Category: Institutions and Revolutions

How to Overcome Both Science Reproducibility and Innovation Crisis

Stuart Buck’s post ‘Escaping science’s paradox‘ addresses the current science reproducibility crisis, and in particular if the current context of replication issues and suspicions could diminish innovation. His view is that “I do not think there’s a contradiction between reproducibility and innovation. Contrary to common belief, we can improve both at once“.

The paper first gives a raft of useful references about the issues of reproducibility and the apparent decrease of innovation (compared to the budgets spent) in science today. One particular issue is the capability of institutions to fund ‘out of the box’ innovative research.

The author proposes to achieve a consistent high rate of innovation “by incentivizing failed results, and by funding “Red Teams” that would aim to refute existing dogma or would be entirely outside it.” He first proposes to make sure there is less bias towards positive results in publications by enticing publication of null result experiments or even negative results experiments. And then he proposes to make sure there is always an independent challenge to avoid groupthink, and that systematic replication of important results should be funded.

It is quite interesting to observe how improving the outcome of scientific research ends up being a psychological balance exercise, making sure to erase biases towards positive results and providing means to foster innovation. This demonstrates how the shaping of the institutional framework is important to achieve the results we need for scientific research.

On the same topic – read our previous post ‘How to Overcome the Science Reproducibility Crisis‘

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How Media Advertising Got Upended by Internet

In this excellent summary paper ‘Did Google and Facebook kill the media revenue model?‘ Frederic Filloux takes a deep insight on the evolution of media advertising evolution in last decades. It benefitted initially paper media and it got completely upended by Internet. The interesting part is that its actual value has also plummeted – making it cheaper for people to advertise but also diminishing the possible revenue stream for media.

“The inefficiency of advertising in print, radio, and TV has always been its historical flaw.” By providing a far more targeted solution, internet advertising suddenly increased dramatically advertising efficiency. In addition, it was suddenly possible to much better measure the effectiveness of a campaign to improve it.

In addition, availability of advertising channels created a major deflation of advertising expenditure and the post contains staggering graphs (out of which the illustration of the post is extracted) showing how total advertising value plummeted in the last decade, with total media adverting expenditure diminishing by more than 25% in most developed countries (after an historical increase that was much more than inflation, so it is also sort of a correction).

Could printed media have reacted earlier? Maybe, but as Frederic Filloux concludes, the changes were so systemic and overwhelming that some exceptions may have transformed sufficiently, but certainly not the entire industry. “Most of the legacy media were in denial. They acted too late and too little. But they were not in a position to do otherwise.”

At the end, media advertising is another area where internet has upended the value chain, and at the same provided more value to advertisers. It should be seen as a quite positive shift for the overall value chain and consumers, were it not for the overwhelming position of Google and Facebook.

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How Social Media Could Be Adjusted to Make a Positive Contribution

Quite opposed to our previous post ‘How Social Media Currently Rewards Bad Behavior‘, Seth Godin post ‘Amplify possibility‘ provides a much more positive view on the adjustments that would be required to make social media more positive.

His analysis of the current situation echoes the analysis of many: “The social media companies optimized their algorithms for profit. And profit, they figured, would come from engagement. And engagement, they figured, would come from confounding our instincts and rewarding outrage.”

He uses a metaphor that I find powerful. Many people slow down to watch when there is an accident on the road, but we are almost in social media today at the stage where we create accidents to engage and get the attention of people!

However, according to him, “That’s not how the world actually works” Actual influencers, he argues, behave differently. It is more a long term engagement, a commitment over time, the development of deep relationships and expertise.

Thus it should not be too difficult to tweak the engagement rules of social media to reward those behaviors instead of the ones we see. “Amplify possibility. Dial down the spread of disinformation, trolling and division. Make it almost impossible to get famous at the expense of civilization. Embrace the fact that breaking news doesn’t have to be the rhythm of our days. Reward thoughtfulness and consistency and responsibility.”

I find this approach enticing, although obviously that would require quite a focus change from the major social medias of today, and less seeking of profit and market share. Maybe that could be an idea for a social network competitor?

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How Social Media Currently Rewards Bad Behavior

This article explains the position of Ellen Pao (ex CEO of Reddit and now quite opposed to Silicon Valley giants for a number or reasons including accusations of gender discrimination) ‘Social Media Reward Bad Behavior’ or another similar interview in Inc.com ‘Why the Trolls Are Winning the Internet‘. Her point is that she observes that social media today rewards bad behaviors because it is not managed in the interest of the people, and because possibly the teams managing the current tools are not sufficiently diverse.

“It makes me really sad, because the internet is such a powerful tool, and it introduced this idea that you could connect with anyone. And it’s been turned into this weapon used to hurt and harass people.” She is quite strong in her words about the impact of social media on the users today.

One of the reasons she mentions is that “One of the big problems is that these platforms were built by homogeneous teams, who didn’t experience the harassment themselves, and who don’t have friends who were harassed. Some of them still don’t understand what other people are experiencing and why change is so important.”

An important point is that she does not believe that this problem can be addressed at the scale of the current social networks. “I don’t think it’s possible anymore except at very small scale, because the nature of interactions at scale has become very attention-focused: “The angrier and meaner I am online, the more attention I get.” This has created a high-energy, high-emotion, conflict-oriented set of interactions. And there’s no clear delineation around what’s a good or a bad engagement. People just want engagement.“

All in all, her view is quite negative on the possibility for social media to change quickly because of its interest to engage people to spend more time on their platform. Still she provides an interesting path for improvement, which is to make sure there is an increased diversity in the social media teams.

Refer also to our previous post ‘How Facebook Model is Addiction and Growth – and Why It Can’t Change‘

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How Venture Capital Can Destroy Sustainable Innovation

This excellent NewYorker article ‘How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism‘ reinforces the fact that Venture Capitalism can have some really bad sides. The point made here is that they can pour so much money in a specific venture that it inflates it, dominating the market, while not being sustainable, crushing other more sustainable alternatives in the process.

The article develops particularly the case of WeWork and how it crushed the market of co-working spaces thanks to an almost unlimited access to capital, therefore allowing the company to buy premium space and rent it out very cheaply. Competitors could not follow suit: “No one could make money at these prices. But they kept lowering them so that they were cheaper than everyone else. It was like they had a bottomless bank account that made it impossible for anyone else to survive“.

The problem here is that there is an assumption that if you capture quickly the entire market, then you can become very profitable. The public promise is that you will generate sufficient scale- and network-efficiency to create extreme value that will benefit everyone; the nasty and less publicized side of it is that if you crush competition you can exploit a monopoly situation and increase prices in the future. There is a fine line between both situations and it is not always obvious which side is really sought by large, well funded start-ups.

The article is quite pessimistic: “The V.C. industry has grown exponentially since Perkins’s heyday, but it has also become increasingly avaricious and cynical. It is now dominated by a few dozen firms, which, collectively, control hundreds of billions of dollars.” Bets have increased on certain ventures, with overall limited return on capital invested. There is less personal commitment.

“A 2018 paper co-written by Martin Kenney, a professor at the University of California, Davis, argued that, thanks to the prodigious bets made by today’s V.C.s, “money-losing firms can continue operating and undercutting incumbents for far longer than previously.” In the traditional capitalist model, the most efficient and capable company succeeds; in the new model, the company with the most funding wins. Such firms are often “destroying economic value”—that is, undermining sound rivals—and creating “disruption without social benefit.””

In a world where funds are more and more readily available due to low interest rates, there may be a need to regulate excessive investments in new ventures that have poor governance and unrealistic expectations. In any case one should be wary of not finding oneself in an impossible competition with an excessively funded start-up.

For more thoughts about the limits of Venture Capital, read my previous post ‘How Venture Capitalists Don’t Really Play the Role We Believe‘

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How Modern Inequality is also Information Inequality

As the Fourth Revolution progresses, we can hear a lot about the rise of inequality mainly in the field of finances and income. But modern inequality is also very much – and increasingly- informational. We already discussed for example in the post ‘How the Transformation of the Press Business Model Makes Access to Quality Information More Difficult‘, but let’s take a wider view of the situation.

There are good quality news outlet out there, that try to stick to journalistic principles. They may be orientated one way or the other, and the editor may favor a certain view on things, but this is generally known as the editorial line of the media. The thing is, access to this media is increasingly paying. Be it traditional press, new news portals and edited aggregators, access increasingly requires subscription.

If you can’t afford subscriptions, or if that’s not culturally on your priority list, what does remain? Public news outlets that are free, some traditional outlets that still manage to be ad-funded, or social networks. And it is this reliance on social networks that is at the origin of quite a number of issues today such as the polarization of society and more extreme groups. Before, the newspaper was displayed to be available for all to read on crowded streets, but not any more.

Thus in the past few years, access to information inequality has grown drastically up to becoming a real societal concern. It certainly needs to be fixed more urgently than income inequality, because the situation may create substantial disruption with groups of citizens living increasingly in parallel worlds.

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How GPS Became Irreplaceable While Free

We don’t think much anymore how miraculous the Global Positioning System GPS is. Still, it takes a lot of high technology (including relativist time corrections on satellites!) to provide us with what is now an everyday service we depend on. Actually we take it for granted when we would be quite lost without it.

Is GPS now part of the minimum infrastructure that we need as humans, like internet access? It has certainly drastically changed the way we navigate. It started as many technology before from the Cold War military efforts, but has been progressively opened to the civilian uses. For free. Until we can’t now part from it.

Let’s imagine for a minute what would happen if the system went to be fully unavailable. We are all using it one way or the other in our daily lives, and even more so in certain industries like logistics. A lot of the efficiency gains in many activities come from GPS availability.

Still this service is available for free as many services we now take for granted, as a by-product of something developed for military purpose. There is an issue about the US controlling the signal, which is being addressed by other blocks of nations that are launching their own system. This will provide redundancy. It is still amazing that something so useful is available for free.

In the Collaborative Age, a lot of the basic infrastructure becomes increasingly available for free or cheap. Maybe we should be careful not to take it too much for granted and have some backup solutions if they suddenly disappear.

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How Facebook Handling of Political Ads Must Be Better Scrutinized

We can observe that Facebook is increasingly under pressure about its political impact. This interesting Mashable article ‘Facebook wants NYU researchers to stop sharing the political ad data it keeps secret‘ provides insights about how secret the platform is about how it is handling political ads.

Apparently the fact that New York University is conducting research and publishing key statistics on Facebook political ads is not agreeable to Facebook itself who probably would prefer to wash its laundry internally.

“Not only do you see how much money each campaign is spending; you also get a breakdown of topics the ads for each candidate cover, the dollar amount going into each one, and the specifics of how ads are targeted toward each candidate’s hoped-for voters. It’s not necessarily comprehensive information, since it depends on how much data volunteers are able to gather. But it’s more transparency than Facebook has provided on the political ad spending hosted by the platform.”

Apparently such transparency is a problem to the network, when it should certainly be public knowledge as a way to check that elections are not unduly influenced.

The reticence of Facebook to encourage such research is another clue that something needs to be changed in the way it tends to influence users.

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How Internet Can Also Be Used to Foster Democracy

This worthwhile Guardian article ‘How Taiwan’s ‘civic hackers’ helped find a new way to run the country‘ describes the important gOv experiment carried out there. Using a platform focused on areas of agreement rather than tending to split communities around disagreement it seems that they have built a platform that gives hope that internet can be used to really foster democracy (g0v.asia).

Of course this experiment could only come from Taiwan where the need for democracy is particularly essential due to the ambitions of its mainland neighbor.

The Guardian article explains how this started in 2014, and how important it is now in the local political landscape, with even a minister stemming from this movement.

Interestingly, a cornerstone of the approach is radical transparency about everything in the public sphere – making information and data much more accessible to the citizens.

But the most interesting I find is that “the discussants found themselves in an entirely new kind of online space – exactly the opposite of a social media platform that encourages strife“. “As people expressed their views, rather than serving up the comments that were the most divisive, it gave the most visibility to those finding consensus – consensus across not just their own little huddle of ideological fellow-travellers, but the other huddles, too. Divisive statements, trolling, provocation – you simply couldn’t see these.“

So it quite possible to use Internet in a way that fosters agreement instead of the traditional social networks we have grown used to, that do rather the contrary. This is quite an important message, and I am looking forward to this type of platforms to become increasingly widespread.

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How Office Space Remains Essential

There are lots of opinions on how office space will evolve as a result of the Covid-19 crisis (which is probably an accelerator of trends more than a trigger). In this interesting post ‘The Case For Space (Office Space, That Is)…‘ Mich Joel, who worked mainly in the advertising industry, explains why office space is definitely not obsolete.

In creative endeavors that require creative teamwork, nothing will replace working together physically. And moreover, “In the agency world, your office is your culture.” Building a strong, differentiated culture requires physical contact.

“Offices are where innovation happens. Offices are where we socialize to build better work. Offices are where new ideas get sparked. Offices are where we learn more about ourselves by watching others. Office are where culture is born and thrives.”

Future offices may be different, and some professions may more decidedly into more virtual offices, but nothing will replace physical offices for many professions in particular for creativity or where teamwork is essential (engineering, projects for example). Virtual work cannot emulate the informal interactions of the physical office and it will remain essential several days a week. It is extremely visible when it comes to the difficulty of onboarding newcomers since the start of confinement.

The office space is not obsolete or dead. It may need to evolve, but remains essential to value and culture creation.

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How a Stock Echange Could Effectively Be Fostering Long Term Strategies

An attempt has been made recently – and quite widely publicized – to launch a Long Term Stock Exchange (LTSE) to foster long-term value creation by companies. The principles are accessible at this page: ‘A principles-based approach‘. It basically requires companies listing there to adhere to principles protecting stakeholders and the environment, and developing long term growth strategies.

While the principle is absolutely commendable, I see a contradiction between the concept of stock exchange and the concept of long term growth and capital stability. In all times, markets to be liquid require a high amount of transactions which then expose to all sorts of psychological effects from traders. On the other hand, it allows quicker reallocation of capital when the economic fundamentals change.

Some companies effectively deploy long term strategies only when a substantial percentage of their capital is held by shareholders that have the same intent, such as family-owned businesses. They may struggle more to adapt to an evolving environment in that case (sometimes family-owned business get stuck in old-fashioned approaches), but this provides stability that can also be beneficial.

At this stage I fail to see how the LTSE can be more than an exchange of stocks specifically picked for some strategic qualities, and effectively foster a longer-term intent from traders and clients. We’ll see!

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How Social Network and Facebook Backlash Should Not Have Let Down

In is quite interesting to note that the strong backlash against Facebook end 2018 / early 2019 has let down, while Facebook has not visibly changed its operating model. Articles from the time are still quite relevant such as for example: ‘Facebook must decide: Is it for the mob or for democracy?‘ or ‘Is It Wrong To Feel Bad For Facebook?‘.

It is increasingly clear that the revenue drive of social networks like Facebook is built on increasingly targeted advertising, and stickiness of the network itself to capture more attention for adds; and this, in turn, has the consequence of having the network show us what we’d like to see, creating relatively isolated communities of similar interest which sometimes lose touch with reality.

Still, it is amazing how the social network backlash has disappeared from front concern when the basics have not changed, people are still addicted to social networks, and the risk of manipulation linked for example to elections, has rather increased through AI generated content and the current possibility to target people at the individual level. Effective regulation has not really been implemented. So why don’t we hear so much about it now? Is that the result of effective lobbying? Is that because people have more pressing concerns? Is that because we resign ourselves to the situation?

I hope that the current debates about election manipulation will come up again around the US presidential elections, and that the subject will be tabled again to finally provide a strong regulation of social networks. We should not lose sight of the need to tackle this issue to protect democracy and our societies from excessive manipulation.

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