stuckk.net

Toxo is the craziest parasite you'll hear about all day

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 01:22:00 -0500

Long time readers of stuckk are probably aware by now that I’m fascinated by neuroscience, evolutionary biology and philosophy of mind. So it’s no surprise that the recent story on Edge.org about Toxoplasma caught my eye.

Toxo is a parasite that can only reproduce in the guts of cats. The parasite exits its host cat in its feces, which (who knew) gets eaten by rodents. Rodents get eaten by cats, and so the cycle continues. So that’s kinda cool because it’s gross, but what makes it interesting is what toxo does to the rodents it inhabits.

Rodents have a natural revulsion to the smell of cat urine. This is an “oh no I might get eaten” revulsion, not a “dude clean up your side of the room” revulsion. Anyway, toxo flips a switch (lots of switches?) in the brains of rodents that makes them ridiculously attracted to cat pee. Turns out at least in males it’s the sexual channel. Yes, that’s right — rats become sexually aroused by the smell of cat pee and go check it out.

This of course leads to the rodent getting eaten a lot more often and toxo getting a free ride back into the cat guts it calls home. The circle of life.

This isn’t the first parasite to change the brains of its host. Grasshoppers get turned suicidal by some types of worms. It’s really crazy stuff. This one is interesting because it affects humans as well. In tropical locales, often more than 50% of people are infected. Pregnant women are evidently told to be wary of cats because if toxo gets into the system of an infant it can wreak havoc. We think that it doesn’t have an effect in adults, or at least we used to.

Turns out people with traces of toxo are way more likely to be in car crashes involving reckless speeding. Three to four times more likely. It seems that whatever sort of fear process that gets turned off in rodents wrt cats also affects us — makes us a bit less fearful in cars.

But it gets even weirder. Being infected by toxo increases your risk of schizophrenia. Additionally, giving toxo-infected rats schizophrenia drugs makes them less attracted to cat urine. There’s a real suggestion here that the “crazy cat lady” trope might be a real thing — just a severe toxo infection.

Just one more thought. Humans have tons of bacteria in our stomachs that help us digest stuff. Assume they implement the mechanism of hunger — that is, they let us know when we want to eat. Are our desires for, say, a PB&J at 1AM less ours for that fact? I’d say certainly not. Yet our desire to be surrounded by cat urine seems alien and imposed. I’ve long argued against a notion of medicine that references some normal state of affairs but when it comes to changes in one’s desires I think it’s really difficult to say what sorts of things we should regard as normal changes in behavior wrt changing circumstance (e.g. changing religion to marry someone) and what changes we should regard as coercion.

Cryonics and personal identity

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 01:16:10 -0500

Some people think that they could achieve immortality by “uploading” their consciousness to a computer. Roughly, the intuition is that a computer could execute the same function as the brain yielding an entity with the same memories and the same basic personality and other psychological characteristics.

Bryan Caplan thinks that’s crazy, and I doubt he’s alone in having that reaction. It just so happens that I’ve been spending some time reading about the philosophy of personal identity recently, and it turns out that some of our best ideas about what matters for survival are consistent with the belief that “uploading” is a way of surviving.

Locke thought two people were the same if and only if one had the memories and experiences of the other. There’s been a lot of development of the idea. One modern version is the so called Psychological Criterion according to which two people are the same person if they have overlapping memories, beliefs, goals, character traits or intentions.

The issue is challenging and really important. If survival is possible in this way, then that’s going to have huge implications for how we organize society.

Developmental surprises

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 16:17:05 -0500

Making aid effective is difficult. We get it wrong a lot; sometimes that means we just didn’t help much, but sometimes that means we made it worse. The MIT Poverty Action Lab has a list of “best buys,” that is, interventions that have proven to be successful and really cost effective too. Most are the sort of things you might expect, but some seem a bit odd.

Deworming in schools is really effective and costs 50 cents per child. Not only do these kids avoid painful and debilitating parasites but they also go to school about 25% more. Effective, cheap and about what you’d expect.

Quotas for women in politics seem like something progressives might like, but would have little effect on development. Turns out women are good at spending on cool public goods that women want like clean roads and water. They also improve the political participation of women for obvious reasons. The development literature consistently winds up saying that giving women more rights and more power is good for countries not just because they deserve it but because it improves the lives of everyone.

But turns out giving free school uniforms is good too. They reduce school dropout rates and teen childbearing. It seems like schools all require them, so giving them for free reduces the costs of going to school pretty directly. You might also imagine that they remind people about school on a more daily basis by being a symbol of it in the home. That’s just speculation, but I’d be interested in a comparison of giving money equivalent to buying school uniforms (including the cost of travel and time to buy it) and the uniforms themselves.

The rest are mostly obvious — subsidizing schools, bednets, vaccines and remedial reading classes. Another thing that’s key to note is that these should all be fairly uncontroversial interventions. No one can argue that better health or more access to education isn’t a good thing, while a lot of our policy interventions are really hard to get right and wind up screwing things up.

Last it’s also important to note that these are direct interventions in the sense that they don’t rely on the governments of African nations. That makes them both more politically palatable there and probably more effective.

LHC warming up

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:36:39 -0500

People are getting excited about the Large Hadron Collider again. When it comes to large dramatic science machines like the Hubble telescope or the Very Large Array, it’s hard not to get excited. It’s clear that we have a lot of romance about space, and that physics is a very prestigious field — name four physicists and four chemists or four biologists and I can bet you’ll be a lot quicker with the first — but I also think that we’re impressed just because it’s big.

My hunch is that things that Craig Venter are doing with synthetic biology are probably significantly more important to humanity the next few decades, and once people realize exactly what we’re doing these days, I think there’s going to be a shock. But because it’s a private enterprise and because it operates on the really small instead of the really big I don’t think we pay it as much attention.

The manhunt for Evan Ratliff

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:16:26 -0500

Wired has a writeup of a project they set up wherein one of their writers attempted to shed his identity entirely and build a new life undetected while his editor at Wired organized a internet and real-life-wide manhunt to track him down. Ultimately he was found out, but it’s a fun story and well worth the read.

Some parts that I found interesting: a really good way to disguise yourself if you’re a hip young writer for Wired is to become less attractive — going bald, gaining weight or looking generally slubby. Also, using Tor and maybe some additional proxying just to be sure is pretty effective at anonymizing your behavior on the internet. It helps not to be really engaged with social media; don’t go making a twitter or a facebook account. Fake business cards and a credit card can be a substitute for ID in most places.

I’m not entirely sure how society feels about people who want to disappear, as it were. We obviously romanticize the notion, and I think we sort of want to live in a society that has that option, but it’s obviously hurtful to the people with whom you’ve formed emotional connections. Evan’s experience reveals that it’s not so plesant to be the person hiding either. He complains a lot about being lonely and tired of suspecting everyone.

It also seems almost impossible to form any sort of authentic relationship with other people. Imagine how often you mention something that happened in your somewhat distant past? That sounds absolutely exhausting to me, and I’m sure it alienates you wrt talking to other people. In short, to all of you who were worried about me suddenly exiting someday, fear not. It doesn’t seem like a good way to live life, though it’s of course still sort of interesting to read about.

I’ll only add one more thing: in this instance I think the internet was valuable to the manhunters much less for the information about Ratliff it made available than for the communication and coordination it enabled. Things like emailing the glutein-free pizza places in New Orleans from across the globe were really key in actually finding him. That seems to me much more challenging than getting clues from a twitter account or something like that.

Utilitarianism and the organ lottery

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 01:22:40 -0500

Is it ever OK to kill one person to save five? What if it’s just a random person on the street? What if it’s a societal institution that we all sign on to in the same way that we agree to taxes or the draft? The proposal to create an organ lottery has been around for a long time now. That is, a random societal lottery like the draft lottery that would randomly select among people with healthy organs. If someone’s “organ card” were selected, then she would be killed and her organs given to someone who needed them to survive.

It seems like utilitarians like Peter Singer should be excited by the idea, but in fact Peter Singer makes a classical economic argument against this. Essentially he argues that creating this system of social insurance leads to moral hazard. In other words, if I know I’m likely to get a new kidney if I destroy my current one, I’m much less likely to take care of the one I’ve got now. Because I don’t take care of my kidney, more people die in a needless way.

While this argument might get Singer out of having a poorly instituted lottery, a well-designed lottery might work. Just as health insurance companies might require us to have a deductible or co-pay of sorts, we might be forced to accept a lot of risk if our kidneys fail. Alternatively, people could be monitored and their behavior regulated to ensure they aren’t negligent with their own organs. I’m not entirely sure what the right sort of incentive structures are for a game like this.

Is killing worse than letting die?

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 01:06:04 -0500

I had a conversation this weekend about what sorts of things philosophy majors would be much more likely to say than similar but non-philosophy major college students. I think philosophers would be far more likely to say that there’s not a morally relevant difference between active and passive euthanasia. That is to say, it’s no worse to kill than to let die.

For a lot of people it’s counterintuitive, but the arguments (from James Rachels above) are really good.

First, in some cases killing is far more humane than letting die. This is the most obvious rejoinder — for people whose existence is consumed by suffering, life is a burden. Forcing a patient to die of painful throat cancer rather than relatively painless lethal injections seems like an incredible cruelty.

Further, in some cases it’s used to make life or death decisions on irrelevant grounds. The example Rachels uses here is children born with both Down’s syndrome and an intestinal blockage. In some cases, the blockage could be removed with surgery, but parents and doctors decide that it would be better for the child not to live. Now regardless of whether you think the baby should live or die in such a case, the intestinal blockage seems entirely irrelevant. Yet when such a blockage is present one can “let the baby die” rather than kill it. This then seems like a hard case for those who wish to defend the distinction between killing and letting die.

It’s also strange to think that doctors perform no action by letting patients die. I can insult someone by not shaking their hand. Alternatively, if a doctor let a patient die who was suffering from a routine and curable illness that would also be morally and probably legally impermissible (assume the doctor doesn’t tell the patient her life is in danger — a non-action in itself).

One worry people might have about allowing doctors to perform such mercy killings is that patients will be pressured into dying. As with kidney donations and other things today it would be good to surround the process with some basic checks to ensure patients choose death freely. But even if patients only wish to die as a way of reducing the burden on others, that seems like a good enough reason that we shouldn’t necessarily preclude the possibility.

What if everyone spoke English?

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:15:57 -0500

Suppose in a few decades, everyone in the world spoke English. Would that be a bad thing?

Some people have strong opinions about “language death,” to the point where there are several different entire ideologies devoted to the preservation of minority (or even much larger) languages. See the language ecology movement, or see EU policy on promoting minority languages.

I’m not totally convinced that it would be a bad thing. A recent article argued the same thing. The article argues that because differences in language are generated by a combination of fairly arbitrary geographic separations and predictable linguistic operations that differences are unlikely to reflect deep cultural attitudes. If languages are randomly generated, it seems that preserving them is fairly unimportant.

It’s true that some modern researchers have found an area of interaction between language and thinking, but it’s not the sort of thing that would produce radically different ideas or differences in predictions. It’s things like whether we envision time as a vertical list or as a horizontal line or whether we envision tables as male or female. Hardly the sort of diversity of thought that we need to take broad steps to preserve.

But imagine the benefits of everyone speaking one language. We could easily view and interpret the perspectives given by news authorities in other countries. International business would become far easier, as would international travel. Moreover, I think we’d feel more like a single human community, strengthening the crucial sense of empathy that seems lacking in a lot of our foreign policy attitudes.

Finally, it would open far more exchange and competition between cultures; I think right now there’s a linguistic lock-in for many cultural ideas and possible life projects. Many children today simply aren’t exposed to all of their potential options because they only speak the language of their home country. I think it would do a lot to improve their lives.

It’s not implausible to think that we’d be better off with a single global language, and it’s not implausible to think we might get close in a few generations from now.

Stickking to Stuckk

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:29:23 -0500

The name Stuckk comes from Stickk, a site that helps people sign self-binding contracts. It’s basically a formalized version of telling your friend, “Here’s $20. Only give it back if I lose 10 pounds this month.” Except with Stickk, you hand over your credit card information, and it charges you if your “referee” says you failed to keep your commitment (giving the money to your charity, hated organization, or friend of your choice).

When Andrew and I were considering starting a blog, we thought Stickk would be a good way to make sure we consistently write so we contracted to write 750 words a week. The penalty for breach was $250. The contract ended September 20th, and I haven’t written a word since. Though I’m planning to begin writing again, I have decided not to contractually commit this time. Still, I wanted to write a little on my experience Stuckk.

Stickk works. This summer I worked a pretty demanding job and didn’t have internet where I lived (something I wish I had known when thinking about the contract terms last spring). Nor did any of my neighbors feel altruistic or naive enough to not password protect their own internet. Our contract weeks ended 6am on Monday, so my Sundays were frantic. Often, I grabbed magazines in Grand Central before taking the train back home, flipping through them desperate to find something to write about. Then, starting around midnight Monday morning, I would slink around my neighborhood laptop open and my hands raised high, hoping to find some signal strong enough to post (did I mention my computer’s wireless connection was also broken?).

After writing/internet-stealing until 3 or 4 in the morning, I went to work most Mondays exhausted. The marginal cost of failing to post was just so high, that - despite the annoyance and sleep deprivation - I always posted. That I squeezed out 750 words each week doesn’t mean they were good. They mostly weren’t. Andrew and I structured the contract with a lot of hope in the parable of the pottery class. If we were successful and there were a few good pieces among the masses of broken pots, the idea that I was producing much more quantity than quality did bother me some those Sunday nights.

The other thing that worried me about Stickking to writing is that it eroded the importance of each individual choice to write. There was something weighty in signing the original contract, but every post that followed was colored by the notion that I was writing instrumentally - to fulfill the contract. This doesn’t matter if you plan to use Stickk to lose weight or floss everyday because then only the result matters. But if the process - the personal ritual of choosing at every step to devote some of your time to a project - is important, then Stickking can kill some of the meaning or weight of your commitment.

I’m not swearing off Stickk. I have an informal self-contract set up with Andrew to get me to try vegetarianism for a month, and I’m setting up a contract to get me waking up earlier. But, because committing to writing is important to me, I won’t be self-contracting to post again anytime soon.

Why scientists should blog

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:51:19 -0500

Seed magazine has a really fascinating article on Saturn’s moons. It’s a cool read and you should check it out if you’re as amazed by space as I am. I want to talk about a different part of the article.

Seed links to the blog of one of the authors of the paper under discussion, where he talks about some of the academic drama that went on behind the scenes. I’m hardly the first to point out that scientists are taking a much more active role in communicating with the general population, but I’m curious what the humanization of scientists through interactions with social media will do.

Humans make mistakes, and a lot of scientific research is wrong. Sometimes it’s wrong only in little ways, and it takes a really careful eye to pick out research mistakes that matter and those that don’t. It’s worrisome that people who wish to oppose the conclusions of new research will be able to point to blog posts by (at least seemingly) reputable people pointing out small mistakes and implying that the whole conclusion is forfeit.

I think this happens a lot when ordinary people try to read legal documents. Every once in a while reddit will happen across the text of some law that seems really extreme but in practice is applied reasonably. This was especially true pre-Obama for obvious reasons.

The internet gives us access to original research but doesn’t necessarily give us the tools for understanding it and more importantly for evaluating it. That’s why science blogs are so essential. Strong authorities that can act as a guide to a subject are going to be extremely valuable to society getting important facts right.

Annoying the user can be a feature

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:12:54 -0400

Google typically has a minimalist aesthetic, so why does Gmail display an obnoxious yellow box whenever you go “invisible” in Talk? Economics to the explanatory rescue!

For those of you who don’t know, when you’re “invisible,” you can see and IM other people who are online but other people can’t see you. This asymmetry can yield a classic free-rider problem — I can get the benefit of bothering people without risking the potential distraction or pain of talking to someone I don’t want to, but in doing so I make the service less useful to others who would wish to bother me.

So if it were really easy to be invisible, then on balance too many people might go invisible, making the feature useless for everyone. The annoying box makes me far more likely to stay visible, forcing me to give back a little bit.

Of course people go invisible all of the time — there are times when it’s worth it to avoid the distraction — but unless I’m specifically avoiding distractions I typically stay visible because it’s just a tiny bit annoying to be invisible.

Windows Vista’s UAC dialogs were supposed to be annoying as well. The idea was that developers would want to avoid annoying their users by using unsafe OS calls and so software written for Windows would become more secure making things in aggregate better for users. In this instance it seems users wound up blaming Windows more than software developers, but it may have actually pushed developers to be more safe. Windows 7 users will likely benefit from the pain that Vista users suffered.

URL aesthetics

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 14:19:22 -0400

Maybe this is just me being weird, but I have pretty strong opinions about the way I like URLs to look. Let’s look at some URLs:

http://www.vimeo.com/4576896

Vimeo has great attention to detail in their UI; part of that is great URLs. No implementation details are visible. It’s obvious what the page is — it’s a watch page for one video on vimeo. Better, the URL is so short that twitter leaves it be which makes me more likely to click on vimeo links (I believe).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I

Not bad from youtube here. Still pretty short and I can see the key parts. I’d like it better if the video id weren’t a parameter so http://www.youtube.com/v/gRzMhlFZz9I would be much nicer.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/218236 and http://www.slate.com/id/2232555/

Newsweek and slate do well here. /id is a short prefix and it’s obvious what the page is.

http://ffffound.com/image/2cc1a600e1b8f1d83611f6cdf2142a1ecb7cc88b

fffound has the right idea, but the key is too long. I know they have a lot of images, but it’s not that many.

http://www.practicalethicsnews.com/practicalethics/2009/09/academic-freedom-isnt-free.html#more or http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/why-are-women-so-unhappy/

Blogs are frequently awful at this. Superlong, repetitive, who cares about the date, who cares about reading the subject — my eyes aren’t even going to get that far. Booo.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/world/middleeast/19iran.html?ref=global-home

Nytimes is awful. Date is needless, two keyword, implementation details spilled everywhere. Boo.

It’s true that keywords in the url influence search rankings a little (see the yt video above) so I can understand putting an optional slug at the end like hypem does:

http://hypem.com/#/track/935285/Birdman+-+More+Milli+Feat+Drake+NO+DJ+

but I’d rather that not be there because it’s so ugly.

What about www? I personally like the no-www style like http://rc3.org/, but non-techie people use the www as a cue that it’s a URL so I can deal with it.

So our URLs here on stuckk.net are OK, but we could do better by dropping the /post/

Changing my mind about GDP alternatives

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 12:40:59 -0400

I now think switching to a measure of well-being that includes some objective and subjective measures of happiness is probably a good thing on balance.

France commissioned a nobel-rich group to look at it. The report offers three broad categories of problems with GDP that an alternative measure might address:

Classical GDP Issues - issues with GDP everybody agrees on like pricing an individual’s use of government provided healthcare or households engaged in child care. Or more wonkish problems like accurately capturing capital depreciation.
Quality of life - things that affect our life broadly not captured in production. Key among these are leisure, consumption, crime and health. More controversially, the report would include subjective measures of wellbeing like so called “ladder of life” scores.
Sustainability - if we’re going to take a hit now for future environmental preservation then it would be best if we had a measure that captured that

GDP is pretty precise, captures a lot of what we think of as well-being and has been collected for a while, but it seems like we should probably fix the “classical” problems at the very least.

I’m inclined to think the sustainability section would be immensely important as well. If we have pride in our GDP, good environmental policy is going to be difficult. And don’t think the warm fuzzies we get from stupid things like GDP numbers don’t matter; two examples:

First, at least in one experiment, putting a smiley face on people’s energy bills when they had below average consumption had a significant effect on their consumption patterns. Second, in oldschool Sim City, the game would play a cheering sound when you reduced taxes and a booo sound when you increased them. But that was based just on the change, not the absolute value, so if I wanted to soak up my citizens’ wealth, I’d increase taxes to 20% and then drop them to 19% just to end on that positive note. Silly, but I bet I’m not the only one.

Subjective measures like “ladder of life” are rightly a bit more controversial in my view. It’s tough to say exactly what they measure. Some people think Bhutan is nuts; the Economist is mixed. I’d probably go with a measure that didn’t include them just to avoid controversy.

Do we understand religion and science the same way?

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:50:29 -0400

Some people view religious beliefs and scientific facts as derived from distinct mental processes. Facts are derived from some sort of cognitive, rational evaluative process, while beliefs are based on faith or revelation.

As with most questions about our minds, I’m interested in what neuroscience has to say about the question. Coincidentally, there’s a new study in PLoS one comparing the neural correlates of religious belief with those of non-religious belief.

Under one interpretation, these results show that people experience religious beliefs on the same mental level as non-religious ones. If that’s true, then we should expect Religious beliefs to affect our behavior just as much as beliefs about, say, a round earth.

Religious people do seem a bit more altruistic and nice than non-religious ones, and some have suggested part of the explanation might be that religious people believe God is watching all of the time.

Two other comments:

First, this should undercut the arguments of people who wish to argue that religion and science are completely compatible because they’re simply different ways of understanding the world (looking at you, Joe).

Second, this research displays, once again, the power of the fMRI to answer important questions that used to be left to philosophical rumination.

A brief hiatus...

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:20:35 -0400

Wansley and my contract period ended September 20th. We’re taking a week long break to decide whether to contract again and, if so, under what terms.

If you have any good contract ideas (maybe how to solve the quantity/quality problem), leave a comment.

The nationalism of liberals and conservatives

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:39:14 -0400

Ben Casnocha recently argued that while liberals point to conservatives’ bastardization of patriotism for aggressive foreign policy, they are equally guilty of appropriating nationalist ideas for their own aims. In particular, through nationalistic trade policies (“Buy American”, tariffs, etc.) liberals undermine the American economy, as well as endangering the livelihoods of the poor in developing countries for whom liberals often claim to advocate.

Casnocha also claims that protectionism is “more dangerously nationalistic” maybe because this brand of patriotism “is less understood, especially by those who hold it”. This is bizarre. The use of patriotism to send America into war for often dubious reasons is at least as dangerous and poorly understood (how many people can articulate a good reason for invading Iraq?). The clearer point in the comparison between liberals and conservatives is that we should be skeptical whenever and wherever patriotism is used to justify policy, as it can be easily employed to disguise baseless and irresponsible government decisions.

Why would hell exist?

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:15:33 -0400

Marcus Gadson, a Dartmouth student and friend who blogs at The Gadson Review, has a post offering a justification for the existence of hell within the Christian religion. He offers three possible reasons - retribution, incapacitation (don’t let sinners pollute hell), and deterrence. I don’t really think these are sufficient for two reasons:

First - Hell is a disproportionately severe punishment. All three of Gadson’s justifications for the existence of hell are only valuable up until they violate the constraint that the punishment not be too severe. Perfect deterrence in society could be achieved through brutally torturing all convicted criminals, but we generally accept that such a punishment would be unjust. Indeed, in order for Gadson’s retribution point to work there has to be a proportional relationship between the crime and the punishment - it would be a very strange kind of retribution if the whole range of possible crimes were met with punishments that were arbitrarily lax or severe in each case. That means, that in addition to proving hell serves a purpose, Gadson also has to prove that hell doesn’t violate the proportionality constraint.

But hell can never be a proportional punishment because it is an infinite punishment for necessarily finite crimes. Transgressions committed on earth which are limited in scope by time and physics are punished for eternity with infinite, divine wrath. Gadson counters this argument by saying:

Now, we might be tempted to think there’s nothing so bad that an eternity spent in hell is a proportionate punishment. But that is from our view as humans, not God’s. Reading through the Bible, you find that God has really a low threshold for what constitutes a sin (at least in human eyes). Christ says that “whosoever looks at woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

It’s true that God does have this high standard, but it doesn’t really give a reason why, except that he’s God and can do what he wants. Given that Gadson is explaining why hell exists as a punishment for earthly sins, I think he has an obligation to do more than say it exists because God wanted it to. Given that it’s such a disproportionate punishment, I don’t think hell - as usually construed or understood - can actually be explained through Gadson’s judicial framework.

Second - I think one of the problems of analyzing the existence of hell under this framework is that it assumes God and society have analogous purposes for punishment. The best example of this problem, I think, is the deterrence argument. When societies set up laws and punishments, they don’t really care what citizens’ motives are for following those laws; it doesn’t matter whether someone chooses not to break the law because he wants to be moral or because he fears punishment. The same is not true for God. Because Christianity focuses so much on the personal relationship with God, the motive is what matters the most. I don’t think deterrence can really explain the existence of hell because I don’t think heaven/hell are meant to act as a carrot/stick combo for conversion. Assuming genuine conversion is what’s really important, badgering people into professing belief doesn’t make sense.

I think what this really means is that in order for hell to “work” within Christianity, it can’t really be understood as a terrible place of eternal punishment. Some thinkers have thought of hell as just an entrenched continuation of life on earth, a mundane, eternal life of separation from God. Regardless, some other alternate understanding (maybe just that hell is death and that’s all she wrote), which is less focused on hell as retribution or a deterrent, would make more sense.

Amazon vs. Target

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 22:23:27 -0400

I have recently shopped both at Target and Amazon, and had a different experience with both.

It was a bit tricky to find what I needed at Target (black socks, if you must know). I couldn’t see all of signs overhead and it wasn’t obvious to me whether to look where the shoes were or where the boxers were. It reminded me of old school web portals that used to keep a categorized directory of the web by topics. Google’s is [still online][gd].

Web portals were dominated by search engines once they started working because search engines were far faster — only one page had to load rather than three. Moreover, users don’t have to go through the entire conceptual hierarchy that leads to the concept they want.

The search-engine for Target would be something like the search kiosks in Borders, or better yet a Target iPhone app (or mobile webpage!) that would tell me where things were located.

Amazon on the other hand has a great search experience — if I don’t find what I want right away from a search on Google, I’m usually only a few clicks away thanks to the “Users who viewed this purchased..” feature among other things. The problems with Amazon are immediacy, it takes to long to get things I need, expense, it’s more expensive to ship things than to pick them up, and exploration, I’m much more hesitant to buy a new product if I haven’t held it in my hand or seen it in person.

I think at least in the short run, Target’s problems are easier to overcome. Amazon now has it’s own brands, so maybe they’re becoming more of a traditional retailer. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some sort of clever brick-and-mortar manifestation of Amazon in the next 10 years.

The value of Twitter

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:37:13 -0400

Everybody has an opinion about Twitter. Robert Scoble thinks it’s great, but those smarties over at the Economist’s Free Exchange blog think it’s going nowhere.

For the longest time nobody thought Facebook was going to make any money, but now they’re cash flow positive. It’s also important to remember that Google was not profitable for some time after it’s launch as well.

I’m in the “Twitter is going to be a success” camp. I think the risks they face are organizational more than anything else. Their product is great if they can just do the right things to keep it growing and make money off of it. I’ll try and convince you that it’s a viable business in the rest of this post.

Real time search - I think this has been a bit over-hyped but it bears repeating. Twitter lowers the bar for content creation and as such, get access to a wealth of information that Google, as yet, cannot see. Blogs will report things, but tweets will come faster. Moreover, tweets will tell you more quickly what things are useful as people tweet links to articles faster than bloggers will post links to other blog posts.

The impact of this is that two types of content: information too geographically isolated to be caught by blogs and information too fresh for blogs won’t make it into Google’s results, but will into Twitter’s search results.

It’s unclear whether Twitter has the tech to do the real time search ranking in-house or whether they’ll just license the firehose API that exposes all tweets in real time to Google/Bing, but it’s certainly a valuable resource.

CRM - People tweet about their experiences with businesses, good and bad. Tweets feel very personal and immediate, so there’s an opportunity for businesses to respond to concerns raised on Twitter and earn customers’ incredibly valuable good will. In practice, this means that businesses need tools to track tweets and reply easily.

As with search, it’s unclear whether Twitter will build their own tools in-house or just license to third parties. Either way, it’s clear there is value to be given there. Personal responses from companies are valuable and hard to come by. Verified accounts are the beginning of Twitter’s interactions with businesses and if you believe Scoble’s account, there is a lot more to come on that front.

Ads - This is the basic webby thing to do, but you can’t just put ads on a page an expect to get rich. The reason Google is so successful is that doing a search for “30 GB Hard drive” is a really good indication that I’m interested in buying a hard drive, so seeing a link then is valuable.

Some tweets are similar. Once I tweeted about how the battery on my Dell laptop had died. In reply, one battery company tweeted at me suggesting that I check out their website for a replacement. Twitter could be slightly smarter about this; an ad could appear just above my tweet automatically based on key words or phrases — searches are less than 140 characters and Google seems to do a good job figuring it out.

It’s true that the vast majority of tweets aren’t monetizable — bits of celebrities’ lives aren’t incredibly interesting — but many searches aren’t monetizable either. The key thing is scale. If Twitter manages to continue expanding at an extremely rapid pace, they have a real shot at becoming a brilliantly successful business.

It’s not obvious that they’ll make the most of what they have, but what Twitter has is incredibly valuable to a lot of people. I believe the doubters will be proven wrong.

What France and Bhutan have in common

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:02:00 -0400

France is moving toward using a metric for national happiness in its economic policy, something Bhutan has done for decades. For France, the transition is rather transparent, since the country hasn’t been performing as well as other developed countries in GDP terms, but should gain GNH (Gross National Happiness) points for its liberal labor and health policies.

GDP and per capita GDP are mostly valuable as proxies for happiness, so looking at other measures of well-being makes sense. This is especially true for countries like France, because wealth is a worse proxy for happiness the more you have of it:

In the early stages of a climb out of poverty, for a household or a country, incomes and contentment grow in lockstep. But various studies show that beyond certain thresholds, roughly as annual per capita income passes $10,000 or $20,000, happiness does not keep up.

Since we’re pretty clueless about what makes people happy, it’s still useful to look at measures like GDP. But I think it’s important not to think of GDP as a ends in itself.