Why is Marc Maron's "WTF" Podcast So Fucking Riveting?

For the uninitiated, Marc Maron is a stand-up comic who also has a podcast called "WTF". He interviews other stand-up comics, as well as the occasional musician or director or other artist. I had never heard of Marc Maron before I started listening to his podcast. I've seen precisely one stand-up comic in my life, and I can't remember the comic's name. So it's not that I'm a fan of stand-up comedians or that I was a fan of Maron in particular. But in my opinion, his podcast is the most riveting thing around. Maron and the people he interviews are always interesting, and sometimes fascinating. But what's fascinating about Maron's podcast is why it's fascinating. He's doing things with the interviews that nobody else I know of is doing.

Marc Maron is a middle-aged stand-up comic who has had a rough time in some ways. He's had a couple of failed marriages, and he's also had bad problems with drug and alcohol addiction (although he's been sober for many years now). One thing that immediately strikes any listener of WTF is that Maron certainly appears to be uncannily honest and self-deprecatory about his history of drug abuse. Although he certainly counts as a successful comic, he's often said that the reason he started doing the podcast in the first place was because his career was on the skids, and he simply didn't know what else to do.

Maron's honesty about his own history is something that I respect and appreciate a great deal. Addiction, depression, and any other mental illness (using the term very broadly) carry a stigma that makes people very uncomfortable. I've frequently written about my own troubles with epilepsy, depression, and chronic pain, and I can certainly attest to the fact that nothing sends people running for the hills faster than learning that someone they know is suffering from such things. People with these conditions hide them, refuse to talk about them, and are generally frightened of what will happen if others find out -- with good reason. But besides overt discrimination, people with chronic medical, psychological, or neurological problems face a difficult and underappreciated challenge. It's unhealthy and counterproductive to hide our conditions from others; isolation is very unhealthy. But at the same time, we don't want to open ourselves up to discrimination or stigma by being too open. And just as importantly, we don't want to be known as tediously dwelling on the trivial aspects of our chronic medical problems.

I certainly don't know of any statistics about stand-up comics. But judging from the WTF podcast, these sorts of problems seem to be very common in that group. So the discussion on the podcast frequently turns to those topics. And here, I think Maron and his guests do a good job of demonstrating how to cope with these challenges. They certainly acknowledge their problems and their (often troubled) histories. But they don't leave the impression that drug addiction (or whatever) defines them or has set the entire course of their lives. There's a delicate balance between recognizing that you've been significantly affected by these things, and not seeing your entire life -- past, present, and future -- through that lens. Someone wiser than me might have some advice about managing that balance, but I don't. But what I'm quite certain of is that if the stigma is ever to go away, we need more people like Maron and his guests who are willing to publicly, honestly discuss the subject in a balanced and reflective way.

The guests on WTF are successful, of course. Otherwise they wouldn't be on the show in the first place. But even with this set of guests, it's remarkable how often the discussion turns to the uncertainty and setbacks of their careers. It would be a mistake to think of stand-up comedians as having no career experience that's relevant to the 99.99999% of people who aren't stand-up comedians. Obviously, I'm no expert on the subject, but it's safe to say that the career choice of pursuing comedy is very entrepreneurial. There's no clear career "track", formal education, or qualifications. Nor is there any job security; and there is very little formal employment. The failure rate is very high, and the opportunity cost is enormous. But a more interesting feature of their careers, as they discuss them, is the need to endlessly hone one's craft, getting as much critical feedback as possible as quickly as possible. Maron and his guests often talk about doing "open mike" gigs for no money, just for the sake of practicing one's material, and revising it in the light of an audience's reaction. Even extremely successful comedians who don't need to work at all will get in front of audiences in order to get feedback, especially negative feedback. Developing a half-hour of material in a year is considered extremely productive. My impression is that the best comedians will achieve that productivity by incrementally improving their material by getting in front of audiences as often as possible.

In this way, comedians are way ahead of the curve -- they've internalized the hard lessons that the rest of us will eventually be faced with. Instead of rising through the ranks of a traditional career trajectory, we'll be forced to learn as much as possible as quickly as possible, usually by failing. Although the end result of their work is different from most of our work, the necessary attitude and values are exactly what we need to adopt. Personally, I find this aspect of Maron's discussions totally fascinating.

On a different note, there's one feature of Maron's interviews that I wish was more common. He is the exact opposite of Larry King, who is the worst interviewer to have ever lived. A typical interview by Larry King -- if you've ever forced yourself to listen to one of those -- is a series of totally disconnected questions with no follow-up whatsoever. There is nothing a guest could possibly do to force Larry King to ask a follow-up question. His interviews were nothing more than a randomly-chosen sequence of totally generic questions, bearing no relationship to one another. The Larry King-style interview is way too common, especially for serious topics discussed by powerful people. The next time you listen to or read a typical interview, ask yourself if it's obvious that the questions weren't all written down beforehand.

It's got to be really difficult to avoid the Larry King interview style. A more engaging back-and-forth conversation has to avoid being nothing more than banter, while avoiding the "inside baseball" discussions that would alienate a listener who isn't immersed in the topic beforehand. The interviewer can't be totally invisible, but the guest should be the focus of the conversation. I don't know how Maron manages to strike the right set of balances, but he does a remarkably good job of it. I wish that the talking heads and mainstream news reporters would take a lesson. It's sad that we have to turn to a comedian for the sort of long-form interviews that would really be nice for discussing important, difficult topics. Come to think of it, I can come up with only three other people who do a good job of this: Terry Gross, Jon Stewart, and Harry Shearer, two of whom are also comedians.

I don't understand why we live in a world where our best sources of intelligent discussion, news, and commentary are comedians. But that's the situation.

How to Think: Three Lessons

I'm finishing up teaching a course on critical thinking. Despite the fact that critical thinking is certainly a valuable skill, I can't help but think that we need a course entitled, "Thinking". Students could take it their freshman year, and then they could go on to learn about critical thinking.

I haven't mastered thinking yet, but I've learned a lot by working with some excellent thinkers. So I'm pretty confident that I've got enough material for at least a one-semester course. Here are a few highlights I've picked up (disclaimer: I've stolen most of the analogies from people who are smarter than me).

There are no geniuses. A major obstacle to thinking is the myth that there is special class of people called "geniuses", for whom the normal rules do not apply. These "geniuses" are able to immediately see solutions to problems that would elude a normal mind. They do not appear to think at all, instead they seem to have special access to the Truth. They do not seem to actually solve problems. They seem to have already known the solutions all along.

So-called "geniuses" are like people who can run very quickly. They may run a lot faster than we can, but they're not doing anything different from what we do when we run. These people don't fly, they just run much more efficiently than we do.

Because there are no geniuses, there's no principled reason to believe that there are particular problems or projects that are reserved for this special class of people. We can learn how to think better, and we can choose to work on whatever topic or problem we like. Of course, we may never catch up to some people in some respects, but we can still play in the same game with them.

Problem solving is not like playing "connect the dots". When we solve a crossword puzzle or win at a video game, we have an implied guarantee that there is a solution, and furthermore, that we have been given all of the information we need to solve it. That's the "connect the dots" model of problem solving.

In real life, we usually don't have all the dots. Some of the dots we do have are wrong. Most are missing. There's no guarantee that we ought to be playing the game in the first place. It might not have a solution at all. There might be some other game that we should be playing, instead.

Educators cause a lot of long term brain damage in their students by systematically giving the impression that thinking and problem solving are like these games. They learn the totally false belief that the best way to attack a difficult problem is to try to rearrange the parts of the problem, and try to construct a solution using all and only those parts. In order to learn how to think, it's crucial to spend time trying to solve ill-defined problems. Then, you know that you need to figure out how to turn that problem into one that can be solved, and which is still valuable.

Selecting the problem is 95% of the work; solving it is the other 5%. I teach a bunch of advanced logic courses. I regularly assign homework problems whose solutions were considered very significant results. Some of those problems helped cement the reputations of the people who solved them. Someone in my class always asks, "How are we supposed to solve this, when the solution was found by some genius?!". Leaving aside the fact that there are no geniuses, my answer is always that these people thought of the problem in the first place. Once they had formulated it, the solution wasn't (necessarily) so difficult. They have well-deserved reputations as great logicians because they are excellent at selecting problems, not necessarily at solving them (although they almost always happen to be excellent at that, too, of course).

This doesn't mean that you can pick any problem at all to solve. The best problems are the ones whose solutions lead to the formulation of new, interesting problems. People who are excellent thinkers spend their time thinking about what happens after the solution is found. Most of us, in contrast, spend the vast majority of our time thinking about the problem itself. Most of us are seeing just a few inches in front of us, whereas the people who make real progress see a mile ahead of themselves. In order to think, one must get into the habit of wondering what sorts of new questions would arise if a particular problem were to be solved. If it's easy to see lots of really interesting new questions, then that's the problem you want to be spending your time on.

These three lessons are just scratching the surface of the tip of the iceberg, but they're a good place to start.

The Coming Two-Tiered Educational System

It's easy to find information about how universities are suffering in the current economy. I'm thinking specifically about public universities, which find themselves with smaller amounts of state funding, mandates to educate larger numbers of students, and no obvious source of income to make up the difference. What can universities do to cope with this harsh economic environment? Speaking broadly, there are two possible strategies: Make more money, or cut costs.

Let's suppose you're running a university, and you want to make more money. There are only a few sources that you can go to:

• The state. You can try to lobby for increased public financing for higher education.
• Private donors. You can fund-raise from alumni.
• External grants. You can put pressure on faculty to obtain larger amounts of federal grant money.
• The students. You can raise tuition and fees on your students.

I'm cynical enough to assume that significant increases in state funding are not on the horizon. Public universities were already underfunded when economic times were good, and so a return to that level of funding (which I don't think will happen), isn't enough to offset increasing costs, anyway.

Occasionally, private donors will donate significant funds to a university. But what's not generally appreciated is that this money doesn't do as much good as it should, for the simple reason that private donors almost invariably dictate where their money goes. Nobody donates a million dollars to help renovate a crumbling building or pay general operating expenses. The vast majority of the time, this money goes to departments and programs that are already quite comfortable, financially. Furthermore, if (for example) a business school gets a million dollars from a donor, the university can't reallocate a million dollars from its budget to a needier program, because this would offset whatever impact the donor hoped to make on the business school. This would create a huge disincentive to donors to give money to the university. So, whenever money is donated to a financially secure program, it has little effect on the rest of the university. And unfortunately, most money is donated to precisely those programs.

External grant money is an excellent source of income for the university, because it frequently comes with so-called "indirect costs" budgeted into it. These funds can be reallocated by the university for nearly any purpose; they are the university's incentive to obtain these grants, and they help fund research that's still in its early stages. Of course, you can't just turn on this flow of money like a spigot -- it takes years for most research to get to the point where an external grant application is possible. And it's an unfortunate effect of the current economy that less research is being funded internally by universities, which means that there is less research in the pipeline on its way to obtaining external money.

Increased tuition has none of these drawbacks. You can use tuition for almost any purpose (assuming that the state doesn't impose restrictions, which is often does), and you can grab it on relatively short notice, without having to wait years for it to arrive. Furthermore, it's an ironic fact about the current economy that even though it's getting more difficult for college-educated young people to find jobs, a university education is seen as more necessary than ever. For that reason, young people are willing to cough up whatever money it takes to go to college, even if it means taking on huge loans.

For these reasons, tuition increases inevitably follow when a university decides that it has to obtain more funding.

On the other hand, suppose you decide that you don't want to impose an increasing financial burden on students. In this case, you have to cut costs. So where do we go to cut costs?

By far, the largest operating expense in a university is salary and benefits. So there's an incentive for administrators to create a system that provides them as much flexibility on salary and benefits as possible, so that they can adapt to a changing economic climate. Unfortunately, tenured faculty represent a huge financial burden, and they're almost impossible to fire. They teach fewer classes, for more money, than untenured and non-tenure-track faculty. The difference in salary is enormous -- an adjunct faculty member will teach twice as many students for half the money as a tenured faculty member. It's no mystery why the proportion of tenured and tenure-track faculty is dropping precipitously all over the country.

Furthermore, there's also an incentive to make changes to what courses are being offered. To take a personal example, I regularly teach a very small, upper-level class in advanced logic. Typically, I'll have about a half-dozen students, because it's a very challenging, and technically specialized class that appeals to only a tiny percentage of the student population. The university probably loses money when I teach this class, because my own (modest) salary wouldn't be paid by the tuition that these courses take in. In a bad economic environment, you'd want your faculty teaching as many students as possible, even if it comes at the cost of losing some of the more specialized, higher-level courses.

In short, universities face a dilemma: To take in more money, they need to raise tuition, which dramatically affects students' wallets. To save money, they have to lower the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty, and get rid of specialized, higher-level courses, which affects students' educations. Both options directly impact students.

Although we should expect universities to go down both of these unappealing paths, we should also expect individual universities to concentrate on one or the other approach. Some will try hard to not compromise on the quality of education, while others will try hard not to increase costs.

This will inevitably create a two-tiered educational system in this country. The state universities that concentrate on raising money will become more and more like private schools -- they'll continue to offer an excellent education, but they'll be increasingly out of reach for the vast majority of young people. Other schools will keep their costs as low as possible (although costs will continue to increase, regardless), but the cost-saving measures will lower the quality of education. In short, we're moving to a two-tiered educational system.

How Our Critical Reasoning Courses Fail

(I haven't been doing much writing here for a while because I've been terribly busy, but I hope to start up again now with at least one post every couple of days.)

I'm finishing teaching another semester at the University of Missouri, where I'm an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy. Once again, I've taught a course in critical reasoning (which our department calls "logic and reasoning". And once again, I think I've pretty much failed to accomplish anything.

My students, like usual, have been excellent; the fault is entirely mine. The only defense I'll offer is that critical reasoning courses in general are totally broken, and I've taken on the task of trying to redesign my own course from the ground up. That's tricky, but I'm optimistic that I'll be able to get it right one of these days.

For the uninitiated, critical reasoning courses are supposed to teach the students how to critically evaluate an argument. In other words, the goal is to give students the tools to answer the question, "should I accept the conclusion this particular author is advocating?". And if the answer is "no", the students are supposed to be able to diagnose any flaws in the author's evidence or reasoning. The course is often taken by pre-law students, but it's usually a general education course that's taken by a wide range of freshmen and sophomores.

The appealing thing about teaching such a course is that there's a very well-established framework for organizing the material, and that framework is quite consistent and easy to understand. There's a series of steps that we teach our students to follow, and they lead logically to a well-reasoned and balanced evaluation of an author's claims. Briefly, it goes something like this:

• We identify the conclusion the author is trying to establish -- what's the author's most important point?
• We identify the structure of the argument -- e.g. what are the most important premises supporting the conclusion?
• We identify whether the argument is valid -- if, hypothetically, the premises were true, would we be compelled to accept the conclusion, or is there a gap in the author's reasoning?
• We identify whether the argument is sound -- are the premises actually true?
• We identify any informal fallacies -- e.g. is the author trying to play on our emotions instead of logical reasoning in order to convince us?

There's more to it than that, but those steps are the framework for every critical reasoning course I've every heard of, and they track the chapters of every critical reasoning textbook I've seen.

It's a pretty good framework, all things considered. But I've been really unhappy with it for several years, and so I've been trying a lot of experiments in my classes in order to figure out a new framework. So far, nothing has worked. But it's informative, I think, to consider how the structure of critical reasoning courses has failed our students. There are several really important flaws in these courses.

The first flaw is due to the fact that one must begin with a specific argument -- say, an opinion piece in a newspaper -- and then evaluate it. Because the framework requires a specific example, it precludes asking a very important question that any critical person should definitely ask, namely, "Why did the author decide to write on that topic in the first place?", or alternately, "Why didn't the author decide to write on some other topic?".

This is an absolutely crucial question, which is systematically overlooked in critical reasoning classes. For example, it would be perfectly common for someone teaching such a course to bring in some material taken from a presidential candidate's speeches, or perhaps an exchange from a presidential debate. The class would evaluate whether the candidate has made a convincing argument. All of that is fine, of course. But an easy example shows the breadth of questions that are necessarily missed in such a class. Consider the Obama-Romney debates. They never discussed the morality of using drones to assassinate American citizens overseas. The reason why they didn't is simple: they both happen to agree that it's an acceptable practice. Candidates don't discuss topics they agree on; they only draw contrasts with each other. Right away, this eliminates the majority of important issues facing citizens. In this and other ways, the range of debate is artificially narrowed.

Now, it seems to me at least that this phenomenon is every bit as important as any other feature of an argument. But despite the fact that I've been teaching these courses off and on since 1995, I have never heard of it being mentioned in a critical reasoning course, nor have I seen it discussed in any textbook. But the range of debate is artificially narrowed all the time, for a huge variety of political, economic, and other reasons. It's very, very important to understand this if one wants to be able to critically reason about almost any public debate.

To take another example, we often teach critical reasoning by examining specific newspaper articles or opinion pieces. But we don't teach anything about the complex corporate, government, and political influences on newspapers. Newspapers are increasingly owned by a tiny number of very powerful corporations, which have a vested political and economic interest in how events are portrayed in the media. It would be shocking if those interests didn't manifest themselves in the structure and practice of media. When you think about it, it's clear that this is also every bit as important as being able to identify fallacies in an essay.

Another issue that plagues our critical reasoning courses is more subtle. We have a bias toward teaching things that have names. Every philosophy professor (and lots of other people, of course) can name at least a dozen different fallacies (begging the question, poisoning the well, ad hominem, affirming the consequent, etc.). Those are the "usual suspects" that appear in every critical reasoning text. Examples and readings are carefully chosen to exemplify those fallacies that have names.

But how many fallacies are there? A dozen? Fifty? There are actually an infinite number of different possible fallacies (as my logic professor used to say, it's not like there are a dozen fallacies from which all other fallacies can be derived). Here's an example from Paul Krugman. He thinks we missed the banking crisis because other institutions that don't look like banks started acting like banks, and banks started acting like other kinds of financial institutions. He argues that when other institutions started borrowing short and loaning long, we should have classed them as "banks" for the purpose of economic analysis. Unfortunately, we didn't because these things don't look like banks. But what's the name of the fallacy of relying on surface appearances (like having a big marble staircase and tellers behind a counter) to identify something? He called it something like, "the fallacy of concreteness" because it doesn't have a name. But it's important, and we do it all the time.

To take another example, there's a commercial on television which claims that 90% of all Toyotas sold within the last ten years are still on the road. The clear implication is that there are lots of old Toyotas on the road. But that's not necessarily true -- if the vast majority of Toyotas were sold in the past couple of years, it's possible that every Toyota older than that is sitting on concrete blocks. The fallacy here is using an average over a range of data, and assuming that average holds over the entire range. This fallacy has no name, but again, we do it all the time. But because it has no name, it's not taught.

I could go on literally for a hundred pages about the topics that are systematically missed in every critical reasoning course. Basically, anything that has to do with the fundamental structure of our economy, politics, and media is overlooked; and anything that doesn't have a name is also overlooked. My opinion is that these phenomena are actually much more important than the material that is actually taught (although the material that's taught is still very important).

Our "critical reasoning" courses are really no such thing. Furthermore, I think it's because the people teaching these courses, for the most part, aren't good at critical reasoning themselves, which is why these courses are unlikely to change.

Content Creation vs. Data Mining

Many of the most interesting and complicated systems have a central core containing a lot of information, which is surrounded by a lot of machinery that manipulates the center and reads the information. Cells are like this -- lots of machinery at the center that's manipulated and turned on and off by genes. Our economy is increasingly like this -- a real economy that produces value, surrounded by an enormous banking and financial services industry. We should think of the internet like this, too -- it's a central core of information content, surrounded by layers of machinery. Increasingly, we interact with that machinery more than we interact directly with the content.

I used to be active on the bulletin board systems of the 80s, and I first came across the internet when I installed the NCSA Mosaic program, which is the great-granddaddy of internet browsers. The internet had quite an impressive amount of content back then, but it was like a gigantic library with all the books thrown onto the floor. When someone would create a new page, it was like they were walking into the library and throwing a new book somewhere at random. There was no good way to find anything, and so a lot of pages were "link farms", containing links to pages on various subjects. There were links farms containing links to other link farms. The precursor to Yahoo would occasionally put out a list of internet sites, which could be printed out in about ten or twenty pages.

Not surprisingly, the first layer of machinery surrounding this content comprised the search engines, most of which were hand-curated directories. It may be difficult now to recall how much value this added to the internet, which used to be a disorganized, chaotic mess populated entirely by bleeding-edge early adopters who used it mainly because it was fascinating and new, not because it was useful.

Obviously, when the PageRank algorithm was implemented on a large scale by Google, it was a game-changer. The link farms went away, and hand-curated directories started to die out, too. Google was -- and still is -- a gigantic card catalog for the library. This aspect of Google is still nothing more than a very efficient, large-scale card catalog.

That was the first layer of machinery around the content-filled core: the organization and taming of the chaotic mass of web pages. Think of that layer as an organizing force that makes information accessible, but doesn't create any new information itself.

But an equally important aspect of Google other than its power to organize stems from the fact that it's automated, not hand-curated like the earlier search engines. An automated system can be implemented on a huge scale, and the behavior of the users can be mined for information. The result is everything from targeted, online advertising to early detection of the flu. In my opinion, it's an often overlooked fact that this data-mining of user behavior is parasitic on the internet's central core of content. There may be a very large number of interesting and useful ways to mine user behavior, but that number is finite. Given only a finite amount of online content, it will become increasingly difficult to find new ways to exploit it as the number of data-mining projects increases.

Nonetheless, the number of ways to exploit content is much larger than the number of distinct kinds of content. So whenever there is a new mode of content creation, a comparatively huge number of data-mining initiatives becomes possible. For example, Wikipedia is clearly a novel way to create content. And that content gives rise to a large number of ways to read those articles, analyze the internal links, extract data from the text, and so on. Twitter supports an entire ecosystem of data-mining projects. Wikipedia and Twitter are similar in that respect.

However, Wikipedia and Twitter are different in an important respect. Wikipedia's main economic value is in the content itself. It was conceived as a reference resource, and that's still its primary use. Twitter, on the other hand, has some value as a way of sending out short bursts of information to one's followers. But that's not its main value anymore. It makes money primarily by selling its data to businesses that mine it for useful information. Twitter makes money by harnessing the unforeseen consequences of its system, whereas Wikipedia makes money (through donations) by doing a good job of what it was originally intended to do.

This is why Twitter and Facebook are more interesting than Google and Wikipedia. Twitter and Facebook represent new ways to create content online, and they combine that content creation with unforeseeable (at the time) ways to exploit that content for data-mining purposes. Google and Wikipedia each contain half of that equation. Google excels at data-mining, but not content creation (one aspect of content creation is social media, and Google is notoriously bad at social media; but that's just one specific kind of content creation, which I think is the more important point). Wikipedia is great at content creation, but not data-mining.

Data-mining opportunities are vast, but finite. Content creation opportunities are unlimited, but more difficult to execute. The predictable implication of this fact is that organizations that successfully data-mine a particular core of content will eventually run out of opportunities for growth. Thus, they have to either remain stagnant or go into the content creation business. Examples are everywhere. Netflix is now producing its own shows. Google is creating an augmented reality ecosystem around its "Google Glass" project that will undoubtedly spur a vast amount of new content creation (they did this on a smaller scale with Google Earth, which allowed people to create new layers of information). Conversely, groups that have done very well with content creation must find ways to exploit that content. The obvious example is Facebook. But there are plenty of other examples -- one of my favorite is StockTwits, which provides a way for investors to share opinions about the stock market, and which is also being used to extract opinion about stocks in an automated fashion.

In my opinion, there are two important questions we must answer when we try to predict the future of an internet-related business. The first is, "Are they primarily a data-mining business or a content-creation business?". The second is, "Can they effectively move to the other mode after they've started to grow?". Those are tough questions, but I think they're the right ones.

The Best Best Android Apps Lists List

I'm sure a lot of people have had the same problem I've been struggling with for the past couple of weeks. I purchased a fancy new HTC Android phone, and immediately got lost in the Google Play store trying to find the best apps for my new toy. Then I checked online to try to find useful lists of the best Android apps, only to find that there's an equally confusing tangle of those lists. For those who are similarly struggling, I've taken a little time and put together a list of the best lists of Android apps: it's the "Best Best Android Apps Lists List":

1. PCPro's 25 Best Android Apps. Pros: There's a manageable number of suggestions on this list -- I don't know about you, but when I see a list with more than fifty suggestions, I start to glaze over. Frankly, I think it's just a scheme to get you to flip through a huge number of pages with advertisements. Ten is usually too few to be useful, and so to my mind, twenty-five is the sweet spot. Cons: The only thing I really find objectionable is that it's British, and so the prices are in pounds. Why do the British object so much to joining the Euro? That really pisses me off.
2. Digital Trend's Best Android Apps. This has a few too many suggestions, but it mitigates the harm caused by including seventy apps by giving a sensible set of categories you can skip to without having to page through too many irrelevant lists. I also insist on seeing a good-sized screenshot of each app before I go to the Google Play store. And unlike a lot of other lists, this one includes links directly to the download section of Google Play. This is very helpful, and it's strange to me that so many lists don't take the time to do this.
3. The Business Insider List of Best Android Apps. The strength of this list is that it includes some unusual suggestions (Ancrestry.com's app, for example) in addition to the usual suspects (Evernote, for example). It's a very short list, and so it wouldn't be useful if it just listed the same apps we always see.
4. TechCrunch's Best Android Apps of 2012. For some reason, it seems to be very unusual to include both iPhone and Android apps on the same list, even though there's obviously a lot of overlap in their offerings. One weakness of this list is the inclusion of Google Maps. I call this a weakness not because Google Maps isn't a great app (it definitely is!), but that it's too obvious -- isn't the purpose of a "Best Apps" list to alert the readers to apps they don't know about? In keeping with TechCrunch's emphasis on providing interesting news, there seems to be a focus on apps that provide information as opposed to games, for example. But if you're a regular reader of TechCrunch, this list isn't to be missed.

I hope this helps other new owners of Android phones who have gotten lost in the thicket of "Best Android Apps" lists.

Adobe (ADBE) Sentiment and Price

Today, Adobe has been kind enough to provide an interesting test of sentiment analysis. There's a bunch of speculation that Adobe (ADBE) may reach new highs, and there seem to be a lot of bullish investors out there who are willing go long on this stock. The sentiment analysis, however, paints a different picture. Here's a chart showing the stock price (in blue), and sentiment (orange dashed line).

Both lines have been normalized relative to a fourteen day moving average (mean zero, standard deviation one).

Sentiment is certainly not the only driver of stock price, and it often isn't the most important driver, either. But our tests so far give us at least a few hypotheses about the relationship between sentiment and price. First, and most importantly, when sentiment and price diverge too much (over one and a half standard deviations), the price is far more likely to move in the direction of the sentiment over the next three days. Second, when the price and the sentiment converge, there tends to be a period in which the price stabilizes. The second pattern is weaker than the first, but it's significant.

Based on those observations, what should be speculate about Adobe's immediate future? Well, the price has been much higher than the sentiment -- and in keeping with our other tests, it has been converging to the sentiment level. Sentiment, on the other hand, has been quite flat, or even dropping slightly over the past few months. So we should expect, that Adobe is very unlikely to climb much higher, and it certainly won't stay any higher for more than a day or two at the most.