Category: Old Curmudgeon

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Biking at State Department

I thought it was a joke, but it true.  The State Department now has a bike lending program. You can borrow a bike at State and peddle to your meetings around town, at least until 4:45, when you have to bring it back.  The bikes on offer seem a little lame, but I like the idea. I hope it catches on and I also hope that it provokes a bit of culture change at the Department and in the wider community.

I have been using my bike to get to work since my very first real job,  when I rode clean across Milwaukee to get from the South Side to Mellowes’ Washer Co on Keefe Street.  That means I have been commuting by bicycle since 1973 – around thirty-six years, so I know something about bike commuting. Overall, it has gotten better, at least in Washington. They have built some good bike trails and put some bike lanes on the road. I can ride the 17 +/- miles to work almost completely on bike trails or lightly traveled roads.  (Of course, that required some planning. When we bought our house in 1997 we made sure we were near both a Metro Stop and a bike trail. The W&OD bike trail is a mile from our door.) But we still get no respect when we mix with traffic.  

For example, part of my bike ride to work goes down a city street – Clarendon Boulevard – in Arlington.   There is a nicely marked bike trail along the road, which is a one-way street most of the way I go.  It is also mostly downhill on the way to work, which would make it a nice ride except for the cars.  People treat the bike lane like a drop off zone.  They pull in front of me and then abruptly stop and sometimes pass me and then make a right turn right in front of me into a side street or parking lot.  Since they just passed me, I assume they should be able to see me, but they don’t seem to care. They know that I have few options.  I don’t get as upset about this as I used to, but these clowns endanger my safety. I especially hate the people who talk on cell phones. 

There really is no such thing as multi-tasking when driving.  There is just driving poorly.     

I have had a few close calls and one bona fide bike & bone crunching accident –  in Norway where I got seriously hurt and had the pleasure of experiencing socialized medicine – but I really cannot complain when I consider how many miles I have logged. Most people apologize and lamely claim they didn’t see me.  Sometimes they are aggressive and tell me that I should not be on the road.  I would caution drivers that it is probably not a good idea to do this when the bike is at the side of your car, since we have metal pedals and can easily  scratch the paint on the side of the car door with those pedals “by accident” w/o anybody noticing until later. That is what I used to do … in my younger days of course.

The daily practical problem with biking is lack of showers. I am lucky because Gold’s Gym is across the street & I keep clothes in the office to change into. Otherwise you cannot really ride if you work near other people.  You will get sweaty even on a short ride, especially in a climate like ours in Washington. You also sometimes get rained on and spattered with dirt. State Department, like most other big organizations, talks a good game about bikes, but does not provide showers and changing areas.

I figure the State Department’s bike lending program is mostly a PR gesture, but it is good if it gets people thinking about riding bikes to work and appointments. The world has become friendlier to bike commuters.  Thirty years ago, almost everybody thought I was crazy; today only about half think so.

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That’s a Fact

The printing press created facts by mass producing books and papers that were relatively difficult to alter w/o detection and could be traced more or less to a printer.  Lots of what appeared in print was wrong, but it came with some authority and some authorities became the authorities that most people agreed to accept.    We had the Encyclopedia Britannica for the almost erudite and the Guinness Book of Records to settle barroom disputes about the facts.

You could never be sure of a fact in the pre-print age.  Most information passed by word of mouth.  It was oral history, susceptible to unreliable memories, wishful thinking and ordinary mendacity.   The written word was literally written.  Each copy was different.   Specialists can date manuscripts by the errors that have entered them.   Think of it.   You say something; I hear something else.  We dispute what you said and neither of us remembers correctly.   This is the pre-print world where everything is a matter of opinion and subject to interpretation.

Welcome back to this old world, brought about by new media.   The Internet lets everybody “print” anything.   Finding the facts on Internet may require a kind of triangulation.   You have to compare different sources and then decide which version you believe.    You can also alter what appears on the web.   Well, technically there is a record somewhere, but you can “update” and perhaps overwhelm that.   Truth often means what appears on the first screen of a Google search.

The general level of information has greatly improved.   I am amazed at the extent of what you can find on Wikipedia and the accuracy is very good in many cases.    Wikipedia is essentially an information market.    It works very well when there are lots of participants w/o very much controversy.   Where it falls down is where the market is thin (i.e. few participants to check and correct) or where there is enough controversy to attract lots of people with their own deceptive agendas.   It never stands still.

I have a set of Encyclopedia Britannica.   I used to love those books.  I would just pull one out and read what I found, a kind of a random walk.   I used to like to have the true facts.    I am looking at my Britannica from my chair.  They are nice books to look at, but they are no longer accurate.  Populations have changed since this edition was printed nearly thirty years ago.   Some whole countries have been created or disappeared.   New things have been invented.    My Britannica’s certainly are not worthless, but it would be very foolish to trust them on science, politics or current affairs.   Actually, the only thing they are really good for is history.   I am sure that they have not changed since I got them, so I can trust that those were the “facts” of around 1980.   But overall I am better off with Wikipedia.

This makes me sad.  I liked the idea that I had all the accumulated knowledge on my bookshelves, which now contain facts of antiquarian interest and opinion.   On the other hand, I have the information of the world a few key strokes away.   Decent trade, IMO.

But it is still cool to have the real book, printed at the real time and touched by real people.  Below is from my Britannica Atlas, which is older than I am.  When this map was printed, during WWII, the editors did not know what the map of Europe would look like before the ink was dry, so they went back to the pre-war map, which was only valid for a few months.  This map points to another print v Internet difference.  This obsolete map is in my book unaltered.  I can find the same map on the Internet, but I have to look for it.  The Internet piles new information on old, like a sediment w/o outcropping.  In a book, you might just find something intriguing like a map that doesn’t make sense and bids you learn more.  In the Internet age, if you don’t dig, you don’t find.

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Hanging Around

As long I am wallowing in doubt and indecision, I have a few more thoughts about work, making a contribution and retirement. 

I could retire today… in theory.  FS is like the military in that respect.  We can get our full pensions after 20 years if we are at least fifty years old.  I have achieved both.  We have an up-or –out system.   Had I not been promoted in 2007, and presuming no promotions in 2008 or 2009, they would be kicking me out come this October.  As it is now, I can stay until February 2016.  My last promotion bought me six years and they gave me an extra year as compensation for my year in Iraq.

We are only allowed to stay in each pay-grade-class a certain number of years and we only get 27 years to jump into the Senior Foreign Service.  The grim reaper is always taking the hindmost.    The system, IMO, has a major flaw in that it puts faster risers at greater risk, since they come sooner up against their time in class.   We also have an interesting concept of “opening your window.”  You cannot be promoted into senior FS unless you open your window.  When you do that, it starts a clock ticking.  You get six evaluations and if you don’t make it to SFS by the time the clock runs out, your window shuts and you are involuntarily retired.    Your life can be extended if you go to a place like Iraq or have a year of training (as I did at Fletcher School, which is why I would have gotten the boot in 2009 instead of 2008).  A cautious person would wait until he had been in the FS for 21 years.  That would mean that he would lose nothing if he did not get promoted, since he would get kicked out of the FS in general in 27 years.   Of course, anybody who does that is probably not very ambitious. 

I opened my window as soon as I was eligible.   I didn’t want to hang around like a fart in a phone booth.   I could have survived as an FS01 until 2012, so that would have been only a four year difference (w/o the long term training year).  On the other hand, they could promote me and I would have more options.  I honestly didn’t think I would make it.  The odds are against you.  I knew that I should not hang around too long, but I also knew I would not have the courage to just set out w/o the boot.  So it was a kind of play or trade option. Get up or get out.

There is a kind of FS life-cycle and I fell into it for awhile.  When we are around forty-five, we complain about the lack of recognition and start bragging that we will be out the door the minute we become eligible for retirement, presumably earning the big bucks in the private sector. When we turn forty-nine, we go silent.  We stop talking about retirement in general and start to count the years until our time in the FS runs out.  A couple years later, we start complaining again, but this time it is decry the injustice that a “good worker like me” may be forced out while “I still have so much to contribute.” 

My question is about how much I still have to contribute.   As I wrote a few days ago, I am concerned that some of the new media is passing me by.  A lot of my skills have become obsolete.    Of course, I can learn new ones, but is it really a good deal to taxpayers for somebody like me to retrain to learn something that a lower-paid newer employee can just do out of habits learned as a child growing up with computers?  

It is always a dilemma to weigh experience and judgment against raw talent and brain-power.    Experience improves judgment, but only within a range of similar situations.  In times of rapid or discontinuous change, experience with former systems may be as much as an impediment as an advantage.   Old generals know how to fight the old wars.  They always are in danger of being overtaken by a revolution in military affairs.  The tank means changed tactics. The same goes for all walks of life, if somewhat less dramatically. That is why you have to clear out experience sometimes and let younger people in.  The experience of the past hangs on their necks less heavily or not at all.   Our up-or-out system is supposed to guard against this sort of complacency, but eventually you get to the end of the trail and maybe you get to the end of your own trail before they vote you off the island.

This is not a problem limited to the FS. In fact, we are relatively better off than many others precisely because of our up-or-out system.  The economic downturn has changed the equations.   All over the country people are delaying retirement. This is good in that it saves money on pensions and keeps people productive.   But it also clogs the arteries of an organization.   You need people leaving at the top in order to give people on other rungs of the ladder the opportunity to climb.

IMO, older people should keep working as long as they want to and as long as they can.  In fact, given the upcoming Social Security and entitlement crisis many will have to do just that, like it or not,  but maybe not in the same jobs or even the same professions.  You get stale after a while, as the pathways your good ideas and sound practices have blazed become ruts and craters that limit options for yourself and others. 

My baby boom generation is the biggest, healthiest and best educated cohort of soon-to-be senior citizens in the history of the world.  We see old people running marathons, discovering new things and opening new businesses.   We still have a lot to contribute and a duty not to sponge off the smaller generations that follow us.  I think we will see an amazing flowering of entrepreneurship among older people.    The Internet will greatly facilitate this trend.  

But maybe we need to be bumped out of our ruts. Our experience is valuable to the extent that it does something valuable.   It is a tool and like any tool, it must be used. It does not entitle us to anything, any more than the ownership of a hammer entitles you to pound.

I don’t know where I am going with this.   It is the time again for me to look for a new assignment and so the thoughts like this are clogging my brain. I have options where I can use my experience in new ways.  But I am not sure what to do.   Should I go down a path where I can use the skills I have developed, where I am reasonably sure of success, or try to cut a new one? 

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Punctuated Equilibrium & Phase Transitions

It is a type of evolutionary theory.   I won’t vouch for my grasp of  the biological details, but I think it well applies metaphorically to societies and lots of things in life.   Events seem to go along more or less the same for a long time and then they jump to something else.  In fact, little changes are building up over time, but they are not apparent and counterbalanced until the system just cannot hold.   This is what happened in the old Soviet Empire and it may be what is happening in Iran today.    It is hard to understand how people of the time could have not anticipated the change because it is so easy to see … looking back. Prediction is a lot harder.

The concept that goes with this is “phase transition.”  The standard example of this is water.  It is a solid ice until it reaches 32 degrees.   Then it turns to liquid. This doesn’t happen gradually.  20 below zero looks like 31 degrees above, but get above 32 and it is completely different.  After that it stays the same from 32 until 212 degrees, when it suddenly turns into steam. 

No matter what you call it, I feel like I have just experienced it with the new media.  All those webchats, twitter, Facebook, Flickr, webpages etc have been kicking around IIP for a long time.  Some people were working on them.   But today I noticed that we have made a kind of phase transition.   We are a new media organization.  President Obama is speaking in Ghana today.   We at IIP are supporting with SMS, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr.  We even have a place on Second Life, where avatars will discuss President Obama’s words … and it all seems natural, business as usual, NBD to everybody but me. 

And I am feeling like I just missed a train. I liked blogs. I felt reasonably comfortable with Facebook.  But I really don’t have much use for SMS or Twitter and I positively don’t like Second Life.   I used to be kind of a leader in new tech methods of public diplomacy.  I was a pioneer, a mapper of strange new waters – at least that is what it seemed to me.   Now colleagues are swimming effortlessly in the new media ocean, while I am looking out after them like a beached whale.    The wonder is that this all happened in the course of about a month.  The world I have known for some years have shifted, hence my thoughts of punctuated equilibrium and phased transitions.

I am not sure I can go along on this phased transition. Maybe I walked along this trail as far as it can take me and I need to leave further progress to others. Maybe it is just that it is almost 3am and I can’t sleep. Maybe things will look clearer in the light of day. President Obama will speak on a from a far away continent in just a few hours and our new media will shrink the distance to something inconsequential. What a wonder.

Anyway, I suppose there are other things I can do. 

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Broadcast Monitoring System – The Rise of the Machines

Years of science fiction make big real-world advances look puny. All of us have seen the fantastically multimedia computers on Star Trek or the James Bond and have come to expect instantaneous processing time, perfect video delivery and trouble-free operation.   Of course we know that the real world data systems don’t work like this, but even when we know the real world, it is the illusions we recall. 

I thought about that at a briefing today.  I saw a broadcast monitoring system that lets you to search broadcasts using key words, as well as set up permanent watch lists, much the same way you can do now for text.   It monitors major satellite broadcasts and produces machine generated transcripts in original languages. 

And I thought, “So what?  No big deal.” But it is, actually, a big deal even if it looks a lot like what we imagined we had before. Consider the analogy of search engines.  Think of how much better you can search with Google than you could with Lycos, Magellan, the aptly named “dogpile” or so many of the others whose names we forget. But all Google does is the same thing as the most primitive search engines; it just does it better. That is how progress is made, by making incremental improvements until at some point you have something new, but nobody notices. 

Untethered imagination is much overrated. It is funny to hear people say that Leonardo da Vinci invented helicopters, tanks or submarines just because he imagined the concept and drew some unworkable sketches or that Jules Verne pioneered space travel because he wrote a book about going to the moon. Yet when a helicopter flies overhead, you could say, “NBD, da Vinci invented the thing nearly 500 years ago, it just didn’t fly; this is just a minor improvement.” And I hate that childish notion that this or that modern machine was “really” invented by ancient Africans, Arabs, Chinese, Greeks, Incas, Persians, Russians … Who cares?

It matters less who imagined something first than who make it work first and then who keeps improving it.    It also matters who tells others about.  If you make a great discovery, but nobody else knows about it, you really didn’t make a great discovery. You just indulged your idiosyncratic curiosity.

Returning to the subject at hand, the broadcast monitoring system takes the place of those bored guys that used to watch TV and take notes (Presumably, sales of coffee and cigarettes will decline.)  The advantage is that the machine never sleeps or has to take a bathroom break.  The disadvantage is that the machine doesn’t think or make free association.  It only produces exactly what it is asked to give, although more sophisticated programs are allowing them to branch out with a kind of artificial intelligence.

The original language transcripts are good, the translations, not so good.  They have some of the comical aspects we associate with mistranslation.  However, retrieval is more important than perfection.   Skilled human translators can make whatever changes necessary after the machine does the initial sorting.

The systems I saw can do Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Persian and English. Bahasa, Hindi and Urdu are planned.  It takes at least six months to “train” the program.  They need enough of a sample.   For example, if you let it go for only a short time, for example last week, you might have nothing but Michael Jackson stories.  Your machine would have a strong vocabulary on plastic surgery, gloves, music videos and bizarre behavior by aging man-boys, but maybe not enough on more important topics. 

The system is around 80% accurate, but it depends on who is talking and about what.   It can pick up around 95% of what an anchorman says when he is speaking directly to the camera, but starts to decline when there are multiple participants in a conversation and/or when people start slipping into dialects or even idiolects.  

It works a lot like Google for video and you could probably start using it in less than ten minutes.  The hard part is to know what you want to get from the system and how to use it.   Translation is more an art than a science. Of course, decision making requires even a greater use of judgment. 

I think this is very promising for understanding big trends. As we get more data points to smooth out outliers and the quirks of special situation, we can start seeing the simpler patterns in the ostensible complexity. But despite the coolness of this technology, it provides essentially the same sort of service for video that a reasonably skilled user of Google can achieve with texts. Of course, while Google is very useful in finding information, we still have not really figured out how to use it as an analytical tool for audience research or evaluation.

Still not as cool as I saw on Star Trek many years ago. I suppose Leonardo da Vinci invented the concept.

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ONE Common Man v THE Common Man

The interactive or social media is the future of public diplomacy, but it has the capacity to lead us down lots of blind alleys.  Much of this aimless wandering can be avoided if we just don’t make the error of mistaking ONE common person for THE common person.  Let me explain.

We group things and people in order to simplify and understand our world and we use shorthand phrases, such as the people of country X to describe very large groups that may have little in common with each other.    Marketers, politicians and public diplomacy professional want to reach THE people. The trouble is there is no such thing.  No matter the rhetoric, smart marketers, politician & PD practitioners know this.  That is why we study polling and demographic data.  We try to segment the audience in terms that make sense for our persuasion job. 

We know that in any given population, only a small percentage of the people really care about any particular issue enough to get the facts or develop opinions about it and an even smaller number will leverage the opinions of the larger population.  These influential people are NOT a random sample of the population.  They are people with specific interests, communications skills and access to persuasion methods.  The problem is finding them, especially because you have to find different ones for different occasions.    

The advent of interactive social media does not solve this problem.  Although it empowers us to move much faster, sometimes we might just be moving faster down the path to nowhere and the fastest way to go nowhere in PD is to wrongly identify a representative audience as an influential audience.   A representative sample of 1000 people might be sufficient to accurately measure the attitudes of a millions, but it won’t suffice to influence a change in those attitudes.   On the other hand, 1000 influentials could indeed affect the course of the nation. 

Social media at once reveal and obscure this reality.    We can graphically watch the spread of information on platforms such as Facebook or Twitter and see the power of opinion leaders.  We knew they were out there but to a long time public diplomacy guy, actually seeing them is as amazing as really seeing gravity or magnetic waves would be for a physicist.  But it is more complicated.   Physical forces don’t exercise options or free will; people do.  Physical particles always react the same way; people don’t.   A physical object cannot just lose interest in gravity and stop exerting influence.   People … you get the picture. 

I have noticed a hazardous trend in public diplomacy.   We have started to become much more interested in numbers counted than in influence achieved.   Maybe that is because we can so easily generate numbers with our new technologies, while influence is nearly impossible to quantify.   Numbers can talk, but they don’t always tell the truth and they never tell the truth unless surrounded by an explanatory context.   For example, is it better to reach 1000 people or 100,000 people?  You really cannot answer that question until you know the context. 

Let me illustrate with my own number fallacy.   I fell into it when I started to use Facebook.  It is an embarrassingly simple error, but I have since seen it widely.   Social media is about friends.    The average Facebook user may have 500 friends.  So if my Facebook message reaches 500 people, can’t I just multiply by 500 and claim that my audience was 250,000?   And by that logic, I would only need 2000 people to reach a million.  My job just got a lot easier.  Of course, friends’ networks overlap.   In some communities, the overlap might be 90%+. 

In other words, by reaching one or two, you have already bumped up against boundary of your influence.   Adding hundreds or thousands more from the same group may not add any value at all.  The total number is meaningless. It is like saying that you want infinity and being disappointed that you had to settle for half of it.

BTW – Business Week has a very good article about what an online friend is worth. 

We used to call them boutique programs.  They are the kinds of things you set up for an ambassador or a VIP to give him/her the flavor of an issue or area.    For example, the VIP talks to a youth audience and leaves with the impression that he/she has met THE youth.  He/she has, in fact, spoken maybe sixty people, most of whom know each other (i.e. their communities overlap).  It is a very useful exercise, as long as you know what you are getting into and when you leave the boutique you go to talk to opinion leaders and people who can make connections.  Then maybe look carefully at some polling data.   

You should stay out of the boutique if you think you are getting anything more scientific than a personal impression.  Boutique programs are easier to do online and easier to fall into than they are in non-virtual life.  So remember whether online or in person, meeting ONE common person, or even fifty or a hundred of them, is not the same as meeting THE common person.

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Working Hard/Hardly Working

I admit that I have a pretty sweet deal.  I like most of the things I do at work.  In fact, I would pay to go to many of the meetings and conferences they pay me to attend.  I am not saying it is all great, but the good things far outweigh the negatives.   I think about my job a lot, but that is hard to place in the “work” category, since if I didn’t have this job I would probably be studying many of the same things re new media, persuasion and knowledge management. 

I purport to put in long hours. I rarely get home before 7 or 8 pm, which means that I spend around 10 hours at work, but what is work?  And I can usually carve out time during the day for exercise etc.  I have only recently come to terms with this.  I used to feel guilty and lazy.  I couldn’t understand how I could be doing okay w/o working very hard. But after almost than twenty-five years of decent progress, I had to rethink this. Something seemed to be working.

Most people think or at least say that they are busy.   Much of this is self inflicted work.   Every day I see people doing things that need not be done or doing things in such a way that they actually create more work for themselves and others.   But the biggest reason people think they are busy is that they are fooling themselves. 

WSJ had an article about that, giving some scientific backing to my observation.   When people are asked how much they work, they invariably come up with significant higher hours than when they follow it closely with a diary.   Some of this comes from the definition of work, as I mentioned above.   I read the WSJ, Economist and many other such publications.  I could not do my job if I didn’t keep up with the latest news and innovations.  But what % of that can I call work?  Most our high estimates of work hours comes from giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt. We might think that we usually work ten hour days and count the times when we work less as unusual exceptions.    But maybe there are more “exceptional” than “normal” days.

We have to remember that “normal” doesn’t mean typical or average.   It means the way something would be under good conditions.   A normal man would be healthy, not overweight and not deformed in any significant way.  This is not a typical or average man.   (BTW – an “average” man has less than two legs.  Think about it.  Nobody has more than two legs and some people have less, so the average is less than two.  Statistics can be interesting.)  IN that respect a normal day might be one where you worked through the day w/o important interruptions arriving and leaving on time.  There are not many normal days.

In respect to work, you have to consider both typical and normal. My first job in the FS was as public affairs officer in Porto Alegre. I was ambitious and worked hard, but I was distressed when I talked to colleagues who seemed a lot smarter and harder working.   My results were usually better than typical, but never up to what I considered normal. Life was too easy and I was sure I was just not doing something everybody else was doing.  I worried about this through my next posts, until I figured out that most people just think they are busier than they are and all the talk about constant work is just people talking. Pointing this out to people does not make me universally popular and I have to qualify the statement.  There are some times when you are truly busy, but most of the time not. Beyond that, if you are consistently working more than nine hours a day, and I am not talking about just being there but really working, you are burning out.  It is like trying to sprint through a Marathon. The results matter and sometimes LESS “work” will produce better results. 

I am not making a plea for indolence but I am very suspicious of people who claim to work 70 hour weeks all the time. I think there is a lot of useless energy spent and probably a lot less time on task than they say and probably than they think.

There is some virtue in doing less, especially if you find the points of maximum leverage and then use them. It is often better to clear obstacles than to push harder.   All good leaders should be a little lazy, create the proper conditions for the success of others and then get out of the way.   People need to be free to innovate and do things their way.  Constant hectoring will just give you a sore throat, make everybody less productive and create a lot of work for everybody.

Anyway, I put my time in at work and try to earn my salary, but I know that sometimes it is best to do less but do the right thing.

This story is tangential but it applies.  This guy has a clogged pipe. He called the plumber who says that he can fix the problem, but it will cost fifty dollars.  The guy agrees.   The plumber takes out a little hammer, walks to a place along the pipes and taps it a couple of times.    Everything is fixed.   The guy is outraged.  “Fifty dollars,” he says, “for a few taps?  I want an itemized bill.”   The plumber writes out a receipt.   “Tapping the pipe – $.05.  Knowing how and where to tap – $49.95.”

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Getting Old

The old keep getting older and the young must do the same.  I am 54 years old today. Assuming that I live to be 108, I am middle aged.  I went running yesterday and ran my record worst time for a late spring run. I only measure the middle mile, so that it is not a sprint or a worn out finish. I used to run it in under six minutes.  Yesterday it took almost ten. Fat guys and women now sometimes pass me AND stay ahead. Running still feels the same.  Maybe my watch is defective.  Maybe all watches are defective. Maybe I will just leave the watch at home, since none of them seem to measure my running accurately. I still do ten chin-ups after each run. Since I never try to do more, I don’t know that I have become weaker in that respect.  I am pretty sure I have but since I don’t know I have plausible deniability.   

I am also not as quick as I used to be mentally. This is an interesting situation. I sense that my raw cognitive power has declined, but in compensation I have more experience so I respond better to some challenges. Emotional intelligence is higher, in other words. I am also better at judging situations so that I can do things I am better at doing and avoid the ones where I am weaker.

I read an article a long time ago about useful intelligence and how it develops over a lifetime.   Young people have more raw brainpower, but they lack the perspective and experience to make it useful in all fields.  The raw brain v experience makes the most difference in pure reasoning such as math.   If a person has not achieved something extraordinary in math by the time he is twenty-five, he never will. Achievements in physics come just a bit later and on it goes. In fields where experience and perspective make the most difference, older people do better.   Historians, statesmen and diplomats continue to get better.  They do their best work when they are fifty or more. That gives me a little comfort as I hobble down the the winding path.  The picture, BTW, is me cutting a path through the prickly brush on the tree farm.  The machine ran out of gas long before I ran out of brush to cut.  I suppose that is a metaphor for life.

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The Dot.com Bubble All Over Again?

It is starting to look like the dot.com bubble.   Nobody has really figured out how to monetize Web 2.0 and most of the current value of Web 2.0 companies comes from expectation of future value.  There is great excitement about building online communities, but it is hard to get these communities to do very much except be communities.   There is no doubt Web 2.0 has already changed how people communicate and how they do business.  But how can we really use it?

There was a South Park episode last year where one of the kids became an internet sensation in hopes of making a pile of money.   When he went to collect, he was told that his great fame had indeed earned him millions of internet bucks, but that they were not exchangeable into real money.    In PD 2.0 we are not trying to earn money, but we are trying to achieve sustained changes in attitudes and behavior in fields important to U.S. policies.   What if we reach millions of people only to find that our internet influence is not exchangeable into anything that matters to us?

What about the holy grail of Web 2.0, going viral?  Some top viral videos are at this link. Many of the things that go viral are just silly, like a cat flushing a toilet.   But I question the effectiveness even of the serious contenders.   It is great to get exposure, but what is it good for?   I remember a study of the “Clio Awards.”   Those were the academy awards of commercials, where the funniest and most artistic commercials were chosen by the cognoscenti of commercials.    The problem was that the winners were not particularly good at selling the products they represented.   In fact, they were below average.    People often loved the commercial, but didn’t care about the product and sometimes they couldn’t even tell what product was being advertised.   Many of the viral videos are like the Clio award winners that get lots of attention and even critical acclaim, but don’t do the job.

There is also no reliable way to predict if something will go viral. Studying successful viral videos is not much use.    We can identify – in retrospect – what they did right, but when we compare this to the millions of others that didn’t make it, we find that they also did many of the same things.   It is a type of survivor bias, like attributing special skills to the winner of a very long and multi-round game of Russian roulette.   The guy would probably write a book.  He and all of us would think that his astonishing success must be due to something other than random chance, but we would all be wrong and we should not be enticed into the playing the game with his “proven” method.

The lesson is NOT that we stop exploring new media.  Rather it is that we should not fall in love with it or with any particular aspect, platform or technology.   It is easy to be beguiled by large numbers and exponential growth rates but we should be persistent in questioning HOW we can use it in PD.   Some things will be very useful, but maybe not always or everywhere and others might just be exciting w/o payback.   It is good to think about the differences.

Remember pets.com during the dot.com bubble with that sock puppet?  Everybody loved the marketing.   They even bought a super bowl add featuring the sock puppet.  They were defunct less than a year later.  I could never figure out how most of those companies could make any money; after a while, neither could anybody else.

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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.