adam

As an aside, whenever I need to make a can't miss recipe, I google that dish name + seriouseats food lab. Never had a fail from Kenji and his methodology in constructing recipes.

Thank you for this. So often we rip on government agencies from our perch on...Hacker News, when we really have no idea what's going on.

We do work with the Government in a different context, and I've found nothing but professionalism and deep expertise. In fact the people I've met in the agencies we're working with are some of the smartest I've encountered in my entire career.

I agree with you that organizationally companies may end up having to go in that direction, but I think there are some interim steps to have employees feel more like they have a voice.

For example, we run internal prediction markets at companies where employees get to make bets on relevant outcomes (will we beat sales targets this quarter, will this project get done on time, etc.) that drive decision making. We also run internal Kickstarter-style crowdfunding campaigns, where a chunk of money is literally distributed to employees to spend on ideas they come up with themselves. So for example, we're working with a nuclear lab and they distributed $1.5M to about 500 employees. Ideas they came up with that the "crowd" funded to their "tipping point," the lab agreed would turn in to actual projects. Normally these decisions would have been made by executives only, now they've been completely democratized.

Interesting the production methodology follows Toyota. I blogged about the need for exactly this as I'm convinced in these kinds of situations there are employees working on these projects who know there are issues, but because of culture or pressure to launch, are never heard: https://www.cultivatelabs.com/posts/the-rise-of-anonymous-to...

"Balto" was also the name of Elizabeth Holmes' (of Theranos fame) dog:

For Holmes, the dog represented the journey that lay ahead for Theranos. As she explained to colleagues at the company’s headquarters, in Palo Alto, he was named after the world-famous sled dog who, in 1925, led a team of huskies on a dangerous, 600-mile trek from Nenana, Alaska, to remote Nome, Alaska, bearing an antitoxin that was used to fight a diphtheria outbreak. There is even a statue of Balto in New York’s Central Park, Holmes told one former employee. The metaphorical connection was obvious. In Holmes’s telling, Balto’s perseverance mirrored her own. His voyage with the life-changing drug was not so different from her ambition.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/inside-elizabeth-hol...

Hiring these firms is a major "cover your ass" move. If you're a CEO and you hire McKinsey, your board is going to likely approve as they are from the same East Coast/West Coast Ivy League fraternity as McKinsey consultants. And because they only hire people from those schools or recruit former executives from their clients, there is a strong signaling mechanism that you're hiring "the best and the brightest."

Then if things ever go wrong, you always have the out of "I hired the best, what did you want me to do?"

While the title of this article may be a bit misleading as numerous people here have reliably pointed out, I think comments so far are missing the broader point. Cal Newport's focus for awhile now has been on "minimalist" use of our phones, and how social media, etc. are interrupting/damaging our lives in numerous ways.

Despite the "cheap" headline and arguments you could make of his narrow interpretation of Jobs' introduction of the iPhone, Newport's broader points IMHO should still be recognized and are important to be heard.

Do you have kids?

I'm curious if anyone else has stomach issues after eating the Impossible Burger, the Beyond Meat burger, etc.? Something about the protein isolate or who knows what else doesn't sit well with me. I've talked to others anecdotally about the same thing, but is this a widespread occurrence?

It reminds me a bit of when Frito-Lay tried to introduce Olean into their potato chips and it gave everyone the 3's...

You might check out numer.ai, along with their coming data marketplace, Erasure. They've been running for awhile...

Having been through YC in the second batch in 2006 - their first one in California, and again in 2011, the differences were indeed pretty stark. In 2006, there were 8 startups. We knew each other well and we met with PG at his house a few times which obviously was pretty cool. He was also the one actually doing the cooking at the dinners! There was also lots of interaction with Trevor and Jessica and (less so) Robert. In 2011 there was no such type of interaction as they were just trying to figure out how to scale with 64 startups in the batch, outside money being involved, etc.

The other big difference no one has mentioned is the speakers that came to the dinners. They get the highest profile speakers now, but in 2006, the speakers would meet with each startup after their talk. You could demo to them and they'd give you feedback and personal advice. I distinctly remember a talk by Ev Williams about his failures at Blogger for example. Very raw and emotional. Some of the lessons I carry with me today, 12 years later, were from a few of those talks and after dinner conversations. In 2011 (and on) you're not getting close to one of those speakers unless you just so happen to get to sit by them at dinner.

Actually, prediction markets need some sort of objective, verifiable outcome, so asking "do we need a new CEO" wouldn't be appropriate. Instead the company could ask questions related to the performance metrics the CEO has agreed to meet. "Will we meet sales levels of X?" "Will we achieve x% market share in Y product by Z date?" etc.

And based on the probabilities output by the market, if they were low and trending lower, one could argue there is at least a perception that this CEO isn't getting it done. Or another response could be "why" which could encourage a more open, healthy dialogue internally.

In the public context, people often cite the consensus predictions to get a better understanding of what people _think_ will happen vs. what they _want_ to happen.

In a corporate context, prediction markets are often used internally amongst employees to predict things like sales forecasts, ability to hit milestones, budgets, quantify risks, and predict the outcome of strategic initiatives.

In both contexts, people tend to participate anonymously so they have the freedom to express what they actually think. Contrast this, especially inside a company, with the politics of saying what you actually think. That "reality based" discourse is unheard of, especially in larger organizations. Prediction markets are often the only venue someone can express themselves in a productive way.

This should be a big deal for combatting CO2 emissions as well. I believe it was never refuted after it came out a few years ago that ~15 of these ships emit the same CO2 as all cars in the world? https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/cargo-container-shipping...

In theory you're right - but this isn't how it works in practice. The people who earn the most money are the best traders, not necessarily the people with the "most information and best models." The overall forecasts tend to be accurate, but you cannot look to individual participants, see who has the most money, and assume they know the most about the subject at hand.

Just wrote a blog post about Augur and its future challenges: https://www.cultivatelabs.com/posts/thoughts-on-augur

I know - just another armchair hack, but I've been running a company that builds/runs prediction markets inside corporations for the past 12 years...

Perhaps it's already there, but I wonder if shortcuts will be able to be shared or there will be a library for them. So someone can pre-define all sorts of stuff, then I as a "basic" user can just add the shortcut vs. having to "program" it myself.

This is a great summary. I think his guideposts are helpful for most decision support initiatives, whether you're using data to try and support decisions, or reaching out to humans.

We run prediction markets inside companies and find that if we don't establish a good lifecycle of asking forecasting questions, having people respond with probabilities, then decision makers REACTING to those probabilities in some way (whether they agree with them or not, just acknowledge their existence) the likelihood of the project failing is far higher.

In contrast, a fully human approach using a prediction market: https://alphacast.cultivateforecasts.com/challenges/167-2018...

YOu're right, this is indeed a challenge. But the benefit is often they're not getting screwed by bad planning, over promising, etc. Afterall, those are the kinds of decisions that really burn people out. Instead, they finally get a chance to have a say. Also, I'd argue all the information you're talking about that is potentially decreasing morale is already out there, it's just not being officially recognized/aggregated. At least this way, it's surfaced, and management understands what the perception is out there and can address it head on.

Bottom line, these aren't for everyone. One of the first questions I ask when someone expresses interest is what their culture is like and how humble their leadership is. If they're ready for it, prediction market can be transformative. But if they're not, they can fail - and we've surely had plenty of those projects too!

I understand - I usually don't like to have to talk to people either. Since most of our projects are with large companies, we haven't shared pricing, as each one tends to be pretty different. But we've also worked with smaller teams who just want access to the software, and that's fine too. We start at 399/month for those types of projects and that's for unlimited everything for up to 100 people. You might consider playing with TinyCast which is our free, single question prediction market and see if you like it and people participate. If you/they do, that would be a good indication they'd likely do a full blown prediction market. https://tinycast.cultivatelabs.com

The U.S. Intelligence Community does quite a bit of research in this space that we're involved in, we're also working with pharma, energy, large manufacturing. The profile (in the commercial space) tends to be very capital intensive orgs/projects, where if you can use a prediction market as an "early warning system" by surfacing what people actually know, you can potentially save them a lot of heartache (and money and pissed off/laid off employees, etc.)

We have a prediction market platform, but we also end up consulting most of the time as part of the implementation. As you might imagine, prediction markets can be quite disruptive. They tend to make information radically more transparent and we learned the hard way that in order to not just churn through a bunch of companies, we needed to help companies deal with 1) what key questions to ask, and 2) what are they going to do with the new signals they have? How will they incorporate them in to their decision making processes and how will they acknowledge that the "crowd" has been heard?

The average project size we work with tends to be in the low hundreds of participants, with the biggest one being in the mid-thousands.

Having now run prediction markets inside companies for over 10 years, we can definitely backup the findings in the paper - especially the revelations of bias among different types of employees. We usually ask people to participate anonymously, and it's often the only outlet people have to express what they truly think.

It's always a surreal experience to sit in a meeting with people and their bosses and hear "we're on track, no issues, the new product launch is going to be great, we're going to sell a ton, etc. etc." and then have a private/informal meeting with the same people who will confide that the project/product/strategy is completely fucked and everyone thinks that. :)

Thanks for commenting about this - I don't understand why there isn't more commentary about Ford deciding to drop sedans. It seems like someone is way way behind on the forecasting game. Just as oil prices are going back up and the demand for fuel efficient vehicles will increase, they're doubling down on...gas guzzlers.

Cultivate Labs | Senior Rails Developer | Chicago, IL | Onsite | Full-Time

Cultivate Labs is a Chicago-based company that helps large organizations crowdsource the wisdom of their employees to better predict future events, whether that’s a project milestone, sales target, or if an investment will pay off. We’re a self-funded team of 6, currently working with some of the largest and most influential organizations in the world like AbbVie, AstraZeneca, GE, Bose, the U.S. Intelligence Community, and others.

We’re embarking on our next phase of growth as a company and are looking to hire a new senior Rails developer to join the team and own product development of one or more efforts. Here’s more about the role: https://cultivatelabs.com/hiring

If you prefer your Jaron Lanier in audio form, this was a very similar interview he did for Ezra Klein's podcast: https://www.vox.com/2018/1/16/16897738/jaron-lanier-intervie...

I suspect this will smooth out as they collect more data about what's going empty, etc. If as the article states there was millions in inventory sitting in the stock rooms, each store probably wasn't doing very good inventory management and demand planning, so didn't have good data to begin with to inform a new system.

Reminds me of the Ted Chiang short story "Understand" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understand_(story)

Another perspective: I gave my 5 year old an old iPod Nano + some over-ear headphones, and she uses them to listen to music and kid podcasts. I much prefer this over an iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad. We're just not ready for her to have that kind of screen time.