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.

Finding the story has been a recurring theme for me recently. It’s come up in a variety of settings, so I thought I’d explore the topic some more. Let’s start with the anecdotes.

A friend was looking for advice on sprucing up her resume. I started with the normal advice of stating accomplishments rather than responsibilities and looking for ways to quantify those accomplishments. But then I observed that it seemed to me that her current draft was more about telling her career history rather than convincing potential employers to give her an interview. A resume is a sales document, and everything on that document should contribute towards persuading the person that reads it to call you. So we went over the positions she was applying for, and looked for ways to tune the resume to match the positions, telling the story of why she would be a good fit for those positions.

At work, I was helping a coworker out with a major presentation by doing some data analysis and pulling some numbers for him. While discussing what analysis he needed, I also was interested in understanding the presentation itself. After asking a few questions, I threw out an idea for the “story” that my coworker was trying to tell with the presentation. He liked it, and went with it, and we constructed the presentation around that story. This turned out to be very useful at the presentation itself, as the meeting with the executives was running late so instead of 20 minutes to present, he only had three. Because we’d already agreed on the major story we were trying to tell, we were able to cut back to those key points and he delivered a compelling two minute summary of his work, leaving a minute for questions.

Another friend is teaching a seminar this term for the first time. I asked him what the class was about, and he started listing off some of the topics he plans to cover. It seemed scattershot to me, so I asked him what the underlying theme was, the one thing he hoped his students would take away from the class even if they didn’t remember anything else. He described in one sentence the awareness he hoped to create in his students, and I hope answering that question will help in designing his curriculum.

In each case, I felt like I contributed something by asking the question “What is the story here?” When we are communicating with others in any form, we need to think about what message we are trying to convey. For our communications to be effective, we need to stick to that message and not introduce potentially confusing or distracting elements. This is a core principle of marketing, but it has applications throughout life.

Whenever we interact with other people, we are marketing something. That may sound crass, but when we interact with another person, we are generally trying to convince them of an idea or convey an image of ourselves. This is why we care so much about what we wear (and even choosing to opt out of caring is still an image choice) – it sends a message. So it’s interesting to me to apply marketing principles to these sorts of interactions – pick a position that is consistent with your “product”, and unify your communications around that message. If you try to be all things to all people, you are sending out contradictory signals that remove any persuasive power of your communication.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t refine your message for a given audience. This is one place I believe my skills as a generalist are valuable. I can generally figure out how to present a set of given information to others in a way that makes sense to them and fits in with their goals. I can talk to specialists for an hour, learning about their issues and results, and create a useful minute-long summary without the specialists feeling like I’m misrepresenting them. It helps to do ongoing summaries throughout the conversation (“So what I think you’re saying is X”) so that you can get feedback (“Actually, I didn’t mean X, I meant Y”). I really enjoy this skill and find it valuable – now I just have to figure out the career path it enables. In some sense, I aspire to be an intra-organization marketer, figuring out how to most effectively present different parts of the organization to each other.

It’s ironic that this post about finding the core story and sticking to it is a bit disjointed. I’ve tried writing this post a few times over the past week, and it’s still not quite coming together. But I’m going to post it anyway, because it’s ludicrous that I haven’t posted anything in weeks. Hopefully, this first pass will spark discussion that gets me pointed towards the story I am really trying to tell.

I flew up to my parents’ house yesterday, and our plane came in late due to storms. Over the intercom, the flight attendant said that there was “a newlywed couple in row 14 trying to make a tight connection to their flight to Amsterdam, so if rows 1-13 can please let them through before getting up, they’d really appreciate it.” I leaned over to my sister, and said that such an appeal would never work, as I’d seen it fail on a couple other flights. My sister said she’d seen it work several times, and, in fact, the first 13 rows did stay seated until the couple got to the front of the plane.

I was trying to figure out what was different about this time versus the other times I’d seen it fail, and realized that it was the specificity of the appeal. On the other flights I remember, the flight attendant said “We have several people trying to make close connections, please let them through”, and that appeal had no effect, as everybody considered themselves to have close connections, so everybody got up. What was effective this time was that the flight attendant had framed it as a story – the one-line story of the couple trying to get to Amsterdam reified them in our brains as “real” people. The story also invoked our social sense, and made us defer to them as we would for any member of our community.

To give more background on my thinking, my post on the ultimatum game explores how our brains react differently when we have a one-off transaction with somebody (where we try to get all that we can from that transaction) versus how we react when we are part of a community (where fairness becomes a factor as we’ll have to interact with them again in the future). I also argue in the following post that we can use stories to expand our “monkeysphere”, the number of people that we consider to be “real” people as opposed to strangers who we distrust and/or take advantage of.

Making people persons by associating stories with them comes up in many different situations that I can think of:

• One obvious application is that of user interface design, where I’ve been heavily influenced by Alan Cooper’s tactic of using personas to model real users. In particular, one of the reasons I was effective as a software developer is that I was always developing software for specific people with whom I interacted, rather than for a generic “user”. Because my target audience was specific and real and I knew the stories of how they worked, my software was more effective at helping those people accomplish their goals.
• Another example is in the area of management, especially in the creation of a divide between managers and workers. When the two sides don’t know each other, there is the tendency to ascribe the worst motivations to the other side, and assume that they are actively working towards one’s destruction. But both sides are just fallible humans doing the best they can. Sometimes there are no good choices as a manager, and the manager is doing the best he or she can under the circumstances. As somebody who interacted with both sides, I saw both viewpoints and therefore couldn’t demonize the managers as arrogant control freaks or the workers as entitled whiners. I couldn’t flatten them out into stereotypes, as their stories kept them real people to me.
• One last example is in the area of politics, and specifically homosexuality. I grew up in a very sheltered and religious suburb of Chicago, where the default assumption was that homosexuals were deviant and evil. When I got to MIT, and found myself living in a house with such people, I was initially wary. But of course, once I got to know them as people, I realized how stupid and broken the stereotypes in my head were. And this has been my observation of others as well – it’s difficult to treat somebody as a stereotype once you know them as a person, because their specific details supercede the stereotype in your head.

It takes practice to remember to treat others as people, and not as puppet players on whom you are projecting your own fears and hopes. I still fall into the trap of ascribing my own stories to other people and assuming the worst or best, and being surprised either way. Learning to treat others as real people in their own right remains a goal towards which I strive, and I think it’s an essential skill to learn in a massively networked world where we are always interacting with people outside of our own core community.

What do you think?

P.S. A friend’s new blog, Made of Happy, has a neat star rating WordPress plugin, and when I inquired about it, she said it was GD Star Rating, so I just installed it. Now you can provide feedback on my posts without the trouble of having to come up with a comment!

So I want to build on my last two posts (which both have excellent comments that you should check out, even though I haven’t managed to be coherent enough this week yet to respond). In particular, if I treat everything as a story and I’m asking what the purpose of a design is, the obvious next question is what is the purpose of a story? Or, to put it more broadly, how should one evaluate a story?

I’ve been thinking about this question on and off for weeks, as it keeps on coming up in different contexts. Here are some different possibilities for story metrics:

I’ve been thinking on and off about this post for weeks, and it’s not coming together, so I’m just going to write up what I have and see what happens. Or at least put it up to instigate comments that will help me clarify what I mean (as the comments on my “Faking it” post led to the “Language Games” post).

The basic premise is that we use stories to make sense of the world. I’m using stories in a very broad sense here, including anything where there’s a causal narrative (X did something and Y happened). Let’s take some examples:

• The apple fell from the tree because the Earth exerts a gravitational field that pulls objects with mass towards it.
• The cells weren’t happy today because the incubator was at the wrong temperature.
• 9/11 happened to punish us as a nation for our sins.
• My bike is struggling a bit because the derailleur is out of alignment.

We tell stories to explain how the world works. And if we can’t make sense of the world with our existing stories, we invent a pattern (or story). This New York Times blog entry describes how superstitious beliefs go up in times of uncertainty, as people respond to their lack of control by finding patterns explaining what is going on, such that they understand the causes of the distress they’re experiencing. In ancient times, we anthropomorphized nature into the form of quarreling gods, as we imputed understandable human behavior to objects that were otherwise fearsome and unexplainable.

One of my traits as a generalist is that I find patterns everywhere. This can be a strength, in that I can take a mass of data and observations and distill it down to an underlying pattern. The flip side is that I can often see several possible stories to explain what’s going on, and just pick one as a hypothesis. Somebody wlll point out an inconsistency in my story, and I’ll say “Oh, good point”, and switch to a different story (Paul Saffo calls this “Strong opinions, weakly held”, which I quite like). This can be quite frustrating to people who hold opinions strongly and sometimes even mistake them for Truth.

So my theory of the moment is that everything is a story:

• Science is a story of how scientists go out and explore the world and find unchanging Platonic laws of Nature, which is an attractive but somewhat deceiving story.
• Religion is a story of how a great people was chosen by God to accomplish great works.
• Sports tell the story of the underdog rising up, the champion holding on, the journeyman breaking through, etc.
• Brands are the story of a product’s users – as I read someplace recently, your brand is what your customers tell other people (it sounds like Hugh MacLeod or Seth Godin, but I couldn’t find a reference).

Stories have targeted audiences – not all stories will make sense to all audiences. I can tell the story of a great play in football, and the eyes of my friends will glaze over. I can tell the story of evolution to a fundamentalist Christian and elicit an angry rebuttal. One of the dangers we face currently as a society is that we no longer have a unifying set of stories that you can expect everybody to believe. We have a fragmented set of audiences each believing its own stories. To put it in Latour-ian terms, we have a number of co-evolving parallel Collectives.

This fragmentation of stories and audiences drives the need for more generalists. One of my strengths is understanding different audiences well enough to tell stories that make sense to each audience. To take my well-worn example, when I was working on CellKey, I often had to translate between the physicists and biologists and software developers. The generalist can play the part of the Latour-ian diplomat, interfacing between different Collectives and finding the common ground on which they can be brought together.

Every time I post on this blog, I am telling a story. It’s not a story in a conventional narrative sense, but it is my way of making sense of the world, of describing the patterns I see around me. I record these story patterns with the hope that they can help others make sense of the world as well. This ongoing process of finding and collecting stories has been a fruitful one for me, and I hope that you find it useful as well.

P.S. Third week at Google, and already head-deep in a project. Stayed late at work tonight finishing up a presentation for tomorrow. And yet this is the night I make the effort to blog, partially because putting together the presentation employed these skills of telling a story from a mass of unstructured data, and partially because of the Cokes I was drinking at 8pm to help me with the final push.

This week’s New Yorker has an article describing Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits project. I’ve heard about this project for years, and I’ve never understood what the point is. Collecting all of those pictures and articles and emails about one’s life just creates an overwhelming mass of data that can’t be processed effectively. It’s like the shoeboxes (or now file folders) of photos that we all have that we never look at because they’re not organized and we can’t find the one we want.

The dumbest thing I read in the article was their failed attempt to write software to do “auto-storytelling”.

“What we’re storing, really, is snippets and scenes and episodes,” he says. “A movie tells a story, and we’re not doing that.” What Bell and the others imagine, ultimately, is a function by which a computer assembles a person’s autobiography, which he or she authorizes and passes on.

What they’re talking about is creating the self story. But no computer can do that. They are operating under the misguided belief that facts alone tell the story of one’s life. I mention it in that post, but history is so much more than a recitation of facts. It’s the assembling of facts retroactively into a pattern that allows us to make sense of the facts, to tell the story.

We don’t know what the facts mean to us until we look back later and find out what happened – then we know which facts mattered. Let’s imagine that I’m out at the bar having a drink. I see a cute girl, talk to her for a bit, and get her number (indulge my fantasy here for a second). Is this fact significant in my later life? We can’t tell at this point. Maybe I get dissed after one date. Maybe we go on to have a long-term relationship. The fact of me meeting her in a bar stays the same, but the story changes depending on what happens.

The whole point of telling a story is that it lets us understand the underlying patterns that drive events. Stories are our way of making sense of the world. We feel uncomfortable when events happen that are beyond our understanding. As soon as we can come up with a story that explains what happened (even if it doesn’t fit the facts exactly), we feel better. “He dumped me because he wasn’t ready for a real commitment.” “She dumped me because she thought I didn’t make enough money.” “I got fired because my boss had it in for me.” The story doesn’t even have to make sense to somebody else – the story is the way of coping with the unexpected sequence of events.

Another problem I have with the MyLifeBits project is that it’s inefficient and unhelpful. I don’t want raw mass data dumps of my life. If I were a manager, and I asked my team to get me the sales numbers, I would be furious if they just dumped spreadsheets on me. They need to analyze the data, figure out the trends, and summarize it for me in what is essentially the story of sales.

I’m reading the book Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert. Gilbert cites research saying that our brain does that analysis for us. Our brains don’t remember all the details of our lives – it remembers key points, the bits that differed from the routine, the outline of the story. When we are reconstructing what happened, our brain fills in all sorts of details that may not be strictly factual, but that were irrelevant to the story so they weren’t stored. The brain stores the high-level management report, not the original raw data.

There are risks associated with that approach. As a trained scientist, I understand the importance of keeping the raw data around so that I can go back and re-analyze it later. But re-analysis takes time and energy, so it makes sense that the brain evolved to optimize for efficiency. One of Gilbert’s points is that we are deluding ourselves if we think we remember the raw sensory data, and we need to take into account the high-level nature of our memories. But I’ll get to that in a separate book review.

Scientists and engineers love raw data. It has a primal quality to it, a sense of endless possibility – who knows what patterns will emerge? But raw data is incomplete. It doesn’t mean anything. It needs us to make sense of it, to find the patterns, so that we can use those patterns to make future decisions. Without stories to bind it together, raw data is useless.

I’d much rather have this blog than MyLifeBits. This blog is where I take all of that raw data from my life and simmer it down into key points that I want to remember. This is where I record the stories and thoughts and ideas that help me make sense of the world, that I can use to make decisions. It may be a compressed representation (the backup is only 4MB), but it’s far more helpful to me than the reams of data coming out of MyLifeBits.

I was thinking about the P.S. in my learn-and-latch post and trying to figure out the process by which people absorb general patterns into themselves. In fact, what are those general patterns? What forms do they take?

My thesis of the day is that the general patterns I was talking about are stories. I circle back to the topic of stories pretty regularly, as I find that stories are extremely powerful patterns that our brains are structured to absorb. For instance, I regularly tell stories that I don’t know the origin of; I don’t remember where I read or heard the story or even many of the specific details, but the general pattern of the story itself was memorable and sticks with me. I think the reason for that is that our brains are wired to remember patterns, not details, and our predilection for stories reflects that.

So what makes a story a good general pattern? And how do we even evaluate the “good-ness” of a pattern/story? My evaluation metric is going to be whether a story sticks with people and influences their behavior. As usual on this topic, I’m influenced by Orson Scott Card’s story The Originist, which has the wonderful quote, “the vigor of a community depends on the allegiance of its members, and the allegiance can be created and enhanced by the dissemination of epic stories.” Stories create community. Becoming part of the community involves learning the origin myths and the identity stories and incorporating those into your self story. A great story is one which people take to heart, that changes their behavior, that causes them to self-identify as part of a community.

Constructing these sort of stories is really tricky. Without any details, the story doesn’t seem real, because there’s nothing to anchor our perceptions. More details make the story more specific and real. But too many details doesn’t work either; somebody that drones on, unable to resist talking about every last detail, is incredibly boring. A good storyteller leaves out certain details so that people can project themselves into the story, lettiing them fill in the blanks.

Getting the right details is important. A storyteller will tailor the details to the audience, making references to things they would know so as to anchor the story in their reality. I was noticing this last night when out with friends; I was telling a story about my time at TEP, and slipped in an aside to the other TEPs present of who the protagonist was; since they knew who he was, it helped to ground the story, since they knew that this was totally expected behavior on his part. The story was still funny to the non-TEPs, but I think the extra detail I threw in to make the connection for the TEPs helped.

One of the reasons we often struggle with integrating into a new group or community is that they don’t share the same references as us. So the stories require extra explanation for them to make sense. It takes time before we learn the back history and meet the people of the group so that we can appreciate the stories. But once we become fully integrated, we have taken ownership of the community stories as our own stories, and it almost doesn’t matter whether we witnessed the story or not. The same stories get told about the same people, even if the names keep changing.

Another aspect of a good story is that it should create a template for others to follow. The stories that last are the ones that are exemplars of the desired community behavior. We reward such behavior with immortality through stories. In the context of a community like TEP, the stories almost always revolve around otherwise intelligent people who do odd (and often stupid) things. The Hanging Couch, the Musical Stairwell, Water War stories, etc. In other communities, other things are rewarded, whether it’s great hacks (either computer or other) or self-sacrifice or awesome layouts in frisbee or whatever. The stories that define a community are the best guide as to how an ideal member of the community should behave.

It’s interesting to try to take all of these factors and use them in attempting to evaluate the quality of the construction of a story. Is the story well or badly constructed? It depends on what you are trying to achieve in a story. If it’s to entertain folks over dinner, keeping it snappy and concise is the way to go, and you get instant feedback. If you are trying to create an origin myth for one’s community, you have to consider these other factors, the balance between detail and generality, and it takes much longer to evaluate whether you are successful.

It’s very difficult to self-consciously construct such origin myths. It seems too calculated, too artificial (the example of L. Ron Hubbard to the contrary). The stories have to evolve, to be told and re-told, by people who never even met the people originally in the story, eroding the details such as names and dates and specific places until only the essential bones of the story remain. As the community evolves, the stories change to match.

Patterns. Stories. Communities. Welcome to my mind.

Re-reading my searching for continuity post, I find it somewhat amusing how easy it was for me to construct a story that fits my previous patterns of behavior. The story of our self is always miraculously consistent, no matter how our motivations shifted and changed along the way. It reminds me of the comic book fan practice of retconning.

Retcon is an abbreviation for retroactive continuity. It comes up a lot in comic books, where the writers on a given series will change, and then write something that is clearly inconsistent with what was written by an earlier writer. The diehard fans would notice the inconsistency and complain. So Marvel started giving No Prizes to fans who could make up a creative explanation for the apparent inconsistency, retroactively making the gaffe consistent with the known history. Hence, retroactive continuity. It’s basically a geekier way of saying 20/20 hindsight.

What’s interesting to me is that in my previous post, I was retconning my life. There is no real theme in the things I was interested in, no “prime directive” that was motivating me. I was trying to retroactively create a thread that tied all of my different interests together, rather than just admit I am a dabbler. And it basically worked. By only choosing the details that supported the point I was trying to make, and ignoring other inconsistencies, I created a story that unified my life. Sort of.

This is yet another example of how our mind fills in the blanks, which is a topic I’ve been meaning to get back to for months. There are so many degrees of freedom that I could come up with many different stories, all of which fit the stated events of my life. Which is oddly liberating. There is no One True Me. There are a multiplicity of me’s, waiting to be called into being by my actions. The actions I take moving forward define the story I want to tell about myself, and I can find a way to fit all of my previous actions into that story through the power of retconning. Of course, it’s also terrifying, because it means I can be anybody. Who do I want to be?

One of the issues brought up in response to my last post was that we, as humans, are really poor at statistically evaluating risk. We’re really good at remembering spectacular stories, or relevant anecdotes, but we’re really bad at taking numbers in the abstract and turning them into guides to behavior. And this isn’t just true in the evaluation of risk. In some sense, we use stories to define who we are. I was thinking about this and realized that the usage of stories ties together a whole bunch of scattered interests that I have (and was the subject of one of the first rants I wrote).

Anybody who has a stake in persuading us to do something understands the power of stories. Advertising is the obvious example. What are commercials other than miniature stories, designed to elicit the appropriate consumer behavior from the audience? Or, as Neal Postman described it, the “Parable of the Ring around the Collar”. Jesus used parables as well. He understood that moral laws such as the Golden Rule would be too abstract for most people, so he used parables to bring it down to specifics of how he expected people to behave in difficult situations.

Politics is another obvious application of stories as persuasion tactics. In 1988, the story of Willie Horton became a millstone around the neck of Dukakis, and eventually helped drag him to defeat. I don’t know if Horton was an exception to the rule, or a commonplace occurrence, but it was irrelevant. All it took was one case, because it created the story. Similarly, the cognitive framing that Lakoff refers to is an attempt to use language to evoke a story in our brain. “Tax relief” evokes the story of the cruel government oppressor, stealing our money away.

Stories are how we structure our memories. If you ask me about what I was doing on June 25, 1994, I’d say, “Um, what?” But, when you prompt me that that was the day that my friends Brian and Jen got married, I’d be able to tell you all sorts of details about that day. Our memories are not filed like a computer’s, with dates and times. Our memories are filed like del.icio.us, with tags on various memories that are associatively linked in a spaghetti-like fashion. (No, I’m not a cognitive scientist, and I don’t even play one on TV, but it makes sense to me). In fact, I might even argue that communication in all of its forms is motivated by the desire for us to tell stories to each other, to say something.

I suspect that our brains are still fairly unevolved from the hunter-gatherer state in a lot of ways – Dunbar’s number is a good example. And there’s really no need for a hunter-gatherer to have to process data in a numerical fashion or in an abstract sense. Simple stories in the form of myths are sufficient. And I can’t blame people that are paid for it to take advantage of that by framing things in the form of simple stories. But I wish that we could use that power for higher purposes.

Stories are one of the most powerful ways for us to get outside of our immediate experience and feel what it’s like to be somebody in another place or another culture. It can break down the barriers between us – the story of “America” and what it means to be in the land of opportunity and freedom is one of the few things that ties together this sprawling country of ours, from the liberals of the West Coast to the conservative Midwest, from the newest immigrant to the WASP who can trace their lineage back to the Mayflower.

Wouldn’t it be great if we started developing similar myths that made us aware that we are members of a global community rather than separated by our outdated nation-states? It would seem to be obvious in light of the many global problems facing us, from terrorism to global warming to ever-more-interconnected economies. But because the last several centuries have been devoted to developing the story of the nation-state (if my feeble historical knowledge is any guide, the first nation state in the modern sense was Bismarck’s Germany in the 1800s), we are trapped in that story line, that frame, and haven’t figured out how to move on from there.

The other thing that is really necessary is the awareness of strangers as more than an abstract concept. Because most of us do not deal with people unlike ourselves in our daily life, it is easy to demonize them as The Other, rather than realizing that they are probably people who are mostly like ourselves, just struggling to get by in this world. One of the things I liked about the Extreme Democracy salon was Tom Atlee’s presentation on deliberative communal decision making, how even people who thought they believed very different things were able to find commonalities when they talked about the issues in their lives. It kind of relates to an old post of mine about examining our assumptions. And it leads me to think that if we could use stories to help increase our connections, rather than using it to foment separatism (e.g. against Muslims, or “welfare mothers”, or proponents of gay marriage, or Indian companies outsourcing jobs), wouldn’t the world be a better place? I know I’m being idealistic again, since it’s in people’s self interest to try to make their slice of the pie bigger at the expense of others (Thanks Mancur Olson). But stories would be one way to try to make people aware that our self interests are now so intertwined that what is good for one is often good for all. Anyway.

There’s a lot of fertile ground for thought here. Actually, while I was thinking about this entry, and realizing that it ties several broad areas of my interest together, I started randomly speculating that if I were ever to write a book, this would be a good topic. Use the examples I gave above as a kick start to explore several chapters’ worth of case studies of how we use stories to remember our past, to persuade each other, and to organize our lives. Then go interview some cognitive scientists to get the basis for that. Plus some historians for their perspective (oral history, bards and storytellers, etc.). It could be pretty cool. And the title would be “The Animal Who Tells Stories”; hence the title of this post. Anyway. I’m sure there’s a bunch of similar books out there already (if you know of any, please let me know). And I doubt I’ll ever get motivated enough to pull it together.

I’ve spent some time over the past couple days thinking about why Infinite Jest annoyed me so much. I went and read several gushing reviews of the book, as well as interviews with Wallace where he explains what he was trying to do. Part of what Wallace was apparently trying to convey was that life is messy and complicated and it doesn’t come to a neat conclusion. He wasn’t trying to write a typical narrative novel; in fact, he’s explicitly rejecting the conventions associated with the form. I think that’s a copout, though. If you’re writing a novel, you’re making an implicit agreement with the reader that you will follow the conventions, or at least have a good reason to not follow them. To have the reader work for 900 pages and then say “Ha! Just kidding!” is an elementary school amusement, of the order of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown.

While I was talking to my friend Wilfred about it, he pointed out that there are no finite points in postmodern relativism. Like the game of Eschaton, the map is not the territory. But, again, if that’s the point of Infinite Jest, I cry copout. I don’t need a novel to tell me that. I can look at the world and know that it’s infinite and unable to be described completely in writing. But does that mean we should despair and not even make an attempt to write? Of course not!

Why do we write? We know that we can not capture all of life, so what’s the point? Here’s my answer. We may not be able to create a complete map, but we can create a useful one. All of writing is an attempt to create a useful abstraction of the world. It is distilling it down to interesting or useful tidbits that can be captured. It’s making a map of life that others can hopefully use to assist them in finding their way, by benefitting from our experience.

Why do I write this blog? It’s because I like trying to create such abstractions. To try to distill my experience and thoughts into little nuggets that I can refer back to later. I know that most of my writing contains gross simplifications and generalizations. But that does not necessarily invalidate its viewpoint, so long as it is understood that my views are on a specific subject at a specific time, and not a general description of life. Yes, my map is not the territory. But it can still be a useful guide in navigating this complex world.

Why do people write nonfiction works? They are often sifting through their experience and sharing the portions that they think are relevant. Just because Kunstler is tremendously biased against cars doesn’t mean we should ignore everything he says if we like cars. He may not capture all the subtleties of the debate in developing a community, but he provides a viewpoint, one that we can weigh and judge in light of our own experience. And if it makes sense to us, we integrate it into our own guides to the world, our own maps.

I love that feeling when I read something, and a little light goes on, and my view of the world is shifted in response to this new viewpoint. Reading that first interview with Lakoff was like that – it just opened up a new way of looking at politics and the world that made so much sense. There are often a few nuggets in any book I read that I want to hold on to. I started writing book reviews for myself just for that reason – to grab the bits that jumped out at me, that made me open my eyes and look at something in a new way.

I think the same motivation holds true for fiction works as well. Authors are trying to communicate something, get an idea across to their readers. Wallace had several points that he was trying to make with Infinite Jest. I don’t think he was entirely successful, but that may be just because I’m still annoyed. A romance novelist is reinforcing a fantasy view of the world where love at first sight exists, and everybody lives happily ever after. A science fiction writer may be speculating on what the effects of technology will be in the future. There is a reason they’re writing, and it’s to get some idea out of their brain and into the reader’s.

And it’s hard. Communication is one of the trickiest things we do as human beings. Given the incredibly low bandwidth we have to communicate with in speech and writing, it’s amazing that we can convey what we are feeling and thinking to each other. I’m influenced here by the book The User Illusion and Norretranders’s description of exformation, which is the enormous amount of context that we each use to interpret the words on a screen in front of us, or a conversation with a friend. It’s similar to the idea of reality coefficients, where it’s really hard to communicate with somebody who’s using a different context or a different set of assumptions.

Which brings us back to postmodernism, oddly enough. One of the great insights of postmodernism was that the meaning of a work was not solely in the work itself. It was also in the context that a reader brought to the work. Using that in the example of Infinite Jest, Wallace intentionally evoked the context of a narrative novel, but then intentionally rejected the conventions associated with it. He broke the implicit contract he had with his readers. Given his affection for postmodernism, perhaps he was trying to point out this importance of context explicitly by showing how much we depend on it. Perhaps.

P.S. This post was written while wearing a bandanna, one of David Foster Wallace’s trademarks. Thought you’d like to know.
P.P.S. Any postmodern theory referenced in this post is unlikely to be accurate, since I am a total poser when it comes to postmodern theory.