The Quality of Life

July 31, 2013 By

The idea of quality of life is very twentieth-century. It sparks associations with ideas like statistical quality control and total quality management. It is the idea that entire human lives can be objectively modeled, measured and compared in meaningful ways. That lives can be idealized and normalized in ways that allow us to go beyond comparisons to absolute measures. That lives can be provisioned from cradle-to-grave. That an insistence on a unique, subjective evaluation of one’s own life is something of a individualist-literary conceit.

I suspect the phrase itself is a generalization of the older notion of modern conveniences, a phrase you frequently find in early twentieth-century writing. It referred to the diffusion of various technologies into everyday pre-industrial life, from running hot and cold water in bathrooms and garbage collection to anesthetics and vaccines.

That conception of the quality of life, as the sum total of material conveniences acquired and brutalities of nature thwarted through technology, seems naive today. But with hindsight, it was much better than what it evolved into: baroque United Nations statistics that reflect institutionally enabled and enforced scripts, which dictate what people ought to want.

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The Networked Narrative

July 25, 2013 By

Drew is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Kneeling Bus.

“In every age urban spaces—streets and squares—have served to stage spectacles in which the citizenry participated as players and audience. Urban life in nothing if not theatrical.”

-Spiro Kostof

“Places do not disappear, but their logic and their meaning become absorbed in the network.”

-Manuel Castells

The compact disc, a beachhead in the eventual digital absorption of nearly everything, introduced itself to the world via Philips and Sony with the promise of “perfect sound forever.” Today, that succinct phrase reads as a flawed prophecy about a then-nascent revolution in information and memory: The replacement of an analog world where death and decay ultimately eroded all but the most valued (and fortunate) vessels of information—paintings, books, records, and even buildings—with a digital one where the same bits that had previously lived in physical objects could achieve immortality and begin piling up forever unless consciously deleted. Analog information had to opt into survival through intentional preservation; digital information would have to opt out.

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Inside the Miscellaneous Folder

July 23, 2013 By

In any workflow taxonomy for classifying anything from individual to-d0 lists and desk drawers to countries and large corporations, there are things that require more trouble to classify than they are worth. If you’ve done your job right, you’ll achieve a 80-20 split, where 20% of the taxonomy captures 80% of the action in clean-edged ways, and the remaining 80% that contains the 20% of special cases, outliers, exceptions and so, can all be lumped together under something analogous to a folder marked “miscellaneous.”

Every organization scheme, if it is useful at all, handles a dynamic flow of action. The action enters through some equivalent of an inbox, evolves at varying rates through the taxonomic scheme, and exits through some equivalent of an archival scheme combined with a trash can. Between entrance and exit, the flow divides itself into the ordered part of the organization scheme and the miscellaneous folder.

For a corporation, the inbox is usually the sales pipeline and the miscellaneous folder is often the CEO’s office. For a country, it is a mix of domestic and international economic, political and military “issues” that converge on the governance apparatus in the country’s capital. In the case of the military, the “miscellaneous” folder is often the special forces.

We recognize the need for the organization scheme to evolve with the flow it is processing, but it is usually hard to operationalize this basic idea. Here’s are some basic principles.

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You Are Not an Artisan

July 10, 2013 By

A couple of weeks ago, after reading yet another piece of high-minded marketing copy, full of words like hand-crafted and artisan, a silly verse popped unbidden into my head:

This is not the renaissance.
You are not an artisan.
Go around to the back door,
you’re a smelly tradesman. 

So long as we’re pretending that we’re rediscovering an early-modern work ethic, I think I can call myself a bard and allow myself a bit of anachronistic doggerel.

Thinking through the implications of the whole artisan-crafts-guilds meme in the future-of-work debates led me to an odd conclusion: the future is significantly brighter (or less bleak) than people realize. So long as you stop thinking in terms of crafts and aim to practice a trade instead, there is more work for humans than people realize.

What’s the difference? It’s the difference between bards and chimney-sweeps.

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Consciousness: An Outside View

July 1, 2013 By

Kevin is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Melting Asphalt.

How can ‘mere’ matter, properly configured, manage to be conscious? Are chimpanzees or elephants conscious? Can a computer be conscious?

Today we will answer none of these questions. In fact, we won’t even address them. These questions probe what David Chalmers calls, for good reason, the “hard problem” of consciousness. It’s a notion so slippery that some have spent their whole careers misunderstanding it, while others flirt with denying its very existence.

But ours is not to get mired in this debate. Instead, we’re going to do an end-run around the hard problem of consciousness by taking the “outside view.” Rather than asking about consciousness in the context of an individual mind, we’re going to step back and take a populations-eye view of it.

Enter here the field of epidemiology. Epi (upon) + demos (the people) + logos (study). The study of what is ‘upon’ the people.

Traditionally this has meant diseases — immunity, susceptibility, vectors, contagion, etc. But epidemiology can be used to study other things that live ‘upon’ the people. Dan Sperber, for example, uses the tools of epidemiology to study culture. In the broadest sense, it’s the study of the patterns, causes, and effects of certain conditions within a population.

So today we’re going to look at consciousness through the lens of epidemiology. [Read more…]

Coincidences and Correlations

July 1, 2013 By

Most people have heard the admonition, “correlation is not causation.” Few have heard the related admonition, “coincidence is not correlation.”

In common usage, a coincidence is about pairs of rare events that have a background relationship within a model. Like thinking about a friend you haven’t thought about for ten years, and then running into him the next day. But here, I mean a more banal technical sense of “coincidence” — juxtaposition. Co-incidence, as in “occurring together”

So if you and I are at a coffee shop at the same time, our mutual presence is a “co-incidence” whether we are long-lost friends or strangers who ignore each other.

But why are these two admonitions necessary at all? Why would we assume relatedness among unrelated things, or see causal relationships where there are only correlations? They are necessary because decisions enacted in the real world as opposed to inside your head, share physical time and space with other enactments in progress: situations.

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Players versus Spectators

June 26, 2013 By

I’ve been growing increasingly interested in the interaction between players and spectators in various games, literal and metaphoric. In both kinds of games, spectators need players to create value, and players need spectators to consume it.  I’ve been trying to classify the various sorts of “extra” interactions that seem to emerge, and came up with this 3×3 grid.

dialog1

The classification is based on the observation that both sides always seem to want something beyond the basic economic transaction from the other side. Though players sometimes yell “just shut up and watch,” and though spectators sometimes yell in turn, “just shut up and listen, I am the customer” at the players, neither side ever really shuts up.

The phenomenology of player-spectator interactions is of particular interest today because the Internet has seriously muddied the clarity of roles and relationships all around.

Here’s how you read the chart.

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Lagrangian and Eulerian Decision-Making

June 24, 2013 By

This metaphor is not for everybody, but if it works for you, it will probably be very useful.

Writing Tempo has sparked a lot of  fascinating conversations for me. People either seem to immediately get the decision-making model, or find it completely counter-intuitive and bizarre. Some tell me, “this is exactly how I think, thank you for describing the process clearly.” Others tell me, “nobody could possibly think this way, this is ridiculous.”

In reflecting upon the bimodal responses, it struck me that they were coming from two very different kinds of people. The ones who find the model natural are (predictably) somewhat like me: they do most of their thinking inside their heads with models. The ones who find it unnatural seem to do most of their thinking outside their heads by “watching machines work” as it were. What Myers-Briggs types refer to as the Ti vs. Te distinction (ask your friendly neighborhood Jungian to explain this to you). In terms of concepts in the book, this is the difference between narrative thinkers and situated thinkers.

Narrative thinkers tend to process by following a flow of causation, by keeping an evolving model of it going in their heads. Situationist thinkers focus on the logic of the events flowing through a particular static block of space and time: the one they happen to inhabit at the moment. It’s like following a case as it winds its way through the police investigation, different courts, judges and jurys, versus sitting in a courtroom all day and watching slices of different cases each evolve through a chapter locally.

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War and Nonhuman Agency

June 19, 2013 By

Mike is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog Omniorthogonal.

There are no men, only artillery, infantry, cavalry. Huge masses and the instruments of their direction. Each member of these masses remembers everything and completely forgets himself. In this there must be and is pleasure…

— Tolstoy

Warfare is about killing people. Everyone seems to acknowledge that normal rules of moral behavior go out the window during war, but also that war is not completely free of rules – there are different codes of conduct that hold, and violating those rules gets will get you in trouble, especially if your side ends up losing. Nobody is quite sure what those rules are, and even less sure how such they are to be enforced. Soldiers are trained to kill, yet expected (at least in the modern era) to keep their killing carefully circumscribed. Killing civilians is a criminal atrocity when done at ground level, but perfectly acceptable when done from above. Or maybe the distinction is not altitude but scale, or whether the killing is authorized by someone who went to college.

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Extrovert-Introvert Fog

June 17, 2013 By

Many coastal geographies experience interesting patterns of fog formation when hot and cold currents mix. There are more complicated ways fog forms, but essentially it is a consequence of a collision between two distinct local weather patterns.

It recently struck me that many extrovert-introvert interactions have a similar characteristic. Extroverts gain energy from social interactions. Introverts gain energy from private, secluded thinking. When the two kinds of personalities have been “charging” for a while, they are not just energized, they are also in the grips of serious momentum.

The extrovert’s momentum manifests as wanting to continue social interactions, past the “social charging” event. 

The introvert’s momentum manifests as wanting to continue to think, past the “solitude charging” event.

When the two collide in this stage, the resulting energized communication confusion is really frustrating to experience and hilarious to watch. I call it the extrovert-introvert fog.

The introvert tries to take whatever the extrovert says as more thinking raw material, but the extrovert isn’t interested in that. He or she is interested in continuing to talk, it doesn’t matter about what.

So the extrovert keeps trying to restart the conversation, skipping from topic to topic in an effort to feed the existing momentum. The introvert keeps trying to think about what was said 5 minutes ago and getting the extrovert to shut up while they process.

The interaction usually ends in disengagement with one walking away in frustration, usually the introvert. Otherwise the introvert says something like, “god, will you shut up, and let me think for a moment!” Or the extrovert says something like, “will you pay attention for a moment, you keep tuning out!?”