Longreads + Open Thread

Longreads

• Abraham Thomas writes about how to price a data asset (he's in a good position to know!). This piece has useful business advice for anyone who's either selling a data product or flummoxed by what they're being charged for one, but it's also a masterpiece of applied microeconomics. "Data" describes something heterogeneous, by definition—if two pieces of data are perfectly comparable, one of them is a redundant copy—so many of the intuitions around pricing products don't apply. One of his best points is that data are additive, across dimensions—having a longer list of prospective customers is more valuable, as is having more details about people who are already on the list. And the piece does end up establishing some equilibria, for how datasets should be priced long-term, and how the companies that find them will monetize. For further reading, The Diff has covered the alternative data business ($) (pt 2 ($)), the breadth of the data-business concept, and information as a good that's a universal complement and substitute.
• Niko McCarty has a fun piece in Asimov Press about Cultivarium, a nonprofit that cultivates unusual microbes. We've learned a lot from studying E. Coli, but one reason we study it is that it's easy to handle. This piece provides yet another reminder that there's a lot of runway left in discovering things about the world and applying them in useful ways: "Humanity has discovered an estimated 0.001 percent of all microbes, and many of biology’s most useful tools have come from the “weird” ones."
• Hewlett-Packard's HP200LX handheld computer, released in 1994, came with a game about being chased by squid through a maze. Benj Edwards has the story about how this came about. And, for what it’s worth, it’s not the only example of professional products being shipped with weird little games. There's a lot to enjoy in this piece about two kinds of low-level optimization: getting a game to run on limited hardware, and getting it shipped at a serious company.
• Tracing Woodgrains has a sprawling piece on prolific Wiki editor and host David Gerard. There's an object-level story about one person converting personal grudges into confabulations about group beliefs ("Roko's Basilisk" is to rationalists what Qanon and Critical Race Theory are to conservatives and progressives—something much more central to their critics' conception of them than to their own worldview). But it's also a great piece about political theory, specifically the concept of checks and balances and the risk of revolving doors. Gerard is influential on Wikipedia both as an editor and as someone who helped come up with, and interpret, their rules on reliable sources. In the piece, he uses that position to continuously tweak articles by removing claims that are backed by non-reliable sources, and (the motives here are speculative, but the actions are not) getting some claims into Wikipedia by getting an already-vetted reliable source to write about them. There are good reasons to have rules written by people who will enforce and operate under them, because that puts informed people in charge—but it also means that their biases can get institutionalized, whether or not those biases are conscious. At one level, you can read this as a great big "Who cares!?" story of Internet drama, of which there will always be a roughly infinite supply. But Wikipedia is the overwhelming default way to get a surface-level understanding of many topics, and so it becomes the established truth.
• Jane Psmith reviews Eric Cline's After 1177 B.C.. Civilizational collapse is always a fun topic (The Diff previously reviewed The Inheritance of Rome, on similar themes). One of the questions it always raises is: what do you really mean by collapse? We choose specific dates because they're a good signpost, but aside from specific natural disasters, decline is more of a process. And even with disasters, the decline only really sinks in when you start to realize that halfway-rebuilt is about as rebuilt as anything is going to get. The piece has a great riff on the group that got through the Bronze Age Collapse in the best shape: the Phoenicians. They weren't a unified political entity, but as a collection of mercantile city-states, they were more flexible than centralized monarchial states. There's an echo of that in the collapse of Rome, too; the first places in Europe to surpass the Roman peak were Dutch and Italian polities, which also relied on trade. So if modern civilization does collapse, don't be too surprised if commodity trading firms and hedge funds are somehow the first to rise from the ashes.
• This week in Capital Gains, we looked at mission-driven companies, vanity businesses, and how hard they can be to tell apart in retrospect. Dot-com millionaires have become rocketry centibillionaires (N of 1), and models married to successful executives have also turned their catering side business into a billion-dollar net worth (N of 1, too, unless you're looking at Martha Stewart's current rather than peak net worth, in which case it's N of 0).
• This week in The Riff, we talked David Graeber, concepts that started out as pejorative, the separation of ownership and control, and the burden of knowledge. Listen with Twitter/Spotify/Apple/YouTube.

Books

Bullshit Jobs: Reviewed at greater length here, but there are some notes based on either feedback or things that didn't make it into the final review:

• One of Graeber's most telling anecdotes in the book is about his own history: he was doing research for a Marxist professor's book, and asked how much he was allowed to lie about the hours he worked. The professor was surprised by this question, and Graeber was surprised by his surprise. A lot of work is unimportant to the people doing it but still important to somebody in the process, and money is just an incredibly convenient social technology for getting both sides to care a more similar amount.
• That anecdote is one of a surprising number of stories in the book where the person who thinks they're doing a fake job indicates this to their manager, who looks at them like they're an alien, from another galaxy, etc. This trope shows up in Graeber's first-person stories, and in some of the stories he relates from other people. If you agree with Graeber's thesis, this is relatable, but it's also worth asking: are Graeber and his interlocutors representative? How often have you made an observation at work that got this kind of reaction?
• Graeber comes across as quite charming in his writing, and he would have been fun to hang out with. But charming, charismatic people have a social responsibility to be correct, because their ideas will catch on regardless.
• Is writing an email newsletter itself a "bullshit job"? Not in Graeber's taxonomy—there's a clear value proposition for the product, I know who my customers are, it literally exists because it's what I'd have wanted to read. There may be some other definition by which it qualifies, but asking people to reject Graeber as the price of defending him seems cruel. Graeber himself alludes to the question of whether his job might qualify, without really answering it.
• What about the Obama quote? Graeber says that the "smoking gun" for the existence of these jobs is a quote "from an interview with the US president Barack Obama about some of the reasons why he bucked the preferences of the electorate and insisted on maintaining a private, for-profit health insurance system in America." The gist of the quote is that single-paying healthcare would destroy millions of jobs in health insurance. Part of this is definitely false: it's from an interview with the junior Senator from Illinois in 2006, four years before the Affordable Care Act passed (the book is sprinkled with these little easy-to-check errors, like the claim that the word "sheriff" comes from sharif and not, "shire-reeve." In the same interview, a paragraph before, he says that single-payer obviously isn't that radical, since they have it in Canada, and that he's not averse to discussing it. In the contemporary political environment, 1) single-payer was still considered radical, and 2) Obama himself was viewed as being to the left of the rest of his party. But he also had national ambitions. So it was a good idea for him to signal that he's a pragmatist, with the kinds of concerns that union members, big donors, etc., have, i.e. that he doesn't plan to radically restructure the economy. There is a tendency in this kind of political writing to basically say: everyone is lying to you, and you can't trust anyone in authority—except for a handful of comments which must be taken 100% seriously and literally.

The main thrust of my review, I hope, is that there is a difference between finding individual workers who don't get much meaning from their job and the belief that a growing majority of economic activity is meaningless. There are temporary instances of this, but they get selected against in most environments. And if you strip it down to the jobs that don't face this kind of selection, you're only a few minor edits away from something less likely to be published by an anarchist professor and more likely to come out of the Cato Institute.

Open Thread

• Drop in any links or comments of interest to Diff readers.
• Which other pop economics books are worth revisiting?

Diff Jobs

Companies in the Diff network are actively looking for talent. See a sampling of current open roles below:

• A CRM-ingesting startup is on-boarding customers to its LLM-powered sales software, and is looking for someone to found their go-to-market team—the role is similar to that of an SDR, but with leadership opportunities in the near term. (NYC)
• A company building ML-powered tools to accelerate developer productivity is looking for a frontend engineer with product and UX experience. (Washington DC area)
• A top prop trading firm is looking for an intellectually curious, mathy generalist to work on projects spanning business strategy, technology, and markets. Exceptional math/analytics skills required. (NYC)
• A well-funded startup is building a platform to identify compliance risks associated with both human- and AI-generated outputs. They are looking for a product engineer to join their team of world-class researchers. (NYC)
• A well funded early stage startup founded by two SpaceX engineers is building the software stack for hardware companies, and is looking for a senior infrastructure engineer with 7+ years of experience with distributed systems. (The Gundo)

Even if you don't see an exact match for your skills and interests right now, we're happy to talk early so we can let you know if a good opportunity comes up.

If you’re at a company that's looking for talent, we should talk! Diff Jobs works with companies across fintech, hard tech, consumer software, enterprise software, and other areas—any company where finding unusually effective people is a top priority.