Month: August 2009

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Ignorant and/or Stupid About the Facts

The health care debate has spawned an unusually large number of articles saying that they are “fact checking” or clearing up “myths.”  Reasonable people will come to similar reasonable conclusions if they have similar facts.   And you can take so much smug pleasure in trumping (thumping?) an opponent with THE facts. It leaves him speechless. Not anymore.  Facts just aren’t what they used to be.

The concept of “fact” is closely tied to having a recognized arbitrating authority. James Burke made an interesting BBC program about this concept and way back in 1985 and anticipated the problem we would have as the concept of fact dissipated.   Extrapolating from what he said, shareable facts were possible only with the widespread introduction of printing.   Before that you had to rely on personal knowledge, faith and a lot of interpretation, since hand copied books were full of mistakes and oral history changes with the needs of the circumstances.  Most people didn’t know very much and much of what they knew beyond their personal experience was superstition, hear-say or legend.  They weren’t stupid.  It is just that w/o the kinds of recording tools we use today it was simply impossible for them to master a lot of information beyond what they could see, hear, feel AND remember personally.

I grew up in an age of fact.  The early 1960s in the U.S. might well have been humanities apex at the rational/science/fact culture.  We had faith in science and the certainty it could and would provide, if not today or tomorrow, soon.  We had reference books that could prove the facts and scientists who continually stuffed more facts into them.    I have written about this subject before, so I am going over some of the same ground.  Look at the previous post if you want, but indulge me in this one.  

The bottom line is that facts are not the same as truth and the truthfulness of a fact depends almost entirely on context of reference.   This is provided by the social and cultural environment.  Back when I was a kid, almost every reasonably educated person shared a reasonably common context.    We used the same reference books, read the same newspapers and watched the same things on television.   This context is weakened.   On the other hand, the power of opinion is vastly strengthened by the proliferation of cable TV, Internet sites and just by the vast numbers of experts talking and writing about everything.   We are back in the world of interpretations.   We still long for the certainty that we can no longer achieve and we still try to trump (or thump) each other with our facts, w/o comprehending that they no longer are THE facts.  

I started with the health care debate because it is current, emotionally charged and an excellent case study of the matters of fact and interpretation.  The health care debate is mostly about interpretation because there currently is no bill to debate.  The tentative proposals are subject to interpretation and they are fluid, which is even more problematic. There is a lot of space to read between the lines and to add or subtract whole paragraphs.  But it seems like it should be a matter of fact, since there is so much written and discussed. 

But the would-be fact checkers are deluding themselves if they think they can trump debate with their interpretation, which they call fact. The details of the health care bill are not only unknown, they are also currently unknowable because they have yet to be hammered out.   Even in the world of certainty, something needs to have happened before it can have a fact associated with it.     It cannot be a fact that John Smith landed on Mars on April 1, 2020 and it cannot be a fact what is included or not in the health care bill. Neither has yet happened. That is WHY we have a debate.

We need an honest debate to lay out the parameters of what we want and what we find unacceptable. Let’s not try to shut it down too soon. This is a big deal and everything should be on the table. I wish everybody would stop saying that the other side is ignorant, depraved, greedy or stupid.   In fact, we are ALL currently ignorant on the subject, since the details are not yet manifest. Put in health care terms, ignorance is a treatable condition.  Presumably we are not all stupid, which you really cannot cure.   

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Sh*t Happens Provoking the Wrath of Khan

A famous Bollywood actor, a Mr. Khan, was stopped at an American airport for that extra search.   He claims it is because he has a Muslim name.   Read this absurd article and look at some of the comments.   If it doesn’t annoy you, you might indeed be deluded yourself.

Khan and I have some things in common.  I got that extra search at airports several times, so did Mariza and Espen (when he was only 12).  If airports are profiling, I am not sure why I come up so often.  Maybe it is my Midwestern accent or my blue eyes.  I suspect it is my baldness.  Bald men suffer terrible discrimination. I still cannot explain Espen or Mariza, however.

This whole profiling thing at airports is BS.  Airport personnel are extraordinarily careful NOT to do it.  In fact, they go too far, IMO, searching grandmothers in wheelchairs at the same rate they search healthy young men.  Yes, granny COULD be a bad one.  But you have to go with the probabilities. 

Speaking of probabilities, nobody has ever been able to show a statistical probability of being searched at an airport  based solely on race or ethnicity.  There are lots of suppositions and innuendo but no facts.  Of course, there are other factors that sometimes correlate, but as we all learn in Statistics 101, correlation is not causality.   In my case I think I was “profiled” because I traveled several times to particular areas of the world and I was often traveling on one-way tickets.   These things are uncommon enough to raise a little suspicion.  But who knows?

It is more likely that simple random chance is the cause.  Random chance will NOT spread out evenly.  In fact, if you find perfectly even results, you can be sure that random chance is NOT involved.  It is counter intuitive but true. 

If airport security stops me, two Irish students, a couple from Milwaukee returning from Polish-fest and Khan, who do you think is being “profiled”.  If you answered “none of the above” you are correct.   But will any journalists reporting on this know or care?   Indeed, it will look wrong.   But sometimes we have to accept looking wrong when doing the right thing. 

Consider the amusing case of Bob Dylan.  He evidently is a complete unknown to many in the younger generation and somebody called the cops because he seemed suspicious as he walked around a residential neighborhood.  Was he profiled? I suppose he was based on his behavior.   The reports didn’t mention any other sort of profiling because it wouldn’t make sense, so we just pass it off.  It doesn’t make any more sense to claim profiling at the airport.

We are not energetic  enough in defending ourselves against these accusations. There, IMO, are three big reasons.   Most serious is that we don’t want to “look wrong” or seem intolerant, so we accept a hypersensitivity to perceived slights as natural.  We preemptively apologize and feel guilty for the operation of random chance.

The second is related to privacy rules. Government offices often CANNOT defend themselves because their accusers have privacy rights. I remember the frustration of trying to explain denied visa cases.  As a press attaché I would get calls from journalists saying that someone had been treated unfairly at the Embassy and what was my comment.  Even if I knew the particular circumstance, the person was lying or there was a really good reason why he/she didn’t get a visa, all I could do was quote the general rules.  His privacy rights protected his dishonesty and our “no comment” was seen as an admission of guilt.  

But the biggest reason we don’t properly defend ourselves is a simple misunderstanding of random chance coupled with a human tendency at infer patterns even where they don’t exist.  Kids play the game of looking for faces or animal figures in clouds.  Seaching for patterns is hardwired into our thinking. If I randomly choose ten people, each will come up with a reason – good or bad – why he/she was “singled out.”   And he/she will believe it, but it won’t be true.   

The “shit happens” argument is often valid, but never sounds very convincing. The fictional pattern is usually more interesting.  More nefarious in our litigious society if you can impose a pattern, you might be able to hit the jackpot with some kind of payout. 

Profiling makes for a good story. It sells newspapers and books. It provides publicity for upcoming movies.   It allows people to at once pose as victims and vindicators as they “stick it to the man.”   Sometimes it is even true, but more often there are better but boring explanations.

Bigotry and Racism

As long as I am ranting about these things, let me just give another example. This is from a story in the NYT.  I have put in a blank space to give you a chance to picture the kind of person who would make such a comment.  Tell me if you think that is racist before you look at the article.  If you heard a neighbor disparaging an ethnic or national group in those terms, what would you call it? Would such a blanket condemnation of a whole group ever be justified?  

“You should know that we hate all ____. From the bottom of our souls, we hate you.”

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Hateful Weirdoes at the Cemetery Gates

I have never before encountered anything like it.   As I rode my bike out of Arlington, I noticed about fifty cops and a dozen protestors.  One protestor carried a sign that said, “God Bless IEDs.”  I couldn’t believe that she knew what IED were, so I stopped to ask her. She said something about an IED being a blessed device that killed soldiers.  When I told her that I had been in Iraq and people I knew had been killed or maimed by IEDs, she told me that was a good thing and that I must be a coward for coming home alive. It was an almost instant escalation with all the weirdoes yelling at me, calling me names and screaming that I was going against God’s plan. They didn’t specify how.  

When I asked what kind of horrible and vengeful god they worshipped, since I didn’t recognize the one they were talking about, they really went wild and threatened that he would strike me down. I noticed that they had started to tape the meeting (I may appear on the “Nutcase News tonight).  I figured that they wanted a show, so I gave them one.  Doing my best channeling of Charlton Heston I theatrically spread my arms and challenged their false god to strike me down. I mentioned as a side comment that the true believers might want to stand back so as not to be collateral damage from the expected lightning bolt.  This didn’t amuse them very much.   They told me I was an “arrogant bastard” and that their god would indeed strike me down, only later. I guess he has been busy or just really lethargic, since he has not got around to me yet.  

I didn’t learn who these people were. They showed no desire to explain anything to anybody and fomenting hatred seemed to be their only goal. It worked.  I hate them and I know why there were so many cops around. Lacking the protection of the authorities, my guess is that these clowns – advocating the violent death of American military personnel while standing at the gates of Arlington Cemetery – would quickly get a beat down by decent folks.  I was sorely tempted to toss the first stone myself, but they probably would have enjoyed that too much. 

I am not a religious scholar but I am reasonably sure that if you go to hell, these are some of the people you will meet down there. It is amazing and frightening that such people exist.  I have seen lots of “peaceful” protestors, but never such that could be so appropriately labeled evil.   Maybe there still is some need for this striking down thing.   If I notice a thunderstorm forming over the Potomac I will assume their time of reckoning has arrived.

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The People – United – Will Often be Shortsighted

I got a taste of direct democracy when we lived in New Hampshire. Our little community still used septic tanks, which required regular maintenance and were leaking sewage into local waterways.  It made sense to connect them up to a larger municipal line.  After about five years, the change would pay for itself and after that it would yield consistent cost savings. 

The problem was the five-year payoff.  Some of the older or more mobile residents figured that they would not be around long enough to reap the benefits, which were far in the future but knew that they would be stuck with the upfront costs of the investments today.   So you get the picture right out of a Norman Rockwell painting.  Old Mr. Parker, wearing his simple red plaid shirt, stands up in the town hall meeting to oppose the plan.  Nobody wants to be rude to the old guy and – besides – he is right.  Very likely HIS costs will outweigh HIS benefits.  

The fact is that reaching consensus on many hot issues is almost impossible. That is why they are hot issues.  The frustrating part is that everybody is right from his own perspective. There are no villains. People have figured it out right.

We see this in all large scale reforms and many small ones.   The most recent big examples were the aborted attempts to reform Social Security a few years ago and the probably truncated health care proposals we see today. The dynamics of the situations and even many of the participants (many now opposing health care reform opposed SS reform) are the same.  In both cases, opponents had correctly figured out that the changes would probably leave them net losers. Everybody saw the need to reform in general but everyone could also find places they would suffer in the details of any real world proposal. 

We don’t think rationally about gains and losses.  A loss generally causes a lot more pain than the pleasure we get from a similar gain.  That is why most people would act quicker to avoid the loss of $100 than they would to take advantage of the opportunity to gain it.   From the accounting standpoint, the two are identical. In both cases the subject has $100 less than they would have.  But it sure doesn’t seem the same.   Researchers have consistently shown this happens even in very serious situations and even the semantics makes a difference. People are much more likely to accept the need for an operation that has a 95% success rate than they are one that has 5% failure.   This aspect of human nature plays into every debate about political changes.  It is always powerful and it is always irrational.

Frankly I don’t think it is possible to make sweeping changes that are at the same time effective and popular, which is why Social Security reform failed and why health care will probably not achieve its objectives. Unfortunately, I think the same goes for climate change. Current benefits must be perceived to be significantly higher than costs, especially costs in the future or the logical choice is stand pat.   It might also make sense just to be caution. 

When you think about it, most change is potentially harmful. I can think of very few changes that would make me immediately much healthier, for example, but lots of things could happen to make me worse off.

That is why I think you have to go with incremental, imperfect and differential change.  Change a few key things at a time and see how they evolve.   It is a kind of iterative change where you learn from each step and then incorporate the learning into your next move. It takes a longer time and it is not as exciting.  Probably most problematic is that it is hard for any politician to get credit.  But it tends to work better.

It is really hard to get all the people, or even most of them, to do the right thing all at once.  All serious change starts with a small group of innovators and then spreads more widely. The people – united – will often be shortsighted.  (BTW, you have to chant that like the old student protestors used to)  But they are pretty good at making good individual decisions about what really matters to them and these add up to a lot.  Maybe they are right to resist the big changes.  A variety of ideas is better than one big one.

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Odds & Ends and a New Office

My New Office

We made the move.  I am in my new office now.  It is smaller than my former office but much better because it has windows that have decent views.   Although construction of the new American Institute of Peace blocks my direct view, over my shoulder is the Memorial Bridge and the Potomac, as you can see in the picture above. 

The building is in a less convenient location than old SA 44, but I figure I will adapt. It has what I need, i.e. natural sunlight, showers & a refrigerator for my Coke Zero.

Below is the construction crane across the street.  Notice the airplane.  This is on the flight path, but we don’t get much noise. 

I have a few odds and ends postings. 

Ponderosa  Pine Smell

NPR had a good article about ponderosa pine.   Listen to it at this link.   I wrote an article a while back about the smell of ponderosa pines, among other things.  I didn’t know it was such an issue.  Everybody agrees that the smell is distinctive.

Chrissy and I are going out the Arizona in November and we can spend some time in the pines in the mountains there.

Primitive Climate Change

The Economist has an article about how early human agriculture set off the first round of human influenced  global warming.   Good thing too.   W/o that shot of CO2 and methane back around 7000 years ago we may have slipped back into the ice age.   I read about this a while back, how early agriculture may have diverted the return to ice age conditions, but there is evidently now even more evidence for it.   

Our early ancestors were small in numbers and primitive in technology, but they could be very active.  Because agriculture was so much less efficient back then, they had to slash and burn a lot of land to support their small bands and all that slashing and burning put lot of greenhouse gas in the air.  Soon after, they took up rice patty farming in some parts of the world, which is a big producer of methane, a more potent gas than CO2. 

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Spare Change

Business is down for the guy looking for spare change outside the CVS Pharmacy.   He has been there a long time and people are used to him, so I don’t think it is because people have become less generous or less tolerant.   I think the new self-service check-out stations are to blame.  

It used to be that I went in to buy a coke or some potato chips and came out with a pocketful of change and it was almost natural just to dump it into his cup.   When I use the self-service stations, I always use my credit card.  It is just easier and faster, so very often I literally do not have any change, “spare” or otherwise.   Most stores and restaurants now make it easier to pay by card than with cash.   This works out well for me, since I get one monthly bill, but it is hard on the spare change guys.   They may soon have to find another profession … or start taking credit cards. 

It is funny how little changes in habits and technologies can have knock off effects you just don’t expect.   Since I am on the subject of the spare change guys, I think there is an interesting connection between them and containerization.  Let me explain. 

Medusa Cement, where I worked as a young man, was “served” by the longshoreman’s union.  I guess because we were on The Kinnikinnick River and near the Port of Milwaukee on Lake Michigan.   My father was a long-time member and a lot of the people I knew in my work life at that time worked on docks, drove trucks or bashed metal.   They were good, hard-working guys who gave a good day’s work for a good day’s pay. 

The easiest job was the “fireman” on the trains.  As I understood it, they used to need a fireman to shovel in coal.  When the railroad converted to diesel engines, firemen were no longer needed.  But they had a strong union and so they stayed on the job.  

Most of the jobs didn’t require much in the way of thinking, which was a good thing for some of our colleagues.  Many were smart, but with levels of education you just don’t see much anymore.  One my father’s friends was called “Sitzinone.”  That wasn’t his real name.   It came from the way he would say “that is six and one” when shooting craps.  (Seven is the key to success in that game and shooting craps was a big deal.)  He evidently could not count beyond seven but didn’t need to.  He recognized the patterns on the dice and had an intuitive understanding of the odds. Another of my co-workers, Lester, couldn’t read, but he had a great memory and could usually recognize also patterns on work orders. He drove the folk lift and loaded trucks by following familiar patterns. It worked most of the time.  

Then there was Tom, who worked the twelve-hour shifts and then went off to deliver pizza for a place called Pepi’s on Mitchell Street. Tom didn’t wash much and never brushed his teeth.  He bragged that he hadn’t bushed his teeth since he was discharged from the army after the Korean war. I doubted him, but he smiled broadly and convinced me.  I used to like Pepi’s pizza, but stopped eating it after I got to know Tom.

They used to say that work was the curse of the drinking class and unfortunately many  preferred to consume their daily bread, potatoes and rye in liquid form.   It was easy to slip down that road to perdition.  The bars near the factories opened at 6am for the early liquid breakfast.  (I used to go to a place called the Nautical Inn for lunch.  They had good greasy hamburgers and I would usually get a couple of beers to cut the dust of the afternoon shift.  I had to stop doing it when I got to like it too much.)

Nobody works harder than a drunk sweating off a bender and as long as it was possible to get good paying episodic work these guys could be productive, even admirable members of society. This changed with containerized cargoes and general automation.   

Not only did containerized cargo cut the total unskilled workforce, it also required the remaining workers to be more reliable. Since they operated heavy machines, also excluded were the hard-working boozers, who tended to shake a little too much, not a good thing when running a crane with containers hanging off. 

This change coincided with closing of the flop houses.  If you watch old movies or old “Twilight Zone” episodes, you see guys living in dumpy one-room apartments.  Many of them were not up to code, but they were cheap and could be rented on short-term basis.  In the 1960s, they began to urban “renew” these kinds of places out of existence. These dumps had few champions, but they had provided cheap housing.  When they were gone, some people were left w/o a place to go.

So unskilled episodic jobs disappeared at about the same time the cheap, if substandard, housing was improved out of existence.   Worse yet, the economy started to decline after 1972 and the damage caused by the upheavals and social experiments of the 1960s started to become apparent. Things fell apart.

Anyway, little seemingly unrelated changes and decisions can have big unintended consequences. Above is me in front of the cement company where I used to work.

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Anti-Isms & Bogus Assumptions

We fret a lot about anti-Americanism in my business.  And we watch every up and down blip in America’s image abroad.   But I have suffered a crisis of faith.  I no longer have faith that the GENERAL attitude U.S.  really matters very much and my years of weighing every permutation were as useful as charting waves on the surface of a lake.  I don’t believe the measures of the attitudes measure real attitudes, since they bounce around so widely and I don’t see that it translates much into any actual specific behaviors apart from gnashing of teeth and shouting.  According to recent surveys, our national image was edging up before last year, but now it has surged, but it doesn’t seem to have changed what is happening in a practical sense. No surprise. Most people just do not act out of general beliefs, even if they really know what those beliefs are, itself a questionable assumption.  You also have to understand that people think about us a lot less than we think they do. Let me give you an example about others, which will take away some of the bias we might have from looking at ourselves.  

Let’s put the shoes on the other feet.   Take a look at question # 20 and see what Americans think of various foreign countries.   Only 4% view China very favorably, but this is twice as much as the 2% who favor the Russians.   We like the Brits, but even they get only 41% very favorable, although if you add somewhat favorable you top 77% and only 4% are very unfavorable.    A majority of us even like the French (54% very or somewhat favorable).  So what does that mean to these countries?  Would you pay more for a computer made in France or UK (presuming you could find one) than you would for the Chinese-made model?   Would you favor a British over a Chinese job applicant for that reason alone?  I don’t think so.

You would base your judgment NOT on the GENERAL reputation, but rather on the SPECIFIC one you were considering.  Anything else would be … stupid and bigoted.  Why should we assume that others would be that way toward us that we would find so odious in ourselves?  They say that all politics is local and so it is at least most public affairs.   Of course we know our reputation varies in the countries of the world, but also is variable in within every place, situation and individual based on specific circumstances.  I remember seeing this paradoxical mix of emotions and reason in Iraq. The people said they wanted the U.S. to leave Iraq right away, but they wanted the Marines specifically guarding their homes to stay essentially forever. I think the wisdom on this is “Be careful what you wish for because you may get it.” That is why general sentiment often does not translate to concrete results.  People sometimes don’t say what they believe and/or they question with their intellect what they know in their hearts. And sometimes they really just haven’t thought it through.

I thought about all these things when I was reading this article.   We hear that the Chinese are moving money  all over the world and buying love in the developing world with their investments in infrastructure  and public works.   These investments often come with fewer strings attached (i.e. fewer demands for economic or human rights improvements) than similar investments from the U.S. or the EU. This makes the Chinese ostensibly more attractive partners to some sorts of governments and leaders who view democracy and humans rights with less enthusiasm.  We are exhorted to do something about this, although rarely specified is how, what or why.

But how’s it working for them, image wise? And what are the practical ramifications?  That’s hard to say about the image, but what you can do is count is the rising numbers of Chinese being attacked, targeted and even killed in places as disparate as Algeria and Zambia.  Ten years ago in Indonesia as many as 1500 Chinese were killed in race riots.   This stuff happens.  We just don’t read about it very much.   Both the Chinese investors and local authorities have some interests in not making a big deal about it.  Imagine if 1500 Americans were killed in anti-American riots.  It would be a big deal.   I bet we would pay attention and beat ourselves up with questions about “why do they hate us?”  In places like Indonesia or Malaysia they have a long history of these sorts of ethnic tensions and periodic pogroms, but when you are talking about Algeria or Zambia you wouldn’t guess there were even enough Chinese around to provoke attacks.  Certainly they have not been around long enough to permit the development of deep-seated ethnic or national animosity. 

The evidence is that these troubles resulted from specific, local situations and events that got out of hand, not a general Chinese image problem that stretches from Algeria, through Zambia and Indonesia to Papua New Guinea and beyond. Properly addressing them would mean lots of local responses, none of them exactly the same. Causality regarding a practical overall image would probably run in the direction from the local to the general, not the other way around.   I think the wisdom on this is “watch you pennies and your dollars will look after themselves.”

So my faith in my profession is not gone, but I am zooming down more to ground level, maybe down to the dirt level.  Gone are the beliefs in sweeping transformations.    Sweeping rapid changes are ephemeral and episodic attention is probably pernicious.   What Aristotle said about anger (Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody’s power, that is not easy.) also applies to public affairs.   You have to identify the specific issue and audience at the specific time and in a specific place. 

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Practical + Theoretical = Useful New Stuff?

I would like to bring together people for a conference including those who “do” public diplomacy using the new techniques and technologies such as augmented reality, social networking, text mining & mobile together along with those who develop and study those things in order to discuss practical applications.  

We need to discuss which technologies can be best used to deliver public diplomacy messages and that we and the larger public affairs community can use.  Integral to addressing these issues are our organizational and mission imperatives, which directly affect the extent of use and acceptance of new methods.  Not every new technology is useful for our work and not every useful technology can be used by us.

Subject clusters, along with notional times

8:30 – 9:00

Registration & seating

9 – 9:30

Introduction – new technologies and the new public diplomacy.    A discussion of what has worked so far and what is in the works for the next six months and beyond.

9:30-11:45 (with 15 minute break in middle)

The next big ideas – I envision a panel with an expert on each of these things giving a 15 minute explanation.  Following is a discussion among the panelists with questions from the floor.   We would ask what are the next big ideas and whether or not they are useful in public diplomacy. 

·         Augmented realty – what is it?  What does it do?  How might augmented reality augment public diplomacy?

·         Gaming platforms/virtual realities – what are they?  What is our public diplomacy experience in their use so far?   What are some future applications?  Will “holideck” functions come to dominate online collaboration?

·         Social networking systems – what are they?  What is our public diplomacy experience in their use so far?   What are some future applications?

·         “Old” new techniques (blogging, webpages, outreach) — what are they?  What is our public diplomacy experience in their use so far?   What are some future applications?

11:45-12:45

Content – how much do messages matter?  Can a content neutral or content free social network long endure?   Is such a network worth cultivating?   How can it be used to further public diplomacy goals?  Where will content come from in a post-MSM world (this one is for the journalist and journalism professors)?  Can user-generated content replace professionally crafted material? 

12:45- 1:30

Lunch

1:30-3:30

Putting it together – Panel session format as above

·         Integration/technological models – can one model encompass all/most forms of new technologies?   Can we understand the new technologies w/o an overall model or framework?  How can we determine the appropriate mix to use in various situations?

·         Integration/anthropological models – how do new techniques fit into and alter existing human networks & relationships, both inside and outside organizations?  

·         Integration/information management – can wikis function as information conduits and knowledge generators?  How will dispersed decision making change power structures and priority setting?   Can a series of tactical decisions become strategy?

3:30-5:00

Where do we go from here?  What is the future of public diplomacy?  Does public diplomacy need to be run by, or mostly run by, governments?  Can public diplomacy function successfully as only one voice among many?

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Is Viral Video Marketing Like Retirement Planning Based on Buying Lottery Tickets?

Marketing firms (and some of us) are trying to crack the viral video code. To the extent there is a solution, it is like buying lottery tickets. You cannot win if you don’t play. If you buy a lot of tickets, you increase your chances by a little, but any system for picking the right combination of numbers is just superstition.  And the only way to guarantee a win at the lottery is not to play. 

But people win just enough to keep the suckers piling in the cash.  The winners always have a plausible story to tell.   They often report that they were sure they were going to win that day, or at least they had a feeling.   Many have some kind of lucky number system, some quite complicated.   If you look at a group of lottery winners you can indeed find (or create) patterns among them.    (This is “survivor bias.”   In any kind of random event, somebody is going to win.   It doesn’t mean anything, but people will impose reasons ex-post facto.   The winner may even write a book explaining his system.   People following his precepts will have the same chances the lucky winner had of winning before he won.)

Besides the usually urgent need in need of dental work & gym memberships, most lottery winners are regular players with some sort of system.  Statistically this makes sense.   Regular players buy more tickets so they have a greater chance of winning as a group and most of them develop some sort of system.   But the group odds often don’t make sense when reduced to the individual level.  The odds of winning the big jackpot are so small that the actual difference between a person who buys a thousand tickets and the person who buys only one doesn’t add up to much for any individual.

Anyway, the chances that you can create a video that goes viral are a lot like your chances of winning the lottery.  And the odds will only get worse as more people enter the contest.    Millions of people are trying to crack this code because it would mean millions of dollars to any individual or firm that figured it out. But if they did, others would quickly pile on and pull the odds of success back up to astronomical.   The system is reactive & self-correcting.

It gets worse.  Most successful viral videos are – in a word – dopey.   Let me make a few distinctions.  There are three types of viral videos.   The first results if you happen to be on the spot to get a video of something truly spectacular, such as a plane crash or meteor strike.  The second involves celebrities, who command attention because of their fame.  The video rides on them, not the other way around.   The third type is the miscellaneous or the manufactured, which is the only kind available to non-celebrities who don’t happen to be near a plane crash or meteor strike. 

If you are trying to manufacture the viral part, you increase your odds mostly by doing something silly, humiliating, prurient or shocking.    This is not something most individual or organizations want to do.  It might be better to remain unknown than to be known for your ability to pass gas to the tune of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. 

So let’s treat the great viral video quest the way a reasonable person treats the lottery.  We should do it because it is fun.  Almost everybody has bought a lottery ticket.  You are buying a little piece of a dream and it is a good thing.   But if you are spending too much, even neglecting other things & taking out loans or planning your retirement around your lottery winnings, you are unlikely to have a happy ending.

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Final End of USIA

The United States Information Agency (USIA) was absorbed by State Department in 1999.  I was there when they took down the USIA eagle and prosaically renamed the building State Annex 44 (SA 44).  There was and still is a palpable feeling of loss among some of my colleagues and I miss some parts of my old agency, but not much. By the time of the anschluss with State, there was not much left of USIA worth saving. USIA suffered truly horrible top-leadership through the 1990s and they wrecked the place.  We closed our libraries, shut branch posts, let our contact networks atrophy, laid off experienced FSNs and the director seemed actively hostile to hiring new public affairs officers; by 2000 there were only around half as many of us as there had been ten years before.  

Our fearless leaders were under a general impression that since we had won the Cold War we didn’t need relics like public affairs anymore. After 9/11/2001 we found we were wrong and suffered mightily from our compromised ability to communicate with foreign publics.  But all that is history.   

I think we are better off integrated into State Department. But I still remember with nostalgia and pride coming into the USIA almost a quarter century ago, so the final closing of our offices in the old USIA building makes me sad. We are moving out next week and my group is the last to go. It is finally finished.

Tim Receveur took a few pictures of the end of days at SA 44 and you can see them on this post. There is a kind of Twilight Zone feeling to the old place.  We will be moving to a new building across from the Harry Truman Building.  The offices are nicer, but the location is worse. SA 44 is in a great place. The Orange Line is nearby and you always get a seat on the way home since you board before the big crowds get on after Metro Center. Gold’s Gym is a few minute walk. We are near the Mall, as well as restaurants.  Our new building is near nothing. The State cafeteria is not very good and it is a little expensive for what you get. I will adapt. I just need to find a place to lock my bike and take a shower.  

USIA has been gone for ten years, now the building is recycled and all its denizens scattered and relocated. I guess that’s all there is.  Move along. Nothing left to see. Only a vague remembrance of past glories.