You could have been reading dozens of books and articles about the recent financial crisis and the U.S. government’s response to it and still be inclined to believe moral hazard and ‘bail-outs’ as a preferred mode of response to crises were something unheard of. Which just goes to show how ignorant one can be.

Joshua Green’s profile really helped me put events into perspective. Geithner learned first-hand about the dangers of taking a gradualist approach to a banking crisis as an assistant Treasury attaché in the U.S. embassy in Tokyo. He was part of the crucial team that helped Mexico sustain its troubles. And by the end of the Clinton era, a basic method of responding to financial crisis had emerged: quickly flood the market with money to restore confidence.

There is a lot more in that article to make you think, but that point really made me flinch. If you’re convinced that this exact response mechanism creates more problems than it solves, like I do, although you can just as well see things differently, then you have a much larger and much more established problem at hand than you previously thought.

This profile also reveals how much of our prevailing thinking about the origins of crises and whom to blame etc is shaped by story-telling that bears little to no resemblance to actual reality. As Nassim Taleb’ said, “the narrative fallacy [...] is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths.”

I am deeply interested in the future of journalism. I think one aspect of Y Combinator’s take on this is spot-on:

What would a content site look like if you started from how to make money—as print media once did—instead of taking a particular form of journalism as a given and treating how to make money from it as an afterthought?

I think the best way to make money is to tailor the content individually to each user. News and journalism (i.e. essays, op-eds, original reporting etc.) are abundant. But why should you care what the New York Times thinks is relevant about what’s going on in the world? You may be interested in a lot of different topics or you may be very deeply interested in a single topic.

One-for-all just doesn’t cut it anymore. People crave personalized experiences.

Ever more people need to stay on top of what’s happening in the world or in business. But with a growing amount of news, it gets more difficult and more time-consuming to do so. I think people will pay to have an accurate filtering mechanism pre-determine what they need to consume.

To shorten the amount of time they need to get and consume (eventually) all the relevant information they need, they will pay. It frees considerable time otherwise spent browsing websites or paper editions of the world’s newspapers and magazines.

The end result is a daily executive summary of the world’s news and information, compiled and provided individually for each user. It is tailor-made, medium-independent personal content, presented as an individualized summary with links to all relevant content. That’s enough buzzwords for now.

There are two takes on this I thought of:

1. The “easy” one, or the premium market: GetAbstract for news. Users can subscribe to summaries of any number of newspapers and magazines they want. They get spared the time needed to browse and read the content themselves and instead are provided with an abstract / a summary of the major articles. Users can choose from different options, i.e. different topics may get special coverage or more or less depth of the summaries. There are legal and scaling problems with this idea and it’s not very ground-breaking, but I think there is enough value for it to sell. Obviously, this only makes sense for users who value their time financially high enough to warrant paying for such a service.

2. The “futuristic” one, or the mass market: A daily summary of the world’s news, fully automated – like your personal reading assistant. It’s a combination of several mechanisms which, individually, have proven to work but which, each on their own, are very very hard to get right: (1) Amazon-like recommendations (liked that article about Nancy Pelosi? What about reading on Harry Reid?); (2) delicious-like content recommendations by your friends or social circle, this may include a voting mechanism to not miss what’s popular right now; (3) content selection based on data (keyword) analysis of what you previously liked; (4) content selection based on categories / keywords you provided. All of this should you compiled into a single summary for each user with links to all relevant content. I am no coder, so this is just a conceptual idea with no clue on technical feasibility. It’s just something that I think would be totally awesome to have. Because I read religiously, and I would love to have something like that. I might even pay a little bit for it.

That’s it. Here is the preliminary descriptorum.com. Thanks for reading and please feel free to comment, mail me or further journalism on your own!

The future husband is understandably upbeat about it:

The moral of the story? Apps don’t only solve problems; great apps can change lives

But there is a real problem when venture capitalists – who should identify novel technologies that have huge (commercial) potentials – are getting a bit overjoyed:

I loved this quote and believe it wholeheartedly. Think of the apps that have changed your life. You may even be using one right now…

I actually like this VC as he seems to be very down-to-earth. Still, what makes one say “think of the apps that have changed your life”? Are there any apps that have changed your life?

We shouldn’t confuse progress with the appearance of progress. What we as a society currently value is an illusion of progress, not the real thing.

Sure, it’s very nice to have new means of proposing to your girlfriend or whatever you can do with today’s awesome technology. It’s nice to get updated on the news on the go or answer emails anywhere you go. But it’s still not that different from centuries past. We indeed have new means of doing something – but we don’t have wholly new experiences or inventions that push the human race forward.

If you really think about what has fundamentally changed in technology in the past decades, there’s a lot to grasp. But the longer I thought about it, the more I became convinced that the Singularity is not near at all. Technology appears to be progressing way more than it actually does on a fundamental level.

The story of the Singurality is just wrong.

Peter Thiel was (willfully) misunderstood when he claimed that major technological research is turning out to be fraud.

As he said, 1969 may indeed have been the year progress died.

I believe that we, of the current generation, settle too soon. We expect research and progress and success to come too easily. We do not expand enough effort. We satisfy ourselves with immediate and superficial gratification.

We have been raised as entitled and spoiled kids. It’s time to get past the illusions and face reality.

“What about school, what about university,” you might ask. It’s worth something, of course. It’s just not what you probably think it is.

I always considered myself above average in terms of insightfulness, inquisitiveness and intelligence. I thought highly of myself when it came to understanding the complexities of the world and of life.

How wrong I was, how stupid and arrogant.

I wouldn’t have found out though, if I had listened to what everyone told me to obey: the wisdom of experts, the insightfulness of reporters, the knowledge of educators and the well-intentioned advice of friends and family.

I came to a point where what I read didn’t reconcile with what I had always been told: Experts made stupid predictions all the time; magazine writers didn’t care about the truth if it didn’t fit with their story; there is a difference between good intentions and being good for you.

I paused for a moment and it all came down on me. The idiocy of believing what others tell you to, of accepting the reality others construct for you. There is only one way to grasp the meaning of your life and that is living it true to what you believe in and giving it a meaning by – finding out and then – doing what you were put on this earth to do.

As Viktor Frankl said,

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

Once you recognize that you are responsible for your choices, you start to grasp what responsibility really means. You stop adhering to the opinion’s of others. You stop caring so much about what others think of you. And you start paying attention to the choices you make.

What you read. What and whom you believe. What you do and do not do.

I stopped whining about not knowing how to succeed. It’s not about that. Success will come when you are ready for it. That, you have to prove.

I started by educating myself about my own ignorance.

You would be wrong.

One day, our politicians are drooling all over how the Government Departments are paying international law firms for writing their “fix the big banks” laws. You could argue that the Government Departments don’t pay competitive salaries so the best lawyers go to work elsewhere. An excellent point could also be made that it is highly doubtful at best that big law firms act with the voters best interests in mind whilst writing the laws propping up the very customers they depend(ed) on for a lot of their earnings.

The next day, the government is drooling over the massive bonus payments and feigning outrage at bankers clamoring after the most cash they can get their hands on. As if that were unexpected. Again, there are good arguments to be made for honoring contracts where bankers were contractually promised fixed bonus payments. On the other hand, without government bailouts, good luck getting any bonus payments from insolvent banks.

But all of that – that’s not the point. Because that would be getting close to actually arguing about the important stuff.

In all seriousness: the government bashing for overspending on external lawyers and what have you not has got to f*cking stop!

There are billions of our money – the tax payer’s money – at stake in the bail-outs. And what is being done about that? How does the government ensure that it’s not getting ripped off and is getting its money back soon? And how can we potentially prevent further financial meltdowns in the future – if they can be prevented at all, that is?

We have spent billions to stabilize the economy. If all we learnt from that is that bashing superfluous wrongdoings for popularity reasons pays off in terms of media attention, it will take a lot more hurting for the people to finally wake up to incompetency and do something about it.

There are basically two responses.

You may surprisingly have a reasonable human at hand who replies that he isn’t confident at all in his knowledge as he knows there is so much left he still has to grasp about the world.

Or you may live in the real world and get a truly ignorant answer. ‘Well, sure, I don’t really know all about that science stuff.. But overall, yeah, I’m a pretty clever guy. I bet I’m better than most.’

See, that’s what you would have said, isn’t it?

Sadly, any person who thinks he knows a lot or is supremely confident in his abilities is basically ignorant of the true nature of knowledge and the true extent of his abilities. There is just no limit to what you don’t know. ‘Very well,’ you might say, ‘but what about Richard Feynman or Stephen Hawking? They surely are and were at the top of their field? Don’t they know it all?’

Sure they are among the best. But Richard Feynman for one was the first to agree that he probably didn’t understand all that much after all. He once said, that “[if] we take everything into account – not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn’t know – then I think we must frankly admit that we do not know.”

You can be supremely good at what you do. But you can still recognize the limits of your knowledge. People who continually expand their limits know there is a lot of great progress left. We may never live to find out the truth.

It is a long process to get rid of your arrogance about what you know or don’t know. You believe you’re more knowledgeable than the next guy – but does that really mean anything?

There is no knowledge gap – as soon as you close in on it, it expands ever the more.

But still trying, that is a live worth living.

There may be many viable business models for the future of journalism. It sure will not be any single model anymore.

But I think news and journalism are going to play out differently than we currently imagine.

Try thinking about each piece of journalism – may it be original reporting, an essay, an opinion piece, investigative reporting, etc – flying around, orbiting around us – the consumers, each and every one of us – like satellites orbiting around the earth, devoid of any attachment.

Each consumer is the future center of gravity around which journalism orbits.

Each piece of news or journalism is going to be formless, if not in two years time then in ten years time. The medium won’t matter any more. The consumer will be able to choose how to consume journalism.

But huge challenges have to be faced along the way.

• The creator of each piece of journalism has to be paid in some form. New models matching creator and consumer and leaving middlemen by the wayside will have to be invented.
• Millions of pieces of journalism will be orbiting around every one of us at any given time. We will be overwhelmed by abundance. Scarcity will be gone for good. But filtering will be fundamentally necessary in order to gain value from a state of abundance. Who will provide it.
  • We can’t filter individually, so technology is the best candidate to do it for us. It needs to be up to the task. I need a filter with artificial intelligence: I want to state what I like and vote each filtered piece up or down according to its relevance, from which my filtering mechanism must be able to learn and more adequately match my needs in the future. Hunch, Digg and Hacker News, meet journalism and it’s new master: each consumer on the planet.
  • Crowd-sourcing the filtering may work as well. It’s going to be difficult though – true, our tastes are not as unique as we would like to think. Still, someone operating in any specific niche needs different information than others. But vast amounts of crowd-sourced filters are not a bad thing – the cognitive surplus to achieve it is already there: we just have to find ways to channel it for good.

Journalism – truly a land of abundant opportunity.

Several years ago the user experience was horrible. Nowadays, it’s still very bad – despite dozens of millions going into commercials, development and even new startups! Soon it may be a $ 1 billion market (= it’s a huge market). And what is the user experience like?

The price of advertising is obviously correlated with the impact it leaves on its desired targets. 

The more impact you have with an advertisement, the higher the price. The more focused target group you can show the ad to, the higher the price.

Before advertising really took off on the internet, measuring the impact of advertising probably resembled – by today’s standards – a guessing game: you inferred impact from  general audience or viewership numbers. A huge ad in the NYT was worth more than a small ad in the Rocky Mountain News.

What happened with advertising in the internet age?

Finally, the impact of advertising was really measurable – with far better accuracy.

As Steven Johnson so expertly puts it in “The Invention of Air”:

As is so often the case in the history of science, an increase in the accuracy of measurement led to a fundamental shift in the perception of the world. Marking changes in the temperature of ocean water enabled navigators to identify and exploit a pattern in the ocean’s currents that they had blindly stumbled across in centuries past: a river of warm water that runs from the tropics all the way up the coastline of North America, and then makes a sharp right turn toward Europa as it passes Cape Cod.

An increase in the accuracy of measurement led to the conclusion that traditional forms of advertising looked – and still look – more doomed by the day. Not focused, not relevant, not measurable – therefore there is no justifiable reality-based price-setting mechanism.

And this accuracy of measurement will get upended again and again. 

Google didn’t just display ads more intelligently on its search engine. It found a way to display more relevant ads and therefore more valuable ads.

There will be ways to measure even more accurately, whether actual consumers find the ad to be relevant – and to give advertisers direct feedback on that.

Umair Haque has it right:

Imagine a button underneath every ad at every newspaper, magazine, and blog that said: “tell us this ad sucks”.

Which will, in turn, disrupt current forms of advertising again.

Advertising will get ever more focused, more relevant and more measurable. And those forms of advertising will always be able to command high prices.

Think about it for a moment: Internet advertising revenues are expected to drop.

Is it the recession or another upending of current advertising models?

And truth be told: when some years will have passed, there may be no advertising anymore – it may be called user-requested product information.

“She was proud to support her husband’s dream of building a great business. But five years is a long time to watch someone focus on his company at the expense of everything–everything–else.”

Confessions of an Entrepreneur’s Wife is quite a thrilling read about the detriments of entrepreneurship – especially the toll it takes on one’s family.

What made it all the more interesting for me was a different point though. The author had at that point been a business journalist for a dozen years and had written a couple of books about managing start-ups.

Yet, she was utterly unprepared for what awaited her and her family when her husband decided to start a company.

“Watching Bill navigate the entrepreneurial life, I see now just how little I really knew about starting and building a business.”

She had read a lot and even written a book about entrepreneurship before. Despite all that intellectual knowledge, she was overwhelmed with unforeseen and new experiences and emotions upon living through it.

In every discipline, there are some concepts you absolutely have to grasp, some things you have to know in order to do anything useful. It may just not be as much as we are always told. First-hand experience trumps a lot of theoretical advice as you ultimately learn best not from somebody else’s failures but from your own.

I have always been interested in reading about lots of different disciplines and experiences. I have to take heed of not falling into this overconfidence fallacy by which you think you know enough (to succeed) about some discipline or business just by having read all there is about it.

In order to truly understand and advance, always err on the side of action.