Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

One of the many things I learned reading the literature on standards is how they tend to set floors on behaviors. I was reminded of that from this posting from Kevin Drum

I want to highlight a single passage from the Roger Lowenstein article that I blogged about below. It’s about how investment bankers create complex financial instruments that receive high ratings:

Credit markets are not continuous; a bond that qualifies, though only by a hair, as investment grade is worth a lot more than one that just fails….The challenge to investment banks is to design securities that just meet the rating agencies’ tests….”Every agency has a model available to bankers that allows them to run the numbers until they get something they like and send it in for a rating,” a former Moody’s expert in securitization says.

Go ahead and call me a rube, but is this for real?
This is a bit like being surprised that the lunch on your airplane flight bears no resemblance to what would pass muster as lunch at mom’s house. In fact I love that the airline industry at one point had to convene their industrial standards body only to set a standard for what counted as a sandwich; since some carriers handing out “sandwichs” while others were actually providing a sandwich. Of course once you set the standard everybody in the industry pretty quickly starts handing out the minimum meal that meets the standard.

This kind of gaming of standards is well standard. One way to temper the effect is to keep the rules fuzzy. It is oddly perverse that if you give the regulators wide latitude in their enforcement you can undermine this gaming; since the regulated players will then have to strive to overshoot the standard sufficiently to avoid the risk of failing to meet it. The players will then complain that the rules aren’t clear and that the regulators are capricious. Another trick is to make the standard a bit competitive so only top N% get the rating. The judging will give an element of fuzziness, and it also creates striving for improvement. But then tends to create demands for the judging to be more transparent - a proxy for the return of the bright line - in the name of fairness.

I like to talk about leveraging the talent on the other side of the Internet, or talent scraping. That talent is only just recently discovered. We are in a kind of gold rush to figure out how to mine it. I’ve called that mining industry talent-scrapping, in part to suggest how it’s like a whale filtering plankton from nutrient rich waters.
Talent is usually considered scarce. But now it’s abundant. But now it is different in form than in the past. More diffuse. We used to concentrate it into locations, universities or cities, but now it’s just out there; on the other side of the net. So most of our intuitions are wrong about how to manage it or accumulate it.

We are in a curious situation where you have a choice between abundant talent v.s. scarce talent - but where we have very refined craft knowledge about how to mange scarce talent (think standardized testing, university diplomas, publication pipelines) v.s. very immature craft knowledge about how to tap diffuse talent pools.

That combo scarce-but-skilled vs. abundant-but-unskilled must be a common situation when a new option space break open. It is notable that their is scarcity on both sides of that equation; but they are of a very different nature. One is a resource scarcity, and the other is a lack of expertise - an information good.
When people talk about the attention economy I’ve tended to presume they were saying that attention is scarce. Certainly my attention is a limited resource. I certainly have a whole bag of tricks for managing that scarce resource.

Clay Shirky takes a run at this problem in a most excellent recent essay where-in he introduces the delightful term “cognitive surplus.” He gets there in a most marvelous way that is just hip slapping funny.

The idea of an attention economy is that there is some gross national product of talent out there. That it’s like the water supply of a big city, a pipe flows into the city of skill, and there is only a certain amount to be had - so you really ought to be careful what you spend it on.

I recall how when back in the 1960s there was a drought around NYC and people started talking about water conservation. We used to get a glass of water automatically when every you sat down in a restaurant and they stopped that. I recall hearing how silly that was since meanwhile the water authority came to discover that rivers of water were leaking from the system; entire pipelines were flowing hundreds of miles only be dumped into the Hudson.

To adopt Clay’s term cognition is the water of the attention economy and his point is that we just maybe we are pouring most of the talent on the planet into the abyss.

Talent isn’t scarce anymore, the real question is where the hell has all the talent been going all these years. Clay has some suggestions, and possibly most interesting to me was the hint that society in the past has struggled with this very same question; it’s “the idle hands - the devils playground” problem. And for God sake don’t miss the punch line at the end of his essay!

Some other amusing little hacks on Google App Engine.

I like LunchStr, for coordinating the office lunch expedition.

Dot and Simple Sketch reminds me of the sheep market, talent scraping example; which is recursive of course since google app engine is a fine example of developer network as talent scrapper.

Of course you have to have your standard little apps. Tinyurl clones: grulx.com, Links’R'US, and hurl.

There are some slightly larger applications.

And some larger ones, like a chat rooms provider.
One of the app team’s example apps makes Google an OpenId provider, app here - it’s only version 1, which is lame, even useless.

Most of the really complex stuff is still Google authored. Their directory is filling up fast, including some spam entries. They already have preferential attachment bias in their ranking.

Finally a complain! The user nicknames appearing all over these application are actually revealing people’s email addresses, just add @gmail.com. Feel free to star this defect complaining about how all these sweet little applications are revealing user-email addresses unnecessarily. (Did somebody say oauth?)

Some fun things are popping up in Google App Engine.

I like sprunge (discuss) a tool for command line jockeys.  By example:

$ echo Hi there | sprunge
http://sprunge.us/eUdF
$ curl http://sprunge.us/eUdF
Hi there
$ uuencode foo.jpg < ost.jpg | sprunge
http://sprunge.us/WJHN
$ ls foo.jpg
ls: foo.jpg: No such file or directory
$ curl http://sprunge.us/WJHN | uudecode
% Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  116k  100  116k    0     0  59640      0  0:00:02  0:00:02 –:–:– 68675
$ ls -l foo.jpg ost.jpg
-rw-r–r–  1 bhyde  wheel  86669 Apr 22 08:34 foo.jpg
-rw-r–r–  1 bhyde  wheel  86669 Apr 22 08:31 ost.jpg
$ cat ~/bin/sprunge
#!/bin/sh
exec curl -F ’sprunge=< -' http://sprunge.us

Using uuencode made me happy!

It’s fun observing what people are using Google App Engine for.

Sprunge.us provides a pastebin service which you use from the command line.  For example I put this script in my PATH:

#!/bin/sh
exec curl -F ’sprunge=< -' http://sprunge.us'

At that point you can post things by doing

#!/bin/sh
exec curl -F ’sprunge=<-' http://sprunge.us
http://sprunge.us/