Category: General Thoughts

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Life After People

History Channel featured a show called “Life After People”.   It talks re how long buildings, roads etc would last after people disappeared.    According to the series, various domestic and zoo animals would get out and begin to dominate the world.

The graphics are cool.  In general it was a waste of time watching, but I started wondering  about the meta-message.   They had an ominous sounding narration and those kind of cut in noises that are supposed to create tension.   There is a general theme that somehow this the disappearance of people is justice and that the planet is better off as a result.  

The series seems eager to demonstrate that the works of mankind are fragile and that they will soon decay.   1000 years after people, almost nothing remains.   Nature is resilient.   As far as I am concerned, however, the world w/o people really doesn’t matter, just not my business. People were not around for most of the world’s history and I suppose we won’t be around sometime in the future.  There is no way humans can conceive of a world w/o humans. Things like “Life After People” after all still have a human narration and a human story line. The people who really think they are not “species-centric” are really fooling themselves.   

I saw some kind of spooky abandoned buildings in Iraq.  I wrote re the train station at this link. 

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Belling the Cat & Other Great Ideas

An outside consultant is someone who borrows your watch and charges you a fee to tell you the time.

People have been trying to sell us information research, outreach or new media services for a long time.  They are good people, usually smart guys with impressive credentials and great sounding programs.  But they remind me of stray cats trying to become house cats. They are very friendly and offer a lot, but once they get a steady supply of cream I am not sure they won’t become a nuisance.  I understand the need to work with outside experts, but I have some simple concerns.

The first is a simple sourcing question.  Whenever someone comes with really impressive and precise information, I have to ask where he got it.  Conclusions are no better than the source materials/data they are based on and the soundness of the method with which they were collected, but a clever consultant or academic can build impressive castles on the shifting, soft sand of supposition.  No matter how impressive the tower, the foundation is what matters.

A second question has to do with our own motivations.  We should use outside experts to “rent” expertise we don’t want to buy/develop permanently.  We should not use them as CYA, trying  to outsource decision making or creating/buying systems that will run on auto-pilot. Of course, some things are routine and well enough understood that we can just have a procedure. The hard decisions are hard precisely because they do not fall into that category.  We cannot abdicate responsibility for these decisions. The systems should be decision support, not decision substitution.

A third factor comes as a result of both of the above considerations.  It is possible to create an impressive looking expert-system that leads you inexorably to a wrong decision. We have to guard against it and always consider the inputs and sources.  Maybe the sources are flawed or the analysis in error, but the system is so beautiful and elegant that it creates the impression of greater certainty than the information permits.   If not for the system, you might see that for yourself, but what would have been an obvious flaw is obscured by the impressive and beautiful system built around it.

An important reason for this is the effect of aggregation, which is a fourth factor.  I might make a reasonable guess.  You might too and so might ten others.   Each of us has made a reasonable estimate with a degree of risk.  When we aggregate our guesses, they seem much more certain, but may have introduced all sorts of biases.   The collective judgment may be worse than any of the individuals.   Let me hasten to say that reasonable aggregation of diverse information is a great way to arrive at good decisions.  But when someone creates a model and then runs it, there is a good chance of introducing bias, maybe unintentional, and a significant risk of faulty aggregation.  I have seen lots of examples of information cascades, where the first (wrong) guesses influence the others.  (I have even created a few as experiments.  It is not hard.)  If the model is opaque, as they often are, we can be easily fooled. The worst case is when the model sort of works but because of random events or factors not property accounted in the model.  Arbitrary coherence.

It is not what you don’t know that is most dangerous.  It is what you know that isn’t true. 

A fifth factor is a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle of human affairs.  The very fact that we are doing something, or even just observing, alters the underlying reality.   This is especially true of a big player like the USG.   We need to take account of the effects of our actions and recognize the developing situations.  The correct answer today may well be the worst solution six months from now, w/o either answer being wrong.  That is why I am a great believer in iterative research and programs.  You have to see how things develop and then take the next step.  Of  course you need an overall context, but system-building consultants often become too vested in their peculiar models. They want to continue to apply it even when it has become inappropriate.

Which brings us to my sixth concern: an important reason why we do programs is to create the knowledge and relationship base among our own people.  If we outsource activities, we also outsource or give away the relationships and intimate knowledge of what we are doing. It is sort of like a student hiring another kid to write his term paper.  We become dependent on the models and reports and may be misled when we let our own powers atrophy.  We get the big bucks because of our experience, judgment and knowledge.  If we outsource the tasks that require them, we are not only avoiding the important value we add, we are also giving away the things that build future human capital.

Finally, I always have to ask if the service or research is useful. This seems an obvious question, but it often goes unasked.  We get so bedazzled by the graphs, fascinated by the immensity of a problem and/or baffled by the bull shit, that we never ask, “So, what do I do with this?” 

For something to be useful, it must be capable of being used – AND used by us, not some theoretical all-powerful actor.  When I hear something could be done, I want to know by whom and who has already done it.   I am a little leery of someone trying to tell me that I will be the first one ever to achieve something.  There is often silence at this point.  Many consultants are so honestly in love with their own products that they are not ready for the disconfirming question. Remember the fable of the mice who thought it would be a good idea to put a bell on the cat?  The plan was great until they asked who could do it.

Excuse me if I slip into hyperbole, but if I know there is a vast civilization on a planet of the Alpha Centauri system, but I have no way to contact them or get there, it is very interesting, but not useful information.  It is momentous and I want to know, but it is not useful. Among the compelling but useless information people often try to sell is polling data about whether or not people in X country like the U.S.  This is interesting information, but even assuming it doesn’t fall into one or more of the traps mentioned above, it is useless unless there is something I, we, the USG can do about it. 

For that I need more granular information.  Anyway, I don’t have to pay for that kind of general information.  I can get it free from Pew Research, Brookings, Heritage or many of the others who study such things.  (I found 33 official or authoritative studies on the subject.  I am sure there are more.)   Useful means actionable.   Most of what people are peddling is not.

I learn a lot from listening to these presentations, and I am glad they invite me to hear them. I feel a little bad for them.  They seem honest and earnest, but the chances they will sell much are slim.  I can often think of very good uses for particular parts of the product line, but I doubt I will ever find an acceptable whole solution.  If I do, I will advocate that we buy that system, and I can retire.

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Gutenberg for the 21st Century

IIP Publications (Pubs) show an example of a respected traditional product line that adapted to the new media w/o losing its way.    People look to Pubs for useful content and their offerings have long been among the popular IIP products with our posts and audiences overseas.   Generations of students have relied on the outline series and PAOs handed out printed publications to their contacts.   Publications were among the first products to be put online and all of them are available in full text on America.gov.   But these remained essentially one way communications in the old, pre-web 2.0 model.

The Pubs staff knows that a dialogue is a more effective way of winning friends and influencing people.  Listening as well as talking is a sign of respect that new media audiences demand.    Changing the paradigm from producing products to producing conversations is never an easy transition, but Pubs has significant advantages in this endeavor. 

Most importantly, Pubs has content the audiences want to get and want to discuss.   This is further enhanced by the provenance of most of the articles and chapters in a Pubs product.   They are almost always written by outside experts.   These experts come already equipped with their own audiences, points of view and networks of colleagues.    There is a natural focus for dialogue in each of the articles.

Take the example of the most recent ePublication, Energy Efficiency: the First Fuel.  Several of the articles stimulated me to think and want to respond.  In many ways the response and the cross talk will be better than the articles themselves, since they will tap into the wider knowledge of the readers.   This is the new world of PD 2.0, and we can be part of it if we have the courage to engage.

Pubs is working on this through Facebook, Twitter and other means.   They well understand the need to be flexible and they do not have a “Facebook strategy” or a “Twitter Plan.”  Rather they are working out strategies that involve Facebook or Twitter while still taking advantage of the significant “old media” distribution network long in place, the one that works through posts, IRCs and printing distribution. 

It is still early in the game for Pubs and the new media, but the staff was able to share a couple of insights.   One is that micro-blogging, via Twitter, is easier and less time intensive than ordinary blogging, but it can produce significant results when linked back to an existing IIP publication.    Another observation is that Facebook can serve as a central hub for other online products and activities.    The advantages of Facebook are that it is easily available to customers all over the world and it is easy to update.   Pubs also realizes that much of its product distribution will be outside IIP or USG channels. Since Pubs provides free content,  the products are often copied and repurposed.    Most of the publications are or soon will be available on platforms such as Google Books, Amazon Kindles or I-Phone aps, among others.

George Clack, who directs IIP Pubs shared some experience in thinking about a marketing plan for the new media.   First is to indeed have a written plan.   While you have to recognize that the plan will not be carried out in the detail you envision, having a plan allows everybody to riff off something that is organized and thought out.   

This plan, as all plans should, begins with the end in mind.  Interestingly, many planners forget this step and that, paraphrasing the Cheshire Cat, “if you don’t know where you want to go, you will probably end up someplace else.”   But the direction must be light.   We work with creative people and we have to let them be creative in their own ways.  We must also recognize the MOST of the creativity available to us is outside our own organization.  The new media allows us to tap into that creativity – if we allow it.  That is the path Pubs is pursuing, and they are off to a good start.  

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Wet Protestors

Reasonable people make poor protestors.   It is just not a game they can win.   It is a lot like the one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.  Why?

I passed by a tax protest today.   They called it a “tea party”  after the famous tax protest in Boston.   On this cold and rainy day, maybe a thousand people showed up.   This is certainly enough to make a successful protest, but it wasn’t. They didn’t have the usual protestor characteristics.

Let’s compare this to other protests.   I see a lot of them because of my business and living in Washington, so I consider myself a bit of an aficionado.  

Most protestors are well-behaved, but most protests have their share of semi-violent actors.    This means that the police have to show up in large numbers, shut down streets etc, which advertises the event, draws media attention and magnifies even a small protest.  I have seen protests of only a few dozen people magnified by the police and media attention into major events.    

Anti-globalist organizations are very good at this.   Small cores of activists break windows or vandalize property, drawing in the police.    They achieve their goal just by getting the police to show up.   Their best outcome, however, is for the police to hurt somebody, so radical protestors work hard to be provocative. That is how they get on the news and influence policy.  It is very hard to avoid becoming pawns in their game if your goal is to protect safety and property. Unreasonable people win this one.

The first protest I ever addressed was in Brazil when five guys showed up to protest our policy in Nicaragua.  I wouldn’t let them in the Consulate, so they went outside to shout and carry on.  They stood at the corner in front of a fruit stand and a bus stop.  When they started to shout, the crowd buying fruit & waiting for the bus looked in their general direction.  At that time the journalist snapped a picture and the story said, “Hundreds Protest U.S. Policy.”  I complained to the editor, but it didn’t do any good.

The tax protestors were reasonable and the police knew it.  They didn’t shut down any streets.  There were not massive numbers of cops and I didn’t see any media.   If a tree falls in the woods.

Another thing a protest obviously needs is protestors, the more the better.  Think about who is likely to protest regularly.  People with jobs and responsibilities cannot take the time off, so they are generally out of the mix. Protests anywhere near a college campus benefit from a large number of young people w/o much to do and protests can be fun.   

The habitual protest must also be a generalist.  If you are interested in a few things and really take the time to understand them, you will be an “expert” but not a protestor simply because opportunities to protest in your specialty will be uncommon.   That is why a more-or-less professional class of protestors has developed.   They are generally anti-whatever and they form the core of most protests.   They are the ones who know the chants and they are the ones with all the cool props and costumes.   They know how to draw attention and how to provoke the police.  They also know how to get out of the way so that more casual protestors can get hurt.  It makes a much better story if a local “non-professional” gets pushed by the cops. 

As you can probably tell, I am not greatly enthusiastic about protests.   The right of peaceful assembly is an important right in a democracy, but there is not virtue in using it too much.    It is a tool and as with all tools it can be used for good or bad purposes.   Unfortunately, those wanting to create disruptions are much better able to use this particular tool than reasonable people.

Protestors highjack normal civil discourse.   They can intimidate and can magnify small concerns out of context, as I discuss above.  It annoys me when journalists cover protests almost to the exclusion of whatever the protestors are complaining about.  Television is especially guilty of this, because of its need for compelling pictures.   When you see those pictures, it is good to remember that you are watching a type of theatre.  You are almost never seeing the spontaneous will of the people.  It is almost always a powerful interest groups carrying out politics by other means.

Anyway, I don’t know what will come of the tax protest.  I am convinced that I will be paying higher taxes in the future and there is not much that can stop it.   Almost half of Americans hardly pay any Federal income tax at all and the lower 20% actually gets significantly more back in direct payments than they pay in taxes.   Taxes are supposed to pay for our common expenses (the ones helping us establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity).  The rich should pay more, but everybody should pay something.

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The Eternal Cocktail Party

One of the things I like least about my job is the necessity to go to cocktail parties and make small talk.   I am sure that someplace in Dante’s Inferno is a level where unfortunate souls circulate endlessly and chatter eternally w/o saying anything at all.  Now Twitter is spreading the cocktail party experience to all the world all the time and airheads everywhere are elated and vindicated.   They seem to feel that when their inane and banal blather is ennobled when it is carried over advanced technology. 

Some people bragged that they were twittering during a recent speech by President Obama.   I mean they didn’t hide it; they bragged about it.  How rude is that?  The President of the United States is talking and you are invited to be there in person, but instead of listening, you are talking to others, commenting on what the man is saying before he has a chance to finish his thought.    The fact that you are doing it on with your thumbs on an electronic toy only makes it worse.   Maybe I am just old fashioned, but if the President is standing in front of me talking, I think it is a good idea to pay attention.   

IMO – Twitter is good for sending out notices and very short breaking news, not much else.  The idea that people will just share their unformed thoughts is just silly.  Not everybody agrees.  Take a look at this NYT story.

Think about the kind of people who like – really like – cocktail parties.  Do we really want so many more of them?   At least at a real cocktail party you have some beer to dull the pain.  A little twitter goes a long way.    Human attention is too rare and valuable to waste.

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Survivor Bias & the Teleology Trap

I have been reading an annoying book called Tribes: We Need You to Lead US.  It is typical of many such books about change, new technologies etc. in that it has that insufferable air of superiority and fawning homage to coolness.   There are some good ideas; enough to fill an article or maybe a blog post, but not a book.   But it wasn’t a waste.   I thought about some of the reasons these books sell so well and how the faculties they employ sound so convincing … and why I probably cannot use much of the advice.

This book and others like them (some very good such as the Tipping Point) suffer from survivor bias.   They talk about how little movements turn into big things.  You get examples, like Google or Facebook, that seemed to come from nowhere to dominance.  The examples are real, but the game is rigged.   It is “survivor bias” & the teleology trap.    It is when you assume that conditions you observe today were a natural or even an inevitable outcome. You infer a pattern or purpose where none is implied.  It comes from a faulty perspective.   A lottery winner asks, “What are the chances that I would win?”   But the correct question is “What are the chances somebody will win?”  Of course, the chances of that are 100%.   If you bet on that, you are always right.

A simple illustration of survival bias is a game of Russian roulette.   Survival is a random event, but at the end of the game, somebody will have survived.    If a large enough group starts out, somebody will survive even repeated plays.   You just don’t know who it will be.   No doubt the “winner” will come to believe that he knows some secret of success.   He may write books about it.   But there is nothing to it.

Of course there is more involved in technology companies, celebrities or investing, but sometimes less than you would think.    Let’s take the example of celebrities.   All celebrities have talent.  They are all attractive in some way.   They are generally smart (or at least smarter than they seem).  A celebrity needs these things.  They are threshold requirements, the minimum you need them just to get through the gate, but they are not enough to provide success. Beyond that, the winning combination will not be known in advance.   It looks very different depending on when you look.    

If I know that a person is a celebrity, it is fairly easy to go back and explain why her ascent was inevitable.   But if I substituted a non-celebrity, I might find much the same biography.   When you listen to the winning Super Bowl team, they always say that they knew they were going to win and confidence is important, but the losers also knew they were going to win.   They were just wrong.

Books like Tribes play on this bias.  It is like naming the winner of the lottery AFTER the drawing.  It is easy to be prescient about the past.   The other thing I don’t like about this book is the appeal to coolness.    They talk about the latest styles and sing paeans to change.    People today demand the latest, they say.   Once again, they are right, but so what.   A lot of change is just froth.  I have been reading these sorts of books for more than twenty years.   They are always talking about the changes and the changes are always happening.   But most of them don’t stick.   In fact, the authors are usually self-contradictory.   They seem to think radical change will happen and then it will be the change they want, but things keep on moving.

Another thing that annoys me about the cool change folks is that they don’t seem to understand cycles.  The author of Tribes triumphantly states that smaller organizations are often growing faster than bigger ones.   What a surprise!   A young tree grows faster than an old one, but trends often do not continue.  Beyond that , when praising the growth of the small, it is useful to do some simple math.  Which would you rather have,  50% of $1 or 5% of $1000? 

I have a special perspective on cool fads.  As an FSO, I am away from America sometimes for years.   Sometimes I miss entire fads.   They come and go while I am away and there was no point in even thinking about them.   Ephemera.   Meanwhile, my bookshelf still has lots of classics that are never wildly popular but endure.   The book that has been longest in my possession is a copy of Gibbon’s Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire that my mother gave to my father the Christmas of 1954, the year before I was born.   It was first published in 1776.   I first read it in 1966 and it is still a joy today.  Who could have predicted that the yet unborn baby would still be reading that book fifty-five years after my mother bought it?   

Change is good & and so is continuity.   A balanced person treasures both but is beguiled by neither.

BTW – Survivor bias is why we think stuff was better in the past.  All the junk has long since gone in the garbage.  What is left is better or at least by definition the longer lasting. 

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Let the Games Begin

Continuing my thoughts on games in public affairs, interactive games will soon become the leading method of persuasion and a key advertising medium.   I know that is a sweeping statement.   Those familiar only with the “Space Invaders” game generation will think I am nuts.  The “Myst” people will see the merit in the statement, and those playing World of Warcraft would heartily endorse it, if they could divert their attention long enough from their games.   Games are already a primary way that young people interact with data, each-other and the world in general.   Even the EU now thinks that gaming might be good for young minds, so we better get used to the idea that games.  For a funnier approach, take a look at this video.

Games’ pervasive persuasive ability is part of a continuum of imagined worlds so let’s digress a little to the more familiar previous persuasion champion – the play (or in the modern versions the movie or TV show).  Sophocles and Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw, O’Neil and George Lucas & Steven Spielberg were/are masters of persuasion and they all knew what they were doing.   Think of a play as a very long commercial message that you volunteer to watch.  And remember that if a thirty-second commercial can sell you a product, don’t you think an hour and thirty minute play or a thirty minute TV show can sell you an idea or a lifestyle.

The writers, producers, directors and actors work together to sell you an idea.  Sometimes it is  innocuous; sometimes not.  Shakespeare sold us all the Tudor version of English history and we bought that Richard III was nothing but a sneaky rat and Henry V was a great and brave hero.  There is some truth to some of these characterizations, but they are fictional caricatures, not history.  It was a conscious effort at propaganda, but it was so skillfully done that it is still part of the fabric of our society four centuries later.   A skillful current propagandist is Oliver Stone.   Many people draw their knowledge of JFK or Nixon from his movies and the images are strong.  Even when you know the real history of the events, it is hard to get the image out of your mind.   The living, moving image often trumps the truth of history.   That is the power of the play/movie/TV Show.    

The writers/producers/directors control ALL the characters.   They can make the ones they don’t like unlikable or stupid.  It is all a set up.  They can structure events so that faults are revealed AND they can give characters the faults to be revealed.    It is analogous to your own dream, where all the characters are you but they seem to be others and that is how you react.   In every play, for persuasion purposes, the bad guys and the good guys are on the same side.  They are all working for the guy who wrote the play.  But the illusion remains.    Directors sometimes disingenuously talk about characters as independent or they ridicule critics by pointing out that it is only fiction.   Think of how you view familiar historical people or events.  Now consider whether your image came from reading actual history or just watching it on TV.   

BTW – the power of the producer has increased in Orwellian fashion.  Now many directors go back to their movies and change them to fit the current situation and sensibilities.   The “Star Wars” you saw in 1979 is not the same one you will see today.  “He who controls the past controls the future and he who controls the present controls the past,” is the philosophy of Ingsoc and Big Brother in George Orwell’s “1984.”

But the power of the play/movie/TV show pales in comparison to a modern game.  Viewer might get involved in a drama, but not matter how involved the couch potato gets, he is still a passive participant.   None of his intelligence or perception will change the course of the investigation on “Law & Order”  and none of his passionate tears will prevent one death on “House” or “ER” and the rerun will unfold exactly as it did the first time.

Not so in a game.   The game provides some choices and the illusion of free will.   What you do makes a difference to the outcome.   That is why games are so addictive.   You get to be a player in all the senses of that word.    The irony is that BECAUSE you are making choices and seeming to go your own way, the power of persuasion is multiplied.  

The game maker sets all the parameters.   He can suspend the universal laws of physics.  He can dictate the nature of human interactions.   He can dictate the nature of human nature itself.  Animals can become wise; inanimate object can be animated.   The game maker can determine heroes and villains, but now they are also YOUR friends and enemies.    Humans have a wonderful capacity to personify animals and objects.   It is much easier when these things have elements of a real personality.    Games create that.

I don’t think most game makers have an explicit social or political agenda, but they do have perceptions and prejudices that color their view of reality and so come to color the reality of many others. 

I no longer play many video games and I date myself when I say that used to play Sid Meyer’s Civilization, a game from the 1990s.   It is the only game that I really know well and it is familiar enough to many people, so let me use one example from that game.  You can find examples from other games at this link.

Civilization requires you to develop from a society of Stone Age wanders into a future with space travel.  As you develop various technologies, you get more options, both in civil and military matters.   The game makers have determined the relative merits of particular advances and you get them as givens. You compete with other civilizations and you have to spend a lot of time defending yourself and there was some criticism that the game was too warlike, but so was human history.

The first rendition of the game the other civilizations had characteristics broadly correlated to their historical activities.    For example, Hammurabi and the Babylonians were builders who spent relatively more time developing irrigation and road.  Lincoln and the Americans were technologically savvy and likely to develop democracy.   Shaka and the Zulus were less interested in technology and were more aggressive in attacking others.   The most aggressive and dangerous people on the board were Genghis Khan and the Mongols.   This was very un-pc and it disappeared from subsequent versions of the game.   

So the message of the later versions was that the unpopular idea of national character or any sort of cultural determinism was completely useless.   This is a very important point, BTW.   IF applied to the real world, it would mean that over time you would expect the Swiss and the North Koreans to behave in the same ways and that their national character would have no predictive value.   This, BTW, is the message of cultural relativism that you get in many universities.    If you get it directly, you can counter with the Swiss-North Korean argument.   If you imbibe it unconsciously as a teenager, it just becomes part of your world view.

But there is even a deeper message implicit in the game.  You, as the leader of your civilization, have nearly complete knowledge.  You make choices based on calculation or preference, but you can be logical.   Real world leaders never have this option.   There is always fog and uncertainty.   So if players take a lesson from the game, they have way too much confidence in the ability of leaders to run the economy or engage in foreign policy.   Conversely, if the leader does not deliver as promised, they are less likely to understand the constraints, unavoidable ignorance or mitigating circumstances.

Anyway, more and more we will use games to persuade and train.   Games are artificial models, created by humans, bundled with their unconscious preconceptions and prejudices and often peppered with deliberate manipulation.  As with any model, they represent one reality.  They are not THE reality.  But they sure seem like it to the players and I wonder what sorts of mind-sets the games are creating.   Games can create an entirely artificial world, whose characteristics players may carry over to the real world they (sometimes) live in.

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Tell it Plain

Below is Smokey the Bear, no doubt reading plainly written government regulations.

The Congress in its wisdom has mandated that Federal employees should write in plain language. This is a great idea, but what does it mean?

I write in a simple way.  I don’t use the passive voice very much.  Most of my sentences are simple noun, verb & object.   I don’t use circumlocutions, but I do use the most appropriate word, for example, “circumlocutions”.   Using that one word avoids having to write two or more sentences.  

Plain writing requires a wide vocabulary. You have to use the words appropriate to the ideas you are trying to express.  Speaking of writing plainly does not mean making it so easy that a fifth-grader can understand.  Some concepts are beyond the understanding of a fifth-grader.     We have education to improve people so that they can indeed understand more.

Lord knows that government writing can be convoluted and confusing.  (Note the use of the word “convoluted”.  That is the best word for this thought.  An easier synonym for convoluted is difficult, but that does not adequately convey my meaning.)  I guess I am afraid that this great idea will be misused by some in the government to dumb-down our writing.    Some overzealous official might strip out words like “circumlocutions”, “convoluted” and … “overzealous”.   That would make my writing more simple-minded, but not simpler and not easier to understand.

There is no small irony in assigning a bureaucratic process to the art of writing.  Bureaucracy is the biggest reason our writing is difficult to understand (note that I did not use the word “opaque”, which was my first thought.  Instead I had to use three words (“difficult to understand”) that do not exactly convey the meaning I had in mind.    Much is lost when writing becomes a lowest common denominator group exercise.  The first goal of bureaucratic language is not to offend anybody, BTW. Conveying meaning is always a subordinated goal.

When I was in Poland, one of my Polish staff wrote a note asking for office supplies.   It was very clear, but also very clearly written by someone whose native language was not English.  The person receiving the request sent it back to me with a snarky comment “Didn’t you edit this.”   I wrote back much more politely, “No, I did not edit it.   I understood what she wanted and so do you.  Just send us the requested supplies and don’t bother me again.”  This was very clear and it caused some consternation among the admin folks.  My boss even called me to caution me about hostility, but they never bothered us again and it was worth it.   Had I knuckled under, I would have empowered the pedants and all of us would have spent many hours rewriting great prose like “Please send five boxes of pencils.” 

Government employees spend an inordinate amount of time on these sorts of things. Life is a lot easier if you just say no.  

And, BTW, the legislation specifically does NOT apply to regulations.  They can remain as opaque as ever, so that ordinary educated people cannot figure them out with any certainty.  I think we call that the “lawyer and bureaucrat full employment act.”

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Just a Lane Change

Above is my morning commute on the W&OD bike trail in Arlington, VA.  Notice that they are doing utility work in one of those big cherry pickers.  The rain was coming in behind me.  You can see it in the clouds, but I got to work before the rain did. 

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Robust.  That is what we want and that is what are getting with the new media.  A robust solution provides lots of options and achieves desired outcomes by whatever means work best and whatever path is easiest. 

During a program supporting President Obama’s discussion with Turkish students, CO.NX provided a great example of how a robust system works in practice. 

CO.NX had an audience of hundreds of Turkish young people interacting over the internet while watching President Obama live on streaming video.   Unfortunately, the video pod on the CO.NX software broke down.   Disaster?  It would have been in an earlier technological age, but CO.NX is robust.  

The Adobe software gives users the ability to stream in video from other sources.   CO.NX staff just opened another link and viewers in Turkey seamlessly switched to watching video from the Whitehouse sources, or some preferred CNN Turk, which provided a local angle.  

What would have been an embarrassing program-killing crash is now as uneventful as changing lanes to pass a slow truck on the highway or pushing a button on your remote to get a different perspective. 

There is a greater lesson from this event about robustness. In order to achieve success, we relied on systems outside our own and that gave us several good options.  In the past, we would have needed to produce costly backups, which would have come with their own risk of failure and would never be as elegant as what we can get free.

I think an old saying fits well in this case:  why own a cow when you can just go to the dairy? The new media gives us choices.  Updating the old saying, why own a cow and get only milk, when you can just go to the supermarket and get yogurt, ice cream, Swiss cheese …?

Robust.  I am making that my word of the day.

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Below is the front of our townhouse complex.  I planted those pine trees.   The one in front is an Austrian pine.  Behind is a white pine.

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International Generosity

A lot depends on how your draw the graph and the measures you use.  Statistics are often used in ways that bring the U.S. down.  For example, when we talk about CO2 emissions or military spending, the measure is usually the straight big number.   On the other hand, when we talk about things like foreign aid or investment, we usually find a measure as a % of GDP.   In the apples-to-apples comparison, the U.S. is the world’s #1 foreign aid donor and the #2 producer of CO2.  Per unit of GDP, we are a medium producer of CO2 and a low donor of official foreign aid, although we do significantly better when the total aid (private plus public) is included.

Consider this graph from the Economist.  The graph gives you one impression and the numbers tell another story.   As $26 billion, the U.S. accounted for almost 22% of the entire official foreign aid given world wide.   In fact the increase of U.S. aid from 2007 to 2008 was bigger than the total foreign aid given by some countries.  Sometimes size matters.

If you made a graph of actual outlays, the U.S. would be almost twice as big as the second place donor (Germany).

So I guess it depends on what sort of point you want to make.  If you are trying to make a moral point – that U.S. official aid is stingy because the U.S. could afford more, the graph in the illustration works.  If you are actually wondering how much poor people are receiving, you might want to look also at the raw numbers too, because if you had the choice between getting 90% of my salary or 1% of Bill Gates’, you should go with Bill.

The irony is that declining economic fortunes may improve the outlays as a % of GDP.   If you manage to lose half your money, you become twice as generous by this reckoning, perhaps another reason to reconsider the measurement.  

Beyond the measuring problems, there are questions about the overall effectiveness of official foreign aid.  If official foreign aid was the key to development, Tanzania would be really rich and Singapore would still be a basket case.  The WSJ ran an article today re how aid helps keep Latin America poor.  You sometimes get perverse effects from generosity.

You have to consider behavior.  Unconditionally pouring money into corrupt societies just sustains klepocracies.  U.S. foreign aid has become more effective in recent years when we started to demand reforms in return for the cash.  The Millennium Challenge Program was the best thing that ever happened to foreign aid, IMO.   But overall, the best thing the rich world can do for the poor world is to make trade easier and more transparent.   It has something to do with the old saying about giving a man a fish.