Just get out of the way

Just read “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.”

As the author says at the end, there’s no overarching theme or point to the book. It’s simply a set of statistically backed observations, proof (of a sort) that the unconscious can sort thousands of clues – many of which we’ll never consciously recognize – into impressions, gut instinct.

Blink is about trusting our unconscious.

Now – at risk of sounding arch* – I’ve always believed in the power of the backbrain, the unconscious mind. The SATs, GREs, GMATs were easier when done on paper – when I could read the harder questions, then return to them later, the answers would reveal themselves, almost without effort. Now that they’re on computer – when you have to answer them immediately – they’re more difficult. When I go to buy shoes, the first pair I like is almost always the first one I get. When I meet potential date, I find my initial impression always holds true – that even after going out, in the end, I’ll come back to my first thought, my first like or dislike.

So the unconscious is a powerful engine for turning vague clues into concrete thought.

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What I hadn’t considered was this: Information can get in the way of impressions. Forest for the trees, and all that. It’s easy to get mired in details, dismiss the unconscious, and focus on dates, figures, specifics – to lose the big picture.

Up to a certain point, one must know the facts – to have a true sense of an industry, for example, you have to know the players, the structure, the history, where the money goes and comes from – the landscape. But then you have to forget. You can’t speak Portuguese if you’re always worrying what conjugation to use; you just have to let go, and use it. You can’t play soccer if you’re thinking about what you should be doing; you pour strategy into your head, then look for holes in the gameplay. Chess is about seeing the way the game moves. Soccer is the same way. Politics, war, law, medicine – anything that requires quick, accurate decisions.

To use your unconscious, you must be able to take necessary knowledge for granted. You have to give your unconscious the basis for making decisions, for speaking, for understanding, for acting – and then you have to get the hell out of the way.

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So … the question remains: how do you know what information you need to know, and which is just white noise – filler, but not useful?

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You guessed it; that post is in process :)

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* arch
adjective
1.	(used of behavior or attitude) characteristic of those who treat others with condescension
	from WordNet and Dictionary.com

Knowledge is the new Information

Talk to anyone who invests in the stock market. He (or she) will tell you: success takes a lot more than just knowing the facts. These days, all the information you’re likely to use on a daily – or even monthly – basis is at your fingertips, just a search or a click away. Want to know the price of gold, who won the World Series in 1918, stock trends for Apple versus IBM, the price of mangoes in Guatemala – it’s all right there, and if you can’t find it, the odds are really good you can connect with someone who can.

Getting the facts just isn’t the issue any more.

The issue is knowledge.

Knowledge is cognition, thought, connection. It involves seeing the connections between previously (apparently) disparate, unrelated pieces of information. Success, in turn – whether social or in the business realm – is about leveraging those connections in a profitable way. In other words,

The facts: Music can be digitized. We can make very small hard drives. We can store music on them. We can use hard drives to play music on headphones.

Knowledge: those pieces fit together to make a portable music player.

Success: Steve Jobs says “hey, I bet we can sell these things”…

Netflix’s founders knew the facts – Blockbuster was charging too much for rentals, people are working longer hours, the internet was widespread enough to support the movie habits of a generation used to ipods and online networking – but putting them together – seeing the direction and the trends – that’s knowledge. They leveraged it. As of now, Netflix is trading at 30.18…

If you plan to invest in Real Estate, knowing what the prices have been, and what they are today isn’t enough. You have to take a step back and see the trends. You have to look at social pressures, jobs, the price of oil (affecting transportation costs), location, weather – on and on -

you can’t get effective leverage on a situation, however isolated it seems, until you understand the big picture.

Knowledge is the new Information

Which brings me back to the title of this post. Facts used to be harder to collect, and often the collection of facts forced one to examine and understand their connections. This is no longer the case.

When I was young, my local library had a card catalog. At thirteen I did a research project on the Great Depression. While I was reading, I had to take notes on related topics – dates, people, events – so that I could do other, more effective, searches in the card catalog. In other words, to save myself time and effort - and to research effectively – I had to understand what I was reading, while I was reading it.

In highschoool, I did another project, on the massacres in Tiannamen Square. My highschool had just begun using an internet-based card catalog. New to the internet, I “researched” by searching for keywords. I ended with stacks of unrelated material, and no idea what I should read first. I almost didn’t finish the project.

Last year, I did research on the Cold War and Terrorism. This time, I found most of my information online, in online databases and journals. I didn’t just find it, I read it online. I did read some books in hard copy, but often scanned my reading so I would have it later, no matter where I was. I didn’t complete the project (passed it along to the next research assistant), but wound up amassing thousands of pages, hundreds of articles, multiple bibliographies – and I’m still not sure that the multiplicity of information actually added to my understanding. All the information simply meant I had access to a much larger picture. More information, more timelines, more bibliographies, more, more more. However,

Reading, thinking, and writing helped me – just like in 7th grade.

And the implications are ….

So, once upon a time, knowing the facts implied knowledge of the situation – it implied an understanding of connections. Now, knowing the facts simply implies you’re good at using Google.

Furthermore, the average US citizen today has access to an exponentially larger number of facts (and/or rumors) than s/he did ten or twenty or sixty years ago. It takes time to wade through that many facts. It can be difficult to focus (raise your hand if you’ve ever gotten lost on Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Amazon.com, the NYT, Wired, Wikipedia, Google maps, the IHT, the BBC, Flickr, Twitter, The Onion… I can go on and on). Our hyperlinked world is increasingly searchable. (Check out the Liquid Information project, read articles about it here and here)…

So what. Big deal. There’s more information, there’s more people looking at information, disinformation is harder and harder to pull off … can’t be a bad thing. … right?

We’re back at knowledge versus facts again. Knowledge – new knowledge, and useful or correct knowledge, is about making connections previously unseen, then leveraging them. This means you have to know what – out of all the chaos of mostly-true facts – is important. You have to know how to choose the most important data points.

The issue isn’t about which facts to keep, any more – it’s how to know which ones to ignore.

We have to train our brains to act like our eyes. Our eyes detect motion much better than stillness, largely because trees don’t jump out at us, while tigers (and the occasional snake or angry neighbor) do – and did. Knowing what was important, fast, was a survival trait.

I suspect it will soon be the same with data, if it isn’t already.

Having information just isn’t enough any more. It just means you can do a keyword search. It just means you can spell close enough to correctly to get google to spellcheck for you. It means you can use Wikipedia.

Having facts just doesn’t imply knowledge any more. It doesn’t imply understanding. It doesn’t imply you know which data points to ignore.

Ultimately, that’s the bottom line. Knowing what to ignore is as important now as knowing facts.

Information just doesn’t cut it.

Information and security

Facebook is collecting information about you from other sources

This post is initially inspired by the following flash presentation: http://albumoftheday.com/facebook/
I can’t vouch for its final conclusions, but the rest is verifiable. Check your Facebook “agreement” for corroboration. In short, the film quotes Facebook’s privacy policy as stating the following:

Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (e.g., photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience.

I copy-pasted that from the privacy page, so yes, it really says that (it’s under “the information we collect,” for other Facebook users out there…).

My parents’ generation – perhaps as a result of Watergate and the Red Scare? – believes a free society must control its information as follows: the government must keep all actions as ‘transparent’ as possible, and the citizens must keep their information hidden.
“Opaque” citizens and a “transparent” government promote government by the rules, because any actions outside the realm of sanctioned law and order will be seen by the citizens – and on the other hand, without good personal information, government officials will find it more difficult to get “leverage” on the citizens. Thus bribery/extortion/torture/campaign financing/etc etc etc become more difficult from both sides of the White House fence.

However, this opacity has lost its strength in the face of modern technology and attitudes.

Perhaps we need a new definition of “freedom” these days.

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the power of comprehension

Information on its own is just facts. Information in the wrong hands can be dangerous, or even deadly. Knowledge – information that’s been organized and is understood (“comprehensed” is the word i really want)- is power. We live in an era of networks, not neighborhoods, a time where information itself is a fungible element of power.

The principle of “fungibility” or “fungible power” states that a nation can use power in one realm (say, military) to get power in another (like economic power). Economic sanctions are a pretty good example of the fungible nature of power…

Leaving aside prosaic concerns about data privacy, like the piracy of social security and credit card numbers, I’m still uncomfortable with the idea that a great deal of information about me, personally, is floating in marketing and government databases. Don’t get me wrong: I’m hugely in favor of technology, networking, and stored information (hell, I’ll be starting a new technology job in a month, will be working with a major networking and information storage firm). I’m not uncomfortable with a digitized lifestyle. I’m simply uncomfortable about the ramifications. Here’s why:

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(I believe) “Space” is a necessary element in any civilized society

Social networks have historically existed both in the matrix and the interstices of law and government… we all need to feel we’re gaming the system, just a little, and sometimes we all need to feel we’re making it better, but off the record.
(me: “…and found wanting,” October 12, ‘07)

Humans aren’t perfect. We aren’t now, we never will be. We have good days. We have bad days. We have days where we just don’t give a fuck. Or weeks. Or years. Sometimes, you need to come to the end of yourself to find a way forward again.

One of my favorite people is an ex-heroin addict, ex-coke addict, ex-alcoholic. He spent ten, fifteen years screwing around, and then he met this woman who loved him back. I met him after he’d quit everything, even the drinking, after he decided to change his life for the woman that’s now his wife. Today, he’s finished school, he’s doing a medical/technical internship, he’ll be a professional next year. Great sense of humor, patient beyond belief. Tattoos everywhere.

And here’s the thing: He’s a great guy, and he’s the kind of guy who really should benefit the American system, which purports to be the kind of system that always gives a second chance, that believes in the ability of people and nations to turn themselves around, that believes in the goodness of capitalism, a free market, and the basic right of those who wish to succeed to do so, whatever their past.

But he’s part of the old guard.

There aren’t any pictures of him shooting up online. He never immortalized his dealer friendships via Facebook. His runins with cops are likely not youtubed/blogged about/whatever. He doesn’t post his life online. Ergo, aside from his police record, he’s a blank slate to employers. Typing his name into google gets you nowhere.

In other words, time and a lack of precise record keeping has given him a kind of “space” that allows him to move forward – just as the same social “space” let him get away with many more (minor, hopefully!) criminal actions than he was ever convicted for.

I think that, today, the internet and the permanence/uncontrollability of personal information really make this kind of social space much harder to come by.

The internet, in other words, can really hinder one’s rise away from a murky past.

Or, if you will, it’s necessary to understand intentional data control from a young age in order to avoid ruining your own future via the follies of youth.

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One more thought on Facebook

I’m not sure how we can justify teaching this kind of data control/intentional privacy when we have such a large population of gradeschoolers who can barely read, but it’s not less important because other issues take precedence. One more note, again from Facebook:

You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of User Content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other Users have copied or stored your User Content.

.…Removed information may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time but will not be generally available to members of Facebook…

It’s that last section that really gets me; a corporation, however harmless, controlling all information you enter in a website, eventually gains great power. As i noted at the beginning, power is fungible. Power via information (knowledge) can turn to marketing, police (forceful) power, power of persuasion…

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So what’s the solution?

We’ve gone too far for the solution to be a restriction of information, and education seems impractical at best. If teens are drinking and driving, and texting and driving (article from the NYT today on that, actually), we have no reason to suspect they’ll make better choices when it comes to the virtual world. Furthermore, restricting companies’ use of this information has been only partially successful. Perhaps the free market (and a capitalist, moderately pluralistic society?) will offer a solution. Perhaps when the CEO’s themselves grew up with Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, they’ll give less credence to college candids. Perhaps we will ultimately become a society that only cares what you can do, and not what you do with whom on your own time.

Or perhaps we’ll move in another direction entirely.

Until then, lock your electronic doors, keep your passwords, credit cards, and social security numbers close to hand, and google yourself every once in a while, just to see what’s out there.

All the best, and stay warm – and dry! – wherever you are :)

~**~

**edit** Check out this article about a state (Arizona) that’s decided to use select information – and public humiliation – to combat drunk driving …

…defense lawyers and the spokeswoman for the national chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving said they had never heard of billboards or the Internet being used as scarlet letters…

“I just can’t believe he’s doing it,” said Mark Weingart, a defense lawyer in Tempe who has advised hundreds of people facing charges of driving under the influence. “Besides the fact that it is in bad taste, D.U.I.’s usually involve somebody with no criminal history. The downside to this person being published on the Web site is tremendous. I don’t see the point. Why doesn’t he put sex offenders up there?”

A merger with potential!!

Check this out: The BBC bought Lonely Planet

Meaning one of the best news sources out there just bought my favorite-ever travel guide maker!

Incidentally, anyone who wants to buy me a random present should get me the Europe or USA/Canada/Mexico one(s) :)

:P