Is Recognition of Human Empathy the Solution to our Environmental Problems?
according to Jeremy Rifkin, we’re on the verge of a massive revolution
Posted Feb 19, 11:36 am in biology, consumerism, culture, economics, environment, human nature, improvements, marketing, politics, sustainability
There’s a fascinating interview with writer Jeremy Rifkin over at the New Scientist website. In it, he lays out why he thinks there is going to a be a massive shift in human consciousness as a result of new forms of information accessibility combining with the human ability for expressing empathy. This revolution, in his estimation, will solve the energy and environmental problems our world is facing. Borrowing from evolutionary biology, philosophy, marketing, and many other fields, Rifkin sees hope in the current turmoil where others don’t.
Incidentally, Rifkin’s vision of changing human behavior runs completely contrary to that of Steven Levitt (of Superfreakanomics fame), who as I stated in a previous entry is stuck in neutral with his “solve problems created by technology with more technology” rut.
Corporate Social Responsibility Can't Happen By Itself
emphasis on short-term profitability stunts CSR’s ability to thrive in the market
Posted Oct 1, 10:40 pm in business, business models, culture, economics, ethics, finance, improvements, marketing, sustainability, unfinished thoughts
Regulation is a pretty hot topic. And when I say “hot,” I mean that it has an uncanny ability to divide a crowd. Progressives seem to generally favor regulations as a means of limiting the damage caused by corporate recklessness, and they have been quite vocal in pushing for greater government oversight in what companies can do, and how much they can do it before incurring serious penalties. Meanwhile, proponents of the free market maintain that the only fair and effective way to handle regulation is to allow the market to do the work; they believe in an efficient economic system that automatically controls problems that really matter (i.e. the problems most people care about). I personally can sympathize to some degree with both sides of this debate, but am not convinced that either can be implemented as solutions to the problems we currently face. What follows is my logic.
Before we can go on though, we have to face facts: it’s been obvious to those paying attention that market forces have not been effective in curbing devastating environmental damage caused by companies who have ignored the social costs of their operations. It’s not limited to environmental damages, either. The recent financial meltdown almost certainly would have been prevented with more oversight.
The traditional progressive (read: “liberal”) line about all this is that these corporations are just greedy and soulless, and don’t care about anything but profit. But this views corporate activity within a vacuum, and denies the economic realities underlying their behavior. In the absence of proper incentives, no company will behave in a manner consistent with diffuse, idealized social goals. Companies by their very nature act in ways that are most beneficial to themselves in the marketplace; even companies that try to do social good still have financial and publicity incentives underlying their behavior. Why? Because if they don’t, they effectively get punished by Wall Street and the market; remember that when we’re talking about the stock market, the bottom line is that public companies (i.e. the biggest organizations on the planet, who control the most money) pretty much need to post higher-than-expected profits consistently— or else. On Wall Street, nobody gives a hoot about how socially responsible you are— unless you’re making money from it. And tragically, our system is structured in such a way that companies really cannot afford to piss off Wall Street, for a number of reasons that go beyond the scope of this commentary.
Nevertheless, that is an economic reality; to condemn a company for being socially irresponsible overlooks the conditions that encourage the sort of reckless behavior that we hear so much about. In my opinion, it’s more of an indictment of our social and financial structure than it is of a company to say that they act irresponsibly. Like I’ve said before, we should think of corporations like organisms. They do what it takes to survive now. They typically can’t afford to think too far in the future, because Wall Street does not reward thinking far into the future; Wall Street rewards thinking about next quarter. Whose fault is that? I’d argue that it’s all of our faults. In an environment of high competition and high risk of market punishment, it’s unfair to blame companies for playing the game by the rules we ourselves constructed. Of course, it doesn’t make what they do ethically right, but like in any evolutionary context, the concept of justice doesn’t play a large role in behavioral decision-making; surviving does.
So yes, public companies do operate by almost strictly by financial motives, just like many progressives indignantly charge. But I would argue that this financial motivation should not at all detract from the actions of, say, Wal-Mart, who has done more than almost any other company in the world to enact serious green initiatives. True, they’ve done it for themselves, their own bottom line, and Wall Street— but still, they’ve done it. And if that’s the motivation they need to do it, then perhaps we should encourage that. Besides, if they were supposed to adopt a sudden conscience about their activities and rectify them, whose social goals are they supposed to strive for, anyway? Lots of different social factions have lots of different goals, and many of them have incompatible or actively contradictory goals.
For this reason, it seems fair to place the decision-making process in the hands of the public, through market forces. That allows a sort of collective decision-making process that is free from being regulated by “some guys on a board,” and allows for us to ostensibly have a shared voice in determining the direction that we take as a planet. Unfortunately, however, there are some problems that such market forces don’t resolve. For example, the economically well-endowed have a disproportionately large voice and thus the ability to unilaterally have a strong negative impact with their choices. And there’s still no guarantee that the aforementioned group will pay attention to social well-being if they’re still being held hostage by Wall Street demands. Free market economics as a means of regulation is dependent on not only market efficiency, but ethical, rational, and well-informed decision-making on the part of consumers— many of which are corporate entities.
But as consumers we are neither rational nor omniscient. We are sometimes ethical. But we can’t know everything about all the downstream effects of all our purchases at the time of purchase. This makes it pretty hard to argue the point that the market will be able to curb environmentally damaging business practices through selective consumption.
That may seem like a slam dunk for regulation, and many on the political left would love to see this happen. But it’s not that easy. The problem of regulation is complex, and it is difficult to enact regulation in a way that appears fair to everyone. Here’s the main problem: if there are regulations, who gets to call the shots?
Some might argue that we should use science to guide our regulatory policy, at least with regards to environmental concerns. But what science? Even science can have an agenda. The more you look into scientific research, the more you see how there is a chain of funding. Funding is a political process. People conducting research are subject to biases. No matter what the science says, or the preponderance of evidence suggesting one thing or another, when it comes down to drafting law, there will almost always be some arbitrary component about implementation (e.g. exactly how many tons of CO2 a company can release per year; exactly what chemicals a company can and can’t produce). And those people whose economic interests are being impinged will no more welcome the validity of the science or the arbitrary lines being drawn than a liberal would welcome Sarah Palin’s views if she was placed in charge of preserving endangered wildlife. Ultimately, any laws will be seen as political tools with embedded agendas.
Though it is debatable how much this might change corporate attitudes towards CSR, I think part of the fix is to change the nature of Wall Street. It does not serve companies or society to have such a heavy focus on short-term profitability. This structure denies companies the opportunity to act in ways that favor their own long-term efficiency, the public’s best interest, and the well-being of the planet. If companies didn’t have to keep impressing Wall Street, they could better take actions that could, over the long term, make their operations more efficient, streamlined, and less wasteful. That would be good for their bottom line and for environmental concerns. But that takes time, and it might require a few consecutive quarters of what may appear to be subpar financial performance. Right now, this is a highly risky strategy that most companies wouldn’t consider because they will not be rewarded for it.
Weirdly, even amidst all the talk about reform in the financial industry, I have not heard any talk about this. Admittedly, I’m not sure if anyone has worked out the details about how a “new and improved” stock market system would work, or if anyone has suggested a better set of economic incentives for waste reduction, but perhaps it’s time we started a national dialogue about it. It seems rather important.
Comment [12]
Marketing Privacy
amidst consumer fears and self-consciousness, retailers should offer something that’s hard to get
Posted Jun 15, 01:06 pm in business, consumerism, culture, human nature, improvements, marketing
It’s not infrequent that you hear people lamenting about the loss of privacy in modern society. Grocery stores want us to get loyalty cards so they can monitor what we’re buying and change their marketing mixes to capitalize on it. Facebook wants to sell our user information so marketers can post up banner ads about things they think we might buy. Data mining software on our computers watch what we’re doing and send that information to various companies that sign us up for junk mail and email spam lists.
Some of us actively combat this trend by being secretive when companies try to get information from us, while many of us are just resigned to it; but it remains true that privacy is a highly-valued commodity in our society. Some people value privacy because they don’t want to deal with the irritation and annoyance of people constantly trying to sell them things. But there are also real concerns about things like identity theft and corporations mining information for purposes that many people don’t feel comfortable about. Then there’s the fear of humiliation; sometimes people simply don’t want others— friends, acquaintances, and even strangers— to know certain things about them. There are, for example, fears of looking pathetic or comical in the eyes of others, or fears that potentially embarrassing information might circulate.
This morning, I happened to be in the pharmacy buying some calamine lotion for a poison ivy problem, but I noticed that in the same aisle there were numerous products for problems of a more embarrassing nature, like the slew of products for jock itch. Some people would rather live with the jock itch (or buy a $5 product online and have it shipped out for $7) rather than take that to the counter and face the cashier, knowing that they’re probably snickering under their stoic fascade and laughing about it with co-workers later.
Two aisles away were the condoms, prophylactics, and lubricants. I bet that only a quarter of people looking to buy “male enhancement drugs” in a pharmacy actually have the nerve to take the product to the counter.
In bookstores, I wonder how much potential revenue from the sales of self-help books, health and medical literature, and erotica (or pornography) is lost due to the inability of consumers to work up the gall to look another human in the eye while the price scanner brings up the book title on the computerized cash register.
I mention all these things not because they are humorous and we may see the universal human emotions involved in them, but because there’s a real marketing problem involved here. Consumers want to purchase things but are thwarted by their inhibitions, insecurities, and retailers’ apparent inability to acknowledge these feelings. Retailers are damaged not only because of the lost revenue from salable products that people are actually willing to fork over money for (but won’t), but because these products are taking up shelf and warehouse space and aren’t getting the turnaround that they could. There are high inventory costs to products that don’t shift units.
Some grocery stores, to save on labor costs, have implemented self-checkout lines in which customers ring up their own sales and pay for them through a machine. A system such as this would be incredibly valuable at stores like a bookstore or pharmacy. It offers customers an outlet to pay for an item and retain their privacy. They don’t need to talk to anyone, they don’t need to feel embarrassed, and they don’t need to feel like they are being judged. Retailers benefit because it keeps customers focused on getting the things they need, rather than feeling uneasy about making the transactions. These machines are a little clumsy in the grocery stores, but they would work much better in these venues than they do in grocery stores because you’d typically have a lot fewer items, and all the items have UPC codes (unlike vegetables in the grocery store, which are a pain to ring up).
There’s no doubt that persons in positions of power at retail organizations have recognized this issue. Yet, short of grocery stores (which have ostensibly implemented them for different reasons), I have yet to see one brick-and-mortar store do anything to remedy this misalignment. There may be a number of reasons for this, including concerns about theft, space, bucking convention, and good ol’ status quo; but in my view, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks by a significant margin— and for consumers, it would be a welcome change from feeling like their every move is being watched. For bookstores, it has the added bonus of keeping them as anonymous as Amazon.com, who they’ve been claiming has a competitive advantage over them.
Comment [2]
Rethinking Green
easy approaches to being ‘green’ are en vogue, but do they shoulder the environmental burden?
Posted Apr 18, 11:56 am in environment, human nature, improvements, sustainability
Note: This article is a response to this “eco-business”, which sells standard cleaning products in reused containers.
I don’t mean to engage in the perfect solution fallacy here, but a business selling Windex in reused bottles encapsulates a lot of the things that I think are misguided about the green movement. I do believe that reusing materials is a very good thing, but I am concerned that ‘green marketing’ efforts like this hoodwink well-intentioned people into thinking that minor and convenient consumption changes can offset the huge environmental problems we create by not making serious inquiries to our overall lifestyle choices.
In my mind, efforts like this have the worrying effect of diverting attention away from the real problems (overconsumption), and instead breeding attitudes founded on ease and ignorance (e.g. “well, as long as I recycle, I’m doing my part”) and reliance on consumer goods to promote ideas that really require behavioral changes. I understand that recycling is generally a good thing, but I’ve met countless people who think that just recycling is equivalent to being environmentally conscious. And it’s not; it is simply one expression of it. Buying Windex in recycled bottles and recycling aluminum cans is not, as many people will likely see it, absolution for our collective extravagance. If you read up on the economics of recycling you might see why this is the case (to put it shortly, recycling takes a lot of energy, uses a lot of resources, and has a huge carbon footprint of its own).
The conversation about environmentalism has been so dumbed-down and reduced to quick-fix solutions that it has started to promote the problem by making consumers feel like the only role in the consumption process (with regards to social impact) is the last stage— recycling the empty bottles, cans, and cardboard boxes of the stuff they buy. And while this one way to make a contribution, it’s not even close to being the most effective way to transform concern for the environment into action; it’s just the easiest way— and that’s a big difference.
The reality is that if we really care about the environment, we will need to consume less overall. We will likely need to make major sacrifices to our comfort levels. If we really care, we may need to accept some major inconveniences in our lives. We cannot get something for nothing.
Buying a reused plastic bottle is indeed a small step towards a massive goal, but we should not be tricked into thinking that answers can be bought so easily and shipped to our houses. As I mentioned before, with true commitment comes sacrifice.
We like quick solutions, but it is time to start thinking harder about our roles in creating the problems, instead of trying to consume our way out, which is the way we got in in the first place. But unfortunately, modern culture hinges so much on consumption and consumer products being the solutions to our problems that it is our instinctual response to look for our solutions there— externally— instead of within ourselves and our behavior. Unfortunately, that is precisely the wrong place to look.
Why BART Needs an Overhaul
how basic marketing could fix the Bay Area’s mass transit systems
Posted Jan 12, 04:00 am in environment, experiences, improvements, marketing, pictures, transportation
Last week, I was back in the Bay Area for a day after a trip to Asia. An excursion from the airport on BART reminded me what an egregious marketing disaster the system is for residents of Northern California. It’s a classic example of a well-meaning institution that does not take stock of how it does things, how its methods affect customers, and how that affects their overall revenues and performance. To understand why this is important, we first have to understand the current context of BART and the role it serves in the Bay Area.
BART was developed in the 1960s as a means of getting residents of outlying suburbs in the Bay Area to the city centers of Oakland and San Francisco. It was fashioned as an inter city (between cities) transport system, not an intra city (within a single city) transport system like New York, Tokyo, or Hong Kong. Therefore, the station distribution of the BART system is wider, but with lower density. That means that while BART travels further than most other subway systems across the world, it’s also harder to get to a station, your trip is significantly more likely to involve several legs involving different types of transport, and you have to wait longer between the arrival of two trains. These facts already pose a psychological barrier to potential ridership, so it is important that if administrators want to encourage BART usage, that annoyances be minimized; after all, any excuse a rider can find not to take BART, they likely will employ.
It is for that reason that it is tragic that BART is from top to bottom such a frustrating transit system, and seems to me the perfect example of a wasted opportunity— so much so that it is really an embarrassment for an area of the country that prides itself on technological leadership and progressive thought. At every turn, the BART system seems to want to discourage ridership, and make it ridiculously hard for passengers to do things that should be very simple. Here are some observations about BART that I’ve made, culled from years of experience riding it.
- Marketing Problem #1 – Station Layout and Orientation
Almost all BART stations have unique designs that share few attributes between them besides being uniformly confusing and utterly confounding for people who are unfamiliar with their layouts. I realize that the BART system was largely designed in the 1960s, but a public transit system is not the place to experiment with post-modern design. Some BART stations are so poorly designed that they seem to actively thwart passengers from catching trains. For example, in the 12th street / Oakland City Center station, for a passenger to switch trains, he must climb up one set of stairs to another level, and then climb down a different set of stairs to access the second BART platform. This is despite the fact that the first set of stairs that you climb up actually passes right by the level you are trying to get to; for some reason, access to that floor from the first set of stairs is blocked. In certain other stations, the passenger waiting platforms are placed not in the center between the two train tracks, but on the opposite sides of the train; this means that instead of allowing passengers to access either train from one platform, you have to decide which platform you want to go to before you walk onto it. If you select the wrong one the first time, you have to run back up the flight of stairs you took to get to the one you went to, and run down another flight of stairs to get to the other (New York’s subway system has this same problem— except that there, if you go in the wrong side, you actually have to pay the subway toll again to switch platforms!). This is not problematic for people familiar with the stations, but for visitors and for people new to the area, this can be maddening.
Solution for Problem #1
Short of total redesign, this is a tough one. Better signage would help a lot. It’s impossible to know where to go when all the signs just say things like ‘Platform 1’ and ‘North-bound train.’ This presupposes the customer already has previous understanding of the station layout and geographical sense of the Bay Area. Spell out everything, so people who have no idea know what they’re supposed to do.
- Marketing Problem #2 – Inflexible Payment System
The BART card, which gives a passenger access to the trains, is made of a flimsy piece of magnetic paper that inspires exactly zero confidence. They are easily bent, and will de-magnetize if you happen to place one next to your mobile phone. Bent or de-magnetized tickets are rejected by the turnstiles, and the BART attendants aren’t particularly concerned about helping passengers with problem cards (my girlfriend told an uninterested attendant that her card, which still had $5 on it, wasn’t working. The attendant took it, said that it was “too old” and then told my girlfriend to buy a new one. One wonders, is 1.5 years really a long time in BART years?). If you’re lucky, you can write to some address listed in BART informational literature and get a refund on the money you put on the card, but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.
Solution to Marketing Problem #2
Many other subway systems have much sturdier cards that aren’t so easy to mangle or otherwise damage, like Hong Kong’s system, which has something resembling a credit card. And you can use them to buy all kinds of other stuff too (like food at convenient stores), which make you more likely to keep one around and using them and the BART system too.
- Marketing Problem #3 – Abhorrent Aesthetics
Visually, the BART trains themselves are hardly the stuff of envy for other countries looking to the US for mass transport leadership. I often wonder how wide-eyed visitors to Silicon Valley with dreams of a sunny land filled with the world’s most cutting edge companies must react when they first enter a dingy retro-future steel train with dirty carpeted floors and filthy green upholstered seats. It must have a way of shattering the grandiose illusions about the Californian dream. In what world is it a good idea to make a public mass transit system with seats and floors that can’t be wiped clean with a high pressure hose? With the level of traffic that passes through the BART system every day, why would a designer choose to use materials like carpet and upholstery that retain dirt and which are near impossible to keep clean? For professionals traveling on BART, there’s definitely a sense that you’re ‘slumming’ when you enter a weirdly foul-smelling and visually unappealing environment like a BART train.
Solution to Marketing Problem #3:
My advice is to ditch the upholstery and carpeted floor in favor of the hard plastic used by nearly every other transit system. It’s much cheaper to maintain, it smells a lot better after constant use, it doesn’t get as dirty, and it looks a hell of a lot better than dirty green. Shallow as it may be, initial visual impression is one of the strongest drivers of attitudes towards things. Impress people visually about BART and they’re more likely to ride it.
- Marketing Problem #4 – Seat Arrangement
The arrangement of the seats in BART is at best curious. Space is used inefficiently and arbitrarily; some seats face forwards and others face backwards; some seats are placed perpendicular to the train, while others are parallel; and some seats face other seats so you can stare awkwardly at strangers). You’d think there was some rationale for this arrangement, like perhaps flexibility for special situations; but it’s clear that the arrangement doesn’t even afford this. For example, if you are returning from SFO, San Francisco’s international airport, and you have bags, you can forget about having a place to put your bags without using up seats or blocking access to doors. If you have a bike, there is absolutely no place for it on a BART train where it won’t create serious chaos in how people can sit, or how others can walk around or access the BART car. Here, we have a situation in which the arrangement is neither most convenient for passengers, nor accommodating for special situations; instead, it serves mostly to taunt you and make the whole system seem poorly planned.
Solution to Marketing Problem #4:
I suggest the rearrangement of seats to maximize seating capacity in most cars, but to set aside [a] special car[s] with a different seating arrangement that better accommodates people with packages, baggage, and bicycles.
- Marketing Problem #5 – Biking on BART
Speaking of bikes, BART does allow you to bring a bike on— but not at the times that you’d most likely want to bring your bike on, which is during normal commuting hours. If you want to use your bike as part of your commute to work, don’t even think about it. Not only are they are prohibited during those times, you’ll have to hold it awkwardly while it blocks doors and access to seats— which is why they forbid them in the first place. Bring one on during peak hours, and the train driver will tell you to get off the train.
Solution to Marketing Problem #5: As I mentioned previously, I would suggest adding a special bike car to encourage bikers to use BART and to further encourage use of mass transit— though the BART system has been systematically reducing the number of BART cars in operation in order to cut costs. Ironically, these efforts in cost-cutting also discourage ridership, which along with reducing costs, reduces revenues. To give BART some credit, they have been adding bicycle parking units outside some BART stations, like El Cerrito, where you can store your bike at the station in a special holding container for 3 cents an hour. But this still doesn’t solve the problem of those who need bikes on both ends of their daily commute.
- Marketing Problem #6 – Maps and Signage
The BART system lacks an adequate number of maps, and also offers poor information quality on existing maps. There should be BART maps everywhere, but it’s often hard to find one. There’s usually only one on an entire BART train, when there should be at least 4 in my opinion. Furthermore, if you don’t understand the geography of the area or are unfamiliar with subway maps, you’ll have a heck of a time figuring out how to get from point A to point B. It’s not at all intuitive which train you should be getting on if you want to get from, say, Daly City to Union City, particularly if you don’t understand where those places are in the Bay Area. Not all trains go to all places, so it’s important to understand which ones go where, but it’s especially infuriating to newcomers to understand the idea of transfer points and switching trains, as making sense of the train maps when you don’t have a sense for the geography takes too much effort.
Solution to Marketing Problem #6: I would propose that instead of showing a geographical depiction of cities, BART’s map should be shown as a linear continuum to eliminate unnecessary or confusing information. Perhaps something like this, where flashing lights can indicate where you are (indicated in the diagram by the yellow light in circle 13) and the next station the train will stop at (indicated by the flashing orange light in circle 14):
- Marketing Problem #7 – Communication between System and Passengers
It also doesn’t help that conductors don’t always give helpful messages over the intercoms about where passengers should transfer and whether the train is currently at a transfer point. In fact, it’s often impossible to understand what is being said on the intercom. And too often it’s hard to figure out what station you’re at! If you’re lucky, there’s a tiny sign that you might see posted in the station if you look out your dirty window long enough to find it, but it’s not always there and it’s often surprisingly difficult to spot.
Solution to Problem #7: Tokyo’s subway system has an interactive map on every wall of the train car showing exactly where you are at any given time, what station you are about to arrive at, and most basically, what direction you’re traveling. That would be a great and welcome addition to BART.
- Marketing Problem #8 – Intermodality Issues
BART’s apparent slogan is “BART… and you’re there!”, a phrase that sounds great on paper. Yet, anyone who’s ever ridden BART knows well that BART is anything but that simple. With its few stations positioned in San Francisco and Oakland, as well as places like Fruitvale and Bay Point, you can make a decent argument that BART’s geographical reaches are significant; still, what it means in that slogan to ‘be there’ is clearly up to debate. Sure, you can get from the town of Orinda to the city San Francisco relatively easily if you happen to already be at the originating BART station, but it’s rarely convenient to get either to your originating BART station or from the destination BART station to wherever it is that you’re trying to go. This often means that a range of transport is necessitated for a given trip. You might need to drive or walk to a BART station, take the BART, and hop on a bus to your final destination. Or you might need to get on CalTrain, catch the BART, and hail a taxi for the last leg of the trip. “BART… and you’re there!” is a phrase that not only rings untrue and hollow for the bulk of passengers, but serves mostly as a reminder for how long and tedious it is to get anywhere using BART and Bay Area mass transit in general (which probably explains in large part the ridiculous amount of traffic to be found on any given stretch of highway in the Bay Area during any given time, particularly around commute times).
Solution to Marketing Problem #8: Unfortunately, short of overhauling the entire mass transit system of the Bay Area, there’s little that can be done about this now, but it should be seen as a cautionary example for other up-and-coming systems.
- Marketing Problem #9 – Too Hard to Pay for Tickets
Yet, I have repeatedly mentioned on this blog, any organization that is attempting to increase its patronage needs to make it easy for people to switch to them. The mass transit in the Bay Area does an absolutely abysmal job of this. Infrequent trains and buses as well as limited routes are a big part of the problem, but are for understandable budgetary reasons not easy to fix. But one thing that Bay Area mass transit absolutely should do ASAP is to make it easier to pay for tickets and get on board mass transit.
Solution to Problem #9: One way they could facilitate this is to add RFID systems like Hong Kong’s subway system has, where you can have your funds deducted simply by flicking your card— or now, specially-enabled wristwatch— at a receiver. That’s a technological improvement, and while worthwhile, will only do so much.
- Marketing Problem #10 – Integrated Payment System
But more importantly than the previous note is the main thing that should be adequately addressed: the (potentially) intermodal nature of most mass transit trips taken by Bay Area commuters. There’s BART, CalTrain, MUNI, AC Transit, WestCAT, SamTrans, Golden Gate Transit, and the Oakland Ferry (among the countless other mass transit operators), and they all have different payment forms. Can you imagine what a pain it is to manage multiple transit passes? In the past I’ve had commutes involving AC Transit, BART, and MUNI in a single day. No one wants to fumble around with all these transit cards, constantly monitoring whether they have credit on those cards or not. People want one card. Why should transit be such a big hassle? It’s already a huge time sink.
Solution to Problem #10: Transit operators should be making every effort to sync with other transit operators. This sort of system standardization will not only result in cost savings for the overall system, but will also result in increased system throughput, which is, presumably the goal of all this. Mass transit operators are supposed to be trying to alleviate traffic congestion and reducing pollution, so why should they drag their feet about implementing a universal payment system? I do realize that they are all different agencies, and that there are logistical issues involving funding that likely form the root of the problem here, but they are worth overcoming not just for the good of the public, but also for the environment.
Social Networking and Self-Regulation
the potentially crippling problems inherent in the self-policing realms of Digg and Reddit
Posted Sep 28, 07:15 am in economics, experiences, human nature, improvements, marketing, politics, postmodernism, social networking, unanswered questions
Social networking websites are the big thing right now, not just for armchair sociologists and online businesses, but also for academics. They serve as sort of a vacuum where you can observe interactive behavior from afar in a venue that didn’t even exist just a few years ago.
Two of the sites that get a lot of the attention are Reddit and Digg. These sites are not like Facebook or MySpace, in that they are not pages in which you create profiles for the purpose of having your peers come check you out and find out what music you like. They are essentially link portals that allow users to submit content (links) and allow users to comment on those submissions. They also give users the ability to “upmod” or “downmod” submissions to indicate, respectively, approval or disapproval of said submissions, comments, and links. It’s supposed to be an egalitarian means of aggregating a collective response of the userbase to a submission, and to show others how worthwhile a contribution might be, and to establish a feedback mechanism to the poster.
Keeping count of ups and downs encourages good comments and submissions, and can be seen as a preventative tool to keep out trolls, spammers, and people who say don’t make worthwhile contributions to the public discourse. And like the Roman gladiator battles of old, the idea is that a preponderance of upmods will spare the life of a well-written or interesting contribution, while downmods will effectively slay it, striking it from the viewing grounds.
In theory, it’s a very good thing. Over humanity’s existence, and particularly over the past 15 years, there has been a glut of information flooding into the public sphere at a rate that seems to only accelerate. It become increasingly necessary to more effectively filter what reaches our eyes in order to make our limited time more meaningful. In other words, there’s a lot of junk out there, and you don’t want to waste your time reading it; you want to get to the good stuff immediately (this attitude probably is problematic in its own way, but that’s a different story entirely). These social networking sites help you put mass consciousness to use in achieving that agenda.
For a while this was being considered as the way that private citizens were finally going to wrangle the big bad world wide web and all its anarchic tendencies; finally the masses would be able to collectively wrestle power away from the disproportionately powerful spammers and media corporations, and regain control of the discursive sphere that the internet was always meant to be.
Alas, the debilitating cracks have already formed in the foundations of this well-meaning institution.
Digg was working fine up to a certain point, where articles were being upmodded based on merit and interest, but this utopic system was eventually usurped by an organized network of users operating on a platform of quid pro quo, in which users would agree to upmod another’s comments and submissions in exchange for similar treatment to their own comments and submissions. These rogue networks expanded, using Digg’s proprietary “friend” system, in which a user can befriend other users and monitor each others’ activities with ease. Pretty soon, the entire front page of the site, which was once supposed to house an aggregated list of topics that the entire userbase considered important, was commandeered by people subverting the system through mutual backscratching, thereby annihilating the democratic ideals of the site.
To this day, despite 150,000,000 page views a month and thousands of content submissions per day, the same 20 people’s submissions make it to the front page every day. This, of course, basically makes Digg the equivalent of a mainstream media outlet that uses editorial discretion to filter content, except in this case, it is not exercising supposed meritocratic discretion (“what are the important issues of the day?”) so much as they basically just have a staff of 20 contributors who are going to automatically have their voices heard, while everyone else is basically forced into a consumption role.
So much for that.
It was then that we looked to Reddit to become the site that would cradle our highest democratic ideals. Many Digg users jumped ship to come to Reddit after being disgusted with the downward slide in content quality at Digg. But soon enough, Reddit too was destroyed— but not by the same system as Digg. It was leveled by a much more subtle and insidious form of cancer.
Reddit had always prided itself on being a more thoughtful and educated mass of users than Digg, always mocking Digg for its tendency towards childish humor and ad-hominem verbal sparring. Reddit, on the other hand, was a site that was sophisticated, and more prone to having mature dialogues about subjects that were served more by complex dialectics than verbal drive-bys. But ultimately, this user self-perception and self-selection, combined with the “modding” rights of all users created an ideological vacuum that threatened the very foundation of the site through its own exclusionary behavior.
To understand how this happened, it is relevant for us to first understand what happened in a more concrete sense.
At the moment I am typing this, the front page of Reddit is littered with anti-John McCain/Sarah Palin articles that seem to recite various sensational or seemingly biased positions against them. This is not in itself a problem, but as a supposedly non-partisan site, it has repeatedly been shown that anti-Obama submissions get downmodded into oblivion. Reddit is now essentially a clearinghouse for liberal rhetoric, where every single anti-Republican and anti-progressive screed on the world wide web can be found, being upmodded by users who are probably only reading descriptions of articles rather than full articles, and who are voting based on ideology rather than quality.
Spend a few minutes on the site, and you’ll see liberal comments regularly upmodded (or at least not downmodded), and you’ll see conservative comments downmodded like there’s no tomorrow— with no apparent value put on the complexity or discursive quality of the comment.
Remember, upmodding and downmodding are supposed to be reflections of user opinion on submissions. The issue here is that there are many reasons why users might not like an article, and without consistency in voting patterns, it descends into a meaningless mush of upmod/downmod numbers.
Therein lies the problem with this form of social networking. Upmods and downmods do not carry with them a single unique and transparent value. A downmod does not necessarily mean “I thought this comment was bad on the merits of its thesis”; it could mean “I disagree with you ideologically.” It could even mean “I don’t like this user,” or “I don’t like this user’s username.” All this tends to render whatever submissions are highly upmodded or highly downmodded to be of somewhat ambiguous import— which of course means that anything you are seeing (or not seeing) because of others’ value judgments is based on somewhat arbitrary rationale… which should, in turn, make you wonder why this is such a great medium for brokering dialogue. After all, what if you want to read well-written opinions of people whose ideas differ from the site’s mainstream?
An idealized situation would have separate measures for the any number of factors that might elicit someone’s approval or disapproval: well argued/poorly argued; convincing/not convincing; ideologically agree/disagree; spam/not spam; worthwhile contribution/not worthwhile contribution; stupid username/not stupid username, etc. With such a system, one could theoretically exhibit approval for a contribution on multiple levels but simultaneously disagree on other levels (and let others know it). In this manner, we could read an article that was well argued, but not convincing, that was largely ideologically disagreed with. But we can’t do that now. And that’s too bad, because it forces regular users into intellectual stagnancy. As sociologist Mark Granovetter suggests, it’s actually the people who aren’t in our immediate intellectual circle who are the ones who can teach us things. We already “know” what our ideological peers think.
Of course, this opens up a whole new can of worms because it relies on the ability of users to police themselves in what category of approval or disapproval they choose to give to submissions. Vindictive liberal users might angrily describe an eloquent and well-argued conservative post as “not worthwhile” simply because of their own parochial point of view. This is problematic, and unlikely to be resolved in any meaningful way.
Another reason why this is potentially troubling is because of intersubjective value judgments. What’s worthwhile for you does not match the threshold of what is worthwhile for me. Aggregated over a massive userbase, we’ll end up seeing a sort of middling effect that promotes submissions that basically hug the bottom rung of the ladder of quality. That is, we’ll end up elevating the sorts of things that the most people happen to agree are good. If you listen mainstream radio, read mainstream magazines, and watch mainstream television, you can see why this may not be such a great thing.
Will this ever see resolution? Will humanity’s mainstream be forever condemned to mediocrity in everything it engages in? Will our music, television, movies, literature, politicians, and now content portals all be mediocre? God, I hope not.
Comment [1]
How to Reduce the Complexities of Life to a Formula
and lose all meaning in the process
Posted Aug 25, 02:31 pm in economics, experiences, improvements
The following are some thoughts on an interesting discussion going on over here about “everyday utilitarianism.”
The idea described is that one could apply mathematical formulas involving marginal utility value and such to arrive at solutions for interpersonal problems of everyday life. In the given example, the author describes how you could use a formula he derived to determine whether you should be allowed to watch American Idol or whether your roommate should be allowed to use the television to play video games. By determining the utility value that each of you might receive from having your way, you can figure out what would be the solution that maximizes total enjoyment levels.
As dumb as it sounds, I have to admit that I’ve tried to use these sorts of formulas for real-world decision making in the past. For example, at a time when I was trying to choose between two job opportunities, I employed what I later discovered was a Pugh Matrix (AKA Quality Decision Matrix) to determine the optimal choice based on my own somewhat obscure sets of criteria and conflicting interests.
Sure, it gave me an answer, but in real life there are just too many factors to allow a major life decision to be made by a mathematical formula. For one thing, there simply is not room for all the possible inputs; you will miss important variables, and you’ll put in unimportant ones. You’re also likely to misjudge the marginal utility of all these inputs to you, and further, as Jonathan Haidt wrote in his excellent book “The Happiness Hypothesis,” we are often terrible judges of what our future selves would want. All this has a way of forcing you to second-guess the end answer that you’re given in a situation like this.
As humans, we’ve been thrown into this giant unpredictable chamber of life, and we desperately want to control it, optimize it, and best wrangle it to suit our needs. But we’re no good at it ourselves; no, there’s just too much variability for us to be accomplished at always making the right decisions. It’s for this reason that we look to things like computer dating websites, horoscopes, fortune tellers, and other such purveyors of “real answers” for assistance in making the “right” choices.
From our vantage point, we simply don’t have answers— but we desperately want them. The problem is that once we get the answers from these sources, we don’t typically have much confidence in them.
And why should we? When we are forced to make decisions, we typically have conflicting emotions, a battery of information that we need to make sense of, an understanding that we may be establishing some kind of precedent by our choice, and even the unsettling idea that our choices may be ones we have to live with down the road. Though for some it’s not as laborious as it is for others, serious decision-making is never easy.
So that brings us back to this website, where we are supposed to be using a utilitarian formula to arrive at the optimal quality of life situation for you and your roommate. It’s a great idea, to have a simple solution that would eliminate bickering and establish right-to-power heirarchies in a coherent, non-arbitrary fashion, but you’re not going to get it from this.
As I wrote in the discussion:
…[Unfortunately,] this methodology [requires] individuals to assess their enjoyment levels honestly, and with complete loyalty to the outcome as decided by the equation. In real life, we might expect persons to lie or misrepresent the level of enjoyment they claim they would get by having their way. In other words, this method assumes that individuals are committed to doing the ‘right thing’ as it applies to the goal of creating maximum enjoyment in the world, and having all participants enjoy the maximum enjoyment that they could receive in the long term. Realistically, I would tend to think that most people would try to maximize their own enjoyment instead of trying to maximize the pleasure of all, a motivation which subverts the ability for us to use a formula, since the formula depends on participants to act in a manner that does not necessarily secure their own interests before those of others.
As other voices chimed in, they brought in a number of other good points. Reader Mikey argued,
“How, exactly are you to measure how much utility you get from watching American Idol (at any time) versus how much utility he gets from playing videogames? …Intersubjective utility comparisons are epistemologically impossible.”
In other words, it’s not even possible in theory for you and your roommate to establish standardized values for your emotional responses to you each having your way. You might say that on a scale of 1-10, you want to watch your TV show, say, 7. Your roommate might want to play Halo 3 the same amount, but might give your his utility value an 8. It’s not possible to reconcile this because you can’t get into each others’ heads to do it.
He continues:
If there ever were some way to measure utility and your roommate actually was a utility monster [a person who derives much more pleasure from getting his way than you do], the proper utilitarian decision would look morally questionable (sacrificing all of your utility (and everyone else’s) for his proportionally greater benefit).
Another reader writes:
I find utilitarianism hard to defend. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that the world would be a much happier place if you ate George Bush. Straight utilitarianism would tell you to go right ahead. Most people who subscribe to utilitarianism therefore have additional principles they throw into the mix when rating different actions, but once you start to do that, you lose what I always thought was the main selling point – a less-arbitrary way to rate actions.
Well, back to the old method: sleepless nights tossing and turning.
Sometimes More is Better; A Lot of the Time it's Just Confusing
We’re used to thinking that more is better, but from a marketing perspective, it’s often not
Posted Aug 13, 05:28 am in business, improvements, marketing
My aunt’s house in small town Illinois has a large plasma screen, high definition television. They also have a state-of-the-art satellite dish, and a high fidelity sound system hooked up to said television. It’s all very impressive and cool— until you try to turn the thing on. At this point, it’s the most frustrating experience in the world, and you feel like Rip Van Winkle having needed another person do something as simple as turn on a television for you.
After all, it used to be that turning on a TV meant pressing a button. Now you have to turn on the TV with one remote, turn on the satellite receiver with another remote, and adjust the volume on a third remote. It’s all very complicated and annoying, but it’s a setup that I’ve seen repeatedly in many peoples’ houses. And it’s not just a matter of dealing with the inconvenience of having to press a button on a remote to get something working; it’s the utter, perplexing confusion of seeing 60 buttons on each remote and being unsure what to press and in what combination.
Behind the scenes, companies have labored hard to ensure that their devices are the most competitive and are loaded with the most features. But a side-effect of this strategy is that many high-tech products these days have what is called feature bloat. As functionality increases, the overhead necessary to carry it continue to get bigger and more demanding of your resources. In software such as the despised Windows Vista, this means that it’s taking up more and more of your hard drive space (now 15GB, up from 1.5GB for Windows XP!) and memory with functionality that you may never use, but which convey the idea that the product is ‘new and improved.’ In television products, this means that you have a series of individual components with specialized functions that each have their own massive remote control.
People say they want more features. And they probably do. But at some point, these additional features add only small incremental value to the product in the eyes of the consumer, while adding exponential overhead to their use. Your customer’s time, his/her computer’s resources, his/her very sanity are all being compromised further for every new feature that is being unnecessarily added. Steve Jobs understands this concept well. I read a book, Steve’s Brain, recently that talked about how his workers would labor for years on new features and when they presented them to him, he would just cut them out in a moment’s time, just saying that he didn’t like their affect on usability. This no doubt miffed the folks who had been toiling on these features, but ultimately, it was his sensible approach to feature addition that sustained the company despite being the heavy underdog in a fight with the Microsofts and the Dells of the world. What Jobs understood was that although features can impress people, they often made it more complicated to use the product, which in turn affects how people adopt the product, and how they transmit them to others.
The first generation of IPod apparently had hardware capability for listening to the radio, but Jobs demanded that they remove the radio’s accessibility from the IPod menu. It’s quite stunning to hear about, because we are so used to thinking that more is always better. But Jobs knew something that wasn’t obvious; more isn’t always better; more is often just confusing.
But, despite this, it’s not that simple. If you strip down your product, users will miss certain features. The problem is that they won’t all miss the same features. Mozilla got the idea right with their offer of add-ons, many of which are made by third parties. Good idea. Only get what you want, delete them if you no longer want them, and have fun searching around for stuff that might be useful.
You might think that this may only be possible with software, but it’s not true. You could easily have a system where your satellite receiver could download new features and you could apply them to unused buttons on the remote, or make them accessible through a special menu; or perhaps have a system in which the remote connects to your computer and can access additional feature downloads there.
The important thing to realize is that though new features seem like an automatically good thing, they are not. Adoption rates and satisfaction rates suffer when you make it hard for people to use your product, and it’s doubly bad when you piss them off.
Think of it this way: A little bit of chocolate is good; a lot of it will make you sick. Let your customer decide how much chocolate they want to eat at any given time, and try not to shove it down their throat! After all, too much at once means they might swear off chocolate for a long, long time.
Some Ideas for Cell Phone Companies
Let’s not embrace stagnancy
Posted Jul 18, 03:00 pm in business models, improvements, marketing, social networking
Sometimes I feel like cell phone companies have no idea what they’re doing. I’ve thought of any number of simple concepts that would make phones so much more useful. Here are some ideas:
1) You know the routine; you spend 5 minutes typing out a text message on your cell phone for an idea that it would take you 2 seconds to say. There are times I want to tell someone something, but I don’t want to talk to them or spend time texting it out. I want to be able to call someone’s phone and immediately reach their voicemail, but bypass causing the person’s phone to ring; instead, it should be a system that allows the caller the option of going directly to voice mail as opposed to allowing the phone owner to be in charge of that decision.
2) Allow me to use the GPS to find out whether my friends are physically near me. Update: I found out that a third party company is developing technology to do this.
3) Let me input information regarding my interests into my phone, and let me know if there are any people near me who share my interests. This could also potentially be used as a dating tool.
4) A memo function that allows you to quickly store to-do’s, reminders, ideas, and whatever else you may want to leave for yourself.
Those are just some thoughts. But given the competitive sphere of the cell phone market, why aren’t companies being more imaginative about their products? We’re talking about Fortune 500 corporations with billions of dollars in R&D money in an innovation-driven, high-tech industry that for reasons unexplained, cannot be bothered to push the boundaries!
Standing Out
Live up to your potential!
Posted Jul 12, 02:28 pm in business, business models, improvements, marketing
It always perplexes me as to why many manufacturers in saturated industries don’t take more efforts to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Take beer for example. Budweiser, Miller, and Coors have been fighting in the domestic beer market for ages, and despite the aggressive, multimedia advertising campaigns, the multi-million dollar Superbowl ads, and the painstaking and often pathetic efforts in making ‘sticky’ slogans, you’ve got products that many consumers still think are pretty much interchangeable (even if they have a brand preference). There are other beer brands too, like Sam Adams, Dogfish Head, Sierra Nevada, Heineken, etc. But oddly— except for Red Stripe— they all come in bottles that look exactly the same. Sure, some are green and some are brown, and some are clear, but in terms of the bottle packaging, they’re pretty much the same.
If I were the maker of a brand that needed to build some equity, I would forgo the usual bottle and go with something that would generate interest in people who normally wouldn’t notice my beer. And I’d give them something that might make them buy my beer for a reason other than the beer itself!
I’d make my bottles blockish (perhaps the Jagermeister bottle might be a good model to imagine), and make them so they could interlock. That way people would feel inclined to keep them around the house and find uses for them, like propping things up, building shelves, making huge towers, using them as bookends, etc. The sort of things that college students might want to do. (SEE UPDATE AT BOTTOM)
This is only one example of what you could do. There are many cool things you could have instead of useless round beer bottles. How about a beer bottle in which glass can be easily punched out and be converted into a tobacco waterpipe? College students would love that. Maybe it could be something you could keep your change or pencils in. I haven’t invested a lot of time thinking about other potential ways to change package design because it’s not my job. But just think about how things might change if people wanted your product for more reasons than just the obvious one.
I think the people behind M&M Minis realized this when they started packaging their product in little plastic containers that would perfectly hold a roll of quarters (which many people, particularly young people, could use to hold their laundry money). I think the people in charge of Icebreakers, Altoids, Eclipse Mints, and Mentos Minis also realized this when they started producing useful, well-designed, and reusable containers for their candies. Sure, they are more expensive— a pack of Icebreaker Sours costs some $2.30, which is a lot for candy— but people want those containers.
Perhaps many companies out there might have products that might be able to take a lesson from these guys. Of course, there are logistical hurdles, but there are always logistical hurdles. Wouldn’t it be better to make your product different, to have people want it for many reasons, and have them looking at your products all day instead of just when they’re using it for its primary purpose?
UPDATE:
Apparently Heineken has now developed a brick-like bottle, just like the one I described.