Noodling on Information Flows

I guess I should be discussing tariffs this week, but there are plenty of smarter people than me talking about tariffs.  

I am curious about the information we are getting about tariffs — which seems as politicized, tribal, and rife with misinformation as any other current topic.  It stuns me every day that these amazing inventions — semiconductors, personal computers, the internet, mobile phones, cloud computing, AI — have not made us better informed and, in fact, may have made us worse informed.  My first project at Microsoft nearly 40 years ago was all about connecting people, letting them share information and work together, and gosh, this just seemed like an unalloyed good thing to do.   Greater information sharing, easier networking of people — these can only be great for all of us, right?  Man, I was young.  

I am not sure what my thesis is in this post, but I want to share some things I’ve been reflecting on regarding information.  I’d love to know what you are reading and thinking about.

Open information sharing can be absolutely great — arxiv has disrupted entirely how scientific research is shared and is the bedrock of so much scientific collaboration now.  And, of course, the established scientific journal companies hate it, which is probably a sure sign that it is a good thing.  Breaking open proprietary silos of information and sharing them broadly seems like a great great contribution to society.

Some people are sorry that they used modern tools to share information broadly this month.  I don’t know anyone who hasn’t screwed up and included the wrong person on a mail thread or in a text group.   Once, I accidentally forwarded some negotiating points to the other party during the negotiation.  Another time I sat in a conference room and listened to two representatives at our competitor, who had failed to mute their videoconference link, talk about how they were going to screw us on a contract.  Then, there was the time that I accidentally shared my screen with folks on a video conference, and they saw some private chats I was having.  None of these were career-ending, and I learned about information hygiene every time and never made the same mistake again.   You would think that the highest levels of the Federal Government would be good at this stuff.

Digitization and networks have made every asset more liquid — Want to Invest in a Private Company? All It Takes Is $5,000

Two marketplaces for trading shares in high-risk, high-reward companies are lowering investment minimums.  Easier and wider access to high-risk companies sounds great until people start losing their shirts.  Of course, people are losing their shirts on public companies this week as well.  And some investments are increasingly disconnected from business fundamentals — Tesla’s valuation has long lost any connection with fundamentals, and is more a bet on Mr Musk’s ability to revolutionise any business he turns his hand to.  Investing choices are getting broader, but investing is not getting easier.

I recently read Careless People.  There is some controversy around this book; perhaps the author has made too much out of certain events.  But if even part of the book is true, it is pretty damning for Meta/Facebook.   And Meta’s attempts to stifle the sales of the book suggest that there is a lot of truth in here — as with arxiv when the incumbent powers are trying to suppress information, that is a sign that the information is pretty interesting.

I find the details of Facebook’s involvement with political customers compelling.   Facebook makes a large amount of money from political campaigns and works hand-in-hand with campaigns to create very targeted campaigns, generating even more campaign contributions and, thus, more Facebook ad targeting.  It is quite the flywheel, and it is all information-driven.  Facebook uses customer information to target ads, generating customer interaction (just more information), which drives more money into the system, and the cycle repeats.  There is not much care given to what this flywheel may be doing to the political process or our society.

I also just finished reading The Revolt of the Public, which makes a strong case that unfettered information collection and sharing has torn down the authority structures of our society — we no longer trust our leaders in government, religion, science, academia, business.   This has encouraged the rise of nihilist elements in our societies, and we are in the midst of finding our way through this upheaval.  Another view of this comes from Ted Gioia, who observes the age of Hollywood celebrity has passed and that culture will now be driven from the bottom.  This notion — we are going through a major societal disruption as old authority structures get torn down by information technology — seems pretty important. And I reflect back on the arxiv point – breaking open information silos is good, but it is also turning out to be incredibly disruptive, as it breaks down authority structures and opens the gates to lower quality information.

Hacker Laws has a great list of axioms about software projects, technology, and information — and they apply more broadly to many kinds of projects and activities.   The ones that struck me this week as I read about information flows and their effect on society:

• The 90-9-1 principle suggests that within an internet community such as a wiki, 90% of participants only consume content, 9% edit or modify content and 1% of participants add content.  
• When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right. When they state that something is impossible, they are very probably wrong.
• The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer.
• A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
• Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.
• The Law of Triviality suggests that groups will give far more time and attention to trivial or cosmetic issues rather than serious and substantial ones.

The Diff introduced me to the idea of economic surface area — “…the more economic activity a company sees, and the more visibility it has into the underlying drivers of that activity, the more informed its bets will be.”  Companies like Amazon and Google that sit astride information flows have a tremendous advantage.

Back to Ted Gioia, he collects 40 observations on public discourse.  I love many of these; there is a mix of pessimism and optimism here.  On the pessimistic side, he has some observations on the damage that social media has done and continues to do:

• “The most popular social media platforms will be those that allow people to avoid responsibility for what they say.”  
• “Now everybody gets global access — just by opening a social media account. Your words now reach every part of the planet instantaneously. … This has devalued public discourse to a degree inconceivable just a generation ago.”

On the optimistic side, this seems like a genuinely good idea and applies to a lot of different domains:

• “If I ran Harvard or Oxford or Stanford, I’d create a large language model that only learned from the best scholars. People will soon decide that they prefer talking with the bot that has the narrowest and most exclusive range of inputs.”