On Crowd Accelerated Innovation

Chris Anderson, the guy who founded TED - not the WIRED writer, has an interesting article on what he deems "crowd accelerated innovation." I won't hash out all the details but the basic idea is that people in certain areas (dance and architecture are two I remember) are able to innovate faster vis a vie the internet and specifically videos. The idea came to him when he realized that by publishing TED talks online the quality of future talks was improved. People invited to speak at TED poured over the archive and practiced their speeches and it showed.

This idea appeals to me because one, I have first hand experience with this which I will get into in a moment and two, it dispels the myth of the lone genius which is rarely if ever the case. Einstein had his first wife Mileva who was perhaps smarter than himself, Edison ran innovation like a factory, Kalashnikov (of AK47 fame) was the head of a design team which was played down by the Soviets to trump up the hero card, etc. Tesla may be an exception but come on, it's Tesla. He was barely human.

As usual I digress to a paintball story. Back in the day - that is, roughly the late 90's paintball tournaments were played in the woods. This made for some pretty bad spectating. You could rarely get a good glimpse of what made good teams good. The sport evolved and by the time I started playing national tournaments (NPPL, when there was one league) in roughly 2000 woods fields were a thing of the past. What this allowed more than anything was for amateurs to see how the pros played. It used to be the case that all teams at a tournament would play teams of other classifications - of which there were three - Pro, Amateur A, and Amateur B. In 80-90% of the match-ups the team in the higher division would win handily. But as time progressed and classifications went from 3 divisions to 4 (Pro, D1, D2, D3) and 5 (+semi pro) this wasn't the case at all. The gap in skill decreased. Of course some of this could be attributed to various factors - lower cost of paint, widening of classifications, smaller teams (from 10 man to 7) which means more chance, but by far and away I believe it was because everyone could see what the pros were doing. You could literally stand next to the net at a national tournament without paying admission for the cost of gas to get there. A paintball education became cheap.

You could see where they ran off the break, where they shot, how they shot, how they moved, how they talked, and the young kids started to mimic them. It really cannot be overstated how much it changed paintball. In 2002 if a pro team lost to an amateur team it was the talk of the tournament, but by 2006 it was entirely common for a good amateur team to beat a top ranked pro team - we did it repeatedly.

No Balls Are Safe or I Miss Paintball

I'm sorry that the video is sideways, that's my fault. It was edited a long time ago by Chris Dilts.

In this video Jamin, one of the 2 or 3 "adults/mentors" on our team, is drunk as usually happens when it gets dark out. He barges into the hotel room beachside on the Pacific Coast and picks up Tommy by his balls. The signifigance of this is that anyone who gets shot during the day runs the risk of having "unsafe balls". It was kind of like motivation.

I made this as an 18 year old freshman in college using my brand new 5 megapixel digital camera that I carried with me on all my subsequent paintball trips. I abused that camera; it's no longer with us sadly, but it doesn't owe me anything either. This was the very first event of the reformed NPPL that took place in Huntington Beach, CA. I ended up playing in the NPPL for 5 years, 2 professionally, and a year after I quit they went bankrupt. The time in between was interesting though. I played with the same core of people for about 6 years. Lots of stories for another time.

A new 7-man league has emerged and it looks promising. It's called the USPL (US Paintball League). Their first event starts tomorrow at the same venue in Huntington Beach. It's a pretty amazing place to have a tournament. Anyways, one of my teammates just bought a professional franchise, Indianapolis Mutiny, in the new league. Best of luck to Mutiny and the USPL and a word of advice; focus on playing paintball and staying profitable. Promotion these days comes from being legit, not making lame videos, passing out flyers, and paying Fox for airtime.

Blink... and Paintball

For JC's birthday I asked for and received many books that I had been looking for at the library, but had never been able to locate. Apparently libraries are growing in popularity.

Anyways, I read Blink in a little over a day. It's a book by the ever popular and quoted New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell. This is his second book. The first one being The Tipping Point and the latest being Outliers. Both of which I plan on reading after my current slew of books.

It was a good book, not amazing but pretty good. None the less I find myself talking about it a lot. The concepts he talks about are very applicable to everyday life. Namely, the snap judgments we make and how they can be good or bad. Many of the research studies were famous psychology experiments that I was familiar with, but the extra factor that I had never been aware of was all the product development cases he wrote about. Money for experiments flows to the areas where the most profit can be made... so naturally a lot of it goes to product development.

Then an issue was brought up that I think about all the time but never know how to contextualize or really just do anything productive about; firearm fire fights. I always wonder if all those years of playing paintball has taught me anything with a real world application (outside of the whole Randy Pausch head fake theory). To be honest I'm not sure that anyone really knows for certain. I don't know any former professional players who have or would even consider joining the military, police, etc. And I'm not talking about warfare. Just small groups of people shooting at each other.

Gladwell posits that people enter a state of "temporary autism" when put in such a situation. That is, they focus intently on one thing and other stimuli such as noises and time get blurred or entirely erased. It's funny because there are all these cops' stories about shooting a bad guy, and they all say the same (predictable) things, "time slowed down, I don't remember the shots, etc." I feel in some ways like it's wrong of me to chime in. After all, I've never been involved in a shooting of any sort. Nor do I really wish to be, but some things about paintball have always been true for all its participants.

No matter who you are and how level headed you normally are, after a game of paintball you breath heavier, you're all jacked on adrenaline, your sense of time is screwed up, and you're about 100 times more likely to yell and get in a fight (I'm constantly embarrassed by this). In short, you kind of lose your mind and go on some primitive autopilot. This is what Gladwell attempts to explain. It's also worth mentioning that that feeling you get when playing subsides over time, but never goes away entirely. It's like that part of Fight Club when Edward Norton says that being in Fight Club turns down the volume on everything. Nothing seems like as big of a deal. It takes more to rattle you. But is it really fair to say that playing paintball a lot is in some way really similar to being involved in a fire fight or going to war?

I think, to some extent, yes. I just never know what to do with this idea. It's something that paintball players think a lot about, and something that most military and law enforcement officers will be quick to deny the merit of. Even though their training in actual combat situations or real life experience is severely limited. Blink is essentially a book about how informed people can make snap judgments in their fields of expertise and perform with remarkable accuracy. This is something we can all attest to. Most of us are extremely proficient at at least one thing. It's the nature of our specialized worker society. One of the things I'm really good at (relative to the general population) is paintball. Paintball is a relatively new sport. There aren't a lot of terms for moves, positions, and styles of play. Beyond the basics it's also really hard to teach people how to play it well, and even when you are really good it's hard to explain why you're so good (a similar concept is talked about in the book).

What I'm trying to say is that I think certain professions could get some really cheap and effective training by using paintball as an instructional tool and hiring professional players to help guide them. We're all poor and willing to work cheaply! At the very least it's a good work out and it'll teach its participants to think calmly under pressure. The ability to remain semi-calm under pressure is the biggest plus. This is what should make paintball appealing to a variety of people. Hell, one of my paintball friends trained with a bunch of Navy SEALS and scout sniper teams and Camp Pendleton in CA. Three paintball players (1 old pro, 1 field ref, and probably the best player in the world) against 12 of America's top badasses... all veterans. To be fair he said they were great marksman and learned really quickly, but in the end it was an ass kicking all day by the paintball players. But how is that surprising? Most military personnel are only in for 2-4 years, and most of that time you aren't running close quarters combat simulations. Now compare that to a bunch of kids who grew up playing paintball 2 days a week for several hours for 5,7, or 12 years (for me by the time I was 23). It just seems like a huge waste to not tap some of that talent.

Google Yourself

I must have done something pretty terrible in a former life... why? If you google my name the search results are dominated by a gay Australian pornstar who happens to share a name with yours truly. If however you know a little bit about me and add a term like "paintball" to your query, this is the first page related to me that comes up. Which as it happens, makes it number 2 on the list. It is interesting, or sad for paintball rather, that the professionals are lower on the list than some 15 year old kid who lists paintball as his hobby. I don't think that would ever happen to an NFL player.

Aaron Goes to Afghanistan

"In war you win or you lose, live or die - and the difference is just an eyelash." -Douglas MacArthur

I'm not entirely sure of Aaron's details but he's leaving for Afghanistan tonight. He's in the Army Reserves as an infantryman with demolitions training (the actual designation escapes me).

I've considered joining the military before, but a multitude of factors have prevented me from taking that leap. The largest of which was, suprisingly enough, paintball. The above quote is dead on. Years of training, weekend after weekend of play, dozens of games, and the difference always came down to something like slipping at the beginning of the game, breaking a ball, or catching a lucky bounce. Paintball taught me that sometimes you're doing everything right, and that's a subjective term, and you get shot anyways. Or as Hass told me one time in Denver, after we blew a 6 on 3 lead in the finals, "it doesn't matter [if it's the right move], it either works or it doesn't." I could ramble about this for hours. Bottom line, even the most prepared throw dice in war.

Aaron and me. Aaron is into polaroids.

Picturequote

"Shadows in the flame. - The flame is not itself as bright as those that it illuminates: so, too, the wise man." - Friedrich Nietzsche from Human, All to Human I

I guess that made us the illuminated. This is a photo (poorly edited, sorry) of my former paintball team, Chicago Farside, before we went pro. From left to right: me, Ben, Kyle, and Jason. Paintball, like Randy Pausch's head fake theory, taught me more than any single person or school ever could.