Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Craftsmen always love their tools.  Further most of them love their problem.  And curiously the policeman must sympathize with the criminal; otherwise how will he be able to model his thinking. Negotiators advise you to walk in the other guy’s shoes. Success in complementing the other function plays out best if understand the other function, to a degree, i.e. the best engineers know a bit about sales, manufacturing, quality assurance, or product marketing.
There is a odd mutant form of this pattern where in the problem solver becomes the problem’s advocate.  Defending it.  Assuring the problem persists, that it survives.  This happens when the problem solver’s survival becomes tightly linked to the problem’s survival.  When they have become codependent.
Clay sketches this out nicely in his new book (go get a copy).

The modern example is the record company. Your business solves (what used to be) a hard problem; e.g. how do we get excellent high quality audio performances widely distributed to the general public. Back in the day that was hard! Wax cylinders for heaven’s sake!  Limited shelf space!  Damn radio station play lists!

Now days anybody with a computer can do it; so it’s not really a problem anymore. But for the industry, given that they are in the business of solving that hard problem, they have become the problem’s best friend.  Fighting tooth and nail to keep the problem hard. Odd, isn’t it?

Say your a religion. Your business solves the hard problem of giving people a way stay true to a set of principles; call them ethical principles if you want. But these days modern societies have spun up dozens of schemes to help groups of people stay a chosen course. Some are organizational, like hierarchical management or professional societies, some are technical, like pda’s, some are very transient like flash mobs or flicker groups formed on a single tag; but none of them look particularly like the classic mainstream religion. Again the religion becomes an advocate for the problem.
Clay tells the amusing story of finding some rants defending the craft of monks copying manuscripts in the face of the printing press. He derives a bit of fun by noting that the rant was run off on a printing press.

Recall that Clay’s book is an investigation of what’s unfolding as the cost of forming groups becomes radically different.  As the cost falls below what he delightfully calls Course’s floor.  One of his ideas is that these new easy to form groups are often bound by light forces, affection for example.

Threatening the livelihood of a problem solver is only the most exaggerated scenario for drawing out this odd pattern where he becomes the problem’s best friend.  The problem solver has affection for his tools, his profession, his institutions, his clients.  Deep affection.  When the shift happens and the displacement arrives these ties can not be casually unbound.  To me, that makes it a lot easier to sympathize with a what looks at first to be quite hypocritical behavior.  Gotta love ‘em.

Clay Shirky has written a book. Oh joy! Here Comes Everybody is a wise and insightful look into what’s happening as the costs of group forming evaporates. The book is in your bookstore starting today, so run out and get it!

The big question Clay takes on here runs as follows: Given that we are social creatures. Blessed with a having a latent desire to form groups. What happens when it suddenly becomes radically cheaper to form these groups? The straw-man answer: a lot of groups get formed. Groups start popping up, all over, all the time, for all things.

In much the same way that a mole, living underground, is unlike the butterfly living in the summer air these groups are sufficiently different that our intuitions about groups are called into question. While the cost structure does that so does the scale. The traditional organization must cut off it’s own long tail to curtail it’s classic coordination costs from running out of control. These new lower costs groups can push that cut off much further out. That creates entirely new organizational patterns.

This book is roughly targeted at the same audience as Tipping Point or The Long Tail; i.e. the intelligent reader interested in trends. I don’t want to undervalue how critical such books are, but unlike those books this work brings much that is new to the table. Clay frames existing ideas in new ways that gives them additional energy. For example when he says “beneath the Coasean floor” he is illuminating a very radical idea. E.g. We can now solve large swaths of coordination problems in ways that are contrary to architecture of institutions as we have come to know them.

But at the same time Clay introduces many ideas I’d not seen before and which I suspect are fresh. For example it’s well known that modern societies are rich in groups whose domain is very limited. The neighborhood group that forms only to worry about traffic, or the diet club, the knitting group, the professional society each with it’s very specific topic. These go by the name communities of limited liability, and I’ve often encountered people who would prefer that these not be called communities because they are so carefully limited in their scope.

Clay points out a wonderful reason why we choose to create and maintain these limits. First he reminds us of the birthday problem, i.e. that the chance is high that in a group of 30 people two will have the same birthday. That happens because the number of pair wise connections in a group is N!, i.e. grows very fast in the number of people. Now having a common birthday, that’s a delightful coincidence. But the same pattern has a dark side. As the group grows the chances of pairs with some deep-seated antipathy explodes as well. By keeping the scope of the groups limited so some very narrow topic the chance that these will be uncovered and go onto polarize the group is kept low.

There is much more that I’m loving about this book. So I’ll no doubt be talking about it more over the next weeks. But I think if you’re the least bit interested in groups you gotta read this. Like I say it should be in your bookstore today - get a move on!

The Irish decided to impose a 33 cents tax on those plastic bags that retailers use. I presume this was in part a sin tax, in part an attempt to tax the externalities created by the bags, and in part a bit of stunt. The end of the story is that it’s wiped out the use of plastic bags, shifted social norms about bag usage. It’s a fascinating story about deciding to change the way a society behaves; making it acceptable to shun those who exercise their freedom to use plastic bags.

For some reason that story is currently slotted in my mind with the health care debate’s latest point of discussion.

The question at hand is should we put everybody into the system, or should we allow people to opt out. Allowing people to opt out would presumably create incentives for people to game the system. Or putting it another way it would allow people to gamble that they aren’t going to need health care during the next time interval.

Boffins think that this single choice would have a sharp effect on costs. Plans were we all join look likely to cost us each about $2,700 a year, while those were we allow gaming would cost $4,400 per year. Intuitively that sounds about right - you just take a guess on how many people would decide to take a swag at getting away with no healthcare, say 25%, and then you figure that group is likely to be somewhat less likely to need care, say 60% less; an you get similar numbers.

So that’s 63% more expensive or additional $147/month. Our faux progressive funding system pushes most of the cost of these social programs onto the middle and upper middle class so you can multiply that as you think is appropriate. But that class struggle is less interesting to me today.
What this highlights is how it creates two classes: those who decide they want to take the gamble, in one class, are costing everybody who decides to join, the second class. It is an interesting case of creating a clear cost to the majority group by allowing a minority a freedom. The boffins think that minority is pretty large. Will those who join will shun those who take the gamble? Will the system create shifting social norms, like the Irish experience with the bags, where it becomes unacceptable behavior to take that gamble?
There is another interesting take though. An intertemporal one. I presume that many of those who might decide to take that bet they won’t get sick will be young people. There are plenty of reasons to think that. Young people tend to be less able to afford the insurance. They tend to be less risk adverse. They tend to be healthier. They tend to have less common cause with large institutions. Over time a person is two people; a young person, and then latter a older person. The first of these is raising the costs of the second one.

Actually there are really three people or more people in each individual, since for example, what makes for a healthy young person is a healthy childhood. So the healthy young person that opts out has his head in a bag, selectively blind to both to the past and the future.

“A picture showing a pair of eyes attached to a cafeteria collection box significantly raises the donated amount compared to a flower symbol…” Teehee. Presumably the eyes trigger a reframing; the contributors situate their choice in a different context. A more social one? That effect what ever it actually is might be a portion of what people are reaching for with all those damn TV cameras. “Totem poles put up in villages in North America several hundred years ago standing vigilant at attention, with ever-watchful eyes.” It’s got associations with the managerial tendency to over value close-monitoring (”the cleaning wrasse fish grooms its client fish in the friendliest way when other clients watch, but without an audience it prefers to bite off pieces of its client’s skin”) and the rationalizations used to justify the cost savings inherent in cubical office layouts. It reminds me of the way that a smiley face on the check increases tipping. Important because apparently almost anything on the check increases tipping, including a credit card logo.

Let’s be simple minded and say that people have only two modes of behavior, the one they adopt when watched v.s. the one they adopt in private. How would we determine which of these is more authentic. Maybe this pair creates something that’s more functional than either one alone would be. That mimic’s my presumption that the constraints of group membership generate value that overwhelms their costs on personal autonomy.

There is something here about the difference between gossip and spying. Gossip is about passing private information about a 3rd party outside their oversight. Spying is the collecting of that data. What offends (or frightens) about gossip is the fear that your story will be told poorly. What offends (or frightens) about spying is that you do have two modes and you certainly would have adopted your social and public one if you’d known others were watching; we would have presented those of our many persona that was appropriate to the group in effect.

The mirrored sunglasses are rude; they are spy gear. At the same time they make the wearer appear aloof. They signal that he is not a social participant. That marks him as an outsider.

I’m enjoying reading the last Harry Potter in part because so many other people on the train are reading it.  Last summer there were banners on the Libraries in Cambridge announcing that Cambridge was reading some book and they got me to imagining what that would be like.  Stepping onto the bus, chatting with the bus driver about a particular scene or character.  Waiting at the corner for the light and striking up a conversation with another pedestrian about that plot twist in the third chapter.  You can do that with the Harry Potter, and people do; the book acts as a kind of gang colors inviting the conversation.

The ebb and flow of block busters in the culture is part of the symptoms of the highly skew’d distributions that permeate networks.  The book I’m reading on cities includes an argument that mass media was extremely corrosive to the civic sphere.  At one time cities had an unimaginably rich ecology of civic groups.  To put it simply, with the arrival of television everybody suddenly just stayed home; and the civic groups evaporated.  It’s the bowling alone story or the collapse of social networks story, but much earlier.

A friend pointed this out to me this morning, an early form of cinema

That would travel about, tickets were sold, a man would read a narration, the hand painted scroll would be displayed to the gathered audience.  Now we look at uTube on our iPhones alone, later maybe, forwarding them to our mySpace contacts.