 people, and even that might not be enough of a safety margin.
In the business districts, the vast majority of men wear suits and ties. Dressed in my most formal attire, including Brooks Brothers blazer, I look like I'm wearing business casual.
I feel completely safe from crime wherever I go. The contrast with San Francisco is devastating. In comparison to Tokyo, we live in a third-world country.
The major auto manufacturers have many more models in Japan than in the US. I don't even recognize most of them. One person told me she had a Honda that was very short but very wide, and had three seats in the front, and three seats in the back.
Spoken Japanese is incredibly fast and very melodic and animated. We think of the Japanese as reserved because their English is slow and formal, but their Japanese conversations make most English conversations pale in comparison. Of course, I don't speak any Japanese, so in a number of meetings, I resorted to nodding my head when everyone else did, and trying to look sage and wise each time my name was mentioned.

The Hopelessness Behind Trump's Support

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 20:57:00 +0000

I get a lot of crap from people because I argue that those of us who oppose the policies and behavior of Donald Trump should try to understand and empathize with his voters.

If I were to summarize the criticisms from fellow Trump opponents, it's that Trump voters are racists and bigots who made a conscious decision to vote for a lazy, racist, bigoted blowhard, and that expressing sympathy for them or pointing to reasons for supporting Trump other than prejudice is "letting them off the hook."

I think it's hypocritical to call for compassion and understanding, except for when it comes to your political opponents.

This profile of Trump's continued support in western Pennsylvania argues that despite their increasing suspicion that Trump isn't going to help them economically, people still support Trump because they view him as "on their side" culturally. (I would define that culture as rural, blue-collar, white Christian conservatives)

On the one hand, progressives and liberals might tear their hair out, since it indicates that Trump supporters basically support him regardless of the impact of his policies, as long as he keeps up his pugnacious, bullying style.

On the other hand, I think explains why compassion is so necessary. When people are so desperate and angry that they'll vote for and keep supporting a politician who shares almost none of their background (I'll grant that Donald Trump is white, but he is definitely not rural, blue-collar, or Christian) simply because he expresses their anger at the establishment that presided over 30 years of their declining fortunes, while other groups, especially the hated coastal elites saw their lives improve.

If your life is so hopeless that you've given up on improving your lot, and are now focused on seeing other people feel the same hurt that you feel, you're not going to be persuaded to change your mind when your opponents shower you with further anger and contempt.

Balancing Kindness and Rightness

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 18:29:00 +0000

"Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible." (The Dalai Lama)

I recently read this longform New York Times piece on Amy Cuddy and the replication controversy in social science. The basic summary is that two big trends came together--the first was the rise of social science in popular culture (think Malcolm Gladwell and Dan Gilbert), and the second was a movement within the social sciences to recognize that many studies were not replicable, and that the results they reported were probably the result of poor data hygiene.

In the case of Amy Cuddy, the first trend made her a star, by making her "Power Poses" work a TED Talk sensation, which led to her bestselling book, Presence. The second trend essentially destroyed her academic career, when it turned out that larger follow-up studies failed to show that power poses actually impacted people's testosterone and cortisol levels (though they confirmed Cuddy's finding that power poses made people feel more powerful).

What you conclude from the controversy probably reflects your point of view. Was Cuddy guilty of profiteering based on poor science? Or was she singled out for criticism because of her fame, and attacked because of her gender and appearance?

The tragedy of this episode is that it didn't have to happen. The different parties involved had good intentions, but a simple misunderstanding--only uncovered by the Times reporter's work--let them to wrongly assume bad intent. Here is the crucial passage:

When Simmons and I met, I asked him why he eventually wrote such a damning blog post, when his initial correspondence with Carney did not seem particularly discouraging. He and Simonsohn, he told me, had clearly explained to Cuddy and Carney that the supporting studies they cited were problematic as a body of work — and yet all the researchers did was drop the visual graph, as if deliberately sidestepping the issue. They left in the body of literature that Simmons and Simonsohn’s P-curve discredited. That apparent disregard for contrary evidence was, Simmons said, partly what prompted them to publish the harsh blog post in the first place.

But the email that Simmons and Simonsohn had sent was, in fact, ambiguous: They had explicitly told her to drop the P-curve and yet left the impression that the paper was otherwise sound. At my request, Simmons looked back at his original email. I watched as he read it over. “Oh, yeah,” he said quietly. He had a pained look on his face. “We did say to drop the graph, didn’t we?” He read it over again, then sat back. “I didn’t remember that. This may be a big misunderstanding about — that email is too polite.”
Cuddy and Carney had taken their advice literally. Simmons stood by his analysis but recognized that there was confusion at play in how they interpreted the events that transpired. Simmons says he harbored no ill will toward Cuddy before criticizing her paper; if anything, he remembered her warmly. “She was great,” he said, smiling at the memory. “We published the blog post despite my history with Amy. Because I realized that once we pulled the trigger on this. … ” He did not finish the sentence. Cuddy had, in fact, become the poster girl for this kind of work, which even he thought was not fair. “The original study wasn’t particularly egregious,” he said. “It was published in 2010 before anyone was thinking about this.”

For a moment, the scientist allowed the human element to factor into how he felt about his email response to that paper. “I wish,” he said, “I’d had the presence of mind to pick up the phone and call Amy.”

In other words, Cuddy had corresponded with her critics, had listened to their feedback, and thought that she had done what they had asked of her. Simmons' misunderstanding of his own email, followed by his mistake of interpreting Cuddy's actions as defiance of his advice, led him to publish a piece that he knew would harm her career.

In these troubled times, it can be difficult to balance kindness and rightness. Both are virtues that I value; I believe that we should try to treat people with kindness, and I believe that we should rely on facts and evidence. What the Cuddy episode shows is that the two virtues can easily come into conflict.

I believe that when they do, we should err on the side of kindness.

The problem with unkindness is that it is like a genie that can't be put back in a bottle. If you destroy someone's career because of a misunderstanding, you can't make it up to them. I'm reminded of the Book of Job, who loses his entire family while being tested. Sure, God gives him a new family, but I'm pretty sure he would have strongly preferred not to see his first wife and children killed as a test of his faith.

If Simmons had called Cuddy, her career might have been spared, even if they both eventually concluded that her original study was flawed.

Erring on the side of kindness means being willing to defer the savage, addictive joy of being right, with the knowledge that if your kindness proves misplaced, you can usually get the facts right later.

Even if you are convinced of your rightness, I believe you should acknowledge the possibility that you might be wrong, and consider being kind before pulling the trigger and causing irrevocable harm.

Donald Trump, Race, and the GOP

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 05:44:00 +0000

Ta-Nehisi Coates' cover essay for The Atlantic, "The First White President," explores the role of race and racism in Donald Trump's election as President of the United States. Coates' essay, has been widely read, and drawn praise and criticism (a sign of success; the goal of nearly every writer is to elicit a reaction from readers). My personal summary of its main argument is that the attempts to explain Trump's victory as the result of economic dislocation among the so-called "white working class" are glossing over the impact of race and racism, specifically white racism against African-Americans.

Here is the key paragraph that I think is the heart of Coates' piece (extra paragraph breaks added for emphasis):

"The triumph of Trump’s campaign of bigotry presented the problematic spectacle of an American president succeeding at best in spite of his racism and possibly because of it. Trump moved racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the overt and freely claimed. This presented the country’s thinking class with a dilemma. Hillary Clinton simply could not be correct when she asserted that a large group of Americans was endorsing a candidate because of bigotry.

The implications—that systemic bigotry is still central to our politics; that the country is susceptible to such bigotry; that the salt-of-the-earth Americans whom we lionize in our culture and politics are not so different from those same Americans who grin back at us in lynching photos; that Calhoun’s aim of a pan-Caucasian embrace between workers and capitalists still endures—were just too dark. Leftists would have to cope with the failure, yet again, of class unity in the face of racism.

Incorporating all of this into an analysis of America and the path forward proved too much to ask. Instead, the response has largely been an argument aimed at emotion—the summoning of the white working class, emblem of America’s hardscrabble roots, inheritor of its pioneer spirit, as a shield against the horrific and empirical evidence of trenchant bigotry."

To summarize:

Trump may have succeeded because of his racism
The United States is still subject to systemic bigotry
Rather than deal with the bigotry, liberals have focused on the ability of economic policy to win over the "white working class"

Some of the most powerful arguments in the essay point out the underlying bias in how issues are perceived in this country. For example, why would an opioid crisis call for compassion, while a crack crisis calls for harsher prison sentences? Why are we outraged that life expectancy has declined for less-educated whites, but accept that African-Americans still have lower life expectancies?

While I agree with Coates on his second point, I'm not going to examine it deeply in this post. If the arguments in the paragraph above don't cause you to consider the impact of systemic bigotry, my writing more isn't likely to either. Demonstrating to those who believe otherwise that systemic racism affects minorities in this country is a challenge I don't want to take up right now. I will note from my personal experience that even Asian-Americans, the so-called model minority, face racial discrimination on a regular basis. Being Asian is not the same thing as being white, regardless of how well Asian-Americans have done economically in this country.

Instead, I'm going to focus on the first and third points. I would argue that despite the fact that Donald Trump appears to be a racist that favors white superiority, that this is not the primary factor that led to his election. I would agree that economics alone do not explain white voting patterns, but I don't believe that convincing racists not to be racist is the optimal path to changing those voting patterns.

In his piece, Coates cites a series of statistics that illustrate that Trump won the white vote across many different demographics. The implication is that Trump rode a wave of white racial resentment, catalyzed by Obama's presidency, into the White House. But what he doesn't do is to compare Trump's performance to his GOP predecessors. It's always dangerous to argue from a single data point, because you ignore the context.

Let's correct that error by looking at the vote breakdowns for a variety of Republican presidential candidates over the past 35 years. All data comes from Cornell University's Roper Center:

First, consider the 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections.

Contrary to Coates' hypothesis, Donald Trump did not win a significantly higher proportion of the white vote than John McCain or Mitt Romney. In fact, proportionally more whites voted for Romney. In terms of percentages, Romney outperformed Trump across the board, with only two notable exceptions: Trump did better than Romney with men, and with African-American voters (!). My guess is that this can be explained by the fact that Trump was running against a white woman, rather than a black man.

Nothing about Donald Trump's performance appears anomalous in comparison to traditional GOP candidates like McCain and Romney. His weakness among women, African-Americans, Hispanics, and the young, are simply the extension of long-term trends for the GOP.

In fact, if we look further back to two GOP electoral triumphs (George W. Bush over John Kerry in 2004 and Ronald Reagan over Walter Mondale in 1984), we can see that while Reagan and Bush did better among African-Americans, the absolute numbers are minuscule. The GOP has always been strongest with men, whites, the wealthy, and the old. But popular GOP candidates like Reagan/84 and Bush/04 were able to perform substantially better with women, minorities, the poor, and the young.

(As a side note, the GOP should be terrified by these trends, which show the party's increasing weakness among the young and Hispanics, the two demographic groups that represent the future of this country. George W. Bush actually managed to win 44% of the Hispanic vote in 2004, exceeding even Reagan's 84 landslide results, compared to an anemic 29% for Trump in 2016. The GOP was correct to try to pivot on immigration to win over Hispanics, but Trump's rhetoric will likely make this more difficult in the future.)

It might be that Trump's racism was successful at turning out some white voters, but a) whites made up 70% of the vote in 2016, 2% less than in 2012, and b) he still attracted a smaller share of white voters than Romney's more traditional campaign. Remember, Trump did more poorly than Romney with nearly every group other than men and African-Americans.

It seems far more likely to me that Trump's victory was due to his remarkable luck in running against Hillary Clinton, one of the few public figures in American more disliked than he. Clinton combined unpopularity with a complacent and incompetently run campaign which devoted resources to trying to flip "Red" states rather than simply winning Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and thus the election.

While Trump probably benefited from racism, it does not appear that he benefited any more than traditional GOP candidates like Mitt Romney, who didn't go around making racist statements.

(It's worth pointing out that appealing to white voters, in theory, is no more racist than appealing to African-American or Hispanic voters. When white people vote for someone with the same skin tone, it's racism; when non-whites do the same, it is perfectly acceptable. In practice, of course, I can't recall Barack Obama, Marco Rubio, or Ted Cruz attacking white people or supporting black or brown supremacists.)

In many ways, the lack of difference in Trump's poll results makes Coates' point about systemic bigotry even more relevant. The real revelation of Trump's campaign is not that white men tend to vote Republican; it's that you can openly espouse racist and sexist beliefs, mock the disabled, lie constantly, and still win pretty much the same share of those voters.

Lessons On Writing A Book

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Sun, 03 Sep 2017 23:03:00 +0000

On Thursday, we turned in the manuscript for Blitzscaling. While there is still a lot of work to go before the book appears on shelves (physical or virtual), I wanted to write and share some of my thoughts about the experience of being an author while they were still fresh in my mind.

The story of Blitzscaling stretches all the way back to the class that I, my co-author Reid Hoffman, and my friends John Lilly and Allen Blue, taught together at Stanford in the Fall of 2015. Since then, Reid and I have been hard at work refining our ideas based on what we learned from teaching the class, as well as everything that's happened in the nearly two years since the class began. After all, the world is a very different place in September 2017 than it was in September 2015, and that is probably an understatement.

Rather than talk about the content of the book (which you'll be hearing about soon anyway), I want to focus on the experience of being an writer. In many ways, I know that I, in particular, have it very easy. Not only do I get to work with a brilliant co-author who can seemingly produce wisdom on demand, but the regular course of his life brought us in touch with so many accomplished people that a "regular" author would have trouble even booking a call with. Yet there is a reason that such a small percentage of those who want to write a book end up doing so--it's a lot of hard, mostly solitary work. Here are some of the experiences I had along the way, and what I learned from them. (I won't speak for Reid, though I suspect that he would say some of the same things.)

1. Sometimes, the only way to figure out what the book is about is to write the book.

The version of Blitzscaling that Reid and I turned in wasn't the first version we wrote. In fact, the final manuscript has only about 10% in common with the first rough draft that we wrote. And this was true even though we spent many hours planning out the structure of the book. It turns out that no matter how carefully you outline your work, the process of writing generates new ideas and insights, which then require you to change the book. We set out to write a playbook for blitzscaling, only to discover that we really needed to write the prequel to that book first, so that people who understand when and when not to blitzscale.

2. Books, especially those about recent events, benefit from a gestation period.

In my naive mind, I had planned on the writing process for the book to take less than a year. Even though this flies in the face of most authors' experience, things had gone so smoothly when we wrote The Alliance that I figured that's how every book worked. In the end, I think that the gestation period made Blitzscaling a richer, more interesting book. It's like the difference between a snapshot and a movie; a moving picture provides you with a better basis for understanding trends and predicting the future. Of course, the power of gestation has limits; as Steve Jobs said, "Real artists ship."

3. Writing, like doing your taxes or visiting your dentist, requires willpower, or better yet, good habits.

One of the biggest challenges I faced was purely internal--making the leap from not writing to writing. As William Zinsser wrote in his classic book, On Writing Well, it's very difficult to sit down to commit an act of literature. When the appointed time arrives, all of a sudden, your house seems like it needs a cleaning, or the dog needs walking. Or maybe, you decide, it's not worth it to start a writing session if you only have an hour. Better to wait until you have an uninterrupted block of two hours. Or four. Or eight.

All this is rot, of course. I find that once I get started, I enjoy the writing process, and usually have to remind myself to take breaks. Even wrestling with thorny problems like tricky transitions has its own appeal. It's like when I'm asked a question, or presented with a problem. I feel a compulsion to answer or provide a solution. But that still requires that I get started.

Oddly enough, the advice I found most helpful came from Mel Robbins of CNN. Mel, whose name brings to mind a gravelly-voiced, cigar-chomping newspaper man from the 1930s, is actually an energetic, blonde, former criminal defense attorney. I didn't actually read her latest book, The 5 Second Rule, but she did a great job of summarizing it in 24 words:

"The moment you have an instinct to act on a goal, you must physically move within 5 seconds or your brain will stop you."

Thinking is a very important part of writing, but when it comes to buckling down and starting the writing process, I find that it's better not to think. I just tried to minimize the friction between the moment when I think I ought to be writing, and the moment when my finger hits the first key.

Some of this friction minimization takes the form of preparation--preparing outlines, punch lists, and other supporting material that helps when I actually start typing. But it is all too easy for preparation to become procrastination, which is why the 5 second rule helps. Sometimes I have to invoke it multiple times to get down to work.

The 5 second rule also informed my toolset. For the last sprint to the finish, we transferred the manuscript to a Google Doc, so that we could both work on it at the same time, and never have our versions get out of sync. This actually helped with the 5 second rule, because I just left the Google Doc as an open tab in Chrome, so that all I had to do to start writing was sit down at my computer and click the appropriate tab. And once the text appeared in front of me and I started reading it, I would quickly fall into a flow state and start working.

4. Context is a powerful way to invoke the power of habit.

One of the most effective things I did was to try to define a very specific context for my writing sessions. Here's what I mean:

I didn't write at my desk, which I associate with doing email and reading the internet. Instead, I either wrote in a conference room, at the library, or at my wife's seat at the kitchen table (much to her annoyance). This allowed me to build an association between these locations and writing, which helped make following the 5 second rule that much easier.
I always listened to the same music while writing. My family can be pretty loud. So can office environments. To prevent distractions, I'd put in my earbuds and listen to music...and I'd listen to the same music every time. I should probably thank Pandora in the acknowledgements of the book! Since there is evidence that suggests that listening to the music of one's youth actually makes you act younger, I'd often listen to 80s music, though I ended up relying more on Pandora's "Thumbprint Radio" feature, which plays songs you've thumbed up, and ones that are similar. (Many thanks to Kristen Robinson for teaching me about this feature!)
Naturally, I also tried to use the Pomodoro Technique. By committing to work for 20 minutes without taking a break (and then committing to taking a break), I was able to work in short chunks when no more time was available, and for long stretches, when it was.

Many people ask why I don't write in coffee shops; the simple answer is that in most Palo Alto coffee shops, I'm likely to run into someone I know, and I'm too polite to tell them, "Go away! I'm writing right now!"

Are you also a writer? Do you have any favorite lessons or techniques you're willing to share? Leave them in the comments below!

Violence is (almost) never the right answer

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Sat, 19 Aug 2017 21:33:00 +0000

Like Indiana Jones, when confronted by Nazis, most of us want to punch them in the face. American white supremacists like Richard Spencer are so obviously and cartoonishly evil that the temptation is to treat them like movie villains, and dispatch them with heroic fisticuffs. However, it's critical that we resist this temptation to go Captain America on their smug supposedly-Aryan features.

There are obvious reasons for restraint, ranging from a moral opposition to violence, to thwarting these loathsome creeps' strategy of inciting violence so that they can appear to be the aggrieved party. But the most important reason is the fundamental corrosiveness of violence on civil society.

In his book, "The Better Angels of Our Nature," Steven Pinker uses historical evidence to argue that our modern society, news broadcasts nonwithstanding, is the least violent time in human history (based on the chance that the average individual will perish due to an act of violence). I would argue that the force behind this decline is the fundamental bargain of modern civilization: Granting the government a monopoly on legitimate violence, in exchange for protection and the fair administration of justice.

The role of the military is to protect the residents of a nation from external violence, while the role of the police is to protect us from violence committed by other residents. All of us effectively give out the right to mete out justice ourselves in exchange for a less-violent society.

This bargain is incredibly effective. Imagine if our disputes, rather than being resolved by the courts, were still settled by exchanges of gunfire. Actually, we don't have to do too much imagining; this is why life as a criminal is so dangerous. Rather than going to the police to resolve their inter-gang disputes, rival gangs murder each other (and innocents suffer in the process).

This is why it is so dangerous to advocate violence as a solution to political problems. While it may feel good to talk tough (just ask President Trump), legitimizing violence outside the military or the police attacks the fundamental underpinnings of civil society.

Recently, history Professor NDB Connolly of Johns Hopkins University (and the co-host of one of my favorite podcasts, Backstory) came dangerously close to doing just that (though possibly by accident) in a Washington Post editorial. In this editorial, he used the metaphor of rock-paper-scissors as a guide to fighting white supremacy. He argues that the "paper" of what he characterizes as "liberalism" cannot defeat the "scissors" of white supremacy:

"For a long while, we’ve been throwing a lot of “paper.” Liberalism — our paper — preserves our country’s long commitment to contracts. Under liberalism, citizens stand in contract with their government. The government’s job, in turn, has been to enforce contracts between individuals and groups. Truly, when people ask for rights, be they women’s rights, gay and transgender rights, or rights as people of color, they are asking for contract rights."

In other words, Connolly argues that the fundamental underpinnings of civil society are insufficient to defeat white supremacy, which historically has been based on denying minorities their contractual rights (either through direct means such as slavery itself, or indirect means such as unfair policing).

"Resistance, be it forceful or clandestine, threatened or explicit, stands as our “rock.” Rocks can look like armed self-defense or nonviolent direct-action campaigns. They appear, too, as blunt, bald public speech about the hatred arrayed against the dispossessed. Our rock against racism has also included the sacrifice of people like Medgar Evers, a black World War II veteran and civil rights organizer, dying in Jackson, Miss., in 1963; or Viola Liuzzo, a white Northern Unitarian Universalist, dying for the same cause in Selma, Ala., two years later....

...No matter its form, rock breaks scissors. A half-century ago, nothing less than radical anti-racism could reduce white supremacy to an outlaw religion. Paper could not do that. The contract logic of liberalism, on its own, was not built for that. On matters of racism and discrimination, capitalism can never serve as the great social fix, because in many instances, the very sectors of the economy that have historically been the most profitable in American history — for instance, slavery, real estate — have also been the most discriminatory.....

...Then, in April 1968, amid a flurry of other “rocks,” riots shook American cities following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. It took that rolling unrest, not the promise of further economic growth, to spur President Lyndon Johnson and Congress to action. Within a week they had passed the Fair Housing Act.
Over the past century, liberalism, vexed by an ever-sharp, ever-cutting white supremacy, has needed these rocks....

Consider that the Klan and neo-Nazis are again out and about in daylight, wielding not so much torches as scissors. We can keep on throwing paper. Even after a couple of centuries of trying, we can keep hoping a commitment to commerce can still be the great fix. We would do well, however, to wise up and start throwing rock — public denunciations of white supremacy, clear anti-racist institution building, and fighting for policies that undo the money made off racism, especially with an ancient hatred now standing unhooded.

Segregationists have again assumed their pedestals in the Justice Department, the White House and many other American temples. Paper alone won’t drive them out. Start throwing rocks."

There's a lot to unpack in these excerpts, so let's go point by point.

First, I think it is dangerous to do what Connolly does when he includes a huge continuum of actions under the "rock" of resistance. He describes "rocks" as including everything from public speech to the riots of 1968. To me, that sounds dangerously like saying that violence is necessary to defeat white supremacy. Even our fundamental bargain makes some allowance for violence, since the police aren't everywhere all the time. That's why we excuse violence committed in self-defense.

I think it is perfectly reasonable for protesters who are facing a set of armed opponents to make preparations to defend themselves. The tricky thing is that this logic applies to both sides, which results in two heavily armed mobs that really don't like each other, and makes it far more likely that a fight will break out by accident.

But characterizing rioting as necessary is both wrong and dangerous. At least a fight between opposing protesters is a fight between voluntary opponents. Riots harm many innocent bystanders and cause economic harm to businesses and homeowners who have nothing to do with the conflict.

Second, Connolly seems to argue that capitalism cannot fix discrimination. I strongly disagree. Capitalism, with its amoral focus on returns, tends to reduce, rather than increase discrimination. The evidence is clear that more diverse companies do better than their peers in our current capitalist system. The discrimination that Connolly appears to be referring to, such as the abhorrent practice of redlining and discrimination against African-American home buyers, is a distortion of capitalism, caused by racist individuals who are willing to make less money for the "satisfaction" of carrying out their bigotry.

Finally, intentional or not (and given his profession, I am inclined to believe that this was his intention), using the phrase, "Paper alone won’t drive them out. Start throwing rocks," is both dangerous and inflammatory. Certainly, Connolly's previous paragraph defines rock as "public denunciations of white supremacy, clear anti-racist institution building, and fighting for policies that undo the money made off racism," but I believe that nearly any objective reader would read "start throwing rocks" as an incitement to violence, especially considering how often throwing real (rather than metaphorical) rocks often leads to riots. If a white supremacist had used the same metaphor, but in reverse, describing "left-wing violence" as the scissors and "heroic Aryan resistance" as the rock, we would rightly condemn him for exhorting his audience to, "Stop throwing paper, and start throwing rocks."

What is particularly disappointing about this is that Professor Connolly is a well-respected academic working at a flagship university, which means that A) his words carry considerable weight with those who are inclined to agree with him, and B) the white supremacists he opposes can use his words to accuse academia and the mainstream media of being pro-violence, "Just like President Trump said!"

Confronting evil is important, but we don't live in a Hollywood movie, where violence solves problems and leads to a happy ending. As the late, great Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote, "The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind." (Note: This quote is often attributed to Gandhi, and Gandhi's family believes he may have spoken it, but there is no written evidence that he ever used these words.) Meeting white supremacists' violence with violence will exacerbate the conflict. And if you are willing to follow the advocacy of violence to its ultimate conclusion of killing all those who hold a particular belief, at least be willing to admit your purpose so that others can see you for who you really are.

If you believe in the value of peaceful civilization, don't argue for actions that attack its fundamental principles.

Why Diversity Increases Meritocracy

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Tue, 08 Aug 2017 17:14:00 +0000

Too often, diversity and meritocracy are presented as opposites, when in fact, the two go hand in hand.

The grand irony is that many of those who use the concept of meritocracy to argue against greater diversity are in fact working against the interests of a true meritocracy.

The biggest logical fallacy that most pro-"meritocracy" advocates make is assuming that the current status quo reflects the natural/objective order of things.

If you assume that the status quo reflects the rewards of true meritocracy, by definition, any change to the status quo reflects a retreat from meritocracy.

This core assumption is fatally flawed, and it is easy to provide numerous counterexamples.

In 1946, Kenny Washington became the first African-American to sign a contract with an NFL team. Today, nearly 70% of NFL players are African-American.

Since professional sports teams are evaluated based on wins and losses on the field of play, they are arguably the truest meritocracy in our society. Are we to assume that before 1946, African-Americans lacked football aptitude, but developed these skills in the decades since?

Ah, the pro-"meritocracy" advocates might say, but that was due to racism!

Precisely.

Did the NBA become less meritocratic when its player demographics shifted from predominantly Jewish to predominantly African-American?

Did Major League baseball become less meritocratic when its player demographics shifted from 100% Caucasian to 30% Latino?

The point is that it is highly unlikely that any field of endeavor is a perfect meritocracy. And if professional sports is any guide, increases in diversity tend to correlate with greater meritocracy and performance.

So why do the pro-"meritocracy" forces argue against diversity? The classic argument is that encouraging diversity requires organizations to "lower their standards."

What are these much-cited standards? Years of experience? Demonstrated ability? This is a classic Catch-22; how are people who have been shut out of an industry supposed to acquire the experience that would make them worthy of being hired into that industry?

Or perhaps it's about going to the right college or university? Despite the fact that the undergraduates in Stanford's Computer Science department are 30% women, and Harvard Business School's incoming MBA class is 41.5% women, women still make up far less of the technical staff and leadership levels in corporate America.

Why do young white men have "potential," while others "lack experience"?

And of course, numerous studies based on publicly available data show that women-led companies perform better financially, and that quotas increasing the number of women politicians increase the average quality of male politicians. Even if there are other studies that fail to show these effects, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that increasing diversity in an organization leads to poorer performance. (And if you want to argue that university research and Google's search engine are biased sources that have a hidden agenda, feel free to provide links to other sources that are scientifically valid; I'm guessing you won't find them.)

The LSE Business Review article on the effects of gender quotas for politicians is especially revealing. It's title is, "Gender Quotas and the Crisis of the Mediocre Man." The paper argues that the reason increasing the number of women politicians improves the quality of male politicians (as measured by prior income level) is that these new entrants crowd out lower-quality incumbents.

This has two implications, both of which should be noted. The first is that any losses to incumbents (generally speaking, white men) tend to be felt most by the least-capable incumbents. If organizations hire more women and underrepresented minorities, or universities admit more women and underrepresented minorities, all other things being equal, they must be hiring or admitting fewer men (or overrepresented minorities--more on this later). But these losses to incumbents are not evenly spread; the very best men are still hired/admitted. It's the marginal men who suffer most.

This might lead diversity advocates to adopt a smug attitude of, "Those incumbents deserved to lose their positions," which I think is also a mistake.

The second implication of the disproportionate crowding out of lower-tier incumbents is that those men are facing very real losses. The pain is especially great for those who are just starting out; they suffer the brunt of losses to incumbents, without having the opportunity to benefit from any previous lack of diversity.

It's not surprising, given this fact, that pro-"meritocracy" advocates from the ranks of the marginal men are opposed the notion of diversity hiring. Supporting diversity hiring would directly harm their own interests.

Imagine if someone told you that a new policy was going to hurt your financial interests, and that if you spoke up against this policy, you would reveal yourself to be immoral and reactionary. Would you be upset? I know I would be.

As much as we would like to believe that every change for the better is win-win, and that life is a non-zero sum game, the fact is that even in a non-zero sum game there are usually individual winners and losers, and simply telling the losers to "suck it up" doesn't work very well.

So what can we do about these conflicting interests? There is no magic solution, but I'd like to suggest an approach:

1) Tell the whole truth about diversity, including its downside. Diversity improves the meritocracy because it increases the total pool of qualified candidates. Because diverse hires haven't had the same opportunities to acquire relevant experience and prove their worth, we have to treat diversity as a positive externality, and account for it as an asset in our hiring practices, otherwise we are likely to maintain the status quo. However, while increasing diversity is better for society/humanity as a whole, it results in poorer outcomes for some, just as globalization and free trade are better as a whole, but distribute costs and benefits unevenly.

2) Be sympathetic to people whose expectations aren't going to be met. Acknowledge the distress felt by the marginal players who are being crowded out, rather than treating them as though they personally designed and built the system of bias that resulted in the current status quo. But acknowledging that distress doesn't mean halting progress. Instead, even though they are unlikely to graciously accept this explanation, explain that their pain is helping society/humanity as a whole.

3) Recognize that we are dealing in shades of grey, rather than black and white issues. We are fortunate to be living in times where many of the worst instruments of discrimination have been eliminated. Policies like apartheid, separate-but-equal, and the color line have been rightly dismantled and discredited. Now we live in an era where the instruments of discrimination are subtler and nuanced. Voter ID laws reflect a reasonable principle of making sure that only legitimate votes are counted, but tend to depress voter turnout among legitimate voters in certain demographics. Corporate cultures may impede the progress of women and underrepresented minorities, but don't take the form of absolute barriers like, "Whites only in the executive suite." Treating diversity as a crusade (word choice absolutely intentional on my part, with apologies to my Muslim friends) is a mistake. Specifically, treating these issues as purely black and white, with an inhuman enemy with fewer rights, is counterproductive, not to mention pretty asshole-ish.

Before I conclude, I want to spend a little bit of time on a topic that is almost completely overlooked in all these debates, and one with which I have personal experience, which is the situation faced by Asian-Americans. As the "model minority," Asian-Americans are wealthier and better-educated than the average American. The explanations for these results are varied, but include a cultural emphasis on education, strong family structures, and the fact that many of the Asian-Americans who immigrated to the United States in the post-WW2 era were the highly-educated elites of their countries. My own parents came to Los Angeles to obtain a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at UCLA, and a Masters in Library Science at USC, which made them fairly typical for their generation of highly-educated Chinese immigrants from Taiwan. Imagine if the only American expatriates/immigrants in a country were graduates of Stanford and Harvard; what conclusions might the natives of that country draw about the nature of Americans?

Many of the efforts to increase diversity, such as affirmative action, have harmed the economic interests of Asian-Americans. Within the University of California system, which is barred by law from applying affirmative action to college admissions, 32% of the undergraduates at UCLA, and 42% of the undergraduates at UC Berkeley are of Asian descent. CalTech, which might be the most selective college in the country, comes in at 41% Asian. In contrast, these numbers are 23% at Stanford, and 22% at Harvard.

As a result, many might expect Asian-Americans to oppose increasing diversity. I think that, from a self-interested standpoint, Asian-Americans should be in favor of increasing diversity, but that diversity needs to be tackled at a broader level.

First, affirmative action is not a practice that harms Asian-Americans in favor of African-American/Latino minorities. Rather, it is a practice that harms Asian-Americans in favor of marginal Caucasian students. Let's compare UC Berkeley and Stanford, which are in the same geographic region. At UC Berkeley, 3% of undergraduates are African-American, and 14% are Latino. At Stanford, the equivalent numbers are 8% and 13%. 17% and 21% are pretty close; there may be some marginal impact on Asian-American admissions from affirmative action in favor of underrepresented minorities, but it seems small. In contrast, UC Berkeley is 28% Caucasian, and Stanford is 43% Caucasian. Conveniently enough, if you do the math, the delta between Asian-Americans at UC Berkeley and Stanford is 42% - 23%, or 19%. The delta between Caucasians at UC Berkeley and Stanford is 43% - 28%, or 15%. Add to that the 4% delta between African-American/Latino students between the two schools, and it appears that 15% of the 19% delta (79%) in Asian-American admissions can be attributed to affirmative action discriminating AGAINST Asian-Americans IN FAVOR OF Caucasian applicants.

Second, Asian-Americans continue to be vastly underrepresented in key areas such as elected politics, or the senior management levels of large corporations. Quick--name the highest-ranking executive of East Asian descent at a major Silicon Valley corporation who wasn't one of the founders of that corporation!

The proponents of diversity would do well to acknowledge and support the diversity hiring of Asian-Americans, including Asian-American men, despite their "overrepresentation" in the ranks of elite universities and Silicon Valley engineering departments. And it certainly wouldn't hurt to stop using the term "minorities" to refer to "non-white people other than Asians."

Meanwhile, Asian-Americans would do well to voice their support for diversity initiatives, rather than assuming that those initiatives would be used against them. Increased diversity hiring will likely harm the economic interests of Asian-Americans in some areas, but those losses are likely to be offset by gains in other areas.

In summary, unless you assume that we are already living in a perfect meritocracy, which is almost certainly a false assumption, increasing diversity ought to increase "true" meritocracy by broadening the pool of qualified people, and thus improve society/humanity as a whole. However, increasing diversity has uneven effects; some people (e.g. the marginal men) do lose out, and we should treat those people with compassion, rather than blasting them for not graciously accepting policies that act against their self-interest, but not confuse compassion with abandoning good policy.

Links:

P.S. I expect that this essay will draw the usual reaction to my political/policy writings; I will be attacked by both sides of the debate for being on the opposing side, and a few folks in the middle will criticize me for mushy indecisiveness. To all of those people, I say that dealing with issues like this is hard, and that I'm not convinced that I'm some sort of genius that can solve all these problems with Solomon-like wisdom. I think that everyone could do with a little more hesitancy and empathy for the other side. And if that isn't a ringing call to action, so be it.

P.P.S. While this essay was informed by the current Google diversity memo controversy, I didn't want to focus on that controversy. I will add the following comments:

The diversity memo is correct that shaming people risks creating an ideological echo chamber
The memo's author was very naive; he thought that if he explicitly said he was tackling the extreme position that all differences in outcome are the result of discrimination, and acknowledged that population-level differences are small and tell us little about specific individuals, he would be safe from the echo chamber. He was wrong. A similar mistake forced Larry Summers (Sheryl Sandberg's mentor) to resign as President of Harvard.
The fundamental problem with the argument against diversity advanced in the memo is that the author assumes that diversity lacks inherent value. Otherwise, why would he argue against programs aimed at people of a specific gender or race? This is the "begging the question" logical fallacy--and it is embarrassing that someone who prides himself on logic fell into this! Once you make this (false) assumption, the rest of the argument against diversity follows naturally. But that's like assuming that compassion lacks inherent value; once you make that assumption, every act of compassion makes no sense.
By firing the author of the memo, Google provided evidence that he was correct in his characterization of the company as an ideological echo chamber, and missed out on the opportunity to correct the obvious flaws in his argument. Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote, "First, let me say that we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it. However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace. Our job is to build great products for users that make a difference in their lives. To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK. It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct, which expects “each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination. The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender. Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.” This strikes me as rank hypocrisy. Firing the author of the memo would seem to indicate that Google takes a zero-tolerance approach to any discussion of gender differences, which seems to me like it is a clear example of the "intimidation" that Google claims to want to prevent. Instead of a debate, Google's actions indicated that expressing the wrong opinions can get you fired. Go ahead and read the memo; while the author's arguments are weak and illogical, and he comes off as tone-deaf, it hardly rises to the level of "harassment" and "intimidation" that justifies termination. Just ask yourself the following question: If the memo hadn't been leaked, would Google have fired its author? Yeah, I thought so. By firing the author, rather than actually addressing his arguments by explaining why diversity is valuable, Google made itself part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.

Common ground between those who favor and oppose diversity hiring

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Tue, 25 Jul 2017 19:13:00 +0000

Those who favor and oppose diversity actually share very similar concerns.  This thought occurred to me when I read the end of this interview with Slack developer Kaya Thomas:

The interview ends with the following exchange:

"Brown: As one of the few black women in the industry, have you ever felt tokenized?

Thomas: Yeah. It’s something I struggle with. I think it’s related to imposter syndrome. Did they pick me because of the work I did and my accomplishments, or do they want me to fill in these boxes? You can never know whether or not that’s the case, being a black woman. Most times, there isn't anyone else like me in that space. It can be detrimental to my mental well-being if I always think that I’m a token. I do know that I’ve worked hard. I've earned my spot, but even if I am [a token], at least I’m still here and providing the space for women like me to get here."

None of us want to feel like we don't deserve our success.  Kaya struggles with these feelings because she worries, despite the fact that she's earned her place (as is amply apparent from the interview) that she's been picked because she fills in certain boxes.

The mirror image of this is the deep emotional reaction that some well-off Caucasian men feel in reaction to diversity and inclusion.  By definition, if we say that white men are overrepresented, it means that we're also saying that some of them don't deserve their place.

It's one thing to be in favor of diversity in the abstract; it's another to support diversity to the detriment of your own career.

This is a difficult subject to grapple with, and none of us can be disinterested.

My own approach is twofold.  First, it is important that we seek to eliminate false negative stereotypes and biases.  We need to hire based on reality, not inaccurate perceptions.  Second, we need to recognize that diversity is valuable in and of itself, not just as a remedy for past injustice.  Diverse teams are more innovative and productive; we should seek diversity and inclusion for economic, as well as moral reasons.

It's important to acknowledge that these changes do impact some white men in a negative way.  If one group previously held a disproportionate share of high-tech jobs, and society corrects that distortion, the overall benefits to society will be positive, but the local impact on that group would still be negative.  We shouldn't expect them to be cheerful about the situation.  But we also shouldn't let that stop us from doing what is right.

35 Words

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Tue, 04 Jul 2017 22:10:00 +0000

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

It's probably hard for us to imagine, from our modern perspective, how revolutionary these 35 words were. When the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, some monarchs still ruled by the divine right of kings, millions (including many in what would become the United States) lived in the bonds of slavery, and the pursuit of survival was the best most people could hope for.

To paraphrase Hamilton, despite all the many troubles in the world, we are incredibly lucky to be alive right now, especially here in the United States.

Yet if there's one thing I'd like us to learn from the lessons of the Founding Fathers (and Mothers, Abigail Adams would point out) it's that we must continue to fight and make sacrifices for these ideals.

Our society is far from perfect. We have institutions that continue to deny certain people equality, life, and liberty, let alone the pursuit of happiness. To form a more perfect union, numerous individuals have to choose the hard path of standing up for these ideals, rather than the easy path of least resistance.

Here in Silicon Valley, we've seen a week that was unprecedented in my decades of experience here, where women publicly detailed the sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior of wealthy, powerful male venture capitalists.

In the past, many of the women who were subject to this kind of behavior did what must have seemed rational and kept quiet. Just in the past half decade, women might look at the examples of Ellen Pao, Adria Richards, and Gamergate (Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, and Brianna Wu), consider the harassment (including death threats) that women suffered after speaking up, and conclude that speaking up would bring hardship and not justice.

And yet, the women who came forward this week persisted.

Fortunately, these women got some measure of justice, as men like former Binary Capital partner Justin Caldbeck lost not just their reputations, but millions of dollars. And that has encouraged more people to come forward. While I am worried that this enthusiasm could go too far (calls for establishing a blacklist don't seem aware that most such blacklists have a pretty bad connotation), progress is still progress.

I saw another item today that speaks to the 35 words. "Hawaii Five-0" actors Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park left the show after the two Asian-American actors refused to accept contracts that paid them 10-15% less than their Caucasian co-stars, Alex O'Loughlin and Scott Caan. It's probably worth noting that the population of Hawaii is 26.7% Caucasian, 47.2% Asian/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and 23% mixed-race.

Being a lead actor in a television series is one of the greatest jobs in the world, and Kim and Park were likely making around $100,000 per episode, which means that they walked away from roughly $2.5 million per year to stand up for the principle of equality. I admire their willingness to put ideals ahead of paycheck; I would have a hard time making the same decision!

One of the favorite criticisms that reactionaries level against people who speak up is that, "They're doing it for the attention." If only that were the case. Sadly, speaking up generally costs people money, which means that it is often "unreasonable" to stick with your principles.

But as George Bernard Shaw wrote, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

On this 4th of July, we celebrate the unreasonable men who signed the Declaration of Independence, complete with those 35 amazing words. But we should also celebrate the unreasonable men and women who continue to strive for the ideals contained in those words, despite the cost to themselves.