Twisting in the hand

Watching Aleks Krotoski ’s excellent programme about the Internet last night, I was struck by the one thing she didn’t say:

We make our technology, as we make our gods, in our own image.

She considered the use of social networking for good and for ill and the nuances there are summed up most neatly in the irregular verb:

• I am an activist
• You are a freedom fighter
• He is a terrorist

Every technology extends the reach of the individual and the most chilling part of last night’s episode was her interview with an arrogant little shit who claimed to have generated the denial of service attacks which effectively closed Estonia in 2007.  So the real question about the internet is not ‘is it a force for good or ill?’  The question we should be asking is ‘are we grown up enough as a supposedly intelligent species to be trusted with it?’  When we look at the devastation we’ve caused with every other technology we’ve devised, the answer quite clearly is ‘no’. (Says me. In my blog. Which I will announce via Twitter. And repost on Facebook. Before turning up the central heating because it’s cold here today).

I was however intrigued by the implications of how the internet is changing the dynamics of political power.  20thC democracy is clearly a busted flush. In the UK no-one can be bothered to vote because individuals feel disenfranchised and powerless.  (Was Thatcher’s emasculation of the unions in the 1980s co-incidence, or did it cause this de-politicisation of the workers, I wonder).  And we’ve all come to realise the truth of the old anarchist saying ‘no matter who you vote for, the government will get in’. Now it’s been clearly shown that that means a bunch of trough-snorting, house-flipping, expenses-fiddling, family-funding, John-Lewis-shopping scheisters who seek to use parliamentary privilege to evade the short arm of the law.  No wonder no-one votes.  (Me, I’m composing the limerick with which I’ll spoil my paper in June).  In the US, the stakes and therefore the turnout were higher and Obama clearly gets the internet and used it successfully to reach the voters other media don’t reach.  Even so, the corruption and ritualised posturing of the American political process make the only possible reaction one of disgust.

… and breathe…

I ought to delete that little rant because Krotoski did not mention party politics or the entrenched political processes at all, and it’s irrelevant to this post.  Instead Krotoski looked at the shapes that are coalescing to form the new political power-bases.  I am genuinely interested in concepts like ‘the virtual homeland’ and ’self-radicalisation’ and I find it intriguing that this language is only used in negative contexts.

The way that the Internet enables individuals to engage with the world around them and the power-structures above them is certainly subversive, but when we consider the scum that has risen to the top of the 20thC political processes (see above) is it actually bad that individuals are becoming more engaged and more informed?

Interesting times, eh.

Right.  Time for packing more books into boxes.  When I sell the house I am going to buy a Kindle. Or an iPad.  Or both.

And they are all out to get you, and they all look the same

Some cheery person on Radio 2 the other day was asking what odd fears and phobias people have, and blimey do people have odd fears and phobias. Round shiny objects like peas or malteasers, the word salmon, soggy sandwiches, ach I can’t remember them all.  They made my dislike of cardboard boxes seem entirely rational.  Stacked high, boxes are fine.  Spread all over the floor, full of heavy things and with their flaps open, they just sit there waiting to jump out and hit me on the toes and the shins.  Bastards.

I’d like to think that there is some level of rationality to this. I resisted wearing shoes as a child to the point where I simply wouldn’t wear them from June to September. I would wear them in snow, but probably wasn’t that bothered about a light frost. (Your circulation compensates – my feet were always toasty warm and dry in comparison with the cold feet of those in damp shoes and socks). The soles of my feet were like leather, but I was aware that they were vulnerable. If I dropped anything I’d kick back the nearest foot to knee height, like a flapper doing the Charleston.

Anyhoo, I’m not a particularly fussy house-keeper.  I only have three major domestic dislikes:

• Houses that don’t function properly – all light bulbs must work and I must be able to find things easily and have surfaces that are sufficiently clear to put things down on them.
• Floors that are so full of detritus that they cannot be walked on.  Who knows what is lurking under that masking layer of deception?
• Cardboard boxes that want to stamp on my toes and kick me in the shins.

How lovely is my life right now?

Changing Gear

Chaos and darkness reigning, or possibly raining. It's hard to tell. (This was when I moved in, but it looks worryingly like that now).

I’m going to change the mood in this blog for a while and just use it as a diary for a few weeks.

I am doing an enormous amount of putting Things into Boxes and putting Boxes into Storage, and very little thinking.  It’s frustrating. I watched Aleks Krotoski ’s excellent programme about the history of the Internet yesterday and thought ‘”Oh, that’s interesting”, but it should have fired me off in a score of different directions.   Still, that is what iPlayer is for, I guess.

The electrician’s coming during the second weekend of February and will need relatively unhindered access to walls and floors which imposes something of a deadline for getting the stuff into storage. Storage for an indefinite period, because I’m not sure when I am moving, except that it will be April, or maybe May. Or the summer. Definitely before the autumn, anyway.

Of course, I can’t just put things in boxes.  Oh no.  That would be Too Easy. When I told Drew that I was packing my books this weekend he said “and I bet you are tagging them”.  ”…er yes, I am” I said, embarrassed and confused.  (How did he know?) The thing is, when I moved in 5 years ago I just shoved my books onto shelves, and I haven’t sorted them since.  Now I am boxing them as they come off the shelves, but I am entering the box numbers into Librarything.  It would stress me too much not to be able to track down a book if I needed it urgently.  The last time that happened I ended up re-buying Pratchett’s entire oeuvre one at a time in paperback because I couldn’t find my hardbacks.

And that reminds me of something that is interesting.   (At last, something interesting!) Apparently the books I’ve packed so far most nearly match the libraries of two other people I know from the internets who I didn’t know were librarythingers.  The first is Belgianwaffle, whose blog I don’t read often enough but with whom I have exchanged a few comments when I was blogging regularly under another name.  The second is Cheerful Dragon who I know from one of the BBC web sites.

It’s a small web.

No more kool-aid any more: Sherron Watkins and Enron

Power Failure

• I am taking an ethical stand
• You are a whistle-blower
• He is a grass

The ethical complexities of whistle-blowing tap deeply into the issues of divided loyalties.  It is hard to predict what you’d do faced with this sort of dilemma, and I’ve always been interested in the stories of those who have. Power Failure is co-credited to Sherron Watkins the woman usually described as ‘the Enron whistle-blower’.  I was eager to compare it with Cynthia Cooper’s book Extraordinary Circumstances about blowing the whistle in Worldcom which I reviewed a while ago.

I was curious to understand the differences in the two women’s experiences. Cooper was head of internal audit and her job was to prevent just the sort of fraud (simple, but huge) which she found at Worldcom. The horns of her particular dilemma were her professional accountability vs corporate loyalty. Watkins on the other hand was only one of dozens of insiders expressing concern about Enron both within and without the company, others had leaked for years to market analysts, to the press, even to Yahoo message boards. Watkins just happened to be the one who failed to maintain her anonymity.  The irony is that she kept her concerns within the company, taking them to CEO Ken Lay instead of narrow-casting them outside.

This is one of the few books about Enron not put together from clippings, and it shows.  Swartz clearly obtained access to a number of senior or at least central insiders.  It provides a real sense of why Enron was an addictive place to work, which I’ve not found in any other book.   The only other book with an Enronian’s name on the cover Brian Cruver’s book, ‘Enron, Anatomy of Greed‘, but he arrived late and was just one of thousands of low-level employees dismissed with a $4,000 pay-off just before Christmas 2002.

Reading both these books though, three things stand out for me other than the eye-wateringly huge amounts of money.

The first is the absolute importance of operational controls. Yes, ethics and risk management matter both morally and in business terms, but operational controls come first, because operational chaos not only permits these kinds of fraud it may even require them.  Frequent organisational re-structures and high levels of executive churn are bad signs.  Beware of companies which are overly acquisitive or growing too fast, because things will fall down the cracks.

The second is that it is hard to be faced with the morning-after when you have stopped drinking the kool-aid.  ’Power Failure’ and ‘Extraordinary Circumstances’ both touch on how difficult it was for Watkins and Cooper to determine what the right thing to do was, let alone how hard it was to do it.  I’d like them to have covered the consequences to themselves in a bit more detail, but I guess we don’t like the idea that good people can suffer for doing what’s right.

Finally, while reading the book I found myself wondering what it is like to be Jeffrey Skilling or Andy Fastow right now, in jail.

Enron was a long time ago and I do feel that I’ve read all I need to on the subject, but Lehmans, Goldman, RBS and HBOS remind us that arrogance, chaos and greed enable companies to fall as well as rise.

PS – ‘Power Failure’ is written in the third person by journalist Mimi Swartz. For a more a direct insight into Watkins herself look at the BBC programme Hard Talk where Watkins exchanges wry regrets with the HBOS whistle-blower, Paul Moore.  (This will only be watchable for another two months).

Logical advice about wrestling pigs

The maths text book I had when I was 14 had a cartoon and quotation at the beginning of every chapter. The one on the chapter about stats said

Politicians use statistics as a drunk uses a lamp-post, for support rather than illumination.

This is not just the fate of stats of course; many people misuse logic in the same way.  The confusing thing is that they don’t realise what they are doing is an abuse of logic.  Debates between thinkers and feelers or between sceptics and believers become tedious spirals of cross-purposes and often break down into insult and ad hominem attacks.  The only effective way to cut through this is to introduce cognitive dissonance and use the gap created to introduce some logic, which is what happens in the video below:

Logic is highly structured, it follows rules.  It is not metaphorical or allegorical and people whose minds work best with metaphor and allegory do not (can not?) follow a logical argument step by step to the inevitable conclusion. Instead they arrive at their conclusion intuitively and then seek out arguments that sound as if they justify and support it.  The arguments sound like logic, they use the same language and the same semantic structures as logic, but they are being used in fundamentally different ways.¹

When these two approaches meet, you get an impasse.

Don’t wrestle with a pig, you get muddy and the pig enjoys it.

These arguments are un-winnable.  If someone validates their beliefs intuitively then they are  not going to accept the validity of a logical argument.  And vice versa.

What makes this situation even worse is the Dunning-Kruger effect.  Put very crudely, this is unconscious incompetence in action.  At the lower levels of incompetence, people do not even have the ability to recognise competence in others. Think of David Brent (anti-hero of ‘The Office’, played by Ricky Gervais).  He is so inept it is painful, but he doesn’t recognise his own ineptness and he doesn’t recognise the abilities of others who far outshine him.  Me too: for example I cannot play chess though I know the moves, and I wouldn’t recognise skillfull chess playing if I saw it, though at least I don’t think that I’m any sort of chess player.

Theramin Trees gives a neat summary of the Dunning-Kruger effect below, and I urge you to watch it:

The thing that I find really odd though, is not the persistent failure of the illogical to acknowledge a good argument when it’s presented.

No, what I find really odd is the persistent attempts to flog the dead horse by those who do understand logic.  If someone is not convinced the first time that you say “there’s no evidence base for homoeopathy” then they won’t be convinced the 30th time or the 300th time.  Simply doing the same thing again and again won’t work.

As I have said, what does work is introducing cognitive dissonance, which brings us back, as so often, to the power of finding the right question and asking it.

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1:  I was going to link to the episode of Beyond Belief broadcast on 28th December about Angels, but for some reason it is not available.  It was even more barking than the rest of the series, which I rather like in an outside-the-comfort-zone sort of way.  The reason I like it is because I listen to so many Sceptical podcasts which lazily make a virtue of scorning believers, and this makes a refreshing change without proselytising on behalf of anyone’s specific imaginary friend.

Back to post.

When words are not enough

This is a simple plea for mixed teams and visual tools.

I once asked a friend if he dreamed in colour or black and white, and he said ‘neither, I dream in concepts’.   By contrast with both of us, many post-modernists  seem to believe that thought can only be verbal, but that way madness lies: The only validity of 1+1=2 is as a representation of words, and ‘one plus one equals two’ is a social construct.  Oh dear.

I challenge this doctrine that the Word is god.  When I want to work out how things relate to each other I find words are completely useless. They are are ok for communicating concepts (sometimes) but often I find them bad for uncovering concepts, and they are next to useless for working out how things relate to each other.

Years ago I learned a consultancy or counselling exercise whereby you or the client list(s) all the factors on 3×5s and the client organises them in groups on a table.  It is great for aggregating things together.

The house is a mess, the dog has fleas, the kids are in trouble for losing their home-work, and you’re brroke because you’ve been buying lunch at work all month.

Write ‘em on cards and put them all on the table along with everything else, and suddenly there’s the Eureka moment: the common thread is being short on time.  Deal with that and the other problems melt away.

But until you get the chance to move them around and play them off against each other, you think you’ve got dozens of impossible little problems, instead of one or two larger  ones.

There are many variations on this, and it’s used formally in a lot of project planning workshops for grouping activities into work-streams and blocking them out in time.

The pure gold in this approach is its value in working out the relationships between things.  You can do  on whiteboards, you can do it with cards, you can do it with post-its.  These days I am lazy, so I do it in PowerPoint or Visio. The point is that it’s a process, you won’t arrive at the finished diagram in five minutes, but the very activity of moving things around, like blobs in a lava lamp, will enable your thoughts to coalesce and clarify.

This isn’t just a post about tools, though. It’s saying that there are some conclusions you will never arrive at if you stick to words.  It helps to understand how your team think.  NLP divides thinkers up between the auditory, the visual and the kinesthetic.  I am increasingly doubtful about this, and find it more useful to place them within a venn diagram with circles for the numerate, the verbal and the visual.

Get one of each on your analysis team and so long as there’s no explosion, you will really be cooking with gas.  And I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you get stuck on a problem, change  your tool.

Your custom is very important to us, please hold the line

Something very bizzare happened to me the other day.  I went into a shop in a Barrow-in-Furness to buy some curtain clips and the conversation went like this:

Ben: do you have any of those clips that you hook onto curtain hooks and clip onto a piece of cloth?

Shop lady: no, sorry, we don’t

Ben: ok, thanks

Shop lady:…

Ben (thinks): What? Why’s she still talking to me? She doesn’t have what I want – I’m outta here…

Shop lady:… You could try James’s Hardware opposite, or Johnstons in the High Street.  Or Joan in the market.

At the risk of chanelling my grandmother, it’s been years since I’ve had that sort of conversation without prompting, the sort where someone in a shop engages with your problem and tries to help you solve it, just because you are both human. So long that I’ve given up prompting it.

Earlier in the autumn I was getting prints of some wedding photographs from the photographer in Orkney and the conversation went like this:

Ben: I dropped by the website on Saturday and asked for some framed prints; I left my number but I’d not heard from you…?

Ken: Yes, we’re just framing them now.

Ben: Oh, er, that’s great.  What about payment? I’ve got my card…

Ken: Don’t worry about that. We’ll get them in the post tonight and put an invoice in with them.

It’s got to be 10 years at least since someone offering their services online has done that for me, rather than demanding money up front.

Orkney.

Barrow.

• Is it that chains and franchises dehumanise the people who work for them while driving out the small traders like the curtain shop in Barrow and Orkney Photographic?
• Is it that encroaching urbanisation is speeding up the way of life in and destroying good manners in our county and market towns?
• Is it that web-based transactions are mechanising and anonymising how we buy things, and having a normative effect on how we behave when dealing with others?
• Is it that I am indeed turning into my grandmother?
• Is it all of the above?

Web 2.0 – if you don’t join in are you really missing out?

Years ago there was a television programme on the BBC called Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go Out And Do Something Less Boring Instead? (I always took the hint, so I have no idea if it was any good). But the same is often said of the Internet.  For years I thought that the web was the coolest thing ever and would happily spend entire evenings schlepping around online, while non-internetty people said ‘you have too much time on your hands’ and ‘get a life’.  I took the view that there was loads of really interesting stuff you could only online and besides, I met a whole swathe of clever and talented people via the creative writing sites I hung out on.

Recently I’ve been considering the space between those views – is Web 2.0 life-transforming, or a zero sum game, or (whisper who dares) would we be better just switching off our PCs so we can do something less boring instead?  If you don’t join in, do you actually miss out?

Zero sum

Socially, I am no longer convinced we gain that much from social media. Here’s why.

Making friends

I’ve made a lot of  real flesh-and-blood, go-to-the-pub, dance-at-their-wedding friends on line (gain) but some of my previous friendships have lagged a bit because so much of my social life is brokered electronically (loss) so I don’t necessarily have more friends or better friends, just different friends.

Zero sum, for me anyway.

A window on the world

The web gives us access to places and people which is not limited by cost or mediated by the media:

I get a first hand global account of life in other parts of the world. It is unlikely that I will travel to small town America for instance. I get to hear the sort of trivial day to day stuff that I find fascinating.

Similarly:

Blogs tell me what it is like to be a bookish woman living in Idaho, or to live on a dairy farm in the mid-west, or to be raising a child in south London, or to be a mormon battling crippling burns, or to be a sex-worker.

While this is clearly a rewarding use of time, is it more rewarding than spending the same time reading books or being with friends?

Probably not.

Zero sum. People-watchers only.

Net Gains for niches

It clearly is possible to get real benefits from social media, but most of these are for people in niche circumstances.  For example:

Dealing with illness and taboos

Access to others in similar circumstances is a clear gain: no matter how obscure your illness or unusual your fetish you can find information and fellow travellers which you couldn’t get in any other way.

Could the time and effort spent on the internet give you equivalent benefits off-line? – Almost certainly not.

Net gain, if you are in a relatively rare situation.

Dealing with physical isolation

If you are housebound or physically isolated the internet’s a sanity-saver. And there are other forms of isolation:

For me, it’s communicating in English, amongst other things. This is something I can’t do where I live.

Could you use the time spent hanging around on-line communities to break down these sorts of isolation in any other way? Clearly not.

Net gain, depending on circumstances.

Being creative

Almost everyone likes to have their voice heard, and the internet gives everyone a platform.

It’s a curious bran tub full of frustrated artists, musicians, agit-prop bloggers and the like but it does seem that a lot of talent is being elevated by 2.0 into spheres they’d never have a chance with outside of it.

Could the time spent being creative on-line produce the same satisfaction if it was spent any other way? Well, you can join an writers’ club or do a creative writing course, but only You Tube is You Tube. So that’s a qualified no.

Net gain. Mainly for narcissists and hobbyists.

Feeding a news habit

The web gives you access to foreign, specialist and alternative news media:

People I know who rely on the MSM [Mainstream Media] and don’t use web 2.0 have a very different view of the world than I do. It’s scary, because I don’t think people realise how specific the MSM is in what it presents and how.

Can you keep as well informed with mainstream media? Well, maybe: I had a friend who did so using Teletext and TV news and the very occasional newspaper, but it is clearly quicker and easier online.

Before the internet I had to go to the library and borrow ‘alternative’ magazines, or read counter culture publications and newsletters to get a broader view of news. Or go to meetings and gatherings and talk to people directly more.

And of course now there is Twitter.

Net gain. News-junkies only.

Net gains in the mainstream

There are some situations where social media does make a difference in the mainstream.  But these are not life-transforming differences:

Keeping in touch

My guess is that more people in their 40s have dragged themselves online to keep an eye on what their kids are doing on Facebook than for any other single reason.  And it works the other way round:

I resisted Facebook for a long time, but joined as my family want to keep an eye on me and now I have a window into lots of other families’ lives, the stuff you couldn’t discover from tourist holidays.

This is the contentious one. Is socialising on Facebook better or worse or just different?  I suspect the answer is ‘all three’.

I succumbed to joining Facebook a couple of days ago BECAUSE my not-into-computers friends were using it to display all the photos / video of their newborn baby son. As they don’t use check or use email regularly I was feeling ostracised!

There’s also the alluring prospect that Facebook and Twitter’s frequent updates will make the Christmas Round Robin superfluous.

Net gain, but not necessarily a big one. Mainstream.

Summary

So there you have it.  I really should turn off my PC and do something more interesting instead.

Er…

Fancy going to the pub, then?

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Thanks due to B’elana, Bright Blue Shorts, Christopher, coelacanth, Kea, lanzababy, and Mrs Zen for the quotations.

Hourglass

I know I should blog.  I have posts in draft waiting to be proof-read and posted. I have other posts in draft waiting for me to finish the activities they are reporting on.  I have posts in my head, waiting to be drafted.  I have drafts in my head waiting to be blown away.

I’ve been busy. 2010 is going to be a year of change.  First of all, my husband has got an unmissable career opportunity which involves us moving to Edinburgh, and since I am a remote worker in a team that’s based in Edinburgh it’s pretty peachy for me too. However, moving in my case involves selling my house, and selling my house involves tarting it up. So I spent most of Christmas stripping wallpaper and painting and decorating, and I have a parade of workmen scheduled for January (ha ha) and February. In the gaps between contemplating paint colours, I am thinking vague thoughts about my dissertation.

Oh, and it’s snowed a bit which has slowed things down.  Had you noticed?

Have a pretty picture of the garden and the view.

Cold Snap in the Garden

Thank goodness for VPNs and NetMeeting.

I’ll finish one of the drafts over the weekend and bang it up on Monday. In the meantime, please imagine an hourglass hovering over this blog and a susurration from the hard drive.

Damned Apostrophes

My sister, knowing my fondness for misplaced and missing apostrophes, sent me the following two emails:

Yesterday the conversation got onto dancing in church, [and then] onto religious dance in general and David dancing before the ark and being despised by his wife Michal for unbecoming behaviour, and I was skimming through 1 Samuel for the bits dealing with David’s relationship with Michal and and in Chap 25:42 I saw

And Abigail hasted, and arose, and rode upon an ass, with five damsels of her’s that went after her…

I couldn’t cross-check immediately because I didn’t have another edition of the KJV [King James Version] to hand, but there was one from the Gideons in the Sunday-school cupboard so I looked up the verse this morning and it appears that the error lies with my edition rather than King Jimmie’s translators.

I have two copies of the aforesaid edition, published to commemorate the third jubilee of the British and Foreign Bible Society 1804-1954.  Edited by John Sterling with line drawings by Horace Knowles.

Not as memorable as breeches or adultery, but it seems that the printer’s devil tradition of giving rise to special editions of the bible is still alive and well.

Followed by:

Checked another edition of KJV while Christmas shopping and the apostrophe was in there as well, so it isn’t a case of the BFSBS Jubilee edition getting it wrong but of Gideons having corrected it.

Bible Gateway and Biblos don’t show the error in their King James texts, however Google gives two valid links with that spelling.

Incidentally, how come there is no apostrophe in “King James Version”?