Interesting links. I'd never heard of Mr. Ringer, or his theory before this.
My simplistic understanding of his 3 types theory is this: "In summation, I realized that no matter how a guy came on, he would, in the final analysis, attempt to grab all of my chips (again with the one exception that I pointed out)." (The exception being the classic "win-win", where the other party benefits from my success, thus aligning incentives.)
My reaction to reading that was to think about myself. If the theory is correct, then regardless of my own intentions, I'm going to try to "grab all [his] chips". That actually makes his "Type Number One" guy the most honest and ethical.
I don't think I can quite reconcile my own ethics with that analysis, but I'm willing to consider it. It paints a somewhat bleak picture of business ethics.
How do you read his theory, if you put yourself in the shoes of the other party in the transaction, rather than his first person?
My take on what he wrote was that people (in sales) will do for themselves first, their friends second (if anything is left over or what they can't personally grab), and everyone else last.
Thinking this way helps me keep my confidence when another party tries to sell me on a plan to "help" me when I can't understand how they will personally profit by their plan. So I can refuse their "help" with confidence knowing I can't possibly be missing out on anything.
That is a very succinct summary, thank you for that.
I was actually asking about this from the opposite person's perspective. I didn't catch the "in sales" part -- did I just miss that, or am I missing a larger context of his theory? Having missed that piece of info, I was wondering what this theory says about my own motivations (I would categorize myself in the 3rd category, where I try to help my friends. But shouldn't I question my own motivations, given this outlook?)
I suppose it's reasonable to question one's own motivations pretty regularly, anyhow.
Thanks. I just assumed if value is being transferred, as money/assets rather than experience or knowledge or something else intangible, then the transfer involves "selling". That is just my default assumption in business.
My roommate is a doctor, and I've been having some discussions on this topic lately.
The biggest concept is to use technology to support the existing dr's workflow. This can vary, a lot, between different types of doctors.
The thing he most often comments upon is the text replacement feature for his office's electronic records. He can type "issued XYZ medication due to past history of .HT." and the system will automatically insert the relevant heart history information (maybe a recent test reading, etc.) into the record.
Saves him time in recording info into the patient records. That seems to be his #1 desire for better tech -- saving time. And making complete entry into the medical records is a good place to work, as it solves a frustration that already exists.
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing! It sounds like time is the thing that escapes doctors in the most in their day to day work. This is a good thing to think about and base ideas on. Thanks!
It does a good job of being brief and describing what uberzet allows me to do.
However, it feels fairly sparse, and it doesn't tell me what uberzet is. Is it a web app? Is it a page for me that i can send other people to in order to search my public folder?
A little more work on the layout would make me feel better about giving login credentials to my dropbox.
Can you help me understand the contempt you have for the Zynga games? I don't play, myself, but I do understand that the games exploit (negative? compulsive?) psychology, and they've used unethical business strategies.
But who cares? After all, it's unlikely the next Vonnegut is going to spend his time playing MafiaWars instead of writing "Slaughterhouse Five" or anything.
I am reminded of the aphorism, "Time you've enjoyed wasting is not wasted time."
On the other hand, equity compensation in a startup is also based on the riskiness of the equity. Even if an employee is not that "valuable", they should still not have the original terms of their agreements altered.
[I agree with all the points above, but wanted to add in the fact that early employees are rewarded for risk as well as production. Esp if they signed on for below market salaries, with stock calculated as deferred compensation.]
From the Ars Technica article it sounds like this evidence was introduced in defense of Hotfile. You're most likely right -- hotfile doesn't have the resources to pursue this as a counterattack. However, it could be used as a successful defense in their current case, which could help establish it as part of case law.
"Hotfile has also tried to turn the tables by arguing that one of the studios, Warner Brothers, has itself violated the DMCA by issuing bogus takedown requests"
I 100% agree, when you're talking about the ads that are aired a hundred times a day on syndicated television. Then again, the shows are terrible, so I suppose it's fitting that the ads match.
However, what about Apple's 1984 ad? Or the BMW mini-movie advertisements they ran about 6 years ago?
There are some incredibly cool concept ads out there. They usually are not the ones broadcast, but if you watch the end of the year awards for the industry, there are some very creative minds working there. (And creating some impressive work).
You are right -- there are some neat aspects to this model.
However, it also tends to devalue the work invested by the analysts. They are doing the work for essentially a lottery ticket -- winner take all. That's the reason that it can be so cost effective to the company running the competition -- they don't absorb the costs of the failures (or less optimal approaches).
Those costs have to be absorbed by someone. In this model, they are eaten by the analysts, who (generally) don't have enough resources to cover those costs. Due to that, I don't think this model is sustainable or will really catch on.
OTOH, in some (ideal) academic endeavors, having multiple groups compete for more funding or for a prize has certainly benefitted the sciences. In that case, however, the competition was more friendly than zero sum. Also, I believe the different sides tend to share information more than hoard it, yielding lessons learned to the entire group from one team's failures.
My experience is the opposite. I entered a number of competitions last year. For a data scientist, the opportunity to access clean data sets and interesting real-world problems, as well as to see how your techniques compare to others', is really compelling. (At least it was for me!)
I won a couple of competitions, and discovered that the competitive environment pushed me to create new algorithms and develop new ideas that I otherwise would not have. (Normally I would have thought my initial answers were "good enough" - but in the extremely competitive environment of Kaggle that is never true!)
And of course there were many more competitions I did not win. Honestly, I learnt much more from these - because by the end of the comp I knew quite a bit about the problem domain, and had tried a few ideas out, so when I then read the winning papers it gave me heaps of new ideas and insights that I could use in future projects and competitions.
I became so interested in the company that I invested in it, and then started helping out here and there, and finally joined full-time and this week have moved to SF (from Melbourne, Australia) and am now Kaggle's President and Chief Scientist.
It depends on what you mean by "sustainable." Is it going to create a sustainable business model that will displace the whole analyst labor/consulting market? No. A significant portion? Probably not. Will it create opportunities for firms needing analysis to get it done cheaply and for non-traditional or inexperienced analyst to show their stuff? For sure.
Might it lead to totally new ways of approaching problems that would never have been discovered otherwise? Most likely.
So it's not going to replace analyst in a niche that is already hot, but it will be a valuable component of that ecosystem.
I wish them the best of luck and I'm already thinking of ways my company could use this.
That's fair. I originally had the word "devalue" in the comment, but I pulled it out. Why? No one is forcing the analyst to participate, but instead, they absorb the costs to get exposure or growth (or fun). Whether that's a fair tradeoff is up to each person, but given the number of folks participating in Netflix competitions, these, and others out there, a group of smart, analytic types feel the tradeoff is worth it.
For the Netflix competition in particular, a lot of the entrants were being "paid" in research papers, grants, and academic salary, because it was a high-profile competition in a theoretically not-entirely-settled area (collaborative filtering), so even many non-winning entries could get published papers out of it. I don't think that can be infinitely replicated, in part because once there are dozens of contests, it's less likely any one will be as high profile, and in part because not every ML contest is as academically interesting (the Netflix setting was sort of "weird" from the perspective of traditional statistical models, not being a straightforward regression problem, whereas some of these are pretty straightforward).
I'm not (yet) a highly paid consultant in this area, but I still don't think it's worth my time to participate in most of these Kaggle contests. Even the $3 million prize for the healthcare prediction isn't worth it if you think you have a chance of beating current best-practice (and think you can sell your time or have a friend who can sell your time to corporations).
One other use case is if you have significantly different weather conditions a short distance from one another. I live near the coastal mountains; a 20 minute drive could take me from nice and sunny to cold and rainy.
Your points about feedback are valid, however.
Does anyone think it could also be useful to tie a twitter feed in with weather information? I feel like weather is one of those things that ppl complain about on twitter all the time; some simple geolocation and keyword matching and you could pull up recent geolocated tweets near you. Could be a nice qualitative weather report to accompany the actual data (people like a personal face on the weather).
My simplistic understanding of his 3 types theory is this: "In summation, I realized that no matter how a guy came on, he would, in the final analysis, attempt to grab all of my chips (again with the one exception that I pointed out)." (The exception being the classic "win-win", where the other party benefits from my success, thus aligning incentives.)
My reaction to reading that was to think about myself. If the theory is correct, then regardless of my own intentions, I'm going to try to "grab all [his] chips". That actually makes his "Type Number One" guy the most honest and ethical.
I don't think I can quite reconcile my own ethics with that analysis, but I'm willing to consider it. It paints a somewhat bleak picture of business ethics.
How do you read his theory, if you put yourself in the shoes of the other party in the transaction, rather than his first person?