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You are naive

A friend of mine recently said “I decided to be naive” . My answer was “You are naive”.

Naivete is about knowing unknown unknowns. Unknown unknowns are things you don’t know, and you don’t know that you don’t know them.

The naive kid who touches fire doesn’t know heat exists, and it hurts. And the naive entrepreneur who starts a business doesn’t know how bad things could get until they do.

When we find out those unknown unknowns, we realize how naive we were when we didn’t know they might exist.

Naivete has two interesting characteristics: It is always present, but only realized in hindsight.

There are always unknown unknowns, and because they are unknown unknowns, we can’t find them out, because we don’t know what to search for. This is what makes naivete always present.

And when we realize the unknown unknowns, their state changes from unknown unknowns to a different state. Only then we realize how naive we “were”, which is why we can’t relize naivete in the present. This realization only happens in hindsight.

You might think standing still protects from your naivete by avoiding unknown unknowns. This is a common fallacy, because you might realize your inaction was a result of your naivete trying to avoid consequences that were only in your head. Again, another example of not knowing unknown unknowns.

I hope I could explain what’s on my head. It is a bit hard to wrap your head around it let alone writing it down.

What you don’t know that you don’t know?

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Cautious optimism

I am an optimist by default. There are many reasons for this but that’s for a different discussion.

Growing up in Egypt I had to watch a lot of news. There was no satellite TV and you had to watch whatever being force fed to you. News was like a bad appetizer before a movie, a cartoon, or any good thing you want to watch.

One unforgettable line that was almost playing every night is that the American president – regardless of who he is – always feels “cautious optimism” (يشعر بالتفاؤل المشوب بالحذر) towards the middle east.

When I am recently asked how do you feel? I am mostly answering that I feel like the American president. Cautious optimism.

As diplomatic as it sounds, I see it a better version than absolute optimism. Maybe it is a sign of growing up, maybe of becoming less optimistic, or maybe both.

I don’t know.

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The perfect echo chamber

I used to criticize Facebook for creating an echo chamber. My argument was – as almost every one else – that Facebook should show users what is right, not what they agree with.

I overestimated the level of transparency the internet brings. When the political events were happening in Egypt and the local media was hiding the truth, I thought as soon as every one joins Facebook/twitter the truth will be revealed. I was wrong. It happened to some extent, but the echo chambers were much stronger.

One of the main drivers of hostility on the internet is people seeing their core beliefs being attacked. Regardless of the side, seeing something we disagree with triggers our survival response and hence we become hostile to the adversary.

I am recently giving this a lot of thought. I started to think Facebook shouldn’t try to avoid echo chambers, it should strive to create the perfect one.

If you have the perfect echo chamber and only see the things you agree with, you won’t feel the internet is unsafe as it is now. It sounds counterintuitive, I know, but this behavior is why people are moving more towards private conversations.

That being said, it makes me question why we don’t have this until now, this is what I could think of

  • Nobody thought of it. I highly doubt.
  • It is not technically feasible. I also doubt to some extent.
  • It drives engagement down. If we only see things we agree with, we are less likely to engage with the content. Less engagement means less time spent on site, less ads to be served, and less money to be made.

That’s my theory.

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Writing

Many of my friends want to start blogging. They ask me where to start. I tell everyone I have a few simple rules I keep in mind when writing.

“Real Artists Ship” – Steve Jobs

The key to commit to writing is to hit the publish button. Most people don’t write out of the fear their posts won’t be liked. Here is a surprise: nobody is reading what you write, and nobody will share what you write saying they don’t like it.

There is a second reason to shipping, the only way to get better at anything is to actually do it. The more you do it, the more mistakes you make, which leads to becoming better.

“Anything you say may be used against you” – The Miranda warning

This is one of the traps I fell into multiple times. Opinions are not safe on the internet. I think before publishing any post, if my position has changed, can this post harm me in any way? If the answer is yes, I don’t publish.

“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time” – Leo Tolstoy

Things take time. Don’t expect to an audience from day one. I used to focus on how many people are reading what I write. I slowly adapted the mentality of doing it for myself, and for helping others. Not having Facebook also helped.

One of the most joyful moments is when someone messages me because they benefited from something I wrote. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it is great.

Hit publish.

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Shoe Dog

I recently finished the memoir of Nike’s founder Phil Knight. I didn’t know it is pronounced “Nikee” and not “Nike like Bike”.

It is a clear story of passion and persistence. The book reminds me of “The hard thing about hard things” by Ben Horowitz. It has the same pattern of a series of ups and downs with extremes on both ends. The main difference I felt was Phil’s story was more personal. He talked more about how he felt and what was he thinking when things were happening. It kinda makes you feel in his shoe.

It is a story of mastery. Starting the company with his three decades older coach is a great example of the evolution from apprenticeship to mastery. They both had passion for shoes and running. Phil had the energy, while Bowerman had the experience that made him innovate on shoe designs. I feel envious he was this lucky to find such a mentor.

The book is well written and worth the time. There are countless quotes to share but those two are the ones I liked the most.

  • “We’re also finishing construction on a new athletic facility, which we plan to dedicate to our mothers, Dot and Lota. On a plaque next to the entrance will go an inscription: Because mothers are our first coaches.”
  • “When goods don’t pass international borders, soldiers will. Though I’ve been known to call business war without bullets, it’s actually a wonderful bulwark against war. Trade is the path of coexistence, cooperation. Peace feeds on prosperity.”
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NPS

Every time someone says we should use Net Promoter Score I get a feeling of irritation. It is neither a metric that tells you something you can act on, nor a KPI that indicates the health of your product.

It is biased. Those who buy will be promoters, and those who don’t will be detractors.

It is lagging. In the online world you instantly see the drop in sales, engagement, or whatever core metric you are optimizing, before sending out a survey to customers asking them about the likelihood of recommending the product.

It is non-actionable. The NPS score is a result of multiple core metrics coming together. Successful companies monitor core metrics closely. If some of these metrics get better while others get messed up, it is hard to justify the change in the NPS without looking at each of the core metrics separately.

NPS – most of the time – just creates distraction. Focus on the core metrics is more actionable, and leads to better results.

If you are looking for alternatives to NPS, I think the closest metrics are retention, and virality coefficient. Those two reflect actual product usage, they are actionable, and don’t have the vanity of asking someone “Would you do this?”.

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2X for Kids

I speed up almost every thing I watch or listen to 1.25 to 2X. It doesn’t work for all types of content but – most of the time – it is more efficient.

There is always the question of comprehension. My level is bound – to big extent – by my childhood, where I watched and listened to things at base speed.

Now my brain is less plastic. Changing my wiring to comprehend more of the faster speed will take years.

Since our language comprehension happens at childhood, would kids be able to comprehend more in less time if they always watch/listen to things at faster speeds? If yes, does this mean we are able to have humans that are capable of processing more information than us?

I don’t know.

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Non-Proliferation of Robotic Weapons

Yesterday Boston Dynamics posted a video of their humanoid robot Atlas jumping before doing a backflip.

This made me think of the next generation of weapons of mass destruction.

While Uranium is hard to acquire, transport, and enrich, the new weapons of mass destruction will be made of silicon.

Their software will be available on GitHub for any nation or terrorism group to fork their own. The defense against them will be remote people trying to hack into them.

This will also minize the gap between nations. Instead of having to build your own arsenal of robots, it will be easier to just hack into your adversaries’ robots and make them attack their makers.

Interesting times ahead.

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The new echo chambers

This morning I saw those tweets by Patrick. They made me think a lot about the answers. The last question was the most interesting one.

Thinking about it, I would argue we never had “great, open to all” online communities.

The early adopters of every new social platform were like minded people. Because they were early adopters, it is expected they come from the most open minded percentiles of the society. The content they created early on attracted similar minded people to the conversation.

The communities were not great, open to all. They were in their early stages.

As the platforms grew, the social cohesion of the network started decaying. Facebook tried solving this by the news feed algorithm. The news feed created an algorithmic echo chamber. The algorithmic echo chamber made people stick to the platform while the conversation was still interesting.

After a while, the networks became saturated. Everyone is now on Facebook, twitter, and Quora. This resulted in two things

1) Conversation regression to the mean. It is no longer interesting, thought provoking as the early days. It is average.

2) Public scrutiny, and abuse towards contrarian opinions – regardless of the side – became much bigger.

This led people to try finding a new safe echo chamber. The easiest solution is private groups. Handpicked similar minded people who share the same interests. They can discuss whatever they want without feeling threatened by the public.

Back to Patrick’s questions. I think we need new echo chambers that can maintain their social cohesion, while giving the opportunity for new people to join the conversation. Until then, private groups are the new echo chambers.