Friday, November 27, 2020
Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business
The Case for Jamie
Thursday, November 26, 2020
The Old Drift: A Novel
Sunday, November 22, 2020
Trump and Me
The author of Trump and Me had a great deal of experience covering Trump from his early days sa a business tycoon. With Trump becoming a viable political candidate in 2016, he wrote a book.
Trump is portrayed as a master salesman. The item he has sold best has been himself. He was able to draw funding for his real estate ventures even as previous adventures had failed. He would portray himself as a playboy billionaire. However, he would be nearly insolvent when an ex-wife tried to get a divorce settlement. He made it a point to respect the little guys that worked for his enterprises. This would help endere him to the blue collar workers nationwide. Russian oligarchs saw him as "old money" and had a great dela of respect for him.
From an early day, he had leaderhsip and political ambissions. However, his ideology and party affiliation were unclear. He had been a Democrat, a Republican and a potential Reform Party candidate. He had engaged in blatently unpolitical behavior (such as talking about his sex life on Howard Stern.) Regardless of his afifliation, his primary allegience was to himself and his brand. He was eventually able to sell that brand to the voters to secure a nomination. Truth was never anything that he would let get in the way of self promotion, whether it be in politics or business. It just so happened that Truth checkers are a little more common in the political sphere.
Friday, November 20, 2020
The Year of Dreaming Dangerously
Slavoj Žižek explores the "current events" of 2011 from the Marxist perspective. He has ample criticism and compliments for all sides. There were some protests that were just violence without any particular result desired. Some had concrete goals in mind, but were just advocating changes within the current capitalistic system. He would like to see a full on quest for communism. However, even here he has concerns. Marx was very much a student of the industrial age and thus is very biased towards that way of development. That age is long since passed. A new arising of communism will be different. There may be things that look frivolous today, but in the future will be key events that lead to the new world order.
He focuses on events such as the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring and brings in other less well known uprisings. The discussion is layered with pop culture and literature. He praises "timeless" creations that still work in new places and time (such as Romeo and Juliet set in modern Venice Beach.) He manages to tie Ayn Rand and Lion King together. The circle of life is great if you are a lion. There are a lot of interesting ideas in the book. There are some significant structural problems with our capitalistic society today. The past attempts at communism have also had their shortcomings. Would the dialectic lead us to something totally different?
Sunday, November 15, 2020
Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You
What Does our stuff say about us? What can we find out by superficially looking at other people's environment? These are the questions that Snoop tries to answer.
People will often have two different "physical views". Some areas, such as an office cubicle are meant to be public. A bedroom, on the other hand is a private space. Sometimes people will try to portray a different image in public than in private. This can extend to the digital domain also. An email signature and facebook profile are carefully curated. However, tagged posts are not subject to so much control. Sometimes the public profile will be more aspirational. People may aspire to be neat and tidy. However, there may be evidence of an occasional clean sweep of the mess rather than actual dedicated effort to tidyness.
Psychologists have divided people up into various common profiles. Some internal traits can easily be identifiable by the physical world, while others are more difficult. Our intuition can help us in some areas, but hurt us in others. The author notes that we tend to easily retroactively understand the "correct" intuitions, but these may not be the first ones to come to mind. He found the lectures would go very differently based on the order he presented things. If he asked people to identify the person based on the environment first, people would use the "most common" criteria and then be shocked at the incorrect conclusion. However, if he first started with the "correct" identification mechanism, people would more easily put that in their frame of reference and thing that it properly related.
Music plays a key role in personal identification. The author is based in Austin, Texas where music plays perhaps a greater role in society than most other places. Could this have influenced the finding? The book was also written more than a decade ago when musical experience was different than it is today. One had to actively seek out and purchase music in advance. Now, one can instantly pick anything to stream. Does this change the identifying power of music.
One interesting finding was the power of stereotypes and the negative impact that the fear of racism has played in our public use of stereotypes. There has been a great deal of research into how stereotypes are bad and lead to improper outcomes. However, there has been very little (if any) to study how stereotypes can be good. White people, especially, are reluctant to admit that race even exists. In one study, they were given different pictures of people to distinguish. The white participants would identify by hair color, gender and any other characteristic they could before trying to use race. (Black participants were more willing to use race.) In our interactions in the world, we must use stereotypes. We cannot relearn everything. We assume that the sidewalk is rigid,even if we have never stepped on it before. Similarly with people, we can assume a great deal about them based on their stereotypes. The mannerisms, clothing and personal environment all tell us a lot about a person. This can help us to understand them better. In job searching, employers give a high weighting to a face-to-face interview. However, this can be misleading. The brief interaction may encourage us to play more to our preconceived notions. We think we are not stereotyping when we are. Instead, we should acknowledge that we are stereotyping all the time. It is normal. We can't fully know somebody. We can work on improving how we group somebody and make sure we are not relying on things that are not valuable for the given situation.