1000 Flowers Bloom

Afraid of the wrong things

I came across this brilliant speech that Michael Crichton wrote (via Brad Feld) called Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21^st Century which is a really interesting look at how society gets afraid of the wrong things because of misinformation and then by acting on that lack of information and understanding makes things worse.

Crichton talks about Chernobyl and that there were only 50 deaths there instead of the  15,000 to 30,000 that the NY Times and the Washington Post reported. That's a MASSIVE discrepancy.

I think that the data and the case laid out in Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth was very compelling but Crichton's speech certainly makes me think twice about it.

If our news outlets can't provide us with good data then how can we make good decisions? How good is our data?

Economic value of Blogs and Open Source

Thor Muller from Ruby Red Labs has a conversation with an economist and the conversation turns around to blogs and open source projects like Wikipedia. The economist doesn't believe that they have any value because they don't conform to his economic models.

“I can’t explain them,” he replied. “They don’t make sense in our models.” He explained that the soft, social benefits normal people would use to explain such behavior weren’t measurable, and therefore didn’t exist.

Consequently he has no intent to address the anomalies.

“I don’t read blogs, either,” he said. “If they had anything of value they’d charge for it.”

Fascinating to me that an economist would ignore this phenomena!

In my humble opinion people that blog and do open source get many of the same benefits that an advertiser gets. They get their name out there, are established as experts in a subject area and this brings clear rewards later on.

Another benefit is the sheer joy of doing it. Participating in communities and conversations is plain old fun. People pay for entertainment all the time.

Would be wonderful to see someone do a real analysis of this phenomena though.