#thebrowser

Found this courtesy of the Economist website:

www.thebrowser.com 

It collects reviews of dozens of interesting books on a vast range of topics, as well as interesting articles by the bagful. Look no further for interesting procrastination material. It's exactly what I've been looking for for ages - a one stop shop for high quality analysis on anything and everything. 

For example, fifteen minutes of 'browsing' led me to:

The mafia provides a neat identification strategy for isolating the effect of fiscal expansion.

Why we should be wary of economists' (and others) tendency towards quantification of everything.

Renting only beats buying as an investment a quarter of the time.

If only it were still 1973...How the McJobs recovery is undermining the position of (who else?) the middle class.

For a while now, I have been using a TheBrowser as my go-to site when I want to read random articles on the interwebz. As the site claims, the content that it links to is not chosen by some means of social filtering (such as Slashdot or Digg) but through the recommendations of "experts" (quotations used because the term expert is not defined by them) and thus represents the "best" of the intellectual internet on any given day. One day, I hope to be able to give a theoretical analysis on the Experts vs. Wisdom of the crowd model, but that requires me to actually do the research (and thus is less likely to ever come to fruition). But at this current moment, I want to talk about something that bothers me with some of the articles that TheBrowser recommends. 

For being the "most interesting" articles on the internet, a number of them say things that range from really obvious to questionable. Here is my favorite current example (it is a short article)

http://associatesmind.com/2011/04/04/lawyers-youre-being-played-by-twitter/

First of all, the author starts off with a red herring that this article will be about examining social media from the perspective of "game theory", so he is immediately trying to establish himself as a really intelligent expert by using some complicated math stuff. However, the rest of the article uses absolutely nothing that actually draws from real game theory but rather just uses the term "gamification".

The author's main point of the article can be summarized as followed: People gain satisfaction from the belief that other people are paying attention to what they tweet. This in turn, encourages the user to continue with an action that gives them pleasure. This process is manipulating you and Twitter is evil.In particular, the author states that Twitter provides you with only self-satisfaction and no real tangible benefits occur.

So to be clear, his point is really people are stupid for enjoying digital conversations that don't lead to anything. Twitter is evil because it helps people enjoy this without leading to any tangible benefits.

Overall, this is a great article to illustrate my point: His only observations are completely obvious and his thesis rests upon a questionable judgment call. The fact that he uses "game theory" in the beginning is icing on the cake.