Month: February 2008

How to run an unconference: 20 useful online resources

As part of helping out with SciBarCamp, I’ve been studying other people’s experiences with unconferences. This post is a collection of some of the more useful links I’ve found.

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Categorized as SciBarCamp

Biweekly links for 02/29/2008

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Criticism is overrated

A couple of years ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great book called “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, whose thesis is that for some apparently complex cognitive tasks, it may be equally or more effective to make a quick decision rather than deliberating at length. Gladwell’s book was a bestseller, and spawned much popular attention and discussion.

Soon after Gladwell’s book, Michael R. LeGault wrote a very serious followup,
Think!: Why Crucial Decisions Can’t Be Made in the Blink of an Eye. Intended in part as an attack on Gladwell’s book, “Think!”‘s eye-opening thesis was that for some cognitive tasks, it’s a good idea to think before making a decision. LeGault discusses, for example, the case of Albert Einstein, who, LeGault assures us, had to think at some length before coming up with his revolutionary theories.

The difference between the works, of course, is that regardless of the merit of LeGault’s criticisms, Gladwell’s book is based on an interesting and novel idea, while LeGault’s is not. LeGault would have been far better off applying his effort to see how far Gladwell’s thesis could be taken, and what the limits of the thesis are, i.e., when it’s a good idea to make decisions quickly, and when it’s a good idea to be more reflective.

A similar phenomenon is now playing itself out in the blogosphere. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, has just published an article arguing that for many new businesses, the natural business model is to give their service away for free. Many bloggers have lept to dismiss Anderson’s ideas. While some of the criticisms have merit, even those with merit mostly rehash standard existing ideas, and so have little intrinsic interest in their own right. Furthermore, many of these bloggers are largely ignoring the extremely interesting and stimulating core of Anderson’s article. It’s as though these critics are watching a miner dig stuff out of the ground, exclaiming “look at all that muck!”, while ignoring the nuggets of gold buried amongst the dirt.

There are two ways to approach the reading of a piece of writing (or, indeed, an idea presented in any form). One way is to take your intellectual firepower and use it to locate the dirt in the piece, all the errors and mistaken assumptions. The second way is to try with all your might to locate the hidden nuggets of gold, the new insights, and, once those insights are located, to extract and purify them as best you can.

Too often I fall into the trap of starting with the first, critical approach. “What’s wrong with this?”, I ask as I read, attempting to track down all the errors and assumptions. Only if the piece passes critical muster do I go to the trouble of locating and purifying the hidden nuggets.

I’m not alone. I suspect most people approach reading primarily from this critical perspective, and formulate their response to a piece of writing largely on the basis of that criticism, as in the examples above. Far better to approach reading looking first for the hidden gold. Sometimes, of course, there is no gold to find; in such cases, there is is no point in applying one’s faculties to criticism. But when one finds gold, then one has something precious, to reflect on, internalize, build upon, and, indeed, to criticise.

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Why isn’t University free?

How long before a major brand University realizes that they can use their brand to almost instantly build an online audience in the millions, sets tuition to zero, and starts broadcasting (and archiving) every lecture at the highest possible quality, complemented by associated online discussion fora, real life meetup groups so students in a given area can regularly meet and discuss the material, broadcasts into Second Life, and so on? Essentially, build an entire economy of services and community around the basic product such a University already offers – lectures by some of the smartest people in the world.

How would this work out financially? At the moment, if a big brand University has 10,000 students each paying (on average) $20,000 / year to attend, that’s $200 million in revenue. They can make the same revenue with 5 million regular viewers, each worth $40 to advertisers. Given Facebook’s admittedly somewhat ludicruous valuation ($300 / user), that seems a trifle.

There are other difficulties and objections, of course, beyond financial viability:

  • Q: Isn’t one of the main points of University to act as a hub for clever young people to come together? And don’t they need to be together to get the full benefit of lectures and so on? A: Yes, but you could get a large fraction of the benefit by doing local community building like I described above, without the $80k price tag. And since so many more people would be involved the aggregate benefit would be far larger. If it’s really that important, then presumably some people will be willing to pay a premium, and still attend the Harvard (or whoever) lectures.
  • Q: Don’t students need real life interaction with the lecturer? A: This is true, in part. But, again, you can get a lot of the same benefit through well-run discussion forums, both online and offline.
  • Q: Don’t the Professors need the students around to stimulate them? A: Much of the stimulation comes at the grad student level, and at that level, I don’t think this proposal would change much. Harvard (or whoever) would carry on with their graduate program, just as before, since it’s largely based on research, not classes. At the undergrad level there would be a loss.
  • Q: What about exams, accreditation, degrees? A: These could, of course, still be offered, by setting up test centres in major urban areas.
  • Q: Wouldn’t we end up in a world with many fewer Universities? A: Probably, yes. But far more people would get a far higher quality education.

There are some half-hearted steps in this direction: UC Berkeley on YouTube, iTunes University, and Open Courseware are all worthwhile. But they’re tiny steps compared with what could be done.

(This question inspired in part by Chris Anderson).

Update: Someone has criticised my comparison of advertising revenue with Facebooks’ valuation. That’s fine – the two are quite different, and it’s fair to ask for a more direct comparison. Unfortunately, I don’t have a good sense of the numbers here. Certainly, most sites make far less than $40 / user per year. But then, I think this site will get a great deal more (monetizable) attention from its users than your average internet site.

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Biweekly links for 02/25/2008

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A bias towards power

Robin Hanson runs a great blog called Overcoming Bias, which is essentially about ways we fool ourselves, both individually and collectively.

A form of bias I’m interested in is the great deference we pay to power, often far more than is warranted by the facts. I’m particularly interested in the damage this does to powerful people, since it greatly reduces the incentive they have to perform well (if people are going to pay attention to you anyway, you have less incentive to improve your ideas), and it also diminishes feedback that can help them improve their ideas.

A few examples (I’m guilty of numbers two and three, incidentally):

  • People’s early works, when they are unknown, are often better than their later works, after they’ve become famous. See, e.g., Tom Clancy.
  • A professor speaking pretty much complete rubbish, and yet being taken seriously by a group of more junior academics. According to James Watson’s account, Linus Pauling should have discovered the structure of DNA before Watson and Crick, but made a stupid error, and then had the misfortune that none of the people around him were confident enough to speak up and say “Hey, that’s obviously wrong!” I’ve seen this in minature a thousand times.
  • A professor shutting down a grad student in a group, simply by disagreeing with them. People tend to assume that the professor is right 100 percent of the time, and the student 0 percent. A more accurate breakup in my experience is 60 / 40. Professors usually aren’t much smarter or more knowledgable than grad students.
  • A rich or famous person holding forth on pretty much any subject, from things they understand well, through to things they barely understand at all, and having other people pay serious attention. An example is the frequent pronouncements on how to solve world hunger we get from Hollywood starlets. Their concern is laudable, but surely there are better experts on this subject?

It’s not hard to think of ways for the powerful to avoid these forms of bias. But in practice it may be rather hard to implement them – it’s nice having people pay attention to what you say! And for the less powerful, it’s hard to see how to avoid them at all.

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Creativity at Google

Kevin Scott:

Google is undoubtedly an awesome company and was certainly a great place to work the entire time I was there. But. These unreservedly positive fluff pieces really aren’t doing the company a service. They irritated me when I was an employee given the too-perfect pictures they painted and what they missed. For instance, ideas at Google do not burst forth from the heads of geniuses and then find their way unimpeded to huge audiences of receptive users. Rather ideas emerge, are torn to shreds, reformulated, torn to shreds, prototyped, torn to shreds, launched to internal users, torn to shreds, rebuilt and relaunched, torn to shreds, refined some more, torn to shreds, put back together one last time, torn to shreds by SREs, tweaked again in a seemingly-endless frenzy of last minute work, and launched…whereupon they are torn to shreds by bloggers, journalists, and competitors. The magic of Google is that tearing to shreds, even when founders are shredding, doesn’t often mean outright project cancellation.

Sounds a lot like good physics research. The great John Wheeler, via a thought-provoking short piece by Ben Schumacher: “Make as many mistakes as possible, as quickly as possible.”

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Mixed-reality conference

Via Troy McMonaghy, news that NASA is putting a live feed of an entire four day conference into Second Life:

NASA Ames (in Silicon Valley) is currently hosting the Next Generation Exploration Conference 2.0. They’re doing something really ambitious… a live video feed of the whole four-day conference into Second Life – so people at the NASA Sun Amphitheatre in Second Life (on the ‘NASA CoLab’ sim) can watch it realtime. Better yet, they’re showing the SL audience on a big screen in the actual conference. They’re also taking questions from people in SL and relaying them to the speakers or panels in California.

Troy posts a great picture of the event:

Why aren’t more conferences made available this way?

More links

I’ll be posting a linklog once a week, from now on. This is actually the second for this week, as I’m tweaking my script a bit, but in the future it should happen only once a week.

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Links for week prior to 02/20/2008

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