MisEntropy

Atoms aren't the new bits but...

In WIRED 18.02, editor-in-chief Chris Anderson pens one more of his soon-to-be-stretched-into-a-book piece - Atoms are the new bits. If it does make it to book form, like his last effort it is likely to be a thick book with a thin idea.

His basic premise is probably uncontestable: "If the past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the Web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world."

It hardly seems the stuff of revolutions, though. Joel Johnson at Gizmodo plucks apart many of the arguments made in the piece, including the prophetic promise of the headline. (It is true that the cost of copying and manipulating atoms is falling, but as Chris Anderson should know, free is a totally different species.)

My own feeling as I read and re-read the piece was that Chris had a tenable story within the stuff he's talking about - but instead of concentrating on it, he reached for the untenable and outrageous claim he couldn't back.

At several places, he hovers over what to me was the real idea behind the piece. Here, for instance:

Transformative change happens when industries democratize, when they’re ripped from the sole domain of companies, governments, and other institutions and handed over to regular folks. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital — the long tail of bits.

Now the same is happening to manufacturing — the long tail of things.

And here:

The academic way to put this is that global supply chains have become scale-free, able to serve the small as well as the large, the garage inventor and Sony.

Which brings me to the real plausible claim that I think Chris could have/should have made with the piece. It's not that atoms are the new bits, but that the 'global supply chain' is the new internet.

[Original pic by  Rétrofuturs (Hulk4598) / Stéphane Massa-Bidal]

Know it, but don't include it

The New York Times brings this story of an economist who has been predicting - disconcertingly accurately - the medals tally for the last few Olympics. (Via Freakonomics.) Daniel Johnson - the economist in question - is currently in the news for his predictions for the current Winter Olympics.

The strange thing about Daniel's predictions is not that they have a record of 94% accuracy with actual medal counts. It is his methology. Rather than basing his predictions on individual athletes, the events or even any knowledge of sport, he bases them on something far more removed.

According to NYT, "his forecast model predicts a country's Olympic performance using per-capita income (the economic output per person), the nation's population, its political structure, its climate and the home-field advantage for hosting the Games or living nearby."

It no doubt raises interesting questions about what success in the Olympics might be an indicator of. It even unearths counterintuitive findings, like this one : "Single-party regimes, traditionally Communist regimes, do much better than their democratic peers."

What I found particularly fascinating, however, was this summation of his method:

"It's just pure economics," Johnson says. "I know nothing about the athletes. And even if I did, I didn't include it."

That completely derailed me. In a world where endless data and information (and the ability to gather more of it) is at our fingertips, how many of us would dare to say "We probably knew it, but we didn't include it." I, for one, haven't opened my register on that one yet.

What's amazing about this is that contrary to our cherished beliefs, more information - especially more 'relevant' infomation - isn't always necessary or indispensable towards acquiring knowledge.

True, it is often information that seeks us out and makes itself comfortable in our already cluttered minds. We may not be able to do much to prevent that from happening.

But what I have discovered now is that we can turn the tables. All it takes is the self-belief to say, "I knew it, but I didn't include it." "I know it, but I won't include it."

[Original pic by janusz l]

Facebook and the myth of QWERTY's inferiority

Writing about the impending 'technological lock-in' of the social operating system space by Facebook, Reuters in a recent article compared the site to the QWERTY keyboard layout. (Via Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics.)

In the words of Reuters, technological lock-in is "the reason why the QWERTY keyboard layout, devised for typewriters in the 1870s, is still the standard despite the development of several more logical configurations. And Facebook, which has more than 100 million users in the United States and 350 million worldwide, appears to have nearly achieved technological lock-in, according to web marketing research company Comscore.com."

I find the comparison (to QWERTY specifically) rather ham-handed.

QWERTY is a standard. It's like driving on the right of the road or using a fahrenheit temperature scale. It's important people around you are doing the same - however, it doesn't preclude other societies/countries/cultures doing things in other ways.

There isn't any technological lock-in or any network effect with QWERTY as in with the Windows OS, DVDs or the internal combustion engine.

There's another reason why the QWERTY comparison is inaccurate. That's because the idea of QWERTY's inferiority seems to be a myth, albeit one that's almost universally believed to be true.

According to a Journal of Law and Economics paper forwarded to Straight Dope's Cecil Adams:

    "(1) the research demonstrating the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard is sparse and methodologically suspect; (2) a sizable body of work suggests that in fact the Dvorak offers little practical advantage over the QWERTY; (3) at least one study indicates that placing commonly used keys far apart, as with the QWERTY, actually speeds typing, since you frequently alternate hands; and (4) the QWERTY keyboard did not become a standard overnight but beat out several competing keyboards over a period of years. Thus it may be fairly said to represent the considered choice of the marketplace."

Even the unflappable Cecil Adams - who on most occasions combines an almost omniscient brain with wit that's stinging with truth - had to concede this one.

QWERTY, it seems, is a victim of our tendency to wrongly favour simplified narratives that capture and perpetuate the seeming triumph of the mediocre over the deserving.

Either that, or at least in some cases, history is being written by sore losers. I don't think Mr.Zuckerberg would mind that too much.

[Original pic by fujur]

How to forge a top-of-the-line cyborg planner

Clive Thompson points to this wonderful essay on computer chess by Garri Kasparov and draws our attention to an intriguing experiment in human chess-machine diplomacy.

Undone by the brute calculative power of IBM's Deep Blue in 1997, Garri came upon a wonderful way to juxtapose the deep calculative method of chess computers with the intuitive and strategic approach of human chess players.

He put together a tournament where humans and chess computers play together against other such 'cyborg' tag teams instead of against each other. Human and computer both would collaborate to play the perfect chess - fortified with the other's strengths and shielded from their collective weaknesses.

This approach was later adopted by an online chess playing site in 2005 in a 'free-style' tournament in which teams of players and computers in any configuration could take part.

Here's what transpired in Kasparov's words:

"Lured by the substantial prize money, several groups of strong grandmasters working with several computers at the same time entered the competition. At first, the results seemed predictable. The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and "coaching" their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process."

Fascinated by Kasparov's epiphany, Clive Thompson nails the argument :

"We work as cyborgs, using machine intelligence to augment our human smarts. Google amplifies our ability to find information, or even to remember it (I often use it to resolve “tip of the tongue” moments — i.e. to locate the name of a person or concept I know but can’t quite put my finger on). Social-networking software gives us an ESP-level awareness of what’s going on in the lives of people we care about. Tools like Mint help us spot invisible patterns in how we’re spending, or blowing, our hard-earned cash. None of these tools replace human intelligence, or even work the way that human intelligence works. Indeed, they’re often cognitively quite alien processes — which is precisely why they can be so unsettling to some people, and why we’re still sort of figuring out how, and when, to use them. The arguments that currently rage about the social impact of Facebook and Google are, in a sense, arguments about what sort of cyborgs we want — or don’t want — to be.

What I love about Kasparov’s algorithm — “Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and … superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process” — is that it suggests serious rewards accrue to those who figure out the best way to use thought-enhancing software."

[This reminds me of a post I wrote a while ago - what blogging does to planners. Drawing on the evolutionary arguments of extended phenotypes I wrote about how planners can enhance their cognitive capacities and weave a web of information around themselves.

Reading the above arguments - and my own post again - I realised what I got right with the above post, inadvertently of course, was to emphasise the process of blogging rather than the tool itself.]

In light of Kasparov's epiphany, the question we planners need to continually ask ourselves is this. Our abilities abound and so do tools and services to ehance them. But what are we doing every single day to fuse them together into an effective cyborg planner? Because it's the latter that will make us radically better at our jobs, not either of the former.