Three interesting things that we read this week

Three interesting things that we read this week

How money and fame ruin modern thinkers [Source: Financial Times]

Simon Kuper of Financial Times believes success has ruined many previously excellent writers and thinkers. According to him, while this is an age-old phenomenon, it has got worse in our era. He laments the fact that the best business nowadays is selling to the elite 1%. A caste of pundits has accordingly arisen to supply them with thoughts and talking points. These pundits make decent money themselves, especially on the speakers’ circuit, which according to Mr. Kuper, is now the place where original thinkers go to ‘die’. He exemplifies his points using some case studies:

Historian: While initial years are spent in the archives producing good books, once you come in the limelight, you start talking about topics such as “What’s next for China?” (The 0.1% want to know the future, because that’s where the money is). When you aren’t being an oracle, you are explaining why you were right five years ago. Eventually you realize you aren’t a historian anymore; just a content provider for the media.

Reporter: Initially, you are multilingual, hardworking and sit in ordinary people’s homes trying to understand what’s going on in their country. But once you are a star, you become a talking head in a complimentary limousine, separated from your material. Focus shifts to princes and diplomats in high places and in trying to understand what’s going on in their countries.

Economist: You spend decades doing brilliant, complex work. But on the side, you have standard political views, and suddenly you’re explaining every day why the other side is wrong.

Political Book writer: You write a thought provoking, original piece of work. A party leader whom you admire calls to say he loved it. Soon you’re texting each other daily. You feel that you have graduated from describing reality to shaping it. In your TV appearances, you start explaining why the party leader is always right.

Rightwing journalist: You are adopted by a rightwing press proprietor. You serve his empire and his friends, telling yourself that his cause is generally just, even if some of the details make you queasy.

Revolutionary writer: You do this so well that you actually make money out of it. You acquire a fine house and even a porcelain collection. Ludwig Börne, the 19th-century German writer to whom this happened, told his rival Heinrich Heine (at least, according to Heine): “You have no idea, my dear Heine, how one is reined in by the possession of beautiful porcelain. Look at me, for instance, who was once so wild, when I had little baggage and no porcelain at all. With possession, and especially with fragile possession, comes fear and servility.”

Mr. Kuper says this list isn’t exhaustive. Being ruined by wealth comes in endless variants. Most thinkers imagine that money will liberate them from drudgery to do their best work. Instead, it removes them from the sphere where they were doing their best work. The effect is worst in the biggest economies. As Martin Amis wrote in 1983: “When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.” And so the global conversation is degraded as original writers and thinkers get ruined.

The work that survives from past eras often wasn’t done by the biggest names. John Galsworthy and JB Priestley were star writers in Britain in the first half of the past century but no longer. Meanwhile, George Orwell went almost unnoticed until 1945, less than five years before his death, when he finally managed to get Animal Farm published. By analogy, today’s most interesting thinker is not the fifty-something, multi-millionaire giving the keynote address, but the ignored 30-year-old blogger.

2) Red Republic of Abujhmad: Inside the unknown hills of south Chhattisgarh [Source: Economic Times]

For Jitendra Majhee, a young class VIII schoolboy, who wants to be a doctor, going home means at least a two-day walk negotiating a hilly terrain, wild animals and rivulets. While he lives in Lanka, his school, Orcha Middle School, is 70km away in south Chhattisgarh. He gets a chance to meet his friends and family every Wednesday at the Orcha’s Wednesday bazaar (market). “My relatives regularly come to Orcha’s Wednesday bazaar. They start their journey on Monday morning and reach here by Tuesday afternoon. They sell the goods in the market, buy some stuff and begin their return journey on Thursday morning. They reach home by Friday afternoon,” says Majhee. This is Abujhmad — “Abujh” means what you can’t understand and “mad” means hill in the local dialect. Young Majhee has a textbook open in front of him, with a map of India. Ironically, Abujhmad is possibly the only piece of land in the country where there is no revenue map as yet; villagers have no title deeds (patta) to the land they live in or cultivate. The area is bigger than the state of Goa — about 4,000 sq. km.

Inhabited by about 40,000 people, Abujhmad includes the entire Orcha block and most of Narayanpur district as well as parts of Dantewada and Bijapur districts of Chhattisgarh and Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra. The majority of people belong to the Abujhmaria tribe. Naresh Korram, sarpanch of Orcha gram panchayat, says road and phone connectivity hold the key to the mainstreaming of the area. “Four buses ply on a 66-km stretch between Orcha and the district headquarters, Narayanpur. There’s no road to most of the interior villages beyond Orcha. Maoists continue to resist road-building and plying of buses; only in August last year, they burnt down a bus after asking the passengers to get down,” he says. Abujhmad, historically, remained an abandoned area since the time of the British who otherwise conducted revenue surveys in areas as far as the Lushai hills (now Mizoram) or Jammu and Kashmir’s Ladakh region. Even after Independence, most parts of Abujhmad were out of reach for outsiders, at times deliberately, to ensure that the tribes living in the area didn’t dilute their ethnicity and tradition by mixing up with outsiders.

But Orcha village was reasonably developed and there were motorable roads between Narayanpur and Orcha in the 1980s. Things changed as Maoists entered the "unknown hill" in the 1990s and consolidated their stronghold in the early 2000s: they burnt over 50 schools, destroyed roads and set up what they called "Jantana Sarkar" in most of Abujhmad. If locals are to be believed, Maoists even today run schools with their own syllabus in at least two places: Murumwada and Boter. The Maoists also trained a 13-year-old girl to entertain the villagers and spread Maoist ideology in a subtle way. The girl can’t recall when exactly she was picked up by Maoists from her village called Hitawada, located deep inside Abujhmad. “It was sometime during the monsoon last year.” Her trainers at Chetna Natya Mandli (CNM), a wing of the Maoists that propagates their ideology through song and dance, made her undergo a tough daily schedule. After being rescued by a police team last year, Vira enrolled in a school in Orcha. When asked whether she would like to go back to the Maoists, she retorted, “Kabhi nahi (Never).”.

3) In search of the real Silicon Valley [Source: Financial Times]

In theory, and on a map, the Silicon Valley stretches across the south-western corner of the San Francisco Bay, from Santa Clara up to Palo Alto. But, in practice, there is little for visitors to see — few landmarks, no obvious valley, nowhere a tourist can take a picture and feel like they’ve arrived at the Silicon Valley they dreamed of. The author Leslie Hook recollects talking to a group of Chinese entrepreneurs who were on a “Silicon Valley tour”. They drove down Sand Hill Road, home to many prestigious venture capital groups in drab office parks, and stopped to take pictures in front of the sign of Kleiner Perkins, a prominent VC firm, until they were shooed away by security guards. As well as Sand Hill Road, there are other routine tour stops: the Computer History Museum, the Stanford Campus, the Golden Gate Bridge up in San Francisco. But none captures the Valley’s essence, because “Silicon Valley” is not really a place any more. Outsiders still dream of somewhere called Silicon Valley, but that dream is increasingly untethered from a physical place.

This was not always the case. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was both silicon (in computer chips) and a valley (the Santa Clara Valley) that was at the forefront of scientific innovation, fuelled by government investment in research and by the nearby Stanford Research Park. The invention of the transistor and the microchip led to waves of technological creativity, closely linked to scientific advances, much of which occurred in the Bay Area. This changed, however, with the advent of the internet and the smartphone, when online businesses and then apps replaced the hard sciences as the currency of disruption. At that point, “Silicon Valley” spread up and down the Bay Area and sparked imitators all over the world — Silicon Alley in New York, Silicon Hills in Austin, Silicon Roundabout in London. The start-ups most associated with the Valley today are companies such as Uber, Airbnb and Twitter, which are all based in San Francisco, dozens of miles from the literal Silicon Valley.

While it is no longer centred in a physical place, there are certain components that make the Valley what it is. First is its brand — so powerful that it needs little explanation. Second is its network of people. This is the true heart of the Valley — and the reason it is so hard for outsiders to discover. The network is not only entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, but also software engineers who avoid the limelight, eccentric billionaires who fund pipe dreams, and Stanford professors with a few side projects. While this network is low profile, it is by far the Valley’s most powerful quality. Then comes the third distinct quality of Silicon Valley: there is a very specific way of thinking here. There is a relentless optimism, which is a necessary quality for any inventor. It is also a place where failure is accepted, even celebrated. It’s considered perfectly normal for an entrepreneur to start a conversation by saying: “Well, my last company didn’t work out, and this is what I’m doing now.”

4) Online reviews are biased. Here’s how to fix them [Source: HBR]

In this Internet age, customers are surrounded by online reviews thanks to other consumers who’ve gone to the trouble of posting opinions about products and services online. While online reviews are blessing if they help consumers to make more informed decisions, they also tend to over-represent the most extreme views. Research shows many of today’s most popular online review platforms — including Yelp business reviews and Amazon product reviews — have a distribution of opinion that is highly polarized, with many extreme positive and/or negative reviews, and few moderate opinions. This creates a “bi-modal” or “J-shaped” distribution of online product reviews that has been well-documented in the academic literature. This makes it hard to learn about true quality from online reviews. A recent survey found 48% of job seekers in the U.S. today rely on online employer reviews from Glassdoor, the jobs site as part of their job search process — a huge fraction of America’s 160-million person labour market. Relying on biased online reviews of employers could be a costly mistake — both for job seekers and employers.

In an experiment, a group of online participants were asked to leave reviews of their employer. Then several types of incentives were tested — both monetary incentives, and “pro-social” incentives, in this case reminders that leaving a review would help other job seekers — to see how online company reviews changed with each. For the experiment, Amazon’s MTurk marketplace was used; all participants were paid $0.20 each to review their employer, and some were paid more, to test the effects of extra monetary incentives. The results show that people are more likely to leave online reviews when they’re reminded that doing so helps other job seekers. Simple pro-social incentives also led the distribution of reviews to be less biased, creating a more normal bell-curve distribution of reviews. The impact of monetary incentives was also tested — paying participants extra to leave employer reviews. Monetary incentives can also work, but only if they are high enough. As the size of monetary payments rises, so does people’s willingness to post online reviews — even those with moderate opinions who would otherwise remain silent. In the experiment, offering $0.15 extra — a 75% payment increase to participants — was enough to reduce bias in reviews.

Do the experimental results also hold up in the real world? To test that, a study also looked at an online incentive program on Glassdoor. Glassdoor receives user content in two ways. First, users may voluntarily submit reviews of their employer, salary, and other job information. Second, Glassdoor also uses what’s known as a “give-to-get” policy that provides a strong incentive for users to provide content: After viewing any three pieces of content online, users are asked to submit their own review back into the online community before being able to view additional information. The authors examined whether this real-world incentive policy changed online opinion about companies. Just as in their lab experiment, they found the distribution of online reviews left voluntarily differed markedly from those left by users who were given an incentive to leave reviews. The distribution of voluntary reviews was significantly more extreme — with many more positive and negative opinions of companies — than the more moderate distribution of incentivized reviews. Both in controlled experiments and in a real-world business setting, research shows that providing monetary and pro-social incentives can lead to more balanced and representative online reviews.

Correcting bias in online reviews can sway important decisions in the economy. Imagine a job seeker deciding between a similar job in two industries, such as consulting versus advertising. The authors’ research shows that the ranking of industries in terms of online ratings often flips based on whether reviews are left voluntarily or in response to an incentive. For example, job seekers relying only on polarized voluntary reviews may believe consulting is a less desirable industry than advertising, when a more balanced set of incentivized reviews offers the opposite conclusion. In this way, biases in the distribution of online reviews can affect real-world economic decisions by distorting the information consumers, job seekers, and investors rely on. Online reviews are a powerful tool for sharing information at scale. But it’s important to remember the source — many online reviews today are from those who’ve voluntarily decided to share opinions, giving a distorted view of products, services and companies.