I concur. Perhaps it's best to rephrase the point about geek adoption versus mainstream adoption. Geeks live in possible futures. Some of these futures materialize (i.e. go mainstream), others don't.
The Internet fatigue Chris talks about, I see it all around me, and more and more articles are popping up about Internet addictions. Plus I suspect the new Facebook redesign will suck people in even more. So in this case, I think he's definitely got a good point.
Very interesting article, I can see some of our discussions in there. I think it's indeed fair to say most people could use less stuff in their lives (minimalism). Furthermore, it's honorable to strive for a simpler life in this age of the Internet and globalization. However, I also agree with the comments that the audience for this article is probably individualistic, unbound, single young men.
Both minimalism and stoicism are about constraints. Therefore, I do not agree with replacing books with a Kindle. A Kindle - like most Internet-connected mobile devices - represents abundance: an abundance of information. Hence I find this point a bit at odds with an information diet. Having physical books puts a constraint on what you can carry around with you (especially important when traveling). Also, which is an argument not heard enough, reading from books - especially hardcovers - has aesthetic value, and it's easier to remember the contents of the book.
You hear people often about "swimmer's bodies": broad shoulders and narrow waist (V-shape), long legs and arms, not too low body fat percentage, medium amount of mass, toned & elongated muscles.
Also ancient pentathletes (modern day decathletes). Aristotle in Rhetoric: "a body capable of enduring all efforts, either of the racecourse or of bodily strength...This is why the athletes in the pentathlon are most beautiful"
A thought-provoking article. However, it's not at all clear to me why having a more informational economy is beneficial per se. Because the non-incremental change - or power law change - can work both ways, up and down.
Take the financial system for instance. Finance is one of the most "informationized" industries, with news coming in fast at Bloomberg terminals, ubiquitous access via smart phones, and thousands of trading orders executed every second. Yes, a system becomes more efficient the less (physical) constraints it has, but it also gets less robust. At the core of this problem is that we don't really understand non-incremental change due to the properties of information and a whole host of cognitive biases.
Therefore, I'd like to see a distinction being made to cases where the informationization is beneficial, and where it is detrimental. It's a good thing in industries where there's mostly exposure to positive non-incremental change (e.g. Internet businesses, biotech), but otherwise not.
You bring up a very good point. Actually, I think this issue warrants an entire blog post in response. I think there are indeed huge dangers in informationization that could be catastrophic.
So I guess we need to determine whether informationization is a force that can be stopped, and if it's not, what can we do to minimize catastrophic failure. One thing could be to have certain physical/static baselines to fall back to (like shelters, food, minimum levels of non-liquid wealth). Or convert some of NNT's black-swan heuristics into well known practices (e.g. "Learn to be redundant, don’t be optimal.", "have small losses if you are wrong, and big profits if you are right", etc.)
I haven't put a lot of thought into the risks and downsides of informationization actually, and perhaps not enough people out there aren't either. At this year's Singularity Summit there was a real lack of skepticism and interest in debating some of these core downsides and dangers.
IMHO, where you right now, I don't think that's a significant enough advantage. The costs of moving and living/working in SV is just not worth it at this stage.
The irrationality you are referring to is called the self-serving bias (SSB). I wrote a thesis on overconfidence for my master in behavioral economics, and the two are related. SSB is a well-documented bias. For instance, 90% of American drivers think they are in the top 50%. It's hard for people to fully appreciate this fact. Allow me to illustrate. Do you still consider yourself, even after reading this statistic, to be in the bottom 50% of drivers? If so, then you're a minority, my friend ;-) (10%, to be exact)
90% (actually, about 98%) of American drivers are above average, owing to a statistical quirk. There are 6 million car accidents in the U.S. each year, out of roughly 240 million vehicles. At a minimum, that means that 97.5% of drivers get in no accidents that year. They join the big bulge of people who are "average", having perfect driving records or only an accident a decade or so.
Accident frequency is a power law distribution - a large percentage of crashes are caused by a small number of drivers who habitually violate traffic laws, drive drunk, or otherwise engage in risky behavior. One of the distinctive features of power law distributions is that there's this long tail of people with very small values, and then a few people who make up most of the curve. So (made up numbers) you might have 60% of the population who has never gotten in an accident, then 35% who has gotten in one, then a tiny fraction of 1% who's been in a dozen. Over an 80 year lifetime, that 6 million accidents/year results in 480 million accidents, or 2/person, so with the hypothetical percentages above, 95% of people are above the mean and 60% are above the median.
Just goes to show that you can't assume everything is a Gaussian. ;-)
A similar phenomenom occurs in many, many other fields. The average (median) wage-earner actually makes below average (mean) wages, because the existence of Bill Gates and Carl Icahn skews the distribution upwards. The median sale price for a startup is $0, because over half of them fail. The average test scores in Palo Alto or Weston, MA or Hunter College High School really are above average, because those places already preselect for bright kids. It's quite possible for Lake Wobegone to exist: you just need to compare your kids with someone else's average.
And none of this invalidates SSB, but you picked a bad example to illustrate it. When 90% of drivers think they're in the top 50%, they're right.
Sure, but that only works because you've chosen a discrete measure of how "good" a driver is. If you defined a "good" driver by some other measure (say, a function of risky behavior and fuel consumption), then 50% of drivers would be above the median and 50% would be below, by definition.
It's all in how you phrase the question, isn't it? Your analysis is right if we're talking about how a person's score on a driving test stacks up against the average score, gp's is right if we're talking about how people rank themselves among the population of all drivers (i.e., if 9/10 drivers think they're in the top five, then there are at least 4 delusional people).
I think nostrademons is essentially saying that the top nine drivers are indistinguishable from each other, as none of them have been in an accident. They are all "the best". Depending on how pessimistic you are, there are either no people in the top five, or nine people in the top five.
The Internet fatigue Chris talks about, I see it all around me, and more and more articles are popping up about Internet addictions. Plus I suspect the new Facebook redesign will suck people in even more. So in this case, I think he's definitely got a good point.