conskeptical

Mostly, I like this article. But... :

"This is the same phenomenon you see with defense contractors or fashion brands. The dumber the customers, the more effort you expend on the process of selling things to them rather than making the things you sell."

At first I thought this was funny and smart... but now I think it's rather glib. "Fashion brands" is almost by definition entirely a marketing exercise... tautology is a pretty boring type of argument. Now... the industry in wearable items is huge and not entirely oriented around marketing at the expense of value...

Defence contracting... I think it's a lot more complicated than dumb customers. For one, there are only a few customers... typically governments. So in a market with a low ratio of buyers to sellers, clearly you have to invest a lot in getting attention. And given the nature of contracts, once you have their attention (and their contract), the profit motive is then to satisfy the contract as close to the line as possible... that is... to skimp and make your product as crap as you can get away with.

Witty insights should really have some grounding in reality, and point the way to other interesting thoughts. This just seems to be a collective geek snigger at the aggressive and the fashionable.

Maybe there's an assumption here that identity has to be constant. If we erase that assumption and accept our identities as a continuous transformation throughout our lives... :

Perhaps keeping your identity flexible can be better at protecting against useless discussion. And the key thing above any consideration of identity is to focus on receive as well as transmit, and to remember to couple the two with some sort of processing. The key point about identity isn't particularly its size, but its flexibility.

A small, inflexible identity is simply a harder target to hit, but when you hit it you'll still find useless discussions there. A large, flexible identity is easy to hit, but when you hit it, you're very likely to find interesting discussions. A small, flexible identity is hard to interest, discussions will fizzle uninterestingly long before the religious war, unless you happen to hit the right topic in which case you'll find a good discussion. A large, inflexible identity is easy to hit and the main cause of pointless discussions.

The best discussions are where flexible identities meet, regardless of their size. A useless discussion is one where the participants come away unchanged. A good discussion is one where the participants come away changed (ie, with something that they didn't have before). You need to be flexible for that.

Of course, there is such a thing as being too flexible...