Relevant History

My son, samurai in training

This year my son started taking fencing lessons. So far he really enjoys it. After a few weeks working on footwork, parries, and attacks, they're now finally fencing each other.

He's the one in the blue shorts. Anyone who knows how I dress will not be in the least surprised

I realized this morning that fencing is pretty much the perfect sport for a 7 year-old boy. It teaches grace and quick thinking, which are good. But it also has lots of equipment, which makes it even more interesting. Finally, of course, there's the whole point (as it were) of fencing, which is to hit other people. The first day, the instructor asked if anyone knew what you did in fencing. My son raised his hand and said, "It's poking people with swords!"

En garde!

I think I'm going to insist he learn archery, riding, and flower arranging. Then he'll be a samurai.

Attack! Or possibly parry!

England prepares for the Armada

Spanish Armada day at Peninsula!

From X2 to Signtific

The Institute's new future of science Web site is now live. For the last couple years we've been running the project under the name X2-- an historical reference to the X Club, a group I've long found fascinating-- but we've updated the name to Signtific, and rolled out a new, much more user-friendly Web site.

No time to stop and relax, though. We've also nearly finished development of a custom version of the online mapping tool that I started using last year (here are copies of my paper spaces and end of cyberspace maps, for example), which promises to be pretty amazing. So no rest for the wicked.

On the unreliability of expert political judgment

I've been working on a think-piece on the future of futures work. (It's an expansion of questions I started asking in my piece on design and futures.) It's organized around a simple question: If you were to invent a discipline of futures and forecasting today, organized to deal with today's problems, and drawing on current science, what would it look like? Would be it be just like the field today? Would it look for weak signals, produce roadmaps and scenarios, and seek to influence strategy and policy?

I suspect the answer is no. No, I'm confident-- using the term as Robert Burton would warn it should be used-- that the answer is no. Now I'm trying to explain where I think the field will, or ought, to go.

One of the things I'm thinking through is the role of expert knowledge and accountability in futures work. We claim to be experts about a bunch of things, most notably about how to think about the future in ways that can better inform the present. But the work of Philip Tetlock (which I've mentioned before) suggests that claims of expert knowledge, particularly when it comes to dealing with the future, are highly suspect.

Teltock's argument is nicely summarized by Louis Menand in a New Yorker review:

It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book, “ Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know” (Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us. When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake. No one is paying you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but the experts are being paid, and Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our system of expertise is completely inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones.

Tetlock got a statistical handle on his task by putting most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.

Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” he reports. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. “Experts in demand,” Tetlock says, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”

The obvious questions are, how relevant is this work to what we futurists do? And are our current attempts to explain that no, we can't predict the future but our work is still valuable, sufficient in the light of work like Tetlock's?

Bye bye molar

Had a molar removed this morning. Good times!

Later. It wasn't bad at all. Something I've stupidly been putting off for a long time-- a molar that has been trying to pursue a solo career, rather than play nicely with the rest of the ensemble. Suffice it to say, it was going to come out one way or another, and this was definitely the easy way.

I've spent a disproportionate time this fall in dentist's chairs, catching up on years of what facilities people would call deferred maintenance. It's a good example of how even intelligent people (including ones who think about the future for a living) put off dealing with what they know are problems, because they don't want to face the consequences of bad outcomes-- even if they know that deferral is likely to make those problems worse.

Overheard at Peninsula this morning

One student to another: "I know that Gray's Anatomy is, like, a textbook. So how were they able to make it into a TV series?"

William Deresiewicz on brains, technology and solitude

I've been reading a lot of stuff on the edges of neuroscience-- it's hard to avoid these days-- and this William Deresiewicz essay in the Chronicle Review pointed out something I'd never realized: a link between our current fascination with models of the mind that emphasize the social nature of cognition, our use of technologies that eliminate the possibility of ever really being alone and recognizing the value of solitude.

[Today's youth] have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.

And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing "in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures," "bait[ing our] hooks with darkness." Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading. The Internet brought text back into a televisual world, but it brought it back on terms dictated by that world — that is, by its remapping of our attention spans. Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity. This is not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it: the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude.

But we no longer believe in the solitary mind. If the Romantics had Hume and the modernists had Freud, the current psychological model — and this should come as no surprise — is that of the networked or social mind. Evolutionary psychology tells us that our brains developed to interpret complex social signals. According to David Brooks, that reliable index of the social-scientific zeitgeist, cognitive scientists tell us that "our decision-making is powerfully influenced by social context"; neuroscientists, that we have "permeable minds" that function in part through a process of "deep imitation"; psychologists, that "we are organized by our attachments"; sociologists, that our behavior is affected by "the power of social networks." The ultimate implication is that there is no mental space that is not social (contemporary social science dovetailing here with postmodern critical theory).

Quote of the day

Thomas Benton, writing on (really warning against) graduate school:

It's hard to tell young people that universities recognize that their idealism and energy — and lack of information — are an exploitable resource. For universities, the impact of graduate programs on the lives of those students is an acceptable externality, like dumping toxins into a river. If you cannot find a tenure-track position, your university will no longer court you; it will pretend you do not exist and will act as if your unemployability is entirely your fault. It will make you feel ashamed, and you will probably just disappear, convinced it's right rather than that the game was rigged from the beginning.

Walk this morning

After getting some coffee, I headed out to take some pictures of Gammage Memorial Auditorium, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed complex that I'd seen in the dark a couple nights earlier. I wanted to walk around it during the daytime, and get a better sense of what it looked like.

via flickr

Usually when I travel somewhere, I go for a long walk. On the better ones, I encounter some surprising thing that I didn't set out to see, but which makes the whole thing worthwhile. This morning, it was this. A sign on top of Lattie Coor Hall, it says "Explore."

via flickr

Evening in Scottsdale

We held our workshop on the future of science and economic development today. It wrapped up at 5, after which I went for a swim and some time in the hot tub; I then met up with my colleagues, and we went over to Scottsdale for dinner. We first went to the Billet Bar, a biker bar in old town, for a drink. (I had a Diet Coke-- I've pretty much given up on alcohol, as I've become an unaccountable lightweight.)

via flickr

After that, it was to Bandera for dinner. It was really outstanding.

via flickr

It turns out that Phoenix-- and in particular Scottsdale-- is, in certain important respects, an economic offshoot of Southern California: according to our local host, who's a geography professor at ASU and therefore entirely trustworthy on such matters, part of the porn industry has relocated to Phoenix, as have a number of rappers. Apparently it's easy to get back to LA, and there are no papparazzi (sp?) here. (The Billet Bar has "Industry Nights," which must be quite the scene.)

Not only does it have all that, but Scottsdale was also the home of Frank Lloyd Wright (in his Taliesin West phase), and is where the Taser was invented. Truly an all-American city.

The great Aeron Chair Rodeo

Every year the chairs are driven south to their spring feeding grounds in Arizona....

Empty computer center

One of the most striking things I saw during tonight's walk around Arizona State was this:

via flickr

It's a computer center. And it's empty. Because it's closed. At first, I literally couldn't believe it. After years around Stanford, seeing a computer cluster that's not surrounded by students, and open 24/7, didn't really register. Proof once again that neuroscience is right, and that we tend to see what we believe, not the other way around.

via flickr

If I were Tom Friedman, this would be the beginning of a piece about how this is an example of how American competitiveness is in decline, and how in China there would be 50,000 students using a facility like this. He'd talk about how in Berkeley a similar center-- which he saw while on his way to play golf with the head of Cisco, before heading to Dubai-- was filled with graduate students, but they were all Chinese.

Impressions of Tempe

I spent the evening walking around downtown Tempe, Arizona and having dinner with colleagues.

Tempe Mission Palms Hotel, via flickr

This is my first time in Arizona, aside from a few flights where I've changed planes in Phoenix, in the wonderfully-named Sky Harbor airport. In fact, I think it's only my third trip to the southwast (assuming Colorado doesn't count-- I'm not sure).

We're staying a few blocks away from Arizona State University, which seems to drive a lot of the local economy.

Hayden Library, via flickr

Tempe has a few old buildings, but most of it is low-rise modern structures. Indeed, the town-- and a surprising amount of the campus-- looks like a collection of mortgage brokerages and day trader offices, a sort of southwestern version of San Carlos.

Borders, and an engineering school, via flickr

View from my hotel room

Greetings from the Tempe Mission Palms.

Greetings from Phoenix!

SFO in the rain

Rainy morning

Why walk around the puddle?

25th Anniversary of the Mac

Happy birthday, computer. I talk about it in a CNN article.

No longer were computers viewed as toys with which to play primitive games or as untouchable tools reserved for degreed engineers. We began to think different.

"The Macintosh demonstrated that it was possible and profitable to create a machine to be used by millions and millions of people," said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, research director for the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, California, think tank, and chief force behind "Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley," an online historical exhibit. "The gold standard now for personal electronics is, 'Is it easy enough for my grandmother to use it?' People on the Macintosh project were the first people to talk about a product in that way."

Pang, 44, remembered being "mesmerized" by the computer when he first saw it up close in his college bookstore.

Renaissance backstop

I don't know what game this originally was built for, but I've always liked the display of linear perspective.

B side

Tonight my daughter asked me to make a CD for her. Her school band is planning to do Green Day's "Holiday" at the rock concert, but they need a second song, and she wanted to bring in some prospects. She had me burn:

• Bari Koral, "Midnight Train to Georgia"
• The Coors, "Little Wing"
• Fleetwood Mac, "Sara"
• Rolling Stones, "Sway"
• Train, "Drops of Jupiter"
• Peter Gabriel, "Down to Earth"
• Sarah McLachlan, "Fallen"
• Smashmouth, "Walkin' on the Sun"

Personally, I think this an interesting cross-section of songs, from several decades, and nothing that's particularly questionable (Amy Winehouse's "You Know I'm No Good," for example). I tried to get her to put on some Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone, or at least Sharon Jones, but so far she's resisting my attempts to get her to listen to soul.

Earlier this evening I was trying to figure out where some unfamiliar music was coming from; I finally realized that my daughter was singing along to "Midnight Train to Georgia." The Bari Koral version, by the way, is a lot less soulful than the Gladys Knight-- how could it be otherwise?-- but is a good choice for her, as it's a much simpler arrangement. The Coors' "Little Wing" is beautiful, but is more of an ensemble piece. I don't think she knows who Stevie Nicks is or what she looks like; 30 years ago she would have wanted to perform Fleetwood Mac in order to be Stevie Nicks for five minutes.

For a few minutes I sat down in the hallway between the kids' rooms, listening to her sing on one side, and my son listen to one of the Harry Potter books on the other. My life as a parent, summed up.

This is very similar to what I did when I was her age. I had a lousy stereo system that we bought at K-Mart, a bunch of 45s, and a couple albums-- Frampton Comes Alive, Elton John's greatest hits (volumes 1 and 2), and a handful of others. (An aside: the quality of audio that young kids have today is probably a thousand time better than what I had when I was their age. I still remember the first time I heard a CD in college-- it was Peter Gabriel's So-- and I was shocked to tears at the purity of the experience.) I was starting to sing in the school choir, and would spend hours in my room, playing my records, singing along, or doing air guitar (the Guitar Hero designers are evil geniuses for taking the private embarrassment of millions and turning it into a game). Along with my telescope and books, music was a tool for building a world of my own construction-- a world that was extremely simple, equally cerebral and romantic, and entirely mine. (I continue to strongly associate certain songs or albums with particular periods in my life, and I'm still amazed at how vivid my musical memories are.)

That's not to say that my normal world was one that I needed to escape from: quite the contrary. This was when I was living with Pop in Nashville, going to a school I loved, and had tons of friends who like me were faculty kids. Unlike when I was with my mother in rural Virginia, I was among my own people. Still, I liked being able to conjure up Planet Alex. But.... I'm beginning to suspect that for kids, imagination is an important form of power. You don't need to want to escape from something to find creating your own world an attractive prospect. The ability to create an imaginary, private world is desirable no matter what your regular life is like; it's desirable as an end in itself. It's an essential prelude to creating yourself.

Most of what my daughter does in her room is jealously protected: she doesn't want me to know what she's doing, and she keeps her door closed all the time. By and large I'm content with her having her privacy: she's too young to be doing anything destructive or illegal, and when she's out of her room she's a good kid. So if she wants her own world, let her have it. I figure it's good for her to be able to create her own space.

But it's nice to have this little musical window into her world, even if I have to sit in the hallway to hear it.

And we're on to 44

Watching the inauguration at Peninsula

Another reason to go back to Copenhagen

The new Copenhagen Concert Hall.

KONCERTHUSET - K3NC241HUS4T, via Flickr

This building, along with the national library (the so-called "Black Rock"), suggests that the Danes now have a thing for extra-interesting cultural monuments. The New York Times writes,

Like Frank Gehry’s 2003 Disney Hall in Los Angeles and Herzog & de Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie, now under construction in Hamburg, Germany, Mr. Nouvel’s new hall demonstrates that an intimate musical experience and boldly imaginative architecture need not be in conflict — they can actually reinforce each other....

Approached along the main road from the historic city, the hall’s cobalt blue exterior has a temporal, ghostly quality. Its translucent fabric skin is stretched over a structural frame of steel beams and tension cables that resembles scaffolding. During the day you can see figures moving about inside, as well as the vague outline of the performance space, its curved form embedded in a matrix of foyers and offices.

It is in darkness that the building comes fully to life. A montage of video images is projected across the cube’s fabric surface at night, transforming it into an enormous light box. Drifting across the cube’s surfaces, the images range from concert performers and their instruments to fragments of form and color.

This is the intoxicating medium of late-capitalist culture. You can easily imagine boxes of detergent or adult chat-line numbers finding their way into the mix.

Sleepover fun

The boys were awake between 3 and 5 last night. I was woken up by my son knocking around in his room-- I was sure someone had broken into the house-- and then two more times when they got too loud. Apparently the idea of whispering was a little too advanced for them.

It'll be interesting to see how my son does today. They're fine so far this morning. Will he crash in the afternoon? Will he melt down? Time will tell.

Back to Rancho San Antonio

Today we went back to Rancho San Antonio, and walked from the main entrance to Deer Hollow Farm, and then along the Mora Trail. It makes a loop a couple miles long.

via flickr

The park was kind of packed today: it took us a little while to get a parking space, but eventually we got lucky. Apparently the park is usually pretty crowded: it's one of the more accessible and family-friendly parks in the mid-Peninsula, in addition to having trails for bikes and horses as well as people.

via flickr

We first walked the half mile up to Deer Hollow Farm. Deer Hollow Farm is a small demonstration farm, with a couple cows, some sheep, goats, chickens, and pigs. There's a barn with picnic tables, where we stopped for lunch. Excellent for kids.

via flickr

From there, we walked along the Rogue Valley Trail, then picked up the Mora Trail. It winds along the edge of park, and for part of its length is adjacent to some very large houses; it then turns toward a big water tank, and back into the park, towards the farm.

via flickr

We saw a few deer and pheasant while we were on the trail. It was interesting seeing them all together.

via flickr

I'm impressed at how kid-friendly this section of the park is.

Enthusiastic, energetic hikers

Elizabeth, Daniel and one of their friends on the Mora Trail, in Rancho San Antonio park.

You can see Palo Alto in the distant background.

Quote of the day

Aaron Hirsh, on "A New Kind of Big Science:"

Citizen Science won’t be very helpful in genome sequencing or particle physics. But it will be helpful — indeed, perhaps essential — for gathering a kind of data that will be increasingly important over the next few decades. Widespread networks of observers are especially well-suited to detecting global change — shifts in weather patterns; movements in the ranges of species; large-scale transformations of eco-systems — and that, unfortunately, is something we will need to know far more about if we are to mitigate and adapt to the fateful effects we are having on the planet.

In the end, though, what may be most important about Citizen Science is what it could mean for the relationship between citizens and science. When everyone is gathering data, that rather austere and forbidding tower becomes a shared human pursuit. In 1963, Alvin Weinberg, who was then the director of Oak Ridge, likened Big Science to the greatest monuments civilizations have ever built: the cathedrals of medieval Europe; the pyramids of Egypt.

But just as we build higher our temples of scientific investigation, so too should we strengthen their foundations, and broaden their congregations.

Quote of the day: Timothy Ferris

Not sure I agree with this, but it's still interesting.

What is the opposite of happiness? Sadness? No. Just as love and hate are two sides of the same coin, so are happiness and sadness. Crying out of happiness is a perfect illustration of this. The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is - here's the clincher - boredom...

The question you should be asking isn't 'What do I want?' or 'What are my goals?' but 'What would excite me?'

Remember - boredom is the enemy, not some abstract 'failure.'

I recently realized that for me, the opposite of being depressed isn't being happy, but rather being active. So perhaps happiness and boredom are opposites.

[via Overcoming Bias]

Korean finance blogger arrested for being right

A Korean blogger who predicted the fall of Lehman Brothers has been arrested by the government.

Among governments struggling to contain the global financial crisis, South Korea set a rare and controversial example over the weekend by arresting a popular blogger who was accused of undermining the financial markets but worshipped by many Koreans as an online guru.

But when some of his predictions on the markets proved right, he gained a huge following among South Koreans fretting over an uncertain economic future....

For months, both the media and the authorities have scrambled to identify Minerva, who has uploaded more than 100 anonymous postings in Daum, the country's second-largest Web portal. He achieved a prophet's status after he predicted the collapse of the U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers, the crash of the Korean currency and the effects of the toxic U.S. mortgage crisis eventually engulfing South Korea.

Newspapers reported his predictions. The government scrambled to dispute his claims. Governing party lawmakers called for his arrest while financial market analysts admitted to avidly following his coverage. His commentaries typically attracted 100,000 viewers per posting....

Park Dae Sung's arrest on Saturday on charges of spreading false online information with a harmful intent - a crime punishable by up to five years in prison - came as the South Korean government was escalating its efforts to fight the fallout of the global financial turmoil.

As Robin Hanson comments, "Does anyone think Park would have been jailed for a mistaken optimistic claim, or that government officials will be jailed for making false claims?"

[via Overcoming Bias]

Well, academics ARE kind of theoretical

Love this!

Professor forgets to attend his own sell-out lecture about duty

A highly respected literary and academic figure failed to attend a talk he was due to give for a literature festival, after getting confused over the date.

Professor of philosophy Anthony Grayling, of Birkbeck College, University of London, had arranged to speak about his latest book, The Choice of Hercules.

His talk was part of Richmond’s 17th annual literature festival.

The book reflects on the challenges of duty versus pleasure.  

]Seen on Not Exactly Rocket Science]

Big Building and little building

The school is full of treehouses and other miniature properties. I think it's a reflecton of the Valley's obsession with real estate.

Limosine One

I don't know if presidential limo is called Limo One, but it seems logical. However, the new one seems to look like something from the Road Warrior. According to one source, "the limo can withstand a 'direct hit from an asteroid.' " More or less.

One really interesting part of the piece is an quote from "Joe Funk, a retired Secret Service agent who was President Bill Clinton's driver during part of his career."

"I think he will be surprised about how when he's in the limo, it's a cocoon," Funk said. "The everyday noises will be gone, and he will be totally isolated in this protective envelope."

"At the same time, I think he will be surprised at the communication capabilities, how the phones, the satellites, the Internet -- everything is at his fingertips," he said. "So at one end, you are totally removed from society. The other side of the coin is that he can have any communications worldwide at a moment's touch."

Maybe the ultimate DIY videos?

Doctor demonstrating (and narrating) a nasoendoscopy:

And a self-intubation (this is NOT as easy as it looks, so don't try it yourself):

Both via Scienceroll

And to think I was feeling nostalgic about Berkeley...

In the wake of the shooting of an unarmed man by Oakland transit police, a protest last night turned ugly, and pointless:

The core group of the mob appeared to be about 40 people, several of whom were with Revolution Books, a Berkeley bookstore. A man distributed the "Revolution" newspaper - whose tagline is "voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, U.S.A." - as he shouted "This whole damn system is guilty!"...

Wednesday night's vandalism victims had nothing to do with the shooting death by a BART police officer of Oscar Grant on New Year's Day - but that did little to sway the mob.

Long live the revolution....

My son, pool shark

Move over, Paul Newman.... My son playing pool at the Dutch Goose tonight.

Fascinated by frauds

I recently chanced upon an old New Yorker article on Joyce Hatto, a pianist whose husband-- the owner of an obscure classical music label-- apparently released a huge number of CDs recorded by others under her name:

He [Hatto's husband] had not merely pinched or polished a few, mostly marginal, recordings. With his collection of more than a hundred Joyce Hatto CDs, Barry had created the most diversely prolific and gifted pianist to emerge in decades, with a corresponding narrative that aroused the esteem and good will of music lovers around the world. Since early in his checkered career, he had deftly manipulated musical identities. What he confected on his wife’s behalf, in her twilight, was vastly more audacious than anything he had pulled off during his “super-bargain” years. The alchemy that transformed Joyce Hatto into “Joyce Hatto” was, in its twisted way, a tour de force, a dazzling work of art, literally the performance of a lifetime.

The New Yorker might have a weakness for these kinds of stories-- people who write fake Holocaust memoirs, con men who run cross-country at Princeton, etc.-- but I think we're fascinated by these kinds of elaborate, life-long frauds, if only because they're extreme examples of a process of reinvention that many of us go through Their motives are also usually pretty complicated: these aren't simple cons or self-delusions, much less straightforward cases of mental imbalance. Just as monsters helped define the boundaries of humanity in the Renaissance and early modern period, these elaborate lived fictions help define (or undermine) our understanding of identity.

Or maybe we just like cons.

Fountain pen

Is it really that hard, or that unusual, to use a fountain pen?

Nice post, still.

Quote of the day: Anatole Broyard

"If it hadn't been for books, we'd have been completely at the mercy of sex." (Anatole Broyard on life in postwar Greenwich Village.)

Just read this

Michael Lewis and David Einhorn have a wickedly well-written two-part essay on the collapse of the financial system.

On structural problems:

The Madoff scandal echoes a deeper absence inside our financial system, which has been undermined not merely by bad behavior but by the lack of checks and balances to discourage it. “Greed” doesn’t cut it as a satisfying explanation for the current financial crisis.

On credit rating agencies:

These oligopolies, which are actually sanctioned by the S.E.C., didn’t merely do their jobs badly. They didn’t simply miss a few calls here and there. In pursuit of their own short-term earnings, they did exactly the opposite of what they were meant to do: rather than expose financial risk they systematically disguised it.

On the S.E.C.:

Created to protect investors from financial predators, the commission has somehow evolved into a mechanism for protecting financial predators with political clout from investors.... The commission’s most recent director of enforcement is the general counsel at JPMorgan Chase; the enforcement chief before him became general counsel at Deutsche Bank; and one of his predecessors became a managing director for Credit Suisse before moving on to Morgan Stanley. A casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that the whole point of landing the job as the S.E.C.’s director of enforcement is to position oneself for the better paying one on Wall Street.

On the government's response:

Say what you will about our government’s approach to the financial crisis, you cannot accuse it of wasting its energy being consistent or trying to win over the masses. In the past year there have been at least seven different bailouts, and six different strategies. And none of them seem to have pleased anyone except a handful of financiers. ...

[H]ere’s the most incredible thing of all: 18 months into the most spectacular man-made financial calamity in modern experience, nothing has been done to change... [the] bad incentives that led us here in the first place....

Rather than tackle the source of the problem, the people running the bailout desperately want to reinflate the credit bubble, prop up the stock market and head off a recession. Their efforts are clearly failing: 2008 was a historically bad year for the stock market, and we’ll be in recession for some time to come. Our leaders have framed the problem as a “crisis of confidence” but what they actually seem to mean is “please pay no attention to the problems we are failing to address.”

And perhaps my favorite one-liner:

When you shout at people “be confident,” you shouldn’t expect them to be anything but terrified.

Thoughts on design + futures

For the last few months, I've been thinking about the relationship between design and futures, and how they could draw on each other. (Of course, I'm hardly alone in this.) During the vacation, I spent some time working on an essay that lays out what I think the biggest opportunities are for collaboration between the two communities, and am posting the first draft here.

ON FUTURES AND DESIGN

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Draft 1.0
4 January 2009

1. Introduction

Over the last few years, a small but significant number of groups have done work at the intersection of design and futures. The Institute for the Future's Jason Tester, English designer John Thackara, American designers Joshua Kauffman and Gwendolyn Floyd (cofounders of Regional), ubiquitous computing researchers Julian Bleeker and Nicholas Nova (organizers of the LIFT conferences), and Danish futurists at the Innovation Lab-- along with many others-- have conducted projects on the future of design, or used design to describe possible futures. The purpose of this essay is to build on this early work, and describe how the relationship between design and futures could be deepened to the benefit of both communities. A closer collaboration, and even more important a hybrid practice that drew on each, would improve product design, profoundly change the way we interact with the future, and create the tools to deal with some of the most critical problems of the 21st century.

I approach this from two directions. First, I describe how design can improve futures. In particular, I argue, research techniques developed by designers-- particularly their close attention to human-device interaction-- could sharpen thinking about, and forecasting of, the future of technology. Second, I describe the contribution futures can make to design. A combination of new technologies and challenges, I contend, are creating an opportunity to design products that can guide people to make better-informed choices about how they can be used, to reinforce behaviors that help users reach long-term goals, and to create a heightened awareness of the future.

This could have profound implications for futures. It would shift the profession from one that communicates through texts, mainly influences leaders and elites, and influences strategic processes, to one that communicates through things, influences large number of people, and informs everyday decision-making. But this is an essential transformation, as it would give us the ability to help solve the critical problems of the 21st century-- problems that, I contend, futures as it currently is practiced is ill-equipped to confront.

Design and the downturn

Michael Cannell's piece "Design Loves a Depression" has some interesting suggestions about the future of design: that the flourishing of expensive, celebrity designers will come to an end, allowing the field to get serious about solving real problems and being more constructive by having to work within constraints.

[D]uring the Great Depression... an early wave of modernism flourished in the United States, partly because it efficiently addressed the middle-class need for a pared-down life without servants and other Victorian trappings.

“American designers took the Depression as a call to arms,” said Kristina Wilson, author of “Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression” and an assistant professor of art history at Clark University. “It was a chance to make good on the Modernist promise to make affordable, intelligent design for a broad audience.”...

Design tends to thrive in hard times. In the scarcity of the 1940s, Charles and Ray Eames produced furniture and other products of enduring appeal from cheap materials like plastic, resin and plywood, and Italian design flowered in the aftermath of World War II....

There is a reason she and others are optimistic: however dark the economic picture, it will most likely cause designers to shift their attention from consumer products to the more pressing needs of infrastructure, housing, city planning, transit and energy. Designers are good at coming up with new ways of looking at complex problems, and if President-elect Barack Obama delivers anything like a W.P.A, we could be “standing on the brink of one of the most productive periods of design ever,” said Reed Kroloff, director of Cranbrook Academy of Art....

One way or another, design will focus less on styling consumer objects with laser-cut patterns and colored resin and more on the intelligent reworking of current conditions. Expect to hear a lot more about open-source design, and cradle-to-cradle, a concept developed by William McDonough and Michael Braungart that calls for cars, packaging and other everyday objects to be designed specifically for recycling so that their parts and materials are used and reused without waste.

This reminds me somewhat of the argument made by Brian Arthur and others (most notably Arthur, I think) that tech bubbles don't create what's really valuable: they create a lot of potentially valuable wreckage and infrastructure that the next round of innovators use to do really serious stuff.

Back to work

Got a lot of my own stuff that I'm working on, as well as never-ending Institute stuff.

Fortunately it's a cold, rainy day here, perfect for writing.