The interim strategy trap

We say we intend to hire and train great people, but in the interim, we'll have to settle for cheap and available. We say we'd like to give back, but of course, in the interim, first we have to get...
 

This interim strategy, the notion that ideals and principles are for later, but right now, all the focus and resources have to be put into the emergency of getting successful—it doesn't work.
 

It doesn't work because it's always the interim. It never seems like the right time to stop doing what worked and start doing what we said was important.
 

From Seth Godin on the trap of the interim strategy. As someone once said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Call me Nostradamus

When Meerkat and then Periscope had the tech world buzzing about live video streaming through mobile phones, I wrote a piece on how the live video streaming space would play out. One bullet in that timeline:

27. Facebook adds a live video streaming button to its app, then shortly after that spins it out into a separate app altogether. They name it Live, and some other company that launched an app called Live that did the same thing a year earlier complains that Facebook stole their name, but no one really pays any attention.
 

From TechCrunch:

Before Periscope and Meerkat jumpstarted the mobile live-streaming craze, Facebook was already quietly working on its own way to let public figures broadcast live videos to their fans. Today, Facebook is launching “Live” as a feature in its Mentions app that’s only available to celebrities with a verified Page.
 

VIPs can start a Live broadcast that’s posted to the News Feed, watch comments overlaid in real-time on their stream, and then make the recording permanently available for viewing. Stars like The Rock and Serena Williams will stream today.
 

Okay, so maybe no one is giving Facebook guff about the name, but I'm still going to give myself a partial high five.

In a post about Venmo and payments as a social network in April, I wrote:

Speaking of the pile of poop emoji, it seems only a matter of time until someone releases an app that allows you to broadcast when you are taking a poop. It should be a mobile app just called Poop. I leave it to the design geniuses at Apple to figure out what type of haptic feedback a poop notification should emit on the Apple Watch.
 

From Mashable this past Friday:

A new chat app called Pooductive aims to create a miniature social network specifically for anyone who gets bored while they are doing a number two, and want to talk to people in the same position.
 

Created by two student developers, the free iPhone app, which began life as a failed Kickstarter, facilitates one-on-one or group chats based on your location. You can choose to message people nearby or be connected with users in other cities or countries.
 

"The fact that there is only little to do whilst tending to ‘number two’ is common knowledge, and truly a first world problem," the developers write on Pooductive's website.
 

Poop is clearly a superior name to Pooductive, so the only reason I didn't nail the name yet again was poor branding instincts on the part of the developers. The sample screenshots of the app in the iTunes App Store are something for the archives, someone actually dreamt up this imaginary chat between two people sitting on the toilet.

I honestly don't know which prediction I'm prouder of.

Respecting the preferences of the poor

One feature, in particular, stands out. The life of the rural poor is extremely boring, with repetitive back-breaking tasks interrupted by periods of enforced idleness; it is far removed from Marie-Antoinettish idylls of Arcadia. As the authors remark, villages do not have movie theatres, concert halls, places to sit and watch interesting strangers go by and frequently not even a lot of work. This may sound rather demeaning to the poor, like Marx's comment about “the idiocy of rural life”.
 

But it is important to understand because, as the authors remark, “things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor”. They tell the story of meeting a Moroccan farmer, Oucha Mbarbk. They ask him what would he do if he had a bit more money. Buy some more food, came the reply. What would he do if he had even more money? Buy better, tastier food. “We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family when we noticed a television, a parabolic antenna and a DVD player.” Why had he bought all this if he didn't have enough money for food? “He laughed and said ‘Oh, but television is more important than food.'”
 

Nutritionists and aid donors often forget this. To them, it is hard to imagine anything being more important than food. And the poorer you are, surely, the more important food must be. So if people do not have enough, it cannot be because they have chosen to spend the little they have on something else, such as a television, a party, or a wedding. Rather it must be because they have nothing and need help. Yet well-intentioned programmes often break down on the indifference of the beneficiaries. People don't eat the nutritious foods they are offered, or take their vitamin supplements. They stick with what makes life more bearable, even if it is sweet tea and DVDs.
 

From a piece at the Economist kicking off a discussion of the book Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. When people throw around the phrase “first world problem” the presumption is that the poor are so many rungs down on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs that they couldn't possibly have the mindshare to contemplate such a frivolous dilemma. In fact, though, the marginal value of something we consider frivolous may be greater for the poor than for the wealthy. This has been one of the greatest breakthroughs in my understanding of the poor and how they think about where to allocate their next dollar.

I've written about this previously in The Psychological Poverty Trap and The Persistence of Poverty. The latter looked at the work of Charles Karelis, who believes our economic models of the poor are broken.

When we're poor, Karelis argues, our economic worldview is shaped by deprivation, and we see the world around us not in terms of goods to be consumed but as problems to be alleviated. This is where the bee stings come in: A person with one bee sting is highly motivated to get it treated. But a person with multiple bee stings does not have much incentive to get one sting treated, because the others will still throb. The more of a painful or undesirable thing one has (i.e. the poorer one is) the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems.
 

Poverty and wealth, by this logic, don't just fall along a continuum the way hot and cold or short and tall do. They are instead fundamentally different experiences, each working on the human psyche in its own way. At some point between the two, people stop thinking in terms of goods and start thinking in terms of problems, and that shift has enormous consequences. Perhaps because economists, by and large, are well-off, he suggests, they've failed to see the shift at all.
 

If Karelis is right, antipoverty initiatives championed all along the ideological spectrum are unlikely to work - from work requirements, time-limited benefits, and marriage and drug counseling to overhauling inner-city education and replacing ghettos with commercially vibrant mixed-income neighborhoods. It also means, Karelis argues, that at one level economists and poverty experts will have to reconsider scarcity, one of the most basic ideas in economics.
 

Karelis' thinking is summarized in his book The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can't Help the Poor.

Karelis' ideas are one possible explanation behind the effectiveness of Sam Tsemberis' approach towards solving chronic homelessness. Pathways to Housing, the organization Tsemberis founded, believes in giving the homeless housing first, no strings attached, rather than forcing the homeless to jump through a series of hoops before they qualify.

Housing First was developed to serve the chronically homelessness who suffer from serious psychiatric disabilities and addictions. Traditionally, the chronically homeless live in a cycle of surviving on the street, being admitted to hospitals, shelters, or jails and then going back to the street. The stress of surviving each day in this cycle puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the individual’s psychiatric and physical health. “Living in the street,” one Pathways to Housing client said, “It makes you crazy.”
 

The traditional structures in place to “help” the homeless population often make things worse, particularly for those who suffer from mental illness. Shelters and transitional living programs often require people to pass sobriety tests and other hurdles before they can be considered for housing programs. Housing is considered a reward for good behavior instead of a tool to help stabilize a homeless-person’s mental health. This attitude cuts out the people who need the support the most, effectively punishing them for their conditions. 
 

Respecting the preferences of the poor means understanding that the logic behind many of their purchase decisions may be very rational under a happiness-maximization framework. That we judge them to be otherwise is more a failure of empathy than anything else.

Science is hard

Taken together, headlines like these might suggest that science is a shady enterprise that spits out a bunch of dressed-up nonsense. But I’ve spent months investigating the problems hounding science, and I’ve learned that the headline-grabbing cases of misconduct and fraud are mere distractions. The state of our science is strong, but it’s plagued by a universal problem: Science is hard — really fucking hard.
 

If we’re going to rely on science as a means for reaching the truth — and it’s still the best tool we have — it’s important that we understand and respect just how difficult it is to get a rigorous result. I could pontificate about all the reasons why science is arduous, but instead I’m going to let you experience one of them for yourself. Welcome to the wild world of p-hacking.
 

A very important piece at 538.com on p-values and the likely prevalence of p-hacking.

The p-value reveals almost nothing about the strength of the evidence, yet a p-value of 0.05 has become the ticket to get into many journals. “The dominant method used [to evaluate evidence] is the p-value,” said Michael Evans, a statistician at the University of Toronto, “and the p-value is well known not to work very well.”
 

...
 

But that doesn’t mean researchers are a bunch of hucksters, a la LaCour. What it means is that they’re human. P-hacking and similar types of manipulations often arise from human biases. “You can do it in unconscious ways — I’ve done it in unconscious ways,” Simonsohn said. “You really believe your hypothesis and you get the data and there’s ambiguity about how to analyze it.” When the first analysis you try doesn’t spit out the result you want, you keep trying until you find one that does. (And if that doesn’t work, you can always fall back on HARKing — hypothesizing after the results are known.)
 

The larger lessons apply not just to science. Journalism is hard, especially investigative journalism. You can spend months reporting a piece only to find no real striking narrative, no clear conclusions of note. And yet, if you have to fill a certain number of pages every day...

In tech, really successful and/or counterintuitive A/B test results are passed around like koans. However, anyone who has done enough A/B testing in the tech world knows that most experiments show no statistically significant results. To design a test that won't show the obvious and that will reveal some hidden truth is not easy.

All data suggests most of us should hold our unproven beliefs more loosely than we're inclined to. Who first came up with the saying “Strong opinions, weakly held” (sometimes “loosely” is substituted). Most of us are good at the first half, not so good at the second, a dangerous combination when it turns out that truth is low yield.

Some things might help. One is something of a reference that is a collection of links to all studies that have tried to answer a particular question along with a summary of the current state of thinking. For example, does drinking a glass of red wine a day improve your health? Why are Americans obese? Does eating a multivitamin every day really do anything for your health? What's the best exercise to improve core strength? And so on. Imagine something like the genetic offspring of Vox, Wikipedia, and Richard Feynman.

Another is something like Github but for research data from all these studies. 538's small experiment widget in this piece was a simplified example of the type of tool that might enable more people to get experience and a deeper understanding of the craft of designing studies and the slippery nature of truth. Also, the more people that can analyze a data set, the greater the likelihood that biases of different types balance each other out and that mistakes are caught. Strong hypotheses can often lead one to control for the very variable that explains a result.

The web is so sprawling, information so infinite now, we need more structured ways to traverse it intelligibly. It's no coincidence one of the words that's entered our vocabulary this past year is “explainer” (here is an explainer on the term explainer). We have so much flow, we need more stock.

Damning with painterly praise

That’s the kind of widget The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is: so good it’s practically defective.
 

This wasn’t something I wanted to see. The posters promise Armie Hammer and Henry Cavill, two actors who are like day-old bread. You practically have to give them away. They look like they’ve been attacked by a stylist from the fall issue of any men’s magazine. Down at the bottom of the poster, standing in front of an Aston Martin and looking like a flight attendant vacationing in a Paul Bowles novel, is Alicia Vikander, a Swede who’ll be shoved in our faces until we love her. Also, and not for nothing: This is a remake of a spy show that ran for four seasons on NBC near the height of the Cold War, a film version of which has been failing to launch for decades. Exactly no one was asking for this.
 

So it’s a surprise to discover that the bar for this movie is low enough to conga under. Ritchie has gotten everyone to agree not to take any of this seriously, including the person responsible for keeping an eye on Hammer’s Russian accent.
 

Wesley Morris on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Here he in the same article on a movie I've never heard of, Cop Car.

From the car emerges Kevin Bacon, with a graying, rusty mustache and nary a line of dialogue, looking every bit the hypothetical adult outcome of Sam Elliott’s decision to do in vitro with himself.
 

When Grantland first arrived on the scene, I could read every article published on the site. Today I can barely keep up with a fraction of what's there, but it's still a wellspring of great writing.

Unfortunately, I have a sinking feeling that despite its popularity, new media economics put Grantland in no man's land: not targeted enough to be a one-man niche, not large enough to collect enough tax revenue to survive as an independent country. In barbell economics, the one in the middle is left holding a lot of weight.

I take solace in the fact that most of the talent there will always find work.