Virtuous Circles

The ever interesting Felix Salmon has reasons for optimism about the future of Paywalls. In particular, he notes how the porous paywall of the NYT beats the FT paywall (which is consumer unfriendly and annoying).

But even better is the marketing opportunity that this sort of paywall creates:

Those paying digital subscribers, however, are much more valuable than their subscription streams alone would suggest. They’re hugely loyal, they read loads of stories, they’re well-heeled, and advertisers will pay a premium to reach them. Judging by the second-quarter results, which is admittedly early days, it seems as though total digital ad revenues are going up, not down, as subscriptions get introduced: the holy grail of paywalls.

This is a principle worth keeping in mind -- there are virtuous circles as well as vicious ones. Not only does the NYT get to collect predictable revenue from a steady stream of subscribers (and predictable revenue is worth a lot), it also gets an advertising boost from being able to identify these readers. It's an amazing outcome and I remain delighted that it worked out for them.

Now I wonder if we could try and apply these principles to public health. How can we create incentives where patients identify themselves in ways that save money and are happy to do so? Because when you manage to get these sorts of two for one punches, efficiency is massively improved.

"How To Party Your Way Into a Multi-Million Dollar Facebook Job" -- the sad state of business journalism

Andrew Gelman (before his virtual sabbatical) linked to this fascinating Gawker article by Ryan Tate:

If you want Facebook to spend millions of dollars hiring you, it helps to be a talented engineer, as the New York Times today [18 May 2011] suggests. But it also helps to carouse with Facebook honchos, invite them to your dad's Mediterranean party palace, and get them introduced to your father's venture capital pals, like Sam Lessin did.

Lessin is the poster boy for today's Times story on Facebook "talent acquisitions." Facebook spent several million dollars to buy Lessin's drop.io, only to shut it down and put Lessin to work on internal projects. To the Times, Lessin is an example of how "the best talent" fetches tons of money these days. "Engineers are worth half a million to one million," a Facebook executive told the paper.

We'll let you in on a few things the Times left out: Lessin is not an engineer, but a Harvard social studies major and a former Bain consultant. His file-sharing startup drop.io was an also-ran competitor to the much more popular Dropbox, and was funded by a chum from Lessin's very rich childhood. Lessin's wealthy investment banker dad provided Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg crucial access to venture capitalists in Facebook's early days. And Lessin had made a habit of wining and dining with Facebook executives for years before he finally scored a deal, including at a famous party he threw at his father's vacation home in Cyprus with girlfriend and Wall Street Journal tech reporter Jessica Vascellaro. (Lessin is well connected in media, too.) . . .

To get the full impact, you have to read the original New York Times piece by Miguel Helft. It's an almost perfect example modern business reporting, gushing and wide-eyed, eager to repeat conventional narratives about the next big thing, and showing no interest in digging for the truth.

It is not just that Helft failed to do even the most rudimentary of fact-checking (twenty minutes on Google would have uncovered a number of major holes); it is that he failed to check an unconvincing story that blatantly served the interests of the people telling it.

Let's start with the credibility of the story. While computer science may well be the top deck of the Titanic in this economy, has the industry really been driven to cannibalization by the dearth of talented people? There are certainly plenty of people in related fields with overlapping skill sets who are looking for work and there's no sign that the companies like Facebook are making a big push to mine these rich pools of labor. Nor have I seen any extraordinary efforts to go beyond the standard recruiting practices in comp sci departments.

How about self-interest? From a PR standpoint, this is the kind of story these companies want told. It depicts the people behind these companies as strong and decisive, the kind of leaders you'd want when you expect to encounter a large number of Gordian Knots. When the NYT quotes Zuckerberg saying “Someone who is exceptional in their role is not just a little better than someone who is pretty good. They are 100 times better,” they are helping him build a do-what-it-takes-to-be-the-best image.

The dude-throws-awesome-parties criteria for hiring tends to undermine that image, as does the quid pro quo aspect of Facebook's deals with Lessin's father.

Of course, there's more at stake here than corporate vanity. Tech companies have spent a great deal of time and money trying to persuade Congress that the country must increase the number of H-1Bs we issue in order to have a viable Tech industry. Without getting into the merits of the case (for that you can check out my reply to Noah Smith on the subject), this article proves once again that one easily impressed NYT reporter is worth any number of highly paid K Street lobbyists.

The New York Times is still, for many people, the paper. I've argued before that I didn't feel the paper deserved its reputation, that you can find better journalism and better newspapers out there, but there's no denying that the paper does have a tremendous brand. People believe things they read in the New York Times. It would be nice if the paper looked at this as an obligation to live up to rather than laurels to rest on.

Press-release journalism and the NYT's lost default setting

As I've mentioned before, much of what we've heard about the NYT paywall makes me wonder if they've really thought things through. The following link from Mark Thoma raised yet another question:

Microsoft Accusing Google of Antitrust Violations - NYTimes.com

Most shorter news stories, particularly those based on press conferences, released statements or other publicly available information, are pretty much interchangeable with respect to provider. The version you get from the New York Times will be essentially identical to the ones from the Washington Post or the LA Times or NPR or any other major outlet.

The New York Times traditionally got a disproportionate share of the traffic for these stories because it had become something of a default setting. This traffic meant increased ad revenue. Perhaps more importantly, it brought people into the site where they could be introduced to other, less interchangeable features (for example, the film reviews of A.O. Scott or the columns of Frank Rich). These features are the basis of a loyal readership.

I'm sure that the models Sulzberger and company are using take into account the fact that traffic will drop when you put the paywall into effect. Having worked on some major corporate initiatives, I can tell you that is not the sort of thing that is likely to be omitted. What is, however, often left out is the necessary disaggregation. For example, even in well-run Fortune-500 businesses, you will often run across analyses that correctly predict that a change will cause a net gain of ten percent of market share but fail to note that most of the established customers you will lose are highly profitable while most of those you're going to gain aren't worth having.

"We had a reason..."

A few years ago, I was working on the roll out of a big project (think lots of zeros) for a company which will remain nameless for obvious reasons. Though impressive in many ways, the initial launch was set up in a way that seemed to preclude us from using most of the data that we had spent a tremendous amount of time and money acquiring.

One day, toward the end of the project, I was having a few beers with one of the chief architects and I asked him point blank why they chose to set things up this way. His answer was (and I'm giving you this verbatim) "I remember we had a reason but I don't remember what it was."

I've been flashing back on that conversation quite a bit recently as the details of the NYT paywall emerge. Of course, the resemblance could be the result of incomplete information. If I had access to all of the data and analyses, I might be loading up on their stock instead of mocking their corporate strategy (I would continue to mock Maureen Dowd regardless), but being limited to an outsider's view, I have to wonder what would happen if you downed a couple of beers with Sulzberger then asked him about this post from Philip Greenspun:

...how the NY Times spent a reported $40-50 million writing the code (Bloomberg; other sources are consistent). Google was financed with $25 million. The New York Times already had a credit card processing system for selling home delivery. It already had a database management system for keeping track of Web site registrants. What did they spend the $40-50 million on? A monster database server to keep track of which readers downloaded how many articles? They should already have been tracking some of that for ad targeting. In any case, a rack of database servers shouldn’t cost $40 million.

What am I missing?

[I built a pay wall back in 1995 for the MIT Press, restricting access to some of their journals, e.g., Cell, to individual subscribers and people whose IP addresses indicated that they were at institutions with site-wide subscriptions. I can't remember exactly what I charged the Press, but it was only a few days of work and I think the invoice worked out to approximately $40 million less than $40 million.]

NYT Paywall -- still getting the feeling they haven't thought this through

As Felix Salmon observes "Here’s the difference, Arthur: stealing a paper on 6th Ave is illegal."

20 each?

Cory Doctorow's post (via DeLong) on the New York Times' new paywall has me thinking:

New York Times paywall: wishful thinking or just crazy? - Boing Boing: lots of people are going to greet the NYT paywall with eye-rolling and frustration: You stupid piece of technology, what do you mean I've seen 20 stories this month? This is exactly the wrong frame of mind to be in when confronted with a signup page (the correct frame of mind to be in on that page is, Huh, wow, I got tons of value from the Times this month. Of course I'm going to sign up!)

Which means that lots of people will take countermeasures to beat the #nytpaywall. The easiest of these, of course, will be to turn off cookies so that the Times's site has no way to know how many pages you've seen this month

Of course, the NYT might respond by planting secret permacookies, using Flash cookies, browser detection, third-party beacons, or secret ex-Soviet vat-grown remote-sensing psychics. At the very minimum, the FTC will probably be unamused to learn that the Grey Lady is actively exploiting browser vulnerabilities (or, as the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse statute puts it, "exceeding authorized access" on a remote system -- which carries a 20 year prison sentence, incidentally)

I'm running a dual boot operating system (Windows and Linux). Barring Doctorow's recently decanted telepaths, I assume that puts me up to forty a month which is about four times what I expect my monthly demand to be.

USA Today has some bad graphs but at least it's not the New York Times

The following quote was included in one of Andrew Gelman's recent posts:

Is this the worst infographic ever to appear in NYT? USA Today is not something to aspire to.

This strikes me as deeply unfair to USA Today. The paper has certainly run its share of bad graphs but these take things to a new level. It is as if the NYT used illustrations from "How to Lie with Statistics" as a starting point and then tried to top them.

Here's the "View of the U.S." where the lower the icon is, the higher its approval.



And here's the "U.S. Pakistan Policy" where the scrolls are arranged so you can't really compare their sizes (I initially thought they were going for some depth effect).

And here's the "Greatest Threat" which takes Huff's height/volume examples to the next level by using images of different shapes and densities.

Finally there's this amazing piece of work:

Just glancing at this you would probably conclude that the amount of blue in the circles corresponds to percentage in agreement. For example, looking at the middle circle you'd assume that almost all of those surveyed were in disagreement. You'd be wrong. More agreed than disagreed. (This was also noted by one of the commenters on Gelman's site.)

While they don't quite match this, these graphs may be the worst we've seen from a major paper in recent memory.




[adapted in part from a comment I left on Andrew Gelman's site]

Someone finally notices the orphan technology

As I mentioned before, over-the-air broadcasting has been a conspicuous hole in any number of media stories, probably due to the demographics of that market and the lack of interested parties pushing the story. Eventually though, once the market included enough young, photogenic professionals, the New York Times did pick up on the story (from this Sunday):

Many pay TV customers are making the same decision. From April to September, cable and satellite companies had a net loss of about 330,000 customers. Craig Moffett, a longtime cable analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein, said the consensus of the industry executives he had talked to was that most of these so-called cord-cutters were turning to over-the-air TV. “It looks like they’re leaving for the antenna,” he said.

The article has its problems. There are factually challenged passages like this:

The new antennas do pull in more programs than your grandfather’s rabbit ears, because of new channels that broadcasters added during the transition to digital signals. The broadcasters can fit multiple digital channels into the same frequencies that used to carry one analog channel.

In St. Paul, for example, where Ms. Bayerl lives, there are extra channels from ABC and NBC with local news and weather, four public television channels and a music video channel. Big markets like Los Angeles have 40 or more channels, according to Nielsen.

(I live in LA county and, according to my digital converter I get 114 channels. There are at least a half dozen more I could get if I wanted to invest in a better antenna set-up. When you're off by a factor of three, "or more" just doesn't cut it.)

The article also completely overlooks the role that the Hispanic market plays in the over-the-air broadcasting story which is a bit like ignoring the role commuters play in the NPR audience.

Still, compared to what we've seen up till now, this account is almost cutting edge.

Update:

While picking up a printer cartridge this morning I fact-checked the following passage from the NYT story:

Modern antennas, which cost $25 to $150, pick up high-definition signals that can actually be crisper than the cable or satellite version of the same program, because the pay TV companies compress the video data.

Actually HDTV compatible antennas the one I use for my 114 channels are available at Target start at $10.98.

"Shape of the earth -- opinions still differ"

I was reminded of Paul Krugman's parody of a New York Times headline when I came to this NYT headline:

"Despite Push, Success at Charter Schools Is Mixed By TRIP GABRIEL"

Followed a few paragraphs later by the money shot:

But for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.”

Although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers,” the report, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, warned, “this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in traditional schools.

As I mentioned before, there is reason to believe that this research is biased in favor of charter schools.

If you showed me test results for a new cholesterol-controlling drug in which 20% of the subjects had lower LDL levels than when they started taking the drugs, 51% stayed the same and 37% were "significantly worse," I don't think I would describe the results as 'mixed.'

But, of course, I'm not writing for the New York Times.

This is, after all, a write in haste-repent at leisure medium

[make sure to check out the comments section]

There's a common type of blog post that consists of sarcastic dismissal of a statement followed by critical statements. Though they tend to be mean, they can be fun read and, if the criticisms are valid, can add quite a bit to the conversation.

The main problem with this type of post is that has an ugly habit of devolving into just a sarcastic dismissal and those devolved posts are not so defensible (even if I'm the one writing them). This is not only mean but cowardly. By leaving out the reasons behind your sarcasm you deny your subjects the chance to defend themselves.

A couple of days ago, I made a sarcastic comment about this passage from the New York Times. Here is the quote:

The road between the two cultures — science and literature — can go both ways. “Fiction provides a new perspective on what happens in evolution,” said William Flesch, a professor of English at Brandeis University.

To Mr. Flesch fictional accounts help explain how altruism evolved despite our selfish genes. Fictional heroes are what he calls “altruistic punishers,” people who right wrongs even if they personally have nothing to gain. “To give us an incentive to monitor and ensure cooperation, nature endows us with a pleasing sense of outrage” at cheaters, and delight when they are punished, Mr. Flesch argues. We enjoy fiction because it is teeming with altruistic punishers: Odysseus, Don Quixote, Hamlet, Hercule Poirot.

And here are comments to my post by Prof. Flesch.

My problems with Prof. Flesch's statement and more importantly with the NYT article are as follows.

Altruistic punishment has become a bit of a flavor of the month, one of those fashionable ideas that people like to work into conversations and op-ed pieces. Unfortunately this often leads to the ideas being applied where they don't fit or being used as labels for related ideas. This can (and, I would argue, should) prompt greater scrutiny and that scrutiny should always start with the question, is the concept being used correctly?

What are the requirements of altruistic punishment?

The punisher has to proceed knowing that not punishing the offender would produce a better outcome for the punisher. Outcome here needs to be broadly defined to include not only the material but also reproductive and reputational – the loan shark who has a defaulter killed is not engaged in altruistic punishment even though he probably would have collected more from a living customer; he is investing in a reputation that will make future defaults less likely.

To make sure not to confound the problem, researchers often focus on unrelated strangers with whom no future encounters are anticipated.

Altruistic punishment is normally discussed in the context of the evolution of large-scale cooperation. "Unlike other creatures, people frequently cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers, often in large groups, with people they will never meet again, and when reputation gains are small or absent." (Fehr and Gächter) The behavior suggests that individuals are biologically programmed to want to enforce the rules that make complex societies possible.

With all that out of the way, can we reasonably say that Odysseus (or, for that matter, Hamlet or Poirot) is an altruistic punisher?

The mythic world of the Odyssey was small and greatly concerned with reputation and social standing. It was clearly in Odysseus' interest to be seen as a dangerous and vengeful opponent. Acts that enhance that reputation can't really be considered altruistic punishment even if (as with Polyphemus and his father) the acts turn out to be more costly than expected.

It is even more difficult to make the case for altruistic punishment in the killing of the suitors. Here we have a group that has threatened to take his property (material), marry his wife and kill his son (genetic) and humiliate him in the process (reputational). It is the trifecta of self-interest. There was a high potential cost to this act but that alone is not sufficient to make it altruistic punishment. (besides, the consequences were based not only on the deaths of the suitors but also on the loss to those who accompanied him to Troy. He might well have faced an angry mob if he had simply told the suitors to go home.)

I admit my knowledge of the Odyssey is weak and I may well have missed some important aspect that supports the hypothesis that Odysseus was an altruistic punisher and not simply someone who pursued great goals at great costs, but they aren't obvious to the casual reader.

As for the other examples, Don Quixote probably does qualify. Hamlet is more problematic. He is acting in the interest of his father which brings in a genetic component (I'm not sure what the evolutionary psychology implications are of his father being a ghost). There's also a self-preservation aspect (perhaps more obvious in the Amleth version). As for Poirot, both his livelihood and his reputation rely on his ability to solve crimes. There are cases (most notably Curtain) where his goal is clearly altruistic punishment, but in most of his cases there is a clear element of self-interest. You could, however, make a pretty good argument for Lord Peter Whimsey.

And there are certainly examples of altruistic punishment out there. The Count of Monte Cristo is a good fit since there is no apparent material or reproductive gain and most of the revenge is carried out anonymously. Crime fiction also provides numerous protagonists (Lew Archer, Travis McGee, Matt Scudder) who take cases from strangers then continue to pursue them after their clients had stopped paying them. In one book, Scudder went so far as to make a suicide look like a murder then frame the man who was morally responsible for the death.

We could go on (anyone care to make the case for Miss Havisham?) but I don't know what it would accomplish. Like every other imaginable human behavior, altruistic punishment occurs in literature. We can take that as a not very interesting given.

There are cases where analyzing a work in terms of evolutionary psychology can provide real and unique insights. All too often, though, when an idea like altruistic punishment becomes fashionable, juxtaposition often replaces analysis. References to trendy terms like market forces or the prisoner's dilemma are stuck into arguments where they contribute little and often don't even apply (such as trying to use the prisoner's dilemma to describe a stag hunt).

We should always welcome new ideas and cross-pollination, but when we see a headline in the New York Times that starts with the words "Next Big Thing," it's probably a time to be a bit more critical.

(and if I had an issue with an New York Times article, I suppose I should have done more than slam one quote.)

And you thought the academic job market was tough

[I have a longer and hopefully fairer follow-up here. Make sure to Flesch's comment which puts his quote in context and largely invalidates my criticism.]

This New York Times article (via Cheap Talk) shows that you can get to be an English professor without ever reading the Odyssey (or even skimming the Cliff Notes):

The road between the two cultures — science and literature — can go both ways. “Fiction provides a new perspective on what happens in evolution,” said William Flesch, a professor of English at Brandeis University.

To Mr. Flesch fictional accounts help explain how altruism evolved despite our selfish genes. Fictional heroes are what he calls “altruistic punishers,” people who right wrongs even if they personally have nothing to gain. “To give us an incentive to monitor and ensure cooperation, nature endows us with a pleasing sense of outrage” at cheaters, and delight when they are punished, Mr. Flesch argues. We enjoy fiction because it is teeming with altruistic punishers: Odysseus, Don Quixote, Hamlet, Hercule Poirot.

Meta-Freakonomics

Joseph recently wrote a post referring to this post by Andrew Gelman (which was based on a series of posts by Kaiser Fung which check the veracity of various claims in Superfreakonomics -- welcome to the convoluted world of the blogosphere). Joseph uses Dr. Gelman's comments about the poor editing and fact-checking of the book to make a point about the disparity between the contribution editing makes and how little we reward it. He ought to know; I have frequently taken advantage of his good nature in this area, but at the risk of being ungrateful, I don't think the point applies here. Rather than being helpful, the kind of criticism Joseph and Gelman describe could only hurt Superfreakonomics.

Or put another way, if we approach this using the techniques and assumptions of the Freakonomics books, we can show that by foregoing a rigorous internal review process the authors were simply acting rationally.

Before we get to the actual argument, we need to address one more point in Joseph's post. Joseph says that providing critical read "is one of the most helpful things a colleague can do for you, yet one of the least rewarded." This statement is absolutely true for easily 99.9% of the books and manuscripts out there. It is not, however, true for the Freakonomics books. Between their prestige and the deep pockets of William Morrow, Levitt and Dubner could have gotten as many highly-qualified internal reviewers as they wanted, reviewers who would have been compensated with both an acknowledgment and a nice check. (Hell, they might even get to be in the movie.)

But if the cost and difficulty of putting together an all-star team of reviewers for Superfreakonomics would have been negligible, how about the benefits? Consider the example of its highly successful predecessor. Freakonomics was so badly vetted that two sections (including the book's centerpiece on abortion) were debunked almost immediately. The source material for the KKK section was so flawed that even Levitt and Dubner disavowed it.

These flaws could have been caught and addressed in the editing process but how would making those corrections help the authors? Do we have any reason to believe that questionable facts and sloppy reasoning cost Levitt and Dubner significant book sales (the book sold over four million copies)? That they endangered the authors' spot with the New York Times? Reduced in any way the pervasive influence the book holds over the next generation of economists? Where would Levitt and Dubner have benefited from a series of tough internal reviews?

Against these elusive benefits we have a number of not-so-hard-to-find costs. While the time and money required to spot flaws is relatively minor, the effort required to address those flaws can be substantial.

Let's look at some specifics. Kaiser Fung raises a number of questions about the statistics in the "sex" chapter (the one about female longevity is particularly damning) and I'm sure he overlooked some -- not because there was anything wrong with his critique but because finding and interpreting reliable data on a century of sex and prostitution is extraordinarily difficult. It involves measurement covert behavior that can be affected by zoning, police procedures, city politics, shifts in organized crime,and countless other factors. Furthermore these same factors can bias the collection of data in nasty and unpredictable ways.

Even if all of the sex chapter's underlying economics arguments were sound (which they are, as far as I know), there would still have been a very good chance that some reviewer might have pointed out flawed data, discredited studies, or turned up findings from more credible sources that undercut the main hypotheses. That doesn't mean that the chapter couldn't be saved -- a good team of researchers with enough time could probably find solid data to support the arguments (assuming, once again, that they were sound) but the final result would be a chapter that would look about the same to the vast majority of readers and external reviewers -- all cost, no benefit.

Worse yet, think about the section on the relative dangers of drunken driving vs. drunken walking. These cute little counter-intuitive analyses are the signature pieces of Levitt and Dubner (and were associated with Dr. Levitt before he formed the team). They are the foundation of the brand. Unfortunately, counter-intuitive analyses tend to be fragile creatures that don't fare that well under scrutiny (intuition has a pretty good track record).

The analysis of modes of drunken transportation would be one of the more fragile ones. Most competent internal reviewers would have had the same reaction that Ezra Klein had:

You can go on and on in this vein. It's terrifically shoddy statistical work. You'd get dinged for this in a college class. But it's in a book written by a celebrated economist and a leading journalist. Moreover, the topic isn't whether people prefer chocolate or vanilla, but whether people should drive drunk. It is shoddy statistical work, in other words, that allows people to conclude that respected authorities believe it is safer for them to drive home drunk than walk home drunk. It's shoddy statistical work that could literally kill somebody. That makes it more than bad statistics. It makes it irresponsible.

Let me be clear. I am not saying that Levitt and Dubner knew there were mistakes here. Quite the opposite. I'm saying they had a highly saleable manuscript ready to go which contained no errors that they knew of, and that any additional checking of the facts, the analyses or logic in the manuscript could only serve to make the book less saleable, to delay its publication or to put the authors in the ugly position of publishing something they knew to be wrong.

Gelman closes his post with this:

It's the nature of interesting-but-true facts that they're most interesting if true, and even more interesting if they're convincingly true.

Perhaps, but Levitt and Dubner have about four million reasons that say he's wrong.

Stand and deliver

This article by the gifted Olivia Judson* explores the research about sitting and obesity that Joseph was talking about and makes some interesting suggestions:

Some people have advanced radical solutions to the sitting syndrome: replace your sit-down desk with a stand-up desk, and equip this with a slow treadmill so that you walk while you work. (Talk about pacing the office.) Make sure that your television can only operate if you are pedaling furiously on an exercise bike. Or, watch television in a rocking chair: rocking also takes energy and involves a continuous gentle flexing of the calf muscles. Get rid of your office chair and replace it with a therapy ball: this too uses more muscles, and hence more energy, than a normal chair, because you have to support your back and work to keep balanced. You also have the option of bouncing, if you like.

* and could someone explain to me why the New York Times' best science writer only shows up in the opinion section.