Lone Gunman

Over­com­ing Bias looks at two research papers on over­con­fi­dence, con­clud­ing that we “are more over­con­fi­dent on tasks we don’t actu­ally expect to per­form, and when we don’t expect to have to explain our eval­u­a­tion to others”.

On per­for­mance:

Par­tic­i­pants made pre­dic­tions about per­for­mance on tasks that they did or did not expect to com­plete.  In three exper­i­ments, par­tic­i­pants in task-unexpected con­di­tions were unre­al­is­ti­cally opti­mistic: They over­es­ti­mated how well they would per­form, often by a large mar­gin, and their pre­dic­tions were not cor­re­lated with their per­for­mance. By con­trast, par­tic­i­pants assigned to task-expected con­di­tions made pre­dic­tions that were not only less opti­mistic but strik­ingly accurate.

Jakob Niel­son, the lead­ing usabil­ity con­sul­tant, dis­cusses the par­tic­i­pa­tion inequal­ity of social com­mu­ni­ties, in which:

• 90% of users are the “audi­ence”, or lurkers.
• 9% of users are “edi­tors”; or those who participate.
• 1% of users are “creators”.

More infor­ma­tion at 90–9-1: a web­site ded­i­cated to this ‘prin­ci­ple’ where you can view, among other things, these fas­ci­nat­ing statistics:

• Over 50% of all the Wikipedia edits are done by just 0.7% of the users.
• Just 0.16% of all vis­i­tors to YouTube upload videos to it, and 0.2% of vis­i­tors to Flickr upload photos.

Richard Milling­ton, Seth Godin’s 2008 sum­mer intern, offers us up some dif­fer­ent ways we can treat this the­ory.

Google.org on help­ing tech­no­log­i­cally devel­op­ing coun­tries in Africa gain a global voice: allow­ing them to be pro­duc­ers, not just con­sumers, of knowledge.

Today, Swahili books online for exam­ple, num­ber in the hun­dreds com­pared to the hun­dreds of mil­lions of books in Eng­lish avail­able online. What mes­sage does this send to young peo­ple about the rel­a­tive impor­tance of their knowl­edge, lan­guage, and culture?

An impor­tant (rhetor­i­cal) question.

Jason Nazar, founder of Doc­Stoc, digs up an old doc­u­ment on Rais­ing Money for a StartUp Company

Good infor­ma­tion within on the ‘fund­ing life­cy­cle’, boot­strap­ping, angel investors vs. ven­ture cap­i­tal, and val­u­a­tion meth­ods, amongst others.

Entre­pre­neurs face a great deal of chal­lenges in build­ing a suc­cess­ful ven­ture.  They have to iden­tify a good oppor­tu­nity, in a thriv­ing indus­try, orga­nize a com­pe­tent man­age­ment team, out pace the com­pe­ti­tion, and build a prod­uct and/or pro­vide a ser­vice that is worth­while to oth­ers.  How­ever, in spite of all these obsta­cles, rais­ing money to seed or grow a com­pany is often the largest chal­lenge of all.  The fol­low­ing paper will dis­cuss the busi­ness and legal process of rais­ing capital.

For­eign Pol­icy presents five physics lessons for Obama, writ­ten by Richard Muller, lec­turer and author of Physics for Future Pres­i­dents (the book, the web­site, the lec­ture series and pod­cast at UC Berke­ley).

There are lessons on ter­ror­ism, energy (oil), nuclear energy, space and global warming.

via Kot­tke