Letters Remain

  • The Wadsworth Constant: Ignore 30% of Everything

    I’ll start with a story.

    Last year my girlfriend and I watched the pilot episode of a new TV show and were immediately hooked. The pilot episode was refreshingly complex and forced us to guess missing plot details continuously: it’s adventurous to make your audience work so hard during a pilot, we surmised.

    We later discovered that, due to a technical glitch, we actually missed the first fifteen minutes of the show (about 30%). The ‘complete’ version of the episode was less satisfying.

    Last year Steve Yegge wrote about life at Amazon.com and what it’s like working under Jeff Bezos. On the topic of presenting to Bezos, Yegge gave this tip: delete every third paragraph.  Why?

    Bezos is so goddamned smart that you have to turn it into a game for him or he’ll be bored and annoyed with you. That was my first realization about him. […]

    So you have to start tearing out whole paragraphs, or even pages, to make it interesting for him. He will fill in the gaps himself without missing a beat. And his brain will have less time to get annoyed with the slow pace of your brain.

    Around the same time as Yegge’s posting, a Reddit user known as Wadsworth pointed out that the first 30% of “nearly every video in the universe” can safely be skipped. As such things go, this soon became a YouTube URL parameter: just add &wadsworth=1 to skip the first third of the video.

    This ‘law’ soon became known as the Wadsworth Constant. It works.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Personal Pronouns as Relationship and Company Indicators

    The personal pronouns used by couples during “conflictive marital interactions” are reliable indicators of relationship quality and marital satisfaction, according to a study tracking 154 couples over 23 years. The study showed that ‘We-words‘ (our, we, etc.) were indicative of a more positive relationship than ‘Me- and You-words‘ (I, you, etc.) (doi).

    Using We-ness language implies a shared identification between spouses, even when the conversation is focused on an area of conflict. Consistent with this, We-ness was associated with more positive and less negative emotion behaviors and with lower cardiovascular arousal. In contrast, Separateness language implies a greater sense of independence and distance in the relationship. Compared with We-ness, Separateness was associated with a very different set of marital qualities including more negative emotional behavior and greater marital dissatisfaction.

    Similarly, the personal pronouns used by CEOs in their annual shareholder letters provide a useful way of predicting future company performance. No doubt gleaned from the Rittenhouse Rankings Candor Survey, this is from Geoff Colvin’s book, Talent is Overrated:

    Laura Rittenhouse, an unusual type of financial analyst, counts the number of times the word “I” occurs in annual letters to shareholders from corporate CEOs, contending that this and other evidence in the letters helps predict company performance (basic finding: Egomaniacs are bad news).

    via Barking Up the Wrong Tree (1 2)

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Strangers and Friends: A Shared History and Less Graciousness

    Ryan Holiday asks a very good question: why do we extend patience and tolerance to strangers, while simultaneously treating those closest to us less graciously?

    It’s an interesting question with some equally interesting possible answers (is it a subconscious and inefficient way of attempting to ease our daily lives by telling those we spend the most time with how we want to be treated?). I like the conclusory piece of advice: we should give everyone “the graciousness of meeting them fresh each time”.

    Some weirdo says something to you in the grocery store and you smile and nod your head, “Yup!” Just to avoid a scene right? You have a meeting with a sales rep and indulge the friendly but pointless chitchat even though you hate it. But a friend mispronounces a word and we leap to correct them. Your girlfriend tells a boring story and you’ve got to say something about it, you’ve got to get short with her. What kind of bullshit is this? We give the benefit of courtesy to everybody but the people who earned it.

    Think of how much patience we have for total strangers and acquaintances. But what a short fuse we have for the actual people in our life. In the course of our everyday lives, our priorities are so very backwards. We do our best to impress people we’ll never see again and take for granted people we see all the time. We’re respectful in our business lives, casual and careless in our personal. We punish closeness with criticism, reward unfamiliarity with politeness.

    This is a great example of why I read Ryan’s work: he’s adept at pointing out the everyday hypocrisies that we rarely notice.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Entrepreneurship and the Possibility of Real Failure

    In 2007 Vinicius Vacanti quit his highly-paid job in finance to take on life as an entrepreneur. In a short post describing his reasons for doing so, Vacanti says that most of us haven’t faced the possibility of real failure, and entrepreneurship is a way to test your limits by attempting to create something of real value:

    A scary idea started creeping into my thoughts: what if I could build something? Wouldn’t I always wonder? Wouldn’t I regret it? Wouldn’t it eat away at me over the years?

    And, that’s when I realized that I didn’t actually know if I was good enough because I hadn’t really failed in life (at least not professionally). Most people don’t really fail. We tend to take the job that we think we’ll succeed in. We are hesitant to reach. And, if we do reach and succeed, then we don’t reach again.

    The only way to know how good you might be at something is to fail trying it.

    And, that’s when I decided it was time to test my limits. It was time to really reach. It was time to quit my safe job and walk straight into almost certain startup failure.

    There’s nothing mind-blowing here, admittedly — I just love how Vacanti phrased this.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Together, Unconscious: We All Sleep

    One constant that connects us all in some way is that–at the end of our day–we lie down and slowly slip into a state of reduced or absent consciousness and become at the mercy of our fellow man. Every day we fall asleep: we have done so for millions of years and will continue to do so.

    This humbling thought was inspired by David Cain’s short disquisition on how the act of sleeping is something that unites us together, all around the world. David’s post didn’t quite take the route I was expecting after reading the (wonderful) excerpt below1, but is still definitely worth a read.

    It’s an interesting quirk of Mother Nature — that she insists on taking us down to the ground like that, every day, no matter who we are. For all of us, the act of leaving consciousness is the same, it’s just our settings and situations — which bookend that unconsciousness — where we differ.

    via Link Banana

    1 I was expecting the post to concentrate on the first sentence (leaving consciousness), rather than the second sentence (sleep as a connector).

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Dark Patterns for Marketers, or: Practical Behavioural Economics

    Taking a systematic approach to implementing findings from behavioural economics into a sales cycle can “unlock significant value”, according to McKinsey’s Ned Welch. To help business do exactly that, Welch–in what, at times, reads a bit like a ‘dark patterns guide for marketers’–has written an article looking at four practical techniques from behavioural economics that marketers should use to persuade purchasers. The techniques:

    1. Make a product’s cost less painful.
    2. Harness the power of a default option.
    3. Don’t overwhelm consumers with choice.
    4. Position your preferred option carefully.

    There’s not much new here, but the summaries are nice and succinct. From item four, I found this bit of grocery store choice architecture interesting:

    Another way to position choices relates not to the products a company offers but to the way it displays them. Our research suggests, for instance, that ice cream shoppers in grocery stores look at the brand first, flavor second, and price last. Organizing supermarket aisles according to way consumers prefer to buy specific products makes customers both happier and less likely to base their purchase decisions on price—allowing retailers to sell higher-priced, higher-margin products. (This explains why aisles are rarely organized by price.) For thermostats, by contrast, people generally start with price, then function, and finally brand. The merchandise layout should therefore be quite different.

    via Nudge

    (If you don’t have a McKinsey account, you can read the article here or here (PDF).)

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The ‘Bad Version’ and How to Tax the Rich

    A ‘bad version’ is a technique used by television writers to inspire creativity when experiencing a creative block. The technique involves writing a purposefully awful section of plot as a way of helping the writer find creativity and, eventually, the ideal solution: it’s a way of “nudging your imagination to someplace better”.

    In The Wall Street Journal, Scott Adams offers some “imagined solutions for the government’s fiscal dilemma” — bad versions of ways to incentivising the rich to willfully pay more tax. Those incentives:

    • Time: Anyone who pays taxes at a rate above some set amount gets to use the car pool lane without a passenger. Or perhaps the rich are allowed to park in handicapped-only spaces.
    • Gratitude: The government makes it a condition that anyone applying for social services has to write a personal thank-you note to a nearby rich person […] It’s easy to hate the generic overspending of the government. It’s harder to begrudge medical care to someone who thanks you personally.
    • Incentives: Suppose the tax code is redesigned so that the rich only pay taxes to fund social services, such as health care and social security. This gives the rich an incentive to find ways to reduce the need for those services.
      Meanwhile, the middle class would be in charge of funding the military. That feels right. The country generally doesn’t go to war unless the middle-class majority is on board.
    • Shared Pain: I doubt that the rich will agree to higher taxes until some serious budget cutting is happening at the same time. That makes the sacrifice seem shared. […] Change the debate from arguing about which programs and how much to cut, and instead to do what the private sector has been doing for decades: Pull a random yet round number out of your ear, let’s say a 10% cut, just for argument’s sake, and apply it across the board. No exceptions.
    • Power: Give the rich two votes apiece in any election. That’s double the power of other citizens. But don’t worry that it will distort election results. There aren’t that many rich people, and they are somewhat divided in their opinions, just like the rest of the world.
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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Common Cooking Mistakes

    We all make mistakes when cooking, right? Cooking Light says that “the creative cook can often cook her way out of a kitchen error, but the smart cook aims to prevent such creativity from being necessary”. In order to help you along your way to “smart cook” status, Cooking Light compiled a list of forty-three common cooking mistakes you can learn to avoid.

    Such mistakes include: slicing meat with the grain, not ‘shocking’ vegetables once they’ve reached the desired texture, and not letting meats get to room temperature before putting them in the oven. I need to pay particular attention to common mistake number one:

    1. You don’t taste as you go.

    Result: The flavors or textures of an otherwise excellent dish are out of balance or unappealing.

    For most cooks, tasting is automatic, but when it’s not, the price can be high. Recipes don’t always call for the “right” amount of seasoning, cooking times are estimates, and results vary depending on your ingredients, your stove, altitude…and a million other factors. Your palate is the control factor.

    via b3ta

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Common Misconceptions About Publishing and Writing

    After realising that “many people don’t have the first clue about how the publishing business works — or even what it is“, the somewhat prolific science fiction writer Charlie Stross decided to do something about it. The result was a series titled Common Misconceptions About Publishing.

    This is admittedly only one author’s viewpoint and set of opinions, but Stross’ series of sometimes lengthy but always insightful essays expose the innards of publishing (at least, it seems to). Posts in the series include:

    Something that particularly struck me was this look at author income inequality:

    Researchers [calculated the] Gini coefficient for authors’ incomes — a measure of income inequality, where 0.0 means everyone takes an identical slice of the combined cake, and 1.0 indicates that a single individual takes all the cake and everyone else starves. Let me provide a yardstick: the UK had a Gini coefficient of 0.36 in 2009, the widest ever gap between rich and poor — while the USA, at 0.408, had the most unequal income distribution in the entire developed world. The Gini coefficient among writers in the UK in 2004-05 was a whopping great 0.74. As the researchers note:

    Writing is shown to be a very risky profession with median earnings of less than one quarter of the typical wage of a UK employee. There is significant inequality within the profession, as indicated by very high Gini Coefficients. The top 10% of authors earn more than 50% of total income, while the bottom 50% earn less than 10% of total income.

    This is the same Gini coefficient as Namibia in 1993 (the worst in the world at the time, according to the World Bank).

    via The Browser

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Intricacies and Joys of Arabic

    I imagine that most people with a passing interest in linguistics read Maciej Cegłowski’s short essay in praise of the Arabic language when it was ‘rediscovered’ by popular social networks a few months ago.

    As one who has studied Arabic (albeit MSA and only for nine months or so), the essay brought back fond memories of struggling to comprehend the strange-yet-wonderful intricacies of the Arabic language. Here are just a few the ways that Arabic “twists healthy minds”, according to Cegłowski:

    • The Root/Pattern System: Nearly all Arabic words consist of a three-consonant root slotted into a pattern of vowels and helper consonants.
    • Broken Plurals: Most of the time to make a plural you have to change the structure of the word quite dramatically.
    • The Writing System: The Arabic writing system is exotic looking but easy to learn, which is a rare combination.
    • Dual: Arabic has a grammatical dual — a special form for talking about two of something.
    • The Feminine Plural: Formal Arabic distinguishes between groups composed entirely of women and groups that contain one or more men.
    • Crazy Agreement Rules: e.g. [Maciej’s] absolute favorite is that all non-human plurals are grammatically feminine singular
    • Funky Numbers: ٩ ٨ ٧ ٦ ٥ ٤ ٣ ٢ ١ – The names of the numbers come with truly terrifying agreement rules, like “if the number is greater than three but less than eleven, it must take the opposite gender of the noun that it modifies”.
    • Diglossia: This is where it really helps to love language study.
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    Lloyd Morgan