Friday, November 01, 2002
From Investor Fantasy to Regulatory Nightmare:
Bad Network Economics and the Internet’s Inevitable Monopolists
Harvard Journal of Law & Technology: Volume 16, Number 1 Fall 2002
The Internet investment bubble has come and gone. For a few years in the late 1990s, it seemed as if the people, companies, and organizations tied to the Internet could do no wrong. That perception changed abruptly, and it now seems as if they can do no right. In the meantime, large numbers of Internet firms were formed, spun out to the public, and valued at outrageous levels by ravenous equity markets. Many Internet companies took full advantage of this nearcanonization; they ran through obscene amounts of cash and burned out as quickly as they had been born.
Pundits have been able to see the inevitability of the bubble’s deflation with perfect hindsight. Ex post discussions of the bubble tend to include pejoratives like “Ponzi scheme,” “irrational exuberance,” “mania,” or the seemingly more neutral “widespread accounting irregularities.” At the same time, more than a handful of those able to exercise this hindsight lost fortunes during the bubble, some made fortunes, and quite a few undoubtedly did both.
The current widespread recognition that the downturn was inevitable notwithstanding, many questions about the bubble remain. One such question is why it occurred. Simplistic references to manias and to crowd psychology are less than entirely compelling. After all, such attitudes could be applied to any industry at any time. The unanswered question remains: Why technology stocks in the late 1990s? What was it that made these investments so attractive during that brief period? Even Ponzi schemes need a reasonable initial pitch to get started. The answer must be that investors misunderstood something. But what was that something?
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Saturday, April 20, 2002
God—America—Faith
I was supposed to write about technology today. For some reason, though, I really don’t feel like writing about technology. I feel a strange need to write about faith. I’m not sure why. Faith has been my bete-noire for a long time now. In fact, for as long as I can remember. I’m afraid of faith because I have observed its power and I don’t understand it at all.
For a long time, I felt great anger at the concept of faith. Sure, I knew people who’d been helped by it. But I could also look around and see the pain and suffering that it caused, the crimes and unspeakable atrocities committed in its name. I have always considered myself fortunate to live in a country without an official religion, without an imposition of faith. And I have long been suspicious of those who attempted to interject faith into the American forum. Couldn’t they see what a wonderful thing we had developed here? Couldn’t they appreciate the brilliance of the Constitutional formulation? Free Exercise and No Establishment. The First Amendment sets out two rules for religion: every individual is free to exercise whatever faith—or lack thereof—they may possess, but the government may not favor any particular faith—or even a combination of faiths. Those two rules allowed us to develop into the most pluralistic, tolerant society in recorded history.
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Monday, September 17, 2001
The Terrorist in the Mirror
By all reports, we are about to embark on a lengthy battle against a potent political philosophy: the belief that the long-term frustration of deeply held beliefs justifies violence against civilians. This philosophy exists at the fringe of virtually every political movement in every part of the world—including this one. We can only defeat it if the non-violent mainstream of each political movement feels motivated to curb its own extremists. We can start by looking in the mirror.
Americans are quite fortunate in this respect. Our violent lunatics tend to dwell on small and apparently manageable fringes. While no mainstream organization actually condones these fringes, many of us tend to view at least some extremism sympathetically, as “misguided,” “overzealous,” or simply “counterproductive.” These attitudes give aid and comfort to the enemy, and will preclude a successful anti-terrorist campaign. It’s easy to condemn violence in the name of a cause you oppose. The challenge is to be equally harsh on extremists who commit violence in the name of a cause you support.
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Monday, November 12, 1990
Realpolitik, Not Myth, Will Help Saudis
[Note that this entry ran as an Op-Ed piece in the (Los Angeles) Daily News on November 15, 1990, during the troop buildup known as “Operation Desert Shield"].
Saudi Arabia, like the Soviet Union, has recently discovered that an unworkable, unrealistic mythology is a poor basis upon which to run a country. The Saudi myth system, of course, has nothing to do with the Communist brotherhood of workers; it relates, instead, to the Islamic brotherhood of Arabs. The Arab empire, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to Persia, is struggling to emerge from five centuries of European and Turkish occupation.
Despite the withdrawal of imperial forces, cultural and economic imperialism remains. Most galling of all, when the last wave of Europeans withdrew in 1948, they left behind their Jewish vassals to guard the long-sought prize of Jerusalem. Under this myth system, the West, and in particular the United States, is not just a bad outsider, but an evil infidel. Israel is not simply a difficult neighbor, but an offensive presence. These myths are so deeply ingrained in the Arab psyche that a military alliance with the west could easily lead to popular insurrection, and that peace with Israel, even in the face of the current Iraqi threat, remains unthinkable.
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Thursday, June 15, 1989
Control Strategies for Two-Player Games
Published in ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 21, No. 2, June 1989
This article, which I wrote in 1986 to fulfill a degree requirement, surveys two branches of the AI literature concerned with two-player games. The first branch, game programming, is a heavily empirical subfield directed toward incremental improvements in state-of-the-art game programs, with a particular emphasis on computer chess.
The second branch, heuristic analysis, is a fairly theoretical subfield interested in formal analyses of heuristic search techniques employed by artificial intelligence systems, including the search strategies used in game-playing systems. Despite their overlapping interests, the fundamental results of these fields point in opposite directions. Game programmers have come to embrace a heuristic version of the minimax algorithm whose performance in chess programs has been outstanding. Every theoretical analysis of minimax, however, has concluded that its standard heuristic implementation should not work. This article reviews both bodies of literature, attempts to explain the source of disagreement between theory and practice, and points to qualitative implications of the theoretical results that should interest game programmers.
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