Quora Answers — 2011
1,699 answers written on Quora between 2010 and 2014, during the peak of the Ribbonfarm era. Questions from others; answers entirely by Venkat. 395 substantive answers are indexed here. For a specific answer, use Search or ask vgr_zirp.
- I am about to launch a new social startup on books. Who are the key people I should contact who can provide know how and good knowledge on the industry?
If you don't already know them, the key people in the industry are rather unlikely to talk to you. I suggest attending a couple of relevant conferences to get the lay of the land and figuring out ho…
- As a UX designer, what do you wish product managers knew about UX?
I've been on the receiving end: being told what my UX designer thought I should know. The message was: "shut the hell up and listen, and stop putting decisions that should be mine to a democratic vo…
- Can computers fall in love?
I disagree strongly with Gavan Woolery 's answer [update: not so strongly after Gavan's 2 updates], which is the standard "strong AI" position, not because I think there is something ineffable about "…
- How can I practice and further my studies in mathematics in my own free time?
I have found that self-study is VERY different from learning in a classroom. You cannot use the same materials or methods. The best way to learn mathematics unfortunately, is in a classroom with a go…
- How relevant will Analyst Firms like Gartner (with its MQ) and Forrester be in the next 10 years? Are new models necessary, and will new models emerge to benchmark and rate vendors/services?
Michael Wolfe frames the problem with nanometric precision. The solution might well be equally precise: LinkedIn. The new "companies" feature is just the tip of the iceberg of what LinkedIn could do…
- How important is it to have a clear purpose in approaching life? Why so?
Teilhard de Chardin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie... ) said something along the lines of "meaning/purpose is not given to us, it is the purpose of life to search for purpose" (very vague rephrase…
- If I have to pick *one*, what is the best software development/engineering/operations title for a high performing team?
A commodity title like "member of technology staff" can be imposed, will cover the job, and add zero catalysis value or talent-attraction value. OTOH, a "branded" title like "pirate" cannot be impose…
- Is the phenomenon of ethnogenesis an example of memetic autopoiesis of a collective intelligence?
I think "memetic autopoiesis" is a contradiction in terms to a certain extent, since autopoiesis is kinda the opposite dynamic to evolution of any sort. Evolution converges into a diversity of species…
- How do you start a guest blogging program for your own blog?
Having tried a couple of times and basically failed, I can list a bunch of points about what can go wrong. But that isn't the same thing as knowing how to do it right of course. I have basically give…
- Why do Indians rarely talk about the caste system to outsiders, even though it appears to affect even their interactions and attitudes towards each other outside of India? Is there a shame or unspoken code about talking about this?
There is no unwritten secret code of silence or shame or taboo. There is tons written about it in the Indian media, and everybody talks about it all the time. It is just an extremely complicated, extr…
- How would you measure the ROI in social media?
You may like this fictional dialogue I wrote on this problem of ROI and measurement... http://enterprise2blog.com/2008/... The short skeptical answer is probably that "sure you can measure it, but i…
- What is the ideal percentage of revenue that you should apply to a marketing budget for a new business?
Marketing is usually absorbed in a line item called SAG (selling, admin, general) within general balance sheets. In young businesses, where admin and general are low, SAG is almost entirely "selling c…
- For new entrepreneurs, are the incentives now aligned such that it's more rational to go after a first time failure than a first time success?
This actually doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Just a business-level application of the s/w development principle, "build the first version to throw away" by Frederick Brooks. I wouldn't say "desig…
- How credible and attention-deserving is Nassim Taleb?
He's an elitist, snooty rogue, who you are forced to like despite his rather infuriating "cultivated" airs :) He deserves all the attention he gets simply for making fun of academics who take themse…
- How important is a well designed logo for a startup? Should I stick with the logo I designed in 10 minutes or pay a designer to do one correctly?
It matters a lot. It is the primary meme that you want to get stuck in people's head. It must be meaningfully associated with your brand, and have all the right connotations. Check out RWW's list of…
- How should one market a new offline magazine or publication?
By creating a site to give away the sample PDF of the first issue free, for those who sign up for your email list. SEO it to death for your target market, and promote it like crazy. This should not …
- Is it best to think like a Go, chess, or poker player?
I don't play any of the games. In fact I suck at most of them. But (perhaps because of my lack of skill), I am fascinated by (and seriously study) the role of metaphor and narrative in how games map t…
- What is the purpose of foam on the top of coffee drinks?
When well made, the foam should actually be a "microfoam" comprising a thin layer of tiny bubbles that actually have some coffee flavor and a hint of brown visible. The only pure white should be the l…
- Who makes a better Business Professor, a PhD with deep research in the field, or a former Senior Executive with little/no advanced education?
This is a false comparison. There are FOUR possible comparisons you can make here among 4 types of people. Bad or good businessperson vs. bad or good academic. If it's a bad versus bad comparison, n…
- What are the benefits to obtaining a PhD in the field of Education?
This view is a few years old, so things might have improved since then. That said... The main benefit is that you can join an education program as a professor and in turn train other graduate student…
- How do you become a conference speaker?
"Conference speaking" is not a job or a target activity. You speak in conferences as part of other jobs/professions/lines of work, and as your reputation and success in your chosen line of work increa…
- What makes you want to follow a leader?
There are several kinds of followers: Worshippers who are in awe of anything they don't understand. Extreme form: cult membersHigh priests: people who codify, discipline and enforce the messy visions…
- Where can you get a Ph.D. in Digital Sociology
HCI, computer science, marketing, sociology, psychology, social psychology, anthropology, management, organizational theory. When a new subject emerges, if you wait till it is formalized and codified…
- What is the difference between a business owner and an entrepreneur?
Interesting question. At an airport once, I met a small business consultant who was in the business of helping people start restaurants. He said he always recommended buying a franchise instead of thi…
- How much does psychology/marketing factor into the pricing of everyday items in the Western world?
You are right. Pricing is mostly psychology. There is a lot of sophisitcated math and analysis that goes on, but that's mostly a sideshow. The real action is in the psychodrama that goes on between "c…
- For a personal blog, what are the pros and cons to using one's name versus using a catchy title?
I have a "no specific theme" personal blog (ribbonfarm.com), and my name is not publicly well-known other than through my blog. I also own the domain for my name (venkateshrao.com), which is redirecte…
- What is the difference between tactical and strategic efforts, and is their difference simply a matter of time duration over which the efforts show their impact?
I am afraid most of the answers here fall victim to the standard confusion around these terms. Nothing but pain, ambiguity and lack of clarity results from using these common distinctions, to the po…
- Are all living things just some complex chemical macro-molecules?
Try Gregory Chaitin, "Towards a Mathematical Definition of Life" as a starting point. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/vie... Self-replication is correlated with, but neither necessary, nor sufficient f…
- Why do smart people, who know that this world is so complex, bang on about needing simplicity - and yet don't want to put the effort in?
"I would not give a farthing for the simplicity on this side of complexity. I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity." (SOTOSOC) -- Oliver Wendell Holmes. Getting to SO…
- What are some claims by Malcolm Gladwell that are incorrect?
Thanks Ani Ravi for that thorough round-up. If this thread doesn't get to best resource status on this question, it ought to :) Addendum: Duncan Watts at Yahoo did some rather clever modeling that s…
- How common is lucid dreaming?
Quite common. I don't know about lucid dreaming itself, but a more extreme form that often follows a lucid dream, called sleep paralysis, is apparently experienced by about 25% of the population at le…
- Can seasonal affective disorder be cured using computer-mediated reality?
I very much doubt it. One of the causes of SAD is lack of enough sunlight, but this doesn't work as you might think. It's not light itself, but its effect on our body clocks that matters. You need s…
- How might we build an education system that is centered on creating rather than replicating knowledge?
This question misframes the issue, and to understand why, you need to understand the history of how the creation/preservation tradeoff has been managed. The short answer to your question is that to …
- Will there be a tech sector crash in the near future?
For once I disagree with User-9918985937555143421 Or maybe I don't, and I am saying the same thing in a different way. I think the startup sector is being temporarily shielded from macroeconomic cond…
- Why are quadrotors used in autonomous vehicle experiments?
Robert Scoble has the first-order reasons down right. The second-order reasons are that in any hardware research, you simplify the things you don't care about, and complicate the things you want to i…
- What are things people should do at least once in their life?
Going for things that aren't likely to happen unless you set out to do them. There's plenty of must do stuff that you will do anyway Watch a total solar eclipseLook at the rings of Saturn, live throu…
- What should someone read to start learning about Buddhism? What books, blogs, podcasts, publications, etc. would you recommend?
At the risk of being unresponsive: don't try to read a book as your starting point. Go find a monastery, spend a day, talk to a monk, listen to a couple of discourses etc. Eat a meal or two. If you ca…
- How can Kolmogorov complexity be described in layman's terms?
Read Gregory Chaitin's "Meta Math" for a detailed and interesting popular treatment. The best way to understand it is as the most elegant, in the sense of shortest, computer program, that produces a …
- What's it like to be an entrepreneur in residence? What do you get to work on? How are compensation and incentives structured? What value does the VC firm get?
The idea of an EiR originated in the VC community I believe, and Michael Wolfe has covered that kind of EiR neatly. I have the EiR title in a big company (Xerox), where I am part of the innovation gr…
- Are libertarianism and solidarity incompatible?
The short answer is yes, they are incompatible. And it has nothing to do with political or economic philosophies. It has to do with psychology. Collectivism/individualism is not so much a moral choi…
- Is being open about your life online a turn off for prospective employers? Especially in creative/online industries?
If you've deliberately asked the question in this form to get broad ideas, answers like the one from Erica Friedman are good starting points. But if you genuinely think about this issue at this level…
- Will we ever see high quality TV programs with an à la carte business model? Is it possible for consumers, distributors, and content producers to all win with à la carte?
Your question is based on the premise that definitions of quality survive changes in media technology, they don't. Three examples: Lee de Forest, one of the (dubious) pioneers of radio, thought radi…
- What are some good ways to annoy very intelligent people?
Pretend to give them your undivided attention when they are holding forth passionately on something intellectual, like "existential Zen in post-revolutionary Iran," and then suddenly interrupt with on…
- Why should words matter to businesses and other organisations? What difference can well-chosen words make to their success?
I'll stick to the brands/branding subset of the question, since general perception management, which includes PR and sales and post-sales communications, is too complex to address in one answer. The …
- What is the most important trend that will impact the marketing industry in the next few years?
Increasing numbers of customers starting to think for themselves. The technology is a sideshow that will help both those who want to stick to traditional ideas and those who want to challenge them. …
- I am a 26 year old Computer Engineering graduate. I have applied to around 30-40 companies and all my job applications were rejected. I am hopeless and so fed up with my life. My CGPA is 3.5 out of 4.0. What shall I do?
Are you doing the basic no-brainer things that don't require permission? Participating in technical Q&A at Stack OverflowContributing to a couple of open-source communitiesMaintaining your own websit…
- Can blogs realistically produce investigative journalism?
Yes. I've kinda done it once, back before it was called "blogging." It was a story on activist efforts to protest a big dam project in Western India. Maybe not Pulitzer worthy, but decent enough. This…
- When did everyone start calling programmers "engineers"?
My theory is that the shift happened around the time OO programming became the norm. Or approximately the late 80s when C++ moved the idea from "lab esoterica" status (i.e. Smalltalk etc.) to "practic…
- How important is SEO for blogging?
Two words: Bounce rate. And thereby hangs a tale. The Baseline There's a baseline cost-of-doing-business SEO level that every site needs. That's a no-brainer in two ways: It's a no-brainer because…
- Would people think if they were not being paid to think?
It's the other way round. You have to pay people to NOT think. Left to themselves, with none of the typical workplace incentives, people perform better, not worse. Dan Pink has extensively profiled t…
- How are the children of rich people socialized into wealth? What behavior codes do they learn that signal their belonging to the wealthy class?
While not specifically about the socialization of children, the general theory of the social psychology of the wealthy basically explains most of what you see. The classic on this subject is Thostei…
- How many Social Media Gurus does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
The question is misframed. You need to use the Charlene Li/Josh Bernoff "POST" model for social design from Groundswell: People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology. You are starting with lightbulbs, the…
- What are some possible reasons that Google replaced Eric Schmidt with Larry Page as CEO?
Well, obviously everybody's figured out Google needs a vision for "Social Web Act II," since they so embarrassingly sat out the Act I. Unless they manage to change the game and make it not about "soc…
- Is it true that "managers do things right but leaders do the right things"?
I think Yishan Wong is dismissing the idea as a content-free clever turn of phrase too quickly. Partly his answer is a prescription rather than a description, and partly he's unconsciously added the a…
- What are the hot topics in marketing and branding at the moment?
Let me start with a little skit you can put on at your next all-hands meeting: Ad guy: "As John Wanamaker said, I know half of my advertising works; I just don't know which half, ha ha!" Google g…
- What is pivoting?
I am usually on the side of making fun of faddish terminology, but I think I'll come to the defense of the word here, since others are beating up on it to an unfair extent I think. "Pivot" does provi…
- Does computer science have a hidden agenda to kill religion?
I suspect the truth is exactly the opposite. The Internet has accelerated the digitization of religiosity. Religious groups are usually far better organized and able to take advantage of the Web than …
- How did people promote their blogs prior to social media becoming popular?
"Blogging" proper began with RSS. Which means they are part of social media. RSS fundamentally changes your marketing channel mix. Before RSS, the things you had didn't feel quite like blogging. I us…
- How much does ego and the desire to be recognized as an individual impede scientific progress?
It does not impede scientific progress. It accelerates it. You need to distinguish between 2 kinds of recognition-hunger though. The first is "acceptance and status" hunger. The kind that puts you on…
- What patterns of behavior have proven to be most helpful in knowledge transfer?
As Jeff Bezos once said, "The only way I know to transfer knowledge is to transfer people." This principle has been validated time and again. Move people, not bits. That's the top best behavior pa…
- Why is what the state says about marriage important to Western civilization?
Nothing particularly Western about it. The state can and SHOULD be concerned with the subject, far more than individuals. Our peculiar pattern of mostly-loyal pair bonding with occasional extremes o…
- How can I define my marketing agency's competitive advantage?
Nothing special about marketing agencies in particular. Competitive advantage is always to be found in the same few areas: Unique data: In marketing this might be unique segmentation data sets, like …
- What role should humor play in business-to-business marketing programs?
It should play a strong role in SMB to SMB B2B markets, and no role in big company to big company markets. Small-to-big is a toss up, but on balance I'd say "no" in either direction (big supplying sma…
- Is it a sign of weak character that I often (unconsciously) slip in to an accent that mimics the particular person I'm speaking to?
Yes, if you are doing it because you want to be accepted. No, if you are doing it to be comprehended. I modified my Indian accent just enough so I could avoid being misunderstood. This meant mainly …
- What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?
Not a scientific concept, but a philosophy of science concept that very few appreciate: The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is m…
- What factors led to the slower advancement of technology as a whole in North and South American cultures as compared to what was happening at the same time in Europe, Africa, and Asia?
Jared Diamond has the simplest and most compelling theory I have seen, in Guns, Germs and Steel. The lack of large draught animals mentioned by Robert Palermo is one of the elements in the larger pic…
- Are friends generally people who are like-minded?
Anecdotally, I have found that friendships seem to behave pretty much like marriages, and the same phenomenon has been well studied in marriage. So apply the idea below, mutatis mutandis. Be cautious …
- What is the first step in defining your online strategy?
The answer is: start by thinking of a name. Even in these days of mobile and apps, when it is possible to have an online presence without a central site, I believe a branded anchor website of some so…
- What is an iPad?
I like Alex Payne's take the best (bold highlights mine): http://al3x.net/2010/01/28/ipad.... For years, me and thousands of other techies have been wondering what comes after the Personal Computer…
- What is the single most admirable and socially attractive trait that a person can have?
For me, no question about it: truth-oriented. Or slightly more accurately, doubt-oriented. To constantly strive to strip your mind of delusions and falsehoods, to keep groping towards deeper understa…
- Is an advanced degree desirable to pursue a career in marketing?
Whatever your personal goals are, if you want to be in marketing and you mean a marketing-related degree, the answer is a resounding NO at the moment (early 2011). The higher-education industry in t…
- What is the impact of information overload?
Look at the research from the Information Overload Research Group (IORG), a consortium-supported group that works on this seriously. http://iorgforum.org/ There is a lot of debate about how to defin…
- Is the feeling of love a physiological or biological reaction or something deeper?
It is biological, and exists in non-humans. The first famous (and famously cruel) demonstration of this was in experiments by Harry Harlow involving infant attachment to mothers in monkeys: http://en…
- Thirty years from now, will you and I be as clueless with technology as our parents are now?
The Bayesian Answer: With 23.8% probability, the answer is YES. Technology will remain comprehensible to humanity, but it won't be worth comprehending to those retired on nice beaches. So they won't.…
- Can the entire world's energy demands be met with 100% renewable energy and 0% coal, petroleum, nuclear?
No, not in any interesting medium-term scenario (50-100 years). Beyond that the future is so unpredictable (we may meet aliens, discover time travel or blow ourselves up....) that it is not interestin…
- Dropbox (product): Will the metaphor of files and folders become obsolete?
This is a fascinating question. Metaphors generally do not live on in their full complexity once the source domain has disappeared through obsolescence. For instance back during the Old West, horse/c…
- Are there any certifications for social media or small business consultants?
Social media and small business expertise are areas where, if you are not careful, obtaining and advertising "certifications" can hurt you more than they help you. Here's an anecdote illustrating how…
- Which city deserves to be the Capital of the World?
Damn, this is a frog-in-the-well set of answers we have here so far. Think GLOBAL people. This London vs. New York debate that is going on in the other answers is a joke. This is not like competing t…
- Must you be ruthless and selfish to be a really successful entrepreneur, and if so, why, and if not, why not?
To a degree, yes. But the word is "individualist" rather than "selfish." Able to think for yourself instead of constantly seeking validation, feedback and consensus. You can be a consensus-type CEO…
- Can there be such a thing as a transparent institution?
I'll take the (currently unpopular) position that a context that has no affordances for backroom dealings cannot add value at all. If true, sustainable value is being created, there is some secrecy go…
- Why is secrecy important to have a properly functioning government?
It is most useful to consider speed of action as a proxy for secrecy, and address the question of the need for secrecy in terms of the need for speed. The opposite of speed in governance is obviously…
- What are Hilbert Spaces in laymen's terms?
The simplest layman's explanation I can think of in terms of a counter-example. You know what a step is, right? Something that looks like, well, a step on a staircase. Now imagine a smooth ramp, lik…
- Mathematics is the best approximation to the truth that humans have invented. Can it be devised to hide the truth? Or is it inherently falseproof?
The answer to "can math be used to prove falsehoods" at a simple level is of course "yes, if you are talking to someone dumb who knows far less than you." But that's not interesting since that's basic…
- Which Arab countries dislike Israel and why?
It's not just Arabs disliking Israelis. That makes it sound like there is one basic line of conflict. It's everybody disliking everybody in ways that even they themselves are confused about. The rest …
- What questions are modern philosophers talking about?
"Serious" philosophy is alive and well. From what I hear, the latest trending areas are in ontology, metaphysics and the philosophy of language. Look up the bios of the younger faculty members in phil…
- What is it that holds groups together?
I think 99.9% of group cohesion actually derives from very primal social instincts that go back to much simpler species. Only about 0.1% of group cohesion is specifically human, and maybe only 0.05% i…
- Why are spreadsheet champions considered to be expert data analysts while computer science majors take a back seat?
Let me illustrate what's happening with an example. I have no skin in either the CS or data science games (I am a control theory guy with amateur yellow-belt status in both fields). A former manager h…
- How is a second-price (for single item) auction anything other than a subsidy from the seller to the buyer?
If you mean the sealed-bid second-price auction (Vickrey), I believe it has some optimality properties of theoretical interest. If you mean English or generalized second-price auctions, I have no ide…
- What are the differences between marketing and branding?
Drucker noted that the job of marketing is to make sales superfluous. I think that's still one of the best definitions of marketing around. Within that function, the job of the brand is to serve as t…
- What are some of the important historical, current and emerging "Interwebs"?
I don't like answering my own questions, but just to get the ball rolling, let me mention a few that got me thinking along these lines: Thanks to User-13743967034596023228 I just discovered tvtropes.…
- How do people who have a passion for everything settle on one thing?
Thanks for pointing this out. I missed this among Xianhang Zhang's posts. He's in good company. The answer to your question actually lies in Isaiah Berlin's Hedgehog-Fox distinction, riffing on the G…
- Are scholarly journals outdated? If so, what should replace them?
Journal publishing issues (no pun intended) are merely a symptom. The real problem is the professionalization of research. We need to re-amateurize inquiry. Research publishing started as a way to s…
- Is large-scale cultural change a prerequisite for political revolution?
This question assumes that there is an evolutionary historicist path of increasingly superior political systems starting with "Man in the state of nature" to "liberal democracy." I agree. I am just c…
- Is paid digital content making a comeback? In what form(s)?
I've been going back and forth over this, but I think, on the whole, not. A basic idea in pricing is that in an efficient market with competition, the price of the nth unit gets arbitrarily close to …
- Has anyone found a good way to kill business cards yet?
Ponder this video by a guy who thinks he has the best business card in the world. I couldn't believe this was serious, but apparently it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4... When technologies mat…
- What is the difference between Marketing 2.0 and Marketing 3.0?
Marketing 2.0 is a term used by reasonably smart people who understand that the 2.0 tag indicates that an idea/concept belongs in a broad mega-trend/evolutionary speciation event like the Cambrian exp…
- What careers or industries are the most meritocratic?
This question is deeply misguided. "Meritocratic" usually indicates some rigid and static notion of merit, usually based on testing/scales/numbers games in mature and professionalized domains. So high…
- Could humanity develop a planetary consciousness?
Short answer: no. I very much doubt it. Structurally, functionally and behaviorally, speaking, this is already weakly true and has been for about 10,000 years. You can attribute a certain amount of …
- What jobs chiefly consist in defining and interpreting the meaningful external reality for others?
For quite a while I used to think A. G. Lafley had it wrong. His original quote implicitly restricted this description to true leaders, i.e. ONLY the CEO. I felt that this task of connecting external…
- What is bureaucracy? How does it emerge in an organisation? What is its purpose?
The defenses of bureaucracies as "rational processes" being posted here are, I have to say, somewhere between disingenuous and naive. The cynics are right here, and are in fact underestimating things.…
- How should companies optimize their innovation mix?
I don't entirely agree with the premise in the question details that "many innovation strategies are proven effective." I think they are all equally ineffective, and innovation mostly happens in spit…
- Is the United States suffering from imperial overstretch?
Fareed Zakaria has a very interesting analysis of this question in his book, The Post-American World, which I am just finishing. The book was published before the recession and before Obama, but basic…
- Why does a number raised to the zeroth power equal one?
Of the mathematical explanations, I like Steve Denton 's best. But none of them is really an "explanation" in the sense that the question is asking for, I think. The question is looking for the "aha!"…
- Why do twenty- and thirty-somethings in the Bay Area and New York seem so proud of being unqualified to be caretakers?
I suspect this is related to the new developmental life phase called "emerging adulthood" posited by developmental psychologists: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/2... We’re in the thick of what one s…
- What are some classifications of stories?
I have far too much material and tons of links on this question, so rather then attempting to be exhaustive I'll list a few of the more representative approaches to classification, and provide google-…
- Why are companies always chasing growth?
I am surprised at the huge variety of answers and the assumption all around that it is a management choice. It is only a management choice for privately held companies that have no ambitions to go pub…
- Why do scientists tend to have liberal (progressive) views?
I think the answer is quite a subtle one, and is identical to the reason why great novelists, artists, comedians and poets also tend to lean progressive liberal. Progressive liberalism is associated …
- Why is it so acceptable to pet random cats and dogs, but not pet random humans?
User-13227694684444020075 is right. The right comparison is with babies, not adult humans, and the comparison is deeper than you think. It's a phenomenon called "paedomorphic cuteness" (yes, that's a …
- What are the biggest marketing challenges for universities?
The biggest challenge is going to be selling the idea that 4-year degrees are worth the ~$100,000 and debt burden they can cause. You cannot really sell the unsellable, so the industry will fail to me…
- What are some good ways to remain aware of the value of your time?
Well...there is a Ben Franklin type Poor Richard's Almanack view implicit in this question, based on a universal-utilitarian, time-value-of-money morality. So my answer is bracketed within a BIG (HUG…
- In science fiction film and television, why do the spacecraft move around in battle scenes as if they were subject to the rules of gravity, even though weightlessness means that the physics of movement are entirely different?
Because the damn studios are too cheap to hire aerospace engineers to create realistic AND interesting scenarios. Yes, it would be surreal, but we get used to all sorts of surreal things. As Colin Je…
- Assuming Charlie Sheen (actor)
Answering my own question here. Charlie disappears to Thailand, having eloped with Rose.Alan finds a letter from Charlie giving him the house.For a moment Alan tries to act sad and concerned that Cha…
- Philosophy of Science: If cosmology relies on mathematics so complex that only a few people understand it, how does it differ from theology?
This is a criticism commonly leveled against Superstring Theory and its approach to gravity. There are two books essentially accusing it of being theological rather than scientific in nature. I revie…
- Why has Airbnb not been sued or regulated out of existence by the agencies that regulate the hotel industry?
Am studying civics stuff for my citizenship test, and it seems to me that Yishan Wong's argument is actually specifically encoded in the 9th amendment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nin... This seems…
- When and how did creative accounting begin?
Interpreting the term broadly, I'll offer this origin myth. It was 15,000 BC. Zorg the caveman killed a deer one year, when the hunting was bad. Morg, the much taller and stronger chief of his trib…
- Is a machine learning a science or art?
Roar Nybø I am not entirely sure this is the same question as Why are spreadsheet champions considered to be expert data analysts while computer science majors take a back seat? That question was mor…
- What is the connection between population growth and the wealth of a nation?
I interviewed Rob Salkowitz (author of a few relevant books on this broad theme) a while back and we touched upon this, in relation to his latest book "Young World Rising" where he explicitly consider…
- Has Apple moved from making tools for creators to making devices for consumers?
I've quoted this article before in some other Apple related question. http://al3x.net/2010/01/28/ipad.... This is why I say that the iPad is a cynical thing: Apple can’t – or won’t – conceive of a …
- Are there more Zero Sum or non Zero Sum games?
I believe both classes would be equal in size. The argument hinges on Euclidean spaces of all finite powers being basically the same infinity and equal to the real line. Take the simplest case, the n…
- What are the best simple games?
My absolute favorite simple game is probably Tetris. I use it as an extended metaphor for accumulation of entropy in decision-making processes in my book, Tempo. Many video games try to build in a "i…
- How can angel investment in DC be rapidly expanded in 2011?
Do something to make LivingSocial the anchor company. Blackboard and AOL are past their "sell by" dates as inspiration.Pick ONE university (AU, GW or Georgetown) to turn into the anchor university. I'…
- How far down the abstraction chain do you need to understand to be a "great" programmer?
Allen Cheung I think nailed it with "Having to leap "between the layers" of abstraction is pretty much counter to what it means for a software layer to be abstracted." To be a great programmer doing …
- Some startups never get the publicity they deserve. What can be done to obtain more exposure, especially in the critical start phase?
To quote Chester Karrass, you don't get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate. In this case, what you negotiate with is the "market." The spectacular products will get found no matter what, an…
- What discipline-specific principles help reframe activities so as to provide useful insights and/or improvement?
I assume the question is asking for principles that are literally applied within the disciplines not proverbs like "measure twice, cut once" (which isn't really a principle in tailoring) "Premature o…
- Are there any psychological benefits to religion or atheism, in terms of mental health and well-being?
As Lawrence Sinclair notes, research shows that religious people are happier. Many studies show this, so it is a very solid correlation. Details of various studies of happiness and well-being reveal…
- Booz's report on "The Rise of Generation C": how accurate are their timing projections?
My first reaction is that the center-piece of the prediction, a converged "PDD" (primary digital device) does not seem even remotely plausible, which makes the rest of the argument very suspect in my…
- What elements should a new Web development framework contain by default?
A combined user and topic model with switches for symmetric/asymmetric following and in-site messagingAn abstract class called "social object" where you can plug in the code for whatever yours is (vid…
- How could a newly-established university be designed today in order to be élite? Which features must be included, and which features can be left out?
I don't agree with Sam Gerstenzang's answer. All the factors he talks about come later. Elitism has almost nothing to do with organizational design, and everything to do with whether you have the righ…
- What industries and professions are still ruled by "good ol' boy" networks? Industries where it can be difficult to break in as a young person, or as anyone who doesn't "know the right people".
I like this article that gives you a snaposhot of how things work these days: http://www.theatlantic.com/magaz... What is more relevant to our times, though, is that the rich of today are also diffe…
- What are the best books on political theory?
My list is going to be highly idiosyncratic, since I am mainly an autodidact in this area. Sticking to core theory. Biographies, analytical histories, political economy texts etc. are all obviously im…
- Bob Dylan (musician): How does it feel to be on your own with no direction home?
I am going to interpret the question as being about free agency, and not being tied to a paycheck. That's the "on your own" part. I don't understand the "no direction home" part and never have. I've…
- What is the upper limit on the number of participants in a group for which goals, rules, roles and so on can reasonably be negotiated?
Complicated questions. We can dismiss one wrong answer straight away: it is NOT Dunbar's number (150). Nor will it be a single number at all (obviously) it will be a coordination complexity/group siz…
- Why do so many people want to go into management consulting?
Let me add a history+future note to the many excellent points raised here, both due to Walter Kiechel, author of Lords of Strategy. I will assume you mean "strategy consulting" here. Without that adje…
- Who are some academic iconoclasts?
Among more modern ones, I like: Jon Doyle and Elisha Sacks in AI, they certainly smashed some idols in "Prolegomena to Any Future Qualitative Physics." Fred Hoyle and his gang kept up a spirited def…
- Why is theoretical computer science so dry in jobs, except for the academia? Though every company is faced with challenges, there is no hard-fought war against tough problems, and people tend to choose the easy way around every problem.
This is like asking, "I really wanted to specialize in solving crossword puzzles, but everybody in the publishing industry is just focused on the 'easy' problems of writing articles and books." Theor…
- Why do some people think they are right just because they are older?
Because they often are. Ignore the strawman stuff about religion, evolution, race etc. Basically, anything to do with social truths and cultural attitudes can be ignored. Pay attention to what they …
- Can you buy human shares? Is there a mechanism to buy shares in individuals' future success? There are profiles of people, such as athletes, I would be very interested in joining risk and contributing my funds.
Many examples already exist, some less dramatic than others. A one-person corporation where the individual's personal brand/skills are the main asset is effectively a publicly traded person if he/she…
- What is the greatest transformation of our world that you have witnessed in your lifetime?
Jeez, absolutely no contest here. Transition from massive information scarcity to massive information surplus in just 20 years. In cognitive terms, this is like the fish->amphibians-> reptiles evolu…
- How did U.G. Krishnamurti lay the groundwork for a system which could enable one to destroy their concept of personal identity?
Interesting. I hadn't heard of him before. He seems to be more like the popular perception of J. Krishnamurthy than JK himself. From what little I know about him, JK was a case of "do as I say, not as…
- What are the most common failure modes of design by committee?
I'll just list the top 10 (not in order) without explanation. These are for healthy committees whose delegates are from basically aligned organizations that are not trying to actively destroy each oth…
- Why do conversations with influencers matter?
Yoda's 25 Laws of Influence A Force that you are immersed in, influence is.Disappear the Force does, if not exercised regularly it is.Strengthened for all, the Force is, if seal a deal any two people…
- What is the most underrated threat to modern society?
Status RED: Falling water tables and water scarcity across the worldThe allure of the American lifestyle, which is a huge burden on the planet when 300 million live it, and will cause utter collapse …
- How did the adoption of agriculture affect quality of life?
Extremely negatively. The reason is a subtle one, and best captured by the William James quote, "The progress from brute to man is characterized by nothing so much as by the decrease in frequency of…
- Did the advent of agriculture affect the conduct of warfare?
There definitely WAS warfare before agriculture, and non-agrarian patterns of conflict continued long after agriculture became the mainstream way of life. In fact, non-agrarian lifestyles are characte…
- What are some signs that you should be acting instead of reflecting?
I like the Dr. House/diagnostic medicine heuristic the best: you need to do something when you've squeezed all the possible intelligence out of the data you already have. Clay Bodine is making the eq…
- How can someone stay focused and not give in to peer pressure?
Nick Huber has a well-intentioned answer, but what little is known about these things tells a grimmer story. Peer pressure has deep roots. Society couldn't function without it. Why? To understand pe…
- What's the best way to select one out of several potential company names?
Read Al and Laura Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. But who am I kidding. Despite my constant preaching, nobody takes naming seriously. They want to get it over with in an afternoon brainstorm…
- Why do businesses need to have a logo?
Does a baby need a recognizable face? Yes. A logo or wordmark, or both. I don't make a big distinction between the two because a wordmark without a logo is usually strongly stylized so it is recogniz…
- Is it better to be niched and a subject matter expert? Or, a generalist who knows a bit about a lot of things?
This is a highly unproductive framing in my experience. Depth/breadth besides being sterile and taxonomic in their approach to capabilities, are uselessly fuzzy and confused. It is useful for organiz…
- Why has the empowered employee predicted in the Cluetrain Manifesto not emerged?
tl;dr version: you can take the individual out of the hierarchy, but you cannot take the hierarchy out of the individual. To be honest, I never bought into the Cluetrain Manifesto to begin with. It w…
- PARC (company): Why did it take so long for Xerox's early 1970s computing developments to reach the mainstream?
Err... no, it didn't. It was astonishingly fast as these things go. It was the very speed of development that made it hard to get organized properly and get everything to market in-house. PARC was s…
- What aspect should you focus to make disruptive a startup for restaurant's online reservation, with social ideas?
User-13135008672097594132's answer covers the basic issue very well. I'd add: watch Gordon Ramsey's shows religiously to understand what's really important in running a good restaurant, and things lik…
- Why don't we have flying cars?
There have literally been DOZENS of working prototypes that solved the technical problem. You can see some of the more famous ones at air museums. Here's a picture of one I took at the Udvar-Hazy muse…
- What are examples of manipulation of consumers' choices?
Expensive brands are stocked at eye level. Cheap brands on lower shelves. See Paco Underhill's Why We Buy for a lot more examples at the retail level. Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely has many ex…
- How do I gently discourage people from leaving me voicemail and instead encourage them to use text-based forms of communication (e.g. SMS, email, etc.)?
Why bother being gentle? Just make your voicemail message polite and brusque but unambiguous: "I rarely check voicemail or return calls. If you want an actual response, email me at blah." I've been m…
- Is Realpha a bad company name?
This is not a good name, and it's not a subjective opinion. It violates several empirically validated branding principles like making your name pronounceable in an obvious way, being tasteful about so…
- What's a cool name for my new custom wood furniture shop in New York City?
I wouldn't go for "clever" here. A small specialty retail store in a custom craft domain is best named after the lead crafts person or owner. You want something that has human-like reputation and cred…
- Can late-blooming developers ever catch up with the whiz-kids? If you didn't start programming until your 20s, can you pretty much forget about competing with these guys?
There may be empirical studies about this sort of thing, but I suspect the answer is no. Programming is similar to mathematics or chess. It is a young person's game. The age of peak achievement may v…
- What is the biggest problem with U.S. foreign relations with developing countries?
Probably the inability to give up the attitude usually known as "American Exceptionalism." The idea that there is one rule for everybody else, and one rule for America. This doesn't cause such a huge…
- What are the best strategies to move up quickly to senior management?
I'll assume this question is about getting to the C-suite in a large company and doing it well enough that you get featured in Fortune magazine etc. I guess I am notorious for promoting the view tha…
- Is Quora the future of blogging?
No, and the reason has nothing to do with technology or business strategy or trends or anything Quora can control. It has to do with the cognitive psychology of the medium. Blogging is not the message…
- Should a student finish college or go work for a startup if given the chance to work for a YC, TechStars alumni?
I am surprised at how narrowly utilitarian and instrumental (i.e. viewing college as a means to an end) all the answers have been so far. I am also willing to bet that a lot of people urging the drop-…
- Was it worth it to view a Space Shuttle launch in person?
I watched one of the rare night launches from a cruise ship. Easily one of the highlights of my life. Wouldn't trade it for anything. The night was overcase, and nothing seemed to happen as the laun…
- What does it cost to place a book at the front of Barnes & Noble?
Unless your name is "Malcolm Gladwell" or something, what you are asking is basically not possible. But a more limited thing is possible. First you need to get distribution via a channel that Barnes…
- What are some ideas for ways we can change American culture, to help people to consider science cool?
Trying to make something "cool" is an exercise in silliness. It's like certain kinds of Christian Rock, or state-sponsored inspirational movies like the ones by Goebbels in Nazi Germany. But this sil…
- What is a one sentence definition of "the cloud"?
I'll provide a working definition that's part of a broader analysis I am doing. This definition actually applies to any kind of infrastructure. A cloud is any piece of infrastructure that separates p…
- If you had a $1 million/unit budget to design the best baby stroller possible, what would it be?
I was asked to answer this question. I have no idea why. I have no kids, and don't plan on having any. But I don't actually dislike kids like some do, and do appreciate the fact that they'll be keepin…
- Is it hard to build, market, and maintain a web app that makes at least $1,000 a month for a single, skilled web developer?
This is a very interesting question, and the responses are very revealing. It is instantly clear who knows what they are talking about. My litmus test for sorting out those who have actually tried to…
- How well is NASA run?
That's the wrong question. Most of the problems with NASA can be traced to confused thinking at the political level. The agency is about as well-run as such an agency can be (a mix of operations wor…
- What does it mean to "keep" a customer?
I don't have a theory, but I have some interesting examples to ponder that suggest some key characteristics of "keeping" a customer (curiously, all B2B). I'll evolve this answer as I think/clarify the…
- For those who went to top-tier schools, is it more rude to answer directly when asked "What school did you go to/Where did you go to school?", or to instead name the city where the school is located? Why?
People who are answering "it is a simple question, just give a straight answer" are missing the social psychological subtleties. "Where did you go to school" rarely comes up as a direct question excep…
- What was the most consequential human decision ever made? By ‘decision’ I mean a specific situation where individual people made a conscious choice.
I think, strictly speaking, this is unknowable. But philosophically this type of question is very useful to ask, because it forces us to truly examine the idea of consequentiality of decisions. It is …
- How do you overcome the paralysis of inaction after experiencing multiple failures?
Seek solace and motivation in the bloody-minded, "nothing to lose" narrative. This is easier to demonstrate than to describe: watch the scene in Cool Hand Luke where he keeps getting beat down and ke…
- What are some studies on the effects of social proof on enjoyment?
In Mindless Eating, Brian Wasnick cites studies that show that people enjoy wine with expensive labels more than the same wine with cheap labels. Price is a sort of proxy for social proof.There was a …
- Are women more intuitive than men?
Mu. The question is misframed. There is no such thing as "general" intuition which can serve as the basis for such a comparison. There are only intuitions, plural. What's more, there is no fundament…
- What slang terms do different industries call their customers?
Fascinating question. Never thought about it. Reveals a lot about the world of buying. Somebody like Paco Underhill ("Why We Buy") should research this and write a book about it. Peter Baskerville ha…
- Given that the rich are so powerful, how did the masses ever win any battles at all?
In addition to the arguments offered by the other answers, it is important to note the implication of one fact: most "popular" revolutions are in fact led by members of the upper classes. In fact you…
- Can filing a patent application be a strategic disadvantage since one is inherently revealing their business model to competitors at the time of filing?
Yes, and this is a very deliberate decision for companies. At my former employer for instance, the internal review process for patent applications could recommend either a filing or retention of the i…
- What can I be doing on the business marketing side for my startup while my partner, a programmer, is still building a proof of concept of our product?
A "model" is not particularly useful, so you are NOT actually ahead. As the paraphrased military saying goes, no business model survives first contact with the market. All this stuff: "I have a full…
- Is consulting a way of outsourcing thinking?
This is a trite question in a way. All consulting IS some form of thinking-outsourcing. The reason this is NOT a trite question is that often what is really going on when it looks like the client is…
- Should internet access be considered a fundamental human right?
I am amused by the people who are using the argument that there are people who still don't have access to more "basic" rights. If it is at all possible, Internet access SHOULD be a basic right becaus…
- Is there a mechanical engineering analogue to "Hello World"? (or: What's a good starter project?)
First, one of the MOST useful things you can do to develop your mechanical engineering instincts is to look at classic mechanisms. The world's biggest collection is called the Realeaux collection at…
- Why are some people more ambitious to be rich than happy?
Happiness is not a particularly laudable goal, philosophically speaking. Nietzsche had only contempt for happiness-seeking. Pursuit of wealth is a flawed version of the pursuit to transform oneself t…
- Why do so many educated people today still believe in religion?
I have encountered five basic motivations among educated people (which I'll also interpret as smart/thoughtful, but disinclined to think too hard; best-case scenario), along with my estimated percenta…
- How do you come to terms with the fact that you're just ordinary?
This is a "be somebody" orientation. With this, even if you become the richest person in the world, win the Nobel in every category, cure cancer and bring about world peace, you'll still have the anxi…
- If we found a habitable planet and wanted to colonize it, what would be the most feasible approach?
Even if we don't assume a basic science breakthrough like hyperspace, warp drive or time travel, we still need at least big engineering paradigm shifts to get to even "not laughable" concepts. Fun sci…
- Is Airbnb's $1 billion valuation ridiculous? By my counts, they seem to have only done about $15-20M in revenue, yet are commanding a $1B+ valuation. They are growing quickly, but shouldn't the valuation have been in the low hundreds of millions?
It is very rare indeed that a Web startup has a clear and distinct impact on the mainstream world, shows clear evidence of a strong revenue stream and a big market disruption opportunity. I also used…
- How much should a small start up realistically set aside for UI design?
Since you are bootstrapped, I'll assume you plan to hit revenue on Day 1 and "profitability" in a lifestyle business sense at a very low acquisition bar like 2000 users. For a bootstrapped business, i…
- Has anything good come out of the Institute for Advanced Study?
The joke in academia is that the Institute destroys geniuses. All the great names associated with it did their best work before going there. That said, I believe Einstein and Godel did some interestin…
- What are the most sinister real-world conspiracies in history?
The takeover of Bengal by the East India Company in 1757. The main actors were Robert Clive, Amir Chand (Omichund), Mir Jafar, Nabakrishna Deb, Alivardi Khan and Siraj-ud-Daulah. I just wrote a blog …
- What is the best way of finding out whether a start up idea is worth spending time developing?
There are three key variables in this decision: Analysis of the idea itself, relative to other ideasEstimation of market demand, by any means necessaryIntrospection, individual and collective by the …
- What should I do if I have an unpronounceable name for most people?
My name is borderline that way. Mispronunciation doesn't bother me at all so long as I can understand when I am being called under normal ambient noise conditions. I expect the same latitude for erro…
- How can I break my sleeping pill habit and better treat my insomnia?
I used to suffer from severe insomnia 12-13 years ago. Medication didn't help. What did the trick for me was voluntarily quitting the pills, adopting much better "sleep hygiene" and slowly making life…
- Is Tristan Walker
It is very misleading to think that Foursquare "owns the brand around location." Location is an engineering aspect of certain products or services. It is not a market or customer experience in its own…
- What are the best comic books that have not yet been made into movies?
Two American super-heroes are quite popular in other parts of the world in syndication but don't seem to be popular in the US itself. One is the Phantom, and the other is Mandrake the Magician. http…
- What is the greatest achievement of Western civilization? What can Westerners be proud of in the global community?
By definition, "Western" suggests a contrast with "Eastern," and in that comparison and the very word "achievement" in the question, you can find the answer. I'll juxtapose "Western" against one major…
- Can war strategy ethically be translated into business strategy?
The other answers are missing the main point, which is the "ethically" bit. Without that, it is a tautology. Of course good ideas from one domain can always be applied in another if they are applicabl…
- Why is it that so many people today are unable to see or are unfamiliar with the true nature of reality?
There are three major assumptions in your question, that there is a true "nature of reality," that there are people who see it better than others (with you being one of them) and that it is useful to …
- How can mathematics be marketed better?
How would you market a deep immersion into Zen practice? A month-long retreat at a monastery? Take those ideas, and substitute math. Because that is what it is. A sort of spiritual practice. And trust…
- How does one market oneself as a Swami?
Roughly the same way popular preachers like Billy Graham establish themselves in America. Here's my lean-Swami startup formula. And yes, you do have to be Indian and Hindu, and start out IN India to w…
- Are there distinctly feminine and masculine values?
I forget the reference, but I read an evolutionary psychology argument somewhere that supports User and Margaret Clinton. Take it with a grain of salt, like all evolutionary psychology arguments. It i…
- What generic first order principles should a new technology project or startup follow?
Now this is what I call a competitive answer field. Hmm... I wonder if I can at least overtake Ashton Kutcher. Overtaking Naval Ravikant is probably out of the question. I'll stick to things that are…
- Why are so many graduate students disillusioned with graduate school/their advisor/etc.? Is it possible to predict how "nice" your advisor is ahead of time, by talking to the advisor's students? Couldn't you transfer advisors?
Because they never take ownership of their lives, and don't overcome cynicism enough to do what I call a "romantic PhD." Most often this is due to a too-strong attachment to the social/community life …
- The West sees South Asia's gender-selective abortions as a major issue. Does South Asia see it as a major issue as well?
I am not aware that it IS seen as a major issue here in the West. I've never seen any coverage of it in the mainstream news. In India, there is significantly more coverage. Or at least there was whi…
- How would I go about doing a new religion "startup?"
Starting a new religion from scratch would be very tough. Antiquity is the main source of legitimacy for religions. It takes at least 100 years for "lunatic cult" to get upgraded to "religion" for exa…
- What are some tips for advanced writers? How do you push your writing into "excellency" territory?
I just published a book and a friend, another book writer, privately complimented me on the "poetic grace" of my book. The comment made my day. So I'll take that as my claim to being an "medium advanc…
- Why hasn't technological improvement resulted in us working less?
A few interesting pieces of history may help here. Let me try to complement Gregory Rader's excellent economics-based answer with a historical one. Actually there WAS some reduction in work for some …
- What could a 20-year-old do to potentially improve their quality of life?
Your biggest asset is time. So the most valuable lesson for you concerns compound interest. Learn to appreciate the absolute centrality of compound interest in every major department of life. Every on…
- Should an artist get to decide or control how the viewer should view their work?
I was one of the polarizing respondents to the What's the best way to photograph food in a restaurant for blog posts? question, so I suppose I should respond to this one. I am actually more accommoda…
- What are some interesting personal manifestos?
I don't like the idea of a manifesto at all. Possibly because I am very suspicious of larger "save the world" visions in general. Most "personal" manifestos aren't really personal at all. They contain…
- Would the Hollywood studio system be improved if more (or any) philosophers were hired?
I am going to give a typically philosophical answer, but just to buy your patience for the process of philosophy, I'll give you a piece of low-hanging fruit. If you are planning to make a campy movie,…
- What is the best way to cope with having to work for a person who is completely incompetent?
Ethics note: these are amoral techniques below, and will likely deeply offend those who believe ends don't justify means or in concepts like "respect." They can be applied towards/against either you…
- What would it take to build a ladder in to outer space?
No, not with materials available today. And likely not with any conceivable material. The main reason is drag. The reason I say this is a much simpler concept that HAS been considered/tried, the idea…
- What are some great character names in fiction (e.g. novels, tv, film, etc.)? Choosing names for characters seems to be extremely hard to do well, since a well-chosen name can encapsulate the entire DNA of a culture. What makes them great?
Going slightly meta, (I posted the question), I learned the significance of character names from a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story, The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World. It was one of the assigned sho…
- How do I re-frame a question on Quora?
I made the following remark in the comments to another Q&A, and Sean Hood asked that I repost it as an answer here. Here goes (with a couple of edits and a bit of expansion). Interesting conversation…
- Why might women have better handwriting (more readable, neater) than men in general?
I am not sure I buy Eva Glasrud's inferences from the research she cites. I am skeptical that this anecdotal neatness observation is actually true. I think context and personality are likely a far b…
- Is it immoral to play Medal of Honor
Err... no. After all, in war gaming, US military personnel routinely play they other side. In a very famous one for example, the Millennium War Games, Paul Van Riper, a marine Lt. Col., played comman…
- Are we on the verge of an entrepreneurial revolution?
I don't quite agree with User. We've mostly seen the pre-game show so far. The revolution proper is just getting started. The intellectual foundations haven't been laid completely yet. To understand t…
- What are tools to help one name a startup?
You really don't need tools beyond a basic whois service and a sense of the gestalt/fashion trends around naming. When you figure out the positioning, the naming and branding problem become fairly tr…
- Who would be good presenters at the HBS Entrepreneurship Conference on Nov 6, 2010?
I expect the usual suspects (Eric Ries Vivek Wadhwa, Steve Blank etc. from the lean startup movement) are already on the radar. Some unusual suspects you may want to consider if there is interest in…
- What are typical key performance indicators for a web product?
I assume you're familiar with Dave McClure's "Startup Metrics for Pirates"? If not, you should take a look. http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500... It's primary value is that it comes with the best bac…
- Why do restaurants have you pay after you've eaten vs. before you begin the meal?
The decision by a retailer to go with pay first/pay later models is only one small part of an overall pricing strategy/experience design problem that is generally called "yield rate management." Besid…
- What strategic role does sales play in product design and development?
This is far too general a question. The relationship between sales and product development induces a combinatorial explosion of possible situations that is vast enough that you can practically fingerp…
- If you were to offer users the choice of 900 hours of usage in a month for $14.95 OR unlimited usage in a month for $19.95, which would people pick?
This is a technical question on setting pricing breakpoints and there is no way to answer it without understanding what you are actually selling and gathering actual usage data. Use this rough approch…
- What can you cook with just a knife and one saucepan?
Let me share one of my own recipes. Rice-lentil porridge Get the papery stuff off an onion, chop off the non-root end and then cut a manhattan grid about 1 inch deep into the onion's circular face,…
- What is the best way to motivate oneself, when one is at the tail end of finishing a PhD?
Get over yourself. There's a point at which "passion for my own ideas" becomes a symptom of intellectual greed, lack of discipline or rationalization of some underlying fear. Methinks you protest too …
- What are prerequisites for a good understanding of a course in aerodynamics?
There is a macro-level subject that is unique to aerospace engineering which is usually called "aerodynamics" or "flight dynamics" and there is a more general micro-level one called "fluid and gas dyn…
- What makes for a great minimalist 80-20 food lifestyle?
Mine: Equipment Cutting board and knifeOne medium saucepan with lidOne griddle or frying pan, medium or largeOne large and one small mixing bowlOne spatulaOne ladleOne rolling pinTwo plates, two sp…
- How do I get my young daughters hooked on watching football?
It's a complex game with a complex subculture around it, so there should be something that plays to ANYONE'S strengths. So figure out their strengths and use them. You'll need to do it individually. N…
- Why are movie directors generally more visible and more renowned than screenwriters?
I used to write the scripts for class productions in high school and did quite a bit of acting and directing as well in amateur theater in college as an undergrad (geek admission, I was the "dramatics…
- Why do corporations die so much more frequently than universities?
It's a case of form following function. I'll ignore the formal structure of both, and consider the functional nature of the two types of organizations. Universities exist to preserve, perpetuate and…
- Do people from Turkey consider themselves to be Europeans or Asians and why? What does the rest of the world think about Turkey’s identity?
tl;dr answer: Asian. The question is almost entirely a religion question. There are 2 other candidate variables that might matter: genetics/looks and non-religious aspects of culture. I'll explain wh…
- How can atheists have meaningful moral opinions?
Umm... I'd say only atheists can have meaningful moral opinions. "Because god said it is a sin" is not a meaningful opinion. Religion takes the meaning out of morality. When religious people are thoug…
- People pay for graphic design, for web development, etc. so why do most people think they can do UX design on their own?
Because in many cases they can. Your question implies a definition of "real" UX professionals that you should probably clarify. Who do you mean? People with HCI degrees? Some sort of diploma? People …
- Maritime Piracy: Why are pirates so romanticized in popular culture?
To a certain extent they deserve to be romanticized. They are an archetype that represents individualism, statelessness and an illegible specter of Darwinian justice in a global court of natural law t…
- What is the literature that one should read in order to get a broad scientific background?
Your question and link suggest that you don't quite understand what you are asking for. The link is to "polymath" with Leonardo Da Vinci held up as an archetype. You are asking what to "read" to under…
- How crucial is cheap energy to future scientific and technological innovation?
In the medium term, cheap energy is ridiculously important for the simple reason that scientific and technological innovation rely on functioning civil societies to support them, generating enough of …
- What are the best ways to respond humbly when someone says that you're smart?
You need a triage. "Thanks" is usually enough for 80% of the cases that are prima facie best-faith and genuine compliments without ulterior motives. The other 20% requires a careful examination of …
- Why doesn’t the mind-body problem bother atheists?
The two are pretty much unrelated. This is like asking why worries about pink bunnies taking over the world don't keep physicists working on a unified field theory up at night. "God" is not a metaphy…
- Why does a chicken egg not break when pressed by its ends?
It's basic mechanical engineering and the same reason arches and domes don't collapse, and the reason why corrugated sheets can support more weight than flat ones. It WILL collapse if you press hard…
- What are the most fascinating known unknowns?
Excellent answers from the physical sciences. Let me add a few known unknowns from the humanities. These tend to be less clearly stated, but the following questions account for a big chunk of what I c…
- What are the right ways and wrong ways companies use strategic planning?
Strategic planning is an umbrella term under which companies do a LOT of things. There are no right or wrong ways to do it (excluding obviously dumb ways like using astrology or tea-leaf reading), the…
- What is the main cause of poverty?
The simplest answer is that it is a necessary companion to economic growth. Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto started this line of thinking in economics, and it continues strongly. http://en.wikipe…
- What would the ideal 2-night itinerary be for someone's first time in Las Vegas?
Recently moved here and am starting to get local instincts. Am assuming you have no special velvet rope access to the secret high-life of Vegas and are not a high-roller willing to drop 100k+ gambling…
- Would it be possible for the West to maintain its standard of living in a world with say, only half the population it has now?
Depends entirely on which half. Douglas Adams' A, B and C arks carried this thought experiment to interesting extremes. It was a clever plan to get rid of the most useless 1/3 of humanity, but it had…
- In which ways is the standard of living a function of population size?
At the lowest level, standard of living is simply species survivability, and I recall one excellent data point about that: the colonization of Australia by early humans. Back then the seas were lower …
- Will oDesk and mfg.com
I used to research this area extensively and led development of a marketplace product at Xerox. As part of this, I researched the space a lot, and got to know the CEO of oDesk, Gary Swart quite well. …
- Will Google+ Hangout significantly change the way we communicate?
I wrote that post in 2008 as you note. Since then, I've gotten a bit skeptical of the ambient presence idea since I haven't actually seen it catch on anywhere. Webcams never got that popular outside t…
- How do you combine tactics to form a strategy?
There are a few different ways of resolving the semantic confusion between the two words and none of them is entirely satisfying. Most are terrible and cause fatal confusions. This question reflects o…
- What benefits does one get from thinking really hard about the foundations of Artificial Intelligence?
I am not a Strong AI guy. So I think AI does not and cannot "explain" what Chalmers' calls the "Hard Problem of Consciousness." (HPoC) I also think HPoC is a more interesting problem than AI itself. …
- Who was specifically responsible for the invention of the "windows" GUI paradigm at Xerox PARC?
If you insist on assigning credit (a bad idea as I will explain) Alan Kay probably deserves much of the credit. You need to remember that the legendary-era PARC was a very collaborative environment w…
- History of Computing: What are the best resources to round out an education on Xerox PARC?
None. A better version of the story will never really be properly told in public because the organizations involved (Xerox, DARPA, Stanford, SRI, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, 3COM...) have perceptions to …
- Is society conditioning us to think that we have to have a job to get money?
First, I'll echo the others: people like Pavlina are not meant to be taken seriously. They are the web's equivalent of bad infomercials. Enjoy for camp value, and move on. Second, I'll answer quite l…
- What are strong indicators that someone new to a particular field has a lot of potential?
You have to distinguish strongly (I can't emphasize this enough) between evolutionary and revolutionary potential. For a young and growing field, the former kind of high-potential people are a lot mor…
- At age 20, why do I have this feeling like there's no more time left? How do I deal with it? Am I having a “quarter-life crisis”?
I have no idea why others are rushing to reassure you. I'll answer your main question instead of the question details which seems to be mainly about the problems of what is being called "emerging adu…
- What are the most interesting castles or palaces in the world? What makes them interesting?
In terms of candidates from India, people generally pick the pretty palaces/forts on the Rajasthan tourism trail. My personal favorites though, are less attractive forts that have more interesting s…
- What are some things to keep in mind when selecting a self-storage provider?
Main decision these days is pods vs. building units. Pods are more expensive, but if you anticipate uncertain and complicated multi-leg moves and need access throughout, they pay for themselves since …
- How will "Coasean growth" be measured?
I don't yet have a good idea, but Gregory Rader I think has taken a very important preliminary step in his recent post "Unifying the Value Universe." http://onthespiral.com/unifying-... Read the …
- Was Babylonian mathematics developed using Arabic numerals or Hindi numerals?
Without a library of original 7th-13th century manuscripts from India, Arabia and Europe to look at, it's hard to say what the actual written notation used to look like back then as the corpus of ma…
- Is violence bad? Why is it celebrated? For example, even the tame stories in popular culture, such as G rated Disney classics, often resolve conflicts with it and cheers follow. Or the dramatic celebration following the violent death of Bin Laden.
Good/bad does not apply. Violence is more fundamental than either. It is a property of the universe that precedes humans and even life itself. Calling it good or bad is like calling the law of gravity…
- Do people base their worth (social media--wise or personal) on how many followers they have?
I assume you mean psychological self-worth, not net-worth in a financial sense or something else. There is clearly no general answer. There are people who do, people who don't, and people who are som…
- What are the most epic fails in the history of the world?
From the weirder pages of Indian history, the hare-brained schemes of Muhammad bin Tughlaq (1325-1351), ruler of the Delhi Sultanate, are great examples of epic fails. His name is now a byword for gov…
- How historically common is it for societies to have a large middle class?
Extremely uncommon. The middle class is largely the creation of the industrial age and has existed mainly since the early 19th century. Arguably there were other short periods when a similar class exi…
- Why does there appear to be a profusion of self-styled "polymaths" on Quora? What aspects of life or work do polymaths believe allows them to include themselves in said group?
Apparently, I come across as one. I detest the term and don't believe it is a well-posed construct. People who call me that imagining they are giving me a compliment should be aware that I view it as …
- Why is the concept of time so important in Western culture?
Too complex to answer on Quora. Try Jeremy Rifkin's "Time Wars" (admittedly a left-liberal polemic) for a few good starting points. If you want deeper, heavier starting points, David Landes Revoluti…
- What celebrities—from movies, television, politics, sports or elsewhere—have best translated their fame into a web "following" of some kind? How did they do it?
A lot of them seem to have translated their offline fame into some sort of followership. In fact most who haven't could do so overnight, so it doesn't really mean much. Sure, some are more skillful th…
- Does Quora need to employ a full-time community manager, and if so, which job responsibilities would be appropriate?
I am very skeptical of the very notion of community manager. Whenever I hear people talking about it, it almost always sounds like a non-job description made up by self-styled social-media "experts" t…
- What is an interesting demonstration using basic tools to show air pressure or water pressure?
There are a couple of really good ones. Both are due to the Bernoulli effect. Kissing eggs: stick two pencils into a corkboard or something, about 2 inches apart, vertical. Get two relatively intact …
- How can you convince someone to abandon a deep-seated belief?
Ignoring easily falsifiable beliefs, obviously unfalsifiable ones and beliefs with no strong emotional content making them "deeply held," we are left with the tricky ones: complicated beliefs involvin…
- What is anecdotal empirical evidence?
tl;dr: Data is not the plural of anecdote. Both are valid. They are not mutually exclusive. Synthesizing them for a given situation is the act of modeling. Two of my posts may help, and one Quora an…
- How did people wake up on time before the invention of the alarm clock?
http://www.quora.com/How-did-people-wake-up-on-time-before-the-invention-of-the-alarm-clock/answer/Marc-Bodnick is pretty a good straight-up one. I'll add some additional context. Two good reference…
- Do authors have a (truly 100%) free place to sell ebooks?
To Katie Bremer's answer I'll add this: for ebooks, you need to distinguish between fulfilment channels and fulfilment+marketing channels. Fulfilment channels merely simplify things like shopping cart…
- How do you know when your online relationship is ready to move to real life?
I've done this sort of thing probably several dozen times so far. Your biggest concern, unfortunately, needs to be ensuring safety and overall pleasantness of encounters (awkwardness is okay and to be…
- Is psychohistory possible? Is it possible and useful to mathematically formalize human behavior on large scales to probabilistically predict the future?
I very strongly doubt it. The math involved in long-range predictive models simply doesn't work that way. Asimov wrote the books before the chaos theory field took off and the full nature of sensiti…
- Why didn't Google enter the smartphone, tablet, or laptop markets before their Nexus and Chrome OS devices were introduced?
Short answer: Google is respecting the historic "grain" of the industry. The computing industry has historically been horizontally rather than vertically integrated since the decline of Big Iron IBM …
- How can one make money starting a blog?
There are some basic confusions in this quesiton. Platforms like WordPress or Blogger do not pay. Ad schemes like AdSense do. "Skewed" is right. The median blog probably makes $0. There are plenty of…
- What advantages do restricted membership groups have over public open groups?
I like an idea I inferred from Geoffrey West's (Santa Fe researcher) recent work on cities vs. corporations: the more open a group is, the more likely it is to be long-lived or even effectively eterna…
- What were the most significant innovations in the history of politics? Why?
I am leaving out some basic ones that enabled things other than politics, such as language and trade. In rough chronological order: The basic protection-for-loyalty tradeFederation (alliances among s…
- Are people better at making observations, discoveries, and decisions if they remain neutral and impartial? Why or why not?
In a limited sense, yes. If you are talking about creative observations, decisions and discoveries in the sense of scientific work. A better phrase is "open minded." In negotiations for example, whe…
- Is verifiable success in a multi-level marketing or pyramid scheme considered good or bad in a candidate for a recruiting position?
I doubt it. One is predatory sales skills targeting the dumbest people you can find. The other is generally peer-to-peer or inferior-to-superior (social status wise) sales skills targeting the smartes…
- What's so amazing that keeps us stargazing, and what do we think we might see?
I assume you mean amateur astronomers, not the professional ones who pretty much program their computers to do the work these days and look at pictures later, rather than pressing their eyes against a…
- What caused India to fall so far behind technologically from its zenith in the 12th Century?
What do you get if you consider a Europe where Christ was born a prince in Rome in 563 BC, and if the Alps were much higher and a few hundred miles further north? You'd get India. The stories of Euro…
- Corporate Culture: Why do successful business people tend to use coarser language and speak more harshly of others than technical people in the same industry?
Technical work tends to be collaborative and non-zero sum. Business work, especially on the deal-making, negotiating front (sales, M&A, investing) tends to be competitive, Darwinian, zero-sum. If you…
- Which are better, the Harry Potter books or movies? Why?
In terms of literary quality, without a doubt it's the movies (ironic, huh?) In terms of just creating a maze-world for serious fans to get lost in, the books. These are the people who live on fanfic…
- Is it possible to out-design nature?
A very smart friend once described evolution, by analogy to software development, as "0% design, 100% QA" (quality assurance: bug detection and elimination). That's exactly correct. The process is …
- What is the simplest way to be calmer, to relax, and to reduce stress?
I may be an outlier here. I don't think actual relaxation is possible for the vast majority. Only band-aids. There's one solution, but it is a competitive one, so only a minority can enjoy it. Consc…
- Does a business opportunity exist to build an inverted anti-ad network to pay visible people NOT to promote a product?
The celebrities in question would have to be notorious/infamous with blackmailer mentalities, rather than ordinary celebrities. The closest example I can think of is the traditional transvestite comm…
- Personal Bankruptcy: What is it like to be secretly broke?
Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire is a pretty interesting exploration of that condition. People hang on to a given social class as long as they can, and long after the means to sustain…
- To what extent has Indian cinema proliferated throughout the world?
I'll preface this by saying I've gradually been losing touch with Indian cinema. I think I last watched an Indian movie almost a year ago. They are popular among non-Indians in parts of Africa, Centr…
- What are the best ways to monetize a food blog without filling it with ads?
My friend Eric Marcus runs vegan.com, which is a lifestyle blog that combines a food lifestyle with other aspects. I believe his primary revenue source is affiliate marketing for things like relevant …
- How do I become a better thinker? How do I actively cultivate the skill of thinking outside the box, drawing insights from disparate facts, and consistently discovering uncharted intellectual territory?
I just wrote a post on my blog trying to generalize some of my thoughts from that answer to other domains. http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/0... Applying the ideas in the post to this question, you c…
- How would a society that focuses on growing Gross National Happiness look different from modern day American society?
Not very different. Reconstructing a feedback control loop requires that you change both what you measure and what you do with the feedback signal (actuation). Our big macroeconomic actuators: monetar…
- Why do people judge other people?
I am just reading Francis Fukuyama's excellent new book The Origins of Political Order. One of the things he does successfully is reframe classic "Man in the State of Nature" ideas (due to Hobbes and…
- What are the most promising disruptive innovations for the decade 2011-2020?
Modern basic science tends to take far longer to reach markets than it used to (~20-30 years at least), so if you are focusing on the next decade, basic science is not the place to look. You want to l…
- If it were possible to consume with zero environmental impact, would consumerism no longer pose a problem?
No. Environmental impact is not actually the most damaging effect of consumerism. The biggest damage is done to our psyches. Humans must fundamentally produce something of value (and I include pred…
- Given that "software is eating the world," what should non-technical people do? Organize to start a violent revolution? Re-train themselves?
I like the violent revolution idea actually :) More seriously, that's exactly what will happen if the software technology monster isn't tamed. It is a technology that's about 1000x more dangerous tha…
- How did long distance phone calls go from special occasions only to something we do without thinking?
It is probably purely a function of price drops. A minor factor may have been the emergence of the Internet as a way to stay in touch more intimately in the background as it were, which would make you…
- Why is the United States of America so much wealthier than other countries?
I am afraid I find most of the answers rather self-congratulatory and based on an amazingly limited context. The numbers in my answer below are rhetorical and metaphoric, not literal. We're talking a…
- Does praise feel less and less good as you get more and more of it?
For status-driven people, it is the source, not the amount that matters. It is a consumable, and you cannot accumulate it, since it depreciates in psychological value rapidly. Like rotting. So you can…
- What metrics would be good early leading indicators that well-educated nationals with valuable skills from other countries no longer see the US as the land of opportunity?
Most foreigners in the US, not counting those from unstable war-torn countries, are not really here for "opportunity" but quality of life. True opportunity-seekers are already mostly gone (or aren't e…
- Is China is preparing to dam the headwaters of the Brahmaputra and Sutlej rivers in Tibet, and re-route the flows into China?
I'll address this question, and also use it to riff a bit on India-China geopolitics, both for context, and also to help seed Quora with more international issues. From the Times of India, August 4t…
- What does it mean to "reinvent" yourself?
It is actually a fairly simple idea. I don't agree with Jeremy Liew that radical behavioral change is needed. People fundamentally don't change behaviors that are difficult to change. They change the…
- Economic Policy: What specific actions should be taken to lower the unemployment rate?
The answers to this related question might be helpful. There is significant emerging evidence that large segments of the middle class in the developed world will basically become unemployable soon, l…
- How did English become a so-called "universal language"?
It is an outcome of a complex of many causes that each appear to be minor, but together add up to an overwhelming advantage for English. I'd even remove the "second language" qualification. Weighting…
- What are the positive and negative manifestations of pride?
Are you proud to be somebody or are you proud that did something? Pride in who you are is generally a negative. Pride in what you do is generally a positive. It is easy to confuse the two. Getting …
- On what basis does a book publisher decide the selling price of a book they've just published?
At this stage in the maturity of the book industry, one factor dominates among the many mentioned by John Rose, "established or acceptable price range for book category." The industry is dominated mo…
- For which graduate programs does it make more sense to go immediately after undergrad?
Mathematics (or strongly mathematical subjects), music/fine arts and medicine are the only ones I can think of where it makes complete sense. Assuming you have the internal motivation. Most other fi…
- Can the US succeed in conquering Afghanistan, where the Soviet Union and British Empire have failed?
The political intractability of governing Afghanistan goes back to long before the Great Game, to the second or third millennium BC. There's a reason it's been called the graveyard of empires. At vari…
- Do I have bad writing habits that I should do something about?
Your strategy is going to get you more words, at the top of your ability, right now and next month. It is going to cause overall fewer words and lower quality over a lifetime. You are robbing your fut…
- Are jobs becoming obsolete?
By my estimate, jobs in the current sense will decine to about 40% of the workforce in America in about 20-25 years. Properly counted, I'd say they account for no more than 70% today. Many people get …
- Is interest in Quora waning? If so, what might be some of the reasons?
Interest is not waning. This is just a classic hype cycle effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyp... http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2008/1... Since this is a Web product, the hype cycle is exaggerated …
- What is going to be the future of online credits?
Fascinating question. The tricky part in predicting the course of this is that online credit schemes variously reflect both a transactional economy that supports a trade in informational goods of real…
- If the Internet and t.v.'s 24-hour news cycle had existed during the Great Depression, would it have ended sooner?
A faster news cycle doesn't necessarily mean more actual news. In fact much of today's news is repetition, dramatization and other random noise and fury signifying nothing. We have more programming ho…
- How did all American car manufacturing happen to get established in Michigan?
There are probably specific, contingent explanations based on unique conditions, local histories and biographies, but there are also some general spatial distribution patterns in the history of Americ…
- For what other reasons or reasons does inflation happen besides printing money?
Governments don't really "print money" anymore, though in theory they could. They do complicated things with bonds that I'll let the monetary policy types explain in their answers. These complicated t…
- What is Occupy Wall Street about?
A populist, vaguely anarcho-socialist movement to protest inequality, endorsed by the hacker group Anonymous (Hacktivist group). It seems to be inspired by the Arab Spring and the UK riots. AdBusters,…
- Why didn't Netflix retain (part of) their brand name when they split their company?
It was a courageous, by the book move, as far as the naming choices go. I don't know enough about the other things the company is getting criticized for, but if this approach to partitioning and repo…
- Why do people like to sit in cafes drinking coffee, using their computers, rather than just doing that at home?
Coffee, tea and alcohol in their social guises are best understood as examples of social objects (or more strictly, the central elements of broader rituals that are the social objects). They catalyze…
- Why is saying "I'm sorry" a sign of weakness to some?
I don't think I've ever encountered or observed a genuine apology in my life. So I have concluded the thing doesn't exist, and people don't like apologizing because they don't know what it actually me…
- Is Occupy Wall Street for real?
This is about as "real" as 9/11. What happened to world trade after the WTC was destroyed? Basically nothing. After a slight delay, business continued as usual. The markets absorbed and reacted to the…
- What moral traditions and values do we have in the U.S. that are unnecessary and outmoded?
I think this question is deeply misguided and a reflection of a very basic conceit on the part of progressives that there is an objective idea of modern/outdated that can be represented on an objectiv…
- If an apocalyptic event were to occur over the next 10-20 years, what shape is it most likely to take?
The top 5 in my subjective Bayesian order... A water-related conflict that escalates into a global-economy-disrupting "third world war" (in both senses of "third"). The violence may be limited to Asi…
- Does Quora's follow/following list qualify as a social network?
This is a question best answered with real data by someone like Stormy Shippy, based on how much Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Google+ graphs predict Quora graphs. I think Google+ is likely to be the most…
- Will Nandan Nilekani's effort to build an Indian biometric database succeed?
It just might. At least in the South, West and the Northwest (Punjab, Haryana) with the civic machinery to execute the idea with reasonable efficiency and acceptable levels of corruption. In what are…
- Corporations: Why do most companies use the Command-and-Control method of management?
It was the only game in town when communication technologies were primitive and expensive. When the cost per bit per hop is high, and the capital cost per direct link is also high, the optimal graph w…
- Is there any truth to the Ballmer Peak?
This is actually a comic exaggeration of a well-known principle in learning psychology called the Yerkes-Dodson law, which states that for optimal learning, you need a specific level of arousal -- not…
- Occupy Wall Street: With protestors calling for the arrests of negligent financial leaders responsible for the economic crisis, who specifically should be arrested, and why?
Unfortunately, the answer, in round numbers, is "nobody." Anything achievable within the letter of the law wouldn't be able to hit any of the real villains, or serve as a warning/deterrent to anyobody…
- Does Bollywood violate basic principles of good screenwriting?
Let's ignore the art house category (it's as good/bad as art house stuff elsewhere in the world). Let's also ignore genuine C-grade movies made for provincial markets (this category is sort of equival…
- When a failure to communicate happens, when is it the sender's fault, and when is it the receiver's fault?
My theory of communication is based on Wiio's law: all communication fails, except by accident. As you might expect, I've written a long-winded post about it. http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/0... I d…
- What are Venkatesh Rao
I am afraid my list will be mostly useless for non-Indians and redundant/contentious for Indians. My favorites are the ones that require either a near-native comprehension of Hindi (because much of …
- What is the simplest, most convincing explanation of the solution to the Monty Hall problem?
Personally I find the second approach mentioned by Henry Robinson works the best to convince me that the right answer is to switch (the large numbers case). It still isn't conceptually satisfying to …
- How do I strike the balance between confidence and arrogance?
Fascinating question. I don't think "balance" is a meaningful concept here. Arrogance is an overload on confidence that is appropriate in some situations. What you want to guard against is inappropria…
- Is Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan smart economics?
No. The numbers are too low, too equal and miss the whole point of tax law design. I don't know the exact rate/yield curve for the US economy (basically, up to a point tax revenues increase with tax l…
- Why do many Americans think that healthcare is not a right for its own taxpaying citizens, and should it not be considered as, or more, important by the American public than is education?
Because logically, it isn't. Nothing that takes scarce resources to provide can ever really be a "right" in the sense of "right to speech" or "right to religious beliefs." Those are rights that cost n…
- What would a moral nihilist say about The Holocaust?
Moral nihilists deny the meaningfulness of categories like good and evil. That does not mean they necessarily deny the reality of pain and suffering or condone acts that cause pain and suffering. Pa…
- What do link-sharing sites represent within the larger social milieu?
I can only speak to the blogger POV and extrapolate to the "broader social milieu" from there. The advantage of the POV is that you get a broad look at all the services and can compare them. The disa…
- What are some memorable experiences/personal transformations people have had in mechanical engineering workshops?
I'll answer my own question here. My experiences building stuff with my own hands (outside of routine home repairs, Ikea-level assembly etc.) are the following: A fairly complex model glider in airpl…
- What would the ideal web technology start-up team be composed of in terms of positions, skills sets, personalities, knowledge base, and experience?
There is an interesting pattern I've noticed: there is a whole lot more diversity of "types" in the successful bootstrapped teams I've met (that eschew traditional investment models) than in the VC f…
- Should 99% of the American people protest by closing their bank and financial service accounts and instead join non-profit credit unions?
It's people, not labels. It is dangerous to correlate "evil people" with a specific subset of institutions and using institution-level balance of power ideas to effect changes in how power is distribu…
- What are the next hard engineering problems that currently resist commoditization?
Paperwork. Screw Siri. I don't need a personal assistant to tell me where to find the nearest pizza place or move my appointments. I am perfectly happy with my productivity on those fronts. I want a p…
- Are U.S. businesses not creating jobs because of policy uncertainty?
I very much doubt it. User-9918985937555143421 has provided a couple of theoretical reasons why this might be true, but I haven't actually met any business owners or HR decision-makers who think this …
- Is consciousness an emergent property of the brain or a fundamental property of matter? Isn't saying that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain just as much a non-explanation as saying it is a fundamental property of all matter?
This is a false dichotomy. It is like asking "is bird flight an emergent property of avian biology or a fundamental property of fluid and gas dynamics in a gravitational field?" Consciousness (in the…
- How many neurons are needed to create a conscious entity? What's the minimum number of neurons to trigger that consciousness?
Sorry, we cannot "define a conscious being as one that is aware (if not perceptive) of both itself and it's surroundings." You've got to distinguish (if not define) consciousness, awareness and perc…
- Is everyone's experience of color the same?
Most answers here seem to be about the neuroscience and psychology of color perception and measurable behavioral differences (across gender or language for instance). This is not the question as it i…
- Why is e-commerce such a hot area in venture capital now?
For once I have a much shorter answer than most. E-Commerce is hot because investors smell blood. As in big-retail blood. As in spilled by swarms of local-brand small businesses thanks to the Group…
- If my vegetarian/vegan roommate doesn't want to use kitchen supplies with which meat is prepared and made, who should pay for the new stuff?
As a vegetarian, and near-vegan who has been in this situation, I'd expect to be the one buying/maintaining veggie-exclusive equipment. That's what I've done. Where possible vegetarians/vegans try the…
- Why is so much of Silicon Valley obsessed with small ideas that don't solve a problem?
It isn't your implicit value judgment that is wrong. It is your assumption that "The truth is that it's not that hard to get into commercialization of more complex technology if you're willing to inve…
- Why does the pro-life movement insist on forcing pregnant mothers who do not want babies to have them?
You're trying to perversely get to the logic of the pro-life position from the foundational assumptions of the pro-choice movement. If that could be done there would be no debate. So I am afraid you…
- What are the best ways for one to make one's cat morbidly obese?
I have one obese cat and one overweight cat. It's not hard. Get 2 cats with conflicting feeding styles, open-feed them dry cat food, don't play with them too much. I ended up in this trifecta situatio…
- Is it really possible to make your own luck?
"For example, when I came to Bell Labs, I shared an office for a while with Shannon. At the same time he was doing information theory, I was doing coding theory. It is suspicious that the two of us di…
- What do I do now that I am rich? I made seven figures last year, which is not that rich, but rich never the less. What should I do with it?
This may sound counter-intuitive, but unless you want to lose all your friends, DON'T start handing it around freely via gifts, easy loans or friendly "investments." Those are among the fastest ways k…
- Has anyone been offered a job because of their Quora participation?
No jobs, but 2 consulting gigs (both about 6 months ago) and one writing gig. I get a fair amount of backchannel messages from people who just want to strike up a conversation or asking for private ad…
- What are some examples of great UX for reservations and scheduling online?
I think timebridge does a pretty good job with its UI to schedule multiple people with multiple options/constraints. The basic matrix grid calendar with toggle between day/week/month is kinda like th…
- Why don't the majority of voters choose candidates who appear logical and honest with the American public?
Insane eras need insane politicians with insane agendas to make any progress at all in today's gridlocked political process. In an actual physical gridlock, which of the Lethal Weapon cops would you w…
- Is it ever "too late" to significantly improve one's understanding of, and problem-solving skills in, mathematics (/physics/computer science), or a point after which it may become much more difficult?
There is good news and bad news for you. Since the question poster originally mentioned s/he was in high school, I'll try to focus at that level (you should mention that point in the question details)…
- What is a good definition of "Forget You Money" in 2011?
Answering my own question, in the US, the last reasonable argument I heard (I've lost the link) computed about $4 million as a reasonable amount to shoot for if you want to retire early into a relativ…
- What are some possible benefits of keeping ALL of your math/physics scratch paper?
I kept about 6 years worth of scratch paper in about a dozen 3-ring binders for about 6 years after the last one (I moved to a job with less need for hands-on technical work). Apart from numbering, pe…
- How is the work environment changing to reflect the growing freelance economy?
This is not a particularly new question. It's been extensively researched. The "boom" in the sense of people voluntarily adopting this lifestyle is kinda over. The peak was a couple of years back. In …
- Is Complex Analysis relevant to Machine Learning?
Learning models in control theory (adaptive control) are usually based on transfer function representations. In one way or another, these are about locating the unknown poles and zeroes of a transfer …
- If you had to pick one, what is the single most important subject everyone should know, beyond "core" subjects taught in the early years? Please don't answer with "core" subjects like reading, writing, basic math, science, and history.
The answers by Mark Eichenlaub, Walter Plinge, Fred Landis and User-13209674370931937457 contain interesting proposals (data, philosophy of science, current affairs, economics) but all suffer the prob…
- Why was the twenty paise Indian coin unpopular?
This doesn't show the later aluminum hexagon that was reasonably commonly used. The basic reason is inflation. When I was a kid, you'd still occasionally find 1 paisa coins (quite exciting). 5p, 10p …
- What are some strange/unusual but delicious sandwiches?
Any kind of sandwich but with different kinds of bread slices on top and bottom. Eg. white+wheat, ciabatta+sourdough, bagel+kaiser roll, English crustless tea-sandwich-white+pumpernickel... The filli…
- What are some lifestyle changes that save money?
Been doing a lot of this lately. 1. Move to a cheaper city if you're renting and have the mobility. HUGE impact. 2. Learn to do small repairs. Can be quite entertaining in a MacGyverish way. 3. Spa…
- From a historical perspective, how do the accomplishments of science compare to those of religion?
I recently learned the terms appreciative knowledge vs. manipulative knowledge (due to John Friedmann: http://books.google.com/books?id...). One allows you to form mental models of the world ("appre…
- What is the main reason for Second Life's failure to meet industry and media expectations made during its 2006-2007 hype era?
First mover disadvantage. It's the Friendster of the space. The winnings tend to go to the second or third entrant after the first mover figures out the risks the hard way. When I joined sometime i…
- Why wasn't Dippin Dots a success?
Once the novelty faded, it needed innovative marketing, spinoffs and aggressive positioning. After all Pringles pulled it off, so clearly not impossible to create enduring brands based on such things.…
- How is technocracy better than democracy when people with right skills are put up at the right place?
Politicians siphon off wealth in every political system. They are wealth extraction specialists. That is a non-issue, it is an unavoidable consequence of the principal-agent effect that is created whe…
- What privileges provide unspoken advantages in American culture, and what kinds of advantages are associated with each privilege?
I'll ignore the well-known ones based on race/gender etc. Some less-known ones: Extrovert privilege: being an extrovert is much more useful in America than in other cultures, since sociable self-prom…
- Why do some planes average the inputs of the two pilots' controls?
I suspect nobody on the flight control system design team thought of this scenario: two pilots communicating so badly that they had the stick at opposite extremes. Missing probable scenarios in contr…
- What should I do if I feel guilty about my parents paying $50k a year to send me to college? I could potentially transfer to a less expensive school or skip college altogether.
Guilt is a sign that you are internalizing others' expectations as your own and have doubts about living up to them. As a thought experiment, if you didn't have parents paying, but at 18 had won a lot…
- Is the "right to die" a human right?
My direct experience here is limited to signing off on euthanizing a cat. It was gut wrenching to do that, but there was never a single doubt in my head that it was the right thing to do. My cat's qua…
- If vertical describes up-down & horizontal describes left-right, what word describes near-far?
The correct answer (nah, this is not a subjective question) is "temporal" but the explanation is involved. ***gulps some vodka and settles in*** Your question is conflating distance, direction and …
- Why is advice largely useless?
Confirmation bias is my candidate for the top reason. People who succeed (and are most likely to offer "advice") make up idiotic reasons for why they succeeded, mostly discounting the role of luck, an…
- What are the best math tips? Are there any shortcuts or alternative methods for remembering formulas that can help with mathematical challenges in daily life?
There's an entire book of math hacks invented by a concentration camp survivor, the Trachtenberg System. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tra... A simple hack, the first one I learned, is that you can g…
- Are some academic departments more laid-back than others? What factors influence this?
I have this theory that the degree to which a department is actually laid back is inversely proportionate to the degree to which it appears laid back. The superficial things: people dressing more info…
- Why does a deck of cards, fresh out of the box, have a lower entropy than the same deck after it is shuffled?
It is more useful to think of this in terms of Kolmogorov Complexity, which finesses the problem of defining macrostates, which is ambiguous, as Anon User says. The question to ask is: what is the sho…
- Why isn't there a legitimate "critic" in Silicon Valley for early-stage startups? Why isn't this role filled in such a dynamic environment? Is there little incentive to critique companies that are so young?
Silicon Valley has the critical feature of any bubble: near-complete control over it's own internal discourses and readymade mechanisms with which to discredit external ones. The first purpose of suc…
- How should a white person deal with 'white guilt'?
I have no idea why I was asked to answer this. But I'll give it a shot. If you aren't directly complicit in oppression, drop the guilt. Not your fault.If you enjoy some inherited privilege, it's in y…
- How can we make open government work better for every American?
There is a brilliant series of episodes in the 80s britcom, Yes, Minister, on the "open government" theme. The cynical conclusion was that making information more open merely results in people turning…
- What is the best way for me, as a freelancer, to start an agency?
Test-drive potential partners, one at a time, over at least 2-3 gigs each. When you get to 4-5 good potential partners, start thinking about which triangle of 3 (one being you, 2 from your pool) woul…
- Could atheism be described as an application of anarchistic principles to religion?
No, it is the application of parental indulgence principles towards their kids' play fantasies, to certain patterns of adult play. As all parents know (though I am not one), toys to fuel fantasy pla…
- What is the greatest appeal of learning a foreign language?
For me, the appeal lies in being able to sustain multiple personalities without being certified and thrown into an asylum. It's the same kind of appeal as role playing. Especially if you are good enou…
- What is the optimal length of a single lecture?
I forget the source, but I recall one study that found 22 minutes to be the optimal time at which point the majority of people start losing the narrative. It's hard to measure because "lecture" is an…
- Why is symmetry such a prominent aspect of the universe?
Most of fundamental physics (possibly all of it, I wouldn't know, you'd have to ask people like Jay Wacker) can be described in terms of symmetries and symmetry-breaking. Symmetry is a measure of inf…
- What problem(s) does Apple's App Store solve?
"What problem does it solve" is typically the question asked to motivate conscious attempts at disruption using something like the lean startup methodology. Usually this means looking for a category o…
- What do you do when your company is over the hill in its field?
From the point of view employees, what you should do is abandon ship and look for a new job before you're forced to. From the point of view of executives and shareholders: it's almost always too late…
- What's a good strategy for ensuring that a trollish and factually incorrect, yet popular, Quora answer gets sufficiently voted down?
Write a better answer (in terms of both substance and rhetoric) and call out the other answer politely, but firmly on its bullshit. Then tweet/share your answer on Facebook. If you've got decent netwo…
- Market Sizing: How many new products are launched every year?
This is a fascinating question that I've been obsessing over for a while as well. A friend and I even talked of creating a small market-sizing app to address this question, among others, but we haven'…
- How can I tell if my boss is interviewing for other jobs?
Look out for signs of positive disengagement. Not apathy, but a generally positive, supportive, encouraging attitude towards everything without any substantial engagement in the content of anything. A…
- If the US goes to war with China, would all Chinese people in the US be put into internment camps?
Obviously a troll question, and generally I ignore such obvious provocation, but when there is silliness on one end and people laying down their lives at the other end... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…
- Has Quora lost its way?
I sent my reactions to one of the Quora team members privately. In it, I noted "lost its way" as one of the two possibilities, the less likely one. The more likely possibility is that Quora is at a …
- Do book lovers look down on non-readers, i.e., do readers assume that those who do or have not know less, have closed minds, and are generally uninteresting people, why or why not?
Somebody recently said that reading books has now once again become a very specialized activity, the way it once was. I didn't like the argument initially. After all, reading a 50,000-word book does…
- What are the best IITs / Indian Institute of Technology campuses?
Physically, Madras is the nicest. Food-wise Kanpur. Kharagpur is ugly and in the middle of nowhere. Bombay (my alma mater, 1993-97, BTech, Mech) is in arguably the best city, but the campus is just ok…
- What are alternative theories to Darwinian evolution that explain our observations in biology?
Shan Kothari's answer is excellent. I'll just add one point to it. Stuart Kauffman at the Santa Fe Institute has been trying to come up with such a theory for a couple of decades now. See At Home in …
- What popular startup advice is plain wrong?
In its general form, as everybody here has pointed out, the question is ill-posed. Truly "plain wrong" general advice doesn't exist because you can always find a percentage of startups for which that …