May 13, 2012
England is a perfectly nice little country, with many achievements to its credit. If you like to attend plays, want to read comic novels, hope to spare your skin the damaging effects of the sun, then England’s the place for you.
“The Economics of the Colonial Cringe,” about The Economist magazine; Washington Post, 1991 - James Fallows - Technology - The Atlantic
May 11, 2012

“I must congratulate you on doing a fantastic job building PayPal. My 14-year-old son is a very apathetic high school student and very much dislikes writing homework assignments. But he just wrote a beautiful e-mail to his friends about how PayPal was growing quickly, why they should sign up for it, and how they could take advantage of the referral structure that you put in place.”

On some level, this was a literary masterpiece. If nothing else, it was impressive for the many nested levels of conversation that were woven in. Other people were talking to other people about PayPal, possibly at infinite levels on down. The son was talking to other people about those people. Bill Gross was talking to his son. Then Gross was talking to Peter Thiel. And at the most opaque and important level, Gross was talking to the other investors at the table, tacitly playing up how smart he was for having invested in PayPal. The message is that sales is hidden. Advertising is hidden. It works best that way.

Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 9 Notes Essay
May 8, 2012
They conclude, “We found no evidence of publication bias in reports on publication bias.” But of course that’s the sort of finding regarding publication bias of findings on publication bias that you’d expect would get published.
Systematic review of publication bias in studies on publication bias « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science (via felixsalmon)

(via felixsalmon)

May 6, 2012
Basically, there are two ways to build an organization,” a former Facebook employee explains. “You can be really, really good at hiring, or you can be really, really good at firing.
The Maturation of Mark Zuckerberg — New York Magazine
Apr 29, 2012
The perfect illustration of competition writ large is war. Everyone just kills everyone. There are always rationalizations for war. Often it’s been romanticized, though perhaps not so much anymore. But it makes sense: if life really is war, you should spend all your time either getting ready for it or doing it. That’s the Harvard mindset.
—Peter Thiel
Apr 29, 2012
PayPal also had a hard time hiring women. An outsider might think that the PayPal guys bought into the stereotype that women don’t do CS. But that’s not true at all. The truth is that PayPal had trouble hiring women because PayPal was just a bunch of nerds! They never talked to women. So how were they supposed to interact with and hire them?
Apr 29, 2012
Peter Thiel: I won’t come out as pro- or anti- Y Combinator. They do some things well and maybe some other things less well. But I will something anti-not-Y Combinator. If you go to incubator that’s not Y Combinator, that is perceived as negative credential. It’s like getting a degree at Berkeley. Okay. It’s not Stanford. You can a complicated story about how you had to do it because your parents had a big mortgage or something. But it’s a hard negative signal to get past.
Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 7 Notes Essay
Apr 29, 2012

Reading Mr. Cowen is like pushing a shopping cart through Whole Foods with Rush Limbaugh. The patter is nonstop and bracing. Mr. Cowen delivers observations that, should Alice Waters ever be detained in Gitmo, her captors will play over loudspeakers to break her spirit.

These observations include: “There’s nothing especially virtuous about the local farmer”; “buying green products seems to encourage individuals to be less moral”; and — a contender for Orwellian sentence of the year — “technology and business are a big part of what makes the world gentle and fun.”

dwight garner
Apr 28, 2012
As Eli M. Noam reported in his 1991 book, Broadcasting in Europe, UK newspaper publishers encouraged the development of the “public” BBC so that no new commercial enterprise could take root, as happened in the United States, and attack their advertising base. UK regulators suppressed commercial TV and radio for decades and protected the BBC from the onslaught of cable TV. Parliament even regulated the VCR.
Who cares if Murdoch lobbied? | Jack Shafer
Apr 27, 2012
Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family you’re likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family you’re likely to go to business school.
George Monbiot – The Self-Attribution Fallacy
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