Club Troppo

I read an article with an attractive title recently. “Complexity and Context-Dependency“.  It’s not very good, but it raises an important point that is important to what I call the psycho-pathology of disciplines and it puts me in mind of something I’ve thought for a long time about policy and politics. I don’t have time to do this subject justice in this post, but thought I’d try to put down a marker.

The paper argues this.

We may look down on other animals, perceiving that they have a biased and limited understanding of the world, but somehow assume that we don’t have analogous biases or limitations that we cannot somehow overcome. Surely this is merely another example of anthropocentric arrogance. That we have had some notable successes at understanding our world and even a systematic set of approaches that has been shown to be useful is not sufficient evidence to assume a lack of limitations and biases.

This astonishing assumption takes many forms in philosophy and discussions about the scientific method. One such is that somehow simplicity is a guide to truth. That is, that simplicity in a model or theory has advantages other than the obvious pragmatic ones (pragmatic virtues are such as: being able to analyze/solve it; being able to have good analogies with which to think about it; needing less data in order to parameterize it; and being able to compute it).

Another version is that everything somehow must be simple if only we can find the right way of looking at it, or formalizing it. It is true that frameworks such as Newtonian Physics are relatively simple (though I doubt many in Newton’s time would have thought so), and using this, many useful models and reliable predictions can be obtained. . . .

I am not going to spend time arguing the above points here. Rather I will consider the case under the anti-anthropocentric assumption, that much of the world around us is organized in a way that is beyond adequate modeling in a sufficiently simple and general manner for us to cope with. . . . Under this, admittedly pessimistic, view the phenomena that are simple enough for us to understand in a scientific manner are the exception – the exception to be sought and struggled for. Under this view, we should make the greatest use of the strengths we have, and seek to acknowledge and mitigate our limitations. Under this view a “Science of Complexity” makes no more sense than a “Science of Non-Red Things”, since both red objects and simple systems are the exception rather than the rule.

Why is it that we can see political benefits from the hyper-connected world produced by Web 2.0 in undemocratic countries but no big apparent improvements in democratic countries? (Continued)

Herewith an paper about my encounter with design, on taking up the Chairmanship of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation and encountering the Family by Family program.  The site where it’s been published doesn’t have any comments facility, so I’m opening up discussion here should anyone wish.

And I read today a quote that might have been a good complement to the quote appearing at the head of the article – immediately below.

Not only was he [Edward Land - inventor of 'instant cameras' and founder of Polaroid] one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that.

Designing better lives: An economist’s appreciation of design

Design is often described as making things not only useable but useful and desirable/delightful. We’d agree this is important – but what is even more fundamental (and rare) is making things that prompt change. – Sarah Schulman and Chris Vanstone [2]

       I.

Design is on the march. Apple teeters on being the most highly valued company in the world – its core competitive strength lying in design and systems integration, not technology. ‘Design thinking’ is becoming increasingly prominent not only in the development of products and processes, but also in the delivery of services. So much so that Deloitte has recently begun investing heavily in its own ability to provide its clients with design knowhow as a crucial engine of its innovation and competitiveness. As I write this, a prominent article on Australia’s Deloitte Online’s homepage [3] is titled “Design thinking demystified”. So what is the core contribution of design and what is behind its rise?

Adam Smith’s invocation of the benefits of self-interest – or as he called it self-love – is famously encapsulated in this aphorism:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

Smith’s point is not that self-interest is good in itself, but that the self-interest of one person in a market brings them into relation with others’ self-interest. Note that Smith’s injunction (implicitly to both parties) is for each to seek their own interest by addressing themselves to the other’sinterest. Since Smith founded it, the discipline of economics has focused on the incentives facing each of the parties to a bargain and on their relative bargaining strength.

But there are more things in heaven and earth. For the butchers, bakers and brewers of Smith’s time there was no great mystery as to what constituted the customer’s wants or needs. Today’s world is much more complex. If you’re making computers or even cars, customers have specific wants that are not so easily divined by producers. Thus, part of Japan’s auto-producers’ recipe for competitive success was meticulous attention to consumer needs.[4]

This process has now gone much further. A great transformation occurred at the outset of the personal computer era when the Apple Macintosh showed that consumers didn’t just want more technical capability from their software and hardware – something that could be captured well enough in standard disclosures of those technical capabilities. They wanted user-friendliness – a very different thing and something inherently difficult to ‘disclose’ in specifications.

It turns out you can’t really make a car or a computer useable without a lot of work, almost invariably involving the users themselves. And indeed there is a discipline that has grown up under our noses which has been all but ignored by economists and policy makers but which nevertheless addresses itself to this issue. That discipline is design. (Continued)

I am just no good at those ‘values’ questionnaires. Whenever I’m asked a question about values my only answer is “it depends”. I don’t think this is very clever, but there you go.

Here is the first page of 120 questions in a questionnaire I’m supposed to fill out about an organisation I’m involved with.

In your preferred culture, to what extent should people be expected to…?	Select your response by clicking a number here…					… or by typing a number here.
	Not at all	To a slight extent	To a moderate extent	To a great extent	To a very great extent
point out flaws	1	2	3	4	5
show concern for the needs of others	1	2	3	4	5
involve others in decisions affecting them	1	2	3	4	5
resolve conflicts constructively	1	2	3	4	5
be supportive of others	1	2	3	4	5
stay on people’s good side	1	2	3	4	5
be a “nice guy”	1	2	3	4	5
do things for the approval of others	1	2	3	4	5
“go along” with others	1	2	3	4	5
win against others	1	2	3	4	5
work to achieve self-set goals	1	2	3	4	5
accept goals without questioning them	1	2	3	4	5
be predictable	1	2	3	4	5
never challenge superiors	1	2	3	4	5
do what is expected	1	2	3	4	5
stay detached and perfectly objective	1	2	3	4	5
oppose new ideas	1	2	3	4	5
help others to grow and develop	1	2	3	4	5
be a good listener	1	2	3	4	5
give positive rewards to others	1	2	3	4	5

But in each and every case the only answer is not ‘more or less’ but in some circumstances more, in some less. I expect these kinds of questionnaires can do more good than harm. But I’m no good at them.

What thinkest thou Oh Troppodillians? (I wonder why my spellcheck doth say that ‘thinkest’ is not a word?)

In conclusion, please tell me whether values are really like this? (And where is Dr Troppo when you need him?)

Herewith my op ed from the Herald and Age today.

What is the good life and are we living it?

Assessing and measuring wellbeing has vexed us since ancient times. But a funny thing happened on the modern world’s way to the answer. The metric that economists used to dampen down the business cycle – Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – received such prominence that it ‘went viral’ as we say these days. It became the default measure of national progress.

But there’s lots wrong with GDP as a measure of economic wellbeing let alone more general wellbeing. Measuring gross activity, it ignores the growth and depreciation of assets – such as buildings, equipment, natural resources like farmland and mineral deposits, biodiversity and clean air. And that’s not to mention the greatest asset of all – our knowhow.

Moreover GDP is measured by money changing hands. So converting bread, mince and salad into a hamburger increases GDP in McDonalds but not at home. More starkly, an evening of passion and pleasure only adds to wellbeing as measured by GDP if it happens in a bordello! More broadly still, GDP takes no account of the distribution of income or of our physical or social wellbeing.

But considering how different all these phenomena are, how can we possibly measure their sum impact on national wellbeing in a single number? Because it would ‘dumb down’ complex issues, economics Nobel Laureate Amatya Sen initially refused to participate in the construction of a single index of human development to help guide development in poorer countries. But he relented because he appreciated that, however unsatisfactory a single wellbeing index might be, it was better than the alternative. Given the thirst for simple answers, the alternative is even more dumbing down as would occur if GDP yet again filled the vacuum. (Continued)

Here’s a paragraph I wrote about fifteen years ago.

The culture of economic expertise places inadequate weight on integrating insights from multiple perspectives, that it frequently places an unreasonably high ‘burden of proof’ on heterodox views, and that it has a penchant for spelling out the normative implications of its analysis by way of ‘peremptory rules’ which narrow the scope for dialogue.

This is just a sketch of a post, because I don’t have time for more, but for some time I’ve wanted to put down a marker about one of the ways in which results from Kaggle are instructive. The winners of Kaggle competitions often win not by trying to build the One True Model of the phenomena they’re trying to model, but rather by building a large number of models all of which have some explanatory power and which are independent of each other and then aggregating their insights. Random forests approaches often perform very well. One might call it a ‘wisdom of algorithmic crowds’ approach.

In any event, this is the antithesis of much economic modelling which involves reaching for the One True Model and then parameterising it.

I was reminded of this by David Colander’s latest piece urging humility on economists (pdf). His proposal? That instead of thinking of themselves as analogous to dentists (which Keynes suggested) economists should think of themselves as engineers:

An engineer’s approach to modeling such a complex system as the macro economy would likely focus much more on statistical models and methods of pulling patterns out of the data. It would explore a wide variety of formal models to gain analytic insight, and then would integrate the many variety of models with the statistical models to interpret the patterns. That would involve a fundamentally different way of doing macro and of thinking about macro problems. Similarly, with micro. Economists focus much of their applied micro policy discussion on Pareto optimal solutions even though we know that all actual policies will violate Pareto optimality. We can contort our micro policy models designed to provide Pareto optimal solutions to provide insight into non-Pareto optimal solutions, but, generally, that contortion comes at a cost. It means that we spend less time discussing other models that betting fit not Pareto optimal solutions, but “reasonable person solutions” that more closely reflect society’s value judgments. An engineering applied microeconomics would likely have an entire branch devoted to measuring society’s value judgments and integrating those judgments into applied policy instruments. Our scientific applied micro leaves the topic almost totally undiscussed.

Quite.

Other required reading on the point is this paper entitled “Identification Problems in the Social Sciences and Life”.

I made the latter point in a discussion of discursive collapse a while back.

The latest psychology bestseller The Folly of Fools is on the triumph of deceit. It looks quite interesting. Anyway, it looked a bit too focused on the bestseller formula – which is often the book of the article formula for me to want to read it all. But I’ve downloaded my Kindle sample and will see how it goes. In the interim I hunted down a few reviews. And an interview at Salon here. The author had a blinding flash of insight.

Working on parent-offspring conflict, I suddenly had this flash of insight: “Ah! If self-deception improves your ability to deceive others, then you would have a strong selective force to get it into your consciousness.”

Well, on inspection it may not have been blinding, but we have it on the author’s authority that it was an insight.

In any event it struck me that it was an inversion of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. In that book, as the child grows conscience begins as an H.L. Mencken conscience. H.L. Mencken said that conscience is that little voice inside us that tells us that someone might be watching. But over time the child internalises the idea and comes to acquire an impartial spectator, a ‘man within the breast’ whose approbation he craves. I had my own insight which is that the new bestselling insight is the inverse of Smith’s insight about how good can come from internalising things. Smiths’ insight is an insight into humans as rhetorical creatures (Smith’s first academic job was as a teacher of rhetoric and belles lettres). Alas this insight is less visible to us now than it was to him.

Then rhetoric was the study of communication and persuasion. Today it is rhetoric as in ‘mere’ rhetoric.

The rift which occured between the view of rhetoric as a central aspect of intellectual endeavour and our own conception of rhetoric as essentially cosmetic is captured comically in this passage by Howell.

The chasm which yawned between the elocutionists, on the one hand , and the traditional or new rhetoricians of the eighteenth century [Smith was one of the finest of the new rhetoricians.], was very wide. . . . Its width at its greatest extent . . . can be suggested by a comparison of the intellectual level of the first sentence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric with that of the first sentence of an American elocutionary textbook of the late nineteenth century. Both of these works were intended for mature students. Said Aristotle: “Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic.” Said the elocutionary textbook: “Always inhale through the nostrils.”

Howell, W.S., Eighteenth Century British Logic and Rhetoric, New Jersey, 1971, p. 713-4.

On the suggestion, some time ago, of Ian Marsh, I finally caught up with the New Democracy Foundation a few weeks ago. Not surprisingly we got on well.  I’ve always been keen on things like consensus conferences – which bring the deliberation of a jury to wider social and political issues.  And when we were debating the republic and the evils of Pauline Hanson I proposed as an antidote to the latter, a third house of parliament chosen by lot. I liked the proposal that Gillard put up to a the the last election for climate change to go to such a body, but it was done in such a way and in such circumstances that it got buried under the media’s and the electorate’s (justified) cynicism about it.

Anyway, I’ve recently been thinking about how such institutions could improve our politics. If the ALP had the courage of its convictions, if, as a relatively conscientious government it comprehended the ease with which the Opposition has been able to divide and conquer the electorate with one scare campaign after another, it would realise that developing such institutions would be in its own long term interest.

In any event, pondering these things an idea occured to me. Sometimes people lament what the party system has done to us – with elected representatives not being able to vote issues on their merits.  In fact this is as it should be – or arguably so. They’re supposed to be representatives after all, so they’re supposed to be publicly accountable for the way they vote, and, given how much community consent is channelled through political parties, they need to be publicly accountable to the party they represent.

Still, wouldn’t it be interesting to know how they would vote if they had a secret ballot? Of course that would be inconsistent with representative democracy.  We need to know how they are voting or all sorts of strange things could occur – like parties placing ‘moles’ inside their opponents’ parties. In fact the members of parliament do have a secret ballet (or if they dont’ now, they did once) in electing the titular heads of the chambers, the Speaker of the House and President of the Senate. And at some stage a public vote would have put in a Liberal as President of the Senate, but in fact the votes when counted supported the Labor candidate. I think it was Justin O’Byrne but the date (1974) seems wrong. Perhaps someone can enlighten us. In any event the ALP candidate was a better candidate than his opponent and one Liberal crossed the floor – or perhaps I should say snuck across the floor – in the secret ballot that was held.

So the thought experiment is this. We can keep going with the current system, but we could also require Parliamentarians to post secret ballots as well – which could be expedited very easily over the net. It would place a bit more pressure on the parties to avoid acting too cynically as they would be shown as supporting policies that do not have the support of the majority of Parliamentarians when some choose to vote according to their consciences.  Of course I’m not really suggesting it could ever happen.  But it might be good if it did. It would also be more fun!

Games seem frivolous. They can stand as metaphors for life, but typically, the outcome of games doesn’t really matter. I wanted Collingwood to win it’s last game this year, but it didn’t and that’s that. Doesn’t matter. Still as I gradually realised when working on the Government 2.0 work in 2009, the element of play is critically important and not just to high level ‘brainstorming’ activity, but to seizing the opportunities for innovation of all kinds from major disruptive innovation to the most minor improvised improvements in the way things are being done.  That’s why I thought things like mashups were so wonderful – they are low cost ways of breaking things up, and inviting others into play with one’s assets (or copies of them while the ‘real’ ones remain on the official website or otherwise in the system somewhere.

And with games becoming so much more prominent in young people’s use of their time, it’s not surprising that educators are arguing that games teach a new kind of literacy. Gamification is all the rage in Silicon Valley. As Wikipedia explains, gamification is

The use of game design techniques^[1] and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. Typically gamification applies to non-game applications and processes (also known as “funware“)^[2], in order to encourage people to adopt them. Gamification works by making technology more engaging^[3], by encouraging users to engage in desired behaviors^[4], by showing a path to mastery and autonomy, and by taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming.^[5] The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, filling out tax forms, or reading web sites.^[3]

Michael Neilsen’s new book on Reinventing Discovery has this to say about Foldit, a very clever gamification of the arduous task of figuring out how proteins fold  which has generated new scientific insights about the formation of proteins.

I was skeptical when I first heard of Foldit. it sounded like the dull educational computer cames I saw in school when I was growing up in the 1980s. But I downloaded the game and spent hours playing it over several days. . . . . People play the game because it’s good.  It has the compelling, addictive quality all good computer games have: a task that’s challenging but not impossible, instant feedback on how well you’re doing, and the sense that you’re always just one step away from improvement.” (p. 146.)

But you can argue that games are more important than that. (Continued)

Yesterday I followed this mellifluously titled article on why the author hadn’t been able to write a best selling ‘ideas book’.

This is what I had to do. First, I needed to have a platform. A platform is something you stand on. It makes you taller than you are. In trade publishing, a platform is the same, but it’s a prestigious brand. I had two: from a trade editor’s point of view, I had been a “professor” at the big university and a “writer” at the big magazine. Second, I needed a big idea. A big idea is an enthusiastically stated thesis, usually taking the form of “This changes everything and will make you rich, happy, and beautiful.” A big idea must be counterintuitive: the this that changes everything must be something everyone thinks is trivial, but in fact matters a great deal. In my case, the this had to be Wikipedia, so my big idea was “Wikipedia changes everything.” I had done no research to substantiate such a claim. Third, I needed a catchphrase title like The Wisdom of Crowds, The Tipping Point, or The Long Tail. The title had to be the kind of thing that becomes a cliché. Trade editors would demand this. And in fact a trade editor suggested a good title—WikiWorld. . . .

I started doing research. . . . It forced me to scotch the idea that “Wikipedia changes everything,” because it obviously didn’t. The truth about Wikipedia was messy. I couldn’t boil it down to catchphrases and anecdotes. So I did my best to reduce the inherent complexity of the subject, and submitted the manuscript. Was it good? Well, the book did the job as I understood it. Was it done? Yes, and that was important. But I was worried. I had strayed from the big-idea template. My book was a convoluted story involving evolution, human nature, media technologies, and their effects on human society and thought. Surprisingly, my editor liked it a lot. He compared me to Jared Diamond. I didn’t know whether that was a compliment or not. I had some serious questions about Diamond’s work, as did many other historians. My agent, however, assured me that this was the best possible news: Diamond’s books sold like hotcakes.

Then my editor fell ominously silent. E-mails went unanswered, phone calls unreturned. What had happened? My agent explained that my big idea—which in fact was no longer my big idea—had a short shelf life. That’s why my editor had wanted the book in six months. Other Wikipedia books were in the pipeline. Some of their authors had higher platforms, bigger ideas, and pithier titles than mine. The clock was ticking. After six months, my editor finally wrote me. Not surprisingly, he no longer liked my book. Too complicated for the average trade reader. He advised me to speculate. “Unleash your inner Marshall McLuhan,” he said, and rewrite the book.

This was excellent advice from a smart man with decades of experience in trade publishing. But I realized that I had no inner Marshall McLuhan. Even more important was my realization that I had no inner James Surowiecki, Malcolm Gladwell, or Chris Anderson. From my editor’s perspective, these were models, and rightly so. They made trade publishers a fortune. From my perspective, however, they were good writers who had spun big ideas into gold. I couldn’t write a big-idea book, because, as it turned out, I didn’t believe in big ideas. By my lights, they almost had to be wrong.

Anyway, at the bottom of the article was a link to another project of the author’s – the new book network where there are podcasts of interviews with the authors of new books. Seems like a good idea to me.  Apart from anything else I like the guy’s sense of humour – which is evident in the site’s video and in lots of his write ups. and, as I snuffled through a cold in bed last night, managed to listen to a bunch of interesting interviews, the highlight being the one with Elizabeth Anderson on her recent book  The Imperative of Integration (Princeton University Press, 2010).

I’ve been struggling to articulate my objection to little strategic set pieces which appear before policy proposals.  They typically take the salient challenges from conventional wisdom – for instance right now that we’re facing potential environmental catastrophe, sovereign debt crises and various other dangers – and then present the policy proposals they are promoting as particularly well suited to those problems.

Trouble is, the two things are disconnected. My usual reason for doing something – like for instance Windows on Workplaces - is not because it’s uniquely well suited to our particular circumstance but because in virtually any circumstance it would be a good idea. Indeed, though there are exceptions, if one is going to implement some policy, one generally wants some faith that the policy suits any circumstances, because circumstances change.

But just as we incessantly ‘theme’ conferences around the issue du jour, somehow there is this compulsion to present an idea as some response to its specific times.

Speaking of Windows on Workplaces, the US Government publishes detailed data on the way in which different US Government agencies perform on employee satisfaction surveys. BestPlacesToWork.org is an excellent initiative, but couldn’t happen in Australia at least right now, because our own Australian Public Service Commission doesn’t want to publish agency specific data.

Anyway, here’s how BestPlacesToWork tells us why its service matters

Today, America faces high unemployment, a growing federal budget deficit, war in Afghanistan, a major military engagement in Iraq, an aging population, long term-energy needs and a host of other daunting challenges. Now, more than ever, we need effective government and public servants who represent the best and brightest that our nation has to offer.

It also tells us that “The 2010 rankings are the fifth edition of this ongoing series, following the 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009 versions.” and that

The rankings provide a mechanism to hold agency leaders accountable for the health of the organizations they run. They also offer a roadmap for better management and provide an early warning sign for agencies in trouble. Had Congress or government leaders paid attention to the 2003 Best Places survey, for example, they would have found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was last in the employee rankings. That was two years before FEMA’s inept response to Hurricane Katrina, but at the time, few noticed.

So if we need the site now “more than ever”, I guess we needed it less just before Hurricane Katrina hit. I guess those earlier editions should have been forwarded with words to the effect “Now, we need effective government and public servants who represent the best and brightest that our nation has to offer – but times may be coming when we will need it even more.” (Continued)