Slavo Ingilizov

I was reading somewhere about survivorship bias recently. It strikes me when I think about it, how often it is out there, in the articles you read, the statistics you view and in any written material that you rely on for information. The easiest way to avoid it would be to have doubt in anything you read, any author, no matter how credible and unbiased he may seem; no matter how hard he worked to win your trust. If you ask Jeff, that’s the way to go – be inquisitive and reinvent the wheel, think through every piece of information that is presented to you. But this is not the point.

The point is, every content provider, news agency or service you are using is entitled to bring you unbiased information. How often this happens in reality, you tell me. I think it takes time for one to actually understand that survivorship bias is everywhere. Our society, our culture is such that we always pay attention to successful people, and try to avoid failures.

Take shelfari.com. It is a site brining social networking into the world of reading. People add books to their shelf, review them, rate them and answer to questions other people have about books. I’ve been a member for a while, and looking at my shelf, there’s no book with a bad review, no book I don’t like. Unconsciously, I’ve been adding only the books that I was impressed by, skipping everything else. Everything in my profile is biased. You cannot call it survivorship bias in this case, but maybe something like good impression bias. Same thing.

And when I think about it, it is normal for me to do this. I don’t remember the books I didn’t like. If I started using shelfari when I started reading and added each book as I finished it, it might be a different story. But the thing is, most social networking tools we use have been out there for a very short time. Does that mean all the information in them is biased? Yes. Does that mean we should care about it? Probably not. A social network in itself is subjective. It relates to one’s personal story and friends and does not serve as an institution providing opinion. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if most people on Facebook took every piece of information that is shared for granted; I wouldn’t be surprised if Shelfari reviews are taken seriously; I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter messages are considered news, although they might be completely untrue.

All I’m saying is – we should be wary. It is our nature to trust someone who is talking to us, but if we want unbiased information, we should look somewhere else, not in social networks.

Recently I’ve been uneasy about the way I behave. I considered myself a person who loves to learn new things and has deep interest in gaining new skills. While I was still studying in AUBG, this was true and I spent the time to make sure I lived up to these principles. For some reason, I’m not confident this is happening any more, at least not to the extent I want to. So having though about it, here are some resolutions and goals that I set for myself until the end of 2009:

1. I should spend time to fully understand and comprehend everything I start to work with. No trial-and-error approaches or just shots in the dark.
2. I should start writing. Be it blog posts, notebook entries or anything else, I should always pay attention to writing down any thoughts and elaborating on what I’ve written, including research to better develop and understand it.
3. I should invest a lot in learning Javascript and related client technologies. This may be in the form of at least two books and one side project.
4. I will dig out and finish at least one project I’ve started or ever thought about starting.
5. I will finish at least two books I’ve started and read at least 8 new.
6. I will try to understand other people’s point of view, and not condemn or criticize before thinking. I will read at least one book on psychology.
7. I should limit the drinking of coke, eating hamburgers and other foods in this category to at most once per week.

Right now these are enough, as it will be hard enough for me to get a good grade on any of them, but if I come up with something really interesting and worth noting as a goal, I will edit this post. Let’s see how I do on December 31, 2009.

I Recently came across Typealyzer. Decided to try it on my own blog and here are the results:

I was expecting this and don’t know if it is good or bad – you tell me

Reading Rob Conery’s post today, I started thinking about how often I read blogs of people having no ideas of their own, but instead writing and restating things they’ve enjoyed reading somewhere else. Now the question is – is this ok? To me it is.

After all, if we waited for everyone to have his own "Eureka!" before writing, then that would mean everyone would be a genius and we would be developing and growing on a much faster scale than we do today. The truth is that everyone shares his personal opinion through blogging, and it’s ok to comment on other people’s posts. It’s ok to just criticize and provoke discussion, and not just wait for a brilliant idea of yours to share. It’s even ok to do how-tos for things totally not your opinion and totally not invented by you.

Then the only problem left is actually doing it. Go! as in a joke a friend of mine told me once:

He was traveling from Istanbul to Sofia on a train, and they were just crossing the Bulgarian-Turkish border. Passport control people were passing through the train and making sure everyone was legal and things were in order. A French guy, obviously excited about his East European trip told the passport control officer: "I want to go to Budapest!" After a few seconds pause, the officer looked at each of the people sitting around the French guy, pointed his arm in (arguably) the direction of Budapest and said: "Go!"

With the risk of many people not understanding the East European context of this joke, I’m posting it. With the risk of many people not understanding the European style of drinking coffee, I’m saying that the Starbucks experience has been around for decades, if not centuries. And, Starbucks is just not fun in Europe – it’s just a normal American store trying to look European. This is like making some breakthrough of exciting Europeans to play baseball, establishing some behavior, and then trying to expand business in the States. But I guess it earns money, so it’s ok.

Hooray for people posting rants when they have nothing else to say. And hooray for me putting links to Instanbul, Sofia and Budapest. So stop wondering about what to do next and what excuse to make up and do what you’ve always waited to do. Write that post and launch that site. Go!