Knowing and Making

It probably has not escaped your notice that the Game of Thrones TV series finished this week. If you use social media at all, I suspect you also saw some anguished squawks about how awful the ending was. How the incompetent writers screwed it all up. Maybe you even signed the petition, along with 1.5 million others, to have the last series remade with a different conclusion. Personally I thought it wasn't a bad outcome, but I seem to be in the minority. Either way, why does this have such significance? I read a counterargument a few days ago: You've had 70 hours of enjoyment already – it's in the bank. You enjoyed episode 1, 2, 3, …and you can't go back and "unenjoy" them now. One bad hour at the end can't rewind the clock and eliminate the last 8 years of pleasure? Yet this feels wrong. The ending can ruin the beginning. Why should this be? A model from cognitive economics may have the answer. The theory of " cognitive goods " says tha...

My former colleague Henri Yandell analyses the differences between context switching and multitasking, and between deep and shallow thinking here . Rory Cellan-Jones has a less interesting but more...well, more BBC, take on the same subject  here . I guess they're both prompted by The Shallows by Nicholas Carr - a man with whose previous writings I have disagreed violently. Looks like the subtitle on the paperback has quietly been changed from "What the Internet is doing to our brains" to "How the Internet is changing the way we think, read and remember". Presumably the old title was provoking too much hostility. Carr's thesis about shallow thinking is very different to, say,  Tyler Cowen's Age of the Infovore , which argues that the Internet now allows us a much deeper  and more engaged experience with the narratives of our lives. Rory's argument (and that of Douglas Adams, to whom  Henri links ) is that this debate has been going on for m...

[ I intended my next post to be a followup to yesterday's, but I need a bit more time to work on that. So you can have this one instead - it's quite good too ] Only someone with Nathan Myhrvold's Microsoft money - and reputation as a mad genius - could get away with starting Intellectual Ventures and still being taken seriously. But since he can, it makes it an interesting concept. This article by Ryan McClafferty  raises some tricky questions about whether the company's attempts to create a marketplace in ideas will encourage, or instead stifle, innovation. Normally if we deepen the market for a commodity, more of it will be produced. It gives producers more chances to sell, consumers more places to buy and lets price discovery be more accurate. As a side-effect it will usually improve the quality of the good - imagine that instead of a competitive dealer network for buying and selling cars, the government simply issued one to every family. It's very unlikely...