The Long Tail

Fooled By Randomness

Great piece in the LA Times by Leonard Mlodinow, a physicist/screenwriter, on how the entire Hollywood hit-making machine is little better than a lottery. As Paul Kedrosky puts it, "The article synthesizes useful material from information cascades, Kahneman &  Tversky, Arthur De Vany's work, and Hollywood lore to show that most of what is called success in Hollywood is more like dumb luck." Quote from the story:

But if picking films is like randomly tossing darts, why do some people hit the bull's-eye more often than others? For the same reason that in a group of apes tossing darts, some apes will do better than others. The answer has nothing to do with skill. Even random events occur in clusters and streaks.

Imagine this game: We line up 20,000 moviegoers who, one by one, flip a coin. If the coin lands heads, they see "X-Men"; if the coin lands tails, it's "The Da Vinci Code." Since the coin has an equal chance of coming up either way, you might think that in this experimental box-office war each film should be in the lead about 10,000 times. But the mathematics of randomness says otherwise: The most probable number of lead changes is zero, and it is 88 times more probable that one of the two films will lead through all 20,000 customers than that each film leads 10,000 times.

Readers who share my admiration for Nassim Taleb will recognize this as a "Black Swan" problem. His classic book, Fooled by Randomness : The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, is highly recommended, even (especially!) for Hollywood studio chiefs.

LT podcasts and interviews

This is the stage of the book rollout where it's inevitably going to get a little self-promotional. Please indulge me for a month or so and I'll get back to your regularly scheduled crunchy graphs n' rants.

I'll spare you the entire Chris Anderson clipping service, but here are a few recent interviews and podcasts of note:

Podcasts:

• A fun discussion with Jeff De Cagna of Principled Innovation on how the Long Tail applies to non-profits and associations.
• A conversation with Ian Dixon of the Media Center Show. I'm a big fan of Windows Media Center and other Internet-enabled DVRs as potential platforms for Long Tail video.

Articles:

• A Q&A with IWantMedia on how peer production compliments traditional media.
• I also have a short article in the current Wired on the Age of Peer Production. Marx appears! Andrew Keen thinks I'm a commie or a hippie; I'm not sure which. For the record, I'm a free-market libertarian, which I thought made me an economic conservative (those years at The Economist should be a clue). I suppose if you live in Berkeley people will assume the worst.