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Strong opinions, weakly held

Category: Commentary (page 16 of 982)

The human body is a tool for experts

Lately I’ve been thinking about exercise, mainly because I’ve been experimenting with Crossfit. Too much has been written about the good and bad of Crossfit, this isn’t one of those posts. What I’m interested in is some of the exercises people do at Crossfit, and how they make me think about how we use our bodies to do work.

Crossfit emphasizes Olympic weight lifts — the clean and jerk and the snatch. They’re both techniques for getting weight from the ground to over your head. With the clean and jerk you do it in two movements, the snatch involves one continuous movement. Both require a large amount of skill, and even people who have been doing them for awhile tend to be pretty terrible at it.

All but the most skilled can lift more weight using simpler approaches. What’s interesting, though, is that if you can perform these lifts well, you’ll be able to lift more weight than an equally strong person could using other techniques. Mastery enables you to make the most of your own physical potential.

Olympic weightlifting teaches you to be an expert in using a particular tool (your body) for a specific task (getting some weight from the ground to over your head). It’s is a pure example of a case where doing things the hard way takes a person further than easier paths can provide.

I find this really motivating. Currently I am at the point where I feel my weakest when I’m trying to do the proper Olympic lifts. The simpler the approach, the more effective I am. I am intrigued, though, by the idea of learning how to use my own body like an expert.

The spooks and the social media titans and the online commerce goliaths are collaborating to improve data-crunching software tools that enable the tracking of our behavior in fantastically intimate ways that simply weren’t possible as recently as four or five years ago. It’s a new military industrial open source Big Data complex. The gift economy has delivered us the surveillance state.

Andrew Leonard writes about the interaction of open source, private industry, and government intelligence agencies in Netflix, Facebook — and the NSA: They’re all in it together. I think the piece is perhaps a bit too negative, I’ll try to follow up on that later.

How management and teaching are alike

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about his experience of teaching a writing class at MIT this semester. Here he is talking about motivating students:

I didn’t have to work hard to motivate people. What I found was that if I showed up, and I was excited, they fed off of that, and they got excited. I came to feel that teaching was performance. My job was to communicate my own energy and belief in the importance of the work.

As a manager, this is what I try to bring to my work. Hopefully I’m successful.

I’m going to write more about this some other time, but one thing I’ve come to realize is that there’s nothing I appreciate more than a committed performance. Whether it’s from a singer, an actor, a teacher, or a colleague. Commitment makes up for almost any other deficiency.

The whisteblower’s name is Edward Snowden

Today The Guardian prints the identity of the PRISM whistleblower, at his request:

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.

For those of us who believe that the protection of whistleblowers is an essential component of a functioning democracy, the question before us is how to effectively protest when he is inevitably arrested and tried. Web site defacements by Anonymous aren’t going to keep him out of jail.

You’ll also read a lot of demands that President Obama pardon Snowden, but I think that’s highly unlikely. The Obama Justice Department has aggressively prosecuted whistleblowers, and the pardon power is generally applied through a bureaucratic process handled by the Justice Department. I’m not optimistic about prosecutorial discretion saving the day, either.

In any case, keeping Snowden’s name in the news as much as possible will be important.

See also: Bruce Schneier on whistleblowers.

One explanation of the hype behind Big Data

Cam Davidson-Pilon talks about 21st Century Problems. Here’s how he describes most of the great technological leaps of the 20th century:

What these technologies have in common is that are all deterministic engineering solutions. By that, I mean they have been created by techniques in mathematics, physics and engineering: often being modeled in a mathematical language, guided by physics’ calculus and constrained and brought to life by engineering. I argue that these types of problems, of modeling deterministically, are problems that our fathers had the luxury of solving.

And here’s the truth behind the hype about Big Data we see so much of these days:

Statistical problems describe the space we haven’t explored yet. Statistical problems are not new: they are likely as old as deterministic problems. What is new is our ability to solve them. Spear-headed by the (constantly increasing) tidal wave of data, practitioners are able to solve new problems otherwise thought impossible.

The last campaign book you need to read

Now that I’ve read Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes, I’ll never look at elections or election coverage the same way again. More importantly, I’ll never look at media criticism the same way again.

First of all, let me start by saying that it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read, period. It’s brilliantly constructed and incredibly well written. Ezra Klein wrote about the book’s impact when Richard Ben Cramer passed away earlier this year.

The most brilliant thing about the book is that Cramer writes with sympathy for all of the candidates that he covers. I wouldn’t have wanted most of the book’s subjects to be President, but I felt bad for all of the losers and the eventual winner as the book unfolded.

I think, though, that the lasting impact of the book is that it makes it clear that all of the political themes we discuss today are just echoes of the same themes that we’ve been arguing about for decades. For example, here’s a snippet from a 1988 Gary Hart speech:

Agriculture and energy, that’s another. … Infrastructure—now what is that? That’s our roads and harbors, and public works, our sewer systems, transit systems, and bridges—there’s bridges falling down in this country in every state of the union! That’s how to put our people back to work!

That sounds like something any Democratic politician might say today. His explanation of Texas conservative politics decades ago that could be a word for word description of the Tea Party today. None of this stuff is new.

Most importantly, he lays the idiocy and destructiveness of horse race campaign coverage bare. The desire to reconstruct actual events into a narrative that the pack can write about, the eagerness to chase pseudo-scandals to keep things interesting, and the need to discipline candidates who don’t meet the expectations of the media horde — he sees and reports on it all.

If you’re interested in politics at all, I’d skip the contemporary accounts and go back and read What It Takes. It’s all already there.

The math that governs A/B testing

A Corollary to ExperimentCalculator.com (with examples)

There’s a lot of talk about A/B testing on Web sites these days, but most people don’t have a good concept of how many people need to see an experiment in order to produce a statistically significant result. It’s more than you probably think.

NewsBlur redesigned

The NewsBlur Redesign

My favorite online feed reader, NewsBlur, launched a major redesign last night. NewsBlur’s biggest drawback has been that the JavaScript-heavy user interface occasionally got in the way of users rather than assisting them. This redesign attacks that problem head on. The upside of NewsBlur has been that it works really well at its core purpose, fetching feeds and displaying them for the user. It also has solid native mobile clients, enabling you to keep read status in sync across devices. Finally, the entire source repository is available through GitHub. You almost certainly won’t run your own NewsBlur instance, and you probably won’t be submitting patch requests, but the transparency is appreciated. Finally, it offers social features that are comparable to the ones that Google Reader killed some time ago. The clock is ticking for Google Reader, and I strongly encourage you to check out NewsBlur.

Taking a stab at verifiable anonymity

The New Yorker is the first publication to create an anonymous drop box for sources based on Strongbox, an anonymized document sharing tool by Kevin Poulsen and Aaron Swartz. What the architecture really shows is how difficult it is to achieve anonymity and security on the Internet, given the amount of data exhaust created by just about any action online. If nothing else, this underscores what an amazing technical achievement Bitcoin is.

Graciousness looks easy, but of course it is not.

Nice little essay on graciousness from Esquire magazine. People who don’t aspire to be more gracious scare me.

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