Slashdot Mirror
How the Social Tech Bubble Is Different
theodp writes "Tech bubbles happen, writes BW's Ashlee Vance, but we usually gain from the innovation left behind. But this one — driven by social networking — could leave us empty-handed. Math whiz Jeff Hammerbacher provides a good case study. One year out of Harvard, 23-year-old Hammerbacher arrived at Facebook, was given the lofty title of research scientist and put to work analyzing how people used the social networking service. Over the next two years, Hammerbacher assembled a team that built a new class of analytical technology, one which translated insights into people's relationships, tendencies, and desires into precision advertising and higher sales. But something gnawed at him. Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google, and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. 'The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,' he says. 'That sucks.' Silicon Valley historian Christophe Lecuyer agrees: 'It's clear that the new industry that is building around Internet advertising and these other services doesn't create that many jobs. The loss of manufacturing and design know-how is truly worrisome.'"
Every time is different, right? Isn't that what they always tell us??
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" - Has there ever been a brief description that describes so well the technological time we live in? Hammerbacher should write a book or two.
Manufacturing is dirty and nasty and you don't ever want to do it. It's for the dummies. It's buggywhips.
That's what's pounded into the heads of everyone going through school that scores above 100 on IQ. As Mike Rowe said at TED, there's a war on work that's been going on for 40 years.
--
BMO
Most American companies are about the marketing anyway. Fast food, candy bars, cars. Lots of fancy colors. Sell as much crap with a fancy wrapper. Don't see what got lost, maybe we are better off :)
A deliberate move.
Concentrate power and wealth for very few, at the cost of all the others... Then? Castigate the losers in this scheme as stupid or non- adaptable.
This is the new America. It's the perfect cesspit for breeding Zuckerbergs.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I use two facebook accounts; one polished and clean for my parents and family, and one for my friends that has very little personal information(for instance i only use initials and dont link to my employer or even my city. I never spent a dime on any apps or services on facebook and I never will. The sad thing isn't the folks at facebook, google or twitter trying to get us to click on ads or buy fake gold for some facebook game, it's the ones of us that do click or buy fake gold. Website advertisement would not exist if it didn't work. This article warms me up and gives me hope that once all the baby boomers will be retired ... the IT workers and advertisement gurus of our generation might finally embrace better values than the ones brought on by capitalism.
has been happening for many years. America has already migrated to a service economy. All we do is sell shit to each other. Many tech jobs have left as well.
Fuck Facebook, Google, Twitter and the rest. They provide nearly nothing of value that wasn't available before they showed up. They are simply flytraps for your eyeballs. I assure you they will be forgotten in a decade. Remember AOL? Neither does anyone else.
Ever.
Groupon, which e-mails coupons to people, may be the fastest-growing company of all time. Its revenue could hit $4 billion this year, up from $750 million last year, and the startup has reached a valuation of $25 billion. Its technological legacy is cute e-mail.
Groupon is going to crash and burn like you've never seen.
1. Barriers to entry are pretty much zero and as such, competitors are cropping faster than ever.
2. The merchants are disillusioned with them: all they get are the people looking for deals and no repeat business and in the meantime, the business they get form Groupon hardly makes any money and most of the time, it's at a loss.
HPs, Oracles, SUN, the Slashdot hated Microsoft all created products - not easily duplicated services that are basically advertising which is what this whole new bubble is. That's all. No new technology. No new "paradigm" like the Internet was - just using bits and bytes instead of paper.
I will enjoy this show immensely!
Unless you can manufacture the candy and soda efficiently, no amount of marketing is going to save your ass.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Well maybe the "greatest minds" of our time have noticed that we have stopped paying attention to their marketing years ago. The saturation point of information vs sales has peaked like spam to legitimate mail on the Internet. I would hope to think that the average consumer should realize the Internet is to the point of cars have been for years, little difference between production years, just over bearing marketing and empty promises.....
Yes, this guy is in advertising. He is the b-ark but for some reason, he figured it out. Well? Advertising has been around for a long time and has always about getting people to buy more widgets they don't need. There really is no difference between the guy who came up with Soaps to sell soap and the guy who invented the monkey gif ad.
If this guy hates his job, there are plenty others. It is hardly as if the whole world is just working for facebook.
If ANYTHING, this guys attitude "my job is just selling ads, therefor the entire world is about selling ads" is the problem. No, the whole world is NOT you. Don't throw a hissy fit because you found out you work in advertising. Oh and the guy in the example? Now runs a data analysis company. Gosh, he was so upset about this job selling advertising he went into data mining. Two guesses what he mines for.
But there are still countless companies doing real work, just as they have been doing while advertising agencies have been around.
Just accept, most of us lead utterly meaningless lives. The b-ark better be really big.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Fox & Friends: "Mr Cosm, how would you describe the modern American economy?"
Cosm: "Well, we have primarily shifted to a PTE based model."
Fox's Token Blond: "What's that? Is that like China?"
Cosm: "Polished Turd Economics, you should be quite familiar with it by now."
Snide Male Co-Host: "You mean like the democrats?"
Cosm: "...well..kind of...that would make the Republicans unpolished..."
Blond: "[winces] Hey now....We'll be back folks after this commercial break."
commercial fade-in: "The new iPad 4G from....fades off..."
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
I think the real question from TFA is if we all do pointless crap like market analysis, marketing, branding, and search engine optimization like the guy in the article, are we going to someday have a future where these skills can no longer be converted into food and shelter through the magic of the market.
For a while now, I've been wondering what the purpose of the USA economy is.
There are the basics, of course. I work so that I can have food, water, clothing, shelter, free time, fun. But it is through the magic of the world economy that I get those things by writing software specifications and unit tests. The economy somehow figures out how many lines of code I need to write to buy a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk.
I suppose I don't worry too much about the fact that most of the work we do is of dubious importantance, so long as it is still convertible into food and shelter. But there is a tipping point somewhere. If everyone in the USA worked making click-through ads, we'd reach a point where no amount of work could be converted to food and shelter.
Actually the *best* minds knew better than to take those jobs in the first place. They are working places like Pixar creating beauty or in startups creating gene therapies or researching that revolutionary new power source we all need.
AI and natural language processing certainly benefit from this, and the technology invented goes beyond just ad placements (even if it's the primary motive).
Not only that, but innovation has taken place just to handle the sheer volume of data created by the "social web".
the technology and resources to predict trends is something that has come out of this whole social thing, and since this kind of information can be compiled and analyzed by just about anyone, just about anyone can capitalize on that information in many ways that don't involve specifically targeted web ads.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
They (including "math whiz" Mr Hammerbacher, apparently) have no clue about those who want no part of their little world. Go figure.
The thing the so-called "whiz" kids are missing is that Google et al are trying to market to people without creating a giant scam network where people are bullied/peer-pressured by their sucker friends into revealing to the rest of the world everything they shouldn't.
Sure, you can analyze and target people more directly once they've told you everything there is to know about their lives, including their relationships, tendencies, and desires.
Without all that, you have to figure it out the hard way; the way that his so-called "peers" are "wasting their talents" on.
Durrrr.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
If anything, the current "social" bubble is giving us unprecedented insight in sociological behaviour at mass scale. We are leaving behind the world where "sociology scientists" could only run limited and poorly-defined experiments over their own student population; now "social companies" like Facebook have at their disposal an incredible amount of relevant, up-to-date, *exact*, aggregated data. The field will never be the same.
-- Let's go Viridian.
You now have a large amount of people using the same services, who are giving you a ton of personal information. They're not going to pay for this service.
How else are you going to make your money? Its just asking to be advertised.
There's a sleeping back factory that cranks out 2 million + bags/yr with 120 employees (including the sales staff, CEO, accountants, etc). It's only because human life is so cheap and worthless that manufacturing is hell.
Now, if we can just figure out what to do with all those people we don't need to manufacture stuff anymore... I guess die in the streets will do, so far it seems to be what the USA is moving towards...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google, and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. 'The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,' he says. 'That sucks.'
I know. It irks me that computing has become a branch of the advertising industry. Each new generation of computer technology produces less significant applications. New CS graduates want to work for Google or Facebook, (or worse, Zynga or Groupon) not iRobot or Autodesk.
Better advertising technology doesn't lead anywhere. Yes, there's progress on classifier systems, but that technology came from robotics. It's inherently a zero-sum game. There are only so many ad dollars out there to chase.
...wrote in Pattern Recognition in 2002 that "far more creativity these days goes into the marketing of products than the products themselves." I'm a software developer for what is basically a marketing company, and I heartily agree.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
Google, for example, is doing a lot of things except making people click on ads.
* Intelligent search, this one day will progress into natural language understanding and even AI * Image recognition, this one day may help robots understand their surroundings * Voice recognition, again, useful * How to efficiently manage massive data centers, great for creating future infrastructure
Even clicking on ads, requires sophisticated AI techniques which are useful in many other areas
When man entered the industrial age 100+ years ago, there was no shortage of whining how bad the factories were, how people needed to be close to the land, and serious doubts on how everyone would get fed if so many were off in the factories and not in the fields where they belong.
Recently, people are whining about the slow transition away from manufacturing, how it weakens the nation, increases imports, etc. Again, irrelevant iff the replacement activities are sufficiently productive.
Now comes this egghead saying marketing has no value. If he really thought that way, he should have been an electrical engineer. Or a farmer. While the value of sophisticated marketing knowledge and targetting might not appear to be useful, financially it is, which is a pretty good sign. Basically, he has found ways to let people know what they might like to buy. Saves them shopping (but not due-diligence). Unless you consider all people to be weak-willed automatons.
I'm sure there were people who thought we should remain hunter-gatherers and not take up herding and agriculture.
I was going to post about how greed and the collapse of the middle class in the US has caused all of this, how intervention and care could have stopped it, how greed, particularly on the part of the political right in concert with greedy corporate interests have shaped this outcome. But I won't. What their greed has created will come to destroy them. Its been posted on /. for a long time now. There is no converting these people. They need to fall hard, and no amount of reasoning will fix them. They are like Adolph Hitler at the end of World War 2; in the bunker, scared, dangerous, not giving a damn about all the damage they caused, and utterly deaf to the collapse all around them. In the end, they bite on the capsule, proclaim their loyalty to Machiavelli and Ayn Rand, and swallow hard.
It's tragic how our era's finest mathematical and technical minds are working on social networking. It's not right that they're wasting themselves trying to figure out how to monetize people sending pet photos to each other!
Why just a few short years ago people in that field were really doing great things for the world--like repurposing the Black-Scholes theorem to create increasingly complicated derivative financial instruments. Those instruments powered a revolution that brought prosperity to everyone.
If we can't get our best and brightest to go back to investment banks and get to work on developing new financial instruments, I don't know what will happen to our fine nation.
Especially about the part about NOT following your passions. "Follow your dreams and go broke." Love it.
Every millionaire I know didn't follow their passions: they followed the money.
I know a welder that spent 8 years as an apprentice. He does incredibly intricate welding: tooling, ultra fine shit, gun smithing (his passion): $100K+ with no college works 40 hour weeks.
"'The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,' he says."
I heard there was a generation where the best minds were thinking about how to build a nuclear bomb.
you can always go to law school and specialize in Intellectual Property Law.
*ducks*
Social networks are not really innovative. They are businesses idea of innovative. An example from another industry: pharmaceutical companies try to convince us that adding an antacid or a time release component to a drug is innovative. They extend their patents on drugs that way
In the minds of MBAs this is innovative high tech, but the reality is that no new drugs were created.
In the same sense social networks did not create anything new, they just moved things around a bit.
.
Probably a very interesting article, but I have no time to read it.
I've got to feed my cows and plant some roses.
Privacy is terrorism.
are using Ad-Block. Or soon will be.
What makes you think IT workers are the brightest minds? Because your company that gives you free pizza keeps telling you that?
I'm not so sure of that (though perhaps I'm being overly optimistic).
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
No need to worry. We're not clicking on the ads. We do wonder why marketing types keep buying this !@#$ believing that we are.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads"
And yet, the best minds in Silicon Valley have NOTHING on what New York media minds have been doing for a long time, who are a lot smarter than Silicon Valley.
Why would an advertiser pay to place their ads next to some image of a college kids throw-up when they can place an ad next to an image of Karlie Kloss in Vogue magazine or with Ryan Seacrest on American Idol? And, they'll pay $150/CPM instead of the $1 CPM that google gets.
Marketing is not a tech problem. It is a creative problem. You can't solve marketing through technology. You need creative production to win ad dollars.
Google the largest Internet ad company, gets only $30 billion a year in revenue. The next largest company, Yahoo, gets about 6 billion.
Meanwhile, News Corp, just one of the many media companies, gets about $32 billion in revenue by themselves.
Silicon Valley should just GIVE UP on any form of business model that attempts to derive money from ad sales. Let the media professionals in New York handle that business.
Go back to making hardware.
No actually if we weren't clicking the ads they wouldn't be giving us said ads. Some dumbass is clicking it, that's why they put it up there. Anyway, I think this guy has a great point: so much brain has towards goals that don't push the world further but perhaps hold us back. Finally some good material on slashdot to think over.
like a bunch of nerds crying about their empty list of facebook friends. "brightest minds" in regards to the IT bunch is comical.
Facebook and other social networking sites produce
nothing of _tangible_ value. Anyone who has been paying
attention could reach this conclusion without needing to
consult the opinions of other people.
Making money alone is not enough. If you want to have a fulfilling life,
you will engage yourself in a vocation which improves the world in
a way that matters. This could ( for example ) be making better computers, designing the
battery which makes electric vehicles a practical reality, or creating a drug which
eases or removes human misery. In short, do something with your life that really does
make the world a better place as a result of your brief time on earth. In the end, the money
you made and the material things you accumulated will not be of any significance to you
as you prepare to leave this world. Do something that leaves a mark in the world, such that
those who come after you can say : "That was a good human being".
It's a Ginsberg parody.
Your brain is not a computer.
The best minds of my generation are creating bio-tech startups in Bangalore
The best minds of my generation design oil rigs for the Santos basin offshore Brazil
The best minds of my generation can't afford education in Nairobi
The best minds of my generation divert rivers in China to power cities not yet built
The best minds of my generation uncover the workings of the brain in a town near the pole
The best minds of my generation overthrew a dictator in Kairo
The best minds of my generation enrolled in a militia in Afghanistan
The best minds of my generation does not read businessweek.com
Really? Doubt it. The smartest people I know want nothing to do with the profit motive. I bet you've got a bunch of very bright 700-math SAT types out there, but that's not saying much. The best minds of any generation have the confidence to embark upon unconventional lives.
If I can make the same product but at lower cost, then I will make more money. It is that simple.
Every business owner in the world faces this incentive (among others, of course).
Profit is the ultimate motivator of all RnD investment. The starry-eyed idealist might want to invent something purely for the greater good...but he needs money...and that comes from venture capitalists who expect to reap a profit.
It isn't so much a "war on work" as "a natural consequence of the desire to get an edge in any competitive domain, and thus make money."
Maybe this is about social evolution and not a technological evolution? To me it seems they are looking for the wrong things. I've seen new political party form, and I've met people I wouldn't have met otherwise. I share and receive information and knowledge in ways I couldn't have 10 years ago.
There will be a technical evolution too obviously driven by this change, it just haven't happened yet. I think the wonderful benefit with social networks is a changed ability to see ourselves and where we are in the universe (the metaphysical universe). All science benefit from this.
I think we're damn lucky that we're socially connected in a world which is about to change drastically.
Social Media Isn't Social. http://jadedtech.bad-advice.info/jaded/?p=569
DragnDon http://www.DragonDon.net
Brilliant people figuring out how to make people buy useless shit. Rather than figuring out how to make the useless shit not so useless. Seems like an ass backwards approach if the shit they were marketing weren't so useless we wouldn't need all the brilliant people figuring out ways to make consumers interested in it. This is why always thought extreme marketing techniques are a bunch of bull and is just a way for companies with crap products to scam more people.
The best minds in the 1860s wasted their lives coming up with new colours of synthetic dyes to allow fabric manufacturers to sell more fabric. The best minds of the 1920s wasted their lives in the new(ish) field of advertising. The best minds of.. The vast majority of the 'best minds' of any generation have ended up taking the stable and well paid jobs associated with working for commercial interests, usually on stuff that won't exactly change the world or make it a better place or anything of the sort. The only thing more depressing is when there's a large war and the best minds of the generation spend years of their lives trying to come up with more efficient ways to kill other human beings. However, in any generation some bright people through accident or design work on things that decades later, in hindsight, are seen to have changed the world in some positive way.
And sometimes people who do useful things with their lives started off doing something like helping facebook sell ads, and had a sudden realization one day that this was a waste of their life. I hope this guy now goes and has a go at something he thinks will make the world a better place instead of just whining about how facebook is ruining the world.
Everyone does things for money. That's it. Knowledge, evolution, development don't matter. Every scientist and researcher knows that. Sell crappy stuff, you make millions, discover great things for humanity, you starve. What we need is some economic inventions that will free us from the tyranny of money. Everyone is tired of being ruled by money.
Research some into the origins of value and representations of time and labor. Create new labor-value-storage rules and representations. Encrypted, uniqeue, peer-checked value representation tokens can be created by anyone, stored and traded. Ok, maybe that's a bit far fetched, but I think that is the general idea. I think there is no more reason to depend on central banks to regulate the instruments we use to work with each other and represent our labor, efforts, and objects. Verifying value and work, adding and subrtracting, and creating documents that cannot be forged are not that hard.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
My car's battery holds enough energy to launch a canned ham to escape velocity.
To come up with that? This is what I've been saying since Yahoo. THEY DON'T PRODUCE anything, and they are nothing but a bunch of computers. They don't "make stuff". We've driven manufacturing out of country, because everyone wants cheap stuff, unions want more money, CEO's want more money, shareholders want more money. Well, you got it. Now look at the rust belt and other locations in the USA. Jobs sent overseas, most likely to never return, EPA & enviro-nut jobs that won't allow us to drill for resources on our OWN DAMN COUNTRY. Congrats! The experiment that is the United States of America is almost over, unless we get out heads out of our butts!
i'm glad that just because some dude that graduated from harvard is having an identity crisis he can somehow get a post on slashdot saying how useless his job is
The article is about how the skills that are used to mine data for ad can potentially be used to solve other important problems in other domain. The point about "great" minds working on how to get more click is valid and the article alludes to that but the main point of the article is not that.
At least up there with this interesting parallel quote by Banksy:
"The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little."
if you do not like money, i will be happy to take it off your hands.
then you will be free of this accursed tyranny!
If you read the emails that anonymous dumped on the web, Team Themis (HB Gary, Berico, Palantir) were scraping facebook to gather information about 'radical' groups.
The even had an automated system of software to do this, slurp it into some kind of proprietary database, and analyze it.
This was all based on the idea that the government would somehow pay them for it.
That's the "value" proposition of facebook.
I cry BULL SHEEET.
New Technology is the production of a new physical product and it changes the way we think about the Universe because we discovered a new law, principle or mathematical relationship in nature.
A good example is break throughs in energy that are happening world wide, that the oil companies are desperate to keep you from knowing about.
http://pesn.com/2011/01/27/9501752_Italian_cold_fusion_saga_continues_with_new_papers_released/
Including paying MIT dorks and their lackies to destroy the careers of people who work in science in the name of maintaining a OIL world.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
you may not have noticed this, but I'd say about 95% of people who comment on stories don't bother to read the article.
Why?
Because 95% of the time, we can guess what the article says just by reading the headline.
The other 5%, well, we'd rather just talk about whatever bug was up our ass that day in the first place; hence reading the article anyways is kind of pointless.
In conclusion, thanks for coming.. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
just kidding.
not really.
http://www.textfiles.com/news/hackpape.hac ... In the middle of Stanford University there is a large concrete- and-glass building filled with computer terminals. When one enters this building through the glass doors, one steps into a different culture. Fifty people stare at terminal screens. Fifty faces connected to 50 bodies, connected to 50 sets of fingers that pound on 50 keyboards ultimately linked to a computer. If you go further inside, you can discover the true addicts: the members of the Establishment. These are the people who spend their lives with computers and fellow "hackers". These are the members of a subculture so foreign to most outsiders that it not only walls itself off but is walled off, in turn, by those who cannot understand it. The wall is built from both sides at once. ... Even if we ignore the costs to society as a whole, we have to look at the costs to the people involved. The computer is a modifier of personalities. It is highly addictive. People who gain this addiction for a period of several months tend never to give it up. And the symptoms are very sad. ..."
"As much as an essay, this is a story. It is a true story of people paying $9,000 a year to lose elements of their humanity. It is a story of the breaking of wills and of people. It is a story of addictions, and of misplaced values. In a large part, it is my own story.
That was from 1980, when I first read it in high school (on a timeshared computer terminal. :-) It was a good warning, even as it ignores that certain types of people (especially introverts) may be more attracted to certain forms of activity, whether as a bookworm or a hacker. Too bad it did not mention vitamin D deficiency disease and vegetable deficiency disease and the need for treadmill workstations (among other good things it does say. :-)
See also:
"Supernormal stimuli: how primal urges overran their evolutionary purpose"
http://books.google.com/books?id=HQlg3rQquUoC
And:
"How to escape The Pleasure Trap !"
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
And:
"Rat Park: A study on the role of stress as the cause of addictive-seeming behavior"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
Stagnant (even declining) real wages for three decades in the USA for most workers while productivity has doubled or tripled. Who go the benefits? Whose life became more precarious?
http://motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap
See also though:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=channel
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-392
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
Good questions. Keep exploring There are answers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
http://johncr8on.com/projects/21st-century-institutions/
http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The B-Ark: HHGG Original TV series
An old HHGG reference. If you didn't know that, turn in your towel!
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science ..."
"Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States.
But, see also on money as a bad motivator for creative work:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Some deeper issues:
http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
My own saga: :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
At least for software engineer, the positive side of this ad-driven internet phenomena is that it has shifted money from other media such as TV, radio, print business etc. This has provided another source of revenue for software profession. Otherwise, it used to be that, for the most part, you had to write some applications for business processes which in itself is not anymore world changing.
You may not like the fact that ultimately you are working for a marketing company in many of these cases but in a lot of the cases the marketing company are also providing some "useful" services to its user, be it facebook, twitter or google. If you just concentrate on one individual or some sub-set of individuals at these companies then yes some of them are using their skills essentially for determining best way to achieve ad effectiveness. However, some of the other people in the same companies are developing something that whole society seem to think its valuable. If internet phenomena had not occurred then these same money would have probably been sitting in the other media outlets so in a grad scheme of things it may not necessarily be all that bad.
Option 1, the best minds in the land are working on useless crap. Option 2, the best minds in the land are working on real problems and you, despite going to Harvard, working at a hot company, and assurances from mommy, are not one of them. I'm sorry to break it to you but mommy lied and you aren't that special
Those of us who are actually the best minds of our generation don't agree to become cogs in some corporate machine, we are doing something new and awesome while you poseurs are figuring out how to make people click on some stupid ad. Yes Mr. Hammerbacher its true, your insecurities that is, you are a small insignificant spec of a man who's "contribution" to society will be forgotten a generation from now. But really, in the grand scheme of things, you should just enjoy it. Despite the fact that you are an abject failure and that you will never change the world you have it better that 1 - 10^8 people on this planet and your vapid complaint about lack of intellectual fulfillment is an affront to those who (literally) eat dirt to survive. So really bro, quit you bitching and enjoy your (relative) privileged life of (relative) mediocrity.
NWBTCW
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" - Has there ever been a brief description that describes so well the technological time we live in? Hammerbacher should write a book or two.
Please, no. One good tweet does not expand well into a full-length book, or even short 128-page fat margin double-spaced quick read books sold at airport bookstores to aspring middle manager types. Use it as your .sig but stop there.
The rest of this comment has been truncated in compliance with the above statement.
Creating technology that increases the chance a customer will find a product that matches their needs and allows companies to more precisely find appropriate clients, seems like it should reduce waste and be a benefit for the economy.
Blake's "Dark, Satanic mills" were churches. Nothing to do with the industrial revolution. He believed that the Devil had taken over organised religion. The second verse is a hymn to sex, which is why it was always either funny or insightful that the Woman's Institute used to sing it at their meetings.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
CEOs are massively overrated. What matters is to have an effective, co-operating management structure instead of competing egos. If you have that, then usually swapping out the CEO works if you replace a dysfunctional parasite with a human being (perhaps you can work out the company I'm particularly thinking of here.) If, as in Germany, CEOs were not given nearly so much power, I suspect many US companies would work better. If you want to understand how a completely dysfunctional management structure can appear successful for a while, read the history of Nazi Germany. Then think that you probably don't know the name of anybody in the current Swiss government.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
We _do_ live in abundance, compared to 100 or even 50 years ago. Our standard of living has increased immensely thanks to increased productivity (from automation, computerization, etc.). As an economy we've converted this extra productivity into more/better goods and services, instead of extra time.
Oh, and before you suggest that median 1950 US citizen had a higher SoL than median 2010 citizen... taken quantifiably, SoL includes things like the size of your TV, car, access to medical care (1950 US medical care is worse than 2010 rural Indian medical care), cost of services like travel (inflation-adjusted plane tickets are like 10% the price of what they once were even 35 years ago), etc.
Technology will not take our jobs, technology will increase our standard of living in the future just as it has done throughout all recorded history. The thing is, absolute gains in personal wealth/GDP/SoL don't actually make us happier. It's an unfortunate quirk of human psychology - our absolute wealth doesn't make us happy, our relative wealth is what makes us happy. Because people tend to live around people who are about their wealth level, this means no one is very happy. (Another unfortunate quirk of human psychology - we tend to compare ourselves with people just above us wealth-wise, and assume there are more of them than we think.)
So, now that we are self-aware about our psychological quirks, here is my 3-step plan to lasting happiness
a) Recognize that on an absolute level, we are wealthier in every measurable way than before. Your TV is bigger and sharper than your grandparent's TV. You have access to lifesaving technologies, with new being developed every day. You have the freaking INTERNET for chrissakes. Now of course, _everybody_ around you also has these things... but now you are lapsing into thinking about *relative* wealth, not absolute wealth.
b) When it comes to relative wealth, start hanging out with people poorer than you. It'll make you feel rich.
c) Support some redistributive economic interventions, because more even distributions of wealth lead to more happiness that highly stratified wealth distributions. These policies will reduce our future growth of wealth as an economy, but as long as we are careful not to take it too far, it doesn't matter. Remember - relative wealth makes us happier than absolute wealth, so even if pure pro-growth policies do make us all much wealthier than the alternative, it will actually make us more unhappy if it serves to stratify the economy,
The internet is the ultimate technological library. Universities will undergo a revolution and split into content and competence validation. More than likely universities will abandon traditional classes and instead focus on seminars and workshops. But whatever you want to learn you can learn from home. Like the old saying: teach a man to fish...
We are on the cusp of a new Renaissance. One where people learn how to make things and start farming at home again. Geeks will be the first to move out of cities proper and start living on larger properties. We will own our own land. Something about the size of a half acre to a couple acres. We will do hydroponic farming and grow our own food again. Taking no more than an hour of work a day. Hydroponics grows food in a smaller area faster and more efficiently. So come hard times will will not be lacking for food. We will build our own work shops. We will learn how to build our own tools. We will recycle metal at home. We will make our own electronic devices. We will trade amongst ourselves.
We will of course still buy stuff but only commodities. Most of what can be make commercially we will be able to be make at home or one of your neighbors will be able to and not too expensively. So the remaining industries will only survive if they can produce inexpensive products, so basically commodity components and materials.
Maglevs and commuter trains will come back into fashion for connecting cities proper with the new rural cities. And cryogenic power-lines will sprout up all over this country like the old railroads to funnel electric power efficiently from wherever it occurs naturally. We will get 2/3 of our power naturally and the rest from nuclear power.
So we will become a civilization of craftsmen again.
the only two things that will be scarce will be things like music and waiters and cleaners
Not when you have cleaning robots. In a society where AI has reached human-level intelligence very few things will be truly valuable, some rare metals, perhaps, and prize real estate are two things that come to my mind.
However there's one thing that's very valuable today and will certainly lose once we have better than human-level AI.
Leadership will be worthless.
What is this quality called "leadership"? It's what let some people get other people to do things. We need it today because there are tasks that cannot be done by one person alone and needs coordination between many people. Leadership is the ability to get a bunch of people to work together.
When we have machines capable of performing any task a human can do, the equivalent to leadership will be software development. Just as leadership is important today, getting computers to do what needs to be done will be the most important and valuable quality in the future.
'The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads'
In other words, selling shiny crap to morons ... :)
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... should consider talking to the "best" minds of the last generation, who could easily and without hesitation tell them that ads are worthless (from a monetary standpoint), they do _not_ pay for themselves, and few if any people click on them, outside of armies of people in India paid to click them, click-bots, and maybe accidentally.
At the end of the day, this is not a social media bubble, it's another advertising bubble. The only difference is we've added social media to the equation and Zuckerburg & Co. have somehow convinced advertisers that ads dropped in Facebook or Twitter somehow work better than ads pushed to other types of media.
It will crash and burn too, give it time. The only real benefit from online advertising is branding. Branding is something very few people understand and cannot be monetized, tabulated, valued or tracked. Since it can't, the bean counters don't like it. Eventually, without any direct evidence of ROI, a lot of advertising programs at companies shut down and the marketing managers get fired. I've seen it happen over and over.
This is easily illustrated by example. I've lost track of the number of times I've either
1. seen an ad on the internet and bought the product later at a bricks and mortar Walmart when I actually needed it
or
2. gone straight to amazon (or a bricks and mortar store) and bought something I've never seen an ad for, Like maybe my kid wants Pokemon Black for his birthday. On our way home from our weekend I stop at Game Stop and he buys it.
This stuff won't show up in anyone's conversion report.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
The loss of manufacturing and design know-how is truly worrisome.
And the fact that the best minds of our time are being employed to manipulate the rest of us isn't?
Advertisements has turned evil long ago. The original idea of getting your product out there, letting people know about it so they can come to buy it if they want - how far have we come since? Marketing is psychological warfare on the population.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Manufacturing is dirty and nasty and you don't ever want to do it. It's for the dummies. It's buggywhips.
That's what's pounded into the heads of everyone going through school that scores above 100 on IQ. As Mike Rowe said at TED, there's a war on work that's been going on for 40 years.
--
BMO
The "war on work" has been going on a lot longer than that, and not just unskilled mechanical labor. Where are the ranks of clerks and scriveners so dear to the hearts of Scrooge, Marley, &Co.? Replaced by computerized accounting and recordkeeping systems. Where do you go to make labor even cheaper that China? Robots.
We do this because life shouldn't have to exist on the razor edge of survival. So we come up with devices and schemes to make work more efficient. We have washing machines, we have Roombas, we have the Internet. But if we get too efficient, we end up with people who have nothing productive to do.
We've generally managed to offset that by finding new things to do - program computers, design social webapps and so forth. But the danger is that we end up in a world where only a limited type of skills have any real value. People with more brawn than brains get left out when the jobs are all phoned it. People who can't create, but can implement get left out when any monkey can implement with automated tools.
George Jetson to the contrary (Man, these 3-hour work days are killing me!), we're still of the opinion that the true value of a person is that they appear to be physically doing something, and pay accordingly. The other day, a congressman was griping about the suggestion that FAA controllers be "paid to sleep", for example, because maintaining mental alertness apparently has no value, but sitting in a chair with one's eyelids drooping does. Just like paying people to level Amazonian rain forests is OK, but paying them to leave the "lungs of the world" intact, is not.
In short, the problem with bean-counting is that it only counts beans, not intangibles. Unless we are careful, we're going to end up with relatively few "productive" jobs and a lot of disaffected people. If the expected levelling-off of the global population anticipated circa 2050 actually happens, even that great driver of business expansion population growth will fail us.
We were once told that the end result of better efficiency was that it would free up our time for leisure pursuits and to better improve our minds and our culture. In the Real Worlds, however, unless you were born wealthy - that is, having the money handed to you - you're expected to "work" for it, even if the need for actual workers dries up. Worse, yet, there's a respectable (numerically, at least) portion of the population who think that education and culture are things to be demonized and shunned.
This obviously calls for the employment of people to figure out how we're going to handle this looming massive work/person imbalance. Which will at least give someone a productive job. Too much of what we do lately is basically people making noise at each other, whether it involves elaborate financial schemes or social networking. In truth, even the poorest among us is in many ways fantastically wealthy as long as you don't count food and shelter as sole indicators of wealth. Much of the manufactured goods and information we consume is the next best thing to free - especially since we relaxed our quality requirement (for example, particle board and flimsy plastic).
One thing that's totally free, though. The first twerp who responds with a sentence beginning "It's Simple..." gets a punch in the mouth, absolutely gratis. So do as many more as my fist can take. Things that are truly simple get solved, even if the human race does tend to be rather perverse about such things. This is not a simple problem and the only people who can claim it has a simple solution are simpletons.
I don't think absolute wealth (vis a vis relative wealth) means what you think it means, or at least, you are failing to see the distinction. See, you're comparing what the median worker can purchase with their contemporaneous workers. That's relative wealth. To compare absolute wealth, we need to put the median 1950 and median 2010 lifestyle side by side; in that sense the median life today is a life of abundance
Obviously, while an iPod or a Kindle would be a priceless object in 1950, because they are a category of product that simply didn't exist then, their ubiquity today means they are devalued in our eyes. But in absolute terms our lifestyle is better, and our failure to see it simply highlights my point about how human psychology is flawed in that it tends to value relative wealth over absolute wealth. Obviously I agree with you that wealth stratification is an issue we should address, because if your goal is human flourishing, you must take into account the foibles of human psychology.
Social networking is driving the study of human relationships. Already we have studies showing Twitter traffic predicting performance in the stock market. That's incredibly surprising, and rather exciting when you think about it. Even if the social networking bubble bursts, it will leave us with plenty of knowledge we wouldn't have had otherwise.
I've never been able to put my finger on it, but it's starting to ring clearer. How the heck does manufacturing know-how play into our technology world? It's the SPIRIT of manufacturing, of doing things yourself, that we are losing. I took plenty of engineering classes as part of my CS degree, and I've always been a "tinkerer" - whether it be with engines or electronics. Over the last several years I got back into motorcycles, and now have an assortment of tools to help me do things myself - grinders, files, welder, raw steel. I bought an old truck to work on. Some people even my own age don't get it. There's not even a DVD player in it! I think we're sinking into a pit. I don't get these social sites. It all seems so meaningless. Which is OK I guess, but you have to unplug from it. When I can't carry on a 1:1 conversation with someone because they are busy checking their phone. It all seems so mindless. When you do things with your hands.. when you do something, you can really focus on it. We seem to have lost our focus - not on one particular thing, just in general.
This is a good video to watch .
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The best minds do not think about making people click ads. Those minds are loud but mediocre at best. The best minds could care less about ads. The best minds will never fall into marketing because marketing itself is a scam. Its purpose is to scam people into buying stuff they probably dont even need. So how, i ask thee, could the best minds fall for something thats so easy to see through? Money? myeah maybe but if i look back in history, most of the best minds that survived the test of time were never in it for the money. Why would this have changed ? Another major mistake by evolution itself like letting humans have the upper hand ? It's not because you're in the spotlight that you are the best. Spotlight kids are usually backed up by better minds who either dont care about the spotlight
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
Why was my post down moderated for? I'd like to see a technical fault I made in my post, for you to justify down modding my post...
(DO I expect the coward who did it to actually APPEAR & technically justify his downward moderation on technical grounds? No - they NEVER do!)
APK
P.S.=> Just posting this for posterities' sake, & mainly due to "webmistressrachel's" crap here today:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2086424&cid=35852858
and here also:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2086424&cid=35854376
and her comment on HOSTS file I will put up a quote of, now, for anyone reading's reference:
"both TomHudson and the rest of us, were SICK TO FUCKING DEATH of you God-Damn HOSTS file BULLSHIT!" - by webmistressrachel (903577) on Sunday April 17, @09:29PM (#35851568) Journal
Now, I don't ever see "the likes of trolls" like both people noted above, EVER disprove a single thing in the post I am asking about, & why it was "down-moderated"... funny that, eh?
No, they're either:
1.) Malware/botnet makers, who can't stand the added layered security protection HOSTS files give you
OR
2.) They're webmasters (more likely w/ rachel quoted above on a guess), who FEAR HOSTS FILES because they can stop adbanners (even though they've been found laden w/ malicious code many times (see my init. post that was modded down for many examples/proofs thereof)), & thus, they doubtless feel that HOSTS FILES STOP THEIR PROFIT MARGINS...
I actually lean to #2 for webmistressrachel, but NOT SO MUCH, in tomhudson's case? See these quotes:
"As I've pointed out elsewhere, it is a trivial exercise to design a C&C that can bypass the whole HOSTS thing" - by tomhudson (43916) on Friday April 01, @11:30AM (#35688796) Homepage Journal
FROM http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2051634&cid=35688796
(Which I UTTERLY DESTROYED & tomhudson RAN from, here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2084000&cid=35823050 as to his "russian botnet design"... layered security, did him in, easily! Too easily in fact...)
and
"Do like I did - work for the Russians for a few years" - by tomhudson (43916) on Monday June 28 2010, @11:09AM (#32716798) Homepage Journal
FROM http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1699526&cid=32716798
(AND, Russians? Are NOTORIOUS for botnets out of the .ru & .su TLD's ... I know, from populating a HOSTS file daily for nearly 15 yrs. now everyday (automagically, via programs I wrote for it to happen, even while I sleep))
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Facebook isn't just about advertising. It has been closely tied in with the Web 2.0/Cloud Computing movement. This has led to the use of web pages as robust applications that can accomplish far more than their first-tech-boom counterparts. People can now, theoretically, accomplish everything they commonly need to do on a computer through the use of a web browser. Facebook, as a familiar fixture of the Web 2.0 world, has played a part and had a hand in this.