Tag: Information Age

Must-Read: Ben Thompson: Grantland and the (Surprising) Future of Publishing

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read:Ben Thompson: Grantland and the (Surprising) Future of Publishing: “As a reader this is frustrating…

…Vox stripped down to the political and policy coverage that is its raison d’être would almost certainly rate as a destination site for me; instead, faced with a deluge of rewrites and summarized videos, I miss most of the good stuff save for what I stumble across on social media. I’m certainly not going to waste my time wading through the filler on the homepage…. Still… Vox is… thriving while Grantland… is dead…. The only destination sites that really seem to be working either have massive brand equity that is being leveraged into subscriptions… or are tiny one-person operations that leverage the Internet to keep costs sustainably low while monetizing through small-scale native advertising (e.g. Daring Fireball and the now-retired Dooce.com, for example) or subscriptions (e.g. The Timmerman Report and the site you’re reading)…. The lesson of Grantland is that there is no room in the middle: not enough scale for advertising, and costs that are far too high for a viable subscription business…

Must-Read: Robinson Meyer: The Decay of Twitter

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Robinson Meyer: The Decay of Twitter: “Anthropologists who study digital spaces have diagnosed that a common problem of online communication…

…is ‘context collapse.’ This plays with the oral-literate distinction: When you speak face-to-face, you’re always judging what you’re saying by the reaction of the person you’re speaking to. But when you write (or make a video or a podcast) online, what you’re saying can go anywhere, get read by anyone, and suddenly your words are finding audiences you never imagined you were speaking to. I think Stewart is identifying a new facet of this. It’s not quite context collapse, because what’s collapsing aren’t audiences so much as expectations. Rather, it’s a collapse of speech-based expectations and print-based interpretations. It’s a consequence of the oral-literate hybrid that flourishes online. It’s conversation smoosh…

Must-Read: MathBabe’s Guest: Dirty Rant About The Human Brain Project

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: MathBabe’s Guest: Dirty Rant About The Human Brain Project: “Some simple observations must be made, which are true now…

…and will still be true in ten years’ time…. (1) We have no f—ing clue how to simulate a brain: We can’t simulate the brain of C. Elegans, a very well studied roundworm (first animal to have its genome sequenced) in which every animal has exactly the same 302-neuron brain…. Pretty much whatever data you want, we can generate it. And yet we don’t know how this brain works. Simply put, data does not equal understanding…. (2) We have no f—ing clue how to wire up a brain: Ok, we do have a macroscopic clue… with a resolution of one cubic millimeter per voxel… [but] any map with cubic-millimeter voxels is a very coarse map indeed. And microscopically, we have no clue…. Imagine taking statistics on the connectivity of transistors in a Pentium chip and then trying to make your own chip based on those statistics. There’s just no way it’s gonna work.

(3) We have no f—ing clue what makes human brains work so well:… There’s a guy whose brain is mostly not there, and he was probably one of the dumber kids in class, but still he functions fine in human society (has a job, family, etc.). Is this surprising? Not surprising? How would we know…. So, the next time you see a pretty 3D picture of many neurons being simulated, think ‘cargo cult brain’. That simulation isn’t gonna think any more than the cargo cult planes are gonna fly. The reason is the same in both cases: We have no clue about what principles allow the real machine to operate. We can only create pretty things that are superficially similar…

Must-Read: Charlie Stross: A Question About the Future of the World Wide Web

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Charlie Stross: A Question About the Future of the World Wide Web: “The current state of the ad-funded web…

…is a death-spiral…. Casual information consumers won’t pay for access to paywalled sites, and a lot of the struggling/bottom-feeding resources on the web are engaged in a zero-sum game for access to the same eyeballs that are increasingly irritated by the clickbait and attention-grabbing excesses of the worst advertisers…. Is there any way to get to a micro-billing infrastructure from where we are today that doesn’t involve burning down the web and starting again from scratch?

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/09/a-question-about-the-future-of.html

Must-Read: Ed Kligore: The Brand: What You See Is What You Get

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Ed Kilgore: The Brand: What You See Is What You Get): “Ann Friedman has written a piece for TNR that will be of great interest to all of us who have had to grapple with the idea…

…of a personal ‘brand’… back in the day… called a ‘voice.’… Friedman shares with us the hilarious and sobering tale of her own wrestling match with ‘branding’…. Personally, I find it easier to remain ‘authentic’… by letting people absorb my unique characteristics organically, rather than spending time each day trying to figure out how to improve the lefty-cracker-Christian-bloviator-with-a-surprisingly-good-vocabulary brand…. We’re not entirely immune to the logic of ‘branding,’ but for the most part, what you see is what you get.

Afternoon Must-Read: Derek Thompson: Reads Annie Lowrey on Why America’s Essentials Are Getting More Expensive While Its Toys Are Getting Cheap

Posted on by Brad DeLong
Why America s Essentials Are Getting More Expensive While Its Toys Are Getting Cheap Derek Thompson The Atlantic

Derek Thompson: Why America’s Essentials Are Getting More Expensive While Its Toys Are Getting Cheap: “Here’s a fascinating snapshot….

You occasionally hear conservatives say that poor people aren’t really poor because, you know, they have refrigerators and TVs, don’t they? Yes, they do…. But the power to alter the temperature of your food and watch FOX is not quite the same as being rich…. Why does it seem like the least important things in life—TVs, toys, and DVD players—are getting cheap while the most important parts of the economy are getting more expensive?….

  1. On poverty: Jordan Weissmann nails it: “Prices are rising on the very things that are essential for climbing out of poverty”… college… sick[ness]… daycare…. Just as the benefits of wealth create a virtuous cycle of behavior, the challenges of poverty start a vicious circle that continues to spin down through multiple generations.
  2. On productivity: When you look at the items in red with falling prices, they largely reflect industries whose jobs are easily off-shored and automated…. Now consider education, health, and childcare, the blue sectors above where prices are rising considerably faster than average. These are service industries that employ local workers. They are not, to use the economic term, “tradable”… are mostly gaining jobs, not shedding them…. Health care, education, and childcare have entirely different products than a television or iPod. Their product is people: healthy people, educated people, and safe baby-people…