SloppyThoughts

Today's Blinders

Tom Smith has decided to trot out both Socialist fallacies and an ignorance of the lifecycle of technological innovation, and since people are actually paying attention thanks to an Instapundit link, I felt I must respond.

There's rarely much hope in talking about creating the value in money, or the imaginary zero-sum game, or the fact that huge dreams provide huge motivation to those who can accomplish great things and provide so much value to the world (which then *gasp* pays for it), or any of the usual tripe-prevention, and I won't comment at length on the contemptible act of suggesting that Charles Simonyi and his like-minded dreamers fantasize about sexual promiscuity to rival some of Heinlein's characters. Those aren't within the scope of this blog anyway.

But I will comment on Smith's apparent ignorance of the life-cycle of technological innovation.

Most revolutionary innovation goes through a very predictable sequence. First is the basic research and commercial idea ... proof of feasability. Many people think it is appropriate for the government to finance this effort, although I do not. The first commercial idea is almost always bare-boned and ridiculously expensive. Its commercial success relies on rich people or corporations (or governments) buying the item.

Next is a period of refinement ... standardization of production methods, improved efficiency, cheaper materials. Entire industries can be created during this process, and the end result is typically a cheaper, but still bare, product available to the masses. Please note, however, that if the original customer of the item is a government, it is frequently unnecessary to go through this process, and the item remains in the hands of the government or major corporations.

The next step is to come up with desirable frills. Again, they start off expensive and are marketed to those who can afford it.

And the last phase is, again, making the new, full-featured product cheap enough for the masses. This is the point at which consequent innvoation just explodes.

ENIAC on one end, Napster's peer-to-peer software architecture on the other. Gramaphone on one end, pink leather-sheathed Ipods on the other. Otto's and Daimler's gas engines on one end, rural power generation and food transport adequate enough to support large cities on the other. Cameras. Cars. Computers. Boats. Airplanes. Telecom. Books. Electricity. Plumbing supplies. Fertilizer and farming equipment. Anything made of steel. Anything made of plastic.

And the future of space flight.

And all because a few "selfish" rich people found it worthwhile to buy something during the expensive steps. So really ... cheer loudly for every expensive purchase you consider frivolous, or give silent thanks to the value they provided to get rich and their invaluable contribution to the things you and your descendants will enjoy.

Or find a cave and some lightning-struck fire, and condemn to your heart's content.

Update: Hello folks from Instapundit. Welcome to my formerly quiet hole in the wall. Just to clarify Glenn's characterization of my position ... it's not that I thought that he was approving Smith's analysis. It's that I thought he was either approving Smith's analysis OR providing both soapbox and audience to his adversaries. I could not understand either act. Regrettable confusion ensued.

Like a Bowl Full of Jelly

Whereas previous articles warned of an obesity epidemic in the US, recent articles assert that the issue is a world-wide concern. So I started wondering if the increase in obesity (requiring larger clothes) and the tendency to dramatically fluctuate in weight during efforts to reduce weight (causing greater turnover in clothes) have influenced the textile market. And, if so, have any textile consortia figured this out to the extent that they might be promoting companies that either facilitate weight change through whatever mechanism?

I can't find anything online to suggest an answer to these questions.

Collaborative Protocol

Once again I skim down my list of subjects to write about, and find that Mr. Phillips at Thinking Faster has already written about one of the same subjects.

What he describes is the aggregate of proscriptions, declared procedure, custom, and common sense that become a set of "rules" or protocols by which interactions between people (whether collaborations toward mutual goals or efforts to mitigate contention of shared resources, e.g., an intersection) can take place both efficiently and safely. I call this the "framework of expectation".

In the programming world, this framework might be comprised of (in part), the corporate mission statement, the project statement of work, the requirements document, the coding style guide, and a firm understanding of the personnel hierarchy, their roles and responsibilities, and the appropriate means of interacting with them. Defining a clear and unambiguous framework of expectation is essential for completing a project in the most efficient and stress-free manner while controlling unnecessary risk.

But be aware of one problem ... people will sometimes think they know better than the framework, or think it would be nicer or more polite or more diplomatic to violate the protocol. For example, take the four-way stop-sign intersection. Every driver's handbook in America states that the first person to the intersection proceeds first, followed by any others in their arrival order. In the case of simultaneous arrival, the car to the right proceeds first. Most drivers know this and follow this, and in this way efficiency is maximized and risk of a fender-bender minimized.

But you sometimes have people who think they'll be "nice" and let someone proceed ahead of them, despite the fact that, by the stated protocol, they are to go first. Now things are broken. Who goes next? Who is to be considered "first"? Questioning looks go all around, tentative, simultanous starts and stops, hand gestures ... everyone's time is wasted, and the possibility of a small accident is increased.

All violations of the framework of expectation decrease efficiency and increase risk. Deal with them accordingly, no matter what the underlying reason for the failure.

Risk and Foresight

The route I take to enter my office building takes me down a hallway dominated by a Montessori pre-school. I mention that it's a Montessori school because those tend to be selected by parents who recognize that the level and quality of thinking provided by the public school system is inadequate.

There's a bulletin board in the hallway. On that board they put notices. One of the notices, not too long ago, was a request that parents not park in the fire lane when dropping off their children (which they do by accompanying their child inside, so it's not an "I'm stopped, run on out, Junior" situation.)

Think about this ... for the sake of a few seconds of convenience, these parents elected to set a precedent of parking in the fire lane. Fire lanes are areas set aside for emergency crews in the case of, for instance, fire. Parking in fire lanes increases the risk that the students in the school will be harmed or die. Their own parents did this.

Be aware of what actions you may be doing carelessly or frivolously that, when done by other people or larger numbers of people, might increase risk to you and those you value. Take particular care in what you teach those who look to you for their example of how to behave.

I Have a Question

I just picked up Mind Performance Hacks. It looks promising, so far, although I’ve just skimmed it. I did see one section, however, that concerned me. It was the section on asking questions.

The author mentions that the construction of conceptual units is the goal of learning. He provides anecdotal evidence (from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!) about the failure to ask questions in an educational scenario. He properly refers to the data processing limit of retaining 5-11 individual items (sometimes called the Crow Epistemology, referring to the fact that birds can deal with individual numbers up to a certain point, after which individual numbers become “several”) at one time in short-term memory. And then he suggests that the problem is a failure, mostly through fear, of asking questions.

And there is my problem. If you happen to be in second grade, you might still be fortunate enough to be dealing with simple, self-contained concepts that can be constructed merely by moving items from short-term directly into long-term memory. Those of us who have lost our fear of cooties, however, have a little more work to do.

All those concepts you’re building don’t exist in a vacuum. Everyone has a framework in which they are constructed, not just of other concepts, results of evaluation and classification, description of concept relationships and causal effects, but even the fundamental understanding of the relationship between reality and the concepts that represent it. Fitting a new idea into all that takes good technique tailored to individual learning style, practice, persistence, constant effort (so as not to have failed to incorporate new information upon which subsequent information is dependent), a great ability to evaluate the nature of an item (e.g., is it an abstract applicable to a class of items?), foresight (is that the complete set of information?), and a willingness to re-evaluate and correct old knowledge.

Ignoring all the other things that the public school system fails entirely to teach, even in an ideal situation, this process takes time. So if you want a person to be able to reasonably ask questions during a presentation, a presenter of information has to facilitate the process.

For instance, plan on two sessions … three would be better, if at all possible. For each session, first present an outline of what will be discussed. This is not an outline to guide your presentation … this is a structure the audience will use to organize the information, determine if there is no more information coming on a particular item (in which case it’s time to ask questions of perceived deficiencies), understand internal and external relationships, etc. Also, define the scope of the discussion.

The first session should present the basic concept or set of concepts. Be thorough. Point out items that can be considered classifications and properties of classes, abstractions, assumptions, etc. Now stop. Integration takes time, and if you keep going you’ll trample on the stuff they’re trying to process, or they’ll dump it all in an effort to keep listening to new information (those who are well trained may be able to continue this process later from their notes.)

The second session should be a very quick recap of the previous session (to drag it all back into memory … information retrieval takes practice, and you should give them at least one effort to do so before they hit testing time, or whatever the equivalent might be in other situations) and a call for questions. No more questions? Start the second session … relationships to other concepts, implications, causality, etc. Don’t do abstractions here … associate your information as tightly to concretes as possible. This is the time in, for example, physics class, to perform your demonstrations. Now stop. Give them a break. Come back, either later in this session or in a third session and, again, review and ask for questions.

This is what the mind needs.

There are time constraints. There are subject constraints (such as pumping as much information into teenage skulls as possible in 9 months.) There are training and conceptual precedence limitations on the part of students and audience. But the principles still hold. So, evaluate what the constraints will be on a presentation and audience, and figure out how to achieve the same effect with your limitations.

Be sure to think outside the box. For example, I was speaking with a Chinese teacher recently. She told me that the Chinese teachers go to each student’s house in the summer to talk with the student and parents in order to learn and evaluate, among other things, what they’ve done over the summer. She then tailors her lessons accordingly. I don’t know of any American teacher who would do such a thing, even if the government permitted her to alter her lesson plans significantly. An analogous situation … if you have to make a presentation to a bunch of programmers in your office, you might consider setting aside 5 minutes for each developer ahead of time to get an idea of their current understanding of the subject.

What else could you do? How would you apply these techniques to self-directed learning?

Corporate Cronyism

If you are trying to achieve a goal, it is entirely reasonable to hire people you trust to facilitate the accomplishment of that goal. Trustworthy people being fairly rare, people in positions of authority tend to keep the same people around them as they move from effort to effort.

People who dislike the particular goals of a person will describe this situation as “cronyism”, but the term, “crony”, implies no such evaluation of goals or methods. It just means an associate you’ve had for a long time (from “khronos”, Greek for time.) People that use the term, “cronyism”, want to imply an immoral or evil intent by virtue (so to speak) of the fact that you’ve got trusted associates around you, implying that the associates support you, not because of their evaluation and support of the goals, but because of, at best, lap-dog obeisance and obedience. They use the term in such a way that you have a visceral reaction to the term itself, avoiding the need to actually evaluate and refute the goals and intent specifically. Any statement by anyone who uses the term must immediately be given lower credibility, and greater effort and thoroughness must be used when evaluating their other claims.

However, identifying cronyism, particularly in business management, has its uses. For instance, if a CEO has a history of success while being surrounded and supported by the same staff, company after company, then that suggests that success in the current venture might be more plausible.

If, on the other hand, a CEO has a history of failures (bankruptcies, resignations for non-success, desperation mergers, etc.), and he has continued to surround himself with the same supporting staff, you must conclude one of the following:

1. he does not associate repeated failure with himself and his decisions or competence
2. he  does not associate repeated failure with his support staff and their decisions or competence
3. his goal is not the success of his company, but is, instead, something that he is achieving despite each failure … therefore, he _does_ view himself as successful

Close scrutiny must be given to the situation to determine which of these is the case and, if the case is either of the first two, what the actual cause of repeated failure was (a predilection for lost causes, for instance.) Needless to say, as an employee or potential employee, accurate identification of this situation is essential.

As an employee, here’s a subset of things to be answered:

• How many failed situations?
• Role of each supporting individual?
• Any individuals departing after each failure? If so, any publicity surrounding the departure, and any subsequent success on the part of that individual?
• Is there a common theme surrounding each situation (industry, business model, stated corporate philosophy, customer type, etc.)?
• Would this position be worth it if you only kept it for 1 year before being laid off? 6 months? 3?

Think of other things to ask, what each says about the situation, and what terms you must demand when being hired in order to compensate for the situation.

Local Meltdown or Global Society?

There are countries that have practiced female infanticide for centuries (an act that has started to embrace technology in the form of gender-selective abortions.) Historically, when the number of available females has dropped significantly below the number of males seeking wives, bad things happen.

In the US, it has always been considered important for women to find husbands who can actually support a family ... even if the woman intends to work, the goal of acquiring a husband who _could_ provide sole support remains. That holds true despite the degree of gender equality we pretend to have embraced (perhaps because it's mitigated by the amount of misandry we've also embraced.) In modern society, that means an educated man. But we're rapidly eliminating the critter. I wonder what will happen when the future generations of girls grow up and find few viable husbands.

Perhaps seek out husbands in India and China, where the men can't find wives?

Or something quite a bit less civilized?

Playing the Game

Back when I was in school, my mother (a teacher) told me that I needed to learn to “play the game” with regard to school and schoolwork. What she meant by this was that I needed to do the things the teacher wanted (as opposed to things that were actually productive, educational, or indicative of some transfer of knowledge or experience) in order to be judged good. If I were judged good, I would get good grades and, consequently, into college (this being before the Internet boom, when graduating from college was pretty much required in order to have a comfortable life.)

I should mention that she was making this statement in reference to activities demanded by a person designated as a “Master Teacher” by my school system.

Being a potentially rational child (as all children are before being corrupted by adult minds), I thought this was pretty silly. While discipline and obedience might be considered useful traits, the lessons that I concluded were being taught were 1. that the perception of accomplishment was more important than actual accomplishment and 2. the educational system was about accomplishing arbitrary steps in a process (that is never explained, justified, verified, and appears to have no relation to reality), not actual learning.

And in my consequent efforts, both of these conclusions proved to be true. If this book is any indication, those lessons don’t change as you advance through the educational system.

So students are getting lessons that learning is not a useful goal … that actions associated with school are tasks to complete, disconnected from any other use but the immediate grades the accomplishment earns them. This is but one of the ridiculously large number of implicit and explicit indicators that actual thought (the facilitation of which is the whole point of learning) is not a useful or desirable thing.

And teachers seem to be surprised that students don’t continue efforts that they think should be educational, or that the risk of failure outweighs the potential benefit of learning:

Communities of Learners

The Game of School

Helping "Fake Readers" Become Proficient Life-Long Readers

My mother visited the other day. During one part of a conversation, I mentioned that I remembered the lessons she taught me. What I didn’t say was that many of those lessons were unintentional.

Do you know what lessons you’re actually teaching your children?