Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Ph.D.

I study people, technology, and the worlds they make

Month: July 2012

Those damn hippies with their electron beam steering devices

July 31, 2012 / / Comments Off on Those damn hippies with their electron beam steering devices

An article about my friend Jim Fadiman and his LSD research includes this awesome bit about his last experiment in the 1960s (conducted on a group of “an architect and three senior scientists—two from Stanford, the other from Hewlett-Packard” who had “each brought along three highly technical problems from their respective fields that they’d been unable to solve for at least several months”) before the government shut down all LSD work:

LSD absolutely had helped them solve their complex, seemingly intractable problems. And the establishment agreed. The 26 men unleashed a slew of widely embraced innovations shortly after their LSD experiences, including a mathematical theorem for NOR gate circuits, a conceptual model of a photon, a linear electron accelerator beam-steering device, a new design for the vibratory microtome, a technical improvement of the magnetic tape recorder, blueprints for a private residency and an arts-and-crafts shopping plaza, and a space probe experiment designed to measure solar properties.

Ah yes, those crazy druggies.

Though the one time Hermann Kahn took psychedelics he supposedly spent two hours saying “Oh, wow,” and claimed afterwards to have come up with a new system for prioritizing nuclear targets. I never believed that story. Maybe I should.

Academic publishing “is pure rentier capitalism”

July 27, 2012 / / 1 Comment

George Monbiot calls publishers like Elsevier and Springer “the most ruthless capitalists in the Western world”:

What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it. Another term for it is economic parasitism. To obtain the knowledge for which we have already paid, we must surrender our feu to the lairds of learning.

Open-access publishing, despite its promise, and some excellent resources such as the Public Library of Science and the physics database arxiv.org, has failed to displace the monopolists…. The reason is that the big publishers have rounded up the journals with the highest academic impact factors, in which publication is essential for researchers trying to secure grants and advance their careers. You can start reading open-access journals, but you can’t stop reading the closed ones.

“autism has played a significant role in crafting much of what we consider to be modern culture”

July 27, 2012 / / Comments Off on “autism has played a significant role in crafting much of what we consider to be modern culture”

Interesting article in Jezebel/io9 (choose your Gawker media outlet) about autism and its growing influence in high-tech culture:

autism has played a significant role in crafting much of what we consider to be modern culture — from the music and books we read, to the technological devices we all take for granted. The acceptance of radically different ways of thinking, it turns out, can be seen as an integral part of a rich and diverse overarching culture….

The signs of autism’s reach are beginning to been seen virtually everywhere. People on the spectrum are driving the creation of alternative forms of expression, new businesses and institutions, and cutting-edge technologies. “And not only do they make these things comfortable for themselves,” noted [wired author Steve] Silberman, “they’re useful for all of us.”

Whole piece is worth reading.

John Lanchester’s Captital

July 27, 2012 / / Comments Off on John Lanchester’s Captital

This week I read John Lanchester’s new novel Capital, about life in London during the great financial collapse of 2008.

I thought it was a great read, though not because of its great pacing or high drama or characters you’re cheering for. It’s more like an Impressionist crowd painting, a set of brilliantly-rendered scenes and personalities and moments, not a story that drives to a decisive conclusion. About 200 pages into it, I started thinking, This is great, but with all this buildup, it had better end with Queen Elizabeth on a velociraptor, on top of Big Ben, striking down zombies with nunchuks.

Not to spoil it, but no Queen Elizabeth, no zombies, no velociraptor. (Though one of the characters does like dinosaurs.)

Still, if you want a book that paints a picture of one of the world’s great cities sans velociraptors- and especially if you’ve spent time there, and perhaps intersected very peripherally with the sorts of characters that populate the book- Capital is terrific.

How writing a book is like racing in the Tour de France, and not like self-marketing

July 23, 2012 / / 1 Comment

I sent off the revised draft of my book last Friday, and celebrated this weekend by watching the end of the Tour de France.


the book is back, via flickr

It was great to see an Englishman win the tour (Britain’s investment in cycling is paying off, as John Kay notes), and it was also cool to see someone win who was so clear about how much his victory was a team achievement. Yes, Wiggins gets to wear the yellow jersey, but as he himself acknowledges, he stands on the shoulders of his teammates.

I was juxtaposing this to Penelope Trunk’s recent essay about self-publishing her book. The piece, a long post on her Brazen Careerist blog, is about how traditional publishers don’t know anything about their markets, they take too long to get stuff out, and you’re better off doing it yourself. The piece was really striking to me because both in scope and substance it’s so different from my recent (or current) experience.

HipstaPrints-21
home office, california style, via flickr

First of all, Trunk’s account of the publishing industry is all about production and distribution; the work of shaping and editing books is invisible. To me, though, this is about 90% of the value that the publishing industry offers. Fourteen months ago, give or take, I had a very very different idea for a book about contemplative computing. That book might have fit well with an academic press, but it wasn’t the book I really wanted to write. I was lucky to have an agent who pushed me to think more commercially without giving up my intellectual bona fides or the ambition of explaining to ordinary users how our deep entanglement with technology shapes us. I was also really lucky, once I’d produced a manuscript, to have an editor who could work with me to tune it up, and who insisted (in that totally self-effacing way most book editors have) on making it more accessible and useful.

Another important way in which our experiences contrast is that Trunk describes books as calling-cards, as a way of introducing to the public who you are and what services you have to offer. Now, this is totally in keeping with the Tom Peters “Brand of Me” way of seeing the world, and I had professors at Wharton who talked about how their books were really just ways of attracting clients, so clearly there are authors who either genuinely feel that a book can play this role, or see reasons to talk about it this way. For me, though, writing this book has been pretty transformative, and I have a hard time imagining starting something this hard with the assumption that there won’t be a big personal payout at the end.


it’s about ME! via flickr

I’m probably going to experiment with some digital self-publishing in the coming year, though I wouldn’t call what I’m going to create electronic books- more like electronic pamphleteering, or digital broadsheeting. A “book” feels like a different proposition than a highly illustrated, expanded version of a talk. Indeed, it’s not just a different proposition, but a promise to readers that the object they’re getting has been through a more rigorous kind of review and publishing process.

Bytes
bytes, via flickr

Indeed, the only way I would self-publish a “book” would be if I could hire editorial talent as strong as Zoë and John, and I’m not sure I’d want to take on the risk of investing that much in a book. It’s possible that I could find equivalent talent in the freelance editorial market, but I quite like the idea that lots of other people at Little, Brown share the risk with me, and have an incentive to help the book be a success.

Just as important, I don’t want my relationship with an editor to become more transactional. As John Kay recently pointed out, the financial services industry worked best for investors and companies when it was more trust-based; in today’s world of super-fast transactions and massive bets, there’s less interest in building trust, because you tend to assume that you’ll be rich and retired within a couple years. I don’t need intellectual relationships that are more transactional. Indeed, I think those two things are polar opposites. Frictionless, transactional relationships are mindless (in Ellen Langer’s use of the term), and can just as easily succeed as win-lose games; meaningful relationships involve trust and struggle, and only succeed when both parties succeed.


stay, via flickr

I see tremendous benefit in having a team of people who are invested in your victory, like Team Sky was invested in Wiggins’ taking home the yellow jersey. If all you’re doing is a straight-on transaction, something you know how to do and really can do on your own, then maybe the self-publishing model works; but the way I write books requires a team.

“the sector’s problems are not the byproduct of unpredictable events”

July 23, 2012 / / Comments Off on “the sector’s problems are not the byproduct of unpredictable events”

John Kay's latest essay on the current state of the financial sector, published on the heels of a report he just released for the British government on state of financial services, is well worth reading:

In the equity investment chain, asset holders and asset managers need to be trusted stewards of savers’ money. Company directors need to be trusted stewards of the assets and activities of the corporations they manage. In the absence of such trust, intermediaries become no more than toll collectors.

It is hard to see how trust can be sustained in an environment characterised by increasingly hyperactive trading, and it has not been. Trust is essentially personal and cannot easily be found in a dark pool. Impersonal trust can be established only in a rigidly disciplined organisation – the kind that retail banks were once but are no longer – or by regulation of a ferocity that has not been achieved and is probably not achievable.

He also has this great observation of the ways analysts and regulators are naturally captured by complicated industries that rely on

behavioural regulation, designed to combat inappropriate incentives by detailed prescriptive rules. The outcome is regulation that is at once extensive and intrusive, yet ineffective and largely captured by financial sector interests.

Such capture is sometimes crudely corrupt, as in the US where politics is in thrall to Wall Street money. The European position is better described as intellectual capture. Regulators come to see the industry through the eyes of market participants rather than the end users they exist to serve, because market participants are the only source of the detailed information and expertise this type of regulation requires. This complexity has created a financial regulation industry – an army of compliance officers, regulators, consultants and advisers – with a vested interest in the regulation industry’s expansion.

I think you can see variations on this in all kinds of policy worlds (foreign and military policy especially), and in technology and futures research. Futurists don't regulate the future in any meaningful way, but they and industry analysts do have a close relationship with their objects of study and clients, and it's "natural" that a kind of regulatory capture occurs in these relationships.

I can only hope that he's correct that more people now recognize that "the sector's problems are not the byproduct of unpredictable events but arise from a wrong turning in the culture of an industry that has come to prioritise transactions and trading over trust relationships."

“American conservative thought is now not a philosophy but, rather, a book of spells”

July 18, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Man, Charles Pierce knows how to write.

I remain convinced that American conservative thought is now not a philosophy but, rather, a book of spells, a series of conjuring words that have meaning only to the initiates.

On “troubled companies” and corporate takeovers

July 17, 2012 / / Comments Off on On “troubled companies” and corporate takeovers

Good point:

"Troubled" companies have a particular meaning on Wall Street. Sure, sometimes they refer to companies that are just muddled, have over-expanded, and are badly managed. But more often, what they are talking about is companies that do not seem to providing a large enough return to shareholders—a stagnating stock price in particular. But that does not mean a company is "troubled." It can be quite profitable, have productive and loyal employees, have satisfied customers, and cash on hand.

What players like Bain do is enforce a Wall Street preference. There is a bias against companies that seek a "quiet life." They are shunned by institutional investors, which depresses stock prices and makes these companies “troubled” in the first place. It isn’t that they are not profitable, but rather than institutional investors don’t like them, and as a result they trade at dramatically lower P/E ratios. Indeed, it isn’t even clear that takeover targets do have weaker stock performance if you look at total returns, including dividends.

Once a company goes public, it is essentially subject to "disciplinary" takeovers if it fails to act in accordance with financial sector preferences. This is often phrased as "poorly performing managers," but what does that really mean? That is really just about enforcing a certain conventional wisdom about what a company ought to do. But these preferences are socially problematic. Consider some of the things that seem to contribute to being a takeover target: slow growth, stable revenues, cash on hand rather than debt, generous employee compensation, conservatively-funded pension or insurance plans.

Hmmm.

“The distinction between equality of outcomes and opportunity has some theoretical appeal, but in practice, you get both or neither”

July 16, 2012 / / Comments Off on “The distinction between equality of outcomes and opportunity has some theoretical appeal, but in practice, you get both or neither”

Dylan Matthews has a short post on equality of outcomes versus equality of opportunity. Political rhetoric claims that you can't choose one or the other. In the real world, though, it turns out that

the distinction between equality of opportunity (usually phrased in terms of upward income mobility) and equality of outcomes (the raw distribution of income or wealth in an economy) is not as big as it sometimes appears. More specifically, countries with high inequality of outcomes (as measured by the Gini index of economic inequality) tend to have low social mobility (as measured by the association between parents’ and childrens’ incomes) as well….

The distinction between equality of outcomes and opportunity has some theoretical appeal, but in practice, you get both or neither.

Very interesting.

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