Some of the most interesting things I've read in the last year are books like Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness and Eliezer Yudkowsky's work on cognitive biases and risks [pdf], which take a close look at the psychological limitations of thinking about the future. Of course, the claim that futurists-- or OR people, accountants, etc.-- make is that the tools they use can correct for these biases.
But a Wharton accounting professor's recent studies suggest that even the apparently most rigorous quantitative tools can contribute to our holding faulty views of the future:
Accounting techniques like budgeting, sales projections and financial reporting are supposed to help prevent business failures by giving managers realistic plans to guide their actions and feedback on their progress. In other words, they are supposed to leaven entrepreneurial optimism with green-eye-shaded realism.
At least that's the theory. But when Gavin Cassar, a Wharton accounting professor, tested this idea, he found something troubling: Some accounting tools not only fail to help businesspeople, but may actually lead them astray. In one of his recent studies, forthcoming in Contemporary Accounting Research, Cassar showed that budgeting didn't help a group of Australian firms accurately forecast their revenues. In a second paper,he found that the preparation of financial projections added to aspiring entrepreneurs' optimism, leading them to overestimate their subsequent levels of sales and employment.
"It's been shown in many studies that people are overly optimistic," Cassar says. "What's interesting here is that, when you use the accounting tools, the optimism is even more extreme. This suggests that using the tools, which a lot of academics and government agencies say is good practice, can lead to even bigger mistakes."
The second of the two studies is more interesting here, because it asks whether doing things like writing business plans and creating sales projections make entrepreneurs more realistic or less realistic in their views of the future. He draws on the work of behavioral economists, who
have documented a number of mental shortcuts and biases that can lead people to depart from the logic that traditional economic orthodoxy would suggest. One of the concepts, for example, introduced by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and co-author Dan Lovallo, is that "an inside view" can distort decision making. A person who adopts an inside view becomes so focused on formulating his particular plan that he neglects to consider critical outside information, like other people's experiences in pursuing the same goal.
"Individuals form an inside view forecast by focusing on the specifics of the case, the details of the plan that exists and obstacles to its completion, and by constructing scenarios of future progress," Cassar summarizes. "In contrast, an outside view is statistical and comparative in nature and does not involve any attempt to divine the future at any level of detail."
Doing financial projections for an entrepreneurial venture, Cassar realized, entails the creation of an inside view. The entrepreneur builds a storyline of success in her head and then plays it out in her spreadsheet, showing rising sales year after year. "Humans are good at storytelling and building causal links," Cassar notes. "They think, 'I'll go to college, I'll write a business plan, I'll raise some capital and then I'll go public or sell out to a big competitor.' There's a probability attached to each of these steps, but they don't think about that. They put all the links together and evaluate the likelihood of success at a much higher probability than is realistic."...
People who did financial projections were the most likely to overestimate the future sales of their ventures. In other words, "the same management activities that entrepreneurs rely on to cope with uncertainty appear to be causing individuals to hold optimistic expectations," he writes. Interestingly, writing a business plan also led to optimism about the likelihood of success, but it didn't lead to overly optimistic expectations because it's also "positively associated with the likelihood that the nascent activity will become an operating venture," he adds. Put another way, people who write plans are more likely to start companies, thereby justifying their optimism.
The details are worth looking at, but the basic moral is clear: what seem like rigorous tools can lead people astray, through a combination of their apparent rigor, and the ways their use generates inside views. The interaction of users and tools co-produces what looks like objective data, and a particular way of looking at that data that's likely to exaggerate the odds of success and downplay the odds of failure.
Now for entrepreneurs you can argue that this is a good thing, and that entrepreneurs aren't successful if they dwell too much on the risks of failure. Starting your own company is an exercise is controlled, disciplined self-delusion. But how much do these kinds of biases-- ones generated by a combination of apparently good information and processes that generate inside views-- affect the work of futurists? I wonder.
From Bloomberg, via Balloon Juice:
[S]enior Goldman {Sachs] people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank....
[The combination of] Goldman and guns plays right into the way Wall- Streeters like to think of themselves. Even those who were bailed out believe they are tough, macho Clint Eastwoods of the financial frontier, protecting the fistful of dollars in one hand with the Glock in the other. The last thing they want is to be so reasonably paid that the peasants have no interest in lynching them.
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).]
Catching up with some reading, I came across Peggy Orenstein's New York Times essay "Growing Up on Facebook," published earlier this year. One of its themes, about the conflict between leaving behind old social circles and reinventing yourself on one hand, and remaining in ambient contact with your old social life on the other, resonated especially strongly:
As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self? The cultural icons of my girlhood were Mary Richards of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and Ann Marie of “That Girl,” both redoubtably trying to make it on their own. Following their lead, I swaggered off to college (where I knew no one) without looking back; then to New York City (where I knew no one) and San Francisco (ditto), refining my adult self with each jump. Certainly, I kept in touch with a few true old friends, but no one else — thank goodness! — witnessed the many and spectacular metaphoric pratfalls I took on the way to figuring out what and whom I wanted to be. Even now, time bends when I open Facebook: it’s as if I’m simultaneously a journalist/wife/mother in Berkeley and the goofy girl I left behind in Minneapolis. Could I have become the former if I had remained perpetually tethered to the latter?
This also connects with an excellent William Deresiewicz essay about social media's erosion of solitude-- which in our pop psychology moments we tend to equate with loneliness and want to banish, but which serves a tremendous psychic need. Humans are social creatures who seem to grow in equal parts through being with others and learning to be on their own-- my children are currently both going through a phase in which they spend a non-trivial amount of time in their rooms-- and Deresciewicz argues that solitude offers a chance (as Orenstein puts it) "to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation."
John Boudreau reports that "the Internet is reconnecting long-lost sweethearts," while Scott Harris writes about Facebook as a time machine (gee, that sounds familiar).
Boudreau:
Not long ago, such rekindlings were largely relegated to once-a-decade school reunions, those awkward gatherings that tend to be more about sizing up past rivals than reconnecting with former sweethearts. But the Internet is now profoundly altering some people's links to the past and sometimes upending their lives in unexpected ways. For some, the outcome is a blissful recoupling; for others, the reignited embers burn down the house....
[T]he Internet, and now social-networking sites such as MyLife.com. and Facebook, make relinking easier and more common. And people are doing it at a much younger age — instead of an uncomfortable phone call to her parents, all he has to do is do a Google search for her name.
Harris:
Many people tell of reuniting with cherished, long-lost friends, or reviving meaningful social circles that had frayed over the years. I've met a couple who were high school sweethearts but had been out of touch for 23 years. Now they credit Facebook for reconnecting them — and the romance is fully rekindled. ...
It's interesting how Facebook has connected a little social network of my high school friends — some close, some not so close. When I couldn't find an address for a friend whose father had died, I contacted one of her classmates through Facebook. She had the e-mail address.
Why is that?
Unlike predecessors Friendster and MySpace, Facebook succeeded by creating a culture of authenticity — not a dodgy realm of alter egos, but a place where people feel comfortable showing off photos of their children to their friends.
I would say that it didn't create that culture of authenticity: it set some initial conditions that allowed users to create it.
A pretty good New York Times article on people who spend a lot of time working in coffeeshops. My favorite: a matchmaker who works out of a "Nora Ephron-ish coffee shop in the West Village" rather than an office because it's "easier to get people talking in a cafe."
Essentially, cafes really have become cheap coworking space filled with cafe zombies.
For a while now, I've been thinking and writing about how Web 2.0 fits in the lives of people my age: how technology affects memory (especially how human and computer memories differ); how the omnipresence of the Web may affect our capacity to forget and grow and mature; and how Facebook serves as a kind of time machines. I've now started a Facebook group on "Digital Middle Age" around these subjects.
There's an assumption that anyone over about 24, pretty much by definition, will find games, new media, and Web 2.0 to be a Strange Foreign Country. Partly this is an extension of the reigning assumption that only the young really "get it" when it comes to new technology. Witness Pamela Satran's gently humorous pieces in More.com explaining how not to act old on Facebook and Twitter. (Okay, a magazine aimed at women over 40 is likely to play on age anxiety more than most; but easy way the articles take for granted that teenagers know the "right" way to behave (certainly the first time in human history we've assumed that!) is still pretty striking.)
But the articles overlook the fact that their readership grew up with PCs, spent thousands of hours in front of computer screens, and is perfectly familiar with the Web. My cohort is one that grew up with computers, but not with social media. I was in high school when the first personal computers appeared. I spent hours with my high school's Apple II; I crunched the numbers for my senior thesis using Lotus 1-2-3; wrote my dissertation on a Mac; and got my first e-mail address when I was a postdoc. People my age have all the technical facility (I refuse to use the word literacy) necessary to rapidly take up services like Twitter and Facebook. There's a good reason older users are the fastest-growing user populations in the Web 2.0 world.
But unlike the teenagers and college students are using these services, we have lives that have taken place offline, largely outside the gravity well of the Internet. These services aren't just continuations of our current lives: they can reconnect us to people we haven't been in touch with for twenty years. Watching myself and my friends online, I sometimes think I'm watching a collision of two very different kinds of social worlds. And if like me you're seriously interested in the social impacts of new technologies, studying these kinds of collisions and transitional groups (like people my age) is a particularly valuable way to see how new technologies affect the way people work and play and socialize and think.
And while teenagers are an interesting subject because they're reckless, extreme, irresponsible, and everyone worries about them-- when you're not certain they're dead in a ditch, you're yelling at them to get off your lawn-- I think its safe to say that their parents have large amounts of disposable income, access to credit, a majority vote in household technology-related decision-making, etc.-- all the things that ought to make them very interesting not just to academic geeks like me, but to advertisers and publishers. (We also have more to lose: drunken blog posts or sexting may be bad when you're 19, but accidentally Tweeting trade secrets is a lot worse, if only because mortgages and parental responsibilities multiply the potential impact of big mistakes.)
So, as part of my ongoing effort to understand how media have affected this transitional generation, I've created the Facebook group. It's open to everyone who's in Facebook, and my hope is that it'll help me better understand how social media function in the lives of people who already have lives. Does reconnecting with people from high school really matter? Does it change your life in some non-trivial way? I think it can, but data is not the plural of anecdote-- especially when you just repeat the same anecdotes (your own) over and over.
Maybe there's an interesting article here. Who knows. We'll see what happens....
Patrick Stewart-- yes, that Patrick Stewart-- has a harrowing but brilliantly-written piece in the Guardian about growing up with an abusive father:
One of the very last men to be evacuated from Dunkirk, his third stripe was chalked on to his uniform by an officer when no more senior NCOs were left alive. Parachuted into Crete and Italy, both times under fire, he fought at Monte Casino and was twice mentioned in dispatches. A fellow soldier once told me, "When your father marches on to the parade ground, the birds in the trees stop singing."
In civilian life it was a different story. He was an angry, unhappy and frustrated man who was not able to control his emotions or his hands. As a child I witnessed his repeated violence against my mother, and the terror and misery he caused was such that, if I felt I could have succeeded, I would have killed him. If my mother had attempted it, I would have held him down.
Read the whole thing.
It seemed like a while since I'd created the last one, and of course I had more complex, pressing things to do this evening, so I created a new banner for the blog. This one is from a September 2009 picture I took in London during my customary evening walk.
I've long had an interest in robotic systems in scientific research. There's been lots in this area in astronomy, with the growth of both remote and robotic observatories. Other scientists are developing robots for use in dangerous icy environments. But some of the most interesting work in this area is happening in ocean science, with everything from fixed sensor nets, to electronic tags on squid, and chemical tags in baby clownfish, to semi-autonomous thermal gliders.
So I was interested to see that the NSF has just awarded a $1 million grant to create automated explorers at much smaller scales. The grant will allow a team at Scripps
to design and deploy autonomous underwater explorers, or AUEs. AUEs will trace the fine details of oceanographic processes vital to tiny marine inhabitants.
While oceanographers have been skilled in detailing large-scale ocean processes, a need has emerged to zero in on functions unfolding at smaller scales. By defining localized currents, temperature, salinity, pressure and biological properties, AUEs will offer new and valuable information about a range of ocean phenomena.
"We're seeing great success in the global use of ocean profiling floats to document large-scale circulation patterns and other physical and chemical attributes of the deep and open seas," said Phillip Taylor of NSF's division of ocean sciences. "These innovative AUEs will allow researchers to sample the environments of coastal regions as well, and to better understand how small organisms operate in the complex surroundings of the oceans."
The miniature robots will aid in obtaining information needed for developing marine protected areas, determining critical nursery habitats for fish and other animals, tracking harmful algae blooms, and monitoring oil spills.
There's a video on YouTube about the robotics and the future of ocean science, but be warned, it's an hour long.
This seems like a technology that could be really cool, and not just because it pushes automated exploration to a new, smaller scale: AUEs that are very small are likely to become pretty cheap, which means that sooner or later they'll be adopted, appropriated, or copied by amateur scientists (or citizen scientists, as some call them). Amateurs aren't likely to tag dolphins or sharks, but an amateur naturalist living in Carmel or Cape May could pretty capably study the micro-environments of the beaches nearby, producing a cross between Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne and a more quantitative intensive area study.
Yesterday was the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. Happy birthday, evolution! (Alfred Russel Wallace, meanwhile, is nowhere to be found.)
And yes, this is the world's worst Stephen Colbert impression.
This just arrived in my in-box:
DotIn, as in, an Indian domain name.
Excuse me, this is not right. Not that I have anything against India. But when I was in Denmark, I was struck by the fact that American porn dominated the late-night airwaves, and I considered it a little mark in my country's favor. It's America's manifest destiny to dominate the market in pornography: we've long been a leader in consumption of it, and damn if we're not producers, too. It's our last genuine globe- um, straddling, American industry. Now is it all going the way of automobiles and steel? Are we going to turn into Britain, but with a better tan? And what'll be left for us? Manufacturing financial panics?
A piece by Steve Almond lamenting the death of the LP and the sentimental culture surrounding it-- okay, it's more nuanced than that-- got me thinking about music, materiality, and memory.
Either Gmail has outsourced itself to jetli.org.cn, or this is a phishing expedition.
While as a futurist I don't can't completely rule the possibility of the first being the case, I'm going with the second.
Be careful.
Listening to this 1976 concert on Wolfgang's Vault tonight reconfirms my sense that the Bee Gees were much more brilliant than we remember. The recording was made at the Los Angeles Forum, a venue I know absolutely nothing about, but the show is polished and professional without being soulless; the audience is enthusiastic; and the brothers themselves are engaged and passionate, not just going through the motions. As I've said before,
The Bee Gees were brilliant songwriters, and their best songs-- I think of "Nights on Broadway," "Fanny Be Tender," "Run to Me"-- are beautifully crafted, passionate, and unforgettable. The problem is that their sound was SO phenomenally distinctive, it made it hard for them to be copied: the whole falsetto thing was really easy to parody, and easier to ignore. If ABBA was the Mies of 1970s pop, the Bee Gees are Eero Saarinen.
For those not familiar with the codes of modern architecture, Saarinen was one of the most amazingly distinctive 20th century architects; but after his death critical opinion tended to regard him as an eccentric, rather than a visionary. Like Saarinen, the Bee Gees are instantly recognizable in a way that ironically detracts from their reputation: the signature singing style-- and their unfortunate association with disco-- distracts from the fact that the songs stand on their own. (Check out Feist's cover of "Inside and Out" for proof.)
My latest piece, "Four Secrets of Innovation," appears in this month's U.S. State Department-sponsored eJournalUSA. Naturally it starts with one of my usual historical references:
In today’s innovation-obsessed, knowledge-intensive global economy, it might come as a surprise that for most of their long histories, science and business have had almost nothing to do with each other. Had you suggested to a silversmith working in ancient China, a captain plying the spice trade during the Age of Exploration, or a Quaker brewer in 18th-century Philadelphia that science could improve commerce, he would have looked at you as if you were crazy. Even today, describing the relationship between science and business — and figuring out how science and industrial policy can be designed to work to the benefit of both parties — is a challenge....
So we seem to be entering a new age in which science is more important for innovation than ever, but is more unpredictable and harder to benefit from. In an age that values innovation, companies and countries have a harder time than ever encouraging and profiting from science.
But does that mean that science policy is now impossible? Certainly not, and successful regions and countries have learned several secrets.
So what are the four secrets? Go read it and find out.
A report on "Knowledge Tools of the Future" that I co-authored with Mike Love (not the Beach Boy, the other one) is now available on the IFTF Web site. For those of you too lazy to download the PDF, I've summarized it in the extended post. For those too lazy to click on the "Read More," it comes down to this:
Computers good.
People better.
Computers + communities = best.
That's pretty much it. There's also some philosophical (or sociological, depending on team you play or root for) stuff about the nature of knowledge, and the degree to which knowledge tools have to be social; the different types of intelligence that humans and computers exhibit (something I've also written about on The End of Cyberspace); and the future of memory.
It also lays out an argument for why simple, social, and symbiotic knowledge tools are triumphing over complex ones-- why the mouse conquered the world, but the chord keyboard and the rest of Doug Engelbart's system languishes in obscurity.
Update: It occurs to me that this is one of a number of pieces that I wrote or co-authored that are available on the IFTF Web site. Others include:
I also have pieces in the 2004, 2005, and 2006 Ten Year Forecasts, though those are very large PDFs.
I'm spending the morning trying to finish up revisions to Futures 2.0, which has been accepted for publication in Foresight, an academic journal on futures and forecasting.
via flickr
I have lots of other work on my plate, clients and editors who I don't want to disappoint, and am taking the family to Colorado for the weekend (to see my folks before they relocate to Singapore in January). So I'm trying to focus.
In his book Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert argued that humans are the only animals who think about the future. Gilbert's not the only one who's made this argument, and it's not uncontroversial. Recently, there have been several reports of other mammals demonstrating forward-thinking ability, most recently dolphins:
At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.
Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming.
But she didn't stop there.
One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.
He's mainly into painting and the iPhone these days, but David Hockney took time to do a Polariod collage of my daughter at Cafe Barrone this morning:
(via Hockeyizer)