Relevant History

Peter Drucker on forecasting too early

This is striking:

[When] Warren Bennis praised him publicly for his foresight, [Peter] Drucker had this surprising reaction: "It was meant as a compliment, but I winced because, bluntly, I was 10 years premature with every one of my forecasts. And that’s not a compliment. That is saying that one has had no impact."

[To the tune of Tori Amos, "Mr. Zebra," from the album Boys For Pele (I give it 1 star).]

"listening, understanding and neutralizing"

From a reader of Andrew Sullivan:

Obama is after bin Laden. No other single action would pay such huge dividends. In this, Obama proves himself again to be, not just the politician as chess master, but the politician as martial artist, always seeking for the fulcrum, the pivot point where four ounces of effort will yield a thousand pounds of result.

It is a very high level skill, far higher and more effective than the brute force men like Cheney, Bush, or Rumsfeld rely on, and it's difficult to attain, because it depends on three subsidiary skills that lesser men simply never recognize, much less master: listening, understanding and neutralizing.... What appears to some to be hesitation or lack of engagement on his part early on in any effort is really just preparation.

[To the tune of Audioslave, "Jewel Of The Summertime," from the album Revelations (I give it 3 stars).]

Alec Baldwin and "the principle of preposterous virility"

From James Parker's piece on Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers in the December issue of The Atlantic:

Sitting at the bar with his ex-wife, his round a little glass something or other, Baldwin... is florid, potent, gloatingly and inflatedly masculine, like a genie who came out of a bottle of aftershave.

[To the tune of Radiohead, "Airbag," from the album Radiohead in Berlin (I give it 2 stars).]

Crooked Timber on being contrarian

How to do it right:

The whole idea of contrarianism is that you’re “attacking the conventional wisdom”, you’re “telling people that their most cherished beliefs are wrong”, you’re “turning the world upside down”. In other words, you’re setting out to annoy people. Now opinions may differ on whether this is a laudable thing to do – I think it’s fantastic – but if annoying people is what you’re trying to do, then you can hardly complain when annoying people is what you actually do....

The other point of contrarianism is that, if it’s well done, you assemble a whole load of points which are individually uncontroversial (or at least, solidly substantiated) and put them together to support a conclusion which is surprising and counterintuitive. In other words, the aim of the thing is the overall impression you give. Because of this, if you’re writing a contrarian piece properly, you ought to be well aware of what point it looks like you’re making, because the entire point is to make a defensible argument which strongly resembles a controversial one.

So having done this intentionally, you don’t get to complain that people have “misinterpreted” your piece by taking you to be saying exactly what you carefully constructed the argument to look like you were saying.

[To the tune of Old Man River, "Sunshine," from the album BIG SOUND 2009 Summit & Showcases (I give it 1 stars).]

They should be futurists

Krugman talking about Levitt and Durbar , and their lame responses to criticism of the climate change chapter in Superfreakonomics:

[H]aving paraded their daring contrarianism, the freakonomists are trying to wiggle out of the consequences when it turns out that they were wrong.

They just need to take a page from the evil futurists' guide.

[To the tune of My Bloody Valentine, "Sometimes," from the album Lost In Translation (I give it 3 stars).]

The little dramas that play out on Facebook

Seen on a friend's page:

Just got a note from a JDater. And I'm not kidding: The photo shows him wearing a tool belt, stooped by some appliance, perhaps on the verge of installing something I want or should want installed. Bet he could screen in that porch of mine. But he doesn't want children... I shouldn't have to pick between kids and a screened-in porch.

[To the tune of Moby, "Extreme Ways," from the album 18 (I give it 4 stars).]

Spencer Ackerman on Michael Gerson

I always like Spencer Ackerman, but his response to Michael Gerson's latest "these liberal Jews don't take antisemitism as seriously as the evangelicals" screed jumped out at me:

[S]eriously: Michael Gerson needs to shut his fucking mouth before he ever even thinks accusing a Jew of insufficient vigilance against antisemitism. I don't know what lack of self-awareness convinces right-wing evangelicals that they're the true guardians of the Jews, but that condescending and parochial nonsense is its own form of antisemitism. We Tribesmen do not need some wire-rimmed enabler of one of the most destructive and inept presidents in American history to protect us from the perfidies of the world. It's us and not him who will pay the price for antisemitism, so if Gerson wants to actually act like a righteous gentile, he can start by not accusing Jews of apathy to their own people's wellbeing for the sin of not sharing his politics.

[To the tune of Ric Ocasek, "Coming For You," from the album This Side Of Paradise (I give it 3 stars).]

Quote of the day: On managerial cosmopolitanism

From bookforum.com, via Crooked Timber:

It is unlikely that anyone has ever confused a page of Thomas Friedman’s with one of Immanuel Kant’s, but between them it is possible to triangulate a prevailing sensibility of the past two decades. Call it managerial cosmopolitanism. It celebrates the idea of a global civil society, with the states cooperating to play their proper (limited) role as guardians of public order and good business practices. The hospitality that each nation extends to visiting foreign traders grows ever wider and deeper; generalized, it becomes the most irenic of principles. And so there emerges on the horizon of the imaginable future something like a world republic, with liberty and frequent-flier miles for all.

I suspect I'm being insulted in this paragraph, but I'm still too jet-lagged to figure out exactly how. No, wait...

"Blogging constituted a kind of gateway drug"

Adam Greenfield on craft, localism and infrastructure:

[O]ver the last several years, San Francisco in particular has become a field of premium and super-premium, small-run craft production: Ice cream. Bicycles. Coffee. Spirits. Clothing. An audience primed to expect, desire and demand the provenance of the “lovingly handcrafted,” and pitch-perfect retail tuned to that demand. Especially for someone like me, whose senses have become inured to the increasingly homogenized material landscape of Manhattan, it’s hard to escape the sense that the last decade’s activity amounts to nothing less than a local renaissance of craft and technique and pride.

It’s not difficult to infer that this all happened when it did, where it did, because of the post-dotcom-crash emergence of a healthy cohort of talented (and relatively well-capitalized) folks hungry to make something with their lives just a little more tangible than some evanescent Web portal. I’m also willing to bet that the relatively low barriers to entry involved in successful push-button publishing of the early blog era convinced a whole lot of people in the Bay Area that it was safe to try their hand at other, more ambitious endeavors – that is, that blogging constituted a kind of gateway drug....

The San Francisco resurgence would not – could not – have happened if there were not at this point literally several hundred years of insight into craft technique just lying on the ground, for just about any domain of productive activity you can imagine.

[To the tune of Alban Berg Quartet, "String Quartet No. 3 in D major, Op. 18 No. 3: III. Allegro," from the album Beethoven: The Complete String Quartets [Disc 3] (I give it 4 stars).]

Paul Graham on talent versus determination

Paul Graham on "the anatomy of determination:"

In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent.

The whole piece is well worth reading.

[To the tune of Yes, "Roundabout," from the album Keys To Ascension (Disc 2) (I give it 4 stars).]

Quote of the day

Lawrence Krauss in the New York Times:

One of my peers in Arizona recently accompanied a group of scientists and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a geological field trip. During the day, he asked how many would be willing to go on a one-way mission into space. Every member of the group raised his hand. The lure of space travel remains intoxicating for a generation brought up on “Star Trek” and “Star Wars.”

I think ultimately I'd say no, but I'd be tempted.

[via Marginal Revolution]

[To the tune of David Bowie, "Stay," from the album Bowie at the Beeb: Best Of BBC Radio 68-72 (I give it 4 stars).]

Quote of the day

On the Today Show hiring Jenna Bush: "I didn’t realize being born to privilege was considered a talent these days."

[To the tune of David Bowie, "If I'm Dreaming My Life," from the album Hours (I give it 2 stars).]

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).]

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).]

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).]

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.'

Quote of the day

From Doonesbury:

Bernie: I believe that's the secret of my success, Mike. I never ever thought outside the box!
Mike: Wow! Really?
Bernie: Yup.... Of course, it helps if you own the box.
Mike: I would imagine.

Turns out Douglas Rushkoff was right-- you should get back in the box!

[To the tune of Billy Joel, "Big Shot," from the album Greatest Hits Vol. 1 (Disc 2) (I give it 3 stars).]

Judith Shulevitz on parenting

An idea I can really relate to, on parenthood and personhood:

It’s true that we ought to make it easier to parent because that would be good for children, and therefore good for society. But there’s another claim about parenting that feminists since Friedan have been pretty bad at making, and that is that it’s good for parents. Not having liked myself much as a child, I didn’t know how to love children until I became a mother. Mothering my children, I mothered myself, and shed a layer of callowness. My children’s fiercely animal bodies brought me alive to my own. And when I watched them see all the things I had trained myself not to see—poverty, racism, sexism, filthy public spaces—I felt responsible and ashamed. In short, I flourished, in the Aristotelian sense of the term: I became more politically aware, more physically attuned—more human.

[To the tune of Laurie Anderson, "Life On A String," from the album Life On A String (I give it 3 stars).]

Yes, shamelessness is the new virtue

A few days ago I wondered if shamelessness was the the new virtue. Yesterday I didn't quite find an answer, but I did find another great example of how information transparency doesn't necessarily lead to greater probity and economy, but greater recklessness or shamelessness. This is from Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, pp. 16-17:

[I]n 1993, federal securities regulators forced companies, for the first time, to reveal details about the pay and perks of their top executives. The idea was that once pay was in the open, boards would be reluctant to give executives outrageous salaries and benefits....

But guess what happened. Once salaries became public information, the media regularly ran special stories ranking CEOs by pay. Rather than suppressing the executive perks, the publicity had CEOs in America comparing their pay with that of everyone else. The result?... [I]n 1976 the average CEO was paid 36 times as much as the average worker. In 1993, the average CEO was paid 131 times as much.... Now the average CEO makes about 369 times as much as the average worker-- about three times the salary before executive compensation went public.

Really great.

The limits of data

[D]ata sets themselves do not really convey any specific meaning. Meaning can be inferred from how the data compare to expectations or previously published data, but numbers in enterprise applications or spreadsheets cannot explain the strategies Intel and its customers are employing or the uncertainties they are facing. Decentralized organizations must find a means of transmitting business context; in other words, instead of transmitting mere data sets, they must transmit information and intelligence from employees who have it to employees who need it to make decisions and plans. (Jay Hopman, "Using Forecasting Markets to Manage Demand Risk," Intel Technology Journal 11:2 (May 2007), emphasis added.)

Taleb the Improbable

"I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event. I just don't know what that event will be." (Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan, p. 154)

On opportunity

"Opportunities to rise, which can, of their very nature, be seized only by the few... [cannot] substitute for a general diffusion of the means of civilization, which are needed by all men whether they rise of not." (R. H. Tawney)

John Oliver on information technology

John Oliver, in the latest issue of The Bugle (the funniest thing in the world), talking about the use of information technology in Iranian protests:

John Oliver: The reinforcements of modern technology stepped to the front line: the twin soldiers of YouTube and Twitter answered their planet's calling. People in protests used their cellphones to shoot footage, and then put it on the Internet. All it took was a potential Iranian revolution to find a practical use for Internet video.

And so I would like to hereby issue a public apology to the piano-playing cat; to the teenage boy receiving a nut-shot from a whiffle bat; and to the fat lady falling off a table. All of your clumsy attempts at entertainment were in fact vital experiments in the development of this communications tool.

Andy Zaltzman: They were very much the John the Baptists to the Jesus of Iranian video.

Emanuel Derman on Tithonus

From Emanuel Derman's blog:

Tithonus got eternal life, but forgot to ask for eternal youth. (See Alfred Lord Tennyson and Aldous Huxley.)

The whole point of eternal life is eternal youth, or at least eternal middle age.

[To the tune of Audioslave, "I Am the Highway," from the album Audioslave (I give it 4 stars).]

Shelagh Delaney on women

"Women never have young minds. They are born three thousand years old." (British author nd playwright Shelagh Delaney)

David Rakoff on creating

I've recently been reading about craft--in particular Richard Sennett's dense but serious and amazing book, The Craftsman-- and so this quote from David Rakoff's Get Too Comfortable, sent to me by my colleague Jason, jumped out at me.

During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. When I am done, I return to both feeling as restored as if I had been on a trip. I almost never get this feeling any other way. I once spent sixteen hours making 150 wedding invitations by hand and was not for one instant of that time tempted to eat or look at my watch. By contrast, if seated at the computer, I check my email conservatively 30,000 times a day. When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes. I used to think that this was nothing more than the difference between those things we do for love and those we do for money. But that can't be the whole story. I didn't always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth.

From my dick.

Margie Lachman on middle age

"It's true that there's a lot going on in your life in middle age and you have little time for leisure. Fortunately, you're also at your peak in terms of competence, control, the ability to handle stress, and sense of responsibility. You're equipped for overload." (Quoted in Winifred Gallagher, "Midlife Myths," The Atlantic Monthly, May 1993)

In Boing Boing again

This time for a time lapse video of Hush's installation at the Carmichael Gallery (owned by the son of a friend):

Thanks, Pesco!

Quote of the day

The, umm, best-laid plans and all that....

[O]fficers answering a report of indecent exposure found an unclothed man and woman apparently having sex against a wall. The couple told police they'd been drinking.

[Oakland County, Michigan Republican Commissioner Kim] Capello tells WXYZ-TV he "started out with good intentions" when he began walking the woman home from a bar before his actions took a wrong turn.

This would be totally unexceptional were it not for that quote, which is a masterpiece of ambiguity.

Another article notes that "A 37-year-old woman was also involved, and a warrant has been issued for her arrest." It also has several unintentionally hilarious paragraphs on his committee assignments and legal practice areas.

Naturally, the local Democratic party issued its own statement, calling for his resignation on the grounds that "Rather than exposing our county to new job opportunities, Kim Capello has indecently exposed himself." It's just a tiny minefield of great little turns of phrase.

Milton Glaser on relationships

From Milton Glaser's 2001 "Ten Things I Have Learned," via Boing Boing and various other links:

[T]here is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

The entire piece is pretty interesting. It gives me a bit of insight into why some people really like him.

More on the current state and future of economics

That article I just quoted (Barry Eichengreen's "The Last Temptation of Risk," in The National Interest) just gets better and better:

[W]here the accelerating pace of change should have prompted more caution, the routinization of risk management encouraged precisely the opposite. The idea that risk management had been reduced to a mere engineering problem seduced business in general, and financial businesses in particular, into believing that it was safe to use more leverage and to invest in more volatile assets.

Of course, risk officers could have pointed out that the models had been fit to data for a period of unprecedented low volatility. They could have pointed out that models designed to predict losses on securities backed by residential mortgages were estimated on data only for years when housing prices were rising and foreclosures were essentially unknown. They could have emphasized the high degree of uncertainty surrounding their estimates. But they knew on which side their bread was buttered. Senior management strongly preferred to take on additional risk, since if the dice came up seven they stood to receive megabonuses, whereas if they rolled snake eyes the worst they could expect was a golden parachute. If an investment strategy that promised high returns today threatened to jeopardize the viability of the enterprise tomorrow, then this was someone else’s problem. For a junior risk officer to warn the members of the investment committee that they were taking undue risk would have dimmed his chances of promotion. And so on up the ladder.

On not blowing the whistle, and the loneliness of being right:

But what of doctoral programs in economics (like the one in which I teach)? The top PhD-granting departments only rarely send their graduates to positions in banking or business—most go on to other universities. But their faculties do not object to the occasional high-paying consulting gig. They don’t mind serving as the entertainment at beachside and ski-slope retreats hosted by investment banks for their important clients.

Generous speaker’s fees were thus available to those prepared to drink the Kool-Aid. Not everyone indulged. But there was nonetheless a subconscious tendency to embrace the arguments of one’s more “successful” colleagues in a discipline where money, in this case earned through speaking engagements and consultancies, is the common denominator of success.

Those who predicted the housing slump eventually became famous, of course. Princeton University Press now takes out space ads in general-interest publications prominently displaying the sober visage of Yale University economics professor Robert Shiller, the maven of the housing crash. Not every academic scribbler can expect this kind of attention from his publisher. But such fame comes only after the fact. The more housing prices rose and the longer predictions of their decline looked to be wrong, the lonelier the intellectual nonconformists became. Sociologists may be more familiar than economists with the psychic costs of nonconformity. But because there is a strong external demand for economists’ services, they may experience even-stronger economic incentives than their colleagues in other disciplines to conform to the industry-held view. They can thus incur even-greater costs—economic and also psychic—from falling out of step.

Finally, this bit that reveals what happens when you have large stores of legacy data, combined with a dramatic drop in the costs of analyzing it:

The last ten years have seen a quiet revolution in the practice of economics. For years theorists held the intellectual high ground. With their mastery of sophisticated mathematics, they were the high-prestige members of the profession. The methods of empirical economists seeking to analyze real data were rudimentary by comparison. As recently as the 1970s, doing a statistical analysis meant entering data on punch cards, submitting them at the university computing center, going out for dinner and returning some hours later to see if the program had successfully run. (I speak from experience.) The typical empirical analysis in economics utilized a few dozen, or at most a few hundred, observations transcribed by hand. It is not surprising that the theoretically inclined looked down, fondly if a bit condescendingly, on their more empirically oriented colleagues or that the theorists ruled the intellectual roost.

But the IT revolution has altered the lay of the intellectual land. Now every graduate student has a laptop computer with more memory than that decades-old university computing center. And she knows what to do with it. Just like the typical twelve-year-old knows more than her parents about how to download data from the internet, for graduate students in economics, unlike their instructors, importing data from cyberspace is second nature. They can grab data on grocery-store spending generated by the club cards issued by supermarket chains and combine it with information on temperature by zip code to see how the weather affects sales of beer. Their next step, of course, is to download securities prices from Bloomberg and see how blue skies and rain affect the behavior of financial markets. Finding that stock markets are more likely to rise on sunny days is not exactly reassuring for believers in the efficient-markets hypothesis.

Really, just go read the whole thing. And I gotta track down Eichengreen.

James Wolcott on writing

I've gotten out of the habit of reading James Wolcott's blog-- the Vanity Fair Web site's nearly pathological need to throw pop-ups on my screen keeps me away-- but maybe I should brave the little subscription offers more often for things like this:

The truth they never teach in J-school is that too much knowledge of a subject can impede the free flow of copy. I know that my own Negative Capability is often best flexed when I know damn all nil about a phenomenon and don't find myself hemmed in by pesky concerns over its quality--you know, taste considerations over whether it's good or bad or a crime against art, that sort of thing.

If anything, having a fully formed opinion can make your job harder to do.

Peter Drucker on futurists

Futurists always measure their batting average by counting how many things they have predicted that have come true. They never count how many important things come true that they did not predict. Everything a forecaster predicts may come to pass. Yet, he may not have seen the most meaningful of the emergent realities or, worse still, may not have paid attention to them. There is no way to avoid this irrelevancy in forecasting, for the important and distinctive are always the results of changes in values, perception, and goals, that is, in things that one can divine but not forecast. (Peter Drucker)

[h/t to Jess]

Same planet, different worlds

The sort of thing that reminds you that while we may all be alike deep down, we're really different on the surface:

I will never forget how I found out that “Blonde Charity Mafia” would be the title of the upcoming reality show about the Georgetown social scene. It was at my annual polo fundraiser, The Courage Cup’s Meadow Matches on June 21, 2008.

And yet, could there be a more perfect name for a reality TV show?

On talent vs. genius

Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target, as far as which others cannot even see. (Arthur Schopenhauer)

Idle Words on Kundera and dating

Maciej Ceglowski, creator of Wrong Tomorrow (our motto: time vs. pundits), may be my new favorite writer. Here he is on Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being:

One of the terrors of dating is Milan Kundera, and specifically, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the sexually-transmitted book that this Czech-born author has inflicted on a generation of American youth.

I fully recognize the important role of the dating book, that is, the carefully selected work you lend a prospective lover sometime in the golden honeymoon period between your second cup of coffee together and the first time you spend a night in the same bed without touching. In that short window of time, your partner is still a delicious mystery to you, an enigmatic and discerning being, and to her you are a dark continent of adventure and excitement, waiting to be explored. And so you lend her books that are funny, playful, and good subway reading, but also complex enough to hint at your Hidden Depths. Something unusual is a plus, as are lots of sexy bits, to serve as a reminder of the animal fires that burn within. And since you don't yet know one another too well, you try to choose a shotgun of a book that fires a wide pattern, thematically speaking. Like an early physicist studying the atom, you will hurl little bits of culture at your new love and collect valuable data about her inner life by observing the way they bounce off.

Given these requirements, it's not surprising that many people have gravitated towards The Unbearable Lightness of Being.... The problem, though, is that The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a really bad book. Milan Kundera is the Dave Matthews of Slavic letters, a talented hack, certainly a hack who's paid his dues, but a hack nonetheless. And by his own admission, this is his worst book.

The idea of new people being like atoms at the Cavendish, to be understood through indirect and oblique probes (Ernest Rutherford was widely acknowledged as the sexiest of the early 20th century's experimental physicists); the Dave Matthews comparison; the assault on a book so well-regarded that Daniel Day-Lewis was in the movie. Gold.

Actually, Wrong Tomorrow would be a great motto for a futurist: "Right Today, Wrong Tomorrow."

Bill Gates on learning from success

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose. (Bill Gates)

[Via Caroline Simard]

Yet another piece of punditry admiring Philip Tetlock's work

Very interesting how a 2005 book can become an overnight sensation. Philip Tetlock, whose work I've written about before, keeps getting cited in high places. Nicholas Kristof's latest op-ed on "Learning How to Think" is all about Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment (now extended by pundits to cover financial expertise, too), and how the media enables and rewards bad thinking:

Talent bookers for television shows and reporters tended to call up experts who provided strong, coherent points of view, who saw things in blacks and whites. People who shouted — like, yes, Jim Cramer!

The marketplace of ideas for now doesn’t clear out bad pundits and bad ideas partly because there’s no accountability. We trumpet our successes and ignore failures — or else attempt to explain that the failure doesn’t count because the situation changed or that we were basically right but the timing was off.

Ironically, I checked the book out of the library yesterday. It's pretty serious stuff-- lots of Q coefficients and graphs-- but still is surprisingly readable.

And as soon as I've finished the article I'm working on, I'm going to write a short piece using Tetlock, Robert Burton, and Nassim Taleb, titled "The Evil Futurist's Guide to Being Famous, Successful, and Completely Wrong." Watch this space.

Quote of the day

From Kung Fu Monkey:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Maybe it was good for me that I was never able to get into either when I was fourteen (I got through The Hobbit, barely, and couldn't get past page 50 of Fellowship of the Ring). Heinlein and Asimov were more to my taste at the time.

[via Balloon Juice]

On drawing

"You cannot draw a face that doesn't have an expression." (Douglass Carmichael)

Douglas Adams on repairs

From the late Douglas Adams (whose birthday would have been today):

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

[via tingilinde]

Bob Geldof on the metaphor of the "dark continent"

Via my friend Gregg, this bit by Bob Geldof:

Africa is not the Dark Continent as so often described by writers from the gloomy northern skies of Europe. Not the Dark Continent at all. It is the Luminous Continent. Drenched in sun, pounded by heat and shimmering in its blinding glare. And within this immense continent, deserts with rolling seas of sand, tropics shrouded with jungles, equators dense with rainforest and coasts with more animals and fish than seems possible. There are more people, languages and cultures here than anywhere else on our planet. Africa is quite simply the most extraordinary, beautiful and luminous place on earth.

Most of us continue to see Africa as an object, a single, blighted place burning in the relentless, glaring heat, for others it occupies a romantic space in the imagination of child-like primitives and wild, beautiful creatures. For yet more of us it’s the dark side of our minds, the impenetrable place, the unknowable mind. And, yes, all of this is partially true too much of the time. But there are other Africas.

Why Michael Lewis is one of my favorite writers

From his Vanity Fair piece on Iceland after the (financial) meltdown:

[W]e arrive at the 101 Hotel, owned by the wife of one of Iceland’s most famous failed bankers. It’s cryptically named (101 is the city’s richest postal code), but instantly recognizable: hip Manhattan hotel. Staff dressed in black, incomprehensible art on the walls, unread books about fashion on unused coffee tables—everything to heighten the social anxiety of a rube from the sticks but the latest edition of The New York Observer. It’s the sort of place bankers stay because they think it’s where the artists stay.

Extraordinary what can happen when people realize they can still be Vikings, only now with banks instead of ships.

There's also this smart observation:

One of the hidden causes of the current global financial crisis is that the people who saw it coming had more to gain from it by taking short positions than they did by trying to publicize the problem.

The whole piece is well worth reading.

Quote of the day

"This is an entire country that thinks of itself as an SUV." (Mark Wigley, Dean, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation)

Remind me to keep an open mind

Again from Metropolis, a good interview with John Bielenberg:

Yesterday at Project M lab you drew a doodle that read, “Remind me to keep an open mind.”

It’s so easy for us to be a victim of our own orthodoxy and synaptic connections. I’ve often thought about giving Project M’ers t-shirts that they have to wear the whole time that reads, “Please remind me to keep an open mind.” That’s why I wear this stupid little bracelet that says, “Live Wrong” because it’s always a reminder to me to think wrong.

How do we actively keep an open mind?

I try to surround myself with people that encourage that. If you’re just sitting in your cabin in the woods, it’s very easy to get wound up in your own thoughts and they reinforce each other.... The biggest thing is having people to play with, who get it, who are challenging and who keep the conversation activated like that.

IDEO on 21st century education

From Metropolis: a nice, short, but provocative list of 10 things to do to create the classroom of the 21st century. A couple of my favorites:

6. Teachers are designers. Let them create. Build an environment where your teachers are actively engaged in learning by doing. Shift the conversation from prescriptive rules to permissive guidance. Even though the resulting environment may be more complicated to manage, the teachers will produce amazing results.

7. Build a learning community. Learning doesn’t happen in the child’s mind alone. It happens through the social interactions with other kids and teachers, parents, the community, and the world at large. It really does take a village. Schools should find new ways to engage parents and build local and national partnerships. This doesn’t just benefit the child—it brings new resources and knowledge to your institution.

8. Be an anthropologist, not an archaeologist. An archaeologist seeks to understand the past by investigating its relics and digging for the truth of what was. An anthropologist studies people to understand their values, needs, and desires. If you want to design new solutions for the future, you have to understand what people care about and design for that. Don’t dig for the answer—connect.

David Gross on dumb money

From David Gross' latest:

The Dumb Money creed rested on four pillars: perpetually low interest rates, perpetually rising asset prices (especially for housing), borrowers of all types remaining perpetually current, and perpetually strong markets for debt. The high priests of this cult were the nation's central bankers. In the Era of Cheap Money (the fall of 2001 through June 2004), Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan convinced us that we could have low interest rates despite inflationary pressures and global growth. His successor, Ben Bernanke, in 2002 began trying to convince us that we might have as much to fear from deflation as from inflation.

Bernanke also provided intellectual fortification for the argument that one of our greatest vices—a tendency to debt-financed consumption—was actually something of a virtue. He helped popularize the concept of a savings glut, arguing that America's twin budget and trade deficits could be traced not to a dearth of American savings but to a glut of foreign savings.... Economists claimed that the government measures of income used to calculate savings—which includes wages and salaries, interest on bonds, and stock dividends but which excluded capital gains on stocks, profits from selling a house, or withdrawals from 401(k) plans—were hopelessly behind the times. "The structure of the household portfolio has changed over time," said David Malpass, chief economist at Bear Stearns, one of the leading exponents of what might be dubbed the theory of Magical Market Savings. In 2004, Malpass found that, thanks to the booming stock and housing markets, the net worth of U.S. households—their assets minus their liabilities—stood at a record $48.54 trillion, up 9.6 percent from 2003 despite sluggish income growth. Why put money aside for a rainy day when your house and the market were doing it for you?

Timing is everything

More from the Scientific American article, "The Expert Mind:"

A 1999 study of professional soccer players from several countries showed that they were much more likely than the general population to have been born at a time of year that would have dictated their enrollment in youth soccer leagues at ages older than the average. In their early years, these children would have enjoyed a substantial advantage in size and strength when playing soccer with their teammates. Because the larger, more agile children would get more opportunities to handle the ball, they would score more often, and their success at the game would motivate them to become even better.