The Trouble with Trade Associations

I've never really found trade associations to be worthwhile, whether engineering, design, or whatever.  And yet many people seem to take them very seriously, pay a lot of money to join, and attend all sorts of conferences put on by them.

I think I've decided that they often end up working like a sort of credibility ponzi scheme (not that this is the intention of any association's founders).  It works like this:

1. A trade association claims to be an important organization of minds in a field where new ideas are shared to the benefit of all involved.
2. People in the industry join so they are seen as staying in touch with the latest developments.  They can put it on their resumes, display the magazine in their offices, and reference the conferences they've been to.  This lends them credibility.
3. Other people write papers for the magazine or do presentations at the conferences.  They are seen -- at their companies and by their customers -- as experts, increasing credibility and career prospects.
4. Dues are paid for access to this credibility, giving the association a pool of money with which to create the magazine, put on the conference, spam me mercilessly and other activities that increase the credibility of the association as a source of credibility, which allows them to pull in more members and higher-power speakers.
5. Repeat

Nowhere in here, however, is there much motivation for anybody to bring quality information -- information that they truly care about -- to the table.  Presenters generally are there for the credibility of having done it, and present information that won't get them in trouble with their employer.  And members, just by paying their dues and attending the conferences, are already getting the  perceived credibility they want out of the bargain, so it's not as if they'll stop coming if the talks are weak or unsubscribe from the magazine if the articles aren't top-notch.  So you end up with an expensive magazine nobody reads and expensive conferences people grudgingly attend.

If I really cared here, I could look into why certain organizations actually do seem to bring a lot of quality information, like TED.  I suspect, however, that these organizations resist being a club;  you can't simply join up and reap the benefits of additional credibility.  The organization is the information, nothing more, so people only pay attention to TED so far as the information remains solid.

How I Accidentally Stopped Hating Work

I've always heard two schools of thought on how to choose your line of work, if you're lucky enough to have the economic breathing room to choose:

1. Do what you love.
2. Do what gives you the income to do what you love in your free time.

The former always sounds appealing, but it has the tendency to turn your love for what-have-you sour.  This happens around the third time that you have a deadline, no inspiration or energy, and you'd really rather be reading a comic book.

The latter is the practical man's solution, and I have respect for that.  You have to put up with daily, nagging ambivalence, if not real hatred, but bills are paid and you continue to have that thing that makes you feel worthwhile.

I wonder though if there isn't a third option that doesn't get the attention it deserves:

Do what you can't stop yourself from doing anyway.

What I mean is that there is probably something that, when given the opportunity, you'll always be the one saying, "I'll get this."

Imagine yourself in a room of people sitting around a table.  On the table are pieces of paper that have tasks on them, just enough for each person in the room.  Everybody has to pick one of these up, and that will be their thing for the day; whoever picks it up first does it.  But if somebody sucks at doing what they picked up, it will go badly for all of you.

I wager there's something you can imagine on the table that will cause you think, "I better get that one because everybody else will just screw it up."  Hopefully there's some situation you've been in that's caused that reaction, because my advice is:  that's the thing that will get you through the day consistently with minimal self-hatred, a decent paycheck, and maybe better chances of advancement.

For me, I realized, it's figuring out how to go about engineering good things.  That sounds really ill defined, but it is definitely my thing.  If there's a need that can be solved by coming up with some logically engineered thing that will do what the intended user really wants to do, then I will fall over myself trying to architect the solution, every time.  Other people do this too where I work, but I think they do it for category-2 reasons -- for a paycheck.  Again, no disrespect for that.  But I walk out of the same meetings with a little engineer's adrenaline buzz because I got that bizness done.

I got lucky falling into a job where this comes up frequently, and where people let me do that thing I have to do.  Previously, I had bounced from job to job, not really understanding what I didn't like about each.  I can't say my days now are all thrilling excitement, but I have some pretty good ones.  Plus when I go home, I can play with photography (or not) and not have to care if it's any good.  Or I can just read a comic book.

Perception, Common Sense, and Audiophiles

Recently I've seen a resurgence of the "audiophile product makers are snake-oil dealers" meme. I'm not going to defend any particular make of audiophile product (I don't know anything about Pear Cable, which has been getting the attention recently) but I do feel compelled to defend audiophile stuff from out-of-hand dismissal, because I hate the false reasoning used by a lot of the critics and because I know from a couple years working at an audiophile store that some of the stuff is honestly pretty amazing.



I think the reason this particular topic draws the kind of debate it does has a lot to do with the nature of our sense of hearing.

Smallness of Talk

I've been lucky enough the last few years to have spent quite a bit of time traveling for business, within the US, in Asia, and in Europe. No matter the vast cultural chasms between these places though, I've noticed there's a sort of common rhythm to the business visit: Introductions are made and sympathy given for the frustrations of travel, Business Topics are discussed, and the day is closed with common goals, good intentions, and plans of action.

Then there's dinner.

Visiting US companies, I always find the dinner part pretty unpleasant. I spend much of the day dreading the evening when I'll have to pretend to understand football references and find gay jokes amusing, and know I'll generally come across as unsociable by trying to steer the conversation back to engineering where I feel less awkward. But as I started traveling overseas a lot, I noticed that I enjoyed dinner. Conversation, conducted in the simplified English spoken by basically everybody in the world anymore, was entertaining and engaging.

I began to realize that this had everything to do with the topics that we fell into discussing. When (at least) one side of a conversation is forced to use a second or third language (and the other side must throttle their pace and vocabulary to match), it's nearly impossible to talk about subtleties and nuance. No, the simplest topics are the big ones, the ones requiring the words everybody knows: love, life, belief, art, food. And this is reinforced by just not having much of the assumed commonality one has with one's own countrymen; they don't watch football in mainland China.



Recently I've been reading a bit about Versaille during the reign of the Sun King, the political island created by Louis to isolate and impoverish the nobles of France, and thus solidify his power over them. Life at Versaille was an endless dance of ceremony, intrigue, and parties, and the the Sun King set the tempo. Rapid shifts in extravagant fashions ensured that nobles spent all their money on frivolities, and the swirling succession of social events ensured that enemies were kept close, and infighting was maximized. It was a shared, contained, small little world made of nothing but subtlety and nuance, that left no time or resources to engage in substance, unless you were the Sun King.

Similarly, dinners between Americans (and I would assume other countrymen) seem to be dominated by the guy who has mastered the subtleties of the standard small talk between Americans. Once you're outside Versaille and talking to people of the world, conversation becomes more substantial and less dominated by anybody.

I suck at the dinners with Americans, but I had some of my deepest conversations with nearly complete strangers in Taiwan. I found that really odd at the time.

Math Can Set Art Free

In case you needed any further proof that governments in general will, in a vacuum of public opinion, side with corporate interests at the expense of the public good... consider copyright terms.



Rufus Pollack has written an excellent paper performing a rigorous mathematical cost analysis of copyright terms, seeking to find the optimum term to maximize the amount of welfare derived from creative work, this of course being the correct reason to have copyright (and patent) law in the first place, as expressed in the US Constitution:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries...

This expresses well the balance between too short a term of exclusive right for creators -- decreasing incentive to create, and thus decreasing welfare through that lost work -- and too long a term -- decreasing welfare through work rendered unavailable or artificially costly, not to mention the loss of contribution of the public domain to the creation of new works.

Pollack encodes all of these dynamics (and many more) in his mathematical model and comes to two conclusions. First, as the costs of production and reproduction decrease, the optimal copyright term decreases. This makes complete sense to me, but hey, it's nice to have math on your side. If you want theorize a bit, you can certainly see how this artificial imbalance attempts to right itself in the rampant online copyright violation we see today with vastly decreased cost of distribution. At the least, this suggests that any copyright laws made should err on the side of being too short.

Second, taking some input values for rate of cultural decay and the discount rate of works from the real world, he concludes that the optimal term of copyright today is about 14 years. Making the most conservative of assumptions, the maximum is about 52 years (and the minimum is around 3 years given liberal assumptions). Interestly, the original term of copyright in the US in 1790 was ... 14 years. Perhaps a bit aggressive given the technology of the day, but at least they were planning ahead! Of course copyright terms today are typically lifetime + 50-70 years. Most of the works created in the 20th century remain out of the public domain. How did this happen?

Copyright law falls into a realm of policy (much like, say, space-bourne weaponization policy) that has very little immediate effect on a given citizen, but great effect on the business of certain corporations. This gives government free rein to push through copyright extensions that bring in campaign dollars and cost virtually nothing in public disapproval -- if government is willing to ignore the negative impact to the public welfare at large.