The Deliberate Practice of Disruption

June 11, 2014 By

Recently, I concluded that our understanding of expertise, especially in the sense of the 10,000 hour meme, is seriously flawed. Even though there is something real there. And I don’t just mean the understanding conveyed by Malcolm Gladwell, who popularized the idea. I include the primary researchers such as K. Anders Ericsson on whose work the popular accounts are based.  

The problem isn’t what you might think. It’s not the basic model of 10,000 hours of practice coupled with metacognition that’s the problem. The observation that you can get to useful levels of skill short of mastery in less time doesn’t fundamentally challenge the model. Nor is there a serious problem with the ideas that practice is necessary or that practice without metacognition is insufficient. That’s all true enough. Nor is the idea vacuous and tautological as some suggest.

The real problem is that research on expertise focuses on fields where “expertise” is a well-posed and objectively codified notion. This means mature fields that are closed and  bounded, and can be easily observed, modeled and studied under laboratory conditions. So it is not surprising that the work of researchers like Ericsson is based on fields like “medicine, music, chess and sports” (Wikipedia) or “music, science, golf and darts” (Ericsson’s own website).

Notice something? They’re all sharply circumscribed and regulated domains.

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Saints and Traders: The John Henry Fable Reconsidered

June 4, 2014 By

I only recently learned (from Sarah Constantin, whose new blog is worth checking out) of the American folk legend of John Henry, a steel driver who raced against a steam drill and won, only to drop dead right after. Wikipedia tells the story thusly:

He worked as a “steel-driver”—a man tasked with hammering a steel drill into rock to make holes for explosives to blast the rock away. He died during the construction of a tunnel for a railroad. In the legend, John Henry’s prowess as a steel-driver was measured in a race against a steam powered hammer, which he won, only to die in victory with his hammer in his hand and heart giving out from stress. The story of John Henry has been the subject of numerous songs, stories, plays, books and novels.

The amazing thing about John Henry is not that he chose to race against a machine. The amazing thing is not even that he won a Pyrrhic victory. The truly amazing thing is that he was turned into a folk hero rather than a cautionary tale, and a symbol of human dignity when in fact his behavior was what you might call morally robotic: based on non-negotiable values that killed him.

The key word above is prowess. It’s a rather archaic word, one I’ve never heard used in conversation, but a useful one. It has connotations of both skill and valor, bundled together in a notion of dignity. On a level playing field with a closed and bounded set of fixed rules, prowess could also be considered synonymous with competitive drive. 

Unfortunately, a human racing against a steam drill is not exactly a level playing field and the economic activity of building profitable railroads is not exactly a cleanly circumscribed Olympic competitive sport. Asymmetric and open-ended conditions separate prowess from competitive ability and turn it into a liability. A large fraction of the labor force today is in a John Henry situation within protectionist sectors of the economy, so it is important to knock down this particular idol with some unsentimental revisionism.

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A Life with a View

April 16, 2014 By

There is a memorable exchange in the Seinfeld episode The Keys, between Kramer and George on the theme of yearning. Unlike much of the show’s humor, which seems dated in the digital era, this little existential joke has improved with age:

Kramer: Do you ever yearn?
George: Yearn? Do I yearn?
Kramer: I yearn.
George: You yearn.
Kramer: Oh, yes. Yes, I yearn. Often, I…I sit…and yearn. Have you yearned?
George: Well, not recently. I craved. I crave all the time, constant craving…but I haven’t yearned.

You can imagine a more poignant version of this conversation over an iPad showing a Facebook feed. The Internet, with its constant parade of lives-that-might-have-been-yours and classmates-not-dated, is a jungle of yearnings. Yearnings that were once confined to fading and static memories of childhood, occasionally awakened by petrichor, now sneak into your life as a steady, colorful stream of living confusion, via windows in present realities. There was no equivalent in the past to being a silent spectator of other lives by default. You either had active, evolving relationships of mutual influence, or mutual invisibility. Like passengers on subways, we only saw people on other routes at stations. There were no relationships of continuous mutual spectatorship.

There was no such thing as a life with a view. 

***

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Ritual and the Productive Community

April 3, 2014 By

Ryan Tanaka is a musician, writer, programmer and product manager living in the Los Angeles area. For every article that he writes, Ryan also improvises a musical piece as means of organizing his ideas. (Below, or here.)

Excerpt from my 9th “Angry Birds” String Quartet, based on the Yellow “Accelerating” Bird (Click to hear a sample recording)

In a previous article on my blog, I wrote about the possibility of creating “Sacred Spaces”, highlighting the ingredients necessary for the creation of communities within technological contexts.  Some of the ingredients include: rituals, symbolic gestures, leadership roles, group identities and group histories.  Without these basic elements to help sustain community identities, the prospects of organizations surviving for the long-term can be said to be very bleak, even with economic and/or political support.

Out of all of these ingredients, the idea of ritual can be said to be the most important, since it exists at the heart of all community-based infrastructures.

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The Message is the Medium

March 20, 2014 By

I’ve been in Europe all week and just got done with the European Trend Day conference in Zurich, organized by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute. So instead of a regular post, you get the slide-deck for my talk, The Message is the Medium.

The slides are probably going to be a bit cryptic for those unfamiliar with McLuhan’s theory of media, so here are some (hopefully helpful) notes.

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Demons by Candelight

February 27, 2014 By

I grew up with frequent power outages and load-shedding, especially during  the summer time. Dark evenings without power were a special time for children. The candle-lit hours on porches and balconies were a strange mix of an ethereal kind of intimacy,  beckoning darkness, and thoughts that retreated from both sunlight and electric lights.

You could do nothing useful during those hours. There was no TV or radio. Reading was difficult. Candle-lit meals tended to be either quick, simple affairs whipped up in semi-darkness, or leftovers. Families who turned the blacked-out evenings into family time generally sat out on the porch. Adults would use the time to tell family stories to children. Teenagers and some couples would stroll up and down the street, occasionally stopping to chat with neighbors. Younger kids would run around squealing and playing, seemingly possessed by the strange euphoria-inducing forces leaking in from another world. Or they would huddle together and try to scare each other with ghost stories.

Even back then, having never experienced cold northern climates, I instinctively knew that the Scottish word fey, born of cold foggy highlands, and which I had only encountered in books, was somehow the right word for the charged pre-Monsoon summer air around me.

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Technical Debt of the West

January 28, 2014 By

Kevin is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Melting Asphalt. This is the finale of his residency.

Here’s a recipe for discovering new ideas:

  1. Examine the frames that give structure (but also bias) to your thinking.
  2. Predict, on the basis of #1, where you’re likely to have blind spots.
  3. Start groping around in those areas.

If you can do this with the very deepest frames — those that constrain not just your own thinking, but your entire civilization’s — you can potentially unearth a treasure trove of insight. You may not find anything 100% original (ideas that literally no one else has ever seen), but whatever you find is almost guaranteed to be underappreciated.

In his lecture series The Tao of Philosophy, Alan Watts sets out to do just this for Western civilization. He wants to examine the very substrate of our thinking, in order to understand and correct for our biases.

So what is the substrate of Western thought?

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Our Diurnal Civilization

December 9, 2013 By

As a kid I used to be afraid of the dark. I grew out of it, as most kids do. Now, as an adult, I find it hard to sleep if it isn’t pitch dark. Being a diurnal species with greater vulnerability to nocturnal predators, the association between fear and darkness has some basis in reality. It takes thousands of safe and undisturbed nights to flip that genetic predisposition through conditioning.

As Marshall McLuhan observed, industrial civilization is a highly visual one, based on an extension of sight over other senses. This suggests that any inherent biases in our visual processing are likely to show up in our larger-scale, collective civilizational behaviors. In particular, I am convinced that the metaphor of darkness is how we viscerally process uncertainty of any sort. We turn any lack of conceptual visibility into stories of hidden dangers real and imaginary. We prefer high-visibility conditions, even if they represent greater real dangers.

In other words, our civilizational itself is a diurnal one, partly driven by fears of monsters lurking under beds at night. We have a fear of dark ages.

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The New Human Wilderness

November 25, 2013 By

“We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localized stylistic sense that my generation grew up with.”

-Brian Eno

“Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri.”

-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Most of us live in cities; a lot of what we deem significant happens in cities; and our society is more “urban,” however we define that word, than ever before. The moment in 2008 when the world’s urban population passed the 50 percent mark possessed great symbolic importance for many who are part of that majority. Interestingly, contemporary authors like Ed Glaeser have built careers upon advocating the continued importance (the “triumph”) of the city, although urbanization, as a trend, doesn’t appear to need any more support than it naturally gets. Of course cities are important, and of course they’re still the focal points of the present economy and culture—they’re where civilization happens.

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Deep Play: An Impressionistic Theory of Innovation

November 19, 2013 By

I have my second essay up at Aeon Magazine, Deep Play. It’s an attempt at an impressionistic picture of how the world of innovation works.  Here’s an extract:

The EMP Museum, the Gates Foundation, and the MOHAI form what I’ve dubbed the Titan Triangle of Seattle, a zone of violent urban terraforming. Sometimes, on my walks, an absurd image pops up into my head: Bezos, Gates and Allen standing like thousand-foot colossi at the three vertices, hammering away at the earth, with the ghost of Boeing looking on. Violence is the key word here. To scurry about within Titan Triangle is to be struck by the relentless violence — physical, financial, social, and psychological — of a process dubbed ‘creative destruction’. As popularised by the economist Joseph Schumpeter in the 1940s, this is the technology-driven unravelling and cohering of social orders in the human world.

But standing between the EMP Museum and the Gates Foundation, and taking in their opposing visions of innovation, I am equally struck by the fact that the transformative violence of creative destruction still appears to be governed by that apparently intractable question: how can you talk of colonies on Mars when there are starving children in Africa?

Billions of dollars are apportioned according to the logic of that question every year. And one has to wonder, do the financiers of creative destruction operate by better answers than the ones you and I trade at parties?

Without giving too much away, the essay tries to get at the fundamental structure of industrial-age innovation models using a happy/broken families metaphor, with some inspiration from Clifford Geertz’ notion of deep play.

And in case you missed it, here’s my first Aeon essay, American Cloud, which appeared earlier this year.

These pieces at Aeon have been an interesting challenge: trying to treat themes as complex as the ones I attempt here at ribbonfarm, but in a more accessible way for a mainstream audience. Tough game, since it means doing without random engineering metaphors or too much obscure conceptual scaffolding (the first draft of this essay was a cheerful mess of yin-yang references, genies in lamps etc. which I would likely have let through untouched if I’d posted here).

Am learning as I go along, thanks to my editor there, Ross Andersen.

No time for a full post this week, but this one should keep you busy.