I'm generally anti-curatorship by disposition.  It just seems like a recipe for bias, politics and elitism.  I tend to look favorably on wisdom-of-the-crowds models, which seem inherently more democratic.  Recently, however, I took a hard look at this thinking and decided I was wrong.

In fact, looking at the profile of the content I consume, I already thought I was wrong and was behaving accordingly.  Because if you look at the content I consume, nearly all of it is curated.  TED Talks, Fora.TV, Big Think, Radiolab, This American Life, Flavorpill, Edge.org, lectures from Chicago Booth and LSE, books that are recommended by friends, industry-specific news digests, not to mention the slew of recommended content I get from Facebook, Twitter and email.  I almost never go to the Digg-like sites.  (I don’t even look at all the content sent by people close to me, e.g. heavy forwarders.)

The problem with classic curatorship, e.g. museums, is that a person or small group of people has inordinate power.  It creates this “I know what art is (and you don’t)” dynamic.  But competitive curatorship (alert – new term just coined; I googled it to make sure J) changes the dynamic by reducing the exclusivity factor.  In truth, we need something like curatorship to protect us from information overload.  Competitive curatorship, i.e. having a portfolio of curators that we curate ourselves, is the first-tier solution to the problem of filter failure.  I choose my content from curators that I choose.  

Which all makes sense and is workable.  However, I’m starting to need a second-tier solution.  Even the amount of content from my specially selected set of “curators” is growing too much for me to handle without being overwhelmed.  I can imagine a platform that would allow me to overlay a social view on top of the recommendations from my curators, with the platform constantly analyzing my clicks and people (incl. friends but not necessarily) with similar tastes to offer me additional recommendations.  The platform could also analyze how long I spent on different types of media and estimate how long it would take for me to absorb, only showing me as much content (in time) as I want to absorb.  Perhaps one hour per day on weekdays, two hours on weekends.

Oh, if wishing made it so.

In a relevant aside, the LSE public lectures are all recorded and are quite long:  http://www.lse.ac.uk/resources/podcasts/publicLecturesAndEvents.htm 

Here are the ones I plan on watching (I would link but the website isn’t very well-constructed).  I will note, however, that this is a terrible job of curatorship since I haven’t yet watched them and there are far too many lectures listed.  This is probably a better artifact of my psychology and perhaps a lesson plan in headline-writing, than of curatorship.

Truly, I am just using this blog as a store for my list, but I may return at some later point and offer some more knowledgeable comments than I can provide now.  But for now:

Dec 08, 2009 – The End of Lawyers? with Richard Susskind
Nov 26, 2009 - The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work with Alain de Botton
Nov 20, 2009 - In Conversation with Amartya Sen  
Nov 10, 2009 - Rules of Evidence with Hilary Mantel
Nov 10, 2009 - The First Legacy Games:  The Physical and Socio-Economic Transformation of East London
Oct 29, 2009 - Human Rights in the 21st Century with Noam Chomsky
Oct 21, 2009 - Predictioneer: How to Predict the Future with Game-Theory with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
Oct 20, 2009 - Why I Grew to Love America and You Should Too with Justin Webb
Oct 15, 2009 - The Cocaine Wars:  The Mess We're In and How to Get Out of It with Tom Feiling
Oct 06, 2009 - The Consolations of Economics with Tim Harford
Sep 24, 2009 - Developing Rural Areas with Esther Daflos
Sep 22, 2009 - Natural Resource Management with Paul Collier
Jul 27, 2009 - The Idea of Justice with Amartya Sen
Apr 30, 2009 - Gray's Anatomy: Thoughts on Politics, Religion and the Meaning of Life with John Gray
Apr 29, 2009 - Wars, Guns and Votes:  Democracy in Dangerous Places with Paul Collier
Feb 18, 2009 - Thinking Like a Social Scientist:  Public Economics and Pub Economics with Nicholas Barr
Feb 03, 2009 - Here Comes Everybody:  How Change Happens When People Come Together with Clay Shirky
Nov 11, 2008 - Navigating Global Economic and Financial Change with Mohamed A El-Erian
Oct 20, 2008 - Gut Feelings:  Shortcuts to Better Decision-Making with Gerd Gigerenzer
Oct 16, 2008 - Inhuman and Degrading Treatment:  The Words Themselves with Jeremy Waldron
Oct 14, 2008 - Hot, Flat and Crowded with Thomas Friedman
May 12, 2008 - McMafia:  Crime Without Frontiers with Misha Glenny
May 02, 2008 - Common Wealth:  Economics for a Crowded Planet with Jeffrey Sachs
Mar 17, 2008 - Behavioural Economics: Common Mistakes in Daily Decisions with Dan Ariely
Feb 28, 2008 - Beyond the Banality of Evil with Steve Reicher
Feb 06, 2008 - The Logic of Life with Tim Harford
Jan 30, 2008 - Sleeping Beauty:  Awakening the American Dream with Maurice Saatchi
Nov 06, 2007 - Popperian Pathways:  The Demarcation Between Quack Cancer Cures and Scientific Remedies 
Nov 06, 2007 - Judging the Booker Prize:  What Concerns Novelists in English Today (and What Does Not)
Oct 18, 2007 - The Divergence of the Bottom Billion with Paul Collier
Oct 01, 2007 - In Conversation with Alan Greenspan

I’m terrible at forced writing.  Every November, NaNoWriMo comes along (http://www.nanowrimo.org/) and I tell myself I’m going to write a novel in a mad month-long burst of creative abandon.  The point of National Novel Writing Month is to force yourself to sit down and enact the process of writing, cease the double-take editing, and write for better or for worse.  And every year on November 2, I succumb to writer’s block.

I’m not a writer by trade and am glad for it.  Because I like writing and I would hate for it to become work.  (This is also the reason why I don’t think I’ll ever get a PhD.)  There is this magic about addressing some blank canvas with the spark of inspiration in you, whether that canvas is a page, a slide, your life or an actual canvas.  With that spark of inspiration, the blankness is not an oppression, but an exuberant freedom.  It is a giving birth, the bringing forward of something new to the world, and the process is wondrous, even if the output is an ugly howling red thing.  I write because it’s fun.

It’s that spark that makes it magic, but the trouble is that the spark is willful and flighty.  It is impossible to control and futile to try.  That’s the trouble with creativity, innovation, whatever you want to call it.  It’s defined by its new-ness, and so, by definition, there’s no build-by-numbers kit for it.  It’s impossible to sift through the infinite permutations.  So, is there any way to encourage the thinking of something that never before existed?  Is remaining watchful all we can do?  

I think we can do more.

Lay the foundation.  There’s this view that creativity is this chaotic, crazy thing that is supported by chaotic, crazy environments that may include, among others, drug use, manic depression, promiscuity and bright colors.  For me, this has never been the case.  This might be because the flavor of creativity I prefer is something akin to pattern recognition.  I like the creativity of sense-making, though I’ve been known to write a poem when a feeling comes over me that I can describe in no other way.  I need a framework to provide context for the new-ness, to help me order the new-ness, hang it in the right place on the Christmas tree of my thinking.  This isn’t an arbitrary framework but one based on personal truths that I consider indisputable, such as the passing of time, my care for myself and my loved ones, and the deep uncertainty of the world around us.  

Build a pile of tinder. The creative product does not come from the air.  It is built from the material of our subconscious, diverse experience, work life, daily observation, culture we imbibe, biologically derived impulses, the idiosyncrasies built into our DNA, and the complexities of our interactions with other people.  The richer the tinder, the more likely and fiery the blaze.  

Shelter it from the storm.  The habits of our daily lives (and especially our daily work lives) are not conducive to new-ness.  We tend to fall into the ruts of doing the necessaries, reacting to external stimuli instead of enacting all the degrees of freedom we were born with.  It’s hard for us to stay aware of our beingness, like the story of the fish in water asking “What the f[expletive] is water?” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/fiction).  It’s even harder to shelter creativity at companies, with their profit imperative.

Rub two sticks together.  We can invite inspiration in a few ways.  Constraints, first of all.  They say that necessity is the mother of innovation.  We have some power over the constraints we lay upon ourselves, and inside organizations, over other people as well.  They can be social constraints (like announcing our objectives to other people), financial constraints (like quitting our jobs), or professional constraints (like setting up a meeting).  We can also invite inspiration through new experiences, exposure to new ideas, the breaking of patterns.    

Remain watchful.  Keep a pen and paper handy for when musings turn into inspiration.  Even if you’re in the shower.  If you’re a company, keep a CNC prototyping machine or a pile of engineers or a pilot budget handy.

I just finished writing a 10-page single-spaced essay.  I have much to say on the topic of forced creativity, and value of academic essays in general, but that’s for an 18-and-over audience.  One thing that struck me over the course of this tortuous process was the heavy emphasis placed on citation in the academic realm.

Now in principle, I’m a fan of giving credit where credit is due.  Citations not only assign appropriate credit, but they also allow the reader to trace back the antecedents and provide a roadmap for the intellectual history of the piece of work.  The citation system also inspired the PageRank algorithm that underlies our always-on-hand Google search engine (http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html).  At the heart of both are social systems for building a shared and constantly evolving edifice of knowledge in a distributed fashion.  In addition to credit, they also lend credence and authority -- through an automated algorithm for PageRank, through the social-reputational mechanism for academia.

Yet, as I inserted citation after citation in-line to this monolith (it really took on this Sisyphean flavor), it felt….if not archaic, then at least dated.  The number of citations drastically reduced the readability of the paper, making it hard to glean whatever original insight existed in the sea of parentheticals.  It felt like, at times, I was citing what any reasonable person would call ‘common sense.’  Perhaps a hundred years ago, it wasn’t common sense, but as common sense enters the collective consciousness, when are we allowed to stop giving credit?  Never?

There is this friction between the needs of the piece of work being created and at hand, and the debt we owe to the works that have come before and their authors.  This is a friction that comes especially to the fore in the clash of traditional copyright and digitization (for those interested, Larry Lessig, in his excellent book Free Culture, offers a brilliant, lucid and forward-looking (if not exactly balanced) discussion of these issues).  It is representative of an even larger war between our principled sense of fairness and the pragmatic reality of results, outcomes, phenomena, and emblematic of the breakdown in conversation between the “two cultures” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures).

What struck me about academic citations is that they seem to be structured around attribution, which offers value to a few individuals, rather than authority, which potentially offers value to many.   Citations can lend authority in two ways – substantiation (here is where I got this information) and reputation (this paper is cited elsewhere by practitioners with relevant judgment).  For people immersed in the relevant body of work, this authority is quite clear.  It is, however, challenging for non-practitioners to read a paper and understand its relevance and authority (and for many online resources as well, which suffer from the added suspicion associated with being readily edited).  This problem cannot be underestimated, as the dizzying array of information sources becomes ever more nauseating.  

Can we make these authority mechanisms more explicit, especially the reputational mechanism?  Is it possible to provide simple, cogent, trusted signals of relevance and authority, without resorting to elite curatorship?  For a given piece of work, can I dynamically understand the relevance of what I am absorbing – before and during reading, without distracting from the process of reading?  Can I access in a simple way the whole history of this piece of work, from whence it came and what later constructs used it as a building block?  I focus on long-form text, because despite the advances and advantages of other forms of media, we still haven’t found a better way to manipulate complex concepts than semantic language.  If we can do this for academic publications, perhaps we can take the system and generalize it to solve for at least one dimension of the sticky problem of ‘filter failure.’

Pop art baffles me.   I'll also admit to having a less than admiring opinion of modern art in general.  The category is not defined by a style but rather a time period, the immediate, most available one.  This is synonymous with being the least filtered time period as well, with virtually no testing by time.  Like unfiltered vodka, it tends to leave me with a headache.  Not all modern art is crap, just most of it.  Odds are.  At least, if you believe the quality of art is measured by how well it stands the test of time (which I don’t necessarily).  But I nevertheless found myself, at the urging of friends, heading off to the Tate Modern to see the much-talked-about Pop Art exhibition.  It was exactly what I expected and, at the same time, nothing like I'd expected.

It was colorful, garish, narcissistically ironic, not at all timeless - and yet, almost against my will, I began to agree that it was art.  And this conclusion had nothing to do with the pieces hanging, and everything to do with me.  Someone once said that learning only comes from friction.  So it was that the friction between the mindset I brought to the museum and what I was confronted by brought me one revelation after another.  And this was what made it art... to me.   If art is that which is designed and successful in making the viewer feel, then all art is subjective.

I jotted down notes on my phone, so I’ll take you down the garden path of my stream of consciousness, and show you how I got where I arrived.  

The commercialization of art.  The elites once sneered at Warhol’s “sell-out aesthetic,” and my democratic sensibilities find the sneering distasteful while finding the art distasteful as well.  Warhol took commercialization to another level, taking commissions from celebrities and offering bulk discounts.  I have to think this art was more accessible to the masses than your average Van Gogh, however, and the affording more people this enjoyment (even if the median enjoyment per person is arguably less) can't be dismissed out of hand.  That is the boon of commercialization after all; it appeals to the masses, and therefore, it must be designed in such a way to appeal to people – and therefore add value to their lives.

I wonder though whether this is at the tradeoff of not being able to stand the test of time. It’s hard to say, now, but I can’t help but think of popcorn and pop the onomatopoeic sound, and their shared characteristic of short-livedness. It has its moment of ‘shock and awe,’ and then suffers inevitable transience.  It would be ironic if pop(ular) art was no longer popular, what would we call it then.  I wonder whether they will still use pop art in the future to describe the art of the day, or will they have to come up with some new term altogether because we’ve confiscated this one and attached it forevermore to this era.

We are hemmed in by our language.  Sometimes it seems that all that exists is the stuff we have words for.  But of course that’s not the case.  The world is infinite and we have art for everything else [we don’t have words for].  Art helps us store all the wordless beingness of living here.  It's maybe the only way we can hold on to our tacit knowledge without transferring it to another human being.  The power of it is that the dialogue we have with it is so personal, at a level without words, that when it works for us, we can't help but be convinced because we are convincing ourselves.  It works best when there is that moment of surprise, then the heart’s sigh, and it pervades us – at least for that moment.  No tour guide can show us, or manufacture something that’s not there, though we can fool ourselves.  Each piece, therefore, cannot be universally accessible because we have to lead ourselves down the path, and not everyone will get there.  Because only we can feel our response in just this way, art is always about us.  It, like life, is deeply narcissistic.

What does it say about someone who puts pop, in its truest subjective sugar-transient sense, on their walls.  Something that doesn’t hold real meaning, but is an ironic throwaway comment, a cliché, a cheap sarcasm.  I struggle not to be dismissive…and I fail.  The thing is, like much façade, no one will know.  Only self-honesty would reveal the falsehood, and why do the rest of us even care.  Perhaps there are lessons here.  Beyond judging is not caring, and beyond not caring is empathy (I think).  For those of us so quick to dismiss pop and pop culture, these are opportunities lost.

Each piece here holds little meaning for me, but there's something here in this installation as a whole.  It is the things I dislike the most that provide the foil for me to think of these things, inspire this intellectual-emotional response, and yet even knowing that, I can’t find it in myself to seek out what I hate.  This section on pornography here, the artist might feel, be, empowered but I can’t help but feel sad when a woman defines herself to society in such a limited way.  As much as she might try to expand thinking, it's a martyrdom even if it finds a modicum of success.  No matter what else you do, the heights you climb, the epithet will never go away.  Once a porn star, always a porn star.

Just as writers tend to write about writers and writing, artists tend to make art about art and artists.  You craft from the material you know.  Some of these artists have commercialized themselves, designed a persona, the artist as art.  I think this is sad as well, this constant self-consciousness, the permanent inconsistency of outside and in.  It’s strange that men would take this on themselves, when they – being men – were born spared the constant and repressive watching that women must bear.  Our choices are few – either we carry it until it warps us, or we struggle to first throw it off and then daily to keep it off.  But the male artist, he had a choice.  These personas are brittle, unsympathetic, allowing few affordances for understanding or empathy.  

I can admit this is art but I would never hang these pieces on my wall.  Hanging a piece on a wall is like having a tattoo on your body – it should be more than novel or pretty.  It should have the depth to age with you like wine, like a spouse.  And it should make you happy.  Happy is a shallow word but what it represents is not shallow at all.  Perhaps feeling anything is better than nothing, but we have more attractive alternatives.  The hacks revert to flimsy irony, but the masters produce what we could never have thought of or made but want to.

I walk outside into the cheek-tingling cold and wish I was back inside.  But the cold isn’t as numbing as it seemed and everything looks like art to me, the knit gloves, the Thames, the commercial signage.  It all has the feeling of the designed.  Pop  Art has escaped, seeped outside.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the headlines, and lately they have tended towards the anti-Google.  “Googzilla demolishes whole industries” or something on that order.  Now I can sympathize with people out of jobs – my father was laid off not too long ago and I know many people in a similar situation – but to demonize Google as the mastermind villain behind the downfall of media seems a bit simplistic.

With economics a discipline in the public front-and-center, it is constantly surprising to me how many interested and smart people have a tenuous grasp of economic principles, including many public commentators.  Let me caveat this by saying that I am not an economist.  I was, however, fortunate enough to have taken courses taught by excellent economists who were also excellent teachers.

Given how powerful a tool economics is for understanding the world around us is, it strikes me as an enormous omission to leave economics out of the required curriculum for K-12 education.  If I had my druthers, I would teach economics alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic, from kindergarten onwards.  Yes, kindergarten.  I know many kindergarteners who are able to understand the concept of money even if they can’t add.  Start with the basics of money, then trade, pricing, supply and demand, comparative advantage, etc. - the logic of economics, then the math.  Not the fancy Excel models with misguided assumptions, but the math that underlies the hard logic that makes economics such a powerful tool.  Of the social sciences, economics is the most usefully predictive (though as we have recently seen, far from perfect).

Imagine a world where the average person is literate in economics.  What different conversations we would have.  Now you might argue that there are 40 million functionally illiterate people in the United States, and how can we teach economics when we can’t teach reading?  The answer is that we can teach reading, we’ve been teaching reading for quite some time now, and we know how to do so inside-out.  The reason why some people are taught reading, and others aren’t, is politics.  How we get great teachers into classrooms consistently – in my mind, 80% of what a great education is about – is a different question than what we should teach in classrooms.

What we should teach in classrooms, in my mind, are subjects that 1) provide a basic understanding of the world, 2) develop the social skills needed to function in a connected society, 3) are useful in later productivity / employment, 4) contribute positively to individual quality of life, and/or 5) create the informed citizenry needed to support a democracy.  Economics scores highly on all these characteristics except for #2, and even if you penalize the subject substantially for inducing people to tell economics jokes at parties, there still remains a strong argument.  After all, it’s better to have people telling economics jokes than try to run a democracy without a citizenry that could understand them.

More prognosticating..  Why?  Because it’s fun.

I used to have a boyfriend who, when shooting pool and faced with a difficult shot, would call a nearly impossible shot – e.g. multiple walls, extravagant combos, etc.  When asked why, he would say that no one expected him to make the shot so the cost of failure was low but the value of success was high.  Very similar to long-horizon predictions.

We are starting to understand the impossibility of knowing with any certainty what will happen 10 years down the road.  A single nuclear attack would change everything.  The development of technology is accelerating while the absorption rate in mainstream culture is relatively fixed.  We should laugh at anyone that tries to predict that far out.

So, for your chuckling pleasure, my predictions for 2020:

1.  Mass-scale solar grid parity

2.  Mainstream full-genome sequencing (as opposed to genotyping) - now priced at $50K

3.  Reemergence of nuclear power

4.  Mass-market sales of hydrogen fuel-cell car models

5.  Rise of India relative to China

6.  Personal body sculpting verges on the mainstream

7.  Consolidation in the dot-com world to improve the seams of the customer experience

8.  Virtual eradication of malaria globally

9.  Broad-based shift of commercial-quality photography to individuals

10.  Pharmaceutical R&D performed by and critical patents held by firms in emerging markets

11.  Permanent decline of the banking sector (banking as a service, not a value-add)

12.  Distillation of newspapers to low-page-count high-quality content paid for by low-cost digital subscription delivered through Kindle-like devices, with paper editions a niche offering delivered as a premium-priced daily news magazine

Don’t quote me on this.

Is he a fiction… or just more evolved than we had thought?

Wikipedia describes homo economicus as “rational and broadly self-interested actors who have the ability to make judgments towards their subjectively defined ends.”  Homo economicus is at the core of Chicago’s currently-disgraced efficient market theory (the disgrace of which, by the way, is creating a wave of interest in Chicago’s now-esteemed work in behavioral science, especially Richard Thaler’s research and book on decision architecture, Nudge – adherence to portfolio theory much?).  

The narrow “strong” form of homo economicus has been discredited, and rightfully so.  But is there a more “evolved’ form of homo economicus that still makes sense?

Perhaps rational self-interest is more than the filthy lucre that one can reasonably calculate.  Incentives might also include:

• Social capital
  
• Quality of life benefits, such as human relationships and meaningful lives
  
• Long-term benefits (including beyond death, since your DNA lives on in your kids)
  

The second and third might explain “inequity aversion,” which monkeys and human beings have been shown to exhibit.  In essence, experiments have shown that people will hurt themselves to punish others for being unfair.  Using the narrow definition of rationality, this dynamic seems highly irrational.  However, if you believe that inequity breeds instability and damages human relationships, there may be a rational incentive that underlies “inequity aversion” behaviors.  And obviously, holding out rather than allowing yourself to be taken advantage of is a pattern of behavior that has clear economic advantages for the individual as well.

Also, it’s worthwhile to note that it’s not incentives, per se, that drive human behavior.  It’s perception of incentives, which is variable from person to person.  Note that this does not necessarily mean that some people are right and some people are wrong.  Everyone might still be right, and a “homo economicus,” because we live in a world with the following characteristics:  a)  deep uncertainty, b) differences in individual preference, and c) differences in individual knowledge and understanding.

For instance, some people value personal relationships more than others.  They may still be homo economicus in the broader sense of the term, making rational decisions based on their own incentives (that are very challenging to draw conclusions from in lab experiments – those poor doctoral students..).  Even people who do not opt into a 401(k) when it is financially advantageous may be behaving as homo economicus, if they do not have an intellectual or visceral understanding of the future benefits that will accrue from the investment of their time (and money) today.  People pay attention to the things that are important to them.  As moronically obvious as this sounds, once you think of attention in evolutionary and biological rather than intellectual terms, the import is less obvious.  When I was going to India for 6 months, I developed a laser focus on all things India-related, an almost physical phenomenon.  Procrastination is natural output of this dynamic as well.  

And if you believe all of this, not opting into a 401(k) might be a problem of knowledge and visceral understanding rather than irrationality.  Emotions are biological-driven phenomena that are part of the decision-making framework.  If I am enraged at you, the pleasure it will give me to throw a mug at your head outweighs my perception of the consequences.  If my heart beats faster than yours in a given situation, I may perceive the decision at hand as riskier and assign a higher cost.  I give because I feel good about it.   If I sank into clinical depression every time I did something charitable, I would probably stop.  That’s why people like to give to individuals rather than faceless masses – a phenomenon called “psychic numbing” – they feel better about it.

In my experience, people tend to make sense.  Presuming irrationality has always seemed to me to be a somewhat condescending stance.  Not all people will behave as I will, but I’ve found that their seeming irrationality is usually due to my inability to empathize in a deep way.  

I don't mean to imply that people cannot be manipulated, or that people don't make decisions that are not in their best interests.  Changing the way you frame the exact same question can affect the answer.  The business of marketing is based on this.  But there is an important distinction between viewing people as irrational and viewing people as rational subject to internal and external stimuli.  Our perception of the rationality of others is inextricably linked to the freedom we are willing to allow them, and the standard of accountability to which we hold them up.  I can't think of anything more important than this.
 

Will Baidu go the way of MySpace?
(I violate the rule that you should only make predictions when you're about to die)

I saw this article (http://www.forbes.com/forbes/ 2009/1005/technology-baidu-robin-li-man-whos-beating-google.html) and it struck me that there were certain parallels between the Google China-Baidu and the MySpace-Facebook dukeouts:

• Network-effect business
  
• Low switching costs
  
• Up-and-coming contender with a better product and less-evil approach
  
• Bifurcated demographics between educated (Google China / Facebook) and less-educated users (Baidu / MySpace)
  

Google China was launched in 2005 and now has 30% of the China market (Baidu has most of the rest), not bad in a market where they’re often referred to as a failure.  

To be clear, no one today (that I know of) is saying Baidu will fail.  They still dominate this market.  But what's the fun of making a prediction if you already know the answer?  China has a growing educated middle class who, with the help of the Internet, are making leaps in cultural sophistication.  As Steven Levitt describes with baby names in Freakonomics, less-educated populations often follow behavioral patterns of educated populations.  That, combined with the fact that China is only becoming more educated, might spell downward spiral for Baidu unless they can adapt quickly to improve the user experience (as it seems they are trying to do).  In the past 3 months, Google China has outgrown Baidu.  Is Baidu where MySpace was in early 2007?