Fluid Factors of Success

July 6, 2009

If you haven’t read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel yet, you should (full disclosure: I’ve read a lot about it but it’s on my to-read list as well).

At the Change.org Social Entrepreneurship blog, Nathaniel Whittemore lays out the book’s basic premise…

The essence of the argument is a total rejection of the notion that one group of people or another was natively smarter. Certain conditions led particularly societies to more quickly develop the capacity for production, politics, and war, and as those societies moved outward, they had advantages that allowed them to dominate others.

… and applies that thinking closer-to-home, incorporating a related lesson from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers as well:

The point is that in understanding why some succeed and others don’t, the environment in which innate capacity is nurtured (or not) is as essential as that capacity itself in determining how it will manifest.

It’s really hard to understand exactly how “nature via nurture” works (to use Matt Ridley’s phrase — by the way, another must-read). It’s something that takes practice (like riding a bike), not something you just “get” (like 2+2=4).

It takes time to learn not to look at the world in terms of absolutes, but in terms of processes of emergent potentialities.

There are still innate reasons why people fail and succeed. It’s how those interact and converge with the environment that’s important. People succeed or fail because their innate strengths, weaknesses, affinities, and aversions either do or don’t fit well with what’s around them.

The means by which the different factors interact (communities, values and social conventions, schools, jobs, organizations, laws and public programs — or the absence thereof) are constantly evolving.

Part of Open/Conceptual‘s emerging mission is to cultivate and refine our ability to manage that process.

Make sure you read the end of Whittemore’s post too.

Nobody needs to be left down or behind. When anyone can be successful — i.e. when everyone can capitalize on their own gifts and dispositions, adding more value to the world’s total — then even those who are already successful stand to gain even more.

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Contrasting the Perpendicular with the Backwards

July 5, 2009

David Warsh at Economic Principals has a very complementary piece this week about Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View:

Economist’s View is a lightly-edited aggregation of items from around the Web – newspaper columns and blog posts mostly, plus the occasional podcast or video, continually updated throughout the day and augmented periodically by Thoma’s own commentary, all the package distinguished by a selecting principle that is lively, informed, inclusive and nearly straight up-and-down. In this respect, Thoma’s site resembles Romenesko on the news industry, Johnson’s Russia List, or Real Clear Politics on the US scene (minus the slowly-increasing volume of Real Clear Politics-produced filler). Thoma monitors nearly 300 feeds, culls them, links thirty items or so, and himself writes as many as a dozen annotated entries a day. The easy-to-use site is an alternative to the sort of RSS feed-reader you might laboriously build yourself. Though the demarcation criteria are not quite so clear as on those other sites – the topic is vast, after all – I find Thoma pretty close to one-stop shopping for the sort of economic news and analysis that interests me qua news – a digital fire-hose, to be sure, but a manageable one. Looking at Thoma once a day is enough.

There’s more in the piece about blogging in general, specifically where Thoma and a couple of others like him (mentioned above) fit into the broader blogosphere:

The proprietors of each are essentially editors. They hue as best they understand it to the perpendicular. They seek to see whole the debate they cover, to present its raw files fairly to readers, to occupy the center ground and treat all comers fairly. They function more like referees on a stylized battlefield than (as Robert Wright distinguishes among bloggers) disc jockeys or musicians. It is no accident that in each of these cases the blogger’s ego is almost totally subordinated to the task, that the proprietors work long hours for little or nothing.

It’s in stark contrast to a column I read yesterday by Connie Schultz at The Plain Dealer (via Jeff Jarvis). She argues that tightening copyright law is the way to save newspapers. Fine for her and her organization, but it would be at the expense of everything newspapers supposedly stand for: open discussion, transparency and objectivity, public accountability, keeping the powerful in-check, shining a light on corruption, giving a voice to the weak and oppressed — all things that a more free and open web would naturally promote, but would be undermined by the atmosphere that would be created by efforts to tighten copyright laws.

I actually spent a long time working on a really negative piece, critical of Schultz’s plan, and more generally, the deeply contradictory attitude being exhibited by some journalists. I was glad when David Warsh and Mark Thoma gave me a positive alternative.

As an aside, I’ve been using Economist’s View as one of many models for my own blogging practices, but now that I think more about it, you might begin to see even more similarities here at Open Conceptual.

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Pragmatism: From Philosophy to Politics

July 4, 2009

Read Carlin Romano’s piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Obama, Philosopher in Chief” (via aldaily).

The article includes a number of useful references for further study (if you haven’t read them already). Adding to Obama’s speech in Cairo (as well as at Buchenwald and Omaha Beach), here are some key books mentioned:

  • Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (W.W. Norton, 2006)
  • Simon Schama, The American Future: A History (Ecco, 2009)
  • William H. Goetzmann, Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought From Paine to Pragmatism (Basic Books, 2009)

Money quote:

A truly cosmopolitan culture permits its members to choose different styles of life and thought, including antiquated ones, as long as they don’t harm the neighbors. Obama, like no president before him, has notified the rest of the world that the United States will continue to export its philosophy, ethos, and political theory — but through conversation, not declamation, seeking free adoption, not grudging acquiescence.

At this point I have a strong sense this is really going somewhere and I want to be on top of it when it happens. There’s a lot more to be said but I don’t have all the resources I need to say anything meaningful or new. My own reaction to Obama’s Cairo speech — and his leadership style in general — is here:

It isn’t exactly “selfless” leadership. It isn’t about putting oneself ahead of, nor behind, everyone else’s wants and needs. It’s about granting everyone the respect and responsibility they deserve as people who are capable of making their own decisions — whether good or bad — and using those connections to cultivate mutual benefit, gradually proliferating the good and diminishing the bad, by speaking to people, not to abstract political conceptions.

Here’s more on Obama’s pragmatic, learning-oriented approach, with more on the man here and here. Here’s more on pragmatism, and a bit more in Open/Conceptual’s very first post.

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What is Good Writing?

July 2, 2009

A funny thing happened in the course of my last post: I committed the same error I was complaining about: putting readability before rigor.

In an earlier version (this is where the problems began, perhaps: fussing over it too much) I had a lengthy excerpt from Seth Godin’s excellent post. In the process of making my post more readable I ended up cutting his — and cutting a corner — by excerpting the part of Bruce Nussbaum’s post that happened to have the best bit of Godin’s…

Convenient, readable… imprecise. [Seth pointed out the error himself.]

The last time I got busted trying to streamline something like that, Richard Florida corrected me for saying “the original hipsters were known as white negroes”:

Well, almost…

The kicker is that I actually spent an abnormally long time composing that sentence (I got up and walked around for a bit), trying to make it as readable and unfussy as possible. In the end I sacrificed accuracy for ease, choosing a quick gesture rather than a more cumbersome description.

So despite my apparent hostility towards the popular style, I can be just as susceptible to its errors as anyone. In fact, being more widely read and enjoyed is something I aspire to.

And why wouldn’t it be? Which is worse: popularity or pedantry?

For every negative remark about “dumbing down” there is a corresponding complaint about “awkward, jargon-clogged academic prose.”

Sometimes I worry that Malcolm Gladwell and J.K Rowling are lowering readers’ tolerance for challenging books, but it could likewise be argued that they are keeping books alive and raising the standards of readability.

Which is it? How do we work it out?

We could propose a kind of compromise by saying that good writing (good non-fiction writing, at least) balances readability and precision: good writing is about finding a sweet spot between the two.

Then the problem is that we all — both as writers and readers — have different sweet spots. One person’s perfection is another person’s pandering — and yet another person’s pedantry.

But having a different sweet spot is no excuse for bad writing — whether it errs on the side of pandery or pedantry. Even the most popularized prose should still be precise, and even the most technical prose should be readable — as difficult as the balance may be.

Now it occurs to me that balance isn’t the right metaphor. Good writing isn’t about “so-much-of this on one side + so-much-of that on the other.”

It’s really only about one thing: good editing.

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Beyond the ‘Free’ Debate with Malcolm Gladwell

July 1, 2009

Halfway through his review of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, it became totally clear to me. I mean, I always knew it but I didn’t appreciate the full implications until now: Malcolm Gladwell is an entertainer.

He writes to be read and enjoyed rather than to challenge and educate. He turns ideas into fashions, baubles to be jingled and toys to be tossed around, as in a game.

Is there anything wrong with that? Not necessarily. I’m not anti-entertainment, nor am I personally attacking Gladwell for entertaining — as long as everyone understands what it is.

We need entertainment as much as we need education, but the distinction needs to be made. We need to ensure we don’t mistake entertainment for serious dialog and education — which seems to be the case in mainstream journalism.

I was reminded of this from Michael Kelly:

The thing that is sometimes dangerous about writers is that they can express their ideas more cleverly than most people. This wouldn’t ever be a bad thing if good writers always had good—that is, sound, true—ideas. But there is in fact no necessary correlation between an ability to finesse language and a true understanding of the world.

Some of Gladwell’s remarks seem astonishingly uninformed (not that he is uninformed, it’s just that some essential information seemed to be forgotten). This part really stands out to me:

It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.” Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels?

Indeed it would be nice to know — which is precisely why so many business intellectuals and behavioural economists are busy working on it, looking at how things like experience, attention, identity, and engagement affect people’s motivations and decisions.

It was Peter Drucker himself, the godfather of modern management theory, who explicitly proposed we should think of employees as volunteers motivated by non-monetary rewards:

Peter Drucker captured it best when he said that knowledge workers do not respond to financial incentives, orders or negative sanctions the way blue-collar workers are expected to. I particularly like Drucker’s observation that the key to motivating creative people is to treat them as “de facto volunteers,” tied to the firm by commitment to aims and purposes… “What motivates knowledge workers,” writes Drucker, “is what motivates volunteers. Volunteers, we know, have to get more satisfaction from their work than paid employees precisely because they do not get a paycheck.” The commitment of creative people is highly contingent, and their motivation comes largely from within.

That’s from Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, another pillar of modern pop-intellectualdom (Florida has come under attack as well, but after giving RotCC a second chance I was impressed by how much substance and longevity it actually has; despite/because of its popularity, I don’t think it gets enough intellectual credit).

In 2009, of all years, and Malcolm Gladwell of all people, using scare-quotes around a notion that has moved to the very centre of the dialog about doing business in the recession and moving into the post-recession economy.

Now that Chris Anderson responded and Seth Godin joined in (all we need now is Thomas Friedman to make this an official pop intellectual battle-royale) I get the feeling that in the end this whole debate is a pointless exercise.

BusinessWeek’s Bruce Nussbaum originally sided with Gladwell, saying he “destroyed” Anderson’s argument, then later agreed with Godin’s criticism of Gladwell. Fundamentally, it looks like everyone is in agreement.

When Godin writes

People will pay for content if it is so unique they can’t get it anywhere else, so fast they benefit from getting it before anyone else, or so related to their tribe that paying for it brings them closer to other people. We’ll always be willing to pay for souvenirs of news, as well, things to go on a shelf or badges of honor to share.

Nussbaum responds

That’s another way of saying that people will pay for value-added and not commodity-type stuff. OK. I agree. That’s always been at the core of capitalism–unique things or services we crave and pay for become over time commodities and cheap (almost free) and are replaced by new stuff, which we are willing to pay lots for.

It’s like one of those arguments in which people mistake a difference of perspective for a difference of opinion. Both sides keep trotting out examples and counter examples that can be interpreted in different ways, depending on how one looks at them.

The fact that YouTube loses a lot of money can be used as evidence for both sides — and neither side — of the debate. Do we look at it as unsustainable in itself, or do we look at it as part of Google’s massive success? The same goes for broadcast TV: does its current decline falsify Anderson’s case, or does the fact it thrived for decades support it? All we can say is it depends, and we’ll see…

The one thing Gladwell unquestionably got right was

The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.

Yeah, “too obvious to write a book about,” but it’s also too complex to treat as a New Yorker piece.

If anybody “destroyed” anyone else’s argument, it was Matthew Yglesias, who destroyed everything:

I think the whole subject could stand to benefit from a little less good writing and a bit more plodding distinction-drawing. …

And more:

To clarify my own position, I think I would say that I basically agree with Anderson that “free is the future.” Where I guess I part ways with him is the sort of exciting up with people business guru tone of the whole thing.

So we’re no further ahead than we were with Anderson’s original article in Wired, along with Kevin Kelly’s thoughts on “Better Than Free.”

What we needed to follow up with was more unfinished dialog, probing, experimenting, essaying, and prototyping — not more slick, Condé Nast-style packaging and presentation.

One of the reasons I support more free and open media is that it conduces more towards unfinished dialog — what Jeff Jarvis calls process journalism — which does more to address and prepare us for real, emerging challenges.

More people are spending more time reading blogs by professional economists, legal scholars, etc. These are usually far from entertaining, but the general public is acquiring a taste and appreciation for them.

There’s hope that journalism will not be tyrannized by good writing forever. Even Malcolm Gladwell remarked:

“It would be so great to write a really small, incredibly nerdy book. I would really like to write a single narrative book… I have a side of me that just wants to have lots of charts and graphs and statistics. And endless footnotes.”

Interesting phrase: “endless footnotes.” That pretty well describes the blogosphere. It reminds me of the fact that ideas are always incomplete, always in-the-making — “there are no iron laws.” 

Given his influence and the respect, I think he owes us that nerdy book.

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