Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

I spent last week in Las Vegas at a conference.

Las Vegas is a very strange place. It disturbs me on a viceral level. It is a climate where nothing grows. The shubs and palms around the hotel each had their own individual water pipe. Up the road from the hotel there was a large lot. Somebody there had stopped the water that fed some trees. They now stood large and barren of leaves in a dust grey field.

In the mornings I would awaken at 6 or 7am east coast time. That’s 3 or 4am Las Vegas time. I’d get in my car and go look for breakfast. In the east I know to never eat in a mall. In the west it there is rarely any commerce outside of a mall. Most of my breakfasts were in aging franchises. I like a bit of age on my environment. The signs that people have inhabited a place. The ways they have customized it.

One bagel place I ate looked like it had originally been some sort of lodge themed resturant. It had a cheap wood beam look with two stories of seating. They had ostracized the non-smokers to the secon story. Some elderly patrons, who I suspect spend most mornings there, were smoking and reviewing which casinos they had never stuck their noses into. All the windows were decorated with snow-in-a-can christmas scenes.

Except in the tourist neighborhoods, almost nobody walks in Las Vegas, Angry young men can be seen walking purposely to nowhere. Prostitutes wave as you drive by. I saw only one group of four kids walking someplace. Single people are occationally seen walking to their jobs, a number of these - in the early morning hours - are carrying a single sleeping child.

On a landscape of walled communities the car and the mall are the dominate life forms. Large video signs decorate the roadside. The University of Nevada has one at the mouth of the main roadway entering the campus. One outside a golf store advertises that financing is available. There are a lot of financing, loan, and check cashing stores.

The conference was in a hotel I found delightful. An old (meaning 1950 or 1960) huge two story motel wrapped around a simple court yard with three pools which nobody used. Everything a little worn out. Nice furniture. Friendly people. No gambling.

In most hotels in Vegas gambling machines outnumber the guests. The gambling machines are programed to make a series of noises designed to force you to give them attention. The people sitting at these machines don’t seem particularly cheerful. Their attention deficit disorder feed by a continous stream of stimulation. I suspect you could bankrupt a hotel by dumping a little Ritalin into their water treatment facility.

These folks at Ryan Air seem to be testing the most outragous boundries of differential pricing. They are giving the flights away for free! On the flight I took yesterday America West was selling access to the previously free movie for 5$. This seemed to trigger a small reduction in of cooperation. People asked to lower their shades seemed less likely to help. I used to joke that the airlines would fill empty seats on some
planes for $30 by selling you a round trip with a meal and a movie, but you wouldn’t be aloud to get off the plane.

I’m reading “Punished by Rewards” by Alfie Kohn. It is a full out rant against the pop-behaviorism. That aspect of American culture where in all of life’s problems have a single simple solution. Problem: you want X to do A. Solution: Tell X you will reward him if he does X. For example “Go to sleep now honey and I’ll buy you an ice cream tommorrow.”

Full of great stories. For example he has a slew of experiments where performance dropped when the subjects were promised rewards. My favorite was with poets. Just the act of imagining the rewards their work might engender triggered the creation of less creative works.
The data suggests that these programs really put the damper on: creativity, risk taking, and cooperation.

In the early days of AI (AI or Artificial Intellegence is the branch of computer science concerned with making intellegent seeming computers) we used to refer to problem- solving methods like these as the “strong methods”. Strong because they apply to so wide a range of problems. Students would always have trouble remembering that these were the “strong methods” because the other feature of all these methods was they all behaved so horribly when applied in practice.
Problem solving is hard.

It’s a fun, but angry, book. It deserves a longer discussion. Maybe latter.

One thing worth mentioning in passing is that these programs are not just pop-behaviorism (tap into that animal hunger), they are also pop-economics (manipulate that rational man).

On that note … here’s something about micropayment donations for free digital content. One of the most venurable of the Macinotosh newsletter is Tidbits. They recently have been playing with letting readers make small donations when they enjoy an article. This gives an overview of the income captured for various articles.

Man you could lay waste to an open source project doing something along these lines.

Gosling wrote this

pleasing little essay in 1990 about standards setting.

It’s a nice little model with only two variables over time; e.g the political demand for a standard and the supply of technical skills to execute on that desire. That model is taken from Toshi Doi of Sony. James’ point is that some standards get set before the technology is ready, while others get set after plenty of skill has accumulated.

This is a nice complement to the models that emphasis the demand side network effects around standards. Those models focus on the buyer’s problem of timing when to jump onto the bandwagon. The buyer in that case afraid that he will jump to soon and onto the wrong one and then later he’ll have to pay huge switching costs. On the other hand he’s afraid he will jump too late and be left behind while others capture the early mover advantages. Those models help explain why the demand for a standard will often runs way out in front of the supply of skills to fufill that demand.

He reaches a somewhat bleak conclusion, that we often setting standards ahead of the technology. I was reminded of this essay recently. While XML is widely used for protocol messaging the XML community is apparently lacking in a number of tools that a protocol designer would have expected. For example there is no standand way to negotiate protocol level when sessions start. For example there is no effective way to make minor revisions to a protocol and yet avoid having to spinning up an entire new namespace each time.

In turn, that reminded me how supply and demand play off each other in suprising ways. In some cases supply gets way out in front of demand. The classic dismissive phrase of business leaders for that is: “Ah, a solution in search of a problem”. In many many cases demand overwhelms supply and somebody will show up with a fraudulent solution. As witnessed by most weight loss programs, gas additives, or school reform plans.

Gossling’s bleak conclusion, that many standards emerge inspite of insufficent skill to design them well, doesn’t go far enough. There is also the common sad cenario where standards emerge years and years ahead of any demand for them.

BBC Audio: Now has all the programs of the last week available on line! I really like “Book at Bedtime”.

This is really as delightful as how
This American Life keeps
all their stuff online.