P. S.: Post Scriptum

Some of you might remember that I wrote a post about the long tail of the ruling class. The post was in Italian and got translated in English by blogger Phil Edward. I took the translation copied it in my blog (with a link), but said that I did not fully agree with Phil understanding of my post. I didn’t enter more into details. And then there was silence, and in the silence I decided it was easier to just ignore the whole discussion. But a few days ago Nicholas Carr from Rough Type wrote a post on how the long tail permits to the service the puts in touch people to make massive amount of money, but to the people who produce the actual content not much money. Absolutely true, and this is why you don’t see google advertisments in my blog. But this is a very different problem from what I was discussing when I was speaking about the long tail of the Ruling Class. Mainly because I was not speaking about the ruling class but about the ‘classe dirigente’. Which is not exactly the ruling class, although I still can’t find a better translation. Ruling class smells a bit too much of kings and queens and prime ministers. And I was actually speaking about ‘classe dirigente’ as people who have authority over a certain field.

So when Phil commented on Nick post:

I blogged on this last year, in response to Pietro Speroni:

I felt I had to answer. Because my post was all about a multidimensional space (all our interests), which gets mistreated as a unidimensional space (money). Poor chap! For a multidimensional space to be treated as a unidimensional one is fairly common, but never fair. And the general excuse is ‘to understand better’, or ‘to simplify a bit’. But I suspect that multidimensional spaces might take it personally, bacause if you treat them bad, they can become quite convoluted, if you know what I mean. Maybe I should write a long post on the importance of not making models (even mental ones) with too few dimensions. But I think I shall leave it for some time next year. And then I can say that it was long due.

In any case I decided to copy my comment to Nick post here. Since it is quite long, and I feel might clarify why I don’t agree with Phil’s reading of my post. The slightly too aggressive tone of the comment is mainly due to the fact that it is one o’clock, and I really should be sleeping.

But Pietro Speroni doesn’t fully agree with what Phil says Pietro is saying.

Pietro’s post, in italian, was not speaking about money at all, nor about taxes, or law. It was speaking about authority. Which Phil translated as legal or economical authority. But that wasn’t the complete sense. I (pardon, Pietro Speroni) should have corrected it last, year. Many other things should have been done last year, and this is far in the long tail of them.

But maybe I can correct it now.

The problem is about unidimensionality versus multidimensionality. When we speak about money (or law, or taxes) we speak about something which is unidimensional. And of course only a finite amount of people can be an authority on that single dimension. You have a google, a myspace and a yahoo. You can’t have a million google all at similar size. Because on one dimension the curve follows a power law and although fat the tail still goes to zero fairly rapidly.

But when you have more dimensions the situation is slightly different. Not in terms of the money. If you try to report it in a single dimesnion you are back on square one. But in terms of information authority. In other words, yes it is true that there is only one amazon, and one google, and they help reach the long tail making massive amount of money while we don’t. But thanks to them we can now find for each of our interest the authority. Now while money is unidimensional (everybody either has more or less money than everybody else) interest is multidimensional. In other words the number of different interests available is higher than the number of people. So everybody can be an authority in a very small sector. And everybody will have multiple interests respecting for each of them the authority of that one person who gained the respect of the internet community on that one interest. This will not make that one person rich, but an authority in his field yes.

An example might finish to confuse the whole thing.
I have various interests: taoism, diet, complex systems, go, etc. On each of them I follow some authorities. But each of those authorities are so small, so precise that few people in the whole world know them. They are not an authority in taoism, but in the particular type of taoism I am interested in. I might even find authorities in Go applied to Taoism. They are not going to get rich with my little money and the little money of the 50 other people interested in their work. But they will be able to deliver content, produce novelty, and generally feed their passion. No money still. Yet things that do have value. It’s just that not all value can be measured in monetary terms. (Although I understand this is a revolutionary concept).

So the solution is to take off the google ads. Keep your daily job, find the blogs off the people who are an authority in the field you are interest in, feed them with questions. Blog about your passion, and answer the questions of the people who are interested in the topic you have become an authority into. All things that give life, not money.

Pietro Speroni di Fenizio.

And the keyword if you want to know more is Pareto Front. So you have something to read about while I find the time to write the long post about unidimensionality versus multidimensionality. And the authority on this (or one of them) is Jordan Pollack, who might not be making money from his website, but it is surely helping people who are interested in multidimensionality versus unidimensionality. While he keeps his daily job as a professor.

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