Relevant History

Quote of the day

From Matt Bai's "The New Old Guard:"

[T]he town hall itself has probably reached the end of its usefulness in the Internet age; if you’re looking for thoughtful dialogue, you might as well hold your next meeting on the stern of a Somali pirate ship.

[To the tune of Alban Berg Quartet, "Op. 59 No. 2 In E Minor 'Rasumovsky': I: Allegro," from the album Beethoven: The Complete String Quartets (Disc 5) (I give it 3 stars).]

Prediction and crankiness

Matt Yglesias on the problem with identifying bubbles:

Even when you’re pretty sure you’ve identified one, this gives you almost no insight into questions of timing. Consequently, it’s quite difficult to use your insight to go make tons of money. And that in turn makes the bubbles more severe, since the skeptics are basically out on the sidelines.

And in the reputational economy of analysts the consequences are even worse. If you go along with the herd and then predict a problem a month before it arises, then you strike everyone as prescient. But if you start warning about something and then it doesn’t happen, and then you keep nagging people, and then you keep complaining about how nobody’s listening to you, you start getting dismissed as a crank. And when you’re proven right, you’re still that crank nobody wants to listen to. You don’t get hailed as a hero. But Ben Bernanke who made very mainstream mistakes and then pivoted adroitly once the bill came due does.

Timing is everything, and ironically but the problem of knowing when to sound an alarm is itself a prime example of the problem of timing.

[To the tune of David Gray, "Slow Motion," from the album Live at Massey Hall (December 2, 2007) (I give it 3 stars).]

John Locke on motivated reasoning

"All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interests, under temptation to it." (John Locke)

[To the tune of David Gray, "Fugitive," from the album Fugitive - Single (I give it 4 stars).]

Placebo, ho!

Via Overcoming Bias, another great example of how we respond to unconscious cues, this time in placebos:

[Lilly scientist William] Potter discovered, however, that geographic location alone could determine whether a drug bested placebo or crossed the futility boundary. By the late ’90s, for example, the classic antianxiety drug diazepam (also known as Valium) was still beating placebo in France and Belgium. But when the drug was tested in the US, it was likely to fail. Conversely, Prozac performed better in America than it did in western Europe and South Africa. It was an unsettling prospect: FDA approval could hinge on where the company chose to conduct a trial. …

As Potter and his colleagues [also] discovered that ratings by trial observers varied significantly from one testing site to another. It was like finding out that the judges in a tight race each had a different idea about the placement of the finish line. … The placebo response is highly sensitive to cultural differences. Anthropologist Daniel Moerman found that Germans are high placebo reactors in trials of ulcer drugs but low in trials of drugs for hypertension—an undertreated condition in Germany, where many people pop pills for herzinsuffizienz, or low blood pressure. Moreover, a pill’s shape, size, branding, and price all influence its effects on the body. Soothing blue capsules make more effective tranquilizers than angry red ones, except among Italian men, for whom the color blue is associated with their national soccer team—Forza Azzurri!

[To the tune of Miles Davis Quintet, "Teo's Bag (alternate take)," from the album The Complete Columbia Studio Sessions, 1965-68 (I give it 1 stars).]

Citizen scientists and citizen journalists

My friend (and, if the editors smile upon our efforts, soon-to-be coauthor) Darlene Cavalier pointed me to an article by Dan Schultz on Media Shift Idea Lab about what journalists can learn from the citizen scientist movement. Essentially, the piece argues that citizen and professional scientists have developed a division of labor and authority that journalists could emulate.

Two points.

First, this isn't the first time that such a division of labor and authority has emerged in science. In the early nineteenth century, the scientific world in Britain (and in somewhat similar measure the U.S.) consisted of a small elite that ran the Royal Society, was considered (or considered itself) competent to deal with big theoretical issues, and set the agenda for science; and a mass of local observers, ranging from country parson and skilled artisans to teachers and soldiers. Members of this second group could become notable for masterful knowledge of a narrow slice of the universe-- the natural history of their parish, the habits of large mammals in eastern Kenya, Jupiter's moons, etc.-- and could make meaningful contributions to science within their area of expertise.

These boundaries weren't entirely hard and fast-- there was always the possibility of either moving up from the category of local expert to scientific eminence (Charles Darwin might never have made the jump to the second category if he hadn't gone on the Beagle), or reaching beyond one's place-- but people generally (to use an outmoded phrase) knew their place.

The existence of these well-understood boundaries, and the resulting symbiotic relationship that is emerging between professional and citizen scientists, gives Schultz hope that journalists could create something similar:

If you buy my claim that scientists and journalists all care about informational integrity and the quest for truth, then several things can be extrapolated:

1. If professional journalists take the lead by clearly defining expectations, explaining best practices, and implementing an accessible infrastructure, then amateurs can contribute without disrupting the industry.
2. If amateur journalists do a good job of covering a smaller scope of topics or areas (e.g. the hyperlocal), then professionals can focus on the deeper, otherwise inaccessible issues.
3. Professional journalists are responsible for creating and maintaining the citizen network if they want it to meet their standards.
4. Citizen networks need more than a host. In order to reach full potential, they need to be explicitly empowered through tools and guidance.
5. A symbiotic relationship between the professional, the amateur, and the crowd is not just possible, it's socially optimal.

And there we have it: If the journalism industry can create an infrastructure that allows amateurs to contribute reliable information, then professionals will be able to dedicate more resources to epic reporting. If local papers can find the capacity to set up and empower meaningful citizen networks, they will establish a major foothold in the evolving domains of community and information.

But this leads to my second point, which is that this division of labor and authority is exactly what some bloggers argue is unnecessary today-- and which is more at issue in contentious scientific fields like climate change (or alas, evolution) than it should be. Proponents of intelligent design, for example, have quite brilliantly appropriated the language of democracy to suggest that people should be allowed to make up their own minds about evolution, and could easily make a similar appeal using the citizen science movement. Journalists, it seems to me, are likely to have a tougher time differentiating what they do from "citizen journalists," particularly in an age in which the boundary between reporting and opinion has been eroded, and the professional status of journalists is under assault.

Still, it's a good model to follow.

[To the tune of Miles Davis, "So What," from the album Columbia Years 1955-85 (Disc 2): Originals/Moods (I give it 4 stars).]

On "weighty" issues

This is fascinating:

Gravity affects not just our bodies and our behaviours, but our very thoughts. That's the fascinating conclusion of a new study which shows that simply holding a heavy object can affect the way we think. A simple heavy clipboard can makes issues seem weightier - when holding one, volunteers think of situations as more important and they invest more mental effort in dealing with abstract issues.

In a variety of languages, from English to Dutch to Chinese, importance is often described by words pertaining to weight. We speak of 'heavy news, 'weighty matters' and 'light entertainment'. We weigh up the value of evidence, we lend weight to arguments with facts, and our opinions carry weight if we wield influence and authority. These are more than just quirks of language - they reflect real links that our minds make between weight and importance.

Nils Jostmann from the University of Amsterdam demonstrated the link between weight and importance through a quartet of experiments. In each one, a different set of volunteers held a clipboard that either weighed 1.5 pounds or 2.3 pounds....

Jostmann reasons that the link between weight and importance is rooted in our early childhood experiences, when we rapidly learn that heavy objects require more effort to deal with, not just in terms of strength but planning too. Our brain relies on these concrete physical experiences when it represents more abstract concepts, like importance. The two are then joined, so that physical experiences can affect abstract thought.

This is far from the first study that has supported this "theory of embodied cognition". Jostmann's explanation can also account for why thinking clean thoughts can soften moral judgments and why immoral thoughts trigger a need for physical cleanliness. It's why warming our hands can make us socially warmer, why social exclusion literally feels cold.

[To the tune of Miles Davis Quintet, "Riot," from the album The Complete Columbia Studio Sessions, 1965-68 (I give it 2 stars).]

Academic kakistocracies

Via Crooked Timber, this Inside Higher Ed review of Diego Gambetta's Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate that has a great comparison of projected incompetence among mafiosi, who according Gambetta, cheerfully "let the professionals and the entrepreneurs take care of the actual business operations" and admit that they're only good at shaking people down, and a certain brand of italian academic, the "baroni (barons) who oversee the selection committees involved in Italian academic promotions."

While some fields are more meritocratic than others, the struggle for advancement often involves a great deal of horse trading. "The barons operate on the basis of a pact of reciprocity, which requires a lot of trust, for debts are repaid years later. Debts and credits are even passed on from generation to generation within a professor's 'lineage,' and professors close to retirement are excluded from the current deals, for they will not be around long enough to return favors."

The most powerful figures in this system, says Gambetta, tend to be the least intellectually distinguished. They do little research, publish rarely, and at best are derivative of "some foreign author on whose fame they hope to ride.... Also, and this is what is the most intriguing, they do not try to hide their weakness. One has the impression that they almost flaunt it in personal contacts."

Well, one also has the impression that the author is here on the verge of writing a satirical novel. But a friend who is interested in both the politics and academic life of Italy tells me that this account is all too recognizably accurate, in some fields anyway. Gambetta calls the system "an academic kakistocracy, or government by the worst," which is definitely an expression I can see catching on.

[To the tune of Thievery Corporation Feat. Sister Nancy, "Originality," from the album Versions (I give it 1 stars).]

Philip Tetlock and big questions for futurists and forecasters

Via Overcoming Bias, I found this great review by Philip Tetlock in The National Interest of several futures-related books I've been meaning to read: Ian Bremmer and Preston Keat's The Fat Tail; Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's The Predictioneer’s Game; and George Friedman's The Next 100 Years. (My ongoing near-obsession with Tetlock's work is well-documented in this blog, and in other things I've written.)

It's one of those reviews that, yes, talks about the books, but really treats the books as a launching-point for talking about other cool things (in other words, it's the kind of book review I like to write).

In this case, there are two things that jump out at me. (Incidentally, Tetlock's verdict is that Frieman and Bremer/Keat aren't very good, but de Mesquita is worth grappling with.) The first is that it includes a nice precis of one of the core arguments of his 2005 book, Expert Political Judgment.

A good deal of research indicates that some ways of thinking (“cognitive styles”) do translate into somewhat more correct forecasts. When we score the accuracy of thousands of predictions from hundreds of experts across dozens of countries over twenty years, we find the best forecasters tend to be modest about their forecasting skills, eclectic in their ideological and theoretical tastes, and self-critical in their analytical styles. Borrowing from philosopher Isaiah Berlin, I call them foxes—experts who know many things and are not finicky about where they get good ideas. Paraphrasing Deng Xiaoping, they do not care if the cat is white or black, only that it catches mice.

Contrast this with what I call hedgehogs—experts who know one big thing from which likely future trends can be more or less directly deduced. The big thing might be any of a variety of theories: Marxist faith in the class struggle as the driver of history or libertarian faith in the self-correcting power of free markets, or a realist faith in balance-of-power politics or an institutionalist faith in the capacity of the international community to make world politics less ruthlessly anarchic, or an eco-doomster faith in the impending apocalypse or a techno-boomster faith in our ability to make cost-effective substitutes for pretty much anything we might run out of.

What experts think—where they fall along the Left-Right spectrum—is a weak predictor of accuracy. But how experts think is a surprisingly consistent predictor. Relative to foxes who are less encumbered by loyalties to an all-encompassing worldview, hedgehogs offer bolder forecasts and, although they hit occasional grand slams, they strike out a lot and wind up with decidedly poorer batting averages.

The second is his suggestion about how to begin to deal with a problem that's central to the field: that we don't really keep track of either how accurate our forecasts are (which is something that clients always want to know).

How then can we produce the most accurate forecasts? The answer is not obvious: right now all we can say confidently is that no one can be 100 percent confident about which approach would win if we were to run a series of level-playing-field forecasting tournaments stretching out to, say, 2020.

But if the market seems largely indifferent to our plight, who might rescue us? There is one potential savior on the horizon: a big institutional purchaser of forecasting services that has the financial clout and technical-support staff ready to run forecasting tournaments that would shed light on the relative performance of competing approaches—a big player that also has powerful incentives to discover superior analytical strategies, for even small improvements in its prediction accuracy can translate into billions of dollars and millions of lives saved. And that player is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Unfortunately, although intelligence agencies have been heavy buyers of forecasting services, they have not used their massive purchasing power to their full advantage. They have allowed the diverse interest groups in the intelligence community to choose freely from private-sector forecasting products. On the one hand, this is commendably open-minded. On the other hand, there has been no integrative effort to assess the relative value added of each product. Indeed, intelligence agencies seem as allergic as private-sector forecasters to being held accountable to public accuracy metrics.

I like Tetlock's suggestion, but personally I think it's just as important to try to assess how useful our work is-- whether it be delivered in the form of roadmaps, scenarios, provocative pieces in industry magazines, or wherever-- as well as how correct we are. Futurists constantly argue that utility is the real metric by which we should be judged: IFTF president emeritus Bob Johansen likes to say that you should never trust anyone who says they can predict the future, especially if they're from California. But too often we don't have the fine detail about how our work gets used by clients, how it informs their decisions, and how we can adjust it to be more useful.

This is a shame, because the field is capable of evolving very quickly: when I was at IFTF, we developed all kinds of new tools and media for both doing research and communicating our ideas. But we tended to have to do so with less rigorous knowledge about how our earlier work had been received, interpreted, analyzed, etc. than I would have liked.

The other problem that the "you can be useful without being right" argument is it leaves unresolved two big questions.

First, how wrong can be you be and still be useful? Can you get the future totally wrong and still be useful to clients? To put it less provocatively, could a good futurist take a forecast or scenario that was essentially generated at random, and create something useful for clients? Is there a point at which error overwhelms utility? (Or conversely, could it be that erroneous forecasts are actually more useful? More counterintuitive things have proved true in our time.)

Second, who's responsible for the work being useful? In one sense, clients are always responsible for generating most of the value from a prediction: if I say something exactly right about the future and a client doesn't act on it, then they've lost the opportunity to create value from my prediction. If utility can be divorced from reality (or future reality), does the burden shift entirely to the client (or reader) to find or create the value in a (right or wrong) forecast?

As a once and kind-of current academic, I'm certainly sympathetic to the idea that our work is like teaching: we can help guide our students or clients, offer access our craft and wisdom, but they have to do the work of understanding and learning themselves. But at the very least, I'd like to better understand how these social contracts are supposed to work, and better yet, understand how they actually do function-- to have a better sense of how clients create utility from our work, and what we can do to increase that utility.

[To the tune of John Coltrane, "A Love Supreme, Part I - Acknowledgement," from the album The Classic Quartet - The Complete Impulse! Studio Recordings (I give it 4 stars).]

Kids lunches

For years I made my kids' lunches. Usually I'd put together their sandwiches the night before school, then assemble the rest of it-- some fruit, milk, maybe something else-- that morning. (Sometimes they'd choose their sides.) Truth be told, I liked doing it: I wasn't crazy about the time it took, especially in the morning when there never seems to be enough time, but it's one of those things you do as a parent that's grounding and not at all about you.

This year, with them going into fifth and second grades, I decided, enough. They can make their own sandwiches. Last year I backed away from making breakfast every morning, with results to warm the hearts of believers in the deep influence of moral hazards on human behavior. Gone were the cravings for eggs, bacon and toast (made by me); in was a preference for cold cereal, toast, or at most instant oatmeal.

So this week, as they've returned to Peninsula for a couple weeks of child care, they're making their own lunches. Some of the results are hilarious. My son turns out to make sandwiches that I can only describe as Dagwood Goes Cubist: absurd amounts of cheese cut into oblongs that immediately start to roll out of the sandwich, with layers of salami to hold the cheese in place until he can get the bread on. My daughter likewise seems to view peanut butter the way a bricklayer sees mortar, as the thing that can bind together elements that don't want to get along-- and in a pinch, cover over mistakes.

It's also led to some renegotiating of what they can pack, and what they have to eat. For whatever reason my daughter doesn't like carrying drinks to school, so she's agreed to consume the USDA recommended quota of milk at breakfast and dinner; both kids are getting an education in what counts as "healthy" food (i.e., the things you have to have to balance out the piece of chocolate you always want to sneak in); and if current trends continue, neither child will eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich again as long as they live.

The other interesting thing is that so far they're squabbling less in the mornings. When they're sitting on the couch watching TV, they can have pointless and unresolvable fights over anything: whether the remote is more on her side of the couch than his, whether this episode of Kim Possible is one they've seen ten times before or only nine, who slept more soundly the night before. If I keep them busy, particularly with things they have to eat, they focus on that.

Maybe when the novelty of making their lunches wears off we'll have to start them on something else, like making their own clothes.

[To the tune of John Coltrane, "Joy (Second Version)," from the album The Classic Quartet - The Complete Impulse! Studio Recordings (I give it 2 stars).]

As soon as I stood up...

She got down a moment later, fortunately. The cats quite enjoy hanging out in the garage while I work.

To those who say there are no easy answers, I say you're not looking hard enough

So said Bart Simpson, and according to a new study from the University of Toronto Rotman School (which I caught via Idea Festival), he was exactly right:

Strategic managers, lacking training in how to build their own situational models and reasoning strategies as opposed to 'implementing' blueprints and recipes, tend to choose easy problems to make sense of their predicaments and use sub-optimally simplistic methods of framing complex problems, shows new research from the Rotman School of Management.

“Managerial problems are not given – they are co-created, by the manager and his context, and what the manager's mind does often matters more than other features of the context,” says the study’s author, Mihnea Moldoveanu, who has articulated a new research field called managerial algorithmics. “This model shows managers systematically avoid certain kinds of problems (logically hard ones) in favour of others (logically simple ones) when they try to make sense of their predicaments." When applied to a vast array of data about the ways in which managers make judgments and solve problems, Moldoveanu's model shows that by and large "managers are logical sloths, even if they are sometimes informational hogs.” Managers seem to systematically avoid 'deep thought' about the situations they face and rather seek 'data', 'stories', 'frameworks' and 'prescriptions' that stand a very good chance of being logically incompatible, he says. However, because they are 'logical sloths', this logical incompatibility will go un-noticed....

This is the kind of research that makes me worry about futurists' love of stories, scenarios, and other pieces of vivid narrative. They have their virtues, undoubtedly, but we've pretty much burned through the narrative turn in business, and I think it's now time to pay more attention to how people tend to misuse or be led astray by good stories.

There was also this interesting bit:

[E]ven though thinking more deeply will almost always help, acting on the deepest possible logical analysis is not always the optimal course of action: being logically omniscient in an environment of logical sloths could also lead to losses. Moldoveanu's argues that managers need to seek out 'adaptive' intelligence, which he defines as 'the right level of logical depth given what you know about others' level of logical depth.'

This reminds me of something that author, neurologist, and expert poker player Robert Burton recently told me: that many serious poker players don't play their own hands, they first try to figure out how their opponents would play whatever hands they have.

[To the tune of Keith Jarrett Trio, "The Out-of-Towners," from the album The Out Of Towners (I give it 1 stars).]

Katja Grace on "mistakes with nonexistent people"

She doesn't mention it, but the problem she describes is one that people have when thinking about the future, too:

Who is better off if you live and I die? Is one morally obliged to go around impregnating women? Is the repugnant conclusion repugnant? Is secret genocide OK? Does it matter if humanity goes extinct? Why shouldn’t we kill people? Is pity for the dead warranted?

All these discussions come down to the same question often: whether to care about the interests of people who don’t exist but could.

I shan’t directly argue either way; care about whatever you like. I want to show that most of the arguments against caring about the non-existent which repeatedly come up in casual discussion rely on two errors.

[To the tune of Keith Jarrett Trio, "You've Changed," from the album The Out Of Towners (I give it 2 stars).]

Sure you're saved. But what about Fido and Fluffy?

Marginal Revolution is remarkably restrained in its description of this new service: Rapture insurance for your pets.

You've committed your life to Jesus. You know you're saved. But when the Rapture comes what's to become of your loving pets who are left behind? Eternal Earth-Bound Pets takes that burden off your mind.

We are a group of dedicated animal lovers, and atheists. Each Eternal Earth-Bound Pet representative is a confirmed atheist, and as such will still be here on Earth after you've received your reward. Our network of animal activists are committed to step in when you step up to Jesus....

Our service is plain and simple; our fee structure is reasonable. For $110.00 we will guarantee that should the Rapture occur within ten (10) years of receipt of payment, one pet per residence will be saved. Each additional pet at your residence will be saved for an additional $15.00 fee. A small price to pay for your peace of mind and the health and safety of your four legged friends.

I think I also really like the way it brings together evangelicals and atheists. Who says people can't put aside their differences?

[To the tune of Willie Nelson, "Gravedigger," from the album Moment of Forever (I give it 5 stars).]

I hope this doesn't describe what I do....

I love the reflexivity of this study (described by Ben Goldacre):

[A] set of experiments from the March 2008 edition of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience... elegantly show that people will buy into bogus explanations much more readily when they are dressed up with a few technical words from the world of neuroscience. Subjects were given descriptions of various psychology phenomena, and then randomly offered one of four explanations for them: the explanations either contained neuroscience, or didn’t; and they were either good explanations or bad ones (bad ones being, for example, simply circular restatements of the phenomenon itself)....

[T]he bogus neuroscience information had a particularly strong effect on peoples’ judgments of bad explanations. As quacks are well aware, adding scientific-sounding but conceptually uninformative information makes it harder to spot a dodgy explanation.

An interesting question is why. The very presence of neuroscience information might be seen as a surrogate marker of a good explanation, regardless of what is actually said. As the researchers say, “something about seeing neuroscience information may encourage people to believe they have received a scientific explanation when they have not.”...

More clues can be found in the extensive literature on irrationality. People tend, for example, to rate longer explanations as being more similar to “experts’ explanations”. There is also the “seductive details” effect: if you present related (but logically irrelevant) details to people, as part of an argument, that seems to make it more difficult for them to encode and later recall the main argument of a text, because attention is diverted.

But any meaningless filler, not just scientific jargon, can change behaviour: studies have found, for example, that people respond positively more often to requests with uninformative “placebo” information in them: office warriors will be interested to hear that “Can I use the photocopier? I have to make some copies,” is more successful than the simple “Can I use the photocopier?”

I hope that my Future 2.0 piece doesn't fall in this category. Of course, if it does, I just need to sound extra-confident and certain, and throw around some more scientific-sounding terms.

[To the tune of The Cranberries, "Zombie," from the album The Cranberries: Stars - The Best of 1992-2002 (I give it 2 stars).]

Ultimate example of DIY?

I really hope this is true! DIY helicopter makers of the world unite!

Some guy in China went and made his own helicopter entirely out of wood. Except for the engine. Because wooden engines are stupid. Admit it, maple motor, you are dumb!

20 year old Chinese farmer Wu Zhongyuan built himself a helicopter using only -- according to the man -- what he remembers of middle school physics lessons and "relevant knowledge [found while] surfing the Internet via my mobile phone."

His single-seater conveyance has blades made from the wood of an Elm tree, a frame reinforced with steel pipes and uses an engine from a motorcycle -- all for around $1,600. Wu claims the 'copter can get him as high as 2,600 feet, though it seems he's grounded for the time being as the Chinese government has forbid him to fly because of safety reasons.

(It's more likely than the Mongolian death worm.)

[To the tune of Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble, "Superstition," from the album Live Alive (I give it 4 stars).]

T...i...m...e... M...a...c...h...i...n...e

Ever since I installed my new gigantic, space-time bending hard drive in my Mac, Time Machine has been incredibly slow. It takes hours to "prepare" to do a backup. There's no way I'm going to abandon doing backups (it's one of the few things I'm really paranoid about), but I'm trying to find ways to speed it up and so far have failed. Frustrating. Grrr.

[To the tune of Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble, "Mary Had A Little Lamb," from the album Live Alive (I give it 2 stars).]

Sometimes comments are the best part

Or in this case, they compress into 18 words all the cruelty, superficiality, and sloth of our interconnected world.

[To the tune of Thievery Corporation Feat. The Flaming Lips, "Marching The Hate Machines (Into The Sun)," from the album The Cosmic Game (I give it 2 stars).]

Camp Winnarainbow

Yesterday we spent the day fetching my daughter from Camp Winnarainbow, where she's spent the last two weeks. She spent a week there last year, and quite enjoyed it. This year she was there long enough to write us letters, which basically said, "Hello, I don't miss any of you, and now I must go and walk on stilts." (And here she is...)

Parking and biking

Slate's Tom Vanderbilt has a good article about the role of parking in shaping the attractiveness of different kinds of transportation. He points out that:

parking helps make commuters—a lesson long ago learned with cars. Studies in New York found that a surprisingly large percentage of vehicles coming into lower Manhattan were government employees or others who had an assured parking spot. Other studies have shown the presence of a guaranteed parking spot at home—required in new residential developments—is what turns a New Yorker into a car commuter.

On the flip side, people would be much less likely to drive into Manhattan if they knew their expensive car was likely to be stolen, vandalized, or taken away by police. And yet this is what was being asked of bicycle commuters, save those lucky few who work in a handful of buildings that provide indoor bicycle parking. Surveys have shown that the leading deterrent to potential bicycle commuters is lack of a safe, secure parking spot on the other end.

When it finally dies, I would love to be able to replace my car with a serious electric bike (or more likely a cheap used car and an electric bike), but parking is kind of a concern. It's one thing to park a $400 bike by chaining it to a fence; I'm not sure what I'd want to do with a bike that cost twenty times that much.

[To the tune of Ides Of March, "Vehicle," from the album Vehicle (I give it 5 stars).]

Unlikely covers

The Guardian music blog is asking readers for their favorite unlikely cover songs:

Now a lot of this will depend on your definition of "unlikely". Certainly, Celtic-funk covers of Leonard Cohen tunes would fit the criteria. As would acoustic versions of Napalm Death. However, I think the range can be more subjective than that (providing you can stand it up, of course). For me, Stevie Wonder's cover of We Can Work It Out would be a good example. He switched the genre, though not dramatically, but the way he reinterpreted the emotions that underpinned the track, from melancholy to near ecstacy, was what made it unlikely.

Here are the first songs that come to my mind:

• Feist, "Inside and Out"
• Stevie Wonder, "Light My Fire"
• Nina Simone, "I Shall Be Released"
• Sting, "Windmills of Your Mind," from The Thomas Crown Affair
• Oleta Adams, "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me"
• Bari Koral, "Midnight Train to Georgia"
• Charlotte Martin, "Wild Horses"
• Emerson Lake and Palmer, "Peter Gunn"
• Grateful Dead, "The Mighty Quinn"
• Stevie Ray Vaughan, "Superstition"

[To the tune of Stevie Wonder, "Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours," from the album Natural Wonder (Disc 2) (I give it 4 stars).]

First post from new machine

Not exactly a completely new machine, but tonight I installed a new hard drive in my MacBook (the one the Institute let me have when they let me go). I'd long had less than 5 or 6 gig free on my factory-installed 80 gb hard drive, and had to carefully manage my remaining space-- regularly burn DVDs of pictures of the kids (which I should do anyway, but still), look for attachments and downloads to clean out, etc..

At first I thought about taking it to one of the shops around here, and having them do it for me. Then I figured I knew enough technical people, I could mail order a hard drive and get someone to do it for a case of beer. The new drive, a 500 gb Seagate, and a plastic external enclosure for the old drive (I found a deal online), arrived yesterday.

I started poking around a little at the instructions for doing a hard drive upgrade on a MacBook, and soon realized, I could do this myself. Not only that, but I wanted to try.

So today I went to my local Frys, bought a couple tools and an anti-static wrist strap, borrowed an OS X install disk from a friend, and after dinner, cleared off some space on the dining room table. My son joined me, even though he was a little disappointed that he wouldn't get to smash up the old hard drive (he really likes taking things like that apart). We watched a couple videos on YouTube and followed some instructions I found online, and 10 minutes later, we had the drives changed out.

men at work, via flickr

After that, it was a matter of booting up from the install disk, then using Time Machine to do a complete restore of my old machine-- really just a matter of clicking on some buttons and then going for coffee. Or in this case, putting the old hard drive in its new enclosure. (I haven't had something so aggressively transparent since my Palm IIIc, or maybe my iMac.) A couple hours later, the restore was complete, the old internal hard drive was happily working as an external hard drive, and all was well.

old and new drives, via flickr

Considering how much (really how little) work it was, the payoff is pretty spectacular. I have what feels like a new machine, with a boundless amount of memory; and I have the experience of having done it all myself.

I think I'll upgrade the RAM next. Now that it's my machine, I can improve it as much as I want. That's as good a metaphor for my new life as any.

look at the size of that thing! via flickr

[To the tune of John Coltrane & Don Cherry, "The Invisible," from the album The Avant-Garde (I give it 2 stars).]

Fred Kaplan on creative freedom

Fred Kaplan's Slate article celebrating the 50th anniversary of the release of Kind of Blue has this great observation:

The album's legacy is mixed, precisely... [because] opened up a whole new path of freedom to jazz musicians: Those who had something to say thrived; those who didn't, noodled. That's the dark side of what Miles Davis and George Russell (and, a few months later, Ornette Coleman, in his own even-freer style of jazz) wrought: a lot of noodling—New Age noodling, jazz-rock-fusion noodling, blaring-and-squealing noodling—all of it baleful, boring, and deadly (literally deadly, given the rise of tight and riveting rock 'n' roll). Some of their successors confused freedom with just blowing whatever came into their heads, and it turned out there wasn't much there.

We often associate freedom with creativity, and assume that the more of the first you have, the more of the second you'll have. Our tendency to see creativity as sudden inspiration; as something that young people are better at (witness Silicon Valley's fetishizing of 20-something programmers and entrepreneurs, or our assumption that young children are more creative than their stodgy parents); and as an activity that's nearly impossible to formally promote (you can't manage creativity, as one article put it; you have to manage for creativity), combine to make it seem like the best way to encourage creativity is to just turn people loose.

But as Kaplan points out, usually that's not quite the case. Lots of creative moments combine preparation and training with serendipity or the creativity that emerges out of responding to in-the-moment challenges or opportunities (travel, biking, workshops and cooking are all examples). Other creative acts are grounded in, or push the boundaries of, the nature and limits of the media you're working with (this applies equally to crayons or Lie groups or reinforced concrete). The tinkering movement recognizes the fundamental materiality of most creative work, and puts engagement with stuff at its center. And as Matthew Crawford and Richard Sennett argue in their books, the creativity of everyone from machinists to musicians is tested and tempered by the demands that their materials make, and the traditions in which they work.

In other words, thinking of "creativity" as mainly an expression of a psychological gift-- a capacity to be creative-- is wrong. Or it's incomplete. People aren't creative when they're free to do whatever they want. They're creative when they're free to experiment, to try out new things, to fail at the boundaries.

[To the tune of John Coltrane & Don Cherry, "Focus On Sanity," from the album The Avant-Garde (I give it 2 stars).]

Aaron Koblin talking about the Senseable City project

Quote of the day

Report from a health care town hall:

A lot of the folks in attendance were confused. President Obama was portrayed on signs and pamphlets as some sort of Nazi, socialist, foreign born, communist, Muslim, euthanasia enthusiast... [by protesters who] don't want to see Medicare go away, but are opposed to government healthcare coverage options.

Blink.

[h/t Pam's House Blend]

[To the tune of Led Zeppelin, "The Battle of Evermore," from the album Box Set (Disc 2) (I give it 4 stars).]

Jugglers on the Quad

Something I saw tonight at Stanford:

via flickr

Juggler practicing on the Quad.

via flickr

Since I'm attending a conference on collaborative visualization and distributed intelligence, I expected to see a lot of really cool things today. I just didn't expect the best one to come after the day was over.

[To the tune of Led Zeppelin, "The Rover," from the album Physical Graffiti (Remastered) (I give it 3 stars).]

That's one of my maps!

Martin Börjesson on healthy lifestyles and the shadow of the future

Martin Börjesson asks, "Why is there a decline of healthy lifestyle?" He suggests that part of the reason has to do with expectations about the future:

[In The Evolution of Cooperation, Robert Axelrod] used the concept of shadow of the future to explain why cooperation changed during different collective perspectives of the future.... The basic idea about this is that if we are likely to have a future together, we are cooperating. But if we don’t have a future together and are not likely to meet again, we tend to cheat on each other more.

Could it be, that if our collective view of the future – the shadow of the future – is playing a major role in explaining how we behave socially, it also has some explanatory power for how well we take care of ourselves? This would imply that this change towards unhealthy behavior is a social macro-group behavior which might continue until we change our view of the future, which to many citizens seems rather gloomy today.

Axelord's phrase "the shadow of the future" is one that I come back to regularly-- it's a great image for thinking about how to think about how we make the future a presence in our lives. Axelrod was using it in a pretty specific instance-- with players of Prisoner's Dilemma-- but Börjesson's argument that unhealthy behavior "might continue until we change our view of the future" at the personal level is interesting in a couple ways.

First, an easy way to test it: how does a list of countries with lowest obesity rates compare to Mansour Javidan's most forward-looking cultures?

Second, while Axelrod was talking about how the shadow of the future influences cooperation between different people occupying the same space (the Prisoner's Dilemma game), you could also use it to think about cooperation or competition between people across time-- in this case, following Paul Bloom, between the different people "Me Today" versus "Me in the Future." As Bloom notes in an essay in the Atlantic Monthly, "Although it might be hard to think about the person who will occupy your body tomorrow morning as someone other than you, it is not hard at all to think that way about the person who will occupy your body 20 years from now. This may be one reason why many young people are indifferent about saving for retirement; they feel as if they would be giving up their money to an elderly stranger."

Paul Bloom on Alison Gopnik's "The Philosophical Baby"

Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, whose work on happiness and our ability to imagine our future selves caught my attention a while ago (when I was a different person), has a good review of Alison Gopnik's latest book, The Philosophical Baby. My understanding is that Gopnik is one of the leaders of a paradigm shift in infant psychology that can be characterized by a shift in thinking that "babies are basically dumb" to "babies are really smart." (I want to write a history of this shift, mainly because How Babies Became Smart would be the perfect baby shower gift for (approximately) ever.)

So it's not surprising that crux of Gopnik's argument is that we've tended to assume that

babies are less conscious than we are or have some features of consciousness but not others. William James, for instance, famously claimed that the mental life of a baby is "one great blooming buzzing confusion."

Gopnik's own view is a clever and counterintuitive twist on James. She argues that babies are more conscious than adults. Her conclusion is based on the study of how attention and inhibition—the capacity to block out distractions—evolve over the course of development. Adult attention is willful and endogenous. Although it can be captured by external events—we will turn if we hear a loud noise—we also have control over what to think about and what to attend to. By sheer will, we can choose to focus on our left foot, then think about what we had for breakfast, then focus on ... whatever we want. Adults are also blessed, to varying degrees, with the power to ignore distractions, both external and internal, and to stay focused on a single task.

This is all harder for babies and young children. They are largely at the mercy of the environment. Simple experiments demonstrate that babies are, for the most part, trapped in the here and now, a conclusion supported by the finding that the part of the brain responsible for inhibition and control, the prefrontal cortex, is among the last to develop. Gopnik uses the example of an adult being dumped into the middle of a foreign city, knowing nothing about what's going on, with no goals and plans, constantly turning to see new things, and struggling to make sense of it all. This is what it's like to be a baby—only more so, since even the most stressed adult has countless ways of controlling attention: We can look forward to lunch, imagine how we would describe this trip to friends, and so on. The baby just is.

This is all interesting, but it leads in a direction that as a futurist I find very intriguing:

For Gopnik, this lack of inhibition and control is a gift. It makes babies and children ideally suited for the task of acquiring information about physical and social reality. When it comes to imagination and learning, their openness to experience makes them "superadults"—not just smart but smarter than we are. She's particularly interested in the power to think about alternate realities, other possible worlds. In several fascinating chapters, she explores how this power is manifested in children's play and in their creation of imaginary companions, plausibly arguing that the capacity to reason about worlds that do not exist is crucial to children's rapid learning about everything from cause-and-effect relationships to human behavior.

"The power to think about alternate realities, other possible worlds" sounds rather like the mental abilities that we try to harness as futurists, albeit without the Baby Einstein music and brightly-colored blocks.

Bloom also throws in this interesting aside about some of his his own recent work:

Some more recent studies I've done in collaboration with Kiley Hamlin and Karen Wynn at Yale have found that 6-month-olds, after witnessing people interact with one another, are capable of subtle social evaluation; they prefer to interact with whoever helped the other person achieve his goals than with the person who thwarted the other's goals.

Apparently the desire to reward people who are more cooperative-- either by choosing to interact with them, or even paying a penalty to see them punished-- goes back pretty far.

P.D. Smith review's Anna Minton's Ground Control

This is a good example of what a book review should be: an essay that's worth reading for itself, not just for what it tells you about the book in question.

You may not have noticed, but our cities are changing. As Anna Minton shows in her excellent new study, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st-century City, the development of Canary Wharf in the 1990s blazed a trail that is now being followed in cities across the UK, creating privatized, personality-free zones stripped of any historical or cultural uniqueness. These hi-tech “defensible spaces” are promoted as being “clean and safe”. But they are also sterile and soulless. Pat, a hairdresser who has lived on the Isle of Dogs for 37 years, says of Canary Wharf today: “I don’t like going there. It always gives me the fear.”

[To the tune of Keith Jarrett, "Vienna, Pt. 2," from the album Vienna Concert (I give it 3 stars).]

Terry Pratchett on dying

Terry Pratchett's Daily Mail piece is very much worth reading:

I hate the term 'assisted suicide'. I have witnessed the aftermath of two suicides, and as a journalist I attended far too many coroners' inquests, where I was amazed and appalled at the many ways that desperate people find to end their lives.

Suicide is fear, shame, despair and grief. It is madness.

Those brave souls lately seeking death abroad seem to me, on the other hand, to be gifted with a furious sanity. They have seen their future, and they don't want to be part of it....

I am enjoying my life to the full, and hope to continue for quite some time. But I also intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod - the latter because Thomas's music could lift even an atheist a little bit closer to Heaven - and perhaps a second brandy if there is time.

Oh, and since this is England I had better add: 'If wet, in the library.'

Reminder of the insignificance of blogging

Chinese detainee poems carved in the wall of the detention center at
Angel Island, the "Ellis Island of the West" (assuming Ellis' mission
was to say "get your ass back to Asia").

Future Tense interview!

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's show Future Tense recently interviewed me me about my piece, "The Evil Futurists' Guide to World Domination."

I'm always a bit anxious with radio interviews, as you can never be sure what pieces of the interview they're going to use. I this case, though, they just ran the whole thing. So if it doesn't make sense, I have only myself to blame. Though since the piece starts off with a bit by Ricky Gervais, it's inevitable that it all be downhill from there. When you follow one of the funniest men in the world, you're going to suffer by comparison.

You can listen to a streaming version, or download the MP3.

Typical northern California beach experience

Half Moon Bay State Park this afternoon. The beaches here prove Mark Twain's great line about summers in San Francisco. Nonetheless I'm confident that after lunch the kids will play in the freezing water!

On academic presentations and the future of conferences

Author and creative writing teacher Rachel Toor writes in the latest Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) about the problems of either dashing off talks the night before, or just reading papers:

More often than I can believe, someone will preface a reading by saying, "I just wrote this last night." Why on earth, I wonder, would you read something that raw? Generally public readings are set up months in advance. It's not like the speakers don't know they're going to have to have something ready.... But then I remembered that arrogance is often the conjoined twin of insecurity. What those writers wanted us to know, perhaps, was that this new work was the result of pure talent: Just think, audience, how good this would be if it were coupled with labor? If the piece stinks, it's simply a matter of timing. It's not my fault. I could do better, really, I could. I just didn't have the time....

Most academics don't present hastily written papers. But they do something almost as bad. They read their papers aloud. Some professors read their lectures. It's common practice, I know, but frankly, it bugs me. It's hard enough for an audience to follow a short story, where, presumably, some attention is being paid to crafting narrative tension. Having to track audibly an argument written in long, convoluted sentences and leaden, jargon-ridden prose can feel like a forced drowning.... Reading instead of presenting is, I think, the academic equivalent of "I just dashed this off last night." It's an act borne out of (choose as many as apply): fear, insecurity, arrogance, procrastination, habit, poor training, or lack of regard for the audience. It's also just plain lazy. It's a lot of work to think something through and then write it out as a conference paper. Taking the next step—understanding what you've done and figuring out how to summarize it extemporaneously—seems to be one that many are willing to forsake.

The piece is a reminder of just how different the kinds of talks I've done for the last few years, and the sorts of intellectual events I'm usually involved in, are from conventional academic presentations. I spend huge amounts of time preparing for the workshops I facilitate: I go over every activity, every breakout session, think about the posters I need to create, the instructions I should give, what I should and shouldn't say, and what outcomes the client and I want.

All this preparation generates one of two things: artifacts and other materials that help organize an event (or that help participants stay self-organized and -aware of what they're supposed to be doing); and a clearer understanding of what I need to do for the day to succeed. What that preparation doesn't generate is a perfectly-planned day: all that planning, I know, is to prepare me to succeed despite the fact that something is going to happen that requires me to adapt and adjust.

What you absolutely cannot do in an environment like this is throw something together the night before; nor can you write it all out and assume you can just follow the script mindlessly-- the two options Toor describes.

Why are these events so different? Two reasons. First, the faciltiated workshop, much more than the academic conference, is explicitly about the production of shared meaning. The aim after a day or two is to have a common vision of the future, a common roadmap, and common understanding of what an organization's strategy should be. You don't necessarily have that as an outcome of a scholarly conference. Second, workshops are a means to an end, not an end in themselves: they're supposed to catalyze action, not be the end of action.

With the proliferation of interesting kinds of workshops, novel forms of meetings, and now the rise of the unconference, I think it's high time we thought about how we could reinvent academic (maybe mainly humanities) conferences. There's no reason we can't create a better model, that satisfies conference speakers' professional needs (e.g., the line on the c.v., the publicity, the chance to interview for jobs) and personal ones (e.g., the opportunity for subsidized travel to see your friends), as well as the needs of conference organizers and the profession/discipline as a whole-- and is a lot more interesting and engaging. So many academic events I go to end on an optimistic note, or generate lots of interest in moving on to actually doing something... but then dissipate, and at best yield an edited volume. Sitting in a stuffy (or over air-conditioned) hotel conference room, listening to someone read a talk, and feeling the collective interest and enthusiasm generated by the event evaporate days afterward-- aren't there better ways we could all spend our time?

Seriously, I'd really like to do this.

[To the tune of Walter Wanderly, "One Note Samba," from the album Out Of Sight (I give it 1 star).]

Redwood Trading Post knows its market!

Xtreme Skyflyer, and learning new and unusual sports

This week the children are between Peninsula summer school and their respective camps, so we're doing things with them. Today we took the kids to Great America. I've been tempted on my last couple visits by something called the Xtreme Skyrider, a ride that basically involves being suspended from a cable, dragged 150 feet up into the air, and then released. You free fall for a couple second, then you swing.

I decided I finally wanted to do it, and Daniel immediately said he wanted to try it too. So he came along.

The first thing they do is put you in this thing that's a combination of a harness and one of those long bibs that, say, radiologists wear. Not the most fetching outfit-- it doesn't allow a flight suit-like swagger-- but since there's nothing else attaching you to the cable, I was all right with that.

Golden Gate Park from Crissy Field

After the California Academy of Sciences and the DeYoung, we took the kids to Crissy Field and the beach. They spent the rest of the afternoon playing the sand, while I watched the kiteboarders.

Underwater in the rainforest

Looking up through the underwater tunnel into the rainforest canopy and the dome.

Canopy level

Silent Running

California Academy of Sciences rainforest. Very space age. Reminds me of the classic sci fi film.