Author: navin

Age and Creativity

Marc Andreessen (who is often wrong but never in doubt) has this detailed but very informative post on the relationship between our age and our “output”. Excerpt:

So what have we learned in a nutshell?

* Generally, productivity — output — rises rapidly from the start of a career to a peak and then declines gradually until retirement.

* This peak in productivity varies by field, from the late 20s to the early 50s, for reasons that are field-specific.

* Precocity, longevity, and output rate are linked. “Those who are precocious also tend to display longevity, and both precocity and longevity are positively associated with high output rates per age unit.” High producers produce highly, systematically, over time.

* The odds of a hit versus a miss do not increase over time. The periods of one’s career with the most hits will also have the most misses. So maximizing quantity — taking more swings at the bat — is much higher payoff than trying to improve one’s batting average.

* Intelligence, at least as measured by metrics such as IQ, is largely irrelevant.

So here’s my first challenge: to anyone who has an opinion on the role of age and entrepreneurship — see if you can fit your opinion into this model!

Found: here.

And after reading the full article. you should also check out Naval Ravikant’s follow-up to this article which manages to add more interesting thoughts to this topic. Well worth spending the time required to read these long articles.

The Twitter Zone and Virtual Geography

Venkat has just written about a new way to map all our social interactions. The innermost ring is the twitter zone, which he describes as:

The twitter zone is the zone of people about whom you get a constant stream of nonessential trivia, ranging from children’s illnesses to tastes in coffee. In previous ages, the high cost of communication meant that this mapped to your village, tribe, (or suburban neighborhood plus cubicle neighbors). Today it includes anyone who engages you in a bidirectional flow of trivia about both your lives, in a constant steady stream, so you develop a full, rich background picture of their lives. It includes some of your physical neighbors (since in this age of Bowling Alone we don’t talk to all our neighbors) and your twitter and instant messaging buddies.

See full article, which should be read in conjunction with the Monkeysphere that I had blogged about earlier.

A disclosure based approach to monitoring educational institutions

Business standard has an editorial pointing out that instead of having approvals / accreditations for educational institutions, a better system would be to have a disclosure based approach. Institutes do not need approval, but they are policed to ensure that they disclose all the “important” information to prospective students. Excerpts:

A major question animating law-makers is the fear of “fly by night” firms who will “run away” with the money of students or short-change them. This is reminiscent of the problems seen in the securities markets, where there are concerns about similar “fly by night” firms who sell securities to “hapless investors” and run away. In the securities markets, the country has seen a shift away from the Controller of Capital Issues—who gave out discretionary permissions to any firm seeking to sell securities—to the modern disclosure-based framework. In this disclosure-based framework, the government only emphasises the importance of accurate information being available to the investor when a decision is made to invest in a security.

A similar approach would work very well in education. In a disclosure-based framework, the focus of the government would be on disclosure. For the rest, the decision about what university a person chooses to go to is best made by that person—and not by the government. The key insight here is that—as with investors—students are not eager to waste money on earning low-quality diplomas. Students are self-interested and work hard on trying to identify good programmes. Their efforts at making a choice can be supported by the government, if it runs a disclosure programme whereby accurate and salient information is made available to prospective students. The great advantage of such a disclosure-based approach lies in the fact that it would eliminate entry barriers in higher education, and make possible a surge of supply through which shortages would ease. Reputed global brands would come into the country to offer educational services. The market for education would shift from the present framework of scarcity and low quality to one with competition and choice.

See full article which I found here.