Learning from One Data Point

September 28, 2010 By

Sometimes I get annoyed by all the pious statistician-types I find all around me. They aren’t all statisticians, but there are a lot of people who raise analytics and “data-driven” to the level of a holy activity. It isn’t that I don’t like analytics. I use statistics whenever it is a cost of doing business. You’d be dumb to not take advantages of ideas like A/B testing for messy questions.

What bothers me is that there are a lot of people who use statistics as an excuse to avoid thinking. Why think about what ONE case means, when you can create 25 cases using brute force, and code, classify, cluster, correlate and regress your way to apparent insight?

This kind of thinking is tempting, but  is dangerous. I constantly remind myself of the value of the other approach to dealing with data: hard, break-out-in-a-sweat thinking about what ONE case means. No rules, no formulas. Just thinking. I call this “learning from one data point.” It is a crucially important skill because by the time a statistically significant amount of data is in, the relevant window of opportunity might be gone.

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Cricket as Metaphor

September 14, 2010 By

I am rather surprised that the game of cricket has never gained popularity as a comprehensive metaphor for work, life and business. I don’t mean localized figurative metaphors like “on a sticky wicket” (tricky situation) or “bowled over” (fell in love/was caught by surprise). I mean a broad, coherent conceptual metaphor. The way American football is sometimes seen as a metaphor for industrial organization, soccer as a metaphor for reactive and opportunistic “network” styles of decision-making, and basketball as a metaphor for an artistic, Zen-like approach to life.  I think I know why this has been the case, and why it might change in the near future.

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How to Take a Walk

August 9, 2010 By

It was cool and mildly breezy around 8 PM today. So I went for a walk, and I noticed something. Though I passed a couple of hundred people, nobody else was taking a walk. There were people returning from work, people going places with purpose-laden bags, people running, people going to the store, people sipping slurpies.  But nobody taking a walk. Young women working their phones, but not taking a walk. People walking their dogs, or pushing a stroller, with the virtuous air of one performing a chore for the benefit of another, but not themselves taking a walk. I was the only one taking a walk. The closest activity to “taking a walk” that I encountered was two people walking together and forgetting, for a moment, to talk to each other. The moment passed. One of them said something and they slipped back into talking rather than taking a walk.

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A Big Little Idea Called Legibility

July 26, 2010 By

James C. Scott’s fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examines how, across dozens of domains, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to urban planning and census-taking, a very predictable failure pattern keeps recurring.  The pictures below, from the book (used with permission from the author) graphically and literally illustrate the central concept in this failure pattern, an idea called “legibility.”

States and large organizations exhibit this pattern of behavior most dramatically, but individuals frequently exhibit it in their private lives as well.

Along with books like Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization, Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors we Live By, William Whyte’s The Organization Man and Keith Johnstone’s Impro, this book is one of the anchor texts for this blog. If I ever teach a course on ‘Ribbonfarmesque Thinking,’ all these books would be required reading. Continuing my series on complex and dense books that I cite often, but are too difficult to review or summarize, here is a quick introduction to the main idea.

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The Right Question, Review of Shallows, Insight vs. Mind-Candy

July 22, 2010 By

I have three off-ribbonfarm posts this week that should interest you guys.

Is the Internet Making us Smart or Stupid?

A guest post on VentureBeat, my review of Nick Carr’s The Shallows (a book-length build on his Atlantic piece, “Is Google Making us Stupid.”

The Dangerous Art of the Right Question

On the Trailmeme blog. This post seems to have gone somewhat viral via Hacker News, Lifehacker and a couple of other significant mentions. Slightly lighter fare than you guys are used to here, but should still be of interest.

My Remarkable, Famous Graph

Also on the Trailmeme blog, this one is a sort of follow-up to the previous one, examining the emerging world of infographics, using 3 of my own ribbonfarm graphics to examine the difference between mind-candy and true insight graphics.

Head on over, comment etc.

The Eight Metaphors of Organization

July 13, 2010 By

Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization is a must-read for those who want to develop a deeper understanding of a lot of the stuff I talk about here. Though I’ve cited the book lots of times, it is one of those dense, complex books that I am never going to attempt to review or summarize. You’ll just have to read it. But I figured since I refer to it so much, I need at least a simple anchor post about it. So I thought I’d summarize the main idea with a picture, and point out some quick connections to things I have written/plan to write.

(For once, the picture was complex enough that I chose to draw it and scan it in, instead of doing one of my ugly MS-Paint sketches). Here’s the main idea of the book — [Read more…]

Amy Lin and the Ancient Eye

March 23, 2010 By

Last weekend, I went to see Amy Lin’s new show, Kinetics, at the Addison-Ripley gallery in DC (the show runs till April 24;  go). Since I last wrote about her, she has started exploring patterns that go beyond her trademark dots. Swirls, lines and other patterns are starting to appear. Amy’s art  represents the death of both art and science as simple-minded categories, and the rediscovery of a much older way of seeing the world, which I’ll call the Ancient Eye. Yes, she nominally functions in the social skin of a modern “artist,” and is also a chemical engineer by day, but really, her art represents a way of seeing the world that is more basic than either “artistic” or “scientific” ways of seeing.  Take this piece from the Kinetics collection for instance, my favorite, titled Cellular.

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The Turpentine Effect

March 18, 2010 By

Picasso once noted that “when art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” When you practice a craft you become skilled and knowledgeable in two areas: the stuff the craft produces, and the processes used to create it. And the second kind of expertise accumulates much faster. I call this the turpentine effect. Under normal circumstances, the turpentine effect only has minor consequences. At best, you become a more thoughtful practitioner of your craft, and at worst, you procrastinate a little, shopping for turpentine rather than painting. But there are trades where tool-making and tool-use involve exactly the same skills, which has interesting consequences. Programming, teaching, writing and mechanical engineering are all such trades.

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Impro by Keith Johnstone

January 23, 2010 By

Once every four or five years, I find a book that is a genuine life-changer. Impro by Keith Johnstone joins my extremely short list of such books. The book crossed my radar after two readers mentioned it, in reactions to the Gervais Principle series Impro is ostensibly a book about improvisation and the theater. Depending on where you are coming from, it might be no more than that, or it might be a near-religious experience.

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Work-Life Balance: Juggling, Spinning or Surfing? (Rerun)

December 27, 2009 By

More rerun fun. About a year ago, I was doing a lot more highly visual posts. This one is one of my personal favorites. Good fodder for end-of- the-year work-life musing.

Work-Life Balance: Juggling, Spinning or Surfing?

So which metaphor do you prefer?