Keep it Sweet and Simple

I just finished reading the transcript of a talk by Hamming while at Bell-Labs (1986), which includes some great advices on research and work spirit overall.

http://www.chris-lott.org/misc/kaiser.html

These are some extracts:

‘ … each of you has one life to live. Even if you believe in reincarnation it doesn’t do you any good from one life to the next! Why shouldn’t you do significant things in this one life, however you define significant?

I find that the major objection is that people think great science is done by luck …. And I will cite Pasteur who said, “Luck favors the prepared mind.” … The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is NOT … Newton said, “If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results.”

One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can’t, almost surely you are not going to.

“Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.” Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity ­ it is very much like compound interest. I don’t want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.

Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. If you believe too much you’ll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won’t get started. It requires a lovely balance.

For those who don’t get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn’t produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention ­ you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work. It’s perfectly obvious.

I have now come down to a topic which is very distasteful; it is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it. `Selling’ to a scientist is an awkward thing to do. It’s very ugly; you shouldn’t have to do it. The world is supposed to be waiting, and when you do something great, they should rush out and welcome it. But the fact is everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well that they will set aside what they are doing, look at what you’ve done, read it, and come back and say, “Yes, that was good.” ‘

Clearly what has happened over the last days with the financial markets will give people lots of things to think about. Some will blame it on capitalism, others on politicians, others in human greedy nature, others in corruption and reckless financial engineering, others in the lack of regulation…

While all the above has had an impact, I believe that the root of the problem has been the failure of the trust and reputation tools used to determines the risk of financial assets. In the 21^st century, we do not yet know how to quantify *trust* in large uncontrolled environments (e.g. where financial assets get recombined all the time). In fact, the world has become so complex that we do not even know how to measure the value of what we create! … and this generates bubble after bubble after bubble.

And you may wonder why is it that I am talking about this? Well, because the Internet also suffered/suffers from similar problems, i.e. that of trust and reputation, and some Internet tools may help here. The Internet is too a large scale, unregulated distributed system, where information appears and gets mixed and re-mixed all the time (web pages, content aggregators, blogs, microblogging, etc). Before Google, it was rather cumbersome to find what you wanted and trust that it was the best page for that topic. But they provided a simple yet scalable way to evaluate the rank of a page, and even more, they managed to monetize such ranking information through ads — charging advertisers that want to appear close to highly ranked pages–, thus, probably creating the first bank and currency of the new trust economy.

As we move forward, reputation and trust will be among the most important things you will care about. After all, your time is finite and probably your most precious asset; and finding trusted goods is very time consuming. I would personally value being able to find a trusted doctor quickly, a reputed travel agency that offers me a good vacation package, or a good fund that won’t be full of subprime loans. And the same goes for companies, which will care about what is their reputation online at any point in time (e.g. right after launching a new product). So who will become the wall street of this new trust economy? Google? Facebook? Telcos?. Actually Telcos are in a very good position to become a bank of trust given that a lot of our online transactions happen through them.

Another problem with measuring trust is how to do it at scale. When a bank wants to lend to another bank or individual, it needs to determine the financial risk involve in that, however, with millions of customers and investments it is very hard to do it well. P2P has been very successful at scaling the delivery of information, so what about P2P lending and P2P reputation? This way, you scale the risk assessment process much better: each potential lender evaluates the risk of each potential borrower and rather than borrowing from the bank, you borrow from your neighbor. Done well, you shouldn´t have to pay higher interests than those offered by banks, and as a lender your risk should be lower. See CNN article on Peer-to-Peer lending

So I would say we pay less attention to the housing and information/IT economies and we focus in the new Trust economy