The Tragicomic Exasperations of Expertise

August 16, 2009 By

The Dunning-Kruger effect is one of those cleanly stated insights that can at once make you feel relieved and hopeless. It is a cognitive bias which lends confidence to ignorance. Wikipedia compactly describes the effect as follows:

“…people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.” They therefore suffer an illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average. This leads to a perverse result where people with less competence will rate their ability more highly than people with relatively more competence.

This dry, academic version actually understates both the richness and emotional complexity of what is going on. This richness begins with the subjective consequences of the impasse: the expert is exasperated, while the novice actually feels contemptuous and superior. The situation is stable: the expert gropes for a way to demonstrate the validity of his view at a level the novice can understand and is reduced to sputtering incoherence, which only serves to strengthen the novice’s illusory sense of superiority. Play out the broader effects of this little piece of sketch comedy, and you get all the pathos and pageantry of human society at the grandest scales.

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Two Manipulative Ways to Close Conversations

August 12, 2009 By

I have a morbid fascination with the idea that conversations represent two computers trying to program each other in real time. Pondering this sometimes yields insights that seem to be valid but manipulative. Here are two examples; you can decide whether these moves should be used. The first has to do with IM/chat conversations. Do you ever tire of closing rituals that take too long?

A: Ciao!

B: Yup, ttyl

A: Have a good weekend

B: Thanks, am looking forward to chilling on my camping trip. You have a nice weekend too.

A: Oh, where are you going?

I’ve found a move that tends to cut off these sessions surgically. I call it repeat-or-complement. The first time the other person uses a closing phrase, you either repeat it exactly (mirroring) or provide the most ritualistic, banal complementary response available. In the example above, the response to Ciao! should have been Ciao!, not ttyl. This works for neutral/symmetric closings. If you get something like Thanks, you should choose You’re welcome (no exclamation point). Not no problem or anytime dude.

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Humor as Massage

August 10, 2009 By

As I grow older, I find fewer things funny. Curiously elephant jokes still work on me. The steady rise of my chuckle-or-cringe threshold hasn’t been a monotonic progression from childish to sophisticated. Things are more complex.

One reason, I suppose, is that over an adult decade-and-half, I’ve experienced at least one complete cycle of innovation in humor (the rise and fall of Seinfeld-Leno style observational humor) and consumed a critical quantity of at least three major kinds of humor (Indian, British and American, in order of influence on me). The result is that these days I can often place a joke or gag in space and time and explain it away quickly enough to kill the chuckle before it is born. Sometimes before the punchline.

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On Seeing Like a Cat

August 6, 2009 By

Cats and dogs are the most familiar among the animal archetypes inhabiting the human imagination.  They are to popular modern culture what the fox and the hedgehog are to high culture, and what farm animals like cows and sheep were to agrarian cultures. They also differ from foxes, hedgehogs, sheep and cows in an important way: nearly all of us have directly interacted with real cats and dogs. So let me begin this meditation by introducing you to the new ribbonfarm mascot: the junkyard cat, Skeletor, and my real, live cat, Jackson. Here they are. And no, this isn’t an aww-my-cat-is-so-cute post. I hate those too.

skeletorandjackson

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The Brain of the World

August 3, 2009 By

Metaphors frame our understanding of numbers.  The idea of per capita is one such. To use per capita in your arguments is to suggest that each of us is metaphorically associated with a “fair share” of something.  For instance, I once read somewhere that  the money spent on a typical American child was 30 times that spent on an Indian child, which in turn, was 30 times that spent on a Somalian child. Whether you are inclined to agree or argue (“yeah, that seems roughly right” or “the real disparity is much worse” or “it isn’t so bad if you look at purchasing power parity”), you’ve been trapped by the metaphor. It has stopped you from questioning whether per capita is a useful frame of reference.

I encountered another example in the ABC show Over a Barrel: The Truth about Oil. One of the talking heads, T. Boone Pickens, offered this thought: the US has only 4% of the world’s population, but uses 25% of its oil production.

Let me juxtapose a different metaphor: the human brain constitutes roughly 2% of the body weight of an average adult, but uses 20% of the body’s oxygen supply. I am suggesting, of course, that the metaphor of the world as a giant organism is the appropriate one here, and that America’s disproportionate energy consumption might be justifiable on the basis of its role as the “brain” within the body politic of the world.

I am not actually making this argument right now. I am merely wondering: to what extent are our ideological commitments hidden within our choice of metaphors?

[#2 in my short-posts experiment. 274 words]

The Rhetoric of the Hyperlink

July 1, 2009 By

The hyperlink is the most elemental of the bundle of ideas that we call the Web. If the  bit is the quark of information, the hyperlink is the hydrogen molecule. It shapes the microstructure of information today.  Surprisingly though, it is nearly as mysterious now as it was back in July 1945, when Vannevar Bush first proposed the idea in his Atlantic Monthly article, As We May Think. July 4th will mark the second anniversary of Ribbonfarm (I started on July 4th, 2007), and to celebrate, I am going to tell you everything I’ve learned so far about the hyperlink. That is the lens through which I tend to look at more traditional macro-level blog-introspection topics, such as “how to make money blogging,” and “will blogs replace newspapers?” So with a “Happy Second Birthday, Ribbonfarm!” and a “Happy 64th Birthday, Hyperlink,” let’s go explore the hyperlink.

Image from Wikipedia, free license

Image from Wikipedia, free license

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Neurotic Leaders, Paternalistic Managers and Self-Absorbed Workers

June 22, 2009 By

Pondering the A. G. Lafley HBR piece that’s been doing the rounds lately, I think I’ve finally really figured out the difference between managers, leaders and workers. The title, and this cartoon I made up, capture the essence of my argument: all three archetypes within the world of business are defined by how they self-destruct. This has been unclear for millenia because it is only in the last two years, thanks to technology, that the last of the trinity: the individual worker bee, has become fully defined. So let’s reconstruct the whole picture from the ground up. mgmtvslead

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Marketing, Innovation and the Creation of Customers

June 15, 2009 By

Recently, one of my projects went through a rapid, but nearly imperceptible phase change. It went from being an “innovation-first” project to being a “marketing-first” project. The marketing hat feels at once comfortable and uncomfortable, familiar and unfamiliar. It feels like listening to unfamiliar lyrics set to a familiar tunes. This disconcerting feeling of being caught up in the dance of a yin-yang pair has had me pondering the best-known Drucker quote (from The Essential Drucker) for weeks now:

“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation.”

Marketing and innovation define each other in yin-yang ways. Thinking about the fundamentals of this dual pair of concepts led me to a curious definition  of the most important word in business: customer.

markinn

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The Hunter-Gatherer Theory of Markets and Shopping

May 28, 2009 By

The idea that men hate shopping while women love it is probably the most defensible among all gender stereotypes. Economics would be very different if Adam Smith had been Eve Smith. Male-driven economics is largely about the stuff the seller wants, money. This is by definition as featureless and abstract as possible. On the buying side though, there is a great deal of complexity, variety, and delight in leisurely and nuanced selection. Let me offer a speculative evolutionary origin myth: all economic activity derives from the original two: hunting and gathering. Men did most of the former, women did most of the latter.  That gives us the starting point for telling the tale of this evolution of real, physical markets. The ones where we actually shop.

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How to Draw and Judge Quadrant Diagrams

April 20, 2009 By

The quadrant diagram has achieved  the status of an intellectual farce. If you, as a presenter, do not make an  ironic joke when you throw one on the screen, you will automatically lose a lot of credibility. For some very good reasons though, the diagram is an indispensable one for the presenter’s toolkit. As a listener, if you have a default dismissive attitude towards the thing, you will have to sit out far too many important conversations with a cynical, superior smile. So here’s a quick tutorial on quadrant diagrams. I’ll tell you both how to make them, and how to evaluate them. Here’s a made-up one to get the basics clear. You basically take two spectra (or watersheds) relevant to a complex issue, simplify each down to a black/white dichotomy, and label the four quadrants you produce, like so:

quad1

This particular one is nonsense, and falls apart at the slightest poking (we’ll poke later in the article), and I made it up for fun. Let us discuss three real examples from business books before we develop a critical theory and design principles. The three I will use are from The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, Making It All Work by David Allen, and Listening to the Future by Dan Rasmus and Rob Salkowitz.

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