Written on the train from one-north to Yishun

I feel like I’m reaching a stage with my work where I’m starting to be able to translate my thoughts and cognitive tools from one sphere to another. By that I mean to say that I’m learning to think about ecommerce the way I think about sociopolitical issues.

God, that sounds pretentious. I don’t mean to imply that I’m particularly good at either. I’m not. I’m below average. I have been, for the past few months, intimidated and overwhelmed by my own incompetence. I often show up at work feeling like I have no idea what I’m doing. And now I sort of feel like I’m starting to understand.

I am growing to love the field that I’m in. Ecommerce is interesting because it marries the internet (which I have a deep love for) and commerce, which is very central to the development of the human species. The challenge for me is to make sense of the vast complexity of the marketplace: as much as is possible for an individual (connected to the minds of others), to a degree that yields insight that is valuable to others.

I think I’m just beginning to develop the sort of love & ownership of my role & my space. So far I have been doing things with a sort of non-depth. My analogy would be… I feel like I’ve been doing cleaning work while afraid to get dirty. My output has been ridiculously limited by perfectionism and this prevents me from conduiting my best work.

Random thoughts now so I can communicate it more effectively later when I have to.

Selling is about communicating value to people in a way that resonates with them enough to compel them to act. The act of buying is triggered when all the prerequisites are fulfilled.

Buying is about navigating a complex landscape to identify products and services that fulfill one’s need/want. The anxiety comes from not being clear about what you want, and from not being sure if there might be a better fit somewhere else ‘out there’.

It’s interesting to compare this general idea to something more visceral like say, dating. Dating is far more complex because the communication is a lot more vague, subtle and suggestive… But there’s a fundamental market structure at the root of it. You want to communicate value to interested parties. The parties you’re interested in might not be interested in you, and you’ll have to earn that interest- you can’t buy it directly. The anxiety with ‘buying’… you get the picture.

The problem with both dating and commerce in general- and many other markets of all kinds- is imperfect information. More precisely, the imperfect routing of information.

Once the problem was a literal lack of information. You didn’t know what was out there at all. Then information started being produced en masse. Then lack of variety of information. Then proliferation of diversity and variety through the democratization of production. Problem of too much information, too much noise. Remember, once the problem was that there was no sound at all! Now there’s too much of it and the challenge is to filter out what we don’t want and seek out what we do want. (No boys to date. Lots of boys to date but they’re all the same. Lots of different kinds of boys to date but it’s hard to tell if you’ve got one that’s a good fit for you.)

Paradox of choice by Barry Schwartz argues convincingly that the way to deal with such overwhelming choice and complexity is to be satisficing- settle for good enough instead of seeking what is best,  because the latter takes too much effort. And this is roughly where we are today.

Here’s a bold prediction- barry’s utilitarian argument will be undermined when the cost of finding out what is best is reduced to pretty much zero. When finding the best partner or product doesn’t involve much effort on your part.

But how does that happen? Improved search. Improved filtration. Humans have always been great pattern-recognizers and we’ve built tools as extensions of our minds to vastly improve our cognition.

How do you make sense of a vast and impossibly complex landscape? The same way ants do- through collaboration.

Now we’ve got to think about social networks. In the 70s, biologist Lewis Thomas stated that networks will touch, fuse, coalesce into a massive single grid.

“Without paying a fee, or filling out a questionnaire, all of us are being linked in similar circuits, for other reasons, by credit bureaus, the census, the tax people, the local police station, or the Army. Sooner or later, if it keeps on, the various networks will begin to touch, fuse, and then, in their coalescence, they will start sorting and retrieving each other, and we will all becomes bits of information on an enormous grid.”

Notice- he wasn’t a technologist, he was a biologist. He observed that eusocial insects ants and termites work together like neurons in a brain, and that such swarm intelligence applies on multiple levels. Human networks share information just as ants do, and are kind of like a large brain. The evolution of life is analogous to the evolution of human thought and knowledge- it starts in small pockets and grows richer and more complex.

Back on track- our biological brains may not have evolved much in the past thousand or even hundred thousand years, but our capacity to build tools that amplify our senses and our cognition have been progressing at a phenomenal rate and it seems almost modest to suggest that we,  as a species,  together with our tools, are rapidly evolving. Consider the evolution of something like Google Maps and how it makes sense of the physical landscape of the Earth- and how our astrophysicists have mapped the universe, and our quantum physicists and chemists and microbiologists have mapped the building blocks of our universe, and the human genome. Neuroscientists and linguists do the most wonderfully recursive things, using brains and language to map brains and language.

Is it so hard to believe or imagine that we’d map human relations and commerce? 100x heartbeat intensity. Glass. Iphones. Unbelievably accurate recreation of fluid dynamics, of skin, art that penetrates the chest and wrenches the heart. If we can figure out what happens when galaxies collide I think we can figure out commerce and romance. (Actually now that I mention it it’s quite possible that both romance and commerce are more complex than galaxies… in fact I think I’ll openly say yes, they are. There might be more stars in a galaxy than people in an economy, but stars behave more predictably than people.)

But have curiosity,  will explore…

abruptly ended here. Had to go for RT at khatib camp. entire full word vomit captured entirely on my smartphone… nice. random thought- need to digest The Long Tail and assimilate it into my cognitive toolkit

have not yet begun talking about routing