Books – Page 63 – artdiamondblog.com

Why “Experts” Censor Their Views to Conform to the Consensus

Source of book image: http://thesituationist.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/irving-janis-groupthink.jpg?w=197&h=290

(p. 5) In his classic 1972 book, “Groupthink,” Irving L. Janis, the Yale psychologist, explained how panels of experts could make colossal mistakes. People on these panels, he said, are forever worrying about their personal relevance and effectiveness, and feel that if they deviate too far from the consensus, they will not be given a serious role. They self-censor personal doubts about the emerging group consensus if they cannot express these doubts in a formal way that conforms with apparent assumptions held by the group.

For the full commentary, see:
ROBERT J. SHILLER. “ECONOMIC VIEW; Challenging the Crowd in Whispers, Not Shouts.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., November 2, 2008): 5.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date November 1, 2008.)

The reference for the second, and last, edition of the Janis book, is:
Janis, Irving L. Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. 2nd (pb) ed. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 1982.

Yahoo Execs Complained that Google Did Yahoo Searches too Well

(p. 45) Even though Google never announced when it refreshed its index, there would invariably be a slight rise in queries around the world soon after the change was implemented. It was as if the global subconscious realized that there were fresher results available.
The response of Yahoo’s users to the Google technology, though, was probably more conscious. They noticed that search was better and used it more. “It increased traffic by, like, 50 percent in two months,” Manber recalls of the switch to Google. But the only comment he got from Yahoo executives was complaints that people were searching too much and they would have to pay higher fees to Google.
But the money Google received for providing search was not the biggest benefit. Even more valuable was that it now had access to many more users and much more data. It would be data that took Google search to the next level. The search behavior of users, captured and encapsulated in the logs that could be analyzed and mined, would make Google the ultimate learning machine.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

In Conflict Between Ecologist and Economist, the Economist Won

Paul Ehrlich (left) and Julian Simon (right). Source of caricature: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. C6) . . . in 1980 Simon made Mr. Ehrlich a bet. If Mr. Ehrlich’s predictions about overpopulation and the depletion of resources were correct, Simon said, then over the next decade the prices of commodities would rise as they became more scarce. Simon contended that, because markets spur innovation and create efficiencies, commodity prices would fall. He proposed that each party put up $1,000 to purchase a basket of five commodities. If the prices of these went down, Mr. Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference between the 1980 and 1990 prices. If the prices went up, Simon would pay. This meant that Mr. Ehrlich’s exposure was limited while Simon’s was theoretically infinite.
. . .
In October 1990, Mr. Ehrlich mailed a check for $576.07 to Simon.
. . .
Mr. Ehrlich was more than a sore loser. In 1995, he told this paper: “If Simon disappeared from the face of the Earth, that would be great for humanity.” (Simon would die in 1998.)
. . .
Mr. Sabin’s portrait of Mr. Ehrlich suggests that he is among the more pernicious figures in the last century of American public life. As Mr. Sabin shows, he pushed an authoritarian vision of America, proposing “luxury taxes” on items such as diapers and bottles and refusing to rule out the use of coercive force in order to prevent Americans from having children. In many ways, Mr. Ehrlich was an early instigator of the worst aspects of America’s culture wars. This picture is all the more damning because Mr. Sabin paints it not with malice but with sympathy. A history professor at Yale, Mr. Sabin shares Mr. Ehrlich’s devotion to environmentalism. Yet this affinity doesn’t prevent Mr. Sabin from being clear-eyed.
At heart, “The Bet” is about not just a conflict of men; it is about a conflict of disciplines, pitting ecologists against economists. Mr. Sabin cautiously posits that neither side has been completely vindicated by the events of the past 40 years. But this may be charity on his part: While not everything Simon predicted has come to pass, in the main he has been vindicated.
. . .
Mr. Ehrlich may have been defeated in the wager, but he has continued to flourish in the public realm. The great mystery left unsolved by “The Bet” is why Paul Ehrlich and his confederates have paid so small a price for their mistakes. And perhaps even been rewarded for them. In 1990, just as Mr. Ehrlich was mailing his check to Simon, the MacArthur Foundation awarded him one of its “genius” grants. And 20 years later his partner in the wager, John Holdren, was appointed by President Obama to be director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

For the full review, see:
JONATHAN V. LAST. “A Prediction that Bombed; Paul Ehrlich predicted an imminent population catastrophe; Julian Simon wagered he was wrong.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., August 31, 2013): C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date August 30, 2013, and has the title “Book Review: ‘The Bet’ by Paul Sabin; Paul Ehrlich predicted an imminent population catastrophe–Julian Simon wagered he was wrong.”)

The book discussed above is:
Sabin, Paul. The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013.

Source of book image: http://paulsabin.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/sabin_the_bet_wr.jpg

Redundancy Allowed Google to Function with Cheap and Failure-Prone Hard Drives

(p. 42) . . . as the web kept growing, Google added more machines–by the end of 1999, there were eighty machines involved in the crawl (out of a total of almost three thousand Google computers at that time)–and the likelihood that something would break increased dramatically. Especially since Google made a point of buying what its engineers referred to as “el cheapo” equipment. Instead of commercial units that carefully processed and checked information, Google would buy discounted consumer models without built-in processes to protect the integrity of data.
As a stopgap measure, the engineers had implemented a scheme where the indexing data was stored on different hard drives. If a machine went bad, everyone’s pager would start buzzing, even if it was the middle of the night, and they’d barrel into the office immediately to stop the crawl, copy the data, and change the configuration files. “This happened every few days, and it basically stopped everything and was very painful,” says Sanjay Ghemawat, one of the DEC research wizards who had joined Google.
. . .
(p. 43) The experience led to an ambitious revamp of the way the entire Google infrastructure dealt with files. “I always had wanted to build a file system, and it was pretty clear that this was something we were going to have to do,” says Ghemawat, who led the team. Though there had previously been systems that handled information distributed over multiple files, Google’s could handle bigger data loads and was more nimble at running full speed in the face of disk crashes– which it had to be because, with Google’s philosophy of buying supercheap components, failure was the norm. “The main idea was that we wanted the file system to automate dealing with failures, and to do that, the file system would keep multiple copies and it would make new copies when some copy failed,” says Ghemawat.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Jeb Bush Reads Clayton Christensen on His Kindle

Jeb Bush. Source of caricature: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

Clayton Christensen is a kindred spirit: he cares about making the world a better place through innovation in free markets. He research is almost always thought-provoking, and sometimes highly illuminating. So it speaks well of Jeb Bush that he has the good judgement to be reading one of Christensen’s books on education.

(p. A11) Currently [Bush is] reading “Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns” — on his Kindle electronic reader.

For the full interview, see:
FRED BARNES. “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW with JEB BUSH; Republicans Must Be a National Party Florida’s former governor on immigration, school choice, and the GOP’s limited-government foundation.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., February 14, 2009): A11.
(Note: words in brackets added.)

The Christensen book mentioned on education, is:
Christensen, Clayton M., Curtis W. Johnson, and Michael B. Horn. Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. New York: NY: McGraw-Hill, 2008.
(Note: a revised edition of the book appeared in 2011.)

To Page and Brin Search Speed “Was Like Motherhood, and Scale Was Apple Pie”

(p. 37) The average search at that time, Hölzle recalls, took three and a half seconds. Considering that speed was one of the core values of Page and Brin– it was like motherhood, and scale was apple pie– this was a source of distress for the founders. “Basically during the middle of the day we were maxed out,” says Hölzle. “Nothing was happening for some users, because it would just never get a page basically back. It was all about scalability, performance improvements.” Part of the problem was that Page and Brin had written the system in what Hölzle calls “university code,” a nice way of saying amateurish.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Google Started in Garage

(p. 34) On September 4, 1998, Page and Brin filed for incorporation and finally moved off campus. Sergey’s girlfriend at the time was friendly with a manager at Intel named Susan Wojcicki, who had just purchased a house on Santa Margarita Street in Menlo Park with her husband for $615,000. To help meet the mortgage, the couple charged Google $1,700 a month to rent the garage and several rooms in the house.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Dubai Has Strong Ruling Clan, But Weak Institutions

Source of book image: http://www.christopherdavidson.net/sitebuilder/images/DVOS_cover-210×300.jpg

(p. 4) For Mr. Davidson, Dubai’s greatest weakness lies in its autocratic governing system. Politics in the emirate, as in most of the Middle East, pivots not on institutions but on clans — a ruling dynasty and its favorites who own and run Dubai in opaque fashion.

True enough, but most of the Middle East is authoritarian, yet Dubai’s enlightened despotism and welcoming social environment have stood out for fostering economic advance. Like China, albeit on a tiny scale, Dubai is engaged in an experiment of economic liberalization without political democracy.
Mr. Davidson further contends that unstable neighbors threaten Dubai’s success, but here he may have matters reversed. When Egypt and Iran stifle their entrepreneurs, many of them find a wide berth in Dubai. When Saudi Arabia imposes cultural restrictions on its population, Dubai offers a place to drink and let loose. When India and Pakistan have trouble creating jobs for their large populations, Dubai absorbs labor migrants. When Iraq or Lebanon descends into war, Dubai profits from rebuilding them.
In short, until a vast arc of countries from East Africa to Southeast Asia changes substantially, Dubai will remain poised to benefit by providing a relatively open, secure, low-tax, business-friendly alternative.

For the full review, see:
STEPHEN KOTKIN. “OFF THE SHELF; The Glittering Emirate, Revisited.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., December 7, 2008): 4.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 6, 2008, and the title “OFF THE SHELF; Dubai, the Glittering Emirate, Revisited.”)

The book under review, is:
Davidson, Christopher M. Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

“We Just Begged and Borrowed” for Equipment

(p. 32) Google was handling as many as 10,000 queries a day. At times it was consuming half of Stanford’s Internet capacity. Its appetite for equipment and bandwidth was voracious. “We just begged and borrowed,” says Page. “There were tons of computers around, and we managed to get some.” Page’s dorm room was essentially Google’s operations center, with a motley assortment of computers from various manufacturers stuffed into a homemade version of a server rack– a storage cabinet made of Legos. Larry and Sergey would hang around the loading dock to see who on campus was getting computers– companies like Intel and Sun gave lots of free machines to Stanford to curry favor with employees of the future– (p. 33) and then the pair would ask the recipients if they could share some of the bounty.
That still wasn’t enough. To store the millions of pages they had crawled, the pair had to buy their own high-capacity disk drives. Page, who had a talent for squeezing the most out of a buck, found a place that sold refurbished disks at prices so low– a tenth of the original cost– that something was clearly wrong with them. “I did the research and figured out that they were okay as long as you replaced the [disk] operating system,” he says. “We got 120 drives, about nine gigs each. So it was about a terabyte of space.” It was an approach that Google would later adopt in building infrastructure at low cost.
Larry and Sergey would be sitting by the monitor, watching the queries– at peak times, there would be a new one every second– and it would be clear that they’d need even more equipment. What next? they’d ask themselves. Maybe this is real.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: italics in original.)

Excite Rejected Google Because It Was too Good

(p. 28) Maybe the closest Page and Brin came to a deal was with Excite, a search-based company that had begun– just like Yahoo– with a bunch of sharp Stanford kids whose company was called Architext before the venture capitalists (VCs) got their hands on it and degeekified the name. Terry Winograd, Sergey’s adviser, accompanied them to a meeting with Vinod Khosla, the venture capitalist who had funded Excite.
. . .
(p. 29) Khosla made a tentative counteroffer of $ 750,000 total. But the deal never happened. Hassan recalls a key meeting that might have sunk it. Though Excite had been started by a group of Stanford geeks very much like Larry and Sergey, its venture capital funders had demanded they hire “adult supervision,” the condescending term used when brainy geeks are pushed aside as top executives and replaced by someone more experienced and mature, someone who could wear a suit without looking as though he were attending his Bar Mitzvah. The new CEO was George Bell, a former Times Mirror magazine executive. Years later, Hassan would still laugh when he described the meeting between the BackRub team and Bell. When the team got to Bell’s office, it fired up BackRub in one window and Excite in the other for a bake-off.
The first query they tested was “Internet.” According to Hassan, Excite’s first results were Chinese web pages where the English word “Internet” stood out among a jumble of Chinese characters. Then the team typed “Internet” into BackRub. The first two results delivered pages that told you how to use browsers. It was exactly the kind of helpful result that would most likely satisfy someone who made the query.
Bell was visibly upset. The Stanford product was too good. If Excite were to host a search engine that instantly gave people information they sought, he explained, the users would leave the site instantly. Since his ad revenue came from people staying on the site–” stickiness” was the most desired metric in websites at the time– using BackRub’s technology would be (p. 30) counterproductive. “He told us he wanted Excite’s search engine to be 80 percent as good as the other search engines,” says Hassan. And we were like, “Wow, these guys don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Hassan says that he urged Larry and Sergey right then, in early 1997, to leave Stanford and start a company. “Everybody else was doing it,” he says. “I saw Hotmail and Netscape doing really well. Money was flowing into the Valley. So I said to them, ‘The search engine is the idea. We should do this.’ They didn’t think so. Larry and Sergey were both very adamant that they could build this search engine at Stanford.”
“We weren’t … in an entrepreneurial frame of mind back then,” Sergey later said.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs added; ellipsis in last sentence, in original.)