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Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

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Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#61

Post by JohnBooty »

asdgionbionio wrote: post #5

What are we doing to ourselves? If you were in the market for a new pair of shoes, what would be the sensible thing to do to get the best pair? Would you look at the glitzy ads, or would you try to choose something that is durable and comfortable for its price? Would you compare celebrity endorsements or spec sheets? There's no one in their right mind who would say the right way to buy a computer is to look at advert…

   > If you were in the market for a new pair of shoes, what would 
   > be the sensible thing to do to get the best pair? Would you 
   > look at the glitzy ads, or would you try to choose something 
   > that is durable and comfortable for its price? Would you compare 
   > celebrity endorsements or spec sheets?
So what shoes do YOU wear? I bet the majority of your shoes are nationally recognized brands. If not, I'd sure like to know where you find "spec sheets" on shoes. =)

But in general you're missing the point here.

In fact it can be boiled down to a single word. From the transcription:

   > Remember, Nike sells a commodity. They sell shoes!!!
Commodity.

You draw a false dichotomy between "glitzy ads" and "durable and comfortable."

The fact is that most shoes, even modestly priced ones, are plenty durable and comfortable. We've been making them for thousands of years and there aren't a lot of useful breakthroughs left to make. For most purposes, they're a commodity.

So how do you get people to buy your stuff when you're competing in a commodity market sector?

Well number one, you have to actually have some quality there. Unless you're selling high-fashion shoes or something they need to be reasonably "durable and comfortable."

And you need to tell some type of story. Perhaps not "glitzy ads" but you do need that story.

Alternately you can, I guess, compete by monopolizing resources or differentiate yourself materially somehow. But there are a lot of product segments where that's not viable. You can't make a pencil that's much better than any other pencil. You can't grow rice that's too much tastier than any other rice. You can't clean gutters too much better than the next guy who cleans gutters. You can't build a computer that's too much faster than anybody else's, unless you're willing to throw down billions of dollars and get into a decades-long arms race with other CPU makers.

And even if you build a better mousetrap you still need to tell people about it, so it's story time anyway...

Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#62

Post by zeroname »

supernova87a wrote: post #55
ouid wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mortgage deduction is actually terrible...

Well, we can definitely debate over whether it produces the right incentives or is equitable. But it is certainly more equitable and useful relative to tax breaks for billionaires and corporations.

Tax breaks for corporations are actually really important, those high rates make real businesses in the U.S. unattractive.

By "real businesses" I don't mean the likes of Amazon who rarely if ever make a profit. They're not really paying taxes anyway. Neither am I talking about big international corporations, they know how to offshore and not pay taxes as well.

The same goes for billionaires. You can't tax them and expect to get more money. They can allocate their wealth to pay the minimum in taxes.

Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#63

Post by pesmhey »

supernova87a wrote: post #28

I love that marketing works, and that people want to believe in values, and will band together over those values. However lately, I've felt that especially in the US, values -- or more accurately -- symbols of values have become more important than actual tangible outcomes or functional real achievements. For people as individuals and as groups. I guess of course that I'm especially thinking about our politics and so…

You would love to read Baudrillard. He would agree with you that symbols have overtaken the real as the domain of reality.

Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#64

Post by dfgert »

jackpirate wrote: post #35
grecy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're all symbols of the most extreme cases, and we latch on to them because they're recognizable, inflammatory, and get us riled up to want to do something Having moved from Australia to the US then Canada and having spent over and month in more than 50 countries around the world, I can tell you the US does this more (better?) than other countries. The entire US system and political discourse is setup as right/w…

you can bet your bottom dollar nobody would ever listen to someone from the other side and perhaps learn something. One problem with listening to the other side is that most people are so ridiculously misinformed about issues (on all sides), that listening to the average person of the other side is unlikely to make you learn something. You have to actively seek out the smartest people from the other side and listen t…

That's because most people religiously put faith in dumb news outlets of USA and keeps repeating the same arguments without trying to fully understand them. They have gotten accustomed to outsourcing critical thinking process to news orgs.

Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#65

Post by hhs »

badpun wrote: post #60
hhs wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting point, badpun. I think there's an assumption that generally a good company: "treats their customers with decency and respect." I wonder if one problem is that cultural/societal values change over time, and a company might not be keeping up with the times. And that may adversely impact the way a company is treating their customers. What do you think?

> I think there's an assumption that generally a good company: "treats their customers with decency and respect." I disagree. Companies' are top-down in nature, so their values are set by their owners. Large companies are almost always owned by a multitide of entities (investors) that do not care about anything else than profits. In such case, maximizing profits is the only true value, and whatever else they might sa…

Thanks for the explanation. Interesting perspective. I'm finding that certain customer tribes over time get turned off by the point that "maximizing profits is the only true value, and whatever else they might say is smokescreen."

This reminds me of the typical social media company (e.g., Facebook). Certain 'customers' have turned cynical because of the company's aim to maximize profits. I wonder what it's going to do to their brand value/personality in the long term?

Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#66

Post by dragonwriter »

grecy wrote: post #33
supernova87a wrote: post #28

I love that marketing works, and that people want to believe in values, and will band together over those values. However lately, I've felt that especially in the US, values -- or more accurately -- symbols of values have become more important than actual tangible outcomes or functional real achievements. For people as individuals and as groups. I guess of course that I'm especially thinking about our politics and so…

> They're all symbols of the most extreme cases, and we latch on to them because they're recognizable, inflammatory, and get us riled up to want to do something Having moved from Australia to the US then Canada and having spent over and month in more than 50 countries around the world, I can tell you the US does this more (better?) than other countries. The entire US system and political discourse is setup as right/w…

> The entire US system and political discourse is setup as right/wrong, black/white, right/left, and leaves no room for discussion.

While the US system is more polarized (and more bimodal) than lots of other modern democracies (largely as a consequence of the electoral system), and the mass-media-mediated public discourse further exaggerates that (Red v. Blue provides a simple, compelling overarching narrative framework), there's actually plenty of nuance and room for discussion, both on a common-citizen level (though you need to talk to people who are more wary of, and often require a better pre-existing relationship before, talking about politics to see it, because those people are tired of getting hit over the head with the orthodoxy on either side) and on an elite level (largely outside of casual public view, both because the participants don't really relish war with the ideologues and because the media isn't interested in nuance.)

Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#67

Post by jpfed »

supernova87a wrote: post #28

I love that marketing works, and that people want to believe in values, and will band together over those values. However lately, I've felt that especially in the US, values -- or more accurately -- symbols of values have become more important than actual tangible outcomes or functional real achievements. For people as individuals and as groups. I guess of course that I'm especially thinking about our politics and so…

MeToo is an interesting example.

I suspect that Facebook and Twitter have their own linear algebra models of who is interested in what, and that factors into their choices of what content from your friends makes it into your stream.

After the wave of MeToo posts on Facebook and Twitter had died down, I asked my friends on Facebook to characterize how many MeToo posts they'd seen. Liberals reported seeing far more MeToo posts than conservatives did.

Something I didn't ask about, but have seen after the fact, is that conservatives and liberals seem to have a totally different idea of what MeToo is about. Algorithmic balkanization may have contributed to these differing ideas, and cordoned most of the MeToo-related activity in a liberal cluster of the social graph.

I saw a lot of personal stories of harassment and abuse from my friends. The sheer volume of them was undeniable. I could never say, given the experiences my friends reported, that it was mostly symbolic. Those experiences were very much concrete. It is possible that my particular subset of the social graph is disproportionately affected by sexual harassment and assault, which would affect the validity of any conclusions about the broader society I might draw from what I saw. But, for the subset of the social graph I observed, there is simply no way to call it symbolic.

Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#68

Post by swagasaurus-rex »

hhs wrote: post #65
badpun wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think there's an assumption that generally a good company: "treats their customers with decency and respect." I disagree. Companies' are top-down in nature, so their values are set by their owners. Large companies are almost always owned by a multitide of entities (investors) that do not care about anything else than profits. In such case, maximizing profits is the only true value, and whatever else they might sa…

Thanks for the explanation. Interesting perspective. I'm finding that certain customer tribes over time get turned off by the point that "maximizing profits is the only true value, and whatever else they might say is smokescreen." This reminds me of the typical social media company (e.g., Facebook). Certain 'customers' have turned cynical because of the company's aim to maximize profits. I wonder what it's going to d…

Facebook never once cared about its users; they are not and never have been the customers.

Facebook's name being dragged through the mud isn't too surprising if you follow the attitude that Zuckerberg was shamelessly open about since the inception of the company.

Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#69

Post by oarabbus_ »

jpfed wrote: post #67
supernova87a wrote: post #28

I love that marketing works, and that people want to believe in values, and will band together over those values. However lately, I've felt that especially in the US, values -- or more accurately -- symbols of values have become more important than actual tangible outcomes or functional real achievements. For people as individuals and as groups. I guess of course that I'm especially thinking about our politics and so…

MeToo is an interesting example. I suspect that Facebook and Twitter have their own linear algebra models of who is interested in what, and that factors into their choices of what content from your friends makes it into your stream. After the wave of MeToo posts on Facebook and Twitter had died down, I asked my friends on Facebook to characterize how many MeToo posts they'd seen. Liberals reported seeing far more MeT…

>Liberals reported seeing far more MeToo posts than conservatives did.

This could be "confirmation bias" or perhaps more accurately the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon... liberals tend to be more in-tune with the MeToo movement and therefore would be more likely to recall having seen it.

Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#70

Post by skybrian »

zeroname wrote: post #59
supernova87a wrote: post #28

I love that marketing works, and that people want to believe in values, and will band together over those values. However lately, I've felt that especially in the US, values -- or more accurately -- symbols of values have become more important than actual tangible outcomes or functional real achievements. For people as individuals and as groups. I guess of course that I'm especially thinking about our politics and so…

> Immigrants are not invading in hordes. Subjectively, they are. > Men at work are not harassing every female employee. Subjectively, sexual harassment is extremely widespread. > People are not trying to kick out elderly widows to turn the block into a shopping mall. When I complain about my rent going up, it is of course much easier to make the case for the poor widow than myself . > Your shoe is not going to make y…

Basic economics: you're mostly competing with other people who apply for the same jobs as you. There is not one labor market, there are many, and they are often pretty specialized. You can't substitute a plumber for a lawyer or vice-versa. This is why different jobs pay different wages.

This means it's never going to be all that useful to approach controversial issues like immigration at a high level of abstraction. It affects people differently. The details matter, and yet, here we are, talking in abstractions instead of from experience.

There are few facts here, lost in a sea of stylized summaries and witty exaggeration. Maybe we shouldn't take it too seriously?

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