Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Nasty polarizing rhetoric dressed up as entertainment is par for the course these days.  Mixing in the entertainment makes them particularly virulent.  James Wolcott is particularly skilled as parsing out the various patterns used in this toxic political theater.   Here for example he sketches the outlines of a nasty attack on Hillary Clinton.  In this example the libertarian attack poodle uses a bad word and then runs around in circles snapping angrily at it’s own tail (nominally punishing it’s self for such naughty behavior).  Meanwhile the other poodles stand around an yap.

As requests go “How long will it take?” is one of the tough ones. Taleb’s book Black Swan makes an thought provoking point about it. Like most of that book the underlying question is what statistical distribution the data is drawn. Naturally, that should color our expectations.

Some project durations are reasonable, Gaussian. How long you will live, for example. As the project unfolds the expected end time draws progressively closer. Delay in these projects push out the end date; yes but, you do get always closer to the finish line. Such projects can be standardized.

But many projects are unreasonable, their duration is drawn from a highly skewed distribution. Choke-a-block with extreme cases and little black swans. In this case as the project unfolds it’s end date moves further out. Each delay increases the expected time to complete the project. Taleb’s example is the refugee who imagines that each passing day brings closer the day he will return home, but as that is likely the this second kind of project, these passing days infact push out that day.

You manage these two kinds of project in very different ways. Most projects are a hybrid. The nature of hope is very different for one v.s. the other.

See also: Time to Market

It seems to me that these two are complements.  Search is outward facing and community is inward.  Search is many many short transactional relationships, like shopping, while community is deeper longer transactions - i.e. real relations.  That Google is a search company and Yahoo is a community company.  Even Facebook, for all it’s flaws, is a community company.

Advertising is more at home in a searching context, and less so in a community context.

Huh?  I don’t seem to have told the whispering hammer story.

As the marginal cost of goods decline there is some threshold where advertising can pay.  Information goods, who’s marginal cost approaches zero, are the most common commodity paid for with advertising.  But my barber gives away cheap combs, address books, key chains, credit card magnifiers, and a half dozen other things.  His phone number is printed on them.  I picked up the bag I carry my computer around in at an Apache Software Foundation conference some years ago.  It was paid for by advertisers.  I will note in passing that I carry both my barber’s comb and ASF bag because of my enthusiasm.

So the question arises why advertising doesn’t appear in some venues where the marginal costs are extremely low.  For example why did Eudora’s Ad supported email client fail? Why doesn’t Microsoft sell a discounted version of Word that features embedded advertisements.  I think the reason is because people find it extremely irritating to have their concentration interrupted by their tools.  Advertising is intolerable when in the flow of real work.

My summary of this insight was a joke.  Presumably the marginal cost of a hammer is really quite low.  Not much higher than a plastic comb.  So someday soon we should see the whispering hammer.  As you lift it to strike the nail it would whisper advertisements for band aids and stainless steel nails into your ear.

Well, so it maybe that search v.s. community is one of those complementary balances that shakes out with one side being commoditized while the other garnering all the profits.  I don’t know.  But commerce does have a significant corrosive effect on community and this appears to be more of the same.