Wisdom in diagnosis, then, involves not only deep knowledge about human biology and an understanding of the array of diseases that plague humankind but also knowledge and understanding about how the mind works in coming to conclusions. Discerning when these biases are operating in our minds is called metacognition, the ability to think about our thinking. The attribute of humility is embodied in the concept of metacognition; we recognize that our minds are imperfect, that there are limits to the validity of our assumptions, that we are subject to biases, and that therefore we must have the sharp sense to doubt our judgments and question whether we considered everything that should have been considered.

From “The Best Medicine” at In Character, by Harvard’s Jerome Groopman, M.D.

The essay focuses on the effects of cognitive bias in medical diagnoses (and why they’re bad). The practice of monitoring biases is important for any type of decision. It’s an essential aspect of open/conceptual’s “meta factors” discipline.

Designers and marketers (not to mention politicos and entertainers) have become adept at manipulating these biases in consumers and users, but I wonder how many are aware of how their own biases may affect the design process itself — or simply the question of which problem to solve…

Here is the book the launched the “heuristics & biases” paradigm and here is a list of cognitive biases that have probably influenced things you’re working on right now.

If you want some practice, try joining the discussion at Less Wrong for a few days.

“Meta factors” are the complex, ambiguous, and largely qualitative (or at least very tricky to quantify) factors behind our experience of everything in art, science, commerce, and civics.

Think of it as building on the field of human factors — applied not just to subjects and potential users but to the researchers and designers themselves.

It involves:

• ideas about our ideas
• methods for evaluating methods
• the discipline of developing new disciplines…

The term is new but the idea & practice are as old as philosophy. In a sense, meta factors is philosophy — stripped of its historical connotations and rendered more effective for today’s challenges & opportunities.

Just a bit of a progress report… more substantial stuff to come soon!

Along with re-designing the website (yet again) and working on identity & positioning there are a few other things currently happening.

The first is that I’ll be speaking about “digital democracy” as part of Media Awareness Week at London’s Central Public Library. That’s November 5. There’s a promotional poster here, the library’s listing is here, and there’s more info on the content of the talk here.

Then you’ll find me trying to pull-off a somewhat more exuberantly original presentation at the SMarts (Social Media for the Arts) Conference at Museum London. That’s Saturday November 14 and there’s more info here — but I’m keeping everything to do with the talk itself very quiet for now.

There’s also a new reading group coming together in London to brainstorm & critique the practical implications of some high profile ideas pertaining to social media. I’m personally looking forward to those discussions and hope to learn not just from the books but from the collaborative experience.

Meanwhile I’m trying to put together a document — a book, hopefully — outlining the philosophical background behind all of this… Challenging but fun.

And with that you’ll see very soon some clearer descriptions of the Open Conceptual enterprise model, as well as its related practices and methodologies. Once everything is a little more formalized we can get on with really putting it into action and seeing exactly what works and what opportunities there are for improvement.

As of now there’s a lot to be done but the site should be ship-shape by the end of this weekend. Once that’s settled there will be more content coming through here — and more genuine action emanating from that.

Big thanks for your patience and support.

-Brian

You will hear people talking about “latency,” which means the delay between a trading signal being given and the trade being made. Low latency — high speed — is what banks and funds are looking for. Yes, we really are talking about shaving off the milliseconds that it takes light to travel along an optical cable.

So, is trading faster than any human can react truly worrisome?

The rest is here (if you want to read more about the practical ethics of quantitative finance). What interests me is the more general notion of mechanistic processes making our decisions for us and inhibiting our ability to recognize and react to possible hazards.

The problem isn’t simply speed (or delay), it comes down to mechanistic processes and structures that are inaccessible to human decisions, neutralizing the power of human judgement and intuition to deal with emerging patterns.

Read another recent New York Times piece about how valuable hunches are in battle:

“Not long ago people thought of emotions as old stuff, as just feelings — feelings that had little to do with rational decision making, or that got in the way of it,” said Dr. Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. “Now that position has reversed. We understand emotions as practical action programs that work to solve a problem, often before we’re conscious of it. These processes are at work continually, in pilots, leaders of expeditions, parents, all of us.”

The mind accomplished a lot over a couple hundred thousand years and we still don’t understand how the most fundamental processes work. Let’s not sell it out just yet. The mind — including intuitions, emotions, the whole ball of crud — is still our best asset.

What the machine-processes give us is objective safeguarding and reference — like instruments in an airplane.

But don’t planes have autopilot too? Isn’t that the same as algorithm-generated trading?

No. I think the difference is that the plane still goes the same speed and the pilot can still notice emerging dangers and use discretion to take over the controls. A fighter pilot wouldn’t let the computer fly in a dogfight (do they still have those?) — though computers come in damn handy to analyze and prioritize potential threats and targets (something I read about in Popular Mechanics when I was a kid, I think for since-cancelled Comanche helicopter program: I don’t know how sophisticated the real flight and weapons systems are).

In quantitative finance, the computers don’t just take over the controls for a while to make things cheaper and easier; the computers have actually changed the nature of task, introducing a different set of directions we can’t handle. There’s no “going manual” anymore, and we lose the ability to identify and manage emerging patterns.

Automated functions must exist to help us identify and correct mistakes (either by freeing our attention to notice them, or by providing objective benchmarks and measures), but they should not drive the process.

I’m becoming a real fan of Daniel Little’s UnderstandingSociety blog.

Here he considers “how good is deliberative democracy?”:

The approach that starts and ends with voting among alternatives has a major shortcoming: no one gets a chance to make persuasive arguments to other citizens; no one has the opportunity of having his/her own beliefs challenged; no one is exposed to new facts or novel considerations that might make a difference in the choice. In other words, the “vote first” approach simply takes people’s preferences and beliefs as fixed, and looks at the problem of choice as simply one of aggregating these antecedent preferences.

The deliberative approach, by contrast, looks at belief formation as itself a cumulative and reasonable process; one in which the individual needs to have the opportunity to think through the facts and values that surround the choice; and, crucially, one in which exposure to other people’s reasoning is an important part of arriving at a sound conclusion.

I’m going to keep hammering this until people are sick of it: The Mindset of the Future is Process. It’s the key conceptual adjustment we need to make in order to address our current challenges — and to move towards the next generation of new opportunities.

Until now, both individuals and groups operate under assumptions of permanence — “this is the way things are” — until a crisis occurs and people start to say “but now we need to change.”

Our own institutions and ideas unintentionally conspire to fool us to believe that change is the exception when the truth is it’s the rule.

Permanence is not just exceptional, it’s deceptional — it’s mythological…

If you look deeply enough into your opinions and beliefs, you’ll find they aren’t just existing there, they actually depend on your ongoing efforts to reinterpret the world, adapting a supporting cast of ideas to keep your opinions and beliefs in accordance with new facts — like a balancing act.

All of this is background for my aim of digitizing our decision-making processes (which I’d like to get back to before this gets too metaphysical).

Any process needs both hard and soft aspects in order to function, i.e. it needs to have an element of fluidity, as in face-to-face conversations, and an element of solidity, as in putting it in writing.

Digital media does both.

The conversations we have in coffee shops and town hall sessions may generate a lot of energy, but that energy has to be channeled and stored or it dissipates. Everyone goes back to whatever everyone does until the next morning or next month when another batch of energy is generated and wasted all over again.

We also tend to forget (or misremember) exactly what our positions and ideas were. Without objective accounts of our conversations (and even with them) we can be astonishingly self-deceptive about our beliefs and reasons for believing.

Without articulation and objective deliberation (or at least deliberation that aspires to objectivity) we fail to notice inconsistencies in our thinking so we miss most of the best opportunities to learn and improve-by-process-of-correction — we fail to make our ideas and institutions more sustainable.

In other words, by failing to embrace change, we become more vulnerable to it.