Evolution is Everywhere

Evolution is one of my great interests. I've noticed lately how evolution is implied in so much, and well beyond biology. It is found in social environments, and in business. It is possibly everywhere. Today's link shows how the same ecological process, operating in opposite directions, can be found in fiction and in non-fiction.

I'm currently reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired. The title refers to the huge number of products that sell rarely if at all. However, the internet economy has now made these items viable products. The business opportunities represented by these goods are collectively comparable to the few 'hits' at the 'head' of the distribution. (See the figure, below, from www.thelongtail.com, Anderson's website.) At one point in the book, Anderson describes these goods in ecological terms. It's as if the top-selling products were always there as islands that show above the water line. Now the ocean is receding, and revealing all those other items that are now available. I read this as saying that many niches are now viable business opportunities.

What about the opposite situation? In the novel Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut describes what happens when a group of tourists are stranded on an island while the rest of the human race contracts a mysterious disease that prevents them from reproducing. In technical terms, the genetic pool is dramatically bottlenecked. Vonnegut mashes up time and space and life and death and ghosts in his usual hilarious format, and describes how an accident saves the human race, but leads to an unusual evolutionary twist.

Weak Links in Politics

I'm going to start a new series of posts on this blog. I'll occasionally post about how the power of weak links is being ignored. Now that I'm thinking about weak links, I see it all around me. Here's one example that I feel is relevent as we lead up to the presidential elections later in the year: the left and right of the political spectrum do not listen to one another. Now, this may not be shocking, but it has important implications. How can consensus-driven, non-partisan politics succeed, without communication? Here's the evidence for this claim.

1) A recent study of links between politically-oriented blogs was carried out by Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance (see the complete study in pdf, and a blog that discusses the study). These researchers showed that blogs fail to link to blogs of the opposite political orientation. The following figure shows the links between top twenty political blogs from each side of the aisle, such that only connections of five or greater links in either direction are shown. Note that connections are robust within one political affiliation, but extremely rare across the aisle.

But that's the political wonks that have highly trafficked blogs. What do people actually read about?

2) One way to study what people are interested in is to look at what they buy together. Valdis Krebs did just that, using web-based bookseller data. He identified political books from the New York Times bestseller list, and looked for incidences of co-purchase, that is, 'someone who bought book x also bought book y'. Here's the data:


There are only a couple of books that bridge the left-right divide! People are reading only what they already agree with and know.

Again, I don't think this is surprising, but it has important implications. There's no chance of communication under these circumstances. And no chance of consensus-building, and not even a good chance of negotiation or compromise. In a broader context, this is dramatic evidence of the difficulty of finding, considering and integrating new ideas.

This is a sort of confirmation bias, which I learned about in The Black Swan. People tend to look for evidence that supports their hypotheses or beliefs. But the better test would be to look for counterevidence. This is analogous to exactly what people are not doing when considering their politics: listening to counterarguments, carefully considering them, and then either changing opinions or figuring out what the problem is with the political argument.

The Heart and Mind

I previously discussed the Edge books: smart, brief discussions about a variety of topics. In particular, What Are You Optimistic About? is interesting in how it allows the thought leaders of today to explain why the future is actually getting better. In a time like ours, which I see as fairly pessimistic, this is a great read. The inspiration for today's link is how this book is a collection of brief essays: each entry is no more than a couple of pages long, and many are significantly shorter. It's a buffet for your brain: a little Jared Diamond, some Judith Rich Harris, a dash of Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Brian Greene, and many others...

The movie Paris, Je T'Aime is a group of vignettes, each with a very small cast, and each by a different director. Most are interesting and touching, and they all take place, of course, in Paris. There are 18 vignettes, each in a different arrondissment, and each with a distinct feel. There's Olivier Assayas, Alfonso Cuarón, the Coen brothers, Tom Tykwer, and Gus van Sant. There's Juliette Binoche (of course!), Nick Nolte, Natalie Portman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Elijah Wood and Steve Buscemi. It was really fun to watch the incredible cast and phenomenal group of directors have a go at conveying the feel of Paris.

Geek MBA

I just got some news that saddened my geeky soul. Gary Gygax, the creator of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, passed away this past week (NY Times Obituary). While it's been years since I've played, there's definitely still a soft spot in me for one of the great pasttimes of my geeky adolescence.

In that spirit, I'd like to make a connection that was really surprising to me when it first came up (but is perhaps obvious in hindsight). With the rising popularity of massive, multiuser online games such as World of Warcraft, it was perhaps inevitable that the skills developed by gaming would be analyzed in some depth. The surprising thing is that some or many of these skills are now thought to be useful in the business world.

The Harvard Business Review ran a list in the February 2008 issue of the Breakthrough Ideas for 2008. Among this list were articles entitled, 'The Gamer Disposition' and, 'Making Alternate Reality the New Business Reality.' (Here's the complete list.) So it was basically a surprise that geeky gaming has gone mainstream and is now considered conducive to good business. (And here's a further discussion.) On top of all this, a recent NY Times Op-Ed discussed how role-playing games help people to understand each other. I didn't think I got any of that from D&D.

Here's to D&D, and to Gary Gygax. It's amazing how it's gone from a sure sign of Satan worship to indicative of business competency.

Strange endings and beginnings

I'm going to make a link today between the book Barney's Version by Modecai Richler, and the movie Magnolia, directed by PT Anderson. But the strange thing is that I'll only provide a hint as to why.

Barney's Version is about an aging Montreal Jew who is convinced to write his memoirs as a defense against accusations in the autobiography of an enemy. The story itself, the characterization of Barney, are all incredible. He's tough to love if you imagine yourself actually knowing him, but easy to smile with as he tells his own version of his life story. He was accused of the murder of his best friend, was found innocent, and is incredibly upset at his best friend for disappearing. But his best friend was sleeping with Barney's third wife. Barney is an increasingly unreliable narrator, which always makes for an interesting story, and Mordecai Richler does not fail to entertain and enrich.

In addition to a great story with a curmudgeonly character, Barney recalls all sorts of places and times that strangely overlap parts of my parents' and grandparents' generations: Barney, the storyteller, was apparently born sometime in between those two generations (Richler himself was born in 1931, closer to my grandparents), and a number of places that he describes could very well have been out of my own family's history. But my enjoyment of this book went well beyond how the book touched me personally.

Magnolia is about the strange intersections of a number of characters in modern Los Angeles. The ensemble cast is incredible, with such powerful acting as so many strange events unfold and personalities are revealed, that it is truly a riveting movie. Tom Cruise and Julianne Moore cut loose, Phillip Seymour Hoffman is dreadfully tender, Phillip Baker Hall and Jason Robards are filled with such profound regret... and there's more as well. Really, watch it.

The thing is, that the movie is about coincidence as much as anything else - the coincidence that these so very different characters lives are all intertwined in some fashion: As one character says at a pivotal moment, "This happens. This is something that happens." This is the sort of coincidence that links this movie to this book. Highlight it to discover the spoiler: Several people die in unlikely ways in the movie, and the manner of one of those deaths is the key to solving the mystery of Barney's Version. Enjoy the trailer...

Connections for The Confused Young Man

The Tao Of Steve, starring Donal Logue and High Fidelity, starring John Cusack and based on the book by Nick Hornby.

I re-watched these movies this month and they both deal, in part, with the 30-something male crisis of Settling Down. Get out the popcorn and have a boys night!

(Hmm maybe boys don't do that.)

Grey swans and optimism

As an aside to the last post, The Black Swan shows how ridiculous it is for humans to make predictions: we're terrible at it. So I was both pleased and disappointed to see the Taleb had not contributed to the current Edge book, What Are You Optimistic About? edited by John Brockman. On the contrary, he was (appropriately) a contributor to What We Believe But Cannot Prove. These Edge books are pretty phenomenal in terms of the contributors: they are generally the thought leaders of today. Check them out.

Framing is amazing

The ability of framing to alter a person's perception is amazing. It was mentioned in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan as one of the classic errors that people make in prediction. If you were to ask a person the last four digits of their social security number, and then ask them the number of dentists in Manhattan, you'll find that their estimate is influenced by the answer to the first question. This and other tactics for affecting the decisions of a person were put to use in Covert Persuasion by Kevin Hogan and James Speakman. It is an applied course in interpersonal strategery.

How is Fast Food Nation like Collapse?

Collapse is a book about how societies destroy the environments that make their own survival possible. Fast Food Nation is about the travesties perpetrated by the fast food and meat industries. How in the world are the two alike?

In one section of Collapse, Jared Diamond describes two oil fields. One is everything that everyone loves to hate about the oil industry. The other is operated by Chevron and is what everyone wishes the oil industry could be like: respectful of the environment, minimizes ecological interference, etc. At least in part, it was in anticipation of public perception and legal regulations regarding environmental sustainability that Chevron operates this particular oil field in this way: they know that they're going to have to one day (probably sooner rather than later) and so they set up the oil field from the start to comply with laws that are likely to be passed at some point in the future.

I made the association to Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation for this reason: just as there are easily foreseeable regulations in the oil industry, so too is there public sentiment favoring more humane treatment of animals. So the indictment of the food industry is perhaps a wake-up call for that industry to voluntarily become more humane before regulations are enacted that force them to do so.

Gore/Card/Friedman/Clarke Started It All - Part 3

Richard Clarke also wrote a fictional account of a near-world-war-three in the near future in Breakpoint. The global politics and technological advancements closely follow the trends discussed in Al Gore's and Thomas Friedman's books. Richard Clarke was the counter-terrorism czar whose warnings were ignored prior to 9/11. He has thought about how terrorism may occur in the digital age possibly more deeply and realistically than anyone else.

These four books all went really well together. It was a complete coincidence that I happened on them at the same time. And I recommend them all.

Gore/Card/Friedman/Clarke Started It All - Part 2

Moving from non-fiction to fiction:

The left/right clashes of Al Gore's book are taken one step further by Orson Scott Card's fictional account of a second civil war in the near future in Empire. The first two thirds or so was very realistic; it only became sci-fi in the last third or so, when flying machines and giant exoskeletons showed up for war.

Gore/Card/Friedman/Clarke Started It All - Part 1

I had a series of four books in a row that gave me the idea for this blog. Here's part 1 describing the four.

Al Gore's The Assault on Reason was a great indictment on the current administration's disdain for logic- and evidence-based decision making. Only one part of the book was disappointing: where he discussed how the internet would change the future of information exchange. This is where Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat took over. He showed how the exchange of information and commerce is now astoundingly global. Both are deeply thoughtful analyses of current political and economic trends.