Thales' Press

Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Overcoming Barriers to Effective Decision-making

No one can ever eliminate mistakes or undesirable outcomes from the choices they make. But you can gain the skills necessary to help you and your colleagues consistently reduce the likelihood of being wrong with important decisions. "Overcoming Barriers to Effective Decision-making", reveals why decision-making in a business context is so difficult and what can be done about it, especially when it relates to Marketing & Business Development. It focuses on the aspects of human behavior and offers five practical steps to clarify ambiguous intentions, generate creative alternatives to achieve your goals, and create value by understanding risk and uncertainty.

Where: The Biltmore, 817 West Peachtree St. NW, Suite 915, Atlanta, Georgia 30308-1163
When: June 17th | 7:30-9:30 am
RSVP: by email mira@creativegrowthgroup.com no later than June 15th

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Are you ready for NXWRLD?

My friend Lucio just launched what I think is going to be among the next most important applications of social media - nxwrld.com.

nxwrld.com is a unique community networking website where people share world views and creative ideas for actionable change. It focuses on the key social, economic and political issues that form the fabric of people's lives, our communities and beyond.

nxwrld.com users contribute thoughts, engaging others, developing new ideas around key social, economic and political issues. The goal is to collaborate with other connectors, actively engage in global issues to help change the world and harness the collective wisdom and knowledge into the online dialog.

nxwrld.com empowers people by providing insightful and compelling content, resources, and rich information to discuss, develop and move forward ideas and issues that people are passionate about, especially when they get together and feel the collective power of their growing movement.

Whether you are one person, or a large organization nxwrld.com provides the ability to reach out to everyone or create your own private area that only you and your friends can access. Joining as an individual or linking your entire organization is easy and free.

I hope you find nxwrld.com an exciting place to spend time.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

We can go home now

I wonder if the same robots will discover metamath?

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

A pox on both their houses?

Monday, April 06, 2009

Black Swans Fly Again

Nassim Taleb provides some very interesting interviews with Russ Roberts. I'm still thinking through what he said. Some ideas I agree with. Some I disagree with. Others I'm surprised by.

#1 Taleb on Black Swans

#2 Taleb on the Financial Crisis

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Inflation, the Silent Tax

Friend and fellow blogger, Rick at Economics for One, wrote this note on the taxing effects of inflation.

I note the following: The other interesting, if not chilling, effect of inflation is that inflation induces greater and greater dependence on government services and employment, which Rick alluded to by explaining the dilution of money as a function of distance from the government. Since people typically want more money rather than less (or more accurately, they want the benefits that more money can seemingly purchase as long as thy have more relative to the amount everyone else has), this dilution gradient likely steers people through this preference to less distance from government distributions of money. (In fact, in light of the Obama stimulus plan, numerous people have recently counseled me to seek government contract employment or seek ways to obtain stimulus money.) It seems to me that this then provides an opportunity for the political class to buy more power by linking access to money to votes for the political class that provides the money. The net effect is the strengthening of the power base of a political class…until the inflation get so unmanageable that the economic system collapses. The net effect of inflation, then, is not only a silent tax but an increase in power for the political class that induces the inflation.

A clarification on political class…Party affiliation may fluctuate as people obtain benefits or lose purchasing power as they perceive those effects being connected to a given party. But a class of people that seek political power will engage in these inflationary tactics regardless of party affiliation. As Friedman and Hayek pointed out, statism extends across political parties, leading to ambiguity and dilution in the real, pragmatic difference in the parties.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Sabotaged Minds

If you took your Father's Day to go trout fishing in the Chattahoochee River, and if you caught anything that you considered worth keeping and that won't make your toenails fall out once you have eaten it, you may have acquired a copy of the Sunday, June 15, 2008 edition of the Atlanta Journal Constitution to prepare your catch for the freezer. And if you paused long enough in the @issue section of the paper, you may have seen these two articles...

“Higher ed, lower bar”
(This article was reprinted from the June 2008 edition of The Atlantic under the title "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower".)

“You say sabotage, I say checklist for my job”

The first article seems to square with my experience of being a student in some post-baccalaureate classes I took from Georgia State University. I was taking a secondary education classes to obtain my professional educator's certification to teach in the state of Georgia (which I no longer do, by the way). One of my professors actually confided in me how depressed he was over the lack of ability of his students to engage in well structured thought. His complaints echoed in my mind as I read the editorial by Professor X. These students were heading out the door eventually to teach the students of the state of Georgia.

As I read the second article, I couldn’t help but think to myself that our culture has actually internalized these sabotage techniques as the way to business of any kind. And I finally realized the problem. It’s not that people don’t want to think, it’s that they CAN’T think. And we have taught them to be this way.

Dudes, we are toast.

Friday, June 13, 2008

Did they learn anything?

I noticed something funny in one of the latest issues (May 26, 2008) of Fortune magazine. It's an ad placed by the Air Force. I haven't seen it in other periodicals yet, but maybe I haven't been attentive enough. The ad begins on page 39. It shows a picture of some unseemly third world dictator waving his gun along with his entourage of other gun toters (by the way, I'm a gun toter, too, so my point is not to disparage the gun toting crowd). The caption on the picture says; "How do you discourage a rogue leader who wants to flex his muscles?" On the following page is a picture of a B-2 bomber with the caption: "Flex back."

The graphic answer provided by the Air Force to force initiated by rogue leaders is to respond with technological brute force. I wondered how John Boyd would respond to this. I can't speak for the Air Force as to what the organization's actual approach is to rogue leaders, but given Boyd's insistence on the priority of people over technology to solve the kind of complex problems posed by rogue leaders, I'd be inclined to think he would be disappointed with the ad. The reason rogue leaders are considered rogues is that they are, well, roguish, unpredictable, novelty generating agents. Those kinds of people eventually figure out how to subvert the best technology.

Don't misunderstand me...I'm not suggesting that Boyd was opposed to the use of technology nor am I suggesting that the Air Force should abandon its technology. But I think the ad might have reassured me more of the Air Force's capabilities if the ad featured people and intelligence over technology. But I guess the ad was designed to attract recruits, not reassure the citizenry.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

We don't need no stinking spreadsheets

My review of the modeling application Analytica 4.1 was published in INFORMS's periodical, "ORMS Today", today.

I don't think it will get the Pulitzer, but it might cure insomnia.

I think that should be Strategic PlanTing Tool

Click on the image and see the lower left corner if you don't get what I mean in the title.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

The Way of the Future in American Schooling

This is what I've been saying! Just avoid the voucher system. We need as little government intrusion in this as possible.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

The Land of the Giants

On Saturday, April 5, 2008, I decided to drive north from Bakersfield, CA to visit Sequoia National Park. It was one of the best sightseeing trips I have ever made.

I took this photo while driving up to see the Sherman sequoia, the biggest tree in the world. I probably should have put my car in park as I took the photo.

Friday, March 28, 2008

The Black Swan Giveth, and the Black Swan Taketh Away

On the 1000th day of its life, Bertrand Russell's turkey felt fat and happy. The next day, Thanksgiving, he was stuffed with bread and eaten to the great satisfaction of the Russell family. Russell's turkey met a black swan.[1]

A black swan was an idea put forward by the Enlightenment philosopher, David Hume, to represent the unexpected, the stuff you know you don't know or don’t know that you don't know. It was a play on the popular idea in the 17th century that the only color of swan found in nature was white. Hume argued that although no one had ever seen a black swan, their existence was not logically ruled out by their lack of being observed, at least by Europeans, as Europeans would soon find out. In fact, black swans do exist, but they weren't recorded in natural histories until Europeans (also) discovered Australia. As native Australians already knew, black swans are quite numerous indeed.[2]

Russell’s turkey met a black swan. We’ve all met black swans. Two good friends of mine met a familiar black swan this past Christmas, the one few of us ever anticipate. Both friends had enjoyed decades long careers at a single employer. Suddenly, they were let go, seemingly out of the blue. Sometimes black swans bear teeth.

But black swans sometimes bear gifts, too. Another friend of mine experienced a virtuous swan just after the new year. He was waiting for his privately held company to go through it’s quarterly valuation and release its updated stock price. If one followed the price history of the company’s stock and believed that past performance indicated future performance, one would reasonable expect an increase of $1 to $5. Imagine his surprise when he opened his email to learn that the company’s stock had jumped $17 per share, an increase of 107%! The value of the ownership he held in the company doubled in one day.

This beautiful bird is about to wreak havoc on those who fail to comprehend its predatory ambitions, or it may deliver a golden egg.

Now both sets of friends face more potential black swans. Will my former example set of friends continue to believe that employment always means stability, or will they take more proactive steps to manage their careers? Will my latter friend be honest enough to understand that his company’s stock price can go back down just as dramatically as it went up?

These surprises are the most general grist for consideration in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s most recent book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,

a more thorough and extensive consideration than his previous book, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.

Taleb, literary essayist, Dean’s Professor of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts, and mathematical options trader, lays out the foundation for his ideas from his experiences in the financial markets. These experiences lead him to discuss three interrelated themes that he ultimately broadens to an understanding of uncertainty in general.

The Ludic Fallacy: The word "ludic" comes from the Latin ludus, for “games.” Most of us were taught to think about systems that involve uncertainty and chance using structured, discrete symmetries like those found in games of chance, such as craps, card games, etc. Unfortunately, these analogies don’t frequently hold up into real world situations; but because it’s comfortable and expected to do so, we persist in their use. Use of binomial distributions are often a result of ludic framing, as is its continuous cousin, the bell curve (or Normal Gaussian for those more trained in quantitative analysis). These distributions have appropriate applications, but they do not apply to all cases of uncertainty.
Mediocristan/Extremistan: Most of us live in Mediocristan, a land not governed so much by mediocrity, but by a persistent belief in the applicability of a characteristic median to all types of uncertainty. When most of us think of uncertainty in some domain, we have been taught to think about that in terms of the bell curve. Taleb demonstrates that many types of uncertainty can be thought of in this way (Class I uncertainty), but not all of them. One characteristic of uncertainties described by a bell curve is that they do not scale, that is, the probability of occurrence of outcomes far from the mean (and median) fall exponentially fast. In this world, no one event outweighs the significance of all the other events. Many physical processes with natural physical constraints are accurately described by such distributions. Black swans can show up here, but they are extremely rare. Unfortunately, most black swans live in Extremistan, the land where uncertainty scales according to a power law (Class II uncertainty), where it is possible for a single event in a domain to outweigh the significance of all the others. Extremistan exists beyond the Platonic fold, where our typical representations of reality fail to apply. The processes that govern such distributions tend to be social, emergent, financial, maybe not entirely physical. This will have an important bearing on seeing the applicability to maneuver conflict.
Confirmation Bias: Oftentimes we become inebriated with hope, that outcomes will go the way we wish and hope. To convince ourselves that such is the case, we develop narratives from cherry-picked data and information that confirm our bias. Using these narratives as a guide to decision making, we are disabused of our fallacious reasoning in sometimes spectacular ways. Yet we still fail to learn if we are still alive to face the next black swan. “Beware the scalable,” Taleb enjoins.

The scandalous malpractice, as Taleb shouts, is that the rules that apply to Mediocristan are too often misappropriated to understand and manage systems that don’t obey such laws, often at the expense of lives and immense fortunes. The most pointed cases involve applications of options and modern portfolio theory in which billions of dollars of investors’ fortunes are lost by the malpractice of Nobel “intellectuals” who should know better (anyone remember the tragedy of the Amaranth fund or the trading company Long-Term Capital Management?); the poignant disaster of the unsinkable Titanic; the current woes of Bear Stearns and the sub-prime lending industry; and, in Taleb’s case, the decade and a half long civil war in his centuries-long peaceful Lebanon, a war that he and all too many others sadly believed would end soon after it started.

How does understanding the black swan inform our understanding of maneuver conflict? Consider the martial arts version of the Ludic Fallacy offered by Mark Spitznagel.

Organized competitive fighting trains the athlete to focus on the game and, in order not to dissipate his concentration, to ignore the possibility of what is not specifically allowed by the rules, such as kicks to the groin, a surprise knife, et cetera. So those who win the gold medal might be precisely those who will be most vulnerable in real life. (Black Swan, pg. 127)

John Boyd leads us to understand that conflict is often a non-cooperative contest for limited resources by novelty generating agents. Novelty is the black swan of conflict. When we become convinced that our side will win on the basis of strength or numbers, when we believe that the other side will follow our rules of engagement, we will be exposed to cruel novelty. This is precisely what Chet Richards describes as a disease of orientation called fixation: “...attachments to appearances, conclusions, institutional positions, dogmas, ideologies — pretty much anything that keeps the people inside the organization from recognizing that the world is changing or being changed by competitors.”

How do we escape the tyranny of the black swan? We have to learn to do at least two things. First, we have to learn how to really learn, always looking for disconfirming evidence to the self-justifying narratives we generate from the first cousins of confirmation & my-side bias, availability bias, and anchoring that keep us from considering a wide range of possible outcomes, their appropriate degrees of likelihood, and their consequences. We have to learn that images in the mirror tell us scant little about the road ahead. To do this, next, we have to learn how to properly discern systems governed by the laws of Mediocristan from those governed by the laws of Extremistan, and act accordingly.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb delivers what may be the only book on epistemology that I would describe as both a blustery and a rollicking good read. If only all the other text books in philosophy of knowledge I read in school had been so fun. If only all the others had been so honest. In that sense, Taleb's book is its own black swan.

[1] The reader should almost immediately recognize that Bertrand Russell was English and did not observe Thanksgiving. In fact, as Russell himself tells this story, he uses a chicken as the example of the doomed bird. Taleb acknowledges this, but adapts the story to an American audience. [back]

[2] I am reminded of an event in my 9th grade year in which my algebra teacher convinced a sizable portion of our class that the state of Nevada did not exist, that it was a ruse invented by the US Air Force to deter investigation into super secret military programs. His “proof” was a simple question: “Have you ever seen a car tag from Nevada?” For kids in rural mid-Georgia, his scam was based on a rather safe bet that Nevadans rarely drove to our sleepy little town. [back]

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Spring is here, and we're a little Boyd crazy

George P. Burdell recently called my attention to this article, about how John Boyd's theories of maneuver conflict could be employed in the management of a library. "Wow! Who knew the Dewey Decimal System could be so fun," I exclaimed.

George P. Burdell (a man known by many for his agility and maneuverability) and I have been reading about and participating in discussions about the ideas of the late Col John Boyd since the publication of Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram in 2004. We're relative newbies to this stuff, so we're still learning.

"You know, George, as I was reading this article, I recalled that you said that the author didn't quite get the OODA Loop, even though he discusses its use quite well."

George closed his eyes and nodded. "Yes, you should check out his resources. he actually points back to an article by Fred Thompson on our friend's, Chet Richards, website as the source for his understanding. The discussion is good, but the depiction of the OODA loop is what bothers me.

As I read the article by Fred Thompson, I had to admit, with George P. Burdell's guidance, that he didn't seem quite to capture graphically the essence of the Boyd Cycle either.

"Maybe Chet needs to provide some gentle counseling to them."

I continued. "So, as I've been thinking about the OODA loop and reading Chet's Neither Shall the Sword, it occurs to me that possibly the best way to describe the OODA loop is not a process loop but as a feedback loop, a type of cybernetic control function."

"In a very simplistic way, I can think of my thermostat-heating system as a kind of OODA loop. The slowest possible configuration I can imagine might involve my running up and down the stairs from my bedroom to my basement to turn my heater off and on in response to temperature measurements I take. In this case, exhaustion and the elements are likely to win since they are always on and relentless. However, if I create an electric feedback loop (as opposed to my running kind) from a thermometer in my bedroom to the switch on my heater in the basement, my heater will respond to the variance in measured temperature to desired temperature faster than before and respond accordingly. In other words, there isn't really a process cycle taking place in the thermostat-heater system in which some agent steps through various commands, that is

Measure temp
Compare to desired temp
Turn on heater for x minutes
Return to 1

The electric thermostat-heater system is actually always on (This is certainly true for analog systems in which measurement is continuous. Digital systems do step through a measure-test process, but so fast that it is essentially continuous. Regardless, the benefit is derived from how fast information is transferred.) The benefit of this configuration is not really related to how fast it goes through process steps, but how fast information (measurements, observations) can be reconciled with the environment and acted upon. Since the transfer of electric signals are faster than heat diffusion, my system 'wins' in that it effectively manages the variance from a desired set point of temperature."

George seemed to go into a trance at this point, and he began to channel the disembodied spirit of Chet Richards, which is odd not so much because Chet is still very much active right here in Atlanta, but because George totally disavows such voodoo-like stuff. "This is a very important observation - it's a dynamic process (for lack of a better word) - like a whirlpool. It's always 'on.' Boyd was strongly influenced by the ideas of the late Ilya Prigogine, who used the phrase 'dissipative structures,' of which a whirlpool is a classic example. Absent the continual flow of energy provided by moving water, it can't exist at all. It's either 'on' or it isn't there. Similar thing in biology. As I understand it, even at rest, nerve cells are firing at a basal rate of around 60 Hz. To send a signal, that rate shoots up. So orientation is continuously sending 'signals' to / controlling action via the implicit guidance and control link."

"Your feedback loop analogy is interesting. To work, the system must not only transmit signals faster than the room heats or cools (decide / act), but the thermostat must register changes much faster than the temperature in the room is actually changing (observe / orient). This is, of course, the classic control problem: Make it too sensitive and the pilot will skitter around all over the sky. If it isn't sensitive enough, or if there are significant lags between input and effect, the pilot can induce uncontrollable oscillations."

I continued with my own thoughts, staring curiously at George, who was now levitating in a rigid prone position above the floor. "In more complex and dramatic human contests, the winner is the one who can process measured information (which metrology tells us is always less than absolutely certain) about the environment, interpret the observation, and reconcile the interpretation with reality in such a way that allows transition from one state to another faster than the opponent who is also doing the same thing. Again, it's not that the winner went through process steps faster, but that the winner was able to measure and interpret information faster to allow for faster, more unpredictable transitions from one state space to another such that its measured state space by an opponent is increasingly variant from reality. In other words, it's not speed along a given dimension that makes me a more effective contender, but the ability to accelerate between dimensions unpredictably."

"Hold on a minute! I think we can describe this mathematically. If we think of a state space as a vector of dimensions of concern of an agent X, representing it as {X}, we can represent the measure (observation) of X's state space by another agent as {X*}. The absolute variance could be given by Vx= |{X-X*}| . X's opponent Y has a state space {Y}, and X's measure of Y's state space is {Y*}. Then X is most likely to win over Y if Vx'' > Vy''. In words, X is most likely to win over Y if the second order time rate of change of the variance between the actual state of X and its measured state space (as observed by Y) is greater than the second order time rate of change of the variance between the actual state of Y and its measured state space (as observed by X). In conflict, you're more likely to win over me if you are able to switch position faster than I can accurately measure and respond to."

Suddenly, the phone rang. George floated over to the phone and answered it. "It's for you. It's Col Chet Richards." Now I really felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. George rotated around his waist-line axis into a head-down position now, arms outstretched, feet pointing to the sky, suspended, unattached to any of his acrobatic wires, four feet above the floor.

"That's a very perceptive observation, Rob, and I think you've penetrated to the heart of the concept - 'broken the code,' as Boyd would say. Using airplanes, which was the original inspiration, define the state vector to be its altitude, airspeed, and direction. 'Maneuverability' is the ability to change the state vector relative to time, that is to climb/descend, accelerate/decelerate, or turn in any combination. 'Agility' is the ability to change maneuver state, which is the second derivative of the state vector function. Boyd said that the most agile aircraft wins." Chet's voice was nonchalant.

"And that's true, IF (big 'if') the pilot of the more agile aircraft knows how to use this agility advantage to end the engagement on favorable terms (i.e., shoot the other guy down). That's really the problem Boyd addresses in his Discourse on Winning and Losing."

"So it's as you said, change your position - or 'state' however defined - more rapidly than the other side can comprehend. And keep doing this until you create some type of advantage that you can exploit to end the situation on favorable terms. And you can be sure that you will reach such a position because by operating inside the opponent's OODA loop, you're degrading the ability of your opponent to function as an organic whole. Very shortly, he's going to start fracturing into 'many non-cooperative centers of gravity' that begin to pull and push in different directions (e.g., split into cliques that bicker among themselves). You'll sense that he's having ever more problems responding effectively - in the business world, products are late and seem outdated when they do arrive (Vista, anyone?), proposals don't correspond to what the client wants, huge amounts of time and money are written off time and again (GM / Fiat) and so on."

"It's knowing what to do...which sounds so simple, doesn't it? AND being able to do it, more rapidly than your opponent can understand. So that by the time he does kind of understand, you're already doing something else. It won't take too long before he starts coming physically, mentally, and morally unglued."

"One point - it's not 'more likely to win.' If one can keep this flow going, one will win. Hence the title of my book -- Certain To Win: The Strategy Of John Boyd, Applied To Business."

At that point, Chet unceremoniously hung up the phone. George maneuvered his way to the floor, rotating as he did into a supine position.

"Whoa. What just happened?" George mumbled, still groggy from the trans-corporeal channeling.

"I think it's spring, and you've gone a little Boyd crazy."

Global Alarming

The theory of evolution has an interesting relationship to the concept of “global warming.” There is very little public policy debate about evolution these days that has the potential to affect all of us the way the debate about global warming does. In fact, regardless of whether the theory of evolution is true or not (I tend to believe it's mostly true, but that's another discussion for another time), we mitigate against the mechanism. The most strident form of public policy debate regarding evolution is whether it ought to be taught in public schools. I’m sure it does creep into other discussions. But the point is, no one is running around saying that if we don’t do something about evolution soon, we as a species are going to be wiped out. If evolution is true, we ARE going to be wiped out. Our species will evolve into something different over time. We don’t know whether it will be something better or worse. Interestingly enough, attempts to control disease and predation may slow the rate at which our evolution occurs. But the reason that occurs is secondary to the belief in the reality of evolution itself. We just simply don’t like to be eaten and we like to live with as few privations as possible. We attempt to control those things to our immediate preferences.

The theory of global warming is different. The people who are pushing for its acceptance are also saying without much equivocation that it is all bad, that we are doomed because of it. Global warming is not just viewed as a part of the phenomenon of nature, like evolution. It’s all man-made, and worse, it’s all made by evil, greedy capitalist European-descendent men of the West. This is not something that nurturing women like Oprah Winfrey contribute to. The driving political agenda behind this almost deters us from actual serious inquiry because it focuses more on the assignment of blame as opposed to the assignment of cause. We might be able to learn something of importance and respond responsibly if it weren’t for the Chicken Little and Boy Who Cried Wolf nature of the rhetoric employed by the current driving forces of the political agenda.

Personally, I’ve never had to deal with the emotionally traumatic idea that global warming might be true like some people who come to the conclusion that evolution might be true in contrast to specific Biblical interpretations or in contrast to right-leaning platforms. It just seems evident to me that the earth goes through cycles of warming and cooling. It happened before. It will reverse itself again. It will happen yet again. I believe that global warming is occurring. The questions that remain to be answered are:

What (or in the current up-cycle, who) is causing global warming?
Is global warming bad for everyone?
Do we understand why it is occurring?
Is CO2 the actual physical substance that drives the mechanism?
If CO2 does, does that make CO2 a pollutant, even though a significant portion of life breathes it and relies on it for life?
If CO2 is not the culprit at the chemical layer, and water vapor is, will we declare water vapor to be a pollutant? Should we outlaw clouds?
How long will global warming last (...again. This isn’t the first time it’s happened.)?
If we observe the phenomena but can’t accurately explain the mechanism, will attempts to control it produce even worse unforeseen effects?
How long will it take us to observe the effects of our efforts?
Who specifically should pay for the mitigation?
How much should they pay?

Here’s an interesting op-ed written by a guy who claims he was an atmospheric scientist. I think he might have been. So he might be qualified to make some publicly distributed informed opinion about the issue. In other words, he’s not a second rate politician using this as a platform to advance a comeback in his career. He has some actual training in interpreting the data. Admittedly, I don’t think he is currently conducting primary research.

It’s long, so if you don’t want to read the whole thing, just scroll down to the bottom third entitled “Summary - ...” and read from there. Down near the bottom is another addendum entitled “You’re going to love this.” It’s a picture of skin-layer (top 1 mm) thermal activity surrounding the Antarctic ice shelf. In today’s news at National Geographic there is an ominous story about the ice shelf breaking off with this opening statement: “New satellite images reveal what scientists call the ‘runaway’ collapse of an enormous ice shelf in Antarctica as the result of global warming.” I guess National Geographic forgot to compare their hypotheses against this data set from NASA. If you look at the NASA photographs, you can see that the warming occurs most intensely around the peninsula only and that the interior cooling occurs all the way out to the edges of the continent. There may also be some contributing effects caused by increased local geothermal activity. National Geographic didn’t inform you of that information, though. It’s “...the result of global warming.”

Of course we can all go to our cherished links of editorials and data that prove our position without regard to the disconfirming rationale and data of other sites, much like second rate Bible students do to support some special theological position supported by isolated verses. Of course I want to avoid that. But National Geographic's conclusions compared against the NASA data seems specious. Consider this:

The most intense warming trend is around the peninsula, where the ice shelf broke off this morning.
The right side of the continent experiences gentle warming.
The majority of the continent is cooling or unchanged.
The middle is cooling as rapidly as the left peninsula is warming.
The left side of the peninsula doesn’t even warm up gradually to the intense area. It’s unchanged! The heat is not accumulating from remote locations.
In other words, the intense warming is almost entirely due to something local, not global.

So I’m all for serious debate and inquiry about the cause of global warming as a climatic phenomenon. I think it’s a good thing to know how and why our earth behaves the way it does. But I am totally put out with hysterical rants and false assignment of every significant phenomenon to global warming, especially when those who make the loudest rants and obvious non-sequiturs are the people who have been revealed over and over to have a political/economic agenda that potentially will hurt you and me much sooner than we know with any certainty that the effects of global warming ever will.

That’s the deal, man.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Arthur C. Clarke goes on a new adventure

Arthur C. Clarke inspired me to dream.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Genius

I just started reading Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman By James Gleick.

This is just a fun book. It reminds me so much of when I was kid and didn't yet know that there were "limits" to what I could learn and discover.

I think I'm going to have new little wrist bands made that say, "WWFD?" Yep, that's right: "What Would Feynman Do?"

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Five Models of Business

Some time ago, a friend of mine suggested that all businesses could be boiled down to 5 types associated with certain illicit activities:

drugs - processing raw material into a refined, usable form

pornography - content created once and distributed through low margin media

prostitution - hourly labor

pimping - providing access to aggregated valued services or products

religion - selling promises about something the purveyor cannot actually deliver

It puts a new spin on business, doesn't it?

I wonder, though, if this "catalog" is complete. Are there other categories that could be added? What about moving things from one place to another? Waste disposal?

Monday, February 04, 2008

Definitions of words to be employed for the study of stupidity

There are a lot of books out there that help one attempt to be successful in a number of endeavors. But I think understanding how not to succeed may be as important as understanding how to succeed. Because stupidity sometimes seems to be a contributing factor to failure (although success sometimes seems to occur in spite of it), I propose that we invent a science of stupidity. To that end, I begin here a lexicon of useful terms. I will update this list from time to time as I learn more.

constigration: (constipation + confligration) failure to allow to pass through one's mind (recognize or admit) the contribution of one's own stupidity to the disastrous consequences that are unfolding around one in a consuming inferno.

epistemiology: (epistemology + epidemiology) the study of the population mechanisms by which stupidity propagates.

Godwin's inversion: The probability that once an analogous reference to Hitler or Nazis is made in an argument, the remaining comments by all contributors will be stupid.

jedi mind trick: the mistakenly optimistic belief that one's stupidity won't be observed in public.

ridiculocity: (ridiculous + velocity) the rate and direction at which stupidity propagates.

spidey sense: the mistakenly optimisitic belief that one's own level of good sense and special insight are always good enough.

If you blink, you just might get it

I entered the office today feeling rather blue, after all, rainy days and Mondays always get me down. But today was a little different. I was maybe feeling a tad bit more deflated than is typical for a rainy Monday morning.

"You look depressed," observed George P. Burdell, a man known for his instinctive awareness. "What's got you down?"

"Well, I just read a book review of by Malcolm Gladwell, and I think we may be out of business. I mean, who's going to call us experts when all people have to do is simply trust their immediate intuition, you know, blink and not think?"

"Hmmm. You may have misunderstood Gladwell's book. My observation is that a number of reviewers are doing this, and the one you read this morning may be among that group that has grasped incorrectly on the message of Blink."

Intrigued now that all may not be lost for us, I lifted my left eyebrow and cocked my head to Burdell. "Please continue," I implored with an unblinking stare.

"Well, let me begin with a comment that might be more like a footnote. If you really want to dig into the science of decision making as dealt with by Gladwell, I recommend the precursor work that Gladwell mentioned in the early pages (2007 paperback version, pp 8-11) of Blink, that is, the work by Gerd Gigerenzer published in his book, . Don't be deceived by the concept of 'simple.' It means neither 'simplistic' nor 'uneducated.' That is a key to understanding Blink."

George continued on for a while, and I studiously took notes. The following is what I took away.

Blink addresses two large themes: the power of making snap decisions, and the capability to achieve this power through "thin slicing." Gladwell weaves compelling anecdotes from such diverse sources as family counseling, art history, trauma care, food tasting, police work, and war to demonstrate how people often make accurate judgments and consequential decisions within a very short time frame through a mental process that appears to slice information from the environment into sparse, manageable chunks. If you have not yet read the book and have only read reviews, you are probably most familiar with this high level synopsis. Furthermore, you may have also received the implication from these reviews, as I seem to, that this snap decision making process is more powerful than thinking through problems systematically and critically. If this is the case, I think it is a mistake on the reviewers' part and fails to bring the reader to an appropriate understanding of Gladwell's message in Blink.

It is George P. Burdell's opinion that Blink DOES NOT actually promote the idea that snap decisions are always the best decisions. To this point, Gladwell spends a great amount of time discussing how snap decisions can go terribly awry. There exists, in fact, a large body of evidence that suggests that gut-level decision making (the unfortunately popular way of thinking about snap decisions) alone is fraught with failure and difficulties. A large part of this is due to the internal biases we develop over time, both cognitive and motivational. The representative work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Khaneman (Memorial Nobel Prize winning work) demonstrate this quite effectively. Other recent books, and (each by Nassim Taleb), eloquently discuss the effects of biases on investors who often make snap decisions as well as well thought out decisions. It is very difficult to overcome the effects of our biases, especially those related to the species of expert overconfidence. The worst part is that they are most pernicious when we think they are not present at all, that we have overcome them with sheer reason and special gifted insight. Gladwell actually reveals this point on pg 233: ” ‘When we make split-second decisions,’ Payne says, ‘We are really vulnerable to being guided by our stereotypes and prejudices, even ones we may not necessarily endorse or believe.’ ” And on pg 252: “…we are often careless with our powers of rapid cognition. We don’t know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don’t always appreciate their fragility. Taking our powers of rapid cognitions seriously means we have to acknowledge the subtle influences that can alter or undermine or bias the products of our unconscious.” Overcoming these influencing biases, though, requires a certain degree of informed effort.

“Thin slicing,” the idea that sparse information helps experts focus on what is important rather than become distracted by informational spam, is another idea promoted within Blink that I have heard mangled by readers. I recently heard one person insist that as little information as possible was always preferable. O course, one can see that if that idea is taken to the limit of zero information or what we might call “negative” information (i.e., lies), decision making becomes an act of random behavior. While this might work for the species, for individuals it can be disastrous. It is true (i.e., confirmed by repeated experiments and mathematics) that a little information is oftentimes much better than more information. For example, there is an idea in decision science called value of information (VOI) that deals, in part, with just this issue. VOI is the rational upper bound one should be willing to pay for additional information on an uncertainty that could cause one to experience regret on making a given decision. Unfortunately, most people do not know how to evaluate VOI, and so they spend increasing levels of resources trying to get more and more information on issues that would not have a great likelihood of causing them to change their decision anyway. The effect is to get mired into analysis paralysis such that no decisions get made in a timely and economically efficient manner. VOI tells a decision maker how to limit the search for information. The point is that more and more information is not the answer to achieve better outcomes, but neither is less and less information. Each extreme leads to diminishing returns. Rather, the point behind thin slicing is that there is an optimal amount of information required by the neural structures of an expert decision maker that regresses data from the environment into inferences on which the decision maker acts (Gerd Gigerenzer describes these simple efficient heuristics as fast and frugal). This thin slicing is not related to novices facing novel situations, but ones in which an “expert” has numerous of hours of experience.

And this gets us to the point of Blink. Blink is not about gut decision making by lay practitioners or novices. Rather it is about how properly unbiased experts have developed the ability to make judgments at a near instinctual level. Experts in this case are people who have spent countless hours studying, thinking, and practicing in their particular area of concern. A normal Joe off the street CANNOT use snap judgment to determine the longevity of a marriage after spending only a few minutes with a couple, nor can he determine the veracity of the claims of authenticity of ancient artifacts unless, perchance, he has been given the clues that experts have learned through intense experience. “Blink”-thinking doesn’t work for just anyone on a moment's notice. It does, however, apply to people who spend obsessive amounts of time immersing themselves in a field of concern, who, in crucial moments when they are called upon to use their expertise, respond instinctively without wasting time using their executive cognitive processes.

Unfortunately, many people who have reviewed Blink seem to miss this point. They focus instead on the idea that expertise doesn’t matter. Maybe realizing this, Gladwell wrote an Afterword to Blink (2007) this shortcoming. He sums it all up on pg 260: “...when it comes to fast-moving, high-stakes situations like battlefields (or emergency rooms, or auditions, or late-night shoot outs in the Bronx), …formal conventional analysis doesn’t help that much. Chancellorsville came down to some ineffable, magical decision-making ability that Lee possessed and Hooker did not. What was that magical thing?…It’s the kind of wisdom that someone acquires after a lifetime of learning and watching and doing.”

But he doesn’t throw the baby out with the bath water, either: “I think the task of figuring out how to combine the best of CONSCIOUS DELIBERATION (emphasis added) and instinctive judgment is one of the greatest challenges of our time.” (pg 269)

It seems, then, that Gladwell is pointing to the route for decision makers that all good artists know they must follow to get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. ...And be humble enough to know that bias is a terrible and frequently uninvited companion on that route.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Riki Tiki Tavi Returns

The next door neighbor boy just came over and asked if he could play with the rubber snake on my front walk way. When I looked out the door, I realized that he was referring to a baby copper head. Since I appreciated the boy’s courtesy, I said, “Sure, go ahead. But let me know when you’re done.”

If you ever want to catch a copper head, just gently stroke it behind its head. This places the snake in a near trance-like state. Then, when it gently attaches itself to your finger with its mouth hooks, you can, with reciprocal gentility, transfer it to a bottle like the one pictured here. Under no circumstances should you try to sprinkle salt on its tail. This only makes it angry, and it might slither away. No fun with that.

Here are some pictures of me having fun with the snake.

If you can’t make out the details of the snake in my pictures, here is a link to a picture of a juvenile copper head with its tell-tale yellow tail.

PS. If anyone has a home remedy for the spontaneous swelling of one’s hand, please let me know. Mine is bigger than a softball and turning blue. Hmmm.

Monday, October 08, 2007

When Green Means "What does that mean?"

My friend George P. Burdell, a man of profound insight, recently pointed me to Dr. Bissantz's article, "Can we steer banks like cars?", at Bissantz's blog: Me, myself, and BI.

After reading the article, I called my friend, George, and exclaimed, "Wow! I didn't even know banks had to obey traffic signals."

There was a long pause, and then a sigh.

George said, "Here's what I thought was the key take away: 'People who deliver green lights instead of the underlying numbers have made a decision instead of supporting the decision-making process.' You ought to think about that. That's worth generalizing into a decision support visualization principle, something like: 'Your data visualization should inform and support the decision process; it should not make the decision.'"

So I thought about it for a awhile. I called George back the next day.

"It seems to me that the problem decision support systems are trying to solve is this: How do you support a decision without forcing the decision maker to understand too deeply the model used to support the decision making? 'Green light' is obviously too high level… at the same time, we can’t expect someone to be an expert in quantitative analysis to use the models we develop for them, or our services won’t be useful in the first place. So, I’m curious, how do we decide where to draw the line between providing raw data and digesting it for the user?"

George responded, "Actually, green light/red light dash boards simply communicate a state of affairs against a predetermined preferential threshold. They are not just data digestions but interpretations as well. Unfortunately, the way most of them work, a system could run just under the line of a threshold and indicate 'good' when it is actually very close to a 'bad' situation. This is why Dr. Bissantz says the machine is doing the deciding. You might could argue that another light could be added (i.e., yellow) that suggested that one was approaching the threshold. However, I would say that the machine is still being given the role of human interpreter against a predetermined bias."

"So what should we do?" I asked George. "Don't managers want simple, quick answers so they can run their business on autopilot and go play golf?"

"Oh heavens! I hope not. The way around this is to provide analyses that do digest the raw data without imposing judgments through such icons such as green light or red light, go or no go, good or bad. We should simply report the digested form in such a way that quick, yet deep, insight can be gained and lead one to more questions. An example of such data digestion might be a risk profile or a tornado plot. They don’t make judgments about the state of things, they merely inform with data digested from the models."

And that seems smart to me.

The next time your dashboards indicate "green," you might want to ask what that really means.

Thursday, August 09, 2007

I can vouch for that

When I mentioned my failing approbation for a school voucher system, my friendly free market pedagogue, George P. Burdell, said, "Have you gone all commie on me? I thought the voucher system was free market?" Unfortunately, I think it still lets Uncle Karl in the back door.

Now, lest anyone doubt it, I am all for free market education and an end to the government monopoly of our educational system. So, in general, I agree with the author's contention for less government intrusion in the lives of parents and their children. But before you get all supercilious on me, too, read this article: Are you smarter than a homeschooler?

Then read the linked article again: School voucher system has its benefits

I found this comment in the second article a little troubling: "Home-schoolers may not receive full funding, but instead a tax credit. Still, with more choice, there may be less need for home-schooling."

The assumption seems to be that parents chose home-schooling simply because of lack of quality and choice in government schools. But the mounting evidence is that home-schooling actually provides a superior education, not to mention the many other familial benefits. Why would anyone want to curtail the obvious successes of that? A voucher system may actually contribute more to the disintegration of the family by promoting less time with one's children.

Furthermore, if a voucher system went into place, and home-schoolers received a tax credit within that system, who's to say that the credit wouldn't be dependent on the home-schooling family conforming to the imposed government standards of education? The standards still represent the imposition of government regulation and the attendant propaganda, which will be present in any voucher supported school system. The voucher system simply makes the transmission of government propaganda more efficient.

Finally, until the financing of a voucher system is based entirely on the level of consumption of educational resources used by each family (i.e., each family pays for each of it's children and only its children) instead of the current method of taxing wealth, the voucher system will still represent a wealth redistribution program. Free education for all regulated by the government is still the 10th Plank of Communism [II -- PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS].

Let's just get government out of education all together. Now I can vouch for that.

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Machismo when the party gets loud

Now this was fascinating: "Subjects who made incorrect decisions under "noisy" conditions tended to have extremely high confidence that their decisions were right. They were far more confident than the subjects dealing with a noncluttered image."

Hmmm...so, the "louder" and more confusing it gets, visually speaking, the more machismo shows up at the party.

The original article, "Visual Clutter Causes High-Magnitude Errors," can be found here.

Monday, July 16, 2007

Why I am a Libertarian

Admittedly, I am borrowing someone else's words here, but this idea captured so succinctly why I am a libertarian: I am just naïve enough to believe that the Constitution of the United States was supposed to guarantee and secure the rights of the individual endowed by the Creator, rather than beat into submission any individual who disagrees with the democratic will of the majority.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

George P. Burdell's Recommended Reading List

Here’s a short excerpt of my recommended reading list that I frequently suggest to clients and other professionals. Some of the texts don’t necessarily speak directly to day-to-day business, but the applications of them to business are profound in many ways. This list represents some of the most helpful books to my own professional growth as well as the most enjoyable to read. An asterisk marks those I regard most remarkable. I will update this list from time to time.

Biographies
By far, some of the best business books are biographies about the successes and failures of people in diverse arenas.

Theodore Rex
by Edmund Morris

John Adams *
by David McCullough

The Education of Henry Adams *
By Henry Addams

MY BRAIN IS OPEN: The Mathematical Journeys of Paul Erdos
by Bruce Schechter

A Beautiful Mind
By Sylvia Nasar

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel*
by Rebecca Goldstein

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin *
by Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
by Walter Isaacson

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War *
by Robert Coram

Decisionmaking
Few people understand that there is a well understood science behind effective decision making. If you learn this methodology, you will always make a good decision. Over time you will increase the likelihood of experiencing desirable outcomes, too.

Decision Traps *
by Dr. J. Edward Russo and Dr. Paul J. H. Schoemaker
Few people have the training they need to make good decisions consistently. Becoming a good decision-maker is like training to be a top athlete: Just as the best coaches use training methods to help athletes develop proper techniques and avoid mistakes, Dr. J. Edward Russo and Dr. Paul J. H. Schoemaker have developed a program that can help you avoid "decision traps" -- the ten common decision-making errors that most people make over and over again. It is extremely well written and simple, yet it is very powerful. The basic concept of the book is: if you want to mess things up, then think this way.

Smart Choices : A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions*
by John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, Howard Raiffa
Combining solid research with common sense and practical experience, this user-friendly guide shows readers how to assess deep-seated objectives, create a comprehensive set of alternatives, determine likely consequences, make tradeoffs, and grapple with uncertainty. Not only will readers learn how to make decisions, they will learn how to make the smartest decisions. For anyone caught at a confusing crossroad–whether you’re choosing between mutual funds or deciding where to retire–the Smart Choices program will improve your decision-making abilities immediately, and make your life more rewarding and fulfilling. Look for other works by the authors. They are some of the thought leaders in DA. This book is DA 101, but I use it as a reference all the time. I also use it as a primer with people making personal decisions. Introduces a little math, but nothing complex.

Value-Focused Thinking: A Path to Creative Decisionmaking*
by Ralph L. Keeney
This book is a little more in-depth than Smart Choices. It’s basic idea is that every decision should be framed in part by goals and values of the stakeholders involved. Everything by this guy is worth reading. The material is important and profound, but his writing is clear, lucid, and free of jargon. Keeney gets into some mathematics that may scare some people off, but it is no more than algebra. For the most part, you can even skip the chapters that deal with math.

Making Hard Decisions: An Introduction to Decision Analysis (2nd Ed.)
by Robert T. Clemen
This best-selling and up-to-date survey of decision analysis concepts and techniques is accessible to a wide range of backgrounds. This is the Pentateuch of decision analysis. You must read this before you can enter the Temple.

Introduction to Decision Analysis (2nd Edition)
by David C. Skinner
David Skinner shares the wealth of his experience and expertise about decision making in a clear, practical way. This book is an excellent resource for managers, technical professionals, and decision analysts, regardless of your experience level with decision analysis. It tells you how you make the theory practical in collaborative decision-making environments.

Why Can't You Just Give Me The Number? An Executive's Guide to Using Probabilistic Thinking to Manage Risk and to Make Better Decisions
by Patrick Leach
An excellent book to give to your boss to explain why probabilistic reasoning is so important and powerful for generating deep insights and creative solutions.

Organizational Learning and Management
How to learn and lead within any organization is one of the keys to personal and professional success.

Overcoming Organizational Defenses: Facilitating Organizational Learning
by Chris Argyris

Flawed Advice and the Management Trap: How Managers Can Know When They're Getting Good Advice and When They're Not
by Chris Argyris

Reasons and Rationalizations: The Limits to Organizational Knowledge
by Chris Argyris

The Trusted Advisor
By David Maister

Economics & Economic History
We live in an economic universe: unlimited demands on limited supply. It’s good to think about how best to allocate resources to achieve one’s goals. It’s also good to know how people can destroy good economic practice, especially through good intentions.

The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
by Joseph A. Schumpeter

The Road to Serfdom (Fiftieth Anniversary Edition) *
by F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman

Free to Choose *
by Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, New Edition
by Jared Diamond

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
by Peter L. Bernstein

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets *
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Armchair Economist: Economics And Everyday Experience
by Steven E. Landsburg

Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life
by David D. Friedman

Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy, Revised and Expanded *
by Thomas Sowell

Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One *
by Thomas Sowell

The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism *
By Michael Novak

The Long Tail
by Chris Anderson

Analysis for Financial Management
by Robert C. Higgins

Strategy Theory
If you don’t know where you want to go, how, and why, you probably won’t get there.

Competitive Strategy
by Michael E. Porter
THE Bible on strategy. No other substitute.

Certain To Win: The Strategy Of John Boyd, Applied To Business
by Chet Richards

Ender’s Game *
By Orson Scott Card
This is a science fiction novel, but Card accurately demonstrates in a compelling narrative how maneuver theory works.

Psychology
Understanding how people think and perceive their environment and how this differs among individuals (even in abnormal and pathological ways) is critical to understanding how to work with people in organizations.

An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
by Oliver Sacks

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
by Oliver Sacks

Thinking In Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life with Autism
by Temple Grandin

Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior
by Temple Grandin, Catherine Johnson

Monday, July 02, 2007

The Boids and the Bees

I really thought this was an interesting article.

One thing that struck me about swarm theory is the lack of management hierarchy as an element of the system. That's probably the point. But why have humans derived management by command-and-control and management hierarchy rather than swarm approaches? Conversely, why doesn't a swarm include such a method? What are the benefits of either? The risks and costs? Could it be that dumb humans aren't as smart as ants, bees, and wildebeasts? Are there good reasons that we have developed command hierarchies in our organizations? Or does such a practice represent foolish consistency and social inertia? Might there be some conditions where one approach is more beneficial than the other, but we've failed to be flexible enough to recognize the differences in conditions that would prescribe one approach to prevail over another?

Part of the reason for such a lack of management hierarchy may be that the swarm focuses on relatively few well-defined activities: gathering food, securing and maintaining shelter, protecting the hive, and reproducing. So it’s not that hard to insure that each individual “knows” exactly what its task is. Secondly, the task assignments are probably hardwired in some way (whether determined by genetics or assigned during the development phases of the young. Alligators predetermine the gender of their offspring by controlling the temperature of their eggs, so it wouldn’t surprise me that bees and ants can determine the task assignment of their offspring by controlling temp, food content, etc.), so there is very little ambiguity about the nature and purpose of each task and the vital reason it needs to be done. Since humans largely join companies primarily to earn a living, the goals of their organization are largely secondary to them. Most people aren’t genetically predisposed to work in a given company. They may even switch frequently among employers. In the minds of the individuals, the survival of the firm or human species isn’t dependent on the actions of the individual, and individuals often overlay their agenda with the agenda of their employing organization, confusing the two. Hardwiring the agenda goes a long way to avoid this ambiguity of purpose.

My initial reaction to the truck-to-ant analogy was that such an analogy is a false one. It seemed to me that the trucking company really just identified the right objective function (minimize cost, not minimize distance traveled) and acted accordingly. Maybe there is more to the swarm theory employed by the trucking company than revealed (or even understood) by the writer. In more general terms, an ant is an unsophisticated automaton, following a simple rule. The cases described in this article are frequently cases where the simple heuristic of following local price signals works well. This has nothing to do with pheromones, and it is nothing new. It is free (rational) enterprise, and its philosophical basis and empirical success are well established in the literature. I'm more inclined to see the telecommunications analogy.

It was the bees’ heuristics I more thought about as related to my own work in decision analysis. In fact, I wrote back to the friend of mine who alerted me to the article and noted that the odd thing about the bees was that they weren’t simple automatons, that they formed an “opinion.” What I found analogous to decision analysis in the example given by the bees was that the bees seek a diversity of options, allow the options to compete against some objective function, and then use some mechanism to narrow the choices. I don't think that the history of decision analysis includes consideration of swarm behavior as its inspiration. Rather, I think rational human intelligence discovered a means for solving uncertain, resource constrained problems through rational thought and experimentation, and nature converged on a similar solution through evolutionary means.

Of course, what is missing from the swarm approach is the means by which the diverse options are "considered." Unless bees are more sentient than I think they are (...which very well may be the case, but no bees have disclosed the level of their sentience to me yet. Many have indicated that I should leave their nest alone.), it seems that bees find their candidate solutions via trial and error, stimulus and response. But it seems to me that human creativity is a special kind of intelligence that may obviate swarm intelligence. Human creativity seems to be driven in virtual reality; that is, humans seem to create alternate realities for consideration. We can visualize a desired or undesired future, and then derive the mechanisms that facilitate or mitigate that conceived future state, and we can hybridize our original set of considered alternatives. In other words, human intelligence and creativity seem suited for strategic thinking. Swarm "thinking", on the other hand, seems to be the biological analogue to such mathematical processes as Metropolis and genetic algorithms, a means to solve well-defined yet mathematically intractable and computationally huge problems. If the situation is more ambiguous, such an approach may be quite brittle.

The closest example I know of a company that implements a hybrid of both approaches to solving problems is Oticon, a Danish company that makes hearing aids. The management team takes pride in its minimal interference with the actions of the work force. Teams are self-forming and self-dissolving. If a technical employee has an idea that he thinks is worth pursuing, it’s up to him to convince his co-workers to join the effort. If he can, the team is formed. If he can’t, then the consensus is that the idea isn’t currently a good one. At any given moment, a typical employee will be on several different teams, each at a different stage of the overall development process. The management team also takes pride in maintaining a certain level of chaos in the office. No one has an assigned office, employees keep nearly all of their information electronically on laptops, and most furniture is on wheels – all to encourage dynamic grouping and re-grouping. Getting back to my original questions, this is more than slightly different from the typical command-and-control attitude of many American management teams. The real questions in my mind are:

does such a "swarm" approach to management actually provide higher returns than the alternatives

under which conditions does one approach work better than others?

in what ways might aspects of command-and-control hybridize with "swarm" approaches to produce even better results?

It looks like I have more reading to do here

Oticon: unorthodox project-based management and careers in a "spaghetti organization"

and here

Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think About Business.

The one last thing that I thought was interesting about the article was that the author tried to attach swarm theory to altruism in the end rather than the obvious: free market capitalism. I wonder why? The Wealth of Nations describes how capitalism benefits everyone in almost the same language as that used to describe swarm theory many years before swarm theory was ever conceived; i.e., individuals acting in their own local self-interests ultimately provide what the global market wants, increasing the value experienced by everyone.

The Necessity of the Electoral College

In preparation for the celebration of Independence Day, in which Americans (should) recall the sacrifices endured to create a homeland free from tyranny, I thought I would share a short meditation by George P. Burdell, visiting Constitutional Law Scholar, on the nature of the Electoral College and how it was designed to guard against political tyranny.

I recently overheard a frustrated and disappointed pundit cry in the wake of post 2004 election blues: "If the guy who got the most votes doesn't win, then IT ISN'T DEMOCRACY!"

How perspicacious of him. America never was, nor should it ever be, a democracy. America is a Federal Republic (US Constitution, ARTICLE IV, Section 4), a hybrid of democracy and monarchy, but not a strict representation of either. A Federal Republic retains the best elements of democracy and monarchy while disposing of their respective worst elements. Since a discussion of monarchy is not in context here, it will be pointed out exclusively that democracy itself is not so desirable. In fact, a strict democracy would never be palliative even for those who feel like their vote was cancelled by an electoral college counter swing for this simple reason: at some point, a popular vote may take place that by a simple majority installs a president with legislative intentions that is "harmful" to the desires of those who would now eradicate the electoral college. The electoral college was put into place to limit the power of simple majorities with minority concerns; i.e. special interest agendas. Special interest agendas, by definition, never accurately reflect the will of the people with such consensus that stability and order is maintained.

The US is a confederation of states, not a homogenous political body. These states are held together by a federal constitution "...to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense (i.e., the general defense), promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity..." However, each state has different resources (or lack of them), different populations, different economic concerns, and different social values. Yes, we are unified, but as a federal integration of differential units. I don't care that the president ever visit my state in a campaign bid. But I do care that the president accurately represents my constitutional rights to the benefit of everyone. Currently, the best expression of the popular intent is at the state level. Here the popular will of the people is appropriately heard, addressed, and reflected by the peculiar concerns of the people in their respective states. In presidential elections, this occurs with the electoral college "all or nothing" format. If it occurs that the will of Californians is commensurate with the will of Georgians, then that will is best known by the electoral college. Otherwise, why would Georgians (or even smaller states) desire to relinquish their concerns to the will of a body politic 2500 miles away with a different economy and differnet values? When each state has equal populations with equivalent economies and social values then an aggregate popular vote will begin to make sense. Otherwise, the only rational place for the national aggregate will of the people to be expressed is in the market place. It is here that all people can act in a self-determined manner to establish the prices for goods and services, respond to supply and demand, and achieve personal wealth.

The President is elected to represent the rights of ALL Americans (not simple majorities of them), to promote legislation to the Congress to further the general welfare of our country, to endorse or veto congressional legislation, and to be the Commander in Chief of our military that provides for the common defense. The electoral college ensures that the president who is elected most likely represents and understands the largest concerns of the country as opposed to the specialized and local concerns of a simple majority contained in only the most populated centers of our country. In other words, the electoral college actually ensures that, more often than not, the elected president fulfills the requirements of our constitution more generally than a president who wins 51% of the popular vote. Consequently, the president is not elected to represent the aggregate will of the people, but the will of the people in their respective differential states. In this line of reasoning, it is Bush who won the largest number of states, and thus represents the broader will of the people. In actuality, neither candidate won a simple majority since by now, the actual popular vote is split approximately 49% to 49%. Hardly an aggregate popular mandate for either candidate. In fact, Bill Clinton won even less popular vote, and he was elected into office by 42% of the popular vote cast. Again, hardly an aggregate popular mandate for him as president, but a decisive mandate from the electoral college.

From James Madison in the Federalist Paper No. 10: "Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority." The constitutional framers were astute students of political power. Consequently, they wrote the constitution with the idea that legislative deadlock should be the norm more often than swift legislative action. To accurately represent the real needs, concerns, and trade-offs of a large population of people requires ponderous rationality and discretion. The electoral college is part of this system of graded powers that prevents majority whim to enact changes that affect significant populations with less than majority influence. Our republic has lasted as long as it has, in part, precisely due to the annealing effect of the balance of graded powers. To change this now, particularly as information and MISINFORMATION are transmitted so effortlessly now, would be national suicide. Instability would become the norm rather than the stability that has been our nation's halmark. In other words, we need the electoral college and representative government now more than ever, not the opposite.

But let the exponents of the eradication of the electoral college be consistent in their desire for a pure democracy, if such a will truly exists. If they are going to decry the electoral college as anti-democratic, why don't they go the full measure and denounce the executive and representative legislative branches as being undemocratic also? Afterall, the various bills placed before both houses of Congress are never assessed and approved by the direct will of the people but by representative proxy. And what about Constitutional interpretation? Why have a judicial branch at all? After all, in a pure democracy, the will of the people should directly determine the appropriateness of legislation and the meaning of laws. Maybe the guilt or innocence of alleged criminals should be determined by national will as well. We could eradicate all branches of government and replace them with daily referendums. But we can see where this goes. One day, one law would be passed, and shortly thereafter another law would overturn it. All it would take is a simple majority in a pure democracy to introduce a yearly (if not monthly) switching dominance of one whim over another. This is the tyranny and quagmire of simple majorities that pure democracies introduce and that our founding fathers so rightly avoided by establishing a federal republic that includes the electoral college.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Jonah's whale of an idea

Jonah Goldberg gets it quite right.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

And don't forget JFK assassins!

The fact of the matter is, this cartoon applies not only to conspiratorialists, but also to anyone who selectively applies data to suport a pet theory, not just young earth creationists, but atheist secularists, anthropogenic global warming-ists, etc.

We all have pet theories or mental models about the world in which causation is often ambiguous. I wonder, though -- is the goal for a good thinker to be right as much as being open to understanding why one might be wrong? I don't think the two have to be mutually exclusive, but an attitude of humility would seem to dictate that the latter rather than the former takes a higher precedence. It would seem, at least, that the two should exist in some tension.

Saturday, March 31, 2007

Rodan the Destroyer and Getting Things Right

The other evening, my friend, George P. Burdell (a man known for his sense of nostalgia), and I were sitting around reminiscing and remiserating our days at Ma Tech. Suddenly, George slapped his knee and whooped.

“Do you remember when you got that B in your aerospace design class for turning in a paper airplane? That took Big Kahunas!”

George just had to bring this up. I turned away, crestfallen, to the setting sun. Nineteen years later, I am still mad about the B.

I began my enginerding career as an Aerospace major (I transferred to Mechanical in my junior year). In the spring quarter or 1987, I took “Introduction to Aerospace” from Rodan the Destroyer.

He was known to fly at supersonic speeds, even at low altitudes.

For the final class project, Prof. Rodan assigned a design project in which we were to use the principles we had learned in his class to develop an airplane that could perform three flight functions:

fly “straight” across the length of the classroom

turn a vertical loop in flight

turn a horizontal loop in flight

The only restriction placed on the design parameters was that to perform the maneuvers, we could only add/remove mass or change the control surfaces of the plane. Those were the only instructions he gave us.

Since this was an introductory class, I didn't know much yet about airplane design. I thought the best way to proceed was to copy the designs of aerobatic planes and scale them to a hand-held size. I used balsa wood and card board. Nothing worked. I considered stealing the Tech Tower “T” just to vent my frustration.

Then I remembered a delta wing paper airplane I was fond of making as a kid. It would do all kinds of aerobatics just by modifying the wing surface with flaps cut into the trailing edge of the wings. If the flaps were both turned up, the plane would do a vertical loop. If the flaps were turned in opposite directions, it would turn in a horizontal loop when thrust with a quick flick to the left. I was just about there. All I needed was to get the plane to fly straight for about 50 feet. But the plane was too unstable. It seemed unwilling to respond to any control surface modifications I made to achieve the final requirement.

George P. Burdell, a man known for his flights of fancy, offered brilliant advice. “Why don't you add mass to it. Maybe the added momentum will overcome the slight pressure changes that force the light plane to turn.” By taping a penny in the forward section of the airplane, the plane flew with stability in a straight path of just about the length I needed. A little practice got this right. Now all design criteria were met. The plane that did exactly what Prof. Rodan had ordered.

The due date of the project finally arrived. Everyone else showed up in class with the kind of things you would expect NASA engineers to design. Balsa wood monstrosities. Gleaming shellac. Rubber band powered motors. I swear, one student's plane had jet engines made from small aerosol cans. I felt like the one Cub Scout at the Pinewood Derby whose dad didn't make his car. Did these kids' parents work for JPL?

But then the test came. No one's plane could perform according to the design criteria. They were just too big and too bulky to fly within the confines of the Guggenheim classroom on Cherry Street. No one's plane, except mine, that is, would perform as specified. I felt victorious. My little paper airplane ruled the roost.

But then a cry went up from the masses. “We have to fly our planes outside!” The class teetered on the verge of mutiny. Rodan gave in. We went outside. Paper airplanes don't fly well in the brisk spring winds of Georgia.

When I received my grade for the project, Prof. Rodan had assigned me a D.

A D! I went to argue my case. “You said our airplanes had to perform the three flight function in the classroom. My airplane was the only one that would do that.”

“Yes, but I wanted something more substantial than a paper airplane.” Prof. Rodan expelled his uranium ignited nuclear breath.

“But you didn't say that. Your only criteria was that the plane fly the three functions in the classroom. My airplane alone did that. Everyone else deserves a D.”

My atomic shield had worked. Rodan again gave in and moved my grade to a B. I was nonplussed, though, because I believed then, as I do now, that I deserved an A.

Now, I don't usually assume to know people's motivations, but the cynical side of me suggests that Prof. Rodan wanted his students to reflect his brilliance as a teacher. When I'm less cynical, I think he just wanted to see something snazzy. But he certainly couldn't state either preference, likely for several reasons.

“It sounds like you learned a valuable lesson about design, especially design for clients,” quipped George.

By now you have probably guessed the problem: Prof. Rodan had a hidden, unstated preference. Simple requirements analysis won't uncover those. Often times, clients haven't even considered what is motivating them to seek a solution or satisfy a desire in the first place. They are simply responding to a burr in their saddle or a bee in their bonnet with a limited set of easily accessible alternatives. Such ambiguity is the bugaboo of planning, design, or problem solving opportunities. Even if one satisfies every client-specified design criteria, the client may still express disappointment and frustration that the real problem hasn't been addressed according to the underlying preferences. And if you have ever been the consultant or engineer trying to help in such a situation, you were likely completely caught off guard. After all, you did exactly what the client asked. The problem is, you brilliantly solved precisely the wrong problem. [Editor's note: In a recent client engagement, I was told that another consultant was released, in part, because he provided what the client asked for, just not what the client wanted. I felt very bad for this fellow.]

And things were likely worse if you went beyond the client's expectations by providing more bells and whistles. Design scope creep simply solves the wrong problem with greater flourish.

What do you do? Shouldn't you solve the problem as the client asks? Shouldn't you always do more than the client expects?

The answer requires two things from you. First, you have to give up any notion that you are the expert. You may be the expert in your design field, but you are not the expert in your clients' preferences. Only the client has such expertise, but it may take some clever facilitation to draw it out. Second, you must help transform your client into a values-based decision making organization. What this entails is digging and prodding to find out what really matters most, to uncover the primary objective and all its supporting means objectives. Once this hierarchy of values has been resolved, you can work with your client to be much more creative about the alternatives that can be exercised to achieve the real goal.

A few other benefits arise as well from this process. Once the primary objective has been clarified, you can know exactly how to measure success with little or no ambiguity. Also, once you understand how the means objectives relate to support the primary objective, you can begin to gain insights into how trade-offs may have to be managed. But most importantly, your client will begin to see you as a trusted advisor who does much more than simply react to requests for proposals. You will be seen as a person who has a vested interest in the client's success. And that makes everyone happy in the end.

I eventually left aerospace engineering for the highly lucrative career of secondary education (which I eventually left for med school, then engineering again, and finally the exciting field of hot dog sales). But Prof. Rodan taught me a valuable lesson about serving my clients even if I learned nothing about airplane design. Today, my clients are happier for it, especially when they fly.

Editor's Note: to learn more about values-focused thinking, read Ralph Keeney's book,

Value-Focused Thinking: A Path to Creative Decisionmaking.

I highly recommend it.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Why we home-school FAQ

Not long after the birth of our first child, some good friends of ours began home-schooling their oldest school-aged child. Before long, the results were obvious. Their child began to excel at a rate beyond her peers. Some of it was due to here innate abilities, but we just could help but believe how much of it was due to the focused and customized attention her parents were able to focus on their child based on the child's abilities and interests. Based on my own experience as a student in the government school system and as a teacher in a private school, I knew that home-schooling was the most natural solution to the problems I had observed and pondered over the last 20 years of my life.

When we considered the nation-wide failure to deliver quality education represented by the massive social works programs of government school systems in our country, and that government-hampered competition has not yet produced many private systems that are both affordable and provide remarkable quality (although this is now rapidly changing with the emergence of University Model Schools), home-schooling became the apparent practical and economic solution to our desires and needs for our children.

Essentially, we home-school our children because we believe that no one else other than the parents of our children (that's us) comprehensively know what our children need and respond to best.

The following represent a few questions we have received over the years and how we respond to them.

How will your children learn socialization if they aren't around other children?
First of all, you are assuming that we have isolated our children from other children. That is not the case. Our children participate in church activities, local sports, and scouts. In addition, we have next-door neighbors who have children, and they play with them regularly. Childhood is a beautiful time of life, and we believe that children should play often with other children.

However, we do not believe that children should learn their life skills nearly exclusively and largely from other children. Traditionally educated children do learn their life skills by being associated with other children for the largest part of their waking day. Rather we believe that the purpose of childhood is to learn to be a successful and contributing adult. The best place to learn the skills required to be such an adult is in the presence of successful and contributing adults. In other words, we believe that children should learn their socialization skills from adults first and from children second. The best way for them to do this is to spend the largest part of their time with the adults who have a vested interest in their personal well-being and development. Children are not concerned about the development of other children nor do they have the life skills to know what are ultimately in the long term interests of other children. Only adults have such experience and skill.

Why don't you trust the public school system?
If I sent my children to a parochial or other religiously affiliated school, I would expect that the world-view of the body that organized the school to inculcate their values in their students. Education naturally entails a transmission of values. It is not value neutral. We personally do not agree with the values (or lack of them) being transmitted in the schools organized by the government. We simply do not trust that people who do not have a personal, vested interest in our children, and yet would have the largest daily influence on their lives, will attempt to inculcate the values we believe are important for our children to understand.

Secondly, most government bureaucracies do not exhibit a high degree of efficiency or accomplishment in achieving the goals that our Constitution established as the appropriate purposes of government. When you consider the overall state of decay in the current government school systems, the question really is: "Why do YOU TRUST the public schools systems?"

Won't your children feel left out if they don't get to participate in a school setting like their friends?
Actually, our children feel a high degree of pride that their parents have made many sacrifices to home-school them and that they are getting probably the best form of education available from the people that love them most. More often than not, they feel sorry for children that go to traditional schools.

Secondly, as a parent, we have to discern what is best for our children regardless of our children's feelings about our decisions. There are many things we withhold from our children that they often want that we believe are not good for them.

I know a family who home-schools, and their children are behind academically. Aren't you afraid that your children will be behind as well?
Currently, our children are performing at or beyond grade levels beyond their peers, depending on the subject. Unless we quit what we're doing or decline in our commitment, it's not likely that they will slow down or get behind.

Also, it is not rational to extrapolate a singular experience to an entire population. This type of thinking is the basis for prejudice and bigotry. Most measurable outcomes, such as academic achievement, generate a distribution of possible outcomes. The family you know may for many reasons simply be falling out on the lower tail of the distribution. There are many reasons that the family you know may not be excelling, and not all families are characterized by such reasons.

Statistically, home-school children outperform their peers in private and public school, in that order. They score higher on standardized tests, perform at higher grade levels for their age, and excel in national contests such as the National Spelling Bee and National Geography Bee. Statistically speaking, then, the desired outcome is on our side.

How long will you home-school?
As long as we feel it is appropriate.

It is important to understand that home-schooling does not necessarily imply sitting around the kitchen table for all learning. Home-schooling simply means that the family is the controlling moral, legal, and economic authority with the responsibility for educating our children. As such, we may opt for tutors and other collaborative educational groups as the need arises.

In October 2007, I took my son, Forrest, on a sailiing trip with a friend down the Atlantic coast. While on our trip, Forrest learned to navigate, take soundings, establish his bearings, and learn to tie knots from Pop. We saw numerous examples of wildlife rarely seen in the north Georgia mountains such as dolphins, sharks, bald eagles, osprey, and alligators. We had some great meals and some that were quite Spartan. We learned to cope, adapt, and make rapid decisions in a quickly changing enviroment. We learned how to suppress the inclination to complain in the face of sea sickness, cold wind, and peanuts for dinner. We realized just how insignificant we were in the grand scale of the sea and sky, and that regardless of how resourceful we were, we were still at the mercy of forces beyond our control. We relied on God to protect us and secure our faith in His grace. Like Odysseus, we recalled how much we love home and looked forward to getting there, enjoyed the friendship of great comrades (Jeff, the captain, and Pop, the first mate), and learned to embrace adventure. This was not schooling in the home, but a life-time enduring education on the high seas. If my son had been in government school, I could have been fined for what would have been an unexcused absence.

Aren't home-schooling families right wing religious nuts?
Many home-schooling families are probably rightly characterized as being religiously and socially conservative. However, many families are socially liberal, atheist, "left wing religious nuts", etc. In short, there are many reasons parents choose to home-school, and the diversity of the social/political/religious make-up of these families is reflected in the diversity of the reasons they choose to home-school. Many of the early families in the home-schooling movement were probably best described as hippies - hardly right wing religious nuts!

How do home-schooled children compare academically to children who go to private school or public schools?
Statistically, they exceed the performance of private and government schooled children.

Can your children get into college? Will they be able to compete once they get there?
Recognizing the superior character and educational accomplishments of many home-school children, many colleges and universities are now actively recruiting home-schooled children to attend their schools. These include Ivy League schools as well. Also, as the prevalence of home-schooling is increasing, many colleges are being established now that recruit only home-schooled children.

All the evidence indicates that home-schooled children continue to excel both in and beyond their college experience.

You were educated in public school. It didn't seem to hurt you.
While I agree that the government schools I attended were not devastating, I do not agree that the experience did not harm me. In government schools, I was under the tutelage of many lackadaisical teachers and administrators, constantly exposed to the disruptive behavior of children who did not receive appropriate guidance from home, and drilled in an academic environment that is considered by most of the industrialized world standards as substandard. In the government schools I was exposed to drugs, violence and sex at age-inappropriate times. The level of involvement and discipline I received from teachers and administrators was minimal and commensurate not so much with people who don't care as much as people who are overwhelmed with an impossible task and did not have a parental level of vested interest in my development and growth.

Would you please buy wrapping paper, candy, etc. to supplement our child’s school’s educational budget?
In addition to the financial burden we have undertaken to personally educate our children, we still pay federal and state taxes to support your child’s school’s budget. We haven’t asked you for additional support. Please do not ask us.

What do you think is the solution to educational reform?
It’s really quite easy. Education should be opened up to the same forces that efficiently deliver housing, transportation, food, clothing, labor, etc. at affordable prices; that is, the free market. The current government monopoly on education effectively masks price transparency through the use of taxes that are not directly associated with the services purchased. Consequently, most people think of government education as essentially free. It isn’t. In order for free market education to produce the same gains we have experienced in practically all other sectors of the economy, we need to open education up to competition through transparent pricing and the profit motive. Let people choose what their children are taught and the manner in which it is delivered without undue meddling from inefficient bureaucracies.

Maybe it isn't your fault after all

My friend, George P. Burdell, a man known for his climatic warmth, suggested that I watch this video:

The Great Global Warming Swindle.

However, if you still need to alleviate your conscience, you can contribute $100 to my Paypal account, and I will contribute a portion to efforts that will offset your carbon footprint. I'm just that nice.

Whatever global warming's cause, If Kiesling's comment in the last post was accurate, Greek anarchy could spread all over an increasingly warm world. Do you comprehend the systematic linkages? Oh, what hath we wrought?

The Greeks Don't Want No Freaks?

This just says it all: "'I think it's easier to be an anarchist in a good climate,' Kiesling suggests."

Wasn't there a famous Greek philosopher who said: "The unexamined life is not worth protesting?"

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Pigs in the Schoolhouse: Some are more equal than others

Did you see this article? Why We Banned Legos?

This reminds me of another favorite quote:

The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.
-President John Adams (1797-1801)

Wanting not that anarchy and tyranny should commence, but more importantly wanting not that a good time should not be had by all in an inequitably distributed way, I ventured to ask the authors of this article, Ann Pelo and Kendra Pelojoaquin, a few questions.

Hello Ann,

I read your article Why We Banned Legos? with interest, and I have a few questions for you.

Why is the Hilltop school mostly white in its demographic?

Should it not actively seek to provide equitable educational resources to other disenfranchised social and cultural groups that aren’t represented by the descendents of white European hegemony?

Does Hilltop provide a superior educational experience or is it equitable to the surrounding educational environment?

If Hilltop does provide for a superior educational experience, how do you ensure that such experience does not provide an undue privilege or inequitable power distribution to the white kids that get to experience it and consequently put lesser advantaged people to even greater disadvantage to the white Hilltop attendees?

If Hilltop does not provide an excellent educational experience beyond the norm, then why provide Hilltop at all except as a day care center, and at that only as a day care center free of charge to disadvantage people if you so believe that resources, such as the ability to provide after school care, should be equitably distributed?

Should Hilltop provide its resources free of charge to all who desire to learn from it? Can Hilltop afford to relinquish its tuition so that all can freely learn from it without overcoming the burden of inequitable power and financial resources?

Who should pay for Hilltop attendees to attend? Only the powerful, well heeled parents of students who can afford to pay the ~$14,000 annual tuition for preschool?

To be fair, I see that you provide assistance to the underprivileged children through subsidy provided by the tax paying citizens of Washington. However, since you obviously have limited resources, and the state only shares enough to pay for approximately half of the $14,000 annual tuition, you limit the number of such subsidized children. Why don’t you provide the other 50%-40% of the tuition so that all can have equitable access to the Hilltop experience? How and why do you prioritize who actually gets in?

Do you believe it should be the goal of the Hilltop school to ensure that all graduates of the Hilltop programs have an equitable distribution of talent, intelligence, motivation, and aptitude? How would you theoretically and practically correct the inequitable distribution of talent, intelligence, motivation, and aptitude in the broader community such that people aren’t burdened or threatened by the inequities that often result from the inequitable distribution of talent, intelligence, motivation, and aptitude?

Thank you in advance for your kind reply.

Best regards,
Rob Brown

No response yet. I'll let you know...

To me, this was one of the most telling statements of all: "...class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive."

Yet, at nearly $14,000 per year to attend pre-school, the Hilltop Children’s Center ensures that only a certain class of privileged students can attend. Their website clearly states that even with a state-funded subsidy of half the tuition, they are still going to turn away some applicants due to limited space. Hmmm. Price-prioritized application of limited resources. Sounds like capitalism to me. Class-based, capitalist, high society.

So I mentioned this breaking story to my friend, George P. Burdell, a man known for the equitable distribution of his talent, intelligence, motivation, and aptitude. I asked him what he thought. There was a long, thoughtful pause.

"Apparently, at the Hilltop Animal Farm, '...all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.'"

I wonder if Napoleon has been rooting around.

Favorite Quotes

Here are some of my favorite quotes about thinking.

But politics is not about facts. It is about what politicians can get people to believe.
--Thomas Sowell
[Editor's note: I love Thomas Sowell. I keep waiting for him to adopt me.]

It seemed like such a good idea at the time...I thought it would work. I planned everything down to the last detail...As God is my witness, I thought turkey's could fly.
--Mr. Carlson, Station owner, WKRP in Cincinnati, Thanksgiving Turkey Drop episode

Before you go to war, make sure you know how much the other side is willing to lose.
--George "SunTzu" P. Burdell

Every prudent man acts out of knowledge, but a fool exposes his folly.
--Proverbs 13:16

The wisdom of the prudent is to give thought to their ways, but the folly of fools is deception.
--Proverbs 14:8

He who answers before listening-that is his folly and his shame.
--Proverbs 18:13

What luck for rulers that men do not think.
-Adolf Hitler

Failing to think provides an opportunity for unfathomable evil.
--George "Bonhoeffer" P. Burdell

Make yourself sheep and the wolves will eat you.
--Benjamin Franklin

Many disastrous mistakes, in both public and private life, are not due to people thinking stupidly but to their not bothering to think at all. If you don't stop and think, then it doesn't matter whether you are a genius or a moron.
--Thomas Sowell
[Editor's note: Did I mention how much I love Thomas Sowell?]

Good sense is the most equitably distributed of all things because no matter how much or little a person has, everyone feels so abundantly provided with good sense that he feels no desire for more than he already possesses.
--Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method

What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
--Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay

If you're not actively seeking to determine whether or not your beliefs are valid, you can't really claim to be sincere, can you?
--Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
--Jonathan Swift

[what distinguishes a great leader from a regular politician?] ...to concentrate on objectives for long periods without tiring.
--Napoleon Bonaparte

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
-- Herbert Spencer

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Madeleine Shrugged

Two weeks prior to the submission deadline for the order form, my 8 year old daughter, Madeleine, had not sold ANY Girl Scout Cookies. This was disturbing to me because in the prior two years Madeleine had been among her Brownie troop's top sellers. This year she was off.

Madeleine was ecstatic the first year she sold Girl Scout cookies. The night she received her order form, she ran home and begged me to go with her that very night "...to get a jump on the market." (I kid you not, she said these exact words.) As a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist, I beamed. That's my daughter!

The next year was just as productive as the first, maybe better. In fact, Madeleine "employed" a younger next door neighbor boy to help her with sales. When I asked what that was about, she replied, "I'm not as cute as I was last year. Adam is so cute, people just can't help but buy cookies." I don't make this stuff up. Anyone with kids knows what I mean.

The first year, Madeleine was eager with enthusiasm. The second year, she was optimizing sales. What was wrong this year? Was she bored with commerce? Had she given up on the profit motive? I decided to explore further.

"Madeleine, why haven't you been selling your Girl Scout cookies?"

"Because I'm tired of selling for everyone else," she answered.

"What do you mean?" I pressed.

"Well, the first year we were told that if we sold the most cookies, we would win a prize, but in the end everyone got the same prize. The next year they told us the same thing, but we all got the same prize AGAIN! Even if you sold 1 box of cookies you got the same prize as the people who sold the most. I don't think that's fair."

Wow! From each Brownie according to her ability to every Brownie regardless of their contribution.

I called George P. Burdell, a man known widely for the efficient use of his invisible hand, and asked him what he thought. There was a long, thougtful pause.

"Apparently, incentives do matter. It sounds like Atlas shrugged to me."

Indeed...Madeleine shrugged.

Madeleine achieves economic enlightenment and levitates above the rest.

Friday, March 09, 2007

Are You Doing What They Want?

Before I get started, I'd like to relate to you that I recently asked my friend, George P. Burdell, a man known for holding deep sympathy for mankind in his bosom, if he would consider breast augmentation mamoplasty. Based on the consequential affect of his face, I'd say this question raised a whole series of questions and images in George's mind. Sheepishly he grinned. "Well, yes. I frequently consider breast augmentation. Why do you ask?" I'll explain presently.

Katherine Rosback's article "Crossing the Line: When has Team Building Gone Too Far?" really raises some interesting thoughts that are associated with some things I've been questioning lately, namely about the ethics of participation in culture in general. I'll wait while you read Katherine's article. Would you like another cup of tea?

I began thinking about this while I worked on a project in Japan. It appeared to me that some, maybe many, Japanese folk criticize others for not being Japanese enough. I think it's an example of what is often called "high shame culture." Think about that for a moment. If you have Japanese parents, how can you be any more Japanese? And what leverage could shame provide to further that end? Obviously, in the minds of many Japanese, being Japanese is about more than merely being Japanese. But who determines what being Japanese is all about? The Ministry of Japanese Cultural Conformity? What are the consequences for having your identity stolen in Japan? Is there of necessity and at a minimum a genetic component? Could I be Japanese? Would I want to? Could I choose to? And what if being born to "Japanese" parents, could I refuse to be Japanese? What should the consequences be, if any?

Ironically enough, as I have been thinking about this issue lately, a friend of mine, who is from mainland China, commented that I look Japanese. I told her that I think I am turning Japanese. Hmmm.

But what if we're not talking about the Japanese anymore but the Aztecs? At what point does a person really make a willing offering of themselves to Quetzalcoatl or Tlaloc? I'd be surprised to find out that you aren't as disgusted by ritual human sacrifice as I am. But in so many ways, we all sort of engage in these sacrifices. In some ways, we all place other people on the alters of our cultural identities, whether they asked for it or not. And yet I don't believe that culture is value neutral. I'll take the US over Aztec culture any day, and I'm suspicious of anyone who wouldn't.

Exposure to this made me begin to think that culture is very rarely a free transaction engaged by people who have given due consideration to the exchanges taking place. At some point some of us do grow up and say, "I can't abide by that" or "I willingly choose to participate in these mores" to the things we're aware of. But there are so many subtle requirements that go beyond our awareness oftentimes.

Of course, this makes me think about my own children and the cultural imposition we (my wife and I) make on them in our raising of them, such as the assumptions we make about truths, what's good and bad, what's noble and opprobrious, etc.

Translate this to business cultures. It doesn't take long to recognize that businesses possess a culture. Who determines how that culture is imposed? Is it transactional? Is it governed by the laws of contracts? Should it be?

I know I may be pushing the limits of propriety here, so please take my comments in the, ah, professional, academic vein in which they are being made. A friend's wife recently went through breast augmentation. She now, how shall I say, "sports" a 36DD. She's proud of that. Why? Two other friends have recently done the same thing, though not as extremely. In each case I attempted to ask a few tactful questions about motivation. I was surprised to find out that, at least consciously, the women were not being motivated by the desire to be attractive to other men (after all, they claim they are happily married and emphatically not seeking new significant others). In each case, I observed that the women in our circle of friends and other neighbors were the ones making comments and side commentary, not the men as I probably stereotypically expected.

Thales' bust ;)

This woman has had breast augmentation mamoplasty. Why would she do that? Are the results really as fun as they look? Do you feel motivated to get your breasts augmented with mamoplasty?

What I wonder is: do women more than men create the expectations of female culture and the more "outward" expressions of them? In other words, I think we superficially assume that gender roles are imposed by more across-gender dynamics than within-gender dynamics. I observe the same thing in regard to women and their clothing. I'm convinced that women dress for women more often than they do for men. So what's my point and how is it related to this issue of culture? Obviously, there seems to be some assessment of what it means to be a woman from within the ranks of women, and "womanness" seems to be imposed regardless of whether or not the participants in the larger culture signed up for the assessment.

In what ways do the various cultures we participate in motivate us to become what we are not, what we likely would not do otherwise? How does your business, church, garden club, etc., make you consider, metaphorically of course, breast augmentation mamoplasty?

"You are totally bonkers," said George.

Editor's note: After some parallel discussion on this theme some time later than the original post here, a friend of mine, The Damascene, penned the following little quatrain. He has allowed me to share it here.

I have noticed a swelling trend
Among my friends and acquaintances
To fit the part and look the role
Through quite unnatural maintenances

Thursday, March 08, 2007

Needle in a Haystack

This reminded me of my earlier post about being a fixed resource. It looks like I'm a needle in my own haystack. Talk about the need to differentiate!

HowManyOfMe.com

There are:
29,348
people with my name
in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

The Definition of Stupid

John Stossel nails it.

Someone has said that CRAZY is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

I suggest that STUPID is the government school system doing the same thing over and over again knowing that it's NOT going to get a different result.

No, wait. That would be CORRUPT.

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Serious Play

[Editor's note: I first published this article in my newsletter "As Chance Would Have It" back in 2000. Leafing through old correspondence the other day, I rediscovered it, enjoyed it a second time, and thought I would share it with you here. I may have a few other gems to republish.]

**I first learned of Michael Schrage's work from a recent email from Harvard Busines School Press pointing to an article written by him, How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate: A User's Guide (http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/ideasatwork/schrage.html). The subject of the article was something that is obviously very important to me - simulation and modeling - but with a twist: the social and political implications of modeling, their pitfalls, and suggestions to avoid such pitfalls. Immediately, I forwarded the article on to several colleagues who are likewise professionally interested in the matter, too. The November edition of Business2.0 also highlighted another article by Michael on the same subject. I contacted Michael and asked him to contribute to the SEA!UG after a few email exchanges. Although most users' groups tend to focus mainly on technical issues surrounding the use of an application, I strongly believe, given the type of application that A! is and the purpose for which it was intended, that ethical and behavioral issues related to modeling should just as well be taken into account by our users' group. Michael has accomplished this in the few articles he has written that I've read, and I'm sure that he has even more so achieved his goal in his now published book, Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate (Harvard Business School Press, October 1999). I encourage you to read his other articles (the one in Business2.0 and a companion piece at http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/ideasatwork/schrage2.html) as well as read his book. If in fact you decide to order his book from HBSP, send me an email. With no further adieu, let me introduce you to Michael Schrage.**

I appreciate Rob's invitation to contribute to his e*newsletter. My book - Serious Play from the Harvard Busines School Press - explores the world of modeling and simulation from a slightly different perspective. While I'm fascinated by how models and simulations behave, I'm even more intrigued by how people behave around models and simulations. Better understanding the relationships between model-behavior and human behavior is, I think, the greatest opportunity for dramatically improving the quality of both.

Serious Play looks at the ethology, economics and culture of model-building and model deployment in organizations. Several of its findings may seem counter-intuitive but many organizations have found them quite useful. Perhaps the most important observation is that, in the real world, models are less about "Better Understanding the Problem" than "Better Understanding Ourselves." In practice, models are used as media to ascertain the trade-offs that the organization is - or is not - prepared to make in order to better manage the problem. I was stunned by how frequently models, simulations and prototypes were tweaked to skew politically/organizationally/culturally-driven - as opposed to data-driven - trade-offs. Models and simulations have become the dominant media for exploring trade-offs between rival choices AND rival people.

Influential models and simulations are thus inherently social media; people seriously play with them Social media inherently fall prey to organizational, political and cultural influences. As the saying goes, "Figures don't lie but liars figure." Rather than accuse modelers of lying, let's just say that some 'simulations' would be better described as 'spinulations.' There is a very thin line between overly optimistic/overly pessimistic scenarios and propaganda.

Further complicating this difficult state of affairs is that models are inherently simplifications of reality. That begs the possibility that what the model leaves out can be every bit as important as what the model puts in. Unfortunately, what's left out is often minimized or marginalized. That's human nature. I now strongly believe in some sort of 'affirmative action' plan that requires modelers and the users of their wares to budget at least some portion of discussion time to what's been excluded from the model, why and the risk factors associated with those exclusions.

As the marginal computational costs of sophisticated modeling continue to fall, I think we have moved to a time where model-management shifts from the challenge of managing scarcity to coping with abundance. We now have to make sure we aren't passing the point of diminshing returns in our modeling & simulation initiatives, That means - yes - we have to model how we model and simulate how we simulate. That's going to be the best way of getting the most bang for our modeling buck. I think we're going to see more and more effective modelers rigorously and tuthlessly audit their development processes. I'll even bet we see some organizations videotape sessions between clients and modelbuilders - much as marketers videotape customer focus groups - to see what kinds of interactions are healthiest and work vs. those toxic interactions that destroy authentic design and assessment.

In sum, I believe that technological prowess and organizational imperatives are combining to create a New Golden Age for Modeling if individuals and institutions have the honesty and courage to respect that human behavior still matters more than model behavior.

Michael Schrage  schrage@media.mit.edu

Friday, September 08, 2006

In Praise of the Ad Hominem Argument...Maybe

I want to pass an idea by you for your consideration. You might be surprised by it. In fact, you might be a little shocked. But here goes: I'm not so sure the ad hominem argument is such a bad thing. I know what you're thinking...ad hominem...yessiree...you're not really into that kind of stuff.

Maybe I should explain a little more. Let's recall what Mrs. Jones taught us in our third grade logic class.

"Class, denying the truth of a proposition based on the character, principles, or passions of the person who made the assertion constitutes an attack 'to the man' [Editor's note: ad hominem is Latin for "to the man." University professors like to assign Latin or Greek names to concepts to add further to their already antiquated and musty odor.], a logical fallacy, as opposed to attacking the validity and soundness of the arguments that lead to the assertion."

So, for example, if the Devil said, "2+2=4", her [Editor's note: in fairness to the Devil, I'm now asserting the politically correct pronoun.] character should not cause me to deny this assertion.

But I think I'm questioning that way of thinking now.

In the example above, the Devil (who does wear Prada, by the way) simply states something that is known to be true independent of her character. We all know that 2+2=4 regardless of who says it or if anybody ever says it all. Our own unique rational experience confirms this statement independently of anyone else. We even confirm our own counting experiences based on this rational experience. If, per chance, you picked up 2 apples and placed them in your little yellow basket, then picked up 2 more apples, you would be astonished to find something other than 4 apples in your basket. You might look for a hole in the basket (if you had less than 4), or you might postulate that some weird, extremely rapid cellular mitosis had occurred (if you had more than 4). Your anomalous experience doesn't cause you to question the laws of number theory. Number theory causes you to seek explanations for the unexpected outcomes. I am beginning to digress a little.

But what about cases where a person asserts something that has an unconfirmed standing, and the assertion relates to areas that are very difficult to demonstrate empirically or require tricky bits of reasoning to affirm? Suppose that this person was one of a few if not the only person to have observed the phenomenon or had the insight into the questions for which he is bringing forth answers. And furthermore, what if that person were known to have made lapses of moral judgment, maybe really big lapses? Obviously, if such a person could compromise sound reasoning in one important area of his life, he quite clearly could compromise sound reasoning in others. In this particular case, it seems to me that the potential veracity of difficult arguments is dependent in some way on the character of the person making the claim. Doesn't that seem reasonable? Can't you see yourself thinking that since a person is a jerk in some areas of his life, you probably can't trust him in others? It's tempting, isn't it?

OK. I admit. I do think the ad hominem argument is a logical fallacy. I really honestly think that claims of truth should be accepted on the basis of logical or empirical integrity. When people of questionable integrity make claims of truth, we probably shouldn't deny the claims outright, although we should definitely add a grain or two of salt.

But I set this situation up to help you, you who are rational, see how many who are not rational think. Whether it's rational or not, our character is often regarded as a proxy for the truth. Decision making leadership requires credibility, and credibility requires sound character...whether that follows the rules of logic or not.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

The Glass Really Is Half Empty...But Must It Be That Way?

(This article was republished by permission from the author. It was first published July 12, 1996. That seems so long ago now.)

ABOUT HALF OF BUSINESS DECISIONS END IN FAILURE, STUDY FINDS

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Managers fail about half the time when they make business decisions involving their organization, a new study suggests.

About one-third of real-life business decisions studied by an Ohio State University researcher were initial failures -- the decisions were never implemented by the organizations involved.

The failure rate climbed to 50 percent when the researcher considered decisions that were only partially used or that were adopted but later overturned.

"These figures suggest that enormous sums of money are being spent on decisions that are put to full use only half the time," said Paul Nutt, author of the study and professor of management science at Ohio State's Max M. Fisher College of Business.

"Managers need to look for better ways to carry out decision making."

These results come from a unique database of 163 business decisions compiled over 16 years by Nutt, who is author of the book Making Tough Decisions (Jossey-Bass, 1989). The database includes decisions by managers at private firms, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. In each case, Nutt asked a top-ranking official of the organization to suggest a decision involving the organization and to name two executives who were familiar with the decision and responsible for carrying it out.

The decisions could involve anything -- from purchasing equipment to renovating space to deciding which products or services to sell.

Nutt conducted in-depth interviews with the two officials selected, asking each to spell out the sequence of steps that were taken to carry out the decision-making effort.

After the interviews, Nutt provided a written summary of the decision-making process to each of the officials involved so they could check it for accuracy.

A decision was classified as an initial failure if it was never adopted by the company. For example, a decision to merge with another company was a failure if the merger was never completed. Nutt found that 36 percent of decisions fell into this category.

A partial failure occurred when only some part of the decision was adopted. An ultimate failure occurred when a decision was adopted but later withdrawn by the organization. When he excluded partial or ultimate failures, Nutt found that only 50 percent of decisions were successful.

Nutt has since expanded his database to 376 decisions, each involving a separate organization. Although he has not finished analyzing the new data, preliminary results suggest the general picture is the same -- 40 percent of the decisions in the expanded database resulted in initial failures.

Nutt cautioned that the decisions he has studied are not a true random sample. He began the search by asking corporate officials he knew to participate. These officials would then recommend other people. Also, the decisions studied were chosen by the organization officials themselves and were not randomly selected.

But Nutt believes a true random sample may show the decision failure rate to be even higher. "I think that corporate leaders would be more likely to tell me about successful decisions at their organizations than they would unsuccessful decisions," he said. "So the real figures may even be worse."

Why do so many business decision fail? Nutt said that managers often use the least effective decision-making tactics. One of the things Nutt analyzed was how managers implemented their decisions. He found that the most successful implementation tactic involved asking for the participation of those who would be affected by the decision. That tactic had the lowest failure rate (30 percent). But it was the least used tactic, being used in only 23 percent of the decisions Nutt studied.

In contrast, one of the most used implementation tactics -- in which managers simply issue directives about how they want a decision implemented -- was the least successful. It was used in 30 percent of the decisions studied, but had a failure rate of 64 percent.

Nutt said he believes most managers know effective decision-making tactics, but don't feel they have the time or resources to put them to use.

"Most of the good decision-making tactics are commonly known, but uncommonly practiced," he said. "Managers seem committed to fast answers and fail to recognize that quick fixes make failure likely."

This study will be included as a chapter of the book Making Successful Strategic Decisions, which is scheduled to be published next year by Sage.

Contact: Paul Nutt, (614) 292-4605; Nutt.1@osu.edu

Written by Jeff Grabmeier, (614) 292-8457; Grabmeier.1@osu.edu

If You're So Smart

Not too long ago, my son, Forrest, with a devious grin on his face, posed a challenge: "Dad, if you're so smart, what is one million plus one million?"

I, Laius, faced my deposer. "Well, son, one million plus one million is two million."

With eyes as large as saucers, my son responded, "Wow! You are good."

There are at least a couple of lessons here for all of us to learn.

A little bit of knowledge can make us both dangerous and foolish. The Apostle Paul said that "...knowledge puffs up...". My experience is that the amount of puffery seems inversely proportional to the amount of actual knowledge we possess - the more you posture what you know, the less you actually know. When you think you are going to undermine someone with what passes for less than a novice level of apprehension of what is so, prepare yourself for a fall. And quite frankly, you will deserve it.

There is typically much more complexity associated with that which is so than we like to admit or are even capable of recognizing. Unfortunately, we tend to believe that simplest is best. When it comes to making decisions, we rely on linear explanations and single point assumptions to guide our thoughts. When we're this simplistic, we miss the opportunity to explore the richness of underlying causes and effects that can make us regret our commitments or reap previously unconsidered sources of value.

It seems paradoxical, but there is value hidden away in uncertainty, and there is value in exploring it. When we're so smart, we admit we're ignorant, and we take the steps to explore and to correct it.

A Girl Named Bright

After reading the following article, "Eureka! Scientists Break Speed of Light," I recalled a limerick I learned as a child:

There once was a girl named Bright/ Whose speed was much faster than light./ She set out one day/ In a relative way/And returned on the previous night.

Then I felt a wave of nausea that usually accompanies an intense feeling of cognitive dissonance. My sense of reality became up-ended. "The speed of light not a barrier?" I thought to my self. This cannot be. Certainly someone is mistaken.

The established ultimate boundary of cosmic speed was more than just a fact to me. From as early as I can remember, the exact speed of light (299,792,458 meters/second) was dear. I knew this number better than my girlf friend's telephone number (Yes, I had a girl friend, but she thought I was a geek, too.) Like many other physics students before me, I used to lay awake at night pondering the gedanken of Herr Einstein, wondering just what my experience would be were I to travel through the Minkowski space-time continuum at such breakneck speed. Collapsing light cones! Lorentz time dilation! Mass dilation! Dopplegangar paradoxes! Yes, I've invested emotion into this. As a former physics teacher, I've taught this...nay, I've preached this...with conviction from my pulpit. This was as solid as my grand mother's love or the ground beneath my feet. On June 5, 2000, as I reread the article, I think my universe changed, and dramatically so.

Understand what I'm saying. To say that nothing can go faster than itself is a truism. The proposition is internally self-consistent (like A=A) and requires no emperical evidence to be accepted as true. It is merely an extension of such a general statement to say that light cannot go faster than itself. We are still in the realm of statements that can be accepted without question. While incontrovertible, though, they are not particularly interesting. But to say that nothing can exceed the speed of light is an altogether different kind of statement. We do not say this because we have tested every particle in the universe to see which ones can or cannot exceed the speed of light. Although we have accumulated some body of experimental data and mathematical constructs that strongly imply that to say, "Nothing can exceed the speed of light" is acceptably true, there really is no definite empirical evidence that it is true. But although the evidence is strong, to believe it without a moment's reflection requires either a type of faith or omniscience, of which none of us possess the latter. (For another interesting article on the subject of the speed of light and the possibility that it might not represent the ultimate speed, visit here.)

I'm choosing my words carefully at this point. I did say "faith." Don't fall into the popular misconception that faith is the belief in something without any evidence, a type of prejudice or presupposition. Quite the contrary. For centuries, theologians have used the term "faith" to mean the belief in something that cannot be seen based on the evidence of things that have been experienced, particularly in this context, through past interations with God. But to ease things up a bit, I'll paraphrase the venerable Reverend Bayes, a man of faith (and a Calvinist, too, for those of you "determined" not to listen): knowledge about the state of our environment is subject to uncertainty and ambiguity. Absolute certainty can only be obtained through omniscience.

Please, do not misunderstand what I'm saying. I would not go so far as to say that there is nothing that can be known or that we cannot know anything other than our own existence (a sort of Cartesian naked singularity). I fear such an unresolvable solipsism as much as the next guy. Something about our experience is rooted in some objective reality. Even if we cannot truly see IT, something about IT is being transduced through our senses to our consciousnesses. What I am saying, though, is that knowledge and information, from the raw, pure data we collect by Popperian methods to the natural common sense we regress with our experiences and senses, should be regarded as possessing a degree of ambiguity, uncertainty, and bias (both cognitive and motivational); and we should always (dare I now use such an absolute adverb?) regard it as such. I think not only humility dictates it, but as of June 5, 2000, the Sunday Times seems to dictate it.

This discussion could lead down numerous pathways, and I would love to discuss them all with each of you. The conclusion I want to emphasize is the need to include a healthy understanding of the uncertainty and our biases involved in any major decision situation at hand. In all seriousness, I do not think that the speed of light should be regarded as an uncertainty. In fact, although I may be quite wrong, I feel reasonably sure that the questions regarding the speed of light apply to "special" cases, the effects of which do not dominate in most daily situations. But if something as resolutely established as the inexcessible speed of light can be brought under serious cross examination, imagine the myriad "facts" we think we know by which we guide our decision-making that have never been confirmed by so much as a sigh from Mt. Sinai or even one controlled experiment.

Indifference and Fixed Resources

A friend of mine recently sought some advice from me on seeking employment. He had been out of work for a while, and desperation was running high. When I asked him what he wanted to do, he replied that he would do anything.

I called my friend, George P. Burdell, a man known for knowing specifically what to do, and related my friend's situation and generic disposition. After thinking for a while, George responded, "If your friend will do anything, he won't do nothing." We Southerners often resort to double negatives to emphasize the point.

I think we've all heard repeatedly that we have to differentiate our services and our selves in order to be successful in business. This probably couldn't be more true than in professional services. However, have you ever really wondered why this might be true other than a matter of distinction? I found an interesting explanation this week in one of the books I'm currently reading: Armchair Economist: Economics And Everyday Experience by Steven Landsburg.

In Chapter 4, Landsburg discusses the Indifference Principle and Fixed Resources. To understand how the indifference principle works imagine a hypothetical restaurant staffed by hypothetical busboys and janitors. The distribution of busboys to janitors is determined in part by each person's preference for combination of pay wages, schedule, level of effort, etc. The distribution would remain more or less fixed for a given set of parameters at the point at which people are indifferent to the parameters. However, if people start tipping busboys, busboys' wages increase, and janitors start wanting to become busboys because the wage parameter that contributed to making them indifferent to another line of work has shifted.

The result of the Indifference Principle is that "...when one activity is preferred to another, people switch to it until it stops being preferred (or until everyone has switched...). Second is its corollary: Only fixed resources generate economic gains. In the absence of fixed resources, the Indifference Principle guarantees that all gains are competed away."

Prior to this, Landsburg pointed out that "...Only the owner of a resource in fixed supply can avoid the consequences of the Indifference Principle. An increased demand for actors cannot benefit actors because new actors are drawn to the field. But an increased demand for Clint Eastwood can benefit Clint Eastwood because Clint Eastwood is a fixed resource: there is only one of him."

In other words, differentiation is what makes us a fixed resource as opposed to competing for diminishing marginal gains. Being a fixed resource makes us appreciably different. A lot of things will make us stand out, but being a fixed resource makes us valuable.

Does that strike you as obvious, or is that a slightly different way of thinking about why differentiation is so important?

I think the question, then, for myself is: "how do I do this?" How do I become a fixed resource? In some ways, it is the nature of of the service I provide that accomplishes some of that, but I'm sure there are many more intangible qualities as well.

What do you think makes you a fixed resource?

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Colored Bubbles and Knowing What to Do

Have you seen this article: The 11-Year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles?

I'll wait a while for you to read it. Would you like a cup of tea?

It really is an amazing story of determination and ingenuity. Tim Kehoe wanted colored bubbles, not an easy technical task. Ultimately, Ram Sabnis, a dye chemist, gave him colored bubbles. All it required of Sabnis, of course, was for him to invent a new dye chemistry. That's all.

Hmmm.....I need a flux capacitor. You know, so I can travel back in time.

The flux capacitor is what makes time travel possible. It requires 1.21 jigawatts of electricity to operate.

I'd borrow shares on October 23, 1929 to short sell the next few days. The world would be my shrimp; I, its Forrest Gump, raking it all in by the nets full. Bwahahaha! Any unemployed physicists out there willing to join me on the high seas of temporal adventure for fun and profit?

Of course there is quite a difference in using the existing rules of nature to do something extraordinary versus violating the laws of nature to do something opprobrious. The latter effort is just wrong...on both accounts.

But an insight came across my mind as I read the article: given enough time, money, and intelligence, we can do anything we want to do! Our universe is plastic, submitting to our minds and malleable in our hands to accomplish that which we desire. If we want colored bubbles, we can have them.

I immediately thought of my friend, visiting scholar, and great American, George P. Burdell, a man known for his time, money, and intelligence. I called him and hurriedly conveyed my new found insight. I waited with pregnant expectation for his approval. There was a long pause.

"Yes, that sounds true enough. But the real wisdom, it seems, is in knowing what to do."

Monday, January 16, 2006

Why "Thales' Press"?

While Thales is regarded as one of the first natural philosophers of the Greek persuasion, scant little is known or written about him. However, there is a fascinating event associated with him that was recorded by Aristotle in his Politics (1259a).

Thales' bust

Who knows if this really is the bust of Thales. There are no remaining photographs with which to compare it. However, as marble busts of pensive Greek men go, this will certainly pass for an ancient philosopher that we can imagine might have looked like Thales.

Apparently, Thales was ridiculed for being poor as a result of his pursuit of truth as opposed to wealth. Thales contended that he wasn't concerned with wealth, but he could use his wisdom to achieve wealth if he wanted to. To prove that he wasn't just whistling The Odyssey, he employed his knowledge of astronomy and other observations to determine that there would be a huge crop of olives in the upcoming harvest (How did astronomy play in this calculation? I haven't a clue.). Using what resources he had, Thales then purchased for a small amount of money the right to lease local olive presses during the harvest time. When the huge crop came in as he predicted, Thales cornered the market of olive presses, leased the presses back out at a higher rate, and made a substantial sum of money. Not only was Thales likely the first natural philosopher, he was also likely the first decision analyst.

Not only did I adopt the title "Thales' Press" to refer to this historic use of systematic reasoning to achieve some goal (namely, the acquisition of olive presses to make a bunch of money), I also intend to press the use of the word "Press" to refer to a means of publishing. The publishing being focused on considerations and observations by myself and others (visiting scholar, George P. Burdell, a great American, may contribute on occasion) about decision analysis and decision management.

“A decision was wise, even though it lead to disastrous consequences, if the evidence at hand indicated that it was the best one to make; and a decision was foolish, even though it lead to the happiest possible consequences, if it was unreasonable to expect those consequences."

-Herodotus, ca. 500 BC.

: Name: Robert D. Brown III; Location: Georgia, United States

I am a senior decision support advisor who provides guidance, deep insights, and valuable solutions for senior decision-makers facing complex, high-risk problems related to strategic planning, risk management, project valuation & planning, and project portfolio analysis & management. My goal is to help people ensure that the decisions they make are well framed (focused on the right problem and clearly defined) and that they understand the implications of uncertainty and risk on the likelihood of achieving their goals.

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