“The statistics were not merely inadequate; they lied. And the lies they told led the people who ran Major League Baseball teams to misjudge their players, and mismanage their games. (Bill) James later reduced his complaint to a sentence: fielding statistics made sense only as numbers, not as language. Language, not numbers, is what interested him. Words, and the meaning they were designed to convey.” - Michael Lewis, ‘Moneyball’

The downfall of newspapers has been caused by a number of things – losing the classifieds business was huge – but mainly because when newspapers went online and were no longer able to partition the market geographically, supply in each region went up by orders of magnitudes.

— Chris Dixon: “What’s the relationship between cost and price?”

I hadn’t seen this argument before, and it feels like it makes sense. However, it makes a lot more sense when you talk about the US and its paper-per-big-metro market. All the big British papers are nationals, and they’re getting clobbered too. Sure, now British papers have to compete with the Americans, and the BBC doesn’t really have an American equivalent, but…

“An expert’s someone who can read documentation faster than you can” - or so the computer-nerd saw goes, anyway.

This all reminds me of another idea I keep meaning to do something with, but never get round to: that usually ‘having ideas’ is a bit like running an import-export operation between different fields of work, and not really all that much about thunderbolts of divine inspiration. Of course, though, that’s not an original notion…