The Compulsive Explainer

Complete Self-assurance

As you know, I was raised a Mormon, a Missouri Mormon. The founder of our church, Joseph Smith, is regarded with high reverence by them - a reverence I do not share. Today I wrote an email to another member of my family who also has his own approach to our family religion:
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I think the one thing Joseph Smith had going for him was his complete self-assurance, he believed in his self-image completely. This is not the same thing as believing in yourself. Movie stars, for example, can get caught up in this self-image thing.

I think Karl Marx was the same way. I made a posting recently Marxism is a Dangerous Religion and a couple of my Marxist friends got very upset about it. They have complete faith in Marx, even though his writings ended up causing millions of deaths. They insist there was no connection.

Joseph Smith did not have such a drastic effect, but he certainly messed things up for a lot of people who believed in him explicitly - and he was killed himself, of course. He would have been forgotten if it had not been for Brigham Young and Joseph Smith III (the leader of the Missouri Mormons), who were good administrators - compared to Joseph, who was one of the world's worst.

Another subject: I met a woman in Silicon Valley who was a successful hypnosis therapist. California has strict standards for psychotherapists, by practically none for the hypnosis kind - and it attracts some strange types. Unlike most of them, she was successful. Almost all of her practice was for weight loss and smoking. I asked if she was successful at this "Of course," she said - as if this was a stupid question. She never bothered to check. She never bothered with hypnosis either.

Afterward, I realized the secret for her success: her absolute self-confidence. Confidence acts like a placebo, and does strange things to people.

Bam! No More Bicycle Computer

Now that I have shocks on the front wheel of my bicycle, I am more aggressive about hitting bumps - and there are a lot of them on the country roads around here. In Cachi this morning I hit a really nasty one, but with no serious consequences - as I noted to my satisfaction. I never thought to check to see if my computer was still on board.

It locked into a little docking port on the handlebars - a nice feature, but it needs to be improved, as you will see. A few miles down the road when I was going down a steep hill, I glanced down to see how fast I was going and it was still there. A few more miles I looked again - no more computer! It is such a tiny thing there was no sense in going back and looking for it.

I just ordered another one: $10 plus about $10 shipping. I will also buy a roll of scotch tape, so I keep this one longer.

The Conservative Right in America

It's time to label these guys for what they are: hateful, violent, destructive people similar to the fascists of the last century. They usually call themselves conservatives - a broad group of which they form the radical fringe. Their objective is simple: to take over America for themselves - and then, as history shows, destroy it.

Their motto might be: To protect the right kind of people from the wrong kind. And they have no doubts about who belongs to each. Poor immigrants, for example, are the wrong kind.

They are often affiliated with the Christian Right, most of their enemies are Islamic, and they support Israel. They are usually Republicans.

They identify with power, money, and strength - especially military strength.

They are not interested in the environment, and hate environmentalists.

They are not interested in civil liberties and have no objections to the repression of progressives, liberals, and insurgents of all kinds - domestic and foreign. They like the idea of torture - so long as it is not directed at them, of course.

They support capitalism and the market economy - although they have almost no idea of what this actually amounts to. They only know it is all-powerful, and intend to keep it that way. They are against any kind of business regulation. And they are also against any kind of social welfare - anything that would benefit the people at large.

They see nothing wrong with America's high incarceration rate, and would like to make it higher, to put drug dealers and prostitutes in jail forever.

The World-Wide Computer

I am not talking about the World-Wide Web (WWW) - but the World-Wide Computer, which has for one of its components the WWW. This will reshape the world.

It is the result of two technologies: mega-computer centers and vast numbers of fiber-optics cables, which were laid during the high-tech boom. The companies responsible for them have since gone to their rewards (bankruptcy) but the cables are still there, forming a glut in the global high-bandwidth communications market. The mega-computer centers have also formed a glut: computing power so cheap it is practically free.

Nicholas Carr in his book The Big Switch compares this situation to the advent of massive power generating stations and the network of power distribution networks. This replaced local power generating stations owned mainly by manufacturers and trolley companies. At first, they didn't trust the power companies, but cheap power eventually won them over.

The government also got involved. After WWII most farms had no electricity. So the Feds set up the Rural Electrification Authority, and sent electricity to them - over the violent objections of the power companies. The farmers thought they were in heaven. The government also got into the power generation business: the Tennessee Valley Authority that revitalized a whole area - and whose abundant power helped make the Atomic Bomb.

Here is the main blurb for The Big Switch:

The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr's best-selling look at the new computer revolution makes a simple and profound statement: Computing is turning into a utility, and the effects of this transition will ultimately change society as completely as the advent of cheap electricity did. From the software business to the newspaper business, from job creation to community formation, from national defense to personal identity, The Big Switch provides a panoramic view of the new world being conjured from the circuits of he "World Wide Computer." 

Mary Eisenhart, of the San Francisco Chronicle says this:

"While technological innovation is largely the creation of idealistic geniuses spurred on by utopian visions, Carr points out, it is rapidly co-opted by the incumbent in power and turned to other purposes .... Technology may be the ultimate tool or even the ultimate psychedelic, but do we really want to become utterly dependent on something about which we have essentially no say? And as for those utopian visions, do we really share them?"

Computer Taiwan is on the Move

MaximumPC Exclusive: Thermaltake's Jaw-Dropping Level 10 Chassis Unboxed!

America's lead in computer technology didn't last very long. This design is brand-new and well thought-out.

Dig the photographs and the comments at the bottom of the article. This super-PC will cost $700 and be available next month!

While you are at it, check this new kind of memory from a South Korean company. It's enough to make American companies piss in their pants. It's also about Dynamic Specialization. All kinds of people, all over the world, were involved in making this device. Samsung just pulled them all together. 

Business is Opening Up

Previously, I have been a more-or-less standard liberal, and used more-or-less standard liberal sources: Truthout, for example. I still use them, but I now have a whole now world of ideas from the must unexpected source imaginable: the business world. The same world that messed up most of my life - and which I hated with the strongest passion imaginable.

What has happened here? Part of the business world seems to have opened up and is now entertaining powerful new ideas. Twenty years ago these thinkers would have gotten the boot. Now they are giving business seminars.

This is a refreshing change. The old liberal world was getting stale and useless. This new world is fresh and has the backing of the people who count - or at least a few of them.

My State of the Union message would now be: a part of American is beginning to open up - but a much larger part is closing down. The future is uncertain.

Here are my new sources:

Nicolas Carr: The Big Switch
The Internet Promotes Social Polarization
Software as a Service

John Hagel & John Seely Brown The Only Sustainable Edge
Why we Need Big organizations
A Labor Day Manifesto for a New World
The Global Financial Crisis: Not out of the Woods Yet

Benoit Mandelbrot: The (Mis)Behavior of Markets
A Fractal View of Financial Turbulance
The Nature of Time
Power Curves

US-Initiated WTO Rules Could Undermine Regulatory Overhaul of Global Finance

From Democracy Now

I read something about this yesterday on Truthout, but I couldn't really understand it, and just forgot about it. This morning I decided to give it another try. I watched the Real Video stream on their site. This was a bit of a hassle, because I had to go though a long update process with Real, but when this was done I was able to watch the video via my ADSL telephone service.

I have to say this is never going to compete with the slick official media presentations you are used to. Lori Wallach, Director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division looks terrible. But she knows what she is talking about, having researched the subject carefully - something the official media never bothers with, even though they have much more money. They don't want to bore their audience with serious subjects.

Basically, the issue is this: the US, in the Bush I and Clinton administrations, pushed strong financial industry deregulation agreements in the WTO - and the EU went along with it. These are now part of binding international agreements we cannot break. 

Now the G20 in Pittsburgh, led by the US and Germany, is calling for regulation of these same industries. Something they cannot do, and they know it.

It almost looks like they are lying to the world - heaven forbid! But it is hard to know what else to make of it.

Our Guided Missiles are Guided by Informants

From Bill Moyer's Journal This applies to the end of this posting.

I have never attended a Presidential briefing, and I never will, but I can imagine one like this:

Sir, we now have a new military capability that will destroy terrorist networks without the need for any ground troops. Everything will be done from the air, using unmanned aircraft and guided missiles.

These will be deployed as part of our new automated search-and-destroy system, ASDS. This system obtains enemy information from many sources, filters it, identifies enemy targets, and then destroys them completely. It uses the latest state-of-the art airborne and ground sensors, military intelligence, computer networks and informational analysis software. Terrorist networks, with their limited technical abilities, have no defense against it.

Some civilian casualties will occur but these are being reduced as development of this system is continues. In any case, our citizens will prefer civilian causalities over there to civilian casualties  here.  This is all-out war, and must be conducted in this manner. 

Who can resist such a pitch? Nothing less than a miracle is claimed. Why not give it a try? Obama seems to like it.

But I can guarantee that it will not work. Everything depends on one part of the equation: military intelligence. And military intelligence is notoriously stupid - always has been and always will be. Especially in backward areas where we have no understanding of what is going on.

Clever local operators will move in and help us with any information - real or imaginary, that we want. How are we going to know any different? In real intelligence operations there are ways of estimating the worth of information, there has to be. But in situations like Afghanistan or Pakistan, we have no local experts and we just grab any information we can get. Our missiles end up killing all kinds of people, who do not appreciate this - and this makes them more supportive of extremist movements - exactly what we do not what.

Actually, we do have some local experts, who have a good feel for the situation, but we ignore them, because what they say does not match our fantasies of what is going on.

Rory Stewart is an example. He walked from one end of Afghanistan to the other, staying in small villages all the way. The video in Bill Moyer's Journal is excellent, and Rory explains the problem carefully. Saying in effect, that the President is not being entirely honest about how he is dealing with the Afghanistan problem.

The Internet Promotes Social Polarization

This is not what we expected at all. I can remember Marshall McLuhan, who I respected immensely, when he was proclaiming the coming of the global village. The Internet would bring everyone together.

Once again, this shows that the social effects of technological innovations are impossible to predict, and are often worse than anyone could imagine. The reason for this is simple: people like to hear things that reinforce what they already believe. We have a bounded rationality, to use a technical term.

Once again, I quote from the book The Big Switch, pages 162-167:

In "Global Village or Cyber-Balkans?," an article that appeared in the journal Management Science in 2005, Eric Brynjolfsson, of MIT; and Marshall Van Alstyne, of Boston University, describe the results of a mathematical model they constructed to measure how individuals' choices influence the makeup of online communities. "Although the conventional wisdom has stressed the integrating effects of [Internet] technology," they write, in introducing their research, "we examine critically the claim that a global village is the inexorable· result of increased connectivity." 

"Our analysis," they write, "suggests that automatic search tools and filters that route communications among people based on their views, reputations, past statements or personal characteristics are not necessarily benign in their effects." Shaped by such tools, online communities could actually end up being less diverse than communities defined by physical proximity.

More and more people are only being shown the things that fit in with their world outlook - either liberal or conservative. This is being done automatically by software tools that work in the background, finding out what we like - and therefore what we would like to buy. Several other studies are cited.

As University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein explains in his book Infotopia, "When like-minded people cluster, they often aggravate their biases, spreading falsehoods." They "end up in a more extreme position in line with their tendencies before deliberation began." This phenomenon, which Sunstein reports has been documented "in hundreds of studies in over a dozen countries," may in the worst cases plant "the roots of extremism and even fanaticism and terrorism." 

Given how easy it is to find like-minded people and sympathetic ideas on the Internet and given our innate tendency to form homogeneous groups, we can see that ideological amplification is likely to be pervasive online. The effect is not merely a tendency for members to conform to the group average but a radicalization in which this average moves toward extremes."

Although they stress that it's too early to know exactly how all of these forces will play out, they warn that "balkanization and the loss of shared experiences and values may be harmful to the structure of democratic societies."

It's clear that two of the hopes most dear to the Internet optimists: that the Web will create a more bountiful culture and that it will promote greater harmony and understanding: should be treated with skepticism. Cultural impoverishment and social fragmentation seem equally likely outcomes.

Why We Need Big Organizations

From the Big Shift blog, published by the Harvard Business School.

Workers were leaving big corporations to get away from "unfulfilling jobs, dysfunctional workplaces, and dead-end careers." As readers of our blog will recognize, we see this dysfunction as the inevitable result of the industrial-era model in which most of today's big companies remain stuck.

In the industrial-era model, companies focus on efficiency above all else--on getting things done at the lowest cost possible. In the name of efficiency they boil their business operations into routinized practices that suppress the creative instincts of their workers, who become standardized parts of a predictable machine. They not only suppress the creative instincts of their workers, they ultimately suppress the individuals themselves. The push-driven programs of these institutions require standardization and predictability. But individuals, especially passionate ones, are ultimately unique and unpredictable.

Small wonder our 2009 Shift Index (PDF) found that only about 20 percent of today's workers are "passionate" about their jobs--defined as loving what they do and working for more than just a paycheck. The Index also found that the most passionate workers were least likely to work for a big corporation.

Which raises a disquieting thought: will big corporations soon be filled only with people too timid to work on their own--the bureaucrats, the clock-watchers, and the resolutely non-talented? Will corporations slowly crumble under their own weight as inertia overwhelms their ability to respond to external events, and their talented people flee to become independent agents?

On the contrary, we believe big institutions will become more relevant than ever--once they focus not just on efficiency but on providing platforms for individuals to systematically experiment, learn, and innovate. As scalable learning replaces scalable efficiency big institutions will become more appealing to talented individuals. In fact, we believe they will become an irresistible magnet for passionate people seeking to amplify their individual efforts to develop faster.