Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

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.

I’m glad I decided to go to the Web2.1 BrainJam. I was a bit nervous, since I didn’t know anybody there and I don’t do this stuff for a living, but it turned out to be a good time.

Chris Heuer, the organizer, wanted to try doing what he called Speed Brainjamming, and what Christopher Allen called “Knowledge Cafes”. The basic idea was to sit down with a few people you didn’t know, talk for a bit (10-20 minutes), and then they called time, and you moved on to a set of new people. I enjoyed it a lot, meeting a bunch of new people, and hearing a bunch of different ideas. It was interesting the different directions that people are coming at this from: some were academics interested in research, others were entrepreneurs who wanted to know what the business model was, others were thinking of it as a tool to help their own pursuits, whether real estate or nonprofits, and, of course, for me, it’s a hobby. So it was great to hear about how people are thinking about using these new web tools, and I was always a bit disappointed when we had to stop talking and move on to the next group.

A couple conversations I particularly enjoyed:

• Dave Gutelius mentioned how he had started off learning about social networks by following a Sufi brotherhood through the Sahara desert. Now he’s teaching at Stanford, and advising Ishtirak and PlanetQuest, but it’s still about understanding social networks.
• We had a good jamming conversation going with Dan Saffer, Rachel Murray, Michael Ferguson of ask.com, and Eric Lin. Both Dan and Rachel are interaction designers rather than technologists, so they were more interested in the culture than the technology, a perspective I appreciate more and more as I learn that I’m not a technologist. Eric brought up the issue of making Web2.1 available on one’s phone, and I riffed off of how I want my whole life available on my Sidekick. It’s close (the Sidekick enabled me to go on a three week road trip and still always be in phone and email contact), but it’s not quite there.

After four rounds of conversations, the whole group reformed and went to presentations. This was less interactive, which was a bit of a disappointment. But there were a couple gems.

Jeff Jarvis did a great little talk on Recovery 2.0. I knew Jarvis’s name, but had never read his blog or seen him speak before, and I was really impressed. Quotes I liked a lot included:

• “It’s not a medium, it’s a means”, making the point that users aren’t generating content for the sake of content - they’re sharing their lives as communication
• “We need to swarm better” and “congregate to other communities”, taking advantage of the distributed nature of the blogosphere, rather than depending on mass media to do the filtering for us.
• “There is no it, there’s a lot of different its”, along the same lines.

He also pointed out the three prerequisites for effective swarming, using Recovery 2.0 as an example:

1. A place to swarm to, e.g. the Recovery2.0 wiki and the recovery2 tag.
2. Standardization and APIs, so that swarms can interact and communicate effectively, using XML or whatever else works.
3. Face to face meetings, as the best way to get different swarms talking to each other. Diplomacy is best handled in person rather than through technology.

The other presentation I found inspiring was Adam Kalsey’s presentation of Tagyu. Not so much by the idea of Tagyu, although it’s a pretty nifty idea to have a program figure out the appropriate tags given a URL or text. But by his description of the development process. He had the idea on Tuesday, coded it up Wednesday, tested it on Thursday, and demo’d it on Friday. The tools are getting sufficiently high level that the idea, not the technology, is the limiting factor. Makes me want to start learning more of this web stuff, in case I ever have a good idea.

Overall, it was a good experience. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it to the after party due to a prior engagement, so it felt like I had just barely gotten a shallow introduction to these people and the ideas floating around. But I’ll keep my eyes open and hope to make it to more such events in the future.

Thanks go to Chris Heuer for organizing, his girlfriend Kristie for handling all of the logistics, Brian Shields from KRON for finding us the space (it happened in a KRON studio) and producing a piece for the evening news on it, and to everybody else for being interesting and friendly.

Technorati tag: Web2.1 Web2.1BrainJam Web2point1

After waffling for a bit, I decided to go to Web 2.1 after all. I stayed late this evening at work, and I’ll head in early tomorrow, and will probably have to go in over the weekend, but it’s worth it to talk to some folks whose stuff I’ve been reading for a while.

I think the question that I’d like to see discussed is this idea that Web2.1 is for the people. The tools I see out there right now are still very tech-oriented. Ning.com just came out and is designed for people to construct their own social applications. Which is awesome. Except that I’m guessing most people don’t have any ideas for social applications. I know I’m stumped.

I think this is where we may be overselling the idea of Web2.1. It’s like the ever-popular analogy of software to architecture. No matter how easy architecture tools become, the average person isn’t going to be able to do a good job of designing a house, because it takes long years of experience and many rounds of feedback to learn the tricks of the trade. I foresee that many instances of the current round of social software will fizzle out against the same obstacle.

I think a different focus may be in order. Rather than try to give the tools directly to the people, perhaps we should focus on how we design the tools such that they are most useful to people. What are the design principles of Web2.1? I have my own ideas, but it’s a question I hope to hear some different viewpoints on.

Technorati tag: Web2.1

Last week’s Long Now talk was by Stewart Brand, one of the organizers and author of the book How Buildings Learn. This talk was about cities, and how cities learn.

He started off the talk by talking about demographics. Within the next couple years, more than 50% of the world will live in cities. And the percentage is growing exponentially - in 1800, it was 3%, in 1900, it was 14%. Is this a good or a bad thing? Brand thinks that it’s a great thing, and this talk presents the case against those that think that cities are awful and horrible, and we should all return to living in nature.

He made three seemingly outlandish claims about cities: that they solve the population problem, cure poverty, and are environmentally sound. But he makes a case for each one. They solve the population problem because people in cities don’t have lots of kids. In the country, kids are a benefit - they do chores and help out on the farm. In the cities, kids are a pain; young adults have better things to do than make babies. As he wryly put it, “Which would you rather have, a million dollars or a child?” In fact, people in cities do not even hit the 2.1 children per female average necessary to sustain a population. Since the majority of the world is now in cities, he put up numbers suggesting that the population of Earth will peak this century and then head back down to the 2-3 billion range.

His second claim, that living in cities cures poverty, is also seemingly crazy. When one sees the utter poverty and squalor of the squatter cities outside of Mumbai, how can one claim that cities bring wealth? He cites a book, Shadow Cities, where the author went and studied those squatter cities. It turns out that for many of them, the squatter city was actually an improvement over their hometown. They had more wealth, and insanely more opportunity. Back home, they were condemned to a life of poverty no matter what they did. In the city, they had a chance, albeit a small one, to escape that life, and they were willing to take that chance.

The last claim, that cities are environmentally friendly, he defends by analyzing the ecological footprint of cities. Essentially, the footprint goes up logarithmically with the number of people. Once the infrastructure in place, it basically starts to level off. Or, as he put it, if you took everybody out of a village of 10,000 people, you’d reduce the footprint of the village to zero. If you added those 10,000 people to the city, the city’s footprint would not go up linearly - it would bump up minutely, because most of the infrastructure is in place. I’m not sure I entirely buy it, but it does provide a new perspective on the benefits of cities.

The other concept that he introduced was a hierarchy of change layers. Fashion changes faster than commerce, which changes faster than infrastructure, then governance, culture and nature. He explained it as saying the top, fast-moving layers of fashion and commerce are agents of change, where things are tried dynamically, proposed and discarded if they don’t work. Things lower down, like infrastructure and governance, are more static; they take what the faster layers learn and integrate them. He originally conceived it for an explanation of how cities change and learn, and then later realized that it also maps to how civilizations change and learn. His conclusion? Civilization = cities.

Because change is so important, he points out that it is much better to design one’s structures to evolve and respond to their inhabitants than it is to try to get things right on the first try. He used the example of low-income housing. The best-designed, least-flexible housing always ends up as the worst slums. The housing that is slapped together, but that can be changed in response to people’s needs, does much better. I liked this vision of designing to evolve, because it fits in with my own philosophy.

Afterwards, in the open Q&A session, I asked whether it was possible that the differentiating factor between cities and villages was the ability of cities to evolve, to rapidly respond to their inhabitants. His response was, essentially, yes. He pointed out that cities are laboratories for civilization, that change fast and then teach everybody else how to do things. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it sparked this great vision in my head, where cities are essentially petri dishes of innovation, each innovating and evolving in its own way. And then by people choosing between the various cities’ innovations, we have a form of natural selection, where things evolve crazily, and the best things are kept. When I shared that idea with him after the talk, he pointed out that cities wouldn’t differentiate themselves, because they’re all so connected these days that they would all copy successful innovations, and discard unsuccessful ones. But it makes the natural selection analogy even tighter, I think, because traits will spread quickly throughout the population. I really really like this idea. Evolution is everywhere. Don’t design, just put constraints in place, and let things evolve and respond. It’s like Kevin Kelly’s book, Out of Control, which I should really re-read, because I think I’d get a lot more out of it now than I did ten years ago.

Anyway. Interesting talk. These Long Now talks are pretty darn good. I’ve only been to a couple that were lame, and most are excellent. I’ll keep on going, and boring y’all with these summaries. Ha!