Teach your garden to weed itself

From an excerpt from Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's new book Think Like a Freak:

Van Halen's live show boasted a colossal stage, booming audio and spectacular lighting. All this required a great deal of structural support, electrical power and the like. Thus the 53-page rider, which gave point-by-point instructions to ensure that no one got killed by a collapsing stage or a short-circuiting light tower. But how could Van Halen be sure that the local promoter in each city had read the whole thing and done everything properly?

Cue the brown M&M's. As Roth tells it, he would immediately go backstage to check out the bowl of M&M's. If he saw brown ones, he knew the promoter hadn't read the rider carefully—and that "we had to do a serious line check" to make sure that the more important details hadn't been botched either.

And so it was that David Lee Roth and King Solomon both engaged in a fruitful bit of game theory—which, narrowly defined, is the art of beating your opponent by anticipating his next move.

Both men faced a similar problem: How to sift the guilty from the innocent when no one is stepping forward to profess their guilt? A person who is lying or cheating will often respond to an incentive differently than an honest person. Wouldn't it be nice if this fact could be exploited to ferret out the bad guys?

We believe it can—by tricking the guilty parties into unwittingly revealing their guilt through their own behavior. What should this trick be called? In honor of King Solomon, we'll name it as if it is a lost proverb: Teach Your Garden to Weed Itself.
 

I'd read the brown Van Halen brown M&M story before in Atul Gawande's wonderful book The Checklist Manifesto, but this excerpt contains one story I hadn't seen before, about the medieval ritual of adjudicating by some horrific ordeal.

TMac on the mound

Former NBA star Tracy McGrady is trying to make it in baseball as a pitcher. The ESPN highlight is below, but more video of his pitches can be seen at this Deadspin compilation.

He was clocking in the low to mid-80's with his fastball. Not sure if he's still building up arm strength, but even with the potential downhill plane he can generate with his 6'8" frame, that's not really going to cut it.

Still, moving from almost any of the other major U.S. sports to baseball is unbelievably difficult because so many of its skills, especially hitting and pitching, are so vastly different and specialized. Think about most major league pitchers and how terrible they look when trying to bat, and then recall that many of those players were the best player on their high school team, both as hitters and pitchers, and you realize just how complex a skill that is. It's one reason Bo Jackson was such a legend, and deservedly so.

McGrady's 6'8" frame and long arms make pitching even more difficult because of the length of his lever. Recall how hard it was early in Randy Johnson's career for him to control his pitches. It's one reason you don't see a ton of super tall pitchers in MLB.

So McGrady is likely to fail, but it's a good story.

The music biz

14. Coldplay, Radiohead and Dave Matthews are huge because they snuck in under the wire via the old system, they were the beneficiaries of big TV video play, when that meant something, before the Web obliterated it. Otherwise, they’d be Arcade Fire, which garners great reviews, wins Grammys and most people still have not heard and don’t even care about.

15. There’s tons of money in music, more than ever before, if you’re a superstar, if not, you’re starving.
 

From The Lefsetz Letter on What People Don't Want to Believe. 

Difference between peacetime and wartime

Military operations are, arguably, especially mistake-prone, because militaries aren’t like other organizations. A normal bureaucracy has a job, and it does that job all the time. Militaries, on the other hand, tend to spend most of their time not really engaged in their main purpose: fighting wars.

Teles noted James Q. Wilson’s observation about the fundamental difference between a peacetime army and a wartime army. In peacetime, it’s easy to observe inputs but impossible to observe the output -- which is to say, how ready your troops are to go out and kick some enemy butt on the battlefield. When you get into a war, this completely reverses. In the chaos of battle, it’s very difficult to know exactly what your people are doing. On the other hand, it’s relatively easy to observe whether they killed the people they were supposed to kill and took the territory they were supposed to take.

That means that the people who advance in a peacetime army are, unfortunately, not necessarily the same people you want around when the shooting breaks out.
 

Megan McArdle on why armies mess up so often. I liked this quote from Steven Teles, “In wartime, you want people who would rather ask for forgiveness than permission. In the peacetime army, it’s the opposite.”

The same applies to companies. Being in wartime is very different from being in peacetime, from the CEO level on down. Ben Horowitz writes nicely about the difference for CEO's in his great book The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

Monetizing what's scarce

One school of economic thought says that the price of goods or services should eventually drop down to the marginal cost of production, but of course there are many exceptions to that rule. A better rule is that the price of a good is whatever the market will bear, and value is quite a malleable concept.

One place where supply and demand has held up quite well is in the world of journalism where the internet has lowered the cost of distributing writing so that many folks who in a past life would have needed to admission into the journalism cartel to get an audience can now find many readers without having to work for the NYTimes or other big brand names.

As a result, more and more people have had to turn to monetizing what is truly scarce. For musicians, recorded music is easily digitized and not scarce. The value they derive from that is now negligible. What is scarce is seeing them perform live, so concert tickets continue to shoot up in price, with seats near the front of the stage, the scarcest of inventory, routinely costing upwards of $1,000 a ticket for premium acts like Jay-Z.

The scarcest resource of all is a person's time. We all have only so much of it. More and more we see notable folks monetizing their time directly. Slate + includes, among its benefits, “exclusive access to your favorite Slate writers and editors.” The brilliant Ben Thompson of the must-read Stratechery has a new membership program in which the top tier includes email access to Ben. Consider so many Kickstarter projects and how many of the perks for the highest pledge tiers involve meeting with someone in person.

Of course, this is a practice that is quite old: consider the political fundraiser, in which a presidential candidate can charge tens of thousands of dollars for a table at a dinner. Pledge enough and maybe he or she will shake your hand, take a photo with you. However, in the age of the internet, where scarcity has been reduced in so many areas, I expect we'll see more and more notables turning to direct monetization of one of the scarcest of commodities they can offer: their time.