Views of a Modern World

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Adolf’s downfall

May 26, 2016 by rickcolosimo Leave a Comment

Sometimes, the solution is right in front of you.

I’m a science fiction fan; I can still recall the set of four or five vertical rotating racks of paperbacks at the Paddy Hill Library. I read most of those books, I’m sure – dozens and dozens.

Among all the science fiction themes, time travel is probably my favorite. I always enjoyed, and still really do, finding out how an author was going to resolve all the questions that people have about how time travel might work.

Most of my life, I’d heard about the Hitler question. The question is whether, if you were a time traveler and were in the right time and place, you would kill HItler. One answer is yes, he’s bad; the tension is between that and the “no, I wouldn’t, because it could unleash something much worse.”

Admittedly, I was stuck on this one for a long time (to be fair, I was a kid when this was already in play, so I hopefully just assumed that it was a tough problem). Then I realized that the whole premise of the question is flawed.

Taking a decisive approach, I realized that there’s no information difference between someone from 2016 going back in time and someone deciding in 1939 to kill Hitler. In both cases, no one knows what the future will bring. Any (& every) argument that supposedly suggests “don’t change the past” applies with equal force to the present, i.e., 1939, decision. Or, for that matter, to a 2016 decision to kill butchers in Daesh in Syria/Iraq. Sure, defending the weak and helpless victims of torture, slavery, and genocide might lead to some worse future, but that doesn’t mean we should abandon every moral urge we have to protect each other.

The principle of decisiveness tells us that if a piece of information doesn’t affect the choice we might make, it turns out to be irrelevant and unnecessary. The “the future might generically/in an unforeseen way be worse” argument applies to every choice we make in the present and thus we disregard it and instead focus on the actual better/worse specifics of the choice. Only corporate America refuses to make decisions based on unknown unknowns (uncertainty, a la Frank Knight), and that’s because of a funky punishment/reward system that is skewed to the left (we punish people for bad outcomes without regard to whether they were the result of well-placed bets).

I can’t believe that in all the years I’ve read about this debate in scifi, no one’s ever raised this issue. THAT is why I do what I do: I untangle problems to create and structure opportunities for decisions.

The illustration below, from Jessica Hagy’s wonderful site Indexed, drove me to actually write this down.

(You are currently altering the space-time continuum.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: decisiveness, science fiction, time travel

Why your product reviews miss the mark

December 31, 2012 by rickcolosimo Leave a Comment

Are you getting low affiliate sales from product reviews? Are you giving people information without solving their “what decision do I make” problem? Try making recommendations, or at least comparisons, among the products in the segment. Give your readers a roadmap on how to use your information to verify or trust your conclusion — and buy.

 

Example of the problem:

Here’s a comment I recently made on mac.appstorm.net. I like their reviews of products, but I recognized something in the middle of reading this one. Today, virtually no product or app lives in a vacuum. A list of features and descriptions of how to do things is not entirely pointless, but it is focused on entirely the wrong problem: people looking at software — offline blog editors, for example, are looking to solve a problem. Almost certainly, there is more than one option, and that means there’s a decision to be made.

 

Why this matters:

There’s no such thing as one alternative in the world of decisions. Every choice is between, at a minimum, doing something or doing nothing. And among the somethings, there’s usually more than one option. 

So product reviews may be easier to write when they are standalone descriptions of software or pens or cars or toys, but that doesn’t solve the consumer’s problem: which one do I get? Which one is right for me?

So, my suggestion to the author of that review was to maintain a mini-wrap-up as part of every post (or at least constantly linked to an updating version of the wrap-up comparing and contrasting these products in at least a summary way. Why? So I know which to buy and whether to switch.

 

How it works:

Understanding your customer is the way to make your product – which is the review itself – useful to your customer. Sell me that, and I’ll keep reading. Lists of features I can get from every vendor who cares only about telling me about their product; comparisons I get from you, the curator. 

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: customer, decisiveness

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