Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

Last week, the Computer History Museum hosted a panel on “The Anthropology of Innovation”. I had to attend since I’m a fan of anthropology, I’m fascinated by corporate culture and how it leads to goals like innovation, and the panel featured Genevieve Bell of Intel, who Jofish and Janet interned with in Portland one summer. I discovered once I got there that the panel also featured George Kembel, a co-founder of the Stanford d-school, which is an institution I admire. I wasn’t as impressed with the third panelist, Laura Tyson, despite her impressive resume including being Clinton’s Chief Economic Advisor

This post is mostly a transcription of my scribbled notes so I have a searchable way of referring to them in the future. It will be even less coherent than my normal posts, as my notes are mostly quotes I found interesting. C’est la vie.

Gillian Tett, the moderator, is an anthropology major turned journalist. She started off the evening with a few remarks on her observations of innovation in society and in companies:

• Every society has a cognitive map.

• “The blank spaces are important.” I think this referred to the idea that the things we don’t talk about provide clues to the assumptions that are taken for granted and could be fertile areas for questioning.
• Companies are organized by silos – increasingly interconnected but also increasingly fragmented
• Innovation is about silo busting.

George Kembel then spoke from his perspective as a former entrepreneur turned educator.

• He said innovation is “thinking freely in the presence of constraints”. The constraints are important as they bound the problem and create the opportunity for innovation. No constraints means you could do anything.

• To answer the question of “how do you innovate?”, he observed that design thinking is not just about designing products – you can be creative in everything you do, whether it’s designing business models, new processes, etc.
• He thinks of d.school as a “school crossing” where they can integrate different points of views, existing outside of the traditional “schools” of engineering, science, arts, etc.
• He mentioned that when they started, they were looking for faculty support for their interdisciplinary school, and they had expected the young up-and-coming professors to be their advocates. But those younger professors were all trying to establish themselves in their field and earn tenure, so they couldn’t take risks by going outside their field. Surprisingly, it ended up being the long-established tenured professors who were more willing to take the risks of crossing between fields. Interesting observation of incentives and constraints there.
• Pay more attention to people, not technology.
• When you’re not sure of what to do, try lots of experiments.
• On the topic of how the d.school encourages innovation, he said that the focus is on the student as an innovator – it’s getting the person to innovate, not about creating a process of innovation. Teaching students to break barriers, to find new ways of looking at the problem, that’s where the innovation will come from. The teacher does not have all the answers, but is more of a coach and facilitator. I like the human-centered approach, which recognizes that each person is dealing with unique situations, so no standard process will work for all of those situations, but teaching the person techniques will allow them to address their own individual situation.
• One suggestion was for students to get a “shared experience of the user whose life they wanted to make better”, as “the biggest barriers to innovation are our own biases and assumptions.” A great story here – the man leading the GE MRI division was really proud of the great technology he had built that saved lives. After going to the d.school, he realized he had never seen an MRI machine in a hospital, so he visited his local hospital. He saw the machine and it was glorious and a shining beacon of technology. And then he saw the little kid who was the next patient, who shrieked in terror at this ginormous scary instrument and sobbed and wouldn’t let go of her parents. And he realized that technology wasn’t the only factor to consider. After some more work, he developed a program with the hospitals where they turned going to the MRI into a camping adventure, with camp counselors instead of nurses, and with the MRI machine decorated as a tent for them to hide in. This program, while it was better for the kids, also improved his bottom-line instrument throughput, as the kids were eager to get in and didn’t hold up the process. Nifty story to demonstrate how a user-focused approach can lead to breakthroughs in how you perceive a problem.
• To innovate, you must be “willing to invite discomfort into your life” as you realize your biases and assumptions might be wrong. “Don’t just accept the problem as it’s framed.”
• “Our experts are our liabilities”
• On K-12 education, he said the question isn’t how to teach innovation, it’s how to preserve the creativity of kids – they have it, we just have to not crush it out of them.

Genevieve Bell’s comments:

• She started with the great story of how when she was hired at Intel, she asked her manager what she was supposed to study. Her manager said “Women.” Genevieve said “Um, women? You mean, all 3.2 billion of them?” “Yes, we don’t think we understand women.” “Okay….anything else?” “ROW” “What does ROW mean?” “Rest of World.” “So….World in this case means?” “The US” “Oh, okay, so everybody on the planet outside the US, plus women. No problem!”

• One of her rallying cries is “That may be your world view, but it’s not everybody’s”
• She said one of the reasons she was successful was “sheer stubbornness”, and that “people measure me by my being difficult”. One such story was where she told Paul Otellini, the CEO of Intel, that he was just wrong at a meeting. She could feel everybody around her internally gasping at her audacity, but Otellini asked her why, and she provided him with her data and supporting arguments and changed his mind. Yay anthropology!

I submitted a question that was selected by the panel moderator which was that in an increasingly specialized world where companies are looking for a specific skill set, and with innovation depending on busting silos, where does the generalist fit in? Genevieve had a great response, which was that a “generalist” adds value if they can “curate the conversation from multiple points of view”. She suggested that I was limiting myself by calling myself a generalist, and needed to re-brand and re-imagine my role to create an specialization that companies would value (e.g. “curator”). George said something similar, where he recommended thinking of myself as an integrator, not as a person outside of specialization. Another point he brought up when I approached him after the panel was that the idea of being T-shaped, with both a broad awareness and a deep area of specialization, is somewhat outmoded – we actually need more people who can integrate different viewpoints by having a certain level of depth in multiple fields, rather than just a shallow awareness in several and a deep expertise in one.

The final discussion was interesting, where an audience member asked about how to apply these ideas to health care. Laura suggested taking George’s viewpoint of focusing on the patient, and re-centering everything in the business around the patient. Instead of having specializations where each doctor was only responsible for their area leading to patients getting passed all around the hospital from doctor to doctor, re-design the whole process around making the patient experience better. George expanded upon that by suggesting that we don’t think of patients as sick, but as healthy people who are temporarily un-well, and thinking of medicine as the process to accelerate them back to their normal selves as quickly as possible.

Genevieve then blew my mind by asking if we could take a similar approach to government, where we put the citizen in the middle and organize the government around enabling the citizen. She didn’t exactly know what that would mean, and it depends on the idea that citizens embrace their role as representing their country. People would have to go beyond thinking of themselves as tax-payers who get services from their government (police, army, social security, etc), towards being citizens who embrace their role as representing the government. It was an interesting thought-experiment and a great way to end the night.

Nifty ideas all around. Fun thought-provoking evening, and I’ll have to think more about my generalist branding given the feedback from the panel.

Over the weekend, I attended the Convergence08 unconference, which focused on future technologies like biotech, nanotech, artificial intelligence, etc. I had to miss the Saturday morning sessions, as I had a chorus rehearsal for this week’s Mahler concerts, but I was there on Saturday afternoon and most of the day Sunday.

The first session I attended was on “Building a better search engine”, which I chose because I work at Google (although on nothing related to search). The attendees speculated about the next big jump in information finding technology, including:

• Personalized agents that know you and just find the right information – I brought up privacy, and the general response was that privacy was overrated and should be ignored for the sake of this discussion as better results would trump privacy.
• Semantic technologies with natural language understanding – somebody from Powerset was there pushing this idea, and somebody else recommended Semantifind. I’m extremely skeptical of such technologies, as I’ve spent most of the past ten years figuring out how to translate between different disciplines as a generalist, and I already understand language. I think it’s going to be a long time before computers can figure out the implicit frames that influence comprehension.
• Social search – leverage our social networks to find more relevant results. If a trusted associate noted something, it’s probably more relevant than a random stranger noting the same thing. The issues I raised is the modelling of the social network – I would trust certain friends to make recommendations about stereo equipment but definitely not about clothes and vice versa. And unless the software can gather enough data to model those subject- and pairwise-specific interactions, it’s not going to get the desired results.

As an aside, it was interesting to me that I’ve gone from being a technological positivist where technology will solve our problems, to being skeptical of most technical solutions, partially because I now think the hardest and most interesting problems are not solvable by technology per se, but instead require the design of new social technologies to coordinate people in new ways.

The next panel I attended was called something like AI and Sense making. I’m fascinated by the question of how we make sense of the world as my continuing obsession with stories makes clear. This was a session where people discussed the idea of sense making (Gary Klein’s work with firefighters was a big influence), how it could be embedded into technology and possible business ideas built on such technology. The discussion was interesting but because sense making is a fuzzy cognitive concept, one attendee afterwards commented that it was difficult to separate sense making from general AI. Two recommendations for further reading I want to record for myself: Perspectives on Sensemaking, an article by Gary Klein, and Sensemaking in Organizations, a book by Karl Weick.

One useful construct from the session was the idea that we create a frame, view everything coming in through that frame, but keep track of whether things are corroborating with reality. Once the discrepancy with reality grows too large, we have to consider junking the existing frame and finding a new one that fits the data better, which I see as yet another form of Bruno Latour’s process.

Then it was time for the keynote speech by Paul Saffo, which I had been eagerly anticipating after having seen him speak several years ago. I was not disappointed – even though it covered many of the same topics as that previous talk, it was entertaining and informative. Tidbits that I wrote down:

• “If you don’t change direction, you’ll end up where you are heading.” (in other words, inaction is a choice with consequences)
• The future will still have a lot of dull parts (riffing on Hitchcock’s claim that “Drama is life with the dull parts cut out of it”). We look forward to all the excitement of the future but forget that amid all that excitement will stlil be dull parts.
• “Change is never linear” (s-curve, s-curve)
• “Cherish failure, especially someone else’s” – this was a theme from the other talk I attended, where he pointed out that the consequences of the s-curve is that the time when everybody decides that a technology is a failure and that it will never work is the time when it might be just about to take off. Which actually made me wonder about my dismissal of semantic technologies in the session earlier, as part of the reason I dismissed it is that it’s been “just around the corner” for 20 years now, which, in Saffo’s world, means it may be just about to finally succeed.
• “Look for indicators” – form a quick opinion, but then look for proof that you’re wrong, which he elaborates in his strong opinions, weakly held blog post.
• “Use forecast techniques until reality gets too complex” – this was an interesting riff where he said that even our forecasting techniques continually get outmoded and need to be updated. He believes that we’re in such a phase transition now, where the old qualitative models are breaking down, but new quantitative models haven’t arrived yet. The four factors that he thinks will drive the next generation of forecasting models are Moore’s law, better forecasting algorithms, more and better data, and more of our lives being stored in digital form thanks to Facebook. My eyes lit up, as that’s a perfect explanation of why I joined a forecasting group at Google.
• Three book recommendations: the novel Daemon, by Daniel Suarez, “A general theory of bureaucracy” by Elliot Jaques, and the “creative destruction” work of Joseph Schumpeter.

Sunday morning started with a panel on synthetic biology. There were a variety of panelists, with backgrounds in physics, software, and biology, but my favorite was Denise Caruso of the Hybrid Vigor institute, as she questioned the assumptions that the optimistic scientists were making. Her focus area has been on risk analysis, especially in new fields where the risks are difficult to quantify, but her point is that the benefits are equally difficult to quantify, so we shouldn’t be going in with the assumption that innovation is automatically good. Her belief is that we need to come up with better processes and methods for assessing risk with interdisciplinary input. You can see why a generalist like me would be a fan (I actually asked a question during Q&A supporting her viewpoint). I chatted with her a bit afterwards, and also attended the breakout session after lunch with her on innovation and risk, which brought together interesting conversations and different perspectives (the work that Etan Ayalon is doing at GlobalTech Research looks particularly interesting to me). I also liked Caruso’s concept of Bayesian regulation, where it’s not black and white, but involves conditional probabilities.

I missed the next session as I ended up chatting with folks from that first after lunch session for about half the next session, and then had to prepare for my session, “How do organizations think?” I threw it open as a discussion forum expanding on the ideas in my post on organizational cognition, and had a good discussion with the eight people who attended. We talked about different people’s experiences with different organizational structures and what might work to improve those. One key concept that was identified was that designing an organizational culture and structure has to first start with the purpose for which the organization is built. Different structures will serve different purposes, and incongruities between the structure and purpose will cause friction. People expressed interest in possibly having a follow up session after the conference was over, but I didn’t get everybody’s contact information, so I hope they get in contact with me.

I ended up bailing out on the end of the conference during the longevity panel, as I had other plans for the evening, but all in all, it was a good experience – I met a couple new interesting people, had some good discussions, and found new food for thought, which were pretty much my goals for the weekend. But now it’s time to get back to my normal life.

Technorati tag: Convergence08

On Monday night, I went to a talk by William Duggan, a Columbia business school professor who studies strategy, on a concept that he calls strategic intuition. Duggan has written a book on the subject, and has set up a blog to discuss the concept.

Duggan started by discussing the differences between expert intuition and strategic intuition. Expert intuition is built up by practice and familiarity with situations, of the sort described by Gary Klein in Sources of Power or Malcolm Gladwell in Blink. Expert intuition is using one’s built-up experience to instantly and unconsciously recognize the right thing to do in a familiar situation or its variants.

Duggan then differentiated strategic intuition by explaining that strategic intuition is the ability to recombine previous ideas into a wholly new pattern to address new situations. He uses von Clausewitz’s strategic primer, On War, to describe the process:

Clausewitz gives us four steps. First, you take in “examples from history” throughout your life and put them on the shelves of your brain. Study can help, by putting more there. Second comes “presence of mind,” where you free your brain of all preconceptions about what problem you’re solving and what solution might work. Third comes the flash of insight itself. Clausewitz called it coup d’oeil, which is French for “glance.” In a flash, a new combination of examples from history fly off the shelves of your brain and connect. Fourth comes “resolution,” or determination, where you not only say to yourself, “I see!”, but also, “I’ll do it!”

The rest of Duggan’s talk was describing different examples of strategic intuition, such as Napoleon’s strategy in a critical battle. He pointed out that none of these people invented something new – they just recombined previous elements in new ways. For instance, he described the Google guys as combining data mining techniques from their academic research, AltaVista’s search crawling, the idea of academic citations used as a ranking method, and Overture’s ad placement. Duggan gleefully used T.S. Eliot’s quote “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal” to illustrate the value of looking out into the world to find the missing piece that might make all the difference.

I like the strategic intuition concept in general. I’ve experienced that flash of insight a few times; as I describe in my cognitive subroutines post, “I had one of those moments where I connected a bunch of ideas, and synapses lit up”. Strategic intuition also appeals to me in that it provides a useful role for a generalist; specialists excel at expert intuition, but only generalists can bring the wide-ranging set of ideas and freedom from preconceptions that are necessary for strategic intuition in Duggan’s model.

I am a bit skeptical of how well supported this model is. He claims it’s based off the intelligent memory hypothesis of how the brain works, which I assume is what is described by Hawkins in On Intelligence. I see how that would apply to expert intuition, which builds in common responses at lower layers of the neocortex, but it would seem to fall short in strategic intuition. This may be answered in his book, so I may have to pick that up at some point (after I’ve finished the ten books lying on my floor in various stages of completion).

I’m also skeptical of Duggan’s contention that this primarily happens in the mind of one person. He started the talk by asking people where they got their good ideas, and got answers like “in the shower”, “while running”, and “late at night” and used those answers to scoff at the value of typical group brainstorming sessions. I find this interesting, because I think by talking, and often get great ideas in conversation with others. If gathering a bunch of ideas into one’s brain is advantageous for strategic intuition, it would seem to be even better to combine the ideas across two or more brains. Thinking by myself often gets me stuck in ruts that I can’t escape (which makes me unable to achieve the “presence of mind” Duggan cites as being key), and talking to somebody else breaks me out of those ruts. It seemed like Duggan undervalues the role that conversation with others can play in strategic intuition (again, perhaps something he covers more in the book). I think this is one of the roles that a generalist plays – being able to combine ideas from multiple people to create flashes of insight that could not be conceived from within any one person.

Duggan’s concept of strategic intuition does help to answer a question I’ve been struggling with since watching a Malcolm Gladwell talk about what constitutes genius. In that talk, Gladwell differentiates between genius and expertise. Genius is just being flat-out smarter and seeing things others can’t. Gladwell uses the example of Michael Ventris, the man who was able to decipher the Linear B language in a couple years in his spare time, after others had spent decades trying to figure it out. Other examples would be people like Einstein or Tesla.

Gladwell contrasts genius with expertise by citing the “10,000 hour rule”, where he claims that it takes 10,000 hours (approximately 3 hours a day for 10 years) of deliberate practice to become a world-class expert at something. Gladwell finds it interesting that talent or genius has almost nothing to do with it – if you have the persistence to put in that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, you will be an expert. He uses the interesting example of Roger Wiles proving Fermat’s Last Theorem – Wiles wasn’t a genius, and was not particularly gifted among mathematicians, but Gladwell observes that he was probably the first mathematician to just work at Fermat’s Last Theorem for 10,000 hours and he eventually cracked it. Another example would be somebody like Edison with his 99% perspiration quote.

The 10,000 hour rule really dismayed me when I first heard Gladwell speak about it partially because it makes so much sense. It takes that sort of dedicated repetition and practice to build up the unconscious machinery and cognitive subroutines to see beyond the basics. This applies in games like chess and tennis, where dedicated prodigies can become world-class competitors as teenagers (ten years after they start), as well as most careers. And the question that faced me was where I was spending my 10,000 hours.

Duggan’s talk gives me some hope in providing a new framework for the value a generalist might have. Strategic intuition is the ability to bring disparate elements together by seeing the world with a fresh perspective (what von Clausewitz called “presence of mind”), which is precisely the value I hope to achieve as a generalist. Rather than extend the limits of an existing field as an expert might do, it’s the ability to remix fields and combine them in new ways. I wonder if it’s possible to spend my 10,000 hours as a generalist, and, as Seth Godin put it, specialize in being a generalist. I guess we’ll find out.

Over the weekend, I went for a walk and listened to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s talk at the Long Now (viewable at the Whole Earth site, and summarized here). I’ve been doing this for a few weekends now – I can never pay enough attention to listen to a talk like that if I’m at home because I get distracted, but going for a nice long hour-and-a-half walk is a good way to burn off some energy and get educated at the same time. I recommend the Long Now podcast if you’re looking for good talks from interesting intellectuals.

Taleb recently published The Black Swan, a follow-up to his original book, Fooled by Randomness, and uses the talk to discuss some of the ideas from that book. I won’t try to summarize the whole talk but he made two key points that I want to record for future reference. Both points derive from how our intuitions and our mental tools are not equipped to handle nonlinear models. This may seem like an abstruse topic but had very real consequences in the subprime meltdown, when investors theories’ did not take into account non-linear exponential failures of their models.

Taleb posits two worlds: Mediocrestan and Extremistan. He describes Mediocrestan by having the audience imagine a group of 100 people and their distribution of weights. Then he says to determine how the average weight of the group would change if we added the heaviest person in the world to that group. It turns out to not affect the average that much – even if we add a 1,000 pound person, it shifts the average by only 0.5% or so. This is the world of the normal Gaussian distribution that we understand very well with standard deviations and the like.

Now do the same thought experiment, but use people’s wealth instead. Imagine a group of 100 typical people, and their average wealth. Now add Bill Gates to the group. At this point, 100 of the 101 people in the group are below average in wealth, and Bill Gates has approximately 100% of the wealth of the group. This is the world of Extremistan, where outliers can blow up the normal distribution. This is the world of the Black Swan.

And what’s interesting is that we are so bad at dealing with Extremistan. We just don’t intuitively get it, even though we are surrounded by examples of it. Finance and wealth. Book publishing (a significant portion of all book sales are Harry Potter books). The music industry. eBay. We live in an Extremistan world, but our intuition (evolved in a simpler time without network effects) is still stuck in Mediocrestan. So we have to beware of our instincts, because they will get the wrong answers. And we have to beware of charlatans using Mediocrestan theories because they are calculable – it’s like physicists treating everything as a simple harmonic oscillator because that’s the only equation they can solve.

Another example of Extremistan comes from a completely different source. I’m currently reading Poor Charlie’s Almanack, a book of the wisdom of Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s investment partner. Munger notes: “If you look at Berkshire Hathaway and all of its accumulated billions, the top ten insights account for most of it.” He also quotes Buffett as saying:

“I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches – representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all. Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did, and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about.”

The typical investment strategy is diversification – invest in lots of things and trust in the average, which would work in Mediocrestan. Buffett and Munger have internalized the idea of Extremistan in investing and exploited it to their advantage by realizing that there will be successes wildly out of proportion to the norm and targeting only those investments.

The other illustration of nonlinearity that Taleb used was to imagine an ice cube melting into a small puddle. Now imagine starting with the puddle and trying to reconstruct what the ice cube looked like. You can get the volume of the ice cube, but you can not derive the shape of the ice cube because there are an infinite number of shapes that could have melted and left that puddle. In other words, there is not sufficient information in the final state to determine the initial state; information is lost in this process. He uses this observation to illustrate why he doesn’t trust theories; because the observable world does not constrain theories enough, many theories can fit existing data without providing predictive power.

This multiplicity could also be illustrated by taking the sequence: 1, 2, 3. What’s the next number? Most of us would answer 4. But the answer could be anything from 0.1 to 100,000. I can construct an equation that would give any answer you chose as the fourth entry in that sequence. There are an infinite number of possibilities that fit the available data. Taleb reminds us of this multiplicity and displays extreme skepticism when decisions are made based on believing just one possible theory.

Taleb’s ice cube reminds me of a discussion from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig quotes Poincare as saying “If a phenomenon admits of a complete mechanical explanation it will admit of an infinity of others which will account equally well for all the peculiarities disclosed by experiment.” This is the dirty secret of science – theories are worth nothing, because an infinite number of theories can explain any experimental result, including such outlandish ones as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Popper’s claim that theories must be falsifiable to be scientific is a consequence of this – every theory is always one experimental observation away from being disproven. Scientists live in a world where they are sifting through an infinity of possible theories, trying to choose one that best fits their observations, but knowing that their theories can never be proven true, only proven false.

I don’t really have any deep analysis here. I liked the visual imagery Taleb used to illustrate his points, and wanted to record that in this post. After listening to his talk, I may have to get The Black Swan from the library this summer to see if the rest of the book is of similar quality.

I’m attending the Hackers on Planet Earth conference this weekend. I’d heard about this several months ago, just before I moved to New York and signed up then, because it was a cheap conference and sounded like it could be interesting. This is the conference associated with 2600 Magazine, which has been around forever. Anyway, I’m not really a hacker, but I’m interested in some of the same topics, so what the heck.

I think my conference fee paid for itself last night by getting to see a talk by Mike Murray on “Hacking the Mind: Hypnosis, NLP, and Shellcode”, described in the program as:

The similarities between the methods used to exploit a computer network and the language patterns involved in hypnosis and neuro linguistic programming (NLP) are striking. In this talk, nCircle’s director of vulnerability research Mike Murray (who is also a Master NLP practitioner and certified clinical hypnotherapist) will demonstrate the use of hypnotic language patterns, metaphors, and other patterns of influence, as well as showing how a good hypnotist structures inductions in a similar way to the methods of a skilled computer hacker. Hypnotic analogues to buffer overflows, shellcode, and other types of computer attacks will be demonstrated, leaving the audience with a deeper appreciation for language patterns and their effect on the human mind.

As somebody who continues to be fascinated by manipulation techniques, this was probably the talk I most wanted to see at the conference. And it was far far far better than I could have expected.

Murray posted the slides to the talk, but they don’t give any sense of how masterful a performance he gave. He structured the talk to illustrate the techniques he was discussing, and it was so seamless that even though he was telling us exactly what he was doing, it worked anyway. Brilliant stuff.

For instance, he discussed the techniques of buffer overflow using open loops. There’s the well-known information nugget that people can only remember 7 +/- 2 chunks of information at a time. Once you get past that, he claimed that in some sense, you are talking to the operating system of the brain directly. How do you overflow the buffer? You open up a bunch of “loops” and never close them. A loop in this case is a thread, or, as he used it, a story.

He started the talk with a series of four or five stories, and just as he got to the climax of each one, he would say “That reminds me…” and start another story. But the previous story was still there hanging. And as he got into the talk and described buffer overflows, it was obvious that what he was doing was overflowing our brains with threads. I actually started scribbling down the stories so that I could offload them from my brain in hopes of staying clear. And yet I was definitely drawn in – I got a physical buzzing sensation in my ears, and my perception of his voice got much louder, so something weird was happening in my brain. Very spooky.

The next technique he mentioned was using ambiguous content, so that the person can make it specific to their own experience (shades of filling in the blanks posts that I have yet to write). For instance, when hypnotizing someone, he could say “you will feel a sharp tingling sensation in your left leg”, but then he’d be right only some percentage of the time, and if he’s wrong, it breaks the trance. If instead he says, “You feel a sensation in your leg. Focus on it.”, then however they are feeling they stay in the trance. Another example he gave was “You will continue to breathe, focusing on the breath”; as he quipped, “I know they’re breathing – if they’re not, I’ve got a whole other set of problems”. This is reminiscent of the political training that I took:

His [Bob Mulholland's] example was make your message “Stop Bush!” If you leave it at that, the person that sees it applies their own context and interprets in terms of their own personal woes. If you keep on going and say “Stop Bush because he’s against gay marriage”, then maybe that person goes “Well, I don’t know how I feel about gay marriage, so maybe I don’t agree with this campaigner.” Use the voters’ ability to supply context to your advantage.

Another technique was injecting your own code to be run in somebody else’s brain. That means understanding the unconscious brain, which he says is all about patterns (shades of On Intelligence) and stories (I love stories). I loved the description of Milton Erickson (who I have to read now): “You walked into his office and sat down. Then, Milton told you a story and you found yourself changing.” That sounds so cool.

The last technique was also brilliantly introduced. One slide said “What if there was a language pattern in the world that could ensure that anyone who heard it would execute the program you chose?” Then he said “Can you imagine what such a pattern would be?” Then he said “Don’t you think …?” and we started laughing as we realized the answer. As his next slide put it, “The question can not be avoided by the unconscious mind”. To process the question, we have to evaluate its content. We run the code. It’s similar in principle to the “Don’t think of an elephant” gimmick, where you have to think of an elephant as part of processing the statement. Ask people questions; make their brains make the connections and do the work. If you tell people something, they won’t respond – if they come up with it on their own in response to a question, it’s theirs.

Absolutely brilliant talk. I hung out afterwards in an informal Q&A session with him and several others just so I could hear more stuff. I had actually read several of the books he recommended (including Cialdini and Blink), but I want to follow up on Milton Erickson, and possibly Gregory Bateson, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, as well. Also, he pointed people at the NLP Canada blog, which I plan to start reading – NLP Canada is where he trained.

P.S. One thought I had later in the evening while discussing this with a friend who I happened to meet at the talk: the idea of open loops may explain the flow of great conversations. As the participants start threads, they remind people of other threads, and all of these open loops are left hanging, leading the conversation participants into a state of mutual hypnosis. That’s why it takes time for a great conversation to get rolling, for the open loops to pile up. It’s why any interruption tends to destroy the conversation; the context switch flushes all of the open loops. It’s why the great conversations I’ve had which last for hours often feel like they’re in a timeless state where I have no idea how long we’ve been talking – I’m in a hypnotic state. I’m not sure this is valid, but I think it’s a really fascinating possibility.

Douglas Hofstadter, of Godel Escher Bach fame, gave a lecture at Stanford this evening. I happened to hear about it, and convinced DocBug to go with me (which worked out great when I didn’t allow enough time for traffic because he was able to save me a seat despite a standing-room-only crowd). Hofstadter’s a great speaker. Interesting and personable, with entertaining stories to illustrate his points. Plus he used hand-drawn transparencies on an overhead projector. Old skool, dude.

I was intrigued by the title of the talk, “Analogy as the Core of Cognition”. I thought I might agree with it, but I wanted to hear more about where he was coming from. I liked one story he told to illustrate what he meant: his one-year-old daughter was playing with a dustbuster. Press the button, it made noise. Press the button, it made noise. Then she found another button on the dustbuster. She pressed it. It did not make noise (it was the one to open the dustbuster and empty the filter). And then she looked at her father as if to say “Yo, what’s up?!” (note: not actually how he phrased it). Making the analogy from her own experience, she had expected all buttons on this object to make noise.

Hofstadter’s theory is that all thinking and cognition comes back to this same core use of analogy to one’s own experience: “This is like that other thing, so it should behave similarly”. I think I may agree with him. I had started a series of posts a couple months ago (part 1 and part 2) that was exploring that cognitive process of how we fill in information that we do not know by assuming it was like our previous experience (I need to go back and finish up that series of posts). Along similar lines, Hofstadter made the point that there is no cognitive difference between a single memory trace and a category or concept. As soon as we have a single cognitive element, we can relate other cognitive elements to it. He used the example of the statement “Maybe there are two or three Einsteins in the audience”; there was only one Albert Einstein historically, but he defined a genius “category” into which others can now be placed.

One thought-provoking point was on the process of chunking, where we group things together, and then group the groups, and so on up the chain (e.g. labradors and retrievers and poodles are grouped into “dogs”, and then dogs and cats and monkeys are grouped into “mammals”, and mammals and reptiles are grouped into “animals” and each category becomes more abstract). Hofstadter said that we build up these groups from specific examples, and so we can always deconstruct the groups by looking inside. What struck me about this point was that there are times when I am asked to look inside an abstract concept and I feel like I have to construct its constituent members on the fly, rather than deconstructing the concept from the way I originally made it. But when I started to think of examples from my own experience, I realized that they were all abstract concepts that I had not devised (e.g. somebody once asked me to explain some economic principle that I’d quoted from The Economist). It was somebody else’s abstraction, which is why I had to struggle to construct its constituent members. This process of being able to use somebody else’s abstractions (or analogies as Hofstadter would have it) is interesting, especially in the sense that we can use them even if we did not construct them ourselves. But I’m not sure where I’m going with this, so I’ll stop now.

Another point I really liked was that he emphasized that these analogies are entirely in our heads. They may relate to things in the outside world, but the analogies are between our mental representations of those things. We sometimes project these mental analogies to the outside world, but it is not the world’s fault when they don’t apply.

He mentioned the idea of “unlabelled concepts”, but then skipped over it because he was running out of time which was a disappointment because I’m intrigued by it. The example he used in passing was that there are certain experiences he had had, but completely forgot about, because there was nothing for the experience to relate to and no easy way to label it. But when a new experience evoked the old one (e.g. his one-year-old’s disappointment with the Dustbuster reminded him of one of his own childhood disappointments), the analogy tied the experiences together. I’ve definitely felt this experience myself, when a bunch of unrelated concepts finally align into a structure and everything locks together into an “Aha!” moment. I tend to think in architectural structures rather than bilateral analogies, but I think it’s the same idea.

One minor quibble I had is that he stretched the idea of an analogy so far that it was unclear what he meant by it at the end because he used it differently in different situations. But since I’ve done the same thing myself, I’m sympathetic.

It was an interesting talk. I liked that he took a radical position, and tried to defend it. I’m not sure he entirely succeeded, but he got me thinking, and that’s a good thing. The talk reminded me that I need to do more things that make me think, whether going to good talks, or reading books, or talking to people that challenge me. I let myself get too lazy and set in my thinking habits. And I really enjoy stretching my mind – I could feel my mind revving up trying to take Hofstadter’s ideas and relate them to my own experience and figure out if they made sense to me or not. More thinking. Less lazing about. Since I’m currently unemployed, I have no excuse for not getting back to blogging about abstruse philosophical concepts again.

Bug and I chatted for a bit afterwards, and I brought up my difficulty with the construction of chunking, and he asked me a really good question, which is how do we decide which analogies to make? We have a network of analogies in our mind, and we get a new concept (whether an experience or an object) – where do we hook it into our network and why? I said that it was probably a matter of feature recognition – what other things already in our minds did it most closely resemble? Bug pushed back and said, okay, what are the features and how do we measure similarity/resemblance? He suggested that it comes down to our own experience. We make analogies based on the ways in which we’ve perceived and experienced things, like Hofstadter’s one-year-old with the dustbuster.

One thing I thought of on the drive home was that this network of analogies is one of the reasons I sometimes get tangled up when I’m trying to explain something. I’ll relate it to one thing, and then when that explanation doesn’t seem to work, I’ll relate it to another thing. And they’re all connected in my head, but the connection may not be obvious to somebody else who does not have the same experiences as me, so I end up confusing them more (I was chided recently to “keep my story straight”). I need to remember to make the connection between viewpoints more evident, especially when switching. Of course, if the person I’m talking to believes there’s only one “true” way of looking at things, changing viewpoints will only confuse the issue. But that’s a separate personal jihad.

Okay, this is totally scattered and incoherent, but I’m going to post it anyway. Editing is for wusses.

As mentioned in a post last month (gosh, it’s been a while since I’ve been blogging), I co-led a session on “Meta-BrainJamming”, aka “Building a Better BrainJam”. It was interesting to me primarily because there is no “right” way to run one of these things; each of the choices is a design choice. One of the things I learned from what Chris Heuer said at this session was that he envisioned the BrainJams as a series of events, where they would try different things at each event to see what happened and whether they wanted to keep it.

I think the fascinating thing to me is how choices in organization and structure are choices about what kind of community one wants to foster. For instance, the five-minute one-on-one sessions encourage a shallow but broad network of connections – you meet lots of people, but don’t really get to know any of them. But if people end up having hour-and-a-half long conversations with each person, they’ll only meet two or three people per day, and the network suffers from a lack of interconnections. Is one of these “better” than the other? Not necessarily. But the communities they engender will be different.

It was interesting how the one-on-one sessions were perceived by different people. I thought they were really interesting because I did not have an agenda going in, so I was open to following conversations wherever they went. Others were disappointed, because they were trying to find or hire people to help them with projects, and were not able to find appropriate people (partially due to the way the one-on-ones were arranged such that people with ideas talked to people without ideas). But it’s again a choice of communities – being forced to talk to essentially random people opens your eyes in a different way than staying within one’s group.

This idea that communities are a result of these sorts of design choices struck me as a really deep insight at the time. I guess it’s kind of obvious, but it’s something I often forget – that communities don’t just happen or grow autonomously. They are a result of the choices made by its members who create the community collectively. Most of the times those choices are made unthinkingly (e.g. “This is the way everybody else does it”), but the choices are still being made. I think a lot of company leaders need to think about what their culture design choices say about their company. But that’s another rant.

One of the things I really like about Chris’s vision for having regular BrainJams is that he can experiment with different ways of running the BrainJams to see which build the type of community that he’s hoping to build. It’s an almost scientific process, as he tweaks a couple variables, runs the event again, and sees if he likes the results. The first time he tried groups of four to six people as an icebreaker exercise. This last time it was one-on-one sessions. Different advantages and disadvantages to both. I’m looking forward to what they’ll try for the next one.

Another advantage of having regular events is that it will help to build a community. The BrainJams themselves can be used as an opportunity to throw the doors open and meet new people, and then it’s up to individual people to build on and strengthen those connections between the BrainJams. This also balances the insider/outsider dynamic – because I can get in touch with people I met at the last BrainJam and talk to them outside of the BrainJams events, it frees up the BrainJams as a time to meet new people and expand my circle.

Some other concerns that came up at the Meta-Brainjamming session were:

• How to accommodate people that have a specific agenda. There were some people who had projects for which they were looking for people to help them. It was difficult for those people to find other compatible people given the freeform nature of the event. My suggestion was that maybe it would be a good idea to have a way for people with specific agendas to publish them beforehand, so they can be matched up with like-minded souls, while those of us who have no such agendas can go with the random access conversations that currently happen.
• What will happen when these events grow too large? The first two events have been in the 60-80 person range where even though I couldn’t meet everybody, I feel like I met a significant fraction of folks by the end of the day. If the events grew to 200 or 300, it would be too big, I think. But if the size is limited, how should the event be run to ensure that newcomers are welcomed so that the community can get fresh perspectives? Tough questions. It seems like there’s a Dunbar number limit, so maybe any time a particular BrainJams community reaches a size of 100-150, it splits off into two groups (much like Gore and Associates). There could be cross-pollination between groups, but that would accommodate both the need to keep growing and gaining new perspectives, but also the need for each BrainJam community to stay accessible and participatory. Just a thought.
• How to keep track of everybody that we talk to. I think the one-on-one sessions were almost too rushed, because people were trying to squeeze conversations into five minutes, which consisted of two minute introductions by each person, which left only one minute for actual discussion. I think Brian suggested that there need to be more frequent breaks (maybe every three to four conversations) so that people get a chance to jot down some notes about who they’ve talked to while they still remember the conversations, and can follow up to get contact info. This might also be a place where having people fill out a one paragraph summary of their interests in their registration form could come in handy – by cross-referencing names to blurbs, it might be easier to reconstruct which conversations one wanted to follow up on. Of course, it’d be even easier if there were a way to automate the whole process (bar codes? ).

Okay, enough rambling. I’m amazed I’m able to reconstruct as much as I did about where I was going with this post a month ago when I started it. The main insight: communities are designed, either consciously or not. Think about the kinds of communities that your choices engender.

Technorati tags: BrainJams BrainJams3dec2005

As noted previously, I went to a “BrainJam” on Saturday. It was excellent, everything I had hoped it would be. I met a bunch of interesting people, had some thought-provoking conversations, and was left wanting more, even at the end of a long day (9am-7pm) of talking.

In the morning, they started off with essentially speed-dating, where we talked one-on-one to somebody for five minutes, and then rotated. We did this for a couple hours, so I talked to around 15 people, from very different backgrounds ranging from a Google employee who was just getting started with blogs, to a VC who was looking for interesting ideas, to a former CTO of Visa looking for new opportunities, to people from nonprofits looking for tech assistance. I’ll probably post my full notes when I get a chance to type them up.

I was a bit concerned that the 5-minute format would be boring because we’d each be repeating the same introduction over and over again, but I found myself changing my pitch depending on what the other person said. And I was able to get my pitch down better and better, so that was an unexpected side benefit. So that was fun. The frustrating bit was that each time the bell rang it was like “D’oh, we just started to get into a meaty conversation and now we have to stop”. But on the other hand, I wouldn’t have met as many people if they hadn’t enforced the five minute thing. So it’s a balance.

At lunch I sat down at a table with people I hadn’t met yet, and had an conversation with one guy about the medical records system he’s working on and mentioned a reference from Dourish on how people use medical records, which he thought was interesting and relevant.

And there were two women at the table who were talking about trying to set up a website that would let people find out where to get a good cappucino. They were talking about doing data mining, using address references in blogs and the like to extract information, and I suggested that perhaps they should consider leveraging their users with a rating system. And I also suggested that SMS was the way to go, because everybody has a phone with them all the time. So if I SMS’s an address to their number, and it returned five coffee shops nearby with ratings, that would be fantastic. There would be another SMS number to handle ratings (input coffee shop ID or something and a rating). Not quite sure what happens with the UI from there, but it was fun kicking around ideas.

After lunch there were larger group discussions. I ended up accidentally co-leading one on “meta-brainjamming”. The group discussions were meant to be open, so there was a place to sign up to lead sessions, and while I was talking to Brian during one break, we got interrupted once again by Chris Heuer over the PA telling us it was time to stop talking and move on, and Brian and I looked at each other and said “There has to be a better way to do this”, so we signed up to do a session on “Building a Better BrainJam”. The discussion was interesting – we talked about how to improve the conference experience, how to balance the insider/outsider dynamic, how to keep the community alive, how to encourage conversations with people we don’t know, while leaving time to follow up with those we do. I may write up a whole post about it when I get a chance because it ties into thoughts I have about building community.

And I stuck around til the end of the day, even going out to the bar afterwards for a couple hours, where I talked to some of the organizers, so I may get involved with planning the next one in February, especially since they’d like to hold it up in Berkeley/Oakland someplace. I’m supposed to track down a location if I can. Not quite sure how to do that, but maybe I’ll ask Berkeley what their conference hosting facilities are like.

All in all, it was a great day, interesting people, interesting ideas, good times all around. I’m really glad I went, even though my voice ended up being trashed from talking all day, and it left me a little exhausted, neither of which is good entering a concert week. I definitely plan to write up my notes, and maybe more about the meta-BrainJamming session, when I get the chance.

P.S. Oh, I should mention that I won a drawing for “mind-mapping software” from MindJet, one of the sponsors. Since I already view this blog as my external brain, it might be interesting to map it out using that tool. Something to do with my free time. Maybe over Christmas.

P.P.S. For a quick look at what happened, Brian Shields, a reporter from KRON4, did a piece on it for KRON news.

Technorati tags: BrainJams3dec2005

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getting started with blogs:This guy was new to the blogosphere, and was a bit intimidated because he saw all these people updating eight times a day, and couldn’t figure out how he could even keep up reading, let alone writing, if he only had a couple hours a week. This got us into an interesting discussion about whether it was possible to make the blogosphere meaningful at different levels of participation. At the one end, you have the A-list bloggers like Kos and Scoble and the rest of the Technorati 100. How do we take that world and distill it down to something people can absorb in only a few minutes a day?

The analogy I came up with was to the sports world. You have the folks who are hardcore sports addicts, spending hours each day surfing the web for sports opinions, going to all the home games of their team, etc. Then you have the guys who flip on the game on the weekend, and watch a couple hours. And it’s meaningful at all levels of participation. Can we make the blogosphere like that?

I recommended finding some blogs that were lower traffic that did a good job of pointing to interesting conversations that were happening. That’s essentially what my blogroll is now; it’s a personalized information service, pointing me to things I find interesting. I don’t read any newspapers, but interesting articles still find their way to my attention. I also recommended writing what he felt like – not everybody has to write all the time and link to everything.

I wonder if there needs to be a blogosphere starter kit. On the writing blogs side, there’s places like Blogger, LiveJournal, etc. But on the reading side, I don’t really know of a good feed that would introduce folks to the blogosphere gradually, a guided tour, if you will. Granted, most of us who read blogs do so because we came across a blog that we liked, and that linked to another, and that linked to another, etc. But it’s interesting to ponder whether there’s an opportunity for somebody to provide a well-written, well-edited, weekly (daily?) digest of the blogosphere. Of course, this ignores the problem that everybody has their own personal blogosphere, but whatever.

Changing my pitch: The two answers I came up with by the end of the one-on-one sessions were:

• In response to “Why are you here?”, I said that I was interested in how the barriers to making a difference have been lowered. It used to be that you had to be a major corporation to make a difference, because it required big technology, and big marketing efforts. Now a few people can make a huge difference; on the corporate side, 37 Signals is the standard-bearer of smaller is better.

  And the BrainJam itself is a great example. Web2.1 was something dreamed up by Chris Heuer the week before the Web2.0 conference, he sent out a couple emails, posted about it on his blog, and 60 people showed up. It was so successful, they decided to make this a series of events, and about 80 or 90 people showed up on a Saturday for this one. Pretty amazing.

• In response to “What do you do?”, I went with something like “I’m a programmer developing mathematical models for a biotech consulting firm. Although I come from a technical background, the more I work with clients, the more I realize that a technical solution is often not enough. I’ve been in the situation where I delivered exactly what the customer asked for, only to have it rejected because it wasn’t what they wanted. So I’ve started thinking about the whole solution, incorporating not just the technology, but also the community, the environment, the culture, etc.”

Last Wednesday, Jofish commented on my Latour post that he was going to be in California for the 4S conference (Society for the Social Studies of Science) the next day and that I should come down and schmooz for a bit over the weekend. After an entertaining miscommunication where I repeatedly read Pasadena as Palo Alto, I eventually figured out that that would entail heading to LA for the weekend. Initially, I was like, nah, that’s too much trouble, but then I realized I could get no better person than Jofish to go around and introduce me to folks in this field that I keep on talking about, even if I can’t define it. So Friday evening saw me hitting the I-5 and driving down.

I crashed in Jofish’s hotel room that night, and went with him to a bunch of talks on Saturday. They varied in quality, as might be expected, but notable ones included:

• Laura Watts presented her work in the form of a first-person short story, interacting with a “future archaeologist”. I’m not sure I entirely followed how her ideas were represented in the story, but the presentation was excellent. There’s a Myst-esque web page associated with the project.
• Fred Turner from Stanford did an interesting talk connecting Buckminster Fuller and techno-determinism with the counterculture of the 60s (it looks like another version of the talk is available online). One of the things I really liked was his description of Buckminster Fuller’s conception of a “Comprehensive Designer”, somebody who would take the technology developed by the global military/industrial complex, and figure out ways to personalize it and localize it to serve the needs of regular people. This is another thread to add to my recent thoughts of how to adapt the global to the local.
• I thought Tara McPherson’s talk about the Eames’s was okay, but I was intrigued by the journal that she edits called Vectors.
• David Stark‘s presentation on the use of powerpoint was standing room only. I didn’t get that much out of it, except for when he referred to powerpoint as a transportation system, transporting the listener to the site of evidence, which I thought was an interesting metaphor. A questioner afterwards came after him and pointed out that it wasn’t just the Powerpoint slides that achieved that translation – it was the patter that went with the slides – the slides are often not convincing in and of themselves. Stark made the claim that the narrative voiceover is part of the Powerpoint presentation, and that the slides are merely one of the tools used to construct reality (or set the Lakoff-ian frame).
• I liked Anne Balsamo‘s talk a lot, entitled “Taking Culture Seriously”. I liked her description of multidisciplinary teams, where team members have to know some thing deeply, but also know it from multiple perspectives. They have to know what they know and be a confident and reliable source of knowledge on that topic, but also be intellectually humble in admitting what they don’t know. I’m biased, because that description ties in well with my theory on what makes a good team. She also pointed to HASTAC, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, which sounds like an interesting concept, even if it’s too soon to tell what it actually does.
• Bart Simon‘s work on applying how Goffman’s ideas to the idea of gaming as learning. I was pretty dazed at this point, so I’m not sure I entirely caught everything, but it sounded neat.
• Janet Vertesi is a friend of Jofish at Cornell, and her talk on the London Underground map was excellent. Using interviews with a variety of London residents, she tracked how people’s perception of London’s geography was heavily (if not solely) influenced by the iconic representation of the Underground map. Her discussion on how various people’s perception of London geography changed when they started walking or biking reminded me of how I originally learned Boston in sections of a couple block radius around Tstops, and only later figured out how to connect those sections above ground.
• I got to have a fanboy moment when Jofish introduced me to Lucy Suchman, whose book I had enjoyed reading this summer upon Jofish’s recommendation. I couldn’t think of anything interesting or relevant to say in the moment, alas, so I just complimented her on providing me with a new perspective for me to take back to my office.

I’m really glad I went. It was interesting hearing about all this different work and the different perspectives that researchers have. When asked what drew me to the conference, I extemporized a few answers:

• Understanding better how different contexts leads to different understandings is a topic that comes up regularly in my working life. In particular, the negotiation of software requirements is always contentious because of the non-aligned perspectives that the various stakeholders (client, project manager and engineers) bring to the table. So learning a bit more of the theory behind this process may help me in a purely practical sense. I have in my notes the “iterative feedback loop” of the “cooperative social construction of requirements”. At least I’m learning to be buzzword-compliant.
• Continuing along the lines of the different world views, I’ve got this idea bouncing around of designing for the collective, which I need to explore more fully. Maybe pick up on the idea of the personal blogosphere.
• On another tack, I have this evangelistic desire to try to force people to see and really grok multiple perspectives, understanding that there is no “One True Reality” that “anybody” can see. Our experiences invariably control what we see. So thinking about ways to develop “critical learning” methods is another thing I’d be interested in.
• And on yet another tangent, while I’m relatively in favor of democratizing technology, and putting control directly in the hands of users, there’s also something to be said for expertise. This is an idea I want to develop into a full post at some point, but the basic idea is that, well, most people aren’t good designers. Witness the explosion of neon-colored web pages with blink tags in the early days of the web. So how do we reconcile democratizing technology with the inability of most folks to do, or sometimes even recognize, good design? Is it a matter of creating higher level tools for them? I’m really not sure. This actually ties in with the first point in that I often had the experience where I would give users exactly what they asked for, but then was told that it was not what they wanted. Occasionally I had to give them something completely different, because it solved their true problem, whereas what they asked for was their interpretation of how to solve that problem. And that’s a manifestation of the ability of the designer to see beyond the surface to the true needs of the user.

Lots of interesting stuff to follow up on in my copious free time.

After the conference was done on Saturday night, I went and crashed at my friend Emil’s place. We stayed up way too late talking about some of these issues, him from his perspective as an architect, and me from my perspective of a dilettante. One weird cross connection that I want to record: when we were discussing his wife’s work as a screenwriter, he was describing the role of the producer as being a person who assembles a mass of people, and when the mass got large enough, it developed momentum on its own and became a movie. My brain immediately connected this to the work of Bruno Latour, who describes the assemblies necessary to produce science or engineering. Not a deep connection or anything, but a sign of how much Latour has infiltrated my thinking – it’s a perspective that I am finding more and more uses for.

In the morning, we talked for a few more hours, and then I had to leave so that I could stop by Bungee’s place before making the long drive home. And now it’s time for another week at my day job.

As previously mentioned, Bruno Latour came to Berkeley to give a talk. I was psyched. So I left work early, but hit more traffic than expected and got to the auditorium just at 6:30 when the pre-talk movie was starting. And the place was standing room only. 150 seat auditorium, all seats filled, for a guy that I’ve been calling an obscure French philosopher, but is apparently a total rock star philosopher. By the time of the actual talk at 7:30, all of the aisles were filled with people and there were dozens of people in the back of the room crowded in to hear him speak. It was cool, if unexpected.

The movie was a walk through of his recent art show Making Things Public, which takes the ideas he covers in The Politics of Nature and explores artistic representations of them. I just did a quick pass through, and the exhibition website appears to do a good job of covering the exhibition ideas concisely, so go read that if you’re interested.

The talk itself also covered some of his ideas from the book. He’s very concerned with the idea of “representation”, of determining whether representations are accurate or legitimate, because his collectives can not exhibit due process without good representations, or spokespersons. He bounced around a lot and covered a variety of different topics, but I didn’t feel the talk cohered well as a whole. But there were some fascinating tidbits:

• In his book he mentions (and I quote) how the eight thousand people who die in car accidents each year are not represented, and are forgotten by the collective French public. In the talk (and in this article) he describes how the French Ministry of Transportation is now representing those deaths, with stark black silhouettes posted at the site of each death as a reminder of their passing. I don’t know if it’s art or politics or what, but I love this idea. Make the invisible visible.
• He talks about how the space shuttle Columbia went from being an “object” (a self-contained entity with all of its properties inherent in itself) before it crashed, to a “thing” (a massive conglomeration of people, processes, organizations and physical objects all connected through the Shuttle) after the crash. Only after the crash did we as the public choose to acknowledge this whole network necessary to launch the Shuttle, because now we questioned whether the bureaucracy (or the people at NASA) had made the right decisions. I thought it was a great point that the public believes in a “modern” “object-oriented” viewpoint until it needs to find somebody to blame, and then the object is no longer singular and isolated.
• He mentioned how he hoped that Colin Powell’s testimony at the UN about WMDs (“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”) would once and for all destroy the idea of “facts”. There are only representations, and the question is whether the representations are accurate and legitimate or not.
• Along those lines, he pointed out that “facts” can not be disputed, since “facts” are seen as the statement of eternal truths, a bias which Powell sought to take advantage of by declaring his statements as facts. When we see the world as being made up of representations and spokespersons, it opens up the discussion, for we can dispute the legitimacy of spokespersons. We can demonstrate that the statements being made are not a good representation of the collection of things behind the statements (in this case, the CIA reports, etc.)
• Afterwards, a gentleman accosted Latour and asked how he could call Powell’s testimony a lie when there was no such thing as a “matter of fact”. The gentleman was very adamant on this point, and argued it far past where I thought was polite, but whatever. I was impressed with Latour’s response though – he has been thinking for so long in this fashion that he no longer even comprehends the notion of a fact so he kept on returning to the idea of Powell being a poor spokesperson by unfaithfully representing the forces he was marshalling. Latour pointed out that if Powell had merely said “These are the data we have, and these are the conclusions we draw”, that would have been perfectly legitimate; it was only by giving the conclusions the sacred status of “facts” that was unacceptable.
• Speaking of Latour’s viewpoint, he brought up a funny example during the Q&A when somebody asked him to give an example of an “object”, something that existed only in itself. And Latour said that he and his co-curator had tried to come up with something like that for the exhibition and failed, because anything either of them thought of could also be seen as an object of study, which entails bringing in a whole network of experts, etc. Even something as quotidian as a rock arouses the interest of geologists, who can use the composition of the rock to tell a story of the forces that acted on the rock, etc.

Wow. I had more material than I thought. Even though I thought the talk was disjointed, it was great to see Latour work his way through some examples, because you can clearly see how he has fully assimilated these ideas and incorporated them into how he thinks. I’m still working on that.

Afterwards, I was a geek fan-boy and got my copy of Politics of Nature signed. I told him I was a huge fan of his work, and that he should think about how he can use the idea of collectives to represent the self as well as assemblages, since that’s an idea that interests me. He said they’d thought about it for the show, but dropped it, but he was interested in thinking about it some more. So that was cool. I should have gotten his email address to follow up. Oh well. Okay, I just looked it up. Off to write him.