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News & Analysis | NO. 338

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The Workforce Pincer Move During Recessions

Companies are doing something smart (and sometimes a bit gross) during this economic…whatever this is. They’re using the downturn as an opportunity to get rid of people they don’t like, which solidifies their workforce.

Here’s the move:

They have to remove people anyway because of the recession.Find the groups of people who have annoyed them in the last few years.They put out a public message designed to repel them.Use those extra heads to save money or hire people who want to work there.

Some examples:

Meta says some of their employees probably shouldn’t work there.Elon stopped most work from home.Netflix said if you don’t like our content you should quit.

It’s smart, but it also feels pretty slippery—especially if/when it was the company’s misbehavior that caused the people to be unhappy in the first place.

Anyway. I’m not saying it’s happening at every company. Or at yours. But it is happening.

Maybe now you’ll notice it more, and you’ll be able to ask the two natural follow-up questions:

Who are they trying to get rid of?What statements have they made to expedite that?

Two Americas

The US’s terminal conflict will be an internal one, fought between people who only see America’s flaws and those who pretend they don’t exist. And of course, both are wrong.

The US has done some horrific shit in its history, and we still have many problems. But we’re still one of the best places in the world for an oppressed person to move in search of freedom.

If you’re Black, or non-CIS in any way, or follow a non-dominant religion, the US and some parts of Western Europe are your absolute best places to move, which is why immigration flows so heavily into those areas. If America were 1/10th as bad as the extreme left thinks it is, it wouldn’t be the top desired destination (Gallup) for immigrants. Which it is.

Yet at the same time, we just overturned Roe. We run prisons as an industrial complex. And we are failing to educate most of our children. So, as usual, both of the extremes fail to understand the principle of Multiple Truths. America is a mess, but it’s also still one of the best countries in the world.

Sadly that’s only because most of the rest of the world is truly horrific when it comes to human rights for Black people, women, the queer community, and those who have unorthodox beliefs. So it’s a low bar, but we’re absolutely still one of the least bad places anywhere. If you doubt this, the cure for your ailment is spending more time traveling outside the US and Europe where we talk incessantly about how horrible we are.

We need to both hate and worship ourselves less. And aggressively pursue the mentality once captured by Bill Clinton:

There isn’t anything that’s wrong with America that can’t be fixed with what’s right with America.

I like that a lot. I’m not sure I believe it, but I want to.

L33t H4cking vs. M0st H4acking

The Cybersecurity Skills Gap is Another Instance of Late-stage Capitalism

It’s common to hear that it’s hard to get into cybersecurity, and that this is a problem. That seems to be true, but it’s informative to ask a simple follow-up:

The current cybersecurity jobs gap sits at around 2.7 million people.

A problem for who?

I think what we’re facing is an instance of the Two-Worlds Problem that’s now everywhere in US society. It’s where the vast majority of people are feeling pain from an issue, but there’s an elite that lives in a reality where the problem doesn’t exist.

We’re living in two different worlds.

Is parenting getting more difficult? Ask your nannies to spend more time with them.Are groceries more expensive? Have your assistant shop at both Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s.Is gas expensive? That’s why we’re a Tesla family.

It’s the same for security hiring. For MANGA and Unicorn companies—henceforth known as Mangacorns—hiring cybersecurity talent is a nanny browsing Whole Foods with a Platinum Amex.

They get the best of the best. The best candidates, from the best schools, as well as named talent from throughout the industry. And when these fresh college graduates ask for over 200K in base salary, and the named talent asks for over a million in total comp, they plop down the Mangacorn Amex.

At Mangacorn recruiting, most of their days involve the logistics of ‘giant garbage trucks of cash’.

So, for them, everything is fine. Cybersecurity skills shortage? Never heard of it. Everyone wants to work here and they love what we pay!

Indeed.

That’s one world, and just like the parents with nannies and the families with Teslas and shopping assistants, they have a real hard time understanding complaints about gas and grocery prices. The problem is everywhere and everyone else. So in other words, the other 95%.

For everyone else there are problems on both the hiring side and on the getting-hired side. It’s both hard for companies to find qualified people, and it’s hard for early-career applicants to get taken seriously enough to get their first shot.

Long thread but serious talk.

Seeing a massive problem in the security industry today. We have brand new candidates lacking "hands on" experience coming into the workforce and finding it extremely difficult to find a job. 1/10

— Dave Kennedy (@HackingDave) June 17, 2022

One can absolutely argue that it isn’t Mangacorn’s responsibility to fix this, but that’s the problem isn’t it? That’s the difference between a healthy society and an unhealthy society. In the unhealthy one, you hear people say a lot that it’s not their responsibility, and in the healthy one people find things that are not their responsibility and they make it so.

From the title you might be thinking I’m down on Capitalism and I’m about to go all Marx you. Nope. I think Capitalism is still—by far—the best of our bad options for managing such things. The problem is the above: responsibility. Or more specifically, in a world where there’s a thriving 5% at the top of any system, who’s going to take responsibility for the other 95%?

If you ask any French cybersecurity recruiter in 1799 they’ll tell you it’s the 5%’s problem as well.

Join the Unsupervised Learning CommunityI read 20+ hours a week and send the best stuff to ~50,000 people every Monday morning.

The natural move there is to say the government, but that only seems to work when everyone agrees on the matter—including the 5%. That’s why the Viking countries thrive with a blend of capitalism and government: their 5% have taken responsibility for their 95%.

We need to frame this as responsibility instead of blame.

So, yeah, back to security. In the US we have a lack of someone taking responsibility for building a cybersecurity pipeline. We have a happy 5% in the Mangacorns, and we have a struggling 95% in most SME businesses and startups.

Fairness is not the default state of nature; it’s something you have to struggle to maintain. The default state is a system of have, have-less’s, and have-nots. And the Mangacorns didn’t create this broken system we have now; they’re just benefitting from what came naturally.

But it is time to start blaming them for benefiting from it without doing something about it.

If you want to be the Finland of cybersecurity jobs, the Mangacorns have to take responsibility for the other 95%.

What that means tactically is up for debate, but it starts with the 5% taking responsibility and investing in the pipelines. Maybe that involves some government. Maybe it involves the universities and junior colleges. Maybe it involves big training companies like SANS. And it’s probably all of the above. My friend Jason Haddix and I talk a lot about what this might look like, and he’s doing a series of talks about it as well.

We’re both happy to take any ideas you may have on that front, and to work actively on practical solutions.

TL;DR: If you ever find something that’s broken for most of society, and you wonder why it is broken, ask yourself if it’s still working for the top 5% and whether that 5% has taken responsibility for the success for the other 95%. If not, there’s your answer.

News & Analysis | NO. 337

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Summary: Don’t Trust Your Gut

10/10

My One-Sentence SummaryContent ExtractionAnalysisIntegration

My One-Sentence Summary

My Book Summaries.

We’ve been wrong for decades/centuries/millennia about the most important questions in life—such as dating, success, and happiness—and data science is just now starting to provide real answers that are often counter-intuitive.

Content Extraction

All quotes here are from the book itself unless otherwise indicated.

The discipline of data science can be seen as “Moneyball for life.”

An analogy he uses in the book is “Moneyball for Life”, which is the idea of using high quality data analysis to find ways to get advantages in life that others don’t know aboutThis is based on something that happened in Baseball where someone figured out they could buy less expensive players and win way more than they should because the popularity of players did not correspond to their actual effectivenessOne example is the emotional expressiveness of salespeople. It’s obvious that negative emotions probably won’t work, but many think being super emotionally positive might work best. But the data science says a more even keel is most effective

You can make better life decisions. Big Data can help you.

MarriageMarriage might be the most important life decision a person makesPeople have been trying to figure out how to make a good match for thousands of yearsThere are now massive datasets to use in answering this questionCommon attributes looked at include demographics, attractiveness, sexual tastes, interests and hobbies, mental health, values, etc.Analysis of all this data turned out to say that you couldn’t much from it; there weren’t any big factors that predicted romantic successIt’s easy to predict what people will like, but not what will be a good matchThey looked a lot at dating data and found that certain things were true on dating sitesAttractive people got more responsesTall men, but not tall womenRace was unfortunately a major factor in who responded to whoBlack females responded least to Black males of all racesIncome had the biggest response effect for malesAfter income the occupation mattered a lot as wellSexy names mattered a lotThe biggest predictor for success with a given person was the answer to:Were you satisfied with your life before you met Sally?Were you free from depression before you met Sally?Did you have a positive affect before you met Sally?These mattered more than anything about Sally. The effect was four times stronger than all the traits of the partner combined.His summary of the analysis:

In the dating market, people compete ferociously for mates with qualities that do not increase one’s chances of romantic happiness.

REMARKABLE!Most likely best mates: someone satisfied with life, secure in themselves, who constantly tries to better themselvesWOWAfter looking at all the data the best thing they could say was that if you’re happy now you’re more likely to be happy laterParentingTLDR: Parenting matters way less than people thinkGenetics matter most, and way more than parentingWhen you raise biological kids apart, they tend to reach the same levels of successWhen you raise adopted kids together they tend to have different levels of success based on their genesBreastfeeding, TV exposure, and lots of other popsci factors didn’t have much impactIncluding being bilingualBut there is one thing that has a massive impact! NEIGHBORHOOD!A major study looked at siblings who moved as kids to see how much neighborhoods mattered for good outcomesBy looking at kids that moved you could control for things outside of the neighborhoodThe best places for increases in adult income were: Seattle, Minneappolis, Salt Lake City, Reading, and MadisonBut it wasn’t just city; it was neighborhoodThey found three major predictors for neighborhoods doing well (the people raised there do well)Percent of residents who graduated collegePercent of two-parent householdsThe percent of people who return their census formsSo, educated parents who are in a stable family who care about being good citizensRole models also mattered, e.g., seeing female inventors and Black fathers in the neighborhoodSo the adults you expose your kids to really matterAthletic successMany sports come down to mostly genes, but some more than othersEvery inch of height nearly doubles one’s chances of being in the NBASo a man under 6 feet tall has a 1 in 1.2 million chance while someone over 7 feet has a 1/7 chanceThere are also body types for sports. Phelps has freakishly long arms and freakishly short legs, for exampleTwin studies help differentiate this as well, by how many twins are in a given sportHe found that NBA ability was 75% natureHe found that football and baseball were 25% natureHighest were Olympic Track and Field, Olympic Wrestlers, Olympic Rowers, and NBALowest were Baseball, Football, Shooters, Cyclists, Fencers, etcWho’s Rich in America?Rich people own stuffOnly 20% of the top .1% of earners make most of their money from wages; the rest own businessesThe top businesses with the most millionaires:Lessors of real estateActivities related to real estateOther financial investmentsIndependent artists, writers, and performersDurable goods wholesalersGet rich checklist:Do I have a businessHow do I avoid ruthless price competition?How do I avoid getting dominated by a behemoth?Grinding to successA 60-year-old startup founder has a 3x higher chance of creating a valuable business than a 30-year-oldAverage age of successful tech startup founder is 42.3 yearsOutsiders are said to have an advantage from unique perspective, but it’s the insiders that normally winCounter-counterintuitive IdeasThere’s a lot of wisdom that was considered accepted, then got turned on its head, and has again been shown to be trueThe most successful employees actually found the most successful firmsNBA players are most likely to come from middle-class, two-parent backgroundsJokes are most looked for when people are happy, not sadIQ advantage doesn’t level off at a certain pointHacking luckEveryone gets opportunities, and luckThe question is how you manage and maximize that luckThe art world is a great example, where you can be X good at art but you will basically have no chance of being seen unless you’re hustling to get your stuff in galleries and showsThe Mona Lisa become popular due to a fluke, not because it was specialOnce the artist becomes successful, it magnifies the value of all their artPeople like Dylan and Springsteen and Picasso have something in common: they produced a massive amount of contentMore content is more changes to get luckyMore chances to start a snowballYou can use the Picasso dynamic for dating as wellUnattractive men going after attractive women have low odds, but if you simply make lots of attempts you will get responses. Same as PicassoNerd MakeoversPictures of people and how competent they look is a powerful predictor of who wins electionsThe more competent picture person won in 72% of elections by one analysisSame with military careers and faces that appeared more “dominant”Change your life by leaving your couchWe misjudge what makes us happyThere’s a difference between how bad pain is during a prolonged event vs. how we remember itAn app called Mapiness pinged users throughout the day and asked them:What are you doing (different activities)How are you with?HOw do you feel from 1 to 100?They collected this for multiple years and had over 3 million measurements from over 60,000 people for 40 activitiesSex made people happinessTheater/Dance/Concert was nextExhibition/Museum/LibrarySports/Running/ExerciseGardeningSinging/PerformingTalking/Chatting/SocializingBird/NatureWatchingWalking/HikingHunting/FishingDrinkingHobbies/Arts/CraftsMeditation/RelaxationWatching sportsPlaying with kids

Playing with pets

From the bottom

Sick in bedWork/StudyQueueingFinances/OrganizationMeetings/Seminars/ClassesCommutingHousework/ChoresTexting/Social Media

Browsing the Internet

Notably, reading was only 26. Gaming was 22. Relaxing and sleeping was only 29.

Top overrated activities: resting/relaxing/sleeping, gaming, watching TV, eating, browsing the internetTop underrated activities: museum/library, exercise, drinking, gardening, shopping/errandsMisery traps

Everything is amazing, and nobody is happy.”

Working reduces happiness by 5.43 pointsWorking at home gives you 3.59 points backWorking while listening to music gives you 3.94

Working with your friends gives you 6.25

Join the Unsupervised Learning CommunityI read 20+ hours a week and send the best stuff to ~50,000 people every Monday morning.

He guesses that an average person working with their friend would be as happy as relaxing alone

The highest gain in happiness comes from hanging with your romantic partner; then friendsHanging with other family members is like 5 times less than friendsThe Mapiness data says social media might make us unhappySports fans don’t seem to benefit much in happiness because there are about equal wins and lossesI wonder though about the overall social aspect of hanging with friends and watching sports, which wasn’t addressed in the bookDrinkingHe says you might want to drink during transit and downtime between peak events, and then enjoy the peak events soberNatureThe best nature-based happiness comes from spending time marine and costal areas (6), then mountains (3), then woodland and others are around 2Other factors typically impact happiness more than weather, e.g., people are happier hanging with friends in bad weather than alone in good weatherThey’d rather be on a lake in cold weather than in a city with nice weather

Analysis

Most people don’t know the data around the most important decisions in our lifeWe’ve often been told so-called wisdom that’s very wrong about these decisionsSometimes the real answers are counterintuitive, and other times they’re counter-counterintuitiveHappiness perhaps isn’t as complicated as it seems: hanging with friends and walking by lakes do wonders

Integration

I value practical books by how they change my actual behavior.

Here are the tangible behavior updates I’d consider updating routines around:

If you’re a high-strung parent, relax. It’s mostly genetics.If you’re about to raise a kid, find a place with lots of educated, two-parent households with high census response numbers.Try to exposure your kids to lots of high-quality adults that they might want to model afterIf you’re looking for a mate, know that the biggest predictor of happiness with them is how happy and stable they are before they met youAlso know that there’s no magical combination of traits and attributes that will lead to a good or bad matchYour best bet is to do like Picasso and meet lots of paintingsSpending time with your romantic partner, or friends, in nature, is some of the best time you can spendMaybe try to avoid lots of the activities that the data show don’t give much happinessIf you’re going to be doing something fun, maybe drink before and/or after rather than during (and obviously do so responsibly while watching for addiction)Read the whole book.

The book’s final summary on happiness:

Be with your live, on an 80-degree sunny day, overlooking water, having sex.

—

Alright, that’s it for this book capture, analysis, and summary. You can find my other summaries here.

Daniel

NotesYou should also read his first book, Everybody Lies, on search engine queries that reveal hidden truths.Related posts:Summary: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k Summary: Algorithms to Live By Recommended Summary: Atlas Shrugged Summary: Human Hacking

News & Analysis | NO. 336

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News & Analysis | NO. 335

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How Good is DALL·E 2 at Creating NFT Artwork?

If you’ve not heard, there are these things called NFTs. I think they’re simultaneously the future of digital signaling and currently mostly hype. But whatever—that’s not what this post is about.

Most NFTs rotate around a piece of collectible art in a baseball card-like format. So you look at something like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and it’s a bunch of personalized apes with stylization.

So the art is a big piece of it. You still need to hype it, get people to believe in its value, etc. But the art is the starting point, and many artists are finding new life in creating these art collections.

So I’ve been playing with DALL-E 2 for a few weeks now—which is an AI project from OpenAI that generates customized art based on prompts. I’ve been telling everyone who’ll listen about how this is the clearest example we’ve ever seen of AI cutting into a previously-human domain of creativity. It’s one thing to do spreadsheets faster, but DALL·E 2 can make you multiple examples of “A Synthwave Dog Riding a Rocket Skateboard” in a matter of seconds.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about how this will directly affect human jobs in the artistic space, but I was just jostled awake by an idea of telling DALL·E 2 to make NFT art. Like, specifically NFT art.

So I started with:

an nft of an 80’s giraffe wearing headphones, digital art

Which was decent:

My first attempt at NFT art using ‘digital art’ as a prompt

The trick is prompt it with the text you would likely read in the caption describing it.

But within a couple of iterations I got to this:

an nft of a steampunk giraffe wearing headphones, digital art

At a glance those look identical to high-quality NFT art. Importantly, they’ve captured the “NFT-ness” element to the artwork, which you would have trouble even trying to describe. I’m guessing it has something to do with the gradient background combined with a type of quasi-reality.

Anyway, the point is—that’s precisely what DALL·E 2 figures out and does effortlessly! It figures out the Je Ne Sais Quoi of NFT-ness—whatever that is—and applies it to content prompt you give it. Let’s try robots with a similar prompt:

an nft of a steampunk robot wearing a turtleneck and an eye patch, digital art

The ‘digital art’ prompt at the end is key to the realistic look and feel.

Join the Unsupervised Learning CommunityI read 20+ hours a week and send the best stuff to ~50,000 people every Monday morning.

NFT robots, Attempt 1

Here’s another pass at something similar:

an nft of a steampunk robot with an eye patch, digital art

Attempt 2 for Robot NFTs

I’m not an expert in the space, but I have to think you could crank through a few iterations (I’ve spent like 6 minutes doing this so far) and come up with some truly stunning results.

Thoughts

So I think the short version of this is that—yes—DALL·E 2 can already generate pretty convincing NFT art. And that feels weird.

You have this moment with NFTs where quirky artists suddenly have a spotlight shown on them. And out of nowhere DALL·E can suddenly—and casually—do a lot of what they can do.

Some think we’re in an AI winter still, but I feel it’s more like outer space where a piece of metal facing the sun will be super-heated, while the backside is deeply frozen.

GPT-3, DALL·E, and Google’s Gato represent the sunlight where the theory collides with practicality. Exciting for sure—but in a scary way.

Anyway, if you find any prompts that create even better NFTs, let me know.

NotesThere’s one aspect of DALL·E where humans still have an advantage for things like NFT collections, and that’s in making a full set of related art. The problem with DALL·E is that if you iterate 20 times you’ll get widely different results, and it won’t be easy to sell the idea that they’re part of the same collection.