It was a nice warm spring day. I ran around the Mall at lunch and had some random thoughts on using the new media. I know that is nerdy, but it is what I do.
Below is a pickup game on the Mall. I am not sure what they were playing. They had a soccer ball, but nobody seemed to be kicking it. They were just wandering around. BTW – I ran past them near the start of my run, and when I got back around them 20 minutes later they had made no progress. Maybe they were just enjoying the warm weather.
The New Media is NOT about technology any more than what you say on the phone or watch on television is about technology. The new media is about using appropriate technologies and techniques with audiences or organization based on cultural, personal social, anthropological or organizational logics. It is – in short – an intensely human paradigm. Technology is the easy part – the transparent part.
The fluid and protean nature of the new media requires more flexibility and individual responsibility than we have seen in the past, and maybe more than many of us are comfortable with.
In the new media, you not only learn by doing but you shape the reality by what you do. That means that nobody merely observing the activities can properly understand the reality because it is in the process of being created.
Most organizations have a fantastic amount of expertise and knowledge locked in our people. Together we can come to good decisions faster and better than committees of experts. Our biggest challenge is to tap that power and channel it w/o ruining it by over directing the resource.
In general, I do not think a plan is possible, if what we mean by a plan is a specific set of things we will do and specific resources we will use. The technological and social tools we will depend on five years from now or even next year have not yet been developed. What we can bring into being is a process that will take us toward our goals, w/o specifying exactly what actions need to be taken. In this way we can take advantage of all our aggregated knowledge, skills and passions for the work.
We often “know” things are right or wrong w/o being able to express exactly how we know it. And that is why we instinctively recoil at various types of injustice and immorality even when we can find no intellectual or legal basis.
In our skeptical age, however, it is nice to have more empirical evidence. Here I would point to the ultimatum game, which shows how people will seek justice even when it doesn’t do them any good. In the game one participant is given a sum of money (say $10) and is supposed to divide with another participant. The giver can offer any amount he wants. The receiver has the option only of taking it or leaving it. They don’t negotiate, hence the ultimatum. If the recipient accepts the offer, both get to keep their share. If the recipient rejects the offer, both get nothing.
A rational theory (or a cynical one) would suggest that the giver should offer as little as possible and that the receiver should be happy to get it, since the alternative is zero. Yet wherever the game is played, the givers usually offer about half and in those cases where an unfair offer is made, the receivers almost always reject the offer, even though it means getting nothing. This is a very human nature choice; it is not rational.
Justice is not rational. It is moral and emotional. It is based on our humanity. As GK Chesterton said, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”
The variations on the ultimatum game also show that it is not only about equality. If both participants believe one of them has a better claim to more money, from expertise, work etc, they are willing to offer and accept different amounts. What we are evidently looking for is shares corresponding to fairness, not mere equality. I think this makes sense. We should give people what they deserve tempered with compassion. It is not fair to treat unequal efforts equally, nor is it fair to treat equal efforts unequally. This is justice.
I think that is why I am annoyed, like many Americans, about the AIG bonuses. I don’t begrudge a bonus IF the person is doing a good job and deserves it. A reward comes from doing a good job. But it offends the fundamental concepts of justice to take taxpayer money to reward those who evidently didn’t prevent their firm from being destroyed – i.e. did a bad job. It is like rewarding the captain of the Titanic for not hitting an iceberg – oh wait …maybe there should be no bonus.
How much more shameful is it to make a bonus for sinking the ship? Even if it is only a figurative ship in the case of some of our financial institutions; they are still at the bottom of the economy and dragging many others with them.
It points to the moral hazard with any kind of bailout. It tends to protect bad behavior. It may be unavoidable to protect the bad behavior that got us into this mess. It will do us no good if we let it drag us all down to prove our point. But we should not reward it.
It seems like we have been given an ultimatum. What do we do?
I wanted to experiment with Facebook advertising, so over the weekend I made a simple ad directing people to one of my blog entries and ran it for three days in to college students in Germany and Poland . It took less than five minutes to make and submit the ad. I just wanted to see what would happen.
The complaint about advertising is that it mostly falls on those who don’t notice the ad or don’t care about what you are selling. (Many people treat commercial breaks as bathroom opportunities.) So, you don’t know who saw your ad. You don’t know if those who saw it paid attention. You don’t know if people who paid attention cared about it. And you don’t know if those who cared were committed enough to do anything. For Facebook ads, you pay only if someone clicks through to your site. The completed transaction indicates that the person is interested in your content because they took a required action to get to you. The ad may have appeared in thousands of places, but you pay only for the ones who saw it, paid attention, cared about it and took action to get more information. Google, Yahoo etc, offer similar deals.
You get the advantage of precise targeting, the Holy Grail of marketers through the generations. You can be reasonably certain that your advert for Denture Cream is not reaching an audience of mostly teenage girls. It is a fascinating new world for marketers and public affairs professionals, but it seems like nobody has figured it out how to thrive sustainably in this embarrassment of riches. Maybe those who know are not saying, but those who say clearly don’t know. Anyway that is why I did my experiment.
It cost me $16.93 to reach thousands of people over a three day period and get 180 new visitors to my blog entry on forestry. That doesn’t sound like many, but when you consider that on an average day I get only around 500 visitors to all the pages put together, it starts to add up. Mine is not a commercial site and I don’t sell or promote anything, but for someone who is in business a prospective, interested customer in the shop (so to speak) is probably worth the nine-and-a- half cents it costs. Advertising Age has an article about this. They say that Facebook is now sending more traffic to some sites than Google. I believe it. In addition to targeting, Facebook has the community aspect going for it. It is a pseudo-personal relationship, but it can seem real, elevating a targeted online ad to almost a word-of-mouth recommendation.
Interesting implications. Will Facebook steal market share from Google? Will Google create its own version of Facebook? Will both be displaced by an idea not yet formed and events that haven’t yet happened? The world of new technologies changes so quickly and it is possible to identify the winners only after they have come and gone. Sic transit gloria mundi – much faster than ever.
It was cold today, around 20 degrees and wind out of the north, so the walk up Capitol Hill was a little uncomfortable. It was not so bad on the way back and it looked nice in the bright sunlight with the blanket of snow. I have included some pictures.
It is supposed to be warmer by the end of the week. It is hard to believe, but spring will be here really soon.
Above is a beautiful zelkova. Notice the graceful curves. I have been passing this tree for around ten years. It is growing fast and its curves are getting thicker.
It remind me of why Americans are fatter today. It is not the only reason, but it is a reason.
Years ago, Pepsi couldn’t compete with Coke because Coke had a very attractive vase shaped bottle. The bottle is important because it is part of the total package. Most people really cannot tell the difference by taste alone. Pepsi tried lots of bottles; nothing worked. But Pepsi executives knew that the actual soda cost almost nothing. The big expenses were in marketing, bottling and distribution. They also knew that people would finish off a bottle, even if it had more in it. They call it unit gluttony. So they could afford to make bottles bigger, give away “free” soda and still sell as many bottles. Coke had to match the offer, but as you make the curvy bottles bigger, they become less attractive. This is a curse of all curvy things.
Pretty soon lots of things came in bigger packages and super sizes. People finished them off and demanded more. Today everything is bigger and lots of things are thicker around the middle, just like my tree.
I give up. For many years I have been looking for a grand unified theory of persuasion or at least of public affairs. I have read hundreds of books about the subject and thousands of articles. I have listened carefully to skilled practitioners and tried a lot of things out for myself. I have achieved success, suffered failure and tried to apply the lessons of each. I have looked for the pattern; inferred the pattern and imposed a pattern where none really existed. But the long search has reached a dead end … and an insight. (The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.)
Below is the Library of Congress. There are several other buildings which together contain the accumulated knowledge of humanity. All you have to do is look for it.
I could not find a grand unified theory of persuasion and public affairs because none exists. I have to be content with tactical success and experimentation. The best strategy is to follow up and double down where things work and abandon failure as quickly and cleanly as possible.
An organization that can do this is not omniscient; it is robust and opportunistic. Inan uncertain world, we are always playing the probabilities. It is a world where the best plan might fail and the worst succeed, but in the course of repeated tries and many actions, the better ones make progress. It is an evolutionarysystem that unfolds through iterations; the truth is revealed conditionally and gradually. It cannot be choreographed in advance.
I remain a believer in truth and in seeking truth. It is just that I do not believe that we humans have the capacity to find the big truths. Actually, I am not giving up the search, but I am switching methods. Repeated inquiry and intelligent analysis of both process and results will bring us to an approximation of practical truth, wrong in many details but useful for decision making in the situations for which it was developed.
You don’t need to know the whole truth to know what to do. We have to walk the line between recklessness and paralysis. At some point we know enough to jump. That point comes when we estimate the probabilities are good enough – not perfect, but good enough – when the probable outcome of doing something is better than waiting. We will be wrong a lot. We need to be robust because omniscience, or even understanding most things, is not an option available to mortal man. We are always wrong to some extent.
“Often wrong, but never in doubt.”
That is how they described MBAs when I was at the University of Minnesota B-school. It was meant pejoratively, but it is not a bad strategy. If you more likely to be right than wrong and the rewards of success are significant while the cost of failure is not catastrophic, the smart decision is just do it. If it works, do it again and improve it. If it doesn’t work, figure out why and do something better.
Just because you don’t have a detailed plan doesn’t mean you don’t have a plan. Often the best plan is the structure of the choice architecture in the organization itself. Giving people a broad goal in an organization structured to take advantage of opportunity and can learn from experience is the best plan you can have in a changing world. After it works, you can take credit for prescience if taking credit is important to you.
Ask the guy in the kayak about his precise plan before he hits the white water around the bend. It is better to know you can adapt to what will come than to develop a bogus detailed strategy for everything that could be on the way.
The ostensible arbiters of taste hate the suburbs. They critically acclaim crappy movies like “American Beauty” or “Revolutionary Row” that fit into cognoscenti stereotypes of life in the suburbs. Maybe these wise guys won’t understand, but suburbanites are the happier with their lives than those people who live in small towns or big cities, according to Pew Research.
I feel uniquely qualified to speak to this issue, since I work in the city, live in the suburbs and spend a lot of time on my farms in rural areas. Each has its attraction and I would not want to have to choose among them and I don’t have to, so in many ways it is a false choice. Let me address it anyway.
The key advantage of the city is that you can walk to the places you need to go, although this advantage is lost on many urban dwellers, since they don’t walk much anyway. Suburbs are a little too much car culture for me. Of course, I am a bit spoiled in Washington, which is one of the world’s most pleasant and walkable cities. Washington really isn’t a city. At least around the Capitol, it is more like a nice park with magnificent monuments and musuems. Who wouldn’t like that? In many cities these days you cannot really walk around much.
Diversity used to be an advantage of cities, but not anymore. Today that is an advantage of the near-in in suburbs. Fairfax County, where I live, is more diverse than Washington DC. My homeowners’ association has people from all over the world interacting and getting along, which is true diversity. People in cities tend to have more defined and sometimes antagonistic group identities. Group identify is not diversity; it is just a kind of standoff. The suburbs are now doing a better job of breaking down archaic group-think. I suppose that sort of homogenization is one of the things that offends some people, but I prefer to interact with people, not “representatives.” Rural areas tend to be less diverse, in my experience, because fewer people are moving in.
The advantage of the rural areas is space and I love to hike in the big natural areas and I really love MY forests, but absent those things, rural life holds few attractions for me. The countryside is a place to get away to … and then get away from. It is not a place I would like to live permanently. We lived in Londonderry in New Hampshire, which was an interesting exurb. It has the demographic characteristics of a suburb, but the density of a rural area along with a little bit of a small town. We lived in a kind of cluster development, which I found very pleasant.
Above was our home area in Londonderry, NH. It was both suburb and country. The picture below is about 200 yards away.
I like to see my neighbors, but be able to leave them behind when I want to be alone. This may be the blueprint for the community of the future. You can have fairly dense development amid green fields connected to urban amenities. The old suburbs, where everybody has a rambler or ranch style house set on a half acre lot are soooo 1950s. The gritty urban environment is too unpleasant and the countryside is too vast. Put the three together, and you have something nice. I guess that is why I am happy where I am now in Fairfax. Of course, I will be keeping my eyes open for something better. That is the American way.
Above – people like old fashioned small towns … in theory, but they demand the larger floorplans and conveniences available only in modern suburbs. Below is a little too empty. Some people think they want to “get away” but few really do. They are nice places to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
Speaking of that, Pew has an article about the middle class (available here) and I read the Economist special report on the growing global middle class (here). The middle class is also much maligned by the cool ones. The cone headed intellectuals used to call us bourgeois. But when you think about it, most of the good values come from the middle class. The poor are too screwed and screwed up to think about the better things in life and the rich are too spoiled and effete to care. Read the articles, and I bet you will agree.
Above – Old buildings are very popular with a small, but vocal, part of the population. They have lots of nice nooks and great lines, but the plumbing tends to be bad. Open markets (below) are another “must have” ammenity. Unfortunately, they are often not economically viable, as the people who claim to love them shop elsewhere.
All things considered, we have lots of options and this middle class guy is feeling okay in the new and improved suburbs.
The nicest places, IMO, are the garden cities that were popular in the early 20th Century. This is a bit older, but has the open feel and modest opulence. Below – good mass transit is a necessity to a nice city or suburb. They have to be more convenient than driving for many people. You can do this only by making it more difficult and expensive to drive. If you provide enough parking and prevent traffic jams, most people who can will choose to drive and doom mass transit to a poor transport method for the poor. It is a tragedy of the commons. Everyone benefits if more people take mass transit, but each individual can make himself relatively better off if he can get himself into the car.
Below is that bad part of the suburbs – parking lots. Cars are overused. We have too many impervious surfaces, too many roads, too much traffic and too many fat people because of our love affair with the automobile.
A lot depends on not on the location or the life station but on the person. No matter what how much you make or where you go, you have to live with yourself. If you don’t like the company, you are out of luck.
Below is a sculture at the Hirschorn. I don’t know what it is supposed to be. Maybe nothing – i.e. non-representative. It looks to me like a little fat devil. Or it could be a cow up on its hind legs. One advantage to cities is you get to look at these things and be amazed.
Mobile devices, such as cell phones, notebook computers and even hand-held games, may soon be the way most people get their news and information and become their primary way of accessing the Internet. We have to be there too. Some places may bypass conventional computers altogether (much like cellular technology bypassed land-lines), especially as more and more features are added to mobile devices. Cell phones now come bundled with still and/or video cameras, global positioning systems and sophisticated computing capabilities. Mobile devices fundamentally change people’s relationship to information because they are available any time and almost anywhere. Mobile devices allow individuals to report what they see on the spot, along with pictures and connections. User created content has essentially made individuals into media.
Above is the hall of the new visitors’ center at the Capitol. It took them years longer and a lot more money. The guard told me that they had to reinforce all the doors and walls to make them more resilient in case of terrorism. This extra precaution costs us billions, but you gotta have it.
Experts from private industry traded experience with veteran public diplomacy officers when International Information Programs (IIP) and the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) explored innovative and imaginative new ways to leverage mobile technologies for public diplomacy during a conference held at NFATC on February 19.
It quickly became clear that mobile media, despite all the highfalutin hoopla, is just another part of the new media environment. Several of the speakers emphasized the necessity of flexibility in the uncertain and protean world of the new media. The new media is more fluid, fragmented, decentralized and personalized than more traditional media. This creates challenges and opportunities for public diplomacy as well as for the traditional way we deliver messages at State Department.
Hearing the experts at the conference talk about exciting new communications technologies and even more coming soon, it also became clear that changes in new media environment are coming at an accelerating rate. We have already seen some of yesterday’s most promising stars become today’s dinosaurs. There is no reason to think this will be any different tomorrow, so it is silly and to try to pick winners among the new media. Besides, we don’t have to. We have an “all of the above” option. What we have to do is experiment, recognizing that many will fail, but we will learn from the experiments that fail and that even those that succeed will work in unexpected ways requiring flexible responses. The new media allows us to be flexible and being flexible means that we don’t choose “the best.” Instead we try all appropriate methods, choosing the mix of media tools we think will work best for particular tasks. We must use technology but not get beguiled by it, remembering that communication is the destination and the technology merely the vehicle we use to get there. The mix will usually involve the newest technology used in the latest ways, but it will just as often include simple proven techniques such as personal visits. Remember, we have the “all of the above” option. Those are some of the lessons I learned at the conference.
Through all the changes in technologies, Edward R. Murrow’s famous observation remains true, “The really crucial link in the international communication chain is the last three feet, which is bridged by personal contact, one person talking to another.” My colleagues and I at IIP understand that but we also know that we need to use all available and appropriate technologies to get within communication range.
I was happy to be able to attend this conference on mobile communications and proud that IIP is looking forward to the future, as demonstrated by its organizing this sort of meeting. State Department is indeed using a variety of media to carry out its public diplomacy. My colleagues at IIP are using twitter, Facebook, webchats, webcasts, podcasts, Youtube, digital video, blogs, online gaming and various mobile technologies to complement our more traditional Internet, speakers, outreach and publications. Colleagues in other parts of State Department are also making innovations that harness the talents of State’s professionals. It is an exciting time to work in public diplomacy.
In a classic episode of M*A*S*H, Father Mulcahy grows some sweet corn. After a summer of hard work and anticipation, he harvests the crop, turns it over to the chow hall cook and everybody looks forward to the hometown taste of fresh roasted corn. But the cook has removed the corn from the cob and creamed it into the kind of slop he usually dispenses. Insulted by the complaints, he replies indignantly, “I was just trying to be helpful. Next Fourth of July you can eat it on the cob for all I care.”
Above is General Grant in front of the Capitol. Grant was an unassuming man. He could easily pass unnoticed. They said that the only way you could tell if Grant was around was that things started to happen. Grant was a great general, but he failed at everything else. Is it enough to be really good at one thing?
Leadership can be like that. Sometimes it takes more time and effort to make a mush than to do the effective thing. It is usually a good idea to lighten up and consider whether your problems are because of instead of in spite of your best efforts, but often the hardest thing to do is nothing. Most of us have a kind of piece-work mentality. We think we earn our money by how much we do. Leadership often means that we add the most value by what we choose to leave undone.
A leadership technique that seems to work is to “get lost,” just be inaccessible. I know that this goes against every fiber of the stay-connected zeitgeist, but sometimes you add no value and generally when you add no value in an organization, you are sucking up value by getting in the way. At times when the problem is best solved by someone else, but you know that others may want to consult or defer to your judgment, the best response is to get lost. Doing nothing, BTW, is a very proactive strategy and is the appropriate one only in some situations. It doesn’t mean you just sneak off to play golf, although in some cases that works by chance. There are some places where things progress a lot better when the boss is not around and I am not talking about prescribed non-action here.
Of course, the whole technique presupposes that you have already built an environment of trust and autonomy, so that colleagues and subordinates will not merely cower in fear and indecision until your triumphant return. And that is the big caveat. You are not allowed to reverse the decision for trivial causes and you can never get angry that it was made w/o you. If you are prone to the character flaws that lead to these behaviors, you need to stay away from this technique, but recognize that your organization will never work at top performance because you won’t allow it. And stop complaining about all the work you have to do or about your incompetent subordinates. That is the world you created by making yourself indispensable. Live with it or change it, but in either case shut up about it.
And as the great Charles de Gaulle said, “The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”
I liked the “Book of the Tao” since I first discovered it when I was around twenty. I bought a book at a used book shop for $0.25 called “The Wisdom of China and India.” It was published in 1943. They would never publish such a book today, since it lumped together these two great but very disparate cultures and presumed to aggregate the collected wisdom of most of Asia in one volume. But it was a great book and I still have it. The binding disintegrated when I gave it to Alex to read last week, but a little duct tape postponed its day of reckoning.
The philosopher Lao Tzu has some sage (really) advice on leadership and since this wisdom has persisted through various iterations and hundreds of generations, maybe there is something to it. For example:
“The Tao abides in non-action, yet nothing is left undone. If kings and lords observed this, the ten thousand things would develop naturally.”
or
“Nothing is softer than water, yet nothing can be better at overcoming the hard.”
and
“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”
If you translated this wisdom into more modern terms, you would say that this sort of leadership taps into the intelligence and imagination of the people. It makes them partners. This is especially valuable when innovations are needed. (Please refer to my posting re management gurus.) Centralized, directive leadership can almost never identify and develop innovation because whether they mean to or not, they bring the power of the organizing to bear to defend the status quo or permit only incremental and usually ineffective change. That is the paradox that when you abide in non-action, you leave nothing undone. I would refine it a little. Leadership’s task is to create conditions favorable for progress and innovation, but it does not directly create anything. To employ my favorite analogy, it is like when I use proper silviculture on my forests. The thinning, fertilizing, planning etc allow the trees to grow better, but I cannot micromanage wood or leaf production. BTW – Below is the exchange from M*A*S*H:
Father Mulcahy: Don’t I know it. All week I’ve been dreaming of getting butter on my cheeks, juice on my shirt, and a niblet wedged between two molars. [walks up to the table] Father Mulcahy: Where is the corn? Cpl. Igor Straminsky: You’re looking at it. The mushy stuff. Father Mulcahy: You… You creamed it! [on the verge of tears] Father Mulcahy: You… you ninny! Cpl. Igor Straminsky: [everybody yells at Igor] I was just trying to be helpful. Next Fourth of July you can eat it on the cob for all I care.
I am not the only one who likes traffic circles or roundabouts. One of my blog readers told me about the roundabout in his town of Monroe, Washington. He told me that his town was the first to get a roundabout in Washington State and it took them a year to get approval from the Department of Transportation. Now the state loves them and Washington State even has a roundabout page.
Below is the roundabout in Monroe, Washington
Before the roundabout, traffic was snarled and tempers frayed. After some confusion and trepidation among drivers unfamiliar with roundabout etiquette, this imported innovation evidently works like a charm.
Below – Americans are not taught to use traffic circles. These signs show graphically how it works. BTW – the way it was explained to me in Europe was very easy. Everybody yields to the traffic already in the circle. Merge when there is an opening.
I saw my first roundabout when I went to the UK when I was in college. I still remember marveling at the seamless flow of traffic. You need a Goldilocks solution: drivers that are too aggressive or too timid can ruin the system, but traffic flows beautifully when they are just right. I wondered why we didn’t have them in the U.S. I figured that American drivers were just too ornery. I am glad to find out that I was wrong.
Above is a traffic circle in Arlington, VA. The intrusive stop signs indicate that they kind of miss the point. I think these traffic circles are meant merely to slow traffic and maybe as decorations.
Above in Stanton Park with a statue of Nathaniel Greene, one of Washington’s most reliable generals and a hero of the campaigns in the Carolinas. Twelve streets feed into this square, so it acts sort of like a traffic circle. If you have a traffic circle, it is nice if you can have a monument in the middle. It gives the place a little more class.
Above is Maryland Ave on Capitol Hill. It is a nice neighborhood. This is a good example of an urban renaissance. Washington was not as nice 20 years ago. It was run by a crooked mayor and full of crime and disorder and some parts had not recovered from the riots way back in 1967. It goes to show how different things can be when they are run differently. It would have been easy to give up; good we didn’t.
Above is the same place looking the other way (you can recognize the trees). It is not as dark as the picture shows. I just got a bad exposure. But if you look a couple of blocks you can see why it was such a shame 20 years ago that this was not a great neighborhood.
I was watching the History Channel today about Neanderthals. Back when I was in school, we learned that they were a separate species from modern humans and that it was likely that anatomically modern humans were hostile to them and maybe wiped them out either through competition, conflict or a combination of both. The Neanderthals were portrayed as brutes, who lacked the skills and organizational abilities that made modern humans so successful. Now the Neanderthals have been upgraded. According to scientists on the show, these guys not only were among our ancestors, but may have contributed the gene that makes it possible for us to learn language – the quintessential human trait.
Science is not neutral. It is embedded in current culture and sensibility. Even if scientists answer all the questions in an unbiased way, the questions themselves are heavily influenced by the surrounding society. The original theories of the Neanderthal were postulated in the 19th Century, in an age when conflict and competition was accepted as a part of nature. Today being cooperative and inclusive is in style, so it should come as no surprise that we now see our long lost cousins in kinder and gentler terms. I don’t know what the Neanderthals were like. Nobody does. We I do know is that our speculations often depend more on us than on what they were really like.
BTW – a fascinating book on the subject is Before the Dawn, which traces human prehistory by studying changes in our DNA. The interesting thing is that evolution didn’t end; it is just not operating to the same sorts of characteristics. Evolution doesn’t always go in the direction of improvement. Fitness in the Darwinian sense just means that you contribute more genes to the next generation. To accomplish this in the natural environment, you usually needed to be stronger, faster, smarter or very lucky, but the pressures have abated. By Darwinian standards, the fittest person in history may be that woman who just had eight kids, on top of the seven she already had.
Another change in interpretation has to do with dinosaurs. I learned that giants were clumsy, lumbering reptiles. Now we hear that some we agile and maybe were warm blooded with feathers. Who knew? Most of today’s real cool dinosaurs, such as raptors, were largely unknown when I was a kid.
Above are little dinosaurs?
BTW – Chimps are very aggressive, as we were reminded by the recent chip attack. In the wild about 1/3 of male chips die from violence. Primitive man was/is violent too. That is our heritage that we struggle to overcome with our civilization. There is no such thing as a noble savage (and Rosseau sucked anyway.)
