There's a great catflight going on between Matt Taibbi (who has turned into a mad cross between Upton Sinclair, Michael Lewis, and Lenny Bruce) and Claudia Deutsch about Goldman Sachs' plan to pay big bonuses to its people again. Matt rips apart a post titled "Congratulations, Goldman-- And I Wish You Many, Many More."
The defense of Goldman seems to boil down to, yes they have all sorts of connections, and yes they got tons of money from the government, but but they're honest about it.
It makes me wonder: At one time, back in the day, we thought that the Internet and other information technologies would create transparency, make it harder to hide corruption, and thus force powerful people to behave better.
But we've essentially run an experiment for a decade testing this hypothesis, and it seems to me that it hasn't worked out that way.
Instead of forcing corruption underground, the Internet has forced shamelessness aboveground-- and indeed, has turned it into a virtue. So the Goldman execs may be dickheads, money-grubbing asses, and willing to sell their grandmothers if the price is right, but they don't pretend to be anything else. So they're welcome to their bonuses.
Bruce Sterling points out the parallels between the instructions I provide in the "Evil Futurists Guide to World Domination" (henceforth EFG2WD), and religion. Of course he's right. I should have thought of it earlier.
It’s a little odd that Pang doesn’t seem to realize that he is describing religion here. His “evil futurist” is a morally-certain holy prophet with a scripture. Social figures of this sort carry out practically every tactic that Pang describes, and that scheme’s been working grandly for millennia.
But on the upside, this'll be good for another dozen really dense footnotes citing works in the psychology of religion and apocalyptic prophecy literature. Win!
For a while now, I've been working on a think-piece on what futures would look like if it started now: if instead of starting during the Cold War, in the middle of enthusiasm for social engineering, computer programming, and rationalistic visions of future societies, futures was able to draw on neuroscience and neuroeconomics, behavioral psychology, simulation, and other fields and tools.
One of thing things I've kept coming back to is that, if you take seriously the criticisms or warnings of people like Nassim Taleb on the impossibility of prediction, Philip Tetlock and J. Scott Anderson on the untrustworthiness of expert opinion, Robert Burton on the emotional bases of certainty, Gary Marcus and Daniel Gilbert on the mind, etc., you could end up with a radically skeptical view of the whole enterprise of futures and forecasting. Or, read another way, you end up with a primer for how to be an incredibly successful futurist, even while you're a shameless fraud, and always wrong.
I've finished a draft of the serious article [PDF], so now it's time for the next project: The Evil Futurists' Guide to World Domination: How to be Successful, Famous, and Wrong. It would be too depressing to write a book-length study, so I'll just post it here.
(This exercise is, by the way, an illustration of Pang's Law, that the power of an idea can be measured by how outrageously-- yet convincingly-- it can be misused. Think of Darwin's ideas morphing into Social Darwinism or being appropriated by the Nazis, or quantum physics being invoked by New Age mystics. And yes, I know Pang's Law will never be as cool as the Nunberg Error, but I do what I can.)
Full essay in the extended post.
The citations are all real. But no, I don't really mean a single word of it. Yet, I wonder....
The Evil Futurists' Guide to World Domination: How to be Successful, Famous, and Wrong
You want to be a futurist, but you're afraid of being wrong. Don't worry. Everyone has that concern at first. But here, I've brought together ideas drawn from a number of books and articles that will help you succeed without having to be right. All you have to do is follow the simple principles laid out below.
Be certain, not right. People love certainty. They crave it. In experiments, psychologists have shown that "[w]e tend to seek advice from experts who exhibit the most confidence – even when we know they haven’t been particularly accurate in the past." We just can't resist certainty.
Further, confidence and certainty aren't things you arrive at after logical deliberation and reasoning: as UCSF neurologist Robert Burton argues in his book On Being Certain, certainty is a feeling, an emotion, and it has a lot less to do with logic than we realize. So go ahead and feel certain; if other people mistake that for being right, that's their problem. But before too long, people who listen to you will become invested in believing that you're really an authority and know what you're talking about, and will defend your reputation to salvage their own beliefs.
So no matter what you do, no matter what you believe, be certain. As Tetlock put it, in this world "only the overconfident survive, and only the truly arrogant thrive."
Finally, for the moralist or logician in you, here's this: even if you don't believe what you're saying, you could wrongly believe you're wrong, and actually be right. Stranger things have happened.
Claim to be an expert: it makes people's brains hurt. In a remarkable new study, Jan Engelmann and colleagues used fMRI to observe the brains of people who received expert advice during a financial simulation. They found that subjects thought differently about their decisions when they received the advice-- even if it was bad advice-- than when they worked on their own. As the researchers put it, "one effect of expert advice is to 'offload' the calculation of value of decision options from the individual’s brain." Put another way, "the advice made the brain switch off (at least to a great extent) processes required for financial decision-making."
No expertise, no problem. It'll actually make your work more accurate if you claim to be an expert-- if you're certain that you're an expert-- but you actually aren't.
Sounds counterintuitive, right? (Ed.: This is how you know I'm a successful futurist. I said what you didn't expect. Now I'll quote some Science to make my point.) In fact, as J. Scott Armstrong has shown over the last twenty or so years, advanced degrees and deep knowledge don't make you a better forecaster or expert. Statistically, experts are hardly better at predicting the future than chimps throwing darts at a board. As Louis Menand put it, "The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge."
And it's perfectly natural to suffer from what Nassim Taleb calls "epistemic arrogance." In all sorts of areas, we routinely overestimate our own certainty and breadth of knowledge, and underestimate what we don't know. If you do that, you're just like everyone else.
So knowing you're not an expert should make you more confident in your work. And confidence is everything.
One simple idea may be one too many. The future is complex, but you shouldn't be. Philip Tetlock explained in Expert Political Judgment that there are two kinds of forecasting personalities: foxes, who tend to appreciate contingency and don't make big claims, and hedgehogs, who have a hammer and see the whole world as a giant nail. Guess who wins. Having a single big theory, even if it's totally outrageous, makes you sound more credible. Having a Great Idea also makes it easier for you to seem like a Great Visionary, capable of seeing things that others cannot.
Get prizes for being outrageous. It's important to get quoted in the media. Being a futurist isn't like being a doctor or lawyer: there are no pesky state boards, no certification tests, none of that. So how do potential clients figure out who to hire? Media attention is one way. As a resident scholar at a think-tank told Tetlock, "I woo dumb-ass reporters who want glib sound bites."
So you need to set yourself apart from the pack, differentiate yourself from the competition. If you're not beautiful, or already famous, the easiest way is to be counterintuitive, or go against the grain. Dissent is always safe, because journalists understand what to do with someone who's critical of the conventional wisdom, and always want someone who can provide an Alternative View For Balance. There are few more secure places in a reporter's Rolodex than that of the Reliably Unpredictable Contrarian.
There's a success hiding in every failure. Let's say you predicted that something would happen, and it hasn't. Is your career over? Of course not. Tetlock found that after a certain point, expertise becomes a hindrance to effective forecasting, because experts are better able to construct erudite-sounding (or erudite-feeling) rationalizations for their failure. Here's how to benefit from this valuable talent.
Don't remember your failures. No one else will. We don't remember our own failures because, well, in retrospect they weren't failures.
Experts retroactively assign greater certainty to forecasts they made that came true, and retroactively downgraded their assessments of competing forecasts. (Put another way, experts tend to suffer more from hindsight bias than average people, not less.) When we're right, we get smarter, and other people get dumber.
Last but not least, remember that everybody has a track record, but no one knows what it is. As Tetlock put it, "We seek out experts who promise impossible levels of accuracy, then we do a poor job keeping score." Make this work for you. And good luck.
In Outliers Malcolm Gladwell writes that it takes about 10,000 hours to master something-- computer programming, classical violin, tennis, what have you. I've been working as a futurist for almost a decade; I don't know if I've done 10,000 hours of decent work, but I have some feel for how the field works, and what we're good at.
About a year ago-- okay, more like two years ago-- Angela Wilkinson, a friend who runs the scenario planning master classes at the Saïd Business School, invited me to write a think-piece about the field. I took it as an occasion to run a thought experiment: if you were to start with a clean sheet of paper-- if there was no Global Business Network, no IFTF, no organized or professionalized efforts to forecast the future-- what would the field look like? What kinds of problems would it tackle? What kinds of science would it draw on? And how would it try to make its impact felt?
As I got into it, I concluded that a new field would look very different from the one I've worked in for the last decade. This essay (it's a PDF, about 260kb) is a first draft at an effort to explain where I think we could go. Lots of what I talk about will be familiar to my colleagues, and indeed to anyone reasonably well-read; but I think there's utility in synthesis and summary, if only to see connections between literatures and chart one's next steps.
All the usual caveats apply: it's unpublished, it's unfinished, it doesn't reflect the thinking of any of the various institutions I'm associated with, all the errors are mine, there are plenty of things I could have talked about but didn't. But so does the usual invitation to comment on it. I could keep tinkering with it, but at this stage I think it's more useful for me to take a step back, work on some other things, and return to it with fresh eyes.
Angela had in mind something quick, short, and provocative. I definitely missed the first two. Angela, I'm sorry to have kept you waiting.
in the course of my reading (or browsing or opportunistic strip-mining) of the literature on behavioral economics, the psychology of the future, studies of certainty, and other things, I keep having the same thought: The whole point of this literature is to explain why people listen to the neocons.
There's no logical reason, after the last eight years, that anyone should ever take anything that William Kristol (to take one example) says seriously. But the neocons don't appeal to logic: they appeal to those parts of our brains that respond to blinding certainty, simple arguments, and self-confidence, not complexity, contingency, and modestly.
Once you realize that it all makes sense. If you want to be constantly rewarded for being consistently wrong, study their careers.
Of course, being well-connected doesn't hurt (amazing anecdote via Balloon Juice, via Denver Post):
I remember back in the late '90s when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture to an economic philosophy class I was taking. It was a great lecture, made more so by the fact that the class was only about ten or twelve students and we got got ask all kinds of questions and got a lot of great, provocative answers.
Anyhow, Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol back either during the first Bush administration. The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at The White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at UPenn and the Kennedy School of Government.
With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. "I oppose it", Irving replied. "It subverts meritocracy."
The whole re-subtitled Downfall thing reaches its logical endpoint here:
SciBarCamp is done. Other than a lot of excellent leftover Pakistani food, a surprising amount of beer, and a photo set on Flickr, you'd never know we hosted 60+ people for two days. Time for a bit of reflection.
Wednesday morning, as I was getting the Institute's conference space ready for SciBarCamp-- hauling tables, moving chairs, trying to figure out how to get sixty people into our large conference room, calculating how many and what kinds of signs we needed to put to up to help guests find the wifi, bathrooms, etc.-- I overhead someone say, "What I love about these things is that you don't have to do any preparation. You just show up."
Yeah, right. Events like these may look like they're spontaneous and free, but that's only because someone has set up the environment in which it takes place. That labor shouldn't really be visible to the participants-- like all infrastructure, its purpose is to be useful, not to call attention to itself-- but it is essential to the success of even the loosest and most improvisational event. To make a brief comparison to music: the most brilliant jazz improvisers, people like Keith Jarrett and Ornette Coleman, aren't brilliant because they just get up onstage and do whatever comes into their heads: they're brilliant because they've played for thousands and thousands of hours, are highly disciplined, have great training... and bring all that to the concert hall. Likewise, when I travel, I like to be able to wander around and explore things; but I can do that because I carry a pack that has all kinds of things that I find useful, and come in handy under a variety of circumstances.
The Institute's conferences are scripted to the minute, the presentations are rehearsed endlessly, group exercises are agonized over. There's a lot of top-down structure, because we have a lot of content to share, and because it's hard for most people to think about the future in an orderly way. People, we assume, need the structure we provide in order to translate our work into terms that will be useful to them. So the bar camp model is one that I find very interesting.
But the camp isn't just the absence of organization: that wouldn't be a bar camp, it would just be chaos. There is structure here, and I want to understand what it is.
I was talking to Jamie McQuay, one of the organizers of this year's camp and a veteran of the bar camp scene, about the ingredients for a successful bar camp. He said that the two things you really need are free space (which saves the organizers money and time, and cuts down on the number of sponsors you have to look for), and interesting people. Tantek Çelik, a camp veteran, told me that all you really need are physical and virtual spaces-- a conference venue and a wiki.
But my sense is that there's more to it than that.
There's a cultural element to the camps that I think is important. People here are veterans of academic meetings, scientific society conferences, and industry trade shows, and know that world well enough to be intelligently dissatisfied by it. (I had a professor who said you couldn't rebel effectively against Catholicism unless you had been educated by Jesuits. Not Franciscans or Dominicans, mind you-- Jesuits. Truly, give me the child until he's seven, and he's ours forever.) When you have an event that's a mirror-world of the traditional conference, you need to know what the traditional conference is like, so you can do the opposite. I would draw a comparison to Wikipedia. One of the usually unacknowledged reasons Wikipedia works is because people know, or think they know, what encyclopedia articles are supposed to sound like: readers and creators alike share a basic understanding of what they should be doing.
I also suspect a good bar camp also requires some minimum number of people who are veterans of the camp scene, and can catalyze others and acculturate novices. I'm not sure what that number is. Tantek said that return attendees are like culture in yogurt, which I think is a good comparison.
I think there are also some practical things that you can do that I've listed after the jump. None are especially profound, but they'd all make the event work better, and are worth paying attention to. But what else is there? Besides physical and virtual space, interesting people, a familiarity with conventional conferences, and perhaps some elusive bare minimum of people who've been to bar camps before, are there other things that a successful camp needs?
Very practical things
In case you can't see, the items are Radiohead's Amnesiac; Alan Furst's novel Dark Star; and the classic children's book Goodnight Moon.
After I stopped being slightly alarmed (can I really be that predictable?), I was pretty impressed.
The New York Times has a piece (Future Vision Banished to the Past") about the likely destruction of Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, a "rare built example of Japanese Metabolism, a movement whose fantastic urban visions became emblems of the country’s postwar cultural resurgence."
Nakagin Capsule Tower, from the New York Times
The building, built in 1972, is now in lousy shape (what a surprise for an architecturally distinctive building employing innovative construction technology), but the author argues that
the building’s demolition would be a bitter loss. The Capsule Tower is not only gorgeous architecture; like all great buildings, it is the crystallization of a far-reaching cultural ideal. Its existence also stands as a powerful reminder of paths not taken, of the possibility of worlds shaped by different sets of values.
Founded by a loose-knit group of architects at the end of the 1950s, the Metabolist movement sought to create flexible urban models for a rapidly changing society. Floating cities. Cities inspired by oil platforms. Buildings that resembled strands of DNA. Such proposals reflected Japan’s transformation from a rural to a modern society. But they also reflected more universal trends, like social dislocation and the fragmentation of the traditional family, influencing generations of architects from London to Moscow.
Like lots of twentieth-century architectural movements, the Metabolists were at least as influential for their ideas as their actual buildings. (I remember studying them along with Archigram and Team X in David Brownlee's Art History 481B-- probably the most important class I took in college, given how often I use what I learned in it.) A lot of the more outlandish ideas from this period were never meant to be built-- drawings of walking cities were stimulating reflections on the nature of building in an impermanent world, but totally impractical-- but they made other, more prolific architects think differently about their work and the issues it raises.
Nakagin Capsule Tower, photo by dod: via flickr
In a way, I wonder if there's a useful comparison to be drawn between movements like these, or projects that remain forever on the drawing board but get talked about, and futurists and their work. Most of us don't build things, or write software, or craft strategies; the scenarios we write are intended to be provocations or stimulations (a hedge against them being wrong, which to one degree or another they inevitably are), and at best we have an indirect but positive influence on other people.
Composed of 140 concrete pods plugged into two interconnected circulation cores, the structure was meant as a kind of bachelor hotel for businessmen working in the swanky Ginza neighborhood of Tokyo.
Inside, each apartment is as compact as a space capsule. A wall of appliances and cabinets is built into one side, including a kitchen stove, a refrigerator, a television and a tape deck. A bathroom unit, about the size of an airplane lavatory, is set into an opposite corner. A big porthole window dominates the far end of the room, with a bed tucked underneath....
Each of the concrete capsules was assembled in a factory, including details like carpeting and bathroom fixtures. They were then shipped to the site and bolted, one by one, onto the concrete and steel cores that housed the building’s elevators, stairs and mechanical systems.
Nakagin Capsule Tower capsule, photo by pict_u_re via flickrIn theory, more capsules could be plugged in or removed whenever needed. The idea was to create a completely flexible system, one that could be adapted to the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society. The building became a symbol of Japan’s technological ambitions, as well as of the increasingly nomadic existence of the white-collar worker.
It's amazing how much work and expense goes into making the first example of something modular and standardized.
Of course, the great irony of building and construction standardization is that it hasn't produced a revolution in architecture. If anything, it's made it easier to throw up thousands of neo-Spanish colonial (or American colonial, or frontier, or postmodern-via-Miami Vice) houses in California's Central Valley, outside Phoenix, or in the suburban rings around Atlanta. Kurokawa was right that modularity and flexibility would suit "the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society;" but when married to the reality of real estate development, and the unreality of the mortgage market in the 2000s, the result was kind of architecture very different from what the Metabolists imagined-- a useful reminder for futurists that what we think of as "exogenous" factors often have a bigger impact on the futures we're trying to understand than the factors we do pay attention to.
Via Slate, this pretty amazing short film consisting of a drive through the streets of Paris-- at 140 mph.
Claude Lelouch's Rendezvous... from Dat on Vimeo.
As Kevin Conley explains,
The director, who had no permits to film or to stop traffic, hooked a camera to the front bumper of a Mercedes-Benz (in the only bit of film trickery, the sound of the motor was played by a five-speed Ferrari) and filmed the entire movie in a single cinema-verité take: He drove through the streets of Paris at five in the morning, through red lights, around the Arc de Triomphe, down the Champs-Élysées, against one-way traffic, over sidewalks, at speeds up to 140 miles per hour. The film ends after nine terrifying minutes when the driver parks the car in Montmartre and a blonde comes up the stairs toward Sacre Coeur. (It was a date.) After the first showing, the director was arrested for endangering public safety.
I suspect if you're familiar with Paris, this is even more terrifying a spectacle.
...on the blog NCBI ROFL. NCBI is the National Center for Biotechnology Information, and its Web site has a number of scientific journal databases.
Some of these public articles on such cutting-edge subjects as "Disco clothing, female sexual motivation, and relationship status," which concluded that
females are aware of the social signal function of their clothing and that they in some cases alter their clothing style to match their courtship motivation. In particular, sheer clothing -although rare in the study- positively correlated with the motivation for sex.
It may be just me, but the only reason I can imagine this article being written is to help nerdy guys get laid.
The case study on accidental condom inhalation, the article on the dangers of beards in microbiology labs, and the study of canned cat food evaluation techniques are also must-reads.
However, I think the article title "Inappropriate use of a titanium penile ring: An interdisciplinary challenge for urologists, jewelers, and locksmiths" (umm, LOCKSMITHS???) may be the best thing ever written.
Thanks, Anthony!
[Update: Made it onto Boing Boing!]
From GraphJam:
[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.)
My son has started tutoring in reading. He's not as strong a reader as we'd like, or as strong as he'd like. So twice a week we take him to a reading expert. She's a former Peninsula teacher, and is actually someone my wife had as a child.
His enthusiasm is striking, because when I was a kid, getting tutored was a Bad Thing. Certainly you didn't look forward to it, or expect it to be fun. I don't know if this is a general change in kids' attitudes, or something specific to this area, or an extension of their general Peninsula-bred love of school. My kids look forward to Monday coming around so they can go back to school, and my daughter and her friends always complain about the end of the school, so those attitudes probably influence their attitudes toward turoring. And my son has known Marion (her tutor) for ages, and that made him more excited to be working with her.
And while I haven't done any surveys, my sense is that a lot more of my kids' friends are doing that in an earlier age might have been seen as remedial, and not talked much about. At least two or three of my son's friends have worked with Marion, which goes a long way to normalizing it. And for kids who already are taking music lessons, are in swimming clubs or little league, or doing lots of other scheduled things, tutoring or speech therapy probably doesn't seem like anything out of the ordinary.
So he'd better be reading Tolstoy by September, or I'm going ask for my money back.
My nemesis, Ryanair (which I flew several times last year), has announced a brave new era in customer service:
RyanAir this week announced that they will soon eliminate all airport check-in counters and require passengers to carry-on their luggage. Starting early next year, passengers will need to schlep their bags through airport security and drop them at the steps of the plane for checking into plane's cargo hold. Once aboard though, there will be gambling!
Not exactly going to have Virgin Air quaking in its boots.
My favorite comment: "It's like Ryanair has ceased to become an air carrier and has become a Brecktean improv group."
[h/t to Nancy]
Today we took the kids to Fort Funston, an old fort and beach in San Francisco. It's very popular with hang-gliders, so while playing in the freezing cold waves was the main attraction, the kids also enjoyed watching hang-gliding up close.
via flickr
I'd never been this close to them either, and was impressed at how long they could stay in the air.
via flickr
The beach is at the bottom of a fairly steep trail, and it's too dangerous to actually swim in the water; but that's hardly unusual for beaches in this area. Unlike southern California, our beaches are mainly for walking along.
via flickr
"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)
The next generation Macbooks. Top this, Windows!
"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, 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.
