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Clay Shirky

Vice Provost, New York University · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

academicauthoranalyst@cshirky ↗shirky.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

He leads NYU's academic strategy around educational technology and artificial intelligence while researching the social and economic impact of digital networks. He is best known for his influential writings on internet culture, collective action, and media, including the books Here Comes Everybody, Cognitive Surplus, and Little Rice.

16statements → 10claims → 4claims resolved → 75%fully supported → 3.94/5average certainty → 2.19/5average debate potential → 4.4/5argument clarity · the sources → 5said about them ↓

3 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 6 not checkable as stated how the 10 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 8 assertions · 4 opinions · 2 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 10 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved, and 6 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Clay argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Shirky: Chinese delivery and local service apps dwarf US scale
“Getting that scale in, in something that works like a city rather than a country means that the kinds of applications that rely on density, any app that has to do, anything that has to do with delivery, anything that has to do with transportation, anything tha…”
Clay Shirky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 25:27 a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.4 / 5 directness 4.6 · coherence 4.6 · precision 4.5 · compression 4.1

answered every one of 8 assessed questions directly

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

221 words/min while actually speaking · 8.7 um and uh per 1k words · 21 false starts per 1k · 35.2% of pauses land inside a clause

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,325 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Clay Shirky said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Shirky: US overlooks China's fundamental mobile payment innovations
“The kinds of innovations around e-commerce where people are paying using their mobile phones as with M-Pace in Kenya or have entirely alternate payment systems as with Alipay here, that's a kind of innovation Americans don't even recognize, right? Our innovati…”
Clay Shirky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:51 a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China
Insight
Shirky: Compliance with Beijing censorship is only advantageous inside China
“Because unlike hardware, the, an internet service company doesn't just have to operate at scale. It also has to implement an enormous number of controls that Beijing demands over Over certain kinds of public speech, whether it's monitoring or censorship or pro…”
Clay Shirky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 9:24 a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China
Opinion
Shirky: Treating Apple as the primary innovation archetype has harmed US tech
“When I look back at the U.S., I think that the U.S. Has been somewhat damaged by regarding Apple as our official most innovative company.”
Clay Shirky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:18 a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Shirky: Global tech competition will be fought in developing markets like Kenya
“The competitive battle is not going to be engaged in North America. It's going to be engaged in Kenya and Mexico.”
Clay Shirky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:45 a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Shirky: Next innovation battles will occur in high-density, moderate-income cities
“The U.S. Has no, no native testbed for building out services that have Tens of millions of potential users on moderate income living in a small area, and yet that is where many of the next battles over innovation and market share are going to be waged.”
Clay Shirky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 26:24 a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China
Opinion
Shirky: Hardware Is the Least Important Part of Xiaomi's Innovation
“When you look at a company like Xiaomi, what you see is innovation in process. You see innovation in customer service. You see innovation in manufacturing. The hardware itself is the least important part of this incredible chain of supply and creativity.”
Clay Shirky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 1:58 a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shirky: Xiaomi leverages flash sales to secure bulk component discounts
“What it lets Xiaomi do is do these flash sales where they say, Look, we've got a 100,000 of the Hongmi, or we've got a 100,000 of the Me Too. We're going to sell those now. You have to sign up for the right to get a ticket to have a chance to buy the phone, wh…”
Clay Shirky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:59 a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China
Opinion
Shirky: Xiaomi's operational model resembles Amazon more than Apple
“The company that Xiaomi is most like is Amazon, and when you think about the kinds of things Amazon has done to innovate you see, again, this obsession with supply chain management.”
Clay Shirky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 15:49 a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shirky: Xiaomi unlocked a market segment for affordable luxury hardware
“Xiaomi has created this sweet spot, which no one previously thought existed in the market, where that is, is a well-designed product for cheap enough to be competitive with luxury products in its same domain.”
Clay Shirky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:45 a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shirky: Xiaomi bypassed retail chains by shipping directly without returns
“They bet on open source software. They bet on e-commerce. They said, you know, we're not even going to bother with the supply chain thing. We're going to ship from the warehouse. Anybody who buys a phone from us, whether it's a, you know, mom and pop vendor or…”
Clay Shirky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 4:14 a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China
Assertion Supported
Shirky: Chinese delivery and local service apps dwarf US scale
“Getting that scale in, in something that works like a city rather than a country means that the kinds of applications that rely on density, any app that has to do, anything that has to do with delivery, anything that has to do with transportation, anything tha…”
Clay Shirky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 25:27 a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China
Assertion Supported
Shirky: One-third of Xiaomi MIUI features originate from user suggestions
“Blaise Jones has said that a third of the features in, in me UI have come from suggestions from users.”
Clay Shirky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 12:51 a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shirky: Xiaomi Measures Success by Converted Customers, Not Handsets Sold
“Richard Liu, who was one of the, ah, ah, one of the earliest investors has said, we never talk in terms of handsets sold. We always talk in terms of customers converted.”
Clay Shirky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 13:58 a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China
Assertion Partly supported
Shirky: Xiaomi Releases Weekly OS Updates and Polls Users
“Every time they ship a new version of the operating system, which is every Friday, they do it every week, and they've done it every week for years. They go out with a set of exactly the same four questions they ask the user. What was your favorite feature? Wha…”
Clay Shirky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 14:10 a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China
Assertion Supported
Shirky: Regulatory licensing costs drove Shanghai's electric scooter adoption
“So Shanghai has moved to largely electric scooters in part by simply raising licensing costs. To the point where a market for electric scooters and charging stations emerged as a result to the market signals.”
Clay Shirky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 27:43 a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China
Insight
Shirky: Shanghai Represents an Alternate Model of an Industrialized Society
“Shanghai, what I see in Shanghai is just an alternate way to be a fully industrialized society.”
Clay Shirky Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 30:36 a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China

The other half of the tape: Clay Shirky's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 3 episodes on the a16z Podcast. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Sonal Chokshi 2Chris Dixon 2

Statements about Clay Shirky, by other people (1)

Insight
Dixon: Micropayment skepticism incorrectly assumes human decisions cannot be automated by software
“And, you know, this sort of Clay Shirky argument that no one will ever adopt micropayments because of the mental friction. That, that, that I think is based on what I think is a flawed assumption that micropayments presumes that a human is deciding every singl…”
Chris Dixon Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 8:12 a16z Podcast | Advertising vs. Micropayments in the Age of Ad Blockers

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0022432019episodesmentions
0232019episodes it came up in
000.81.51.532019episodesmentions per episode
2019 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China Jan 2, 2019 17m
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