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.

No related posts.

Another bit of a ramble (I love where it ends up), starting with this Time Q&A:

TIME: How difficult was it to chart a history of a massive and diverse thing like blogging?
Rosenberg: This is a phenomenon that starts small, then diversifies, then explodes at a certain point. At the small phase, it’s not that difficult to shape the story. The first part of the book is really a series of profiles of people — Justin Hall, Dave Winer, Jorn Barger — who were some of the key figures in pioneering blogging. In the middle of the book, my job became picking out the stories that had the most to teach us about what blogging was all about. At that point, the challenge became figuring out what to leave out.

You seem set on changing some of the popular notions of why people blog.
One thing I’ve become very conscious of is how careful you have to be making generalizations about bloggers. You have millions of people blogging. There are a multitude of answers to any question about what blogging is, who bloggers are or why they do it.

The author is Scott Rosenberg, the book is Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. It seems like an opportune time to reflect on where digital media has come from and where it is going. The volume of meta-commentary about the nature and future of blogging has gone up recently. Just about all of the mavens and A-listers wrote something-or-other on the subject last month.

Laura McKenna at 11D generated loads of response after blogging that

blogging has changed a lot in the past six years. It’s still an excellent medium for self-expression and professional networking, but it will no longer make mega-stars. It’s actually a good thing that the hoopla has died down. No one should spend that much time in front of a computer. The expectations were unrealistic. Use your blogs to target particular audiences and have a clear mission, and you’ll get a following. Blogging should be the means to another goal — a rough draft for future articles/books, a way to network with professionals, a place to document your life for your children, a way to have fun. Those are very real and good outcomes of blogging and that’s why I’m continuing to keep at.

To which Ezra Klein lamented

The blogosphere isn’t thrumming with the joyous, raucous, weirdness of the early years. And that’s a shame. But the upside is that it’s more careful. It reports and investigates and uncovers. My blog certainly isn’t as fun to write as it used to be. But it’s also a lot better than it used to be. And it certainly pays more. And so it goes. The blogosphere grew up and it got a job, or, to be more specific, lots of jobs. That made it less fun, but, like a frat house legend who now goes to work every morning, probably more useful to society.

I’m not even sure that’s an analogy, as Klein (born in 1984) and more than a few of the other big blog-turned-job stars are at the age when they’d be finishing grad school, coming out of internships, and settling into responsible positions anyways.

No doubt there are a lot of exceptions, and, as Daniel Drezner pointed out:

new bloggers are not exactly neophytes on their subject matter. Johnson was the IMF’s chief economist, for example.

So exactly how much of the professionalization of blogging is inherent in the medium, vs how much of it amounts to the professionalization and maturity of individual bloggers?

I say, don’t worry because more generations of unprofessionals will arrive soon enough.

For perspective, consider that just as Ezra Klein complains the blogosphere lost its “joyous, raucous, weirdness of the early years,” I imagine a number of older hackers and BBS and Usenet users complained that blogging circa 2003 lacked a particular “joyous, raucus, weirdness” of their earlier scenes.

(E.g. Jaron Lanier comes to mind. He made some remarks about blogging in that provocative essay of his, and apparently he still favours the old static HTML for his own site.)

Sort of as the Policy Blogger Class of 2003 co-promoted themselves into professional, respectable positions (read Rob Horning’s reaction), we might also see still-newer classes embracing still-newer platforms which established bloggers don’t see coming… changing the media landscape yet again, and disrupting Ezra Klein et al the same way they disrupted old-school pundits and columnists.

It won’t happen exactly the same way again. All I’m saying is that blogging will be vital for a long time, but certain kinds of blogging won’t necessarily be — because we’ll still have new classes graduating, hungry and irreverent, into a media landscape filled with opportunities that didn’t exist for previous cohorts.

Shortly before the policy bloggers got wound-up on the subject, there were already some high-volume conversations about the nature and future of blogging coming from more technology-oriented mavens.

Steve Rubel left blogging for lifestreaming:

Now that I have been at it for over five years, writing a weblog is starting to feel very slow and antiquated. It’s like a singles tennis player who focuses solely on the baseline game, logging long balls back and forth. The statusphere, on other hand, is like playing doubles – and at the net all the time.

Robert Scoble went the other way (for a bit anyways):

Whew, OK, now that I’m off of FriendFeed and Twitter I can start talking about what I learned while I was addicted to those systems.

One thing is that knowledge is suffering over there. See, here, it is easy to find old blogs. Just go to Google and search. [...]

The other night Jeremiah Owyang told me that thought leaders should avoid spending a lot of time in Twitter or FriendFeed because that time will be mostly wasted. If you want to reach normal people, he argued, they know how to use Google.

Chris Brogan struck a resolving chord:

I get this. I understand the interest in immediacy. The thing is, I think both are required. While I think there are several occasions where the instantaneous experience of the real-time web is compelling, I still think there are plenty of times when a well-considered blog post has some value.

There’s a difference between making a meal and grabbing a snack. Eating only snacks can lead to us getting flabby. It means we spend less time in deliberate contemplation. It means there aren’t as many places to exercise our larger thoughts.

[As long as these basic platform issues are unsettled, there's no telling where things will go...]

Come to think of it, there is a still-rising movement we should identify and try to understand more thoroughly: the general inversion of influence from top-down authority to bottom-up innovation.

Think way beyond media… Journalism is just a beachhead.

I.e. What would the world look like if, by 2015, digital platforms have undermined the foundations of higher education, or government itself, to the same degree the newspapers have been disrupted already?

To be continued…

[Note: I originally had the quotes from Rubel, Scoble, and Brogan before McKenna's. I made the edit moments after publishing.]

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This morning I realized I was a little unfair to Glen Pearson in my last post at BrianFrank.ca. I excerpted a bit of his blog as a jumping-off point, but the rest of my post didn’t really have much to do with what he wrote. I kind of left it hanging there as if he didn’t have any more to add to the discussion, and I didn’t do anything to show how his blog, The Parallel Parliament, is a pretty good place to start demonstrating the kind of generative articulation we need more of.

I should’ve excerpted what he wrote in his previous post:

When MPs enter the blogosphere with their demonizing rants, they often get what they deserve. And when media types attempt to sell the public on shallow controversy, they too suffer as a result. Unfortunately, such practices have, more frequently than not, put a saddening distance between the serious thinkers of both camps who would like to have meaningful discussions over the national state. So, we have arrived at the place where reflective MPs don’t blog and serious journalists won’t write on serious issues that just won’t sell. The historical healthy tension between politicians and the media has now become a debilitating arena of national distraction. Things have clearly changed and only serious dialogue, thinking and writing within these two camps can bring us back to a serious national mood. It would be interesting to see what the journalists/delegates at Charlottetown would make of all this.

I genuinely believe there will be tremendous improvements to the quality of blogosphere commentary and conversation in the next year or two as more late adopters (i.e. normal people) get on and balance things out.

I’m even imagining (I mean, dreaming of) a day when all politicians are expected to use blogs (or whatever they’re called in the future) and social media to make their attitudes and convictions fully open, articulate, and honest. I want it to be just as standard & required in the future as conventions and fundraisers [and staged debates] are today.

We need to see exactly where people’s ideas come from. As it is now, I’m not sure too many people know where their own ideas come from. Leaders should be compelled to make a more rigorous account of what they’re supposedly promoting — both in campaigns, and while in office.

There’s a saying that “daylight is the best disinfectant.” By making things more transparent and accountable (I’m talking about more than just money) — open to scrutiny by anyone, i.e. on the web where everything is findable, and forever — the people who have the most to hide (incopetence, sketchy motives) will struggle the most.

Some will argue that the critics and commenters might have sketchy motives too — well I’m sure a lot of them do, but everything they do is open to scrutiny as well. The ones who are just trolling to undermine the discussion won’t get any traction on the mature web.

Now that the web has become an essential part of our political system and our daily lives, most people online don’t have any time to waste on snickering, sneering, and snark. People ultimately want quality — if it’s available. Attention, popularity, and authority will gravitate to those who provide the most relevant and generative value for people.

With a little work, the good guys & gals will win in the end — regardless of which party they represent.

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David Eaves did something awesome. I didn’t clue into this possibility when I blogged about Umair Haque’s Generation M Manifesto. He literally remixed and edited it.

I was inspired to start editing it myself but found I wanted to change too much — not that I disagreed with the spirit of the thing (which I agree with almost too-passionately) but because I have my own perspective, with my own specialized vocabulary, which I use to address the issues that I’m in the best position to understand and affect. Accordingly, I’m inclined to frame it in rather different terms.

But the last thing I’d want to do is oppose or contradict what Haque and Eaves or the rest of the best are saying.

It shouldn’t be a tug-of-war over terminology and semantics. That’s the old way of doing things — what Generation M is supposed to overcome.

But, nor can we merely “agree to disagree.” We have to keep the dialog open and alive.

What these conversations and debates do, which we need to ensure they continue doing, is generate familiarity & orientation, adaptation & integration.

The notion of Familiarity replaces the notion of categorization. Instead of silos we have networks of relations. Instead of neatly arranging everything (and everybody) into discrete slots, we need to appreciate things for the various traits they share with this-and that — and, ultimately, their individual character.

Orientation replaces the overconfident notion that we actually know where everything is and where we’re going. We can’t plan everything. We will go off the road from time to time (maybe because the road gets washed-out or collapsed, maybe because we see better opportunities in previously untravelled & unexplored areas), so it’s better to have the ability to re-orient ourselves in changing environments.

I’ll leave Adaptation and Integration with you… and there are a lot more notions to explore…

What it comes down to is that this is really an anti-manifesto kind of movement. It’s about the process — whether it’s the process of remixing or sharing or debating… — not anything that could be laid out comprehensively in absolute terms.

Put simply, it isn’t about the document, it’s about the dialog.

At the same time, we need documents and draft manifestos as platforms or frameworks and references for dialog. Discussing things like this is the best way to exercise our minds, voices, and vocabularies; to generate familiarity and rapport with others; to understand their ideas and appreciate their perspectives.

… as long as they keep our conversations and adventures alive.

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I’ve been thinking about the pernicious effects of our overachievement society again, this time by way of Philip Delves Broughton (via NYTimes Opinionator), in a post called The McNamara Syndrome.

The following is actually from the author’s book, Ahead of the Curve:

One of the most famous alumni of Harvard’s MBA program is Robert McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, and member of the class of 1939. In his book InRetrospect reflecting on the war, he wrote that while at Harvard he had developed “an approach to organizing human activities.” There were three steps: “Define a clear objective…develop a plan to achieve that objective, and systematically monitor progress against the plan.” This was still the essence of the HBS method. Strategy, planning and measurement. Of course, McNamara’s methods came to seem macabre when he applied it to counting bodies in Vietnam.

[If you haven't seen The Fog of War yet, you should.]

Broughton goes on in his post to suggest “the McNamara Syndrome persists at Harvard Business School and more widely among business and economic leaders. It consists of three very dangerous elements”:

1)       Excessive faith in systems, long-established networks, language, thinking and a set of assumptions which change more quickly than you do…

2)       An over-justified confidence in one’s methods, instilled by schools and prior success…

3)       Brilliant people often end up working and thinking inside a bubble. Inhabitants of this bubble reinforce each other’s behavior, assuming it to be all equally brilliant…

Any of this seem familiar?

In today’s economy, the goal of increased home ownership, fine, became the mortgage meltdown and the creation of far too many credit derivatives.

What really caught my attention was

In McNamara’s case, he assumed that what worked at HBS, Stanford and Ford would work at the DoD. This is the subject of Halberstam’s brilliant and tragic book The Best and the Brightest, about McNamara and the other men around JFK. The financial collapse is The Best and the Brightest replayed in the economic sphere, though stripped of the public service ethic in Kennedy’s generation.

That highlighted part (my emphasis) represents one of my most persistent complaints.

“The best and the brightest” in our society owe their success to a rigorous sort of disposition that is reinforced from a very early age. In turn, they continue to refine our institutions and conventions towards those values.

Our whole system of education and career advancement is set up to promote people who thrive within established frameworks, where there are “right and wrong answers,” competing to win zero-sum games in closed, rule-directed systems, with clear “winners and losers.”

The lessons learned along the way — from classroom to sandlot, continuing on through graduate school, carrying over to the negotiating table, board room, golf course, etc — aren’t easily unlearned when people find themselves facing big, ambiguous, complex challenges that require the reticence to dwell in uncertainty, adaptiveness, humility to give up on goals and plans that turn out to be misdirected, and the creativeness to develop new frameworks.

Instead, the best and the brightest — so used to winning and being right (not to mention being recognized and rewarded for it) — have interpreted the open and dynamic systems they face at the highest levels in the real world as being like the simpler challenges, in closed systems, they had dominated all their lives.

The more I think and write about it, the more I believe that much of the past century was an experiment — an attempt by mankind to control everything with machines, mathematics, and rigid management regimes — which eventually failed.

According to current assumptions about success (i.e. our need for certainty and confirmation), that’s supposed to be bad news.

But if we start to bury those arrogant ideals and look at the world more openly, as we ought to — as an inherently uncertain process, beyond our ability to control completely — then the realization that the 20th century was an experiment, is, in fact invigorating…

Our response to the ongoing collapse of the old models should be, “Look at how much we’ve learned!”

And look at all of the opportunity…

No related posts.

Umair Haque at Harvard Business Blogs has written a Generation M Manifesto, which begins:

Dear Old People Who Run the World,

My generation would like to break up with you.

Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.

I understand that previous generations have made similar complaints in the past, when they were young. I’m inclined to think that the big difference between today’s radical sentiments vs, say, the 1960′s, is how much of a technical advantage we have. Not only do we know how to program DVD players and tweak security settings on Facebook, but we are also using that technical advantage to advance our theoretical knowledge.

So it isn’t like we simply have a different perspective. Some of us can make pretty serious, objective cases when we argue [as Haque goes on]:

You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere.

You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people — not just banks.

You wanted shareholder value — built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.

You wanted an invisible hand — it became a digital hand. Today’s markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted.

You wanted growth — faster. We want to slow down — so we can become better.

You didn’t care which communities were capsized, or which lives were sunk. We want a rising tide that lifts all boats.

You wanted to biggie size life: McMansions, Hummers, and McFood. We want to humanize life.

You wanted exurbs, sprawl, and gated anti-communities. We want a society built on authentic community.

You wanted more money, credit and leverage — to consume ravenously. We want to be great at doing stuff that matters.

You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: you sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We’re not for sale: we’re learning to once again do what is meaningful.

There’s a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I’m going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation “M.”

And no, this isn’t just a reactionary youth movement. We’ve already got a stacked roster of role models who have either carved a niche or dynamited their presence into the heart of the old landscape:

Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday’s way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government. Who’s Gen M? Obama, kind of. Larry and Sergey. The Threadless, Etsy, and Flickr guys. Ev, Biz and the Twitter crew. Tehran 2.0. The folks at Kiva, Talking Points Memo, and FindtheFarmer. Shigeru Miyamoto, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus, and Jeff Sachs are like the grandpas of Gen M. There are tons where these innovators came from. [...]

Anyone — young or old — can answer it. Generation M is more about what you do and who you are than when you were born. So the question is this: do you still belong to the 20th century - or the 21st?

I find myself starting to get a more radical edge.

This is not comfortable for me. In the past I’ve been fairly conservative by nature, but these points just seem increasingly obvious to me. Where does this lead?

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Won’t lie.

When you package seminal books in a design-conscious concept, I turn into a total sucker.

The latest set to catch my eye is the Penguin Magnum Collection (just a UK & Australia thing?), featuring six narrative non-fiction classics updated with iconic cover photos. [via CR via BMD]

A couple of them are on my to-read radar (not exactly on my to-read list). If I saw these seven or eight years ago I might’ve given into the craving to buy; I’d have those barcoded spines planted on my bookshelf, looking at me every day, reminding me of my transaction.

I’m glad I’ve outgrown that impulse.

But now I have a new impulse: making this stuff…

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There’s some good insight to be gleaned from this throwaway quote by Marc Andreessen (at Wired: Epicenter):

“Twitter was timed right: Two years earlier, or later, and it would have been a failure,” he says. “This is what our problem was 15 years ago (with Netscape).”

It’s a good following to the last post, about success not being exclusively a matter of personal (or group) characteristics, nor exclusively a matter of the environment, but a result of how those different factors interact.

It’s the same with ideas, behaviours, beliefs, business models, etc…

We all say we understand that “there’s a time and a place for everything,” but we also have a tendency to get into habits of assuming that a) such-and-such an idea failed in the past, we learned our lesson — “it’s wrong” –  or b) such-and-such an idea worked in the past so it is right, it’s been proven — “it’s right.”

It isn’t enough to know that something is right or wrong, we need to try to understand how and why as well; so when circumstances change we can adapt our ideas accordingly.

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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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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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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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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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