Antonym: The Brown Highlighter Edition
How to spot zombie statistics, meteor impact simulators and why Apple's VR play is not for you.
Dear Reader
It’s a harsh fact of business that is really hard to get your head around. It’s taken Antonym a couple of business cycles to understand it:
Just because you’re right, doesn’t mean you’ll win. Just because you’re wrong, doesn’t mean you’ll lose.
It shouldn’t be true but it is. I have examples.
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By the way, if you’re hankering for more AI content, I’ve started another newsletter with my company Brilliant Noise. It’s called BN Edition and the first issue now live.
The £3500 Apple googles are for Zuckerberg, not you
This week, Apple gave a sneak peek of its VisionPro VR/XR glasses. The reviewers, particularly those who had the chance to try them out, were pleasantly surprised by the impressive quality of the product, surpassing that of its rivals. It’ll be 2024 before the likes of the rest of us get to try a pair of future-goggles.
Canny commentator, Scott Galloway loves to reprise his “VR headgear is the ultimate prophylactic, because no one will be attracted to you”, but sees the Vision Pro as fundamentally an anti-Facebook play by Apple:
The grudge match isn’t personal, it’s existential. Meta’s singular strategic objective is to escape second-tier status and, like Apple and Alphabet, control its distribution. And its path to independence runs through Apple Park. Zuckerberg is spending the GDP of a small country to invent a new world, the metaverse, where Apple doesn’t own the roads or power stations. Vision Pro is insurance against the metaverse evolving into anything more than an incel panic room.
Useful jargon of the week “zombie statistics”
FT Alphaville’s Sinead O’Sullivan used the term “zombie statistics” this week to describe the space industry’s blindly accepted assertion that the space industry is worth a trillion dollars:
I have to hear this claim all day, every day. It’s repeated nonstop and at every available opportunity because space investors, executives and enthusiasts want (and need?) so badly for it to be true.
This number originally came from Morgan Stanley’s infamous sell-side research which, admittedly, has done a great job at selling the industry.
She goes on to cite other flimsy data and ways that the industry is far less inevitable than its favourite numbers imply:
The frustration with the McKinseys and the Morgan Stanleys and the Harvard Business Reviews of the world entering the ‘space is hyperscaling’ conversation is that they have willingly exaggerated or misled their audiences to provide legitimacy to the space industry’s hot air when they don’t honestly discussed the industry’s real market size, and the induced demand in the system.
I’ve seen how these three “industry expert” papers have been used countless times to promote crypto-like shilling of stocks and investment deals that can only end badly.
Meta-zombies…
An example of zombie stats would be the hype last year around “the metaverse”, as described in our “Metaverse of Emptiness” post.
The CEO of the UK’s fastest growing agency said:
To stay in the game and to successfully engage within the metaverse, brands will need to invest their time and budget into strategizing channels and producing an endless amount of content to fuel engagement.
And the CTO of the $62 billion turnover mega-consultancy, Accenture said:
It is the time to stake your claim in the metaverse. The exponential pace of technology change is going to continue, and the applicability to every part of what you do is going to continue.
A zombie stat that may still be walking around is the claim, cited by McKinsey, that the metaverse economy could be worth $5 trillion by 2030. Statista saw it as being closer to $936BN.
In 2022, it was estimated that the global metaverse market stood at 65.5 billion U.S. dollars. In 2023, this is expected to rise to 82 billion U.S. dollars, before surging to 936.6 billion U.S. dollars by 2030.
That’s a difference between a research company and the world’s leading management consultancy’s estimate of $464 Trillion.
Better to rely on William Goldman’s advice: “Nobody knows anything.”
Get your brown highlighter out
Fact-checking every joker with a presentation about The Latest Thing is beyond the resources and patience of most of us, so some zombie statistics will become accepted facts in x§the the minds of many.
In fact, when you next encounter a barrage of BS, do the following:
Ask for sources.
Ask for the sources’ sources.
Ask people not to present statistics as facts unless they have both of these.
This will immediately result in meetings where a document or presentation with a suspected zombie stat is caveated with “I know we’re meant to check sources, but this is just so compelling”. People will nod and the battle will be lost…
So how to avoid zombie statistics? Buy a brown highlighter. These are surprisingly hard to source, so Antonym recommends the Faber-Castell metallic copper highlighter:
Mark the suspect stats in brown and accept that many of your team and your competitors are acting as if they are true. Adjust your strategy accordingly, especially if you have better data.
The science of science
One of my favourite history topics was the history of history, or historiography to give it its proper title. I remember the idea of it blowing my little A-level mind. It was love at first insight, both the content and just the fractal idea of it.
So, the science of science, which we won’t call Scientology for obvious reasons, is a topic that is just so intriguing, isn’t it? A paper in Nature this week discusses how the field has grown recently and why it’s important.
This field applies scientific methods to studying the workings of science itself and has recently experienced significant growth. Researchers in this field are focused on developing measures and indicators for science, such as how scientific contributions evolve over a career and how diversity among scientists may advance scientific progress.
Three important things made it possible for scientists to learn more about the way they work and how science works:
Data. Scientists now have access to lots of information about research, grants, patents and more. This data helps scientists understand scientific activity better and on a larger scale.
Measurements. Scientists use the data to learn new ways to measure scientific activities. This helps them answer questions that were hard to answer before.
Methods. New technologies like data science, network science, artificial intelligence and econometrics to study relationships, make predictions and understand how science works and how it can improve.
AI apps scam warning
Beware of downloading apps claiming to offer OpenAI's ChatGPT service. Scammers are taking advantage of people's curiosity about this new technology and offering chatbot apps that look like OpenAI’s ChatGPT app, but charge subscription fees. The apps are often promoted with typos in their names to screen out savvy users, and they're difficult to stamp out because they don't exhibit the technically invasive and malicious behaviour that would get more explicit malware thrown out of the app store.
Most other apps are cr*p pretending to be ChatGPT with varying degrees of deniability.
Real apps
Above is the ChatGPT app on iOS. There’s no official Android app yet.
Antonym also recommends the Poe app, on iOS and Android. It gives access to lots of different AI models but does cost £20 a month.
And, of course, there’s Perplexity, the winner of our AI research app, which is very much a Google-killer search engine for most use cases, from trouble-shooting software to helping guide research on a subject for a report or academic essay. Available on Android and iOS.
For more see WIRED’s recent article about the issue.
End of the world simulator: Asteroid Edition
If an asteroid is headed towards Earth and NASA can't redirect it, you'll want to know what kind of disaster you're facing. Luckily, Neal Agarwal has created an asteroid simulator that lets you see the impact of an asteroid based on its size, speed, and location. This tool allows you to visualize the resulting crater, fireball, shock wave, wind, and earthquake. Entertain family and friends by showing the result of a bus-size chunk of space-rock landing in their town centre…
Here are some of the effects of a large rock falling in mid-Sussex.
Via: Flowingdata
Google’s free AI course
But let’s end with a positive note and a bit of AI. Google’s free Generative AI course is now available. Antonym’s tried out the beginning of it and promises to finish by next week. It's a way for the semi-technical to understand more about AI like Google Bard and ChatGPT, with friendly Googley pictures like this:
And then complicated stuff like this:
That’s all for this week
Thank your reading. May your brown highlighters be ever close at hand.
Antony
P.S. If you have a moment, take a look at BN Edition and let me know what you think. It’s more business-focused, but still interesting (I hope).