The Universal Muscle : Willpower

I started thinking about this post after reading a guest article by Dan Ariely on Tim Ferriss' blog : Understanding the Dangers of “Ego-Depletion”. It tackles avoiding break downs under stress and  sustaining willpower. I'm very much a fan of Ariely's work but in many ways I completely disagree with his view here. Personal experience and research make this article feel like it lacks subtlety and depth. Willpower // Ego

The article can be easily summed up into the six rules Ariely lists to avoid breaking down under stress :

1. Acknowledge the tension, don’t ignore it
2. Call it what it is: ego-depletion (where we don’t have any more energy to make good decisions)
3. Understand ego-depletion (a simple cognitive load can alter decisions)
4. Include and consider the moral implications (when we become depleted, we’re not only more apt to make bad and /or dishonest choices, we’re also more likely to allow ourselves to be tempted to make them in the first place)
5. Evade ego-depletion (Regardless of the indulgence, whether it’s a new pair of shoes, some “me time” where you turn off your phone, an ice cream sundae, or a night out—plan it ahead)
6. Know thyself (Simply knowing you can become depleted, and moreover, knowing the kinds of decisions you might make as a result, makes you far better equipped to handle difficult situations when and as they arise)

Though far from being exhaustive, all these rules are fine by my standards, except one : Rule #5 which really is the most important rule since it's the practical solution to the whole problem. And in a word, Ariely tells his readers : Indulge. But with a twist of course : Plan it ahead. If the problem is ego-depletion, you could consider this an ego-replenishment. And in my opinion, this is the worst advice you can give, be it to a dieter, to an obsessive shopper or to a procrastinator facing willpower problems.

Diet-wise, Ariely gives the example of the Slow-Carb Diet, Tim Ferriss' 4 hour body diet, where followers diet for 6 days and indulge in anything they want on the 7 th day, in any quantity they want. I spent six months Slow-Carbing and to bring it down to the culprit in a sentence : If you have even a trace of an eating disorder, this is the best diet to accentuate it and turn it into a catastrophe. Besides this aspect (and the eat beans recommendation), the diet is OK. Plus, it's a great way to end up eating Paleo (personal experience) which is ... well, the subject of a whole post.

Now, the reason the word ego is used is because ego is indeed involved here.  In the comments, Dylan Watkins writes :

This is similar to a lecture a neuro-scientist was giving at my local Hacker Space. They did a study where you were split into two large groups and activitly participated in the discussion. Then they broke up into groups of two individuals. They were all taken aside individually and told one of two things.

1. You did great, everyone wants to be with you but we just had to pair you with someone at random.
2. You did not so great, everyone want to be with someone else but we just had to pair you with someone at random

They then places a plate of Chocolate Chips Cookies next to the pairs. The people who were told the 2) “no one likes you” statement ate a MUCH greater proportion of the cookies then the people who were told the 1) “everyone likes you”

Here's ego-depletion in full action for you. When you're sad and depressed, you're likely to break down. Just as when you're out of willpower, as Ariely writes, you're also likely to break down. So ego and willpower, though not one and the same, do have something in common : a neural pathway. A common path the brain follows in both situations leading a given individual  from trigger A to action B. And Ariely does a great job sequencing it in a not-so fictional internal dialogue :

“I’m starving! I should go home and make a salad and finish off that leftover grilled chicken” “But it’s been such a long day. I don’t feel like cooking” [Walks by popular spot for Chinese takeout] “Plus, beef lo mein sounds amazing right now” “Yes, yes it does, but you really need to finish those vegetables before they go bad, plus, they’ll be good with some Dijon vinaigrette!” “Not as good as those delicious noodles with all that tender beef.” “Hello, remember the no carbs resolution? And the eat vegetables every day one, too? You’ve been doing so well!” “Exactly, I’ve been so good! I can have this one treat…”

Ariely goes on to explain that this is when the battle is lost. And the reason why is because we use self-control. And self-control, or willpower, is limited. And this, right here, is the key to the whole problem and the root of a real solution : "we use our self-control every time we force ourselves to make the good, reasonable decision". And the solution then ? We shouldn't use self-control. Willpower is too unreliable a resource to be counted on. So what do I use ? A leash ? Good thinking :) but no. Let's call it Decision Automation.

Willpower = Muscle // Decisions = Reps

First of all, reps means repetitions. For the non-gym goers, that's the number of times you repeat a certain movement to train a certain muscle. For example, Mr. X squats 10 times with a bar loaded with 1.5 times his weight.

Slate magazine summed up Ariely's findings some time ago by writing : "The more decisions we take, the less these decisions are good". That's why it's practical to consider willpower a muscle which contractions result in decisions : the more contractions are made, the more fatigue, the less focus, the more difficult the contractions. But the analogy goes further :

• Overloading : In the long term ( months), as HST (Hypertrophy Specific Training) makes clear, overloading is a must if you want to gain muscle. Subjecting muscles to a greater load leads to growth for a very simple reason : Evolution wise, our muscles are tools of survival. They're here to make sure we overcome obstacles so we can, one day, reproduce. Increasing weights by 10 pounds on a squat each week for example, is the equivalent of having to lift heavier animal carcasses to feed the growing tribe. Our muscles grow bigger to allow us to do just that. And same goes for willpower probably. If you've never been confronted with stressful decision making, you won't be able to handle more stressful decision making. So you start off small, at school, with project management for your next presentation. Then college confronts you with more empowering tasks. And work puts you face to face with even bigger challenges and more consequential decisions. Your willpower adapts.

• Failure : In the short term (days), on a day to day basis, going to failure in the gym is important. Pushing your muscles to their ultimate might is actually the one thing that'll guaranty the triggering of their adaptive potential. Without failure, the muscles won't be primed to do so. They have no reason to. And the same goes for willpower. You need to use it all, push it to its boundaries to allow it to grow stronger. No moderation.

• Cycling : But whatever the term, cycling is crucial. And here's where the medium term comes in. In the long term, do seek out bigger and heavier decision making loads and in the short term, do push yourself to the limits. But always make sure you deload. De-loading is a corner stone for any self-respecting bodybuilder. These are phases where you decrease your weights and give your muscles a break so that they can grow stronger later. And here's where increased productivity after a week-end and holidays start making sense. Your willpower, after being pushed to the limit is back and stronger than ever. Compare your willpower on a Friday night to the one you have on a Sunday night. Think. When are you more likely to binge, procrastinate, spend like a mad person ? Probably Friday afternoon. Less so on a Sunday after a relaxing week-end. In the short term, tricks such as the Pomodoro technique (work for 25 minutes, rest for 5 minutes) can also "sharpen your saw". And it's a perfect example of short term de-loading for your willpower.

• Muscle groups : Also in the bodybuilding world, it is common currency that one shouldn't train the same muscle group two days in a row so as to allow it to rest. This is also a form of cycling of course. If only it was possible to use willpower every other day, I think we'd be living in a much more peaceful society. If you can get creative with breaks at work, do so. Work half a day, three days per week and take one day off. Make sure you're relaxing more frequently. If not, make you sure you don't go through two stressful days in a row.

• Ideal number of reps : The debate is still on in the bodybuilding world as to which rep range is best for hypertrophy but consensus seems to be forming around the 8-12 rep range. Whatever the outcome however, this makes us think that for willpower too, there's probably a duration beyond which we lose optimal sharpness and focus. Is it 25 minutes as the Pomodoro technique advocates ? Is it 45 minutes as some other productivity gurus advise ? I believe personal experience is your best way to find out. Or better yet : "when you feel like it". If you're incredibly productive and have been so for the last hour and a half and feel you've got more left in the tank, should you stop and take a pause because Pomodoro or whoever else says so ? No. The moment you feel empty, or a bit short from that : Stop, take a break, wait till you feel energized. Then go back to the task at hand.

• Feed the muscle : Post-workout meals are very important. They bring nutrients to muscles when these need them most. I think the bodybuilding community, at least, agrees on that, even if pre-workout meals still haven't reached consensus. One of the many goals of post-workout nutrition is glycogen replenishment. This last aspect is over-rated but for the purpose of our analogy, this means willpower needs to be fed after an effort too. Its glycogen store is relaxation. Resting, pausing is a way to feed willpower. But eating (food) is also important. And food choices matter. Brain foods are obviously best.

So when you look at it now, what is the problem and where does our use of willpower differ greatly from how we train our muscles ? I believe we're constantly over-training our willpower. We are over-taking decisions. Too much is too much. It feels like a 365/52/24/7. And it shouldn't be. Throughout evolution, we used to spare muscle effort for when we needed it most. It didn't yield any Mr Olympia or IFBB pros (bodybuilding champions) but we were still able to survive. What's been verified is that, whatever the muscle, it's a "use it or lose it" rule. But there's also a "use it when you need it most" silent rule. That's why, for all un-consequential decisions, we should be using : Decision automation. More on that in a second.

Willpower >< Muscle // You = System

I know I've been making the analogy for the last six paragraphs but I need to say : Willpower is not a muscle actually. Willpower is a concept. Likening it to a muscle is a convenient model. It is an imperfect one however. Willpower stems from your brain, surely, but just as everything in you it is related to the system you are. Everything you do affects everything you are. And the state of your body and mental health definitely and obviously affect your willpower. And that's why Dan Ariely is wrong, or at the very least, it's un-adapated :

Giving yourself a break, indulging in shopping, eating, procrastination to replenish willpower, after an ego-depletion, is absurd. Why ? Because willpower is not effort specific. It means that you don't use willpower only to stick to a diet or a decision you've made. You use it for Everything.  So cheating on your diet plan one day per week is useless in that respect. Willpower is a universal muscle that serves multiple functions in your life. Binge-eating one day per week is not solving the root of the problem, which is that this muscle is tired from too much decision making. Binge eating is simply soothing the ache.

Planned indulgences simply camouflage the symptoms. They don't solve the root of the problem.

When my willpower is depleted, all of my decisions suffer, including my work, my creativity, my diet, my workouts ... But if you're cool and relaxed in general, you won't feel any ego depletion. You'll feel focused all the time, whatever the task or the decision at hand. So what am I saying here ? Relax. That is the solution to the problem's roots. Don't "take a day off" from your diet. Sleep more, relax more (meditate, breathe in and out ...) and you won't feel deprived or craving for any kind of food. So instead of planning a cheat day and obsessing about it all week, find a way and a time to relax and stick to it.

The idea behind the "diet break" and the indulgence Ariely talks about is to fix a day a week to relieve your stress about diet restrictions and hence to automate that decision. Automating helps you relieve your brain from the weight of that decision. This is the same stance than the one underlying the idea we have a limited number of "creativity bullets" in any given day and that we should use these wisely. You don't want to be wasting creativity on planning your day or planning your dinner but rather on thinking up your next big venture. Hence, Decision automation. But the use case sucks M. Ariely. Planned indulgence as if a healthy diet was a miserable shore we need to break out of in a planned way is a miserable way to live. So instead of planning your cheat day and suffering through remorse afterwards, plan your relaxation days and strengthen the fuel source of your willpower. Turn the constant battle against your cravings into a constant win reaching of a better, more focused self. Nir Eyal (pictured above) has a video about the different behavior types, how standard methods such as "plan your indulgence ahead" are usually applied in the wrong context and how one size doesn't fit all :

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/43574642 w=400&h=300]

Neural Pathways // Break & Build

Nir Eyal also writes about Internal Triggers and how they form. These are neural pathways and their formation has been well studied. It's a sequence of events that happens quasi-automatically in our brains leading from a certain trigger A to a certain action B. Neural pathways are the way we learn, these automatisms make our brains more able to recreate processes. It's hard to break a neural pathway just as it's hard to de-learn a language. One way to build a new one is by going off the beaten path. "When we repeat something and use that portion of the brain in a focused way, new neural pathways develop in our brains". This is neuro-plasticity at its best.

Now, breaking a neural pathway entails a deep understanding of what triggers it and the exact sequence it follows, just as Ariely advises you to. As noted above, Ego and Willpower share a common neural pathway or at least part of one. This makes me think a combination of loneliness / sadness (ego depletion) and willpower depletion (too much stress / decision making) is the perfect recipe to get off track. So track the pattern. Think. When do you binge eat ? When do you go on a shopping spree ? When is it that you spend two hours in a row on Facebook ? When do you spend 2 hours in a row checking e-mail ? When do you waste an hour trying to re-organize your inbox ? We all have a tiny bit of obsessive-compulsiveness in us that kills our productivity. Track it, Find it, Nail it. Identify trigger A and the road leading to action B. Then break the sequence. Make sure to have damns to stop it from developing.

Willpower on auto-pilot // Decision automation

Now, Decision Automation on the other hand means building a new neural pathway. Or put simply : creating a new habit. And here practical examples work best. The real value of a post, surprisingly enough, sometimes, comes from commenters. Some time they've been through much more iterations, trial and error, than the authors. Trevor Lohrbeer and Derek's comments hence combine to form this list. To increase decision-making hit points :

• Make Fewer Decisions : The fewer decisions you make, the slower you’ll hit decision fatigue. Avoid making unnecessary decisions, especially right before a major decision. In other words, automate as much decisions as you can. 3 ways to accomplish that :

• Use Decision Rules : Avoid detailed analysis for every decision. Use rules of thumb or rules you’ve defined in advance to make your decision. No more thinking. Have rules such as : "I'll check e-mail and look at my phone at 11am, I'm working before". Period !
• Limit Your Choices : The more elements you need to evaluate during a decision, the more taxing it becomes. Keep your options simple and reduce them whenever possible. Examples include what you're going to eat. Don't plan that (expect for the week-end maybe) ! Think of how much time you're wasting thinking about that compared to when it's already planned in advance. Have two, three foods ready at home or a favorite meal at the restaurant. Done !
• Create Habits : Habits allow you to automate a decision so you avoid spending energy on it. Make your decision once, then create a habit to avoid making it repeatedly. Focus on making the desired behavior a habit so it becomes “automatic” and doesn’t generate as much decision making stress. Old habit : On your way home after a party, you stop near the greasiest food making machine in the universe and eat up on the merchandise. New habit : Now that you see the pattern (you drink, you drive, you stop by the machine), you decide to stop drinking up at the party. Further up the sequence : But what caused the drinking ? Peer pressure. Great. Impose your rules then. Drink slower, drink less. Hard ? Think of all you'll be avoiding simply by implementing that simple change. Just that.

• Make Important Decisions First :

• Order your decisions from most important to least important : Spend your limited reserves on the decisions that matter most. That way if you do hit decision fatigue, it’ll have less impact.
• Have a hit list : This is the idea behind the Big 5 To-Do list. 5 things you feel able to do in a day and moreover that'll leave you satisfied once accomplished.

• Fuel your decisions properly :

• Reduce overall stress : Make an effort to reduce overall stress in your life. Meditation, emotional awareness/management, etc. BECAUSE Will power is not effort specific
• Eat : Decision reserves get replenished with foods. And especially brain foods. Also, recent research has pointed to increasing your serotonin levels as a way to make more rational decisions. It may also be helpful in alleviating ego depletion / decision fatigue. Check out the The cheesy secret behind successful decision making

This is a big ongoing experiment which neuro-science are bound to enlighten in the years to come. It'll get very exciting before becoming mainstream. What do you think ?

Power 2.0 : Why Big Brother will get even Bigger from now on

I think every post on politics should be put into perspective using moral psychology. And who better than Jonathan Haidt to get the job done :

Here's a more painful but ultimately constructive diagnosis, from the point of view of moral psychology: politics at the national level is more like religion than it is like shopping. It's more about a moral vision that unifies a nation and calls it to greatness than it is about self-interest or specific policies. In most countries, the right tends to see that more clearly than the left. In America the Republicans did the hard work of drafting their moral vision in the 1970s, and Ronald Reagan was their eloquent spokesman. Patriotism, social order, strong families, personal responsibility (not government safety nets) and free enterprise. Those are values, not government programmes. The Democrats, in contrast, have tried to win voters' hearts by promising to protect or expand programmes for elderly people, young people, students, poor people and the middle class. Vote for us and we'll use government to take care of everyone! But most Americans don't want to live in a nation based primarily on caring. That's what families are for. One reason the left has such difficulty forging a lasting connection with voters is that the right has a built-in advantage – conservatives have a broader moral palate than the liberals (as we call leftists in the US). Think about it this way: our tongues have taste buds that are responsive to five classes of chemicals, which we perceive as sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savoury. Sweetness is generally the most appealing of the five tastes, but when it comes to a serious meal, most people want more than that.

This certainly goes on to show how little reason actually has to do with politics. How much of an emotional, and hence moral, beast, politics are. Isn't strange that just as religion has recourse to burning books in the past to avoid their disruptive power, governments, today, try to bring down websites ...

Power + Information

Power's stronghold is informational asymmetry. I've thought it through. Whatever the stakes, without that, whatever your armies' size, you have no decisive advantage. I'm writing this as I think of how the US beat the Soviet Union during the cold war. The Star Wars episode was very illustrative. The US didn't really have the means to deploy the anti-missile system they were bragging about. Yet, it seemed like they had and nobody knew they couldn't. That was more than enough to throw the Union into a deadly spiral. So that's why governments overreacted during the Wiki leaks episode. Somebody was threatening their side of the informational asymmetry equation.

To me this equation is the reason why Big Brother won't stop growing from now on. The more traditional information gets taken away from governments' grasp, the more they'll try to get a hold of information that can't be easily revealed by their new adversaries : Your information. Of course governments are giving away more and more information. Look at the Open Data movement. But again, which data is being spread ? Recently, two amateur astronomers found a US spy satellite. These are supposed to be secret right ? Well clearly, the needle on the secrecy barometer is shifting. And that is bound to change the power equilibrium.

Now, of course Open Data is the way to go. Keeping the data for yourself in an age where transparency is being touted everywhere is the best way to anger your taxpayers. Obama, Cameron, Hollande ... understood that fairly quickly. "Give them the data !". I don't know if history has proved that the more transparent governments and system end up winning  (US versus The Soviet Union) but giving more tools for citizens to build more things is often a good idea. We live in an open world where we realize much quicker what's happening on the other side of the frontier and start wondering why we're not there yet. One way the "Lumières" made the French Revolution possible is by showing their fellow citizens what was happening on the other side of the English Channel.

If politicians can't promise us that future, they'd better give us the tools to build it ourselves. Hence the present rationale best put forward by Cameron's "Big Society" paradigm. For the standard of political promises is changing. "Change" itself on the lips of a politician cannot possibly mean the same thing it did 5 years ago. Now, among other things, it has to echo citizen empowerment.

Power + The Future

Having more information doesn't mean you'll be more able to predict. Take it from a data analyst. Models with more data from the past will only get better at predicting the past and modeling it nicely. They'll never give a more precise picture of the future. The Black Swan does a good job explaining that. At best, more information can get focusing. In no way does it make the system more predictable. By making you more confident, more information makes you more to making huge mistakes, often caused by small unpredictable, hard to spot waves. Period. More information certainly won't garanty a more sustainable power balance. Power sustainability is the result of two things :

• Political infrastructure : a government capable of taking decisions
• Social cohesion : A people that won't shout too loud when decisions are made

But the more information is available, the more that social cohesion will be hard to form. Governments used to take decisions with information at hand only they owned. Now, they share that information with the people and there are no hidden parameters. When you know on what decisions are being based exactly, accountability reaches a whole new level. No wonder the Portuguese, Spanish and Greek governments are having a hard time. The only solution in that scenario is, again, Cameron's "Big Society". "They might not like what we decide ? Great ! Give them the power to decide themselves. Let them be accountable for their own future." I wonder of this take on things goes on to solve Dani Rodrik's irreconcilable triangle :

Deep down, the crisis is yet another manifestation of what I call “the political trilemma of the world economy”: economic globalization, political democracy, and the nation-state are mutually irreconcilable. We can have at most two at one time. Democracy is compatible with national sovereignty only if we restrict globalization. If we push for globalization while retaining the nation-state, we must jettison democracy. And if we want democracy along with globalization, we must shove the nation-state aside and strive for greater international governance.

This definitely echoes Mundell's impossible trinity as he applies that close/open, government/people, global/local trilemma to monetary exchange. So take China for example. They're certainly pushing for globalization while retaining the nation-state. Hence the lagging democracy. But again, this needs to be considered dynamically, not statically. It's how fast you push each aspect relatively to others that matters. As an illustration, the Chinese government allowed regional elections in the year 2000. This might seem like a big step but relative to pushes in globalization and the nation-state aspects, it's a small advance. Power's sustainability rests on that moving equilibrium.

Power + Feedback

For Power to sustain itself, it also needs to be wary of the ripples of its actions today. Why today more than yesterday ? Because mortgaging the future today has heavier consequences than it had in the past. The US and the UN can't over-react to Syria's misbehavior. They have to show some kind of mercy and understanding. Nobody wants to dig out the Western countries colonialist reputation that the Iraki episode forged. Rome could over-react to one of its regions' uprising and crush it swiftly. People would forget promptly and even if they didn't, they didn't have the power to react, so risking the future wasn't that big of a gamble. But today, remembrance mechanisms are becoming more effective. Many say excessive information is leading us to becoming more forgetful but major players' mistakes remain as more indelible stains today than they did in the past. They become a perpetual part of their identity.

It was Max Weber who talked about the State's legitimate right to exercise violence. In many ways, his conception of the state reflects Machiavelli's pragmatism as the latter also describes the necessity of using force in some cases. For both, feedback and remembrance weren't really issues. In "The Prince" Machiavelli advises to finish off all those who would be likely to rise later on in a conquered state. But just as a website can't be shut down today, a government simply can't finish off the enemy. The playground is way too subtle now and the riposting powers too dispersed. Government need to be ever more careful of feedback. But that doesn't mean they can't use it to their advantage.

The feedback loop is an amazing beast. Among other things, it contributes to what economists call The tinker bell effect (or the Dunning Kruger effect) : you can fly, but only if you believe you can fly. In one of his posts, Krugman describes it in an interesting way, while weighing in on a debate between two other economists :

OK, I have to weigh in briefly on this debate between Mark Thoma and Scott Sumner. Mark is being too gentle here: on this issue, Scott is just wrong — actually wrong on two levels. First, he writes that : "But here’s the bigger flaw with the whole expectations trap argument. People think it applies to monetary policy, but they forget it applies equally to fiscal policy. (Indeed I never realized this until today.) Here’s why. Krugman’s model relies on rational expectations, indeed you can’t get the expectations trap without ratex. But if you have ratex in your model, then no policy can work unless it is expected to work."

What Scott is suggesting is that all macro policy, both monetary and fiscal, is subject to what we might call the Tinkerbell Principle: you can fly, but only if you believe you can fly. But this isn't even true about monetary policy, unless you’re at the zero lower bound. Under normal circumstances, an open-market operation will reduce short-term interest rates, regardless of what the market believes. It’s only when you’re up against the lower bound that increasing the current monetary base does nothing, so an open-market operation matters only if people believe it signals higher inflation later.

In this case, the debate gravitates around monetary policy and how one can get out of the liquidity trap (the one Japan is stuck in and the one economists thought the US was heading towards). But the Tinker Bell effect is very much applicable in other economic situations. We used to say that a third way to reboot the economy, aside the fiscal and monetary techniques the government could employ, is the media reboot : During a crisis, use ads and commercials to give people the impression that everything's OK ("10% discount on all summer tops", "Brand new collection at GAP", "Leave for the Bahamas this summer", "The Dark Knight Rises is an all-time box-office hit"). Spread the joy and people will eventually believe the crisis is over. Everything indicates people are just fine, spending their money happily. Maybe that's how the US dug its way out of its last bust. Fundamentals aren't that shiny.

The Dark Side of Power

And here I'm not talking about Dark Vader or any obscure dictator but rather about the unexplored side of power. One we might be tinkering with now. Today, politicians need to act as :

• Global Vendors, getting on their hands and knees to attract foreign capital
• Local Brokers, catering to their citizens' demands and taking decisions carefully, constantly watching out for feedback

So in a way, being so dependent on others' actions, they're powerless ! But then again, this is what power or rather Power 2.0 really is. It's all about Mediation. Being the perfect middle man. For in an age where Oloptism (The power of collective intelligence) is rising, that is where you want to be to be able to leverage it. Governments need to consider the possibility that a Supra-democracy might rise soon. Many realize that if Internet users decide to vote on launching a satellite in outer space and succeed, the satellite will get funding (Kick-starter ...), get built and launched (maybe by private space companies looking for exposure). And all this, without states having any word to say in all the process.

It goes on to remind me of Eric Van Der Broeke's idea of an atomic fractional production society where small workers make big things happen and where big companies become too heavy, too slow, too big to ... survive. In this vision, co-working spaces would become collision spaces where ideas would meet and mate : The offline equivalent of internet's forums. In other words, what the Internet did to information, e-working and co-working would do to work : Atomize it, fraction it, crowd-source it. Again, this stems from a proven rationale :

• Gutenberg's breakthrough was a drop in the price of printing, see what happened to books
• The internet revolution is a drop in the price of information, see what happened to information and the people living off of its asymmetries
• The work revolution is due to a drop in the price of working tools and working places, a drop in the price of capital (Considering that being able to work = work place + work tools)

It's about scope now not scale, as this Al Jazeera opinion piece points out :

Peer production methodologies are based on the exact opposite tenets. Peer production communities believe that knowledge is a commons, for all to share. Therefore, no innovation can be withheld from the human population as a whole. In fact, withholding a life-saving or world-saving innovation is seen as distinctly unethical. Peer production designs for distribution, inclusion and small-scale fabrication. Planned obsolescence - which is a feature and not a bug, of the current system - is totally alien to peer production logic. In other words, sustainability is a feature of open design communities, not a bug. So what are the economies of scope of this new age? They come in two flavors: the mutualising of knowledge and the mutualising of tangible resources.

In other words, sharing is a viral virus that's conquered us all now. Maybe it's become a need or maybe it's simply been fleshed out thanks to new technologies. Whichever, sharing will reach a new level and when it does, expect the world to look very different :

1. Informational asymmetries are being broken
2. Hence, Big Brother needs to get Bigger to preserve that asymmetry
3. Only more information does not enable a bigger insight into the future and hence a more sustainable power
4. Power sustainability = Power Infrastructure + Social Cohesion
5. Social cohesion, in a transparent environment, entails giving out more power to citizens
6. Consequently, the best way to remain relevant is to leverage that growing power [Big Society]
7. Because of the growing impact of feedback, traditional power holders are forced to become mere mediators
8. Citizens' newly acquired abilities are changing the way they act our citizenship out
9. Sharing is moving from a trend to an inner feature of the rising system
10. Therefore, Power 2.0 will stem from dispersed sources

I'd love to hear what you think about all that. Sharing is sexy, share your opinion :)

How you can still be of use

You get on your browser everyday and go through the usual pages. It's as if that same stroll you take to work, had found its equivalent in your digital life : Google news, Facebook, e-mail. Stroll done. And you wonder where in that settling routine could inspiration ever fit ? Does it even have a place in that life format ? And the answer is neither no nor yes of course. The answer is that it's up to us to design our digital and real lives to squeeze out inspiration.

Surf

And in this design, serendipity is key obviously. I've written in the past about how it was the first step towards inspiration, the start of the process that leads to self-organization. It is beneficial to see a whole lot before you converge towards what interests you. Yes ! I am inviting you to surf the web with no particular goal. Head tow wordpress.com's freshly squeezed section, click on anything, and read : The Portland cooking mom who found relief in baking cookies or the political science student who thinks China's foreign policy isn't that absurd. Read the movie aficionado's latest review or the amateur poet's latest attempt. Too often we say the Internet's beauty is its diversity, we rarely experience it however and too often head too quickly to our centers of interest.

Surf aimlessly yes, but not all the time. Give it a window during your day. Too much and you'll sink. See it as a long full breathe of fresh air. The moment you feel you're full, exhale and move on. Unconstrained surfing might be the best manifestation of the Internet's darkest side : a time-munching beast. That's why another step needs to be included in our design.

Focus

I've hinted to the power of focus already. Brian Knutson summarizes this trend beautifully in The Edge's "Is the Internet changing the way you think ?":

I suspect I am not the sole victim of Internet-induced "present self bias." Indeed, Web-based future self prostheses have begun to emerge, including software that tracks time off task and intervenes (ranging from reminders to blocking access to shutting programs down). Watching my own and others' present versus future self struggles, I worry that the Internet may impose a "survival of the focused," in which individuals gifted with some natural capacity to stay on target or who are hopped up on enough stimulants forge ahead, while the rest of us flail helplessly in some web-based attentional vortex. All of this makes me wonder whether I can trust my selves on the Internet. Or do I need to take more draconian measures and for instance, leave my computer at home, chain myself to a coffeehouse table, and draft longhand? At least in the case of this confessional, the future self's forceful but unsubtle tactics prevailed.

Firms are hiring individuals that are able to FOCUS today. Your knowledge is not crucial. It is that available that acquiring it has become that much easier. So it's all about what you can do with what you know not what you know. And focus is instrumental in the process. The "survival of the focused" isn't a euphemism. It shouldn't even come as a surprise. It's probably been the case during the whole story of our species. The fittest wouldn't have made it if they weren't focused. They would've missed way too many opportunities to get that antelope in the Savannah.

Focus sifts through the information found and narrows down to the most essential bits based on interests and goals. Whether focus is a sustained, constant state or an ability occurring in specific situations is a solved question : You cannot focus with the same intensity all the time. Focus needs to be perceived as a saw that needs to be sharpened quite regularly. So Focus needs to be leveraged at a specific time. More specifically, at a transitional moment, the one that takes you from serendipitous surfing to actual creation.

Curate

Curate sounds a bit like create. And that's nice and nifty because curation is very much a form of creation. It's a focused, smart selection of what's out there. And creation is also a choice among many possible paths. Now, I wouldn't consider indexing a form of curation. It really is at the opposite end of the spectrum. Index driven discovery, meaning going through a list of all that's available, has nothing to do with trusting a curator with what you're about to discover. And trusting a curator is what you're doing when you pay for a museum or a festival ticket. You're hoping the selection is smart, coherent and interesting. Curation propelled discovery is bound to be different from algorithm based discovery. It is more meta, one level above. Finding the best curators should be a side challenge of the mindless surfing described above. They are preferred gateways to quality content.

And this is not about serendipity versus search engines become more personal and showing you only what you want to see. Here, it is not as much a problem of personalization as it is a problem of neighboring information. Google organizes the world's information but does so in a very particular way. One where the information showing near your results is very near, subject-wise, from what you were searching for. When you're on a blog, a curator's page really, neighboring information is also near to the subject you were tracking but much less so. The way our and a curator's interests organize is by branching out into several fields. It's not laser focused, like a search engine's results.

So the idea here is : Once you're done surfing along with no particular focus, you then gather your interests and goals and focus on contextualizing the information and curating it. And yes, there is a balance to strike between the laser-focused and the somewhat serendipitous. What am I asking you for here ? I'm asking you to become a curator. In many ways, you're already there : The links you share on your Facebook wall are a form of curation.

In a way, Facebook itself has developed a new way to flesh out information. One could call it : Network-induced curation. That is the real value of the Facebook feed. Facebook charges corporate clients you liked-one-time big time to display impressions of their page in your news feed. It's become an adage that there's plenty of real value in the Facebook ecosystem but Facebook's real worth is in the first page it displays when you log in : Your news feed. What we're seeing here is the emergence of a new platform. A much more democratic one.

The same thing happened to information (Wordpress is a platform for information curators), music (Squirrel, Tuneln and YouTube which is a platform for curated playlists among other things),  video (ShowYou, Chill) news (Flipboard, Feedly, Zite, Pulse, News360 are curation platforms for blogs and news agencies alike). Resistance was met obviously : Steve Rubel wrote about how news brands were confronting the rise of mobile curation apps. The Facebook feed democratizes the process to an even larger degree. Everyone is throwing his video, audio, news, and information selection at everyone. Hence here's the take from this : Surf, focus, curate. People are listening. In a way, they're forced to. So deliver, and deliver well.

The growing power of Rotten Tomatoes

If there's one thing I learned in the data world, it's to be wary of conclusions based on a single data point. But the one I'm choosing today is compelling enough to illustrate my case :

While a movie with a given number of negative reviews used to lose 30% on average of its initial audience one week later, some 20 years ago, it loses about 50% of that number on average today

Rotten tomatoes are getting stinkier. Or in another terms : Word of mouth is becoming more effective. Whether marketing is still of any use, there is no doubt. But whether it is still as capable, I doubt it. Auto-marketing - a product markets itself - is the new norm. No wonder why build quality and design are on the rise : If marketing used to act as the blur on the showcase window, it just got wiped off but the speed of reach of the feedback of the many. To draw a comparison : We used to live in a valley from the top of which some druid would shout what he saw on the other side. Now we're all in an echo room ... on the top of the valley. Bye Bye druid

We can hear you now

So it comes as no surprise that Google bought Fflix.com for $10M : a start-up that was aggregating tweets about movies to semantically draw a top 10 of newly released movies, hence doing rottentomatoes.com's work automatically. The famous HP Labs paper "Predicting the Future With Social Media" by Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman, analyzed 2.89 million tweets from 1.2 million users referencing 24 movies released over a three month period. Here's a break-down of the results :

The study looked at the pre-launch buzz such as the release of trailers, it found:

• Very few retweets because "people tend to describe their own expectations and experiences, which are not necessarily propaganda."
• URLs in the pre-release tweets didn't seem to have much effect on popularity of the movie, a surprising discovery since pre-launch publicity should contribute to success in the box office.

The study then looked at the first week of release and found a high correlation between the rate of pre-launch tweeting and the success of the opening weekend.

Hollywood understands this. It is getting harder and harder to fool people and one day marketing will be unable to out-voice the echo room. In his 9th request to start-ups, Paul Graham asks the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to "Kill Hollywood" saying this about Hollywood's health :

The main reason we want to fund such startups [the one that'll go after Hollywood] is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying [Hollywood supported SOPA - the anti-Internet bill]. They must be dying if they're resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn't stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it's only when he's beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.

Killing Hollywood

So how do you kill Hollywood ? You beat it. On every possible front you can imagine. Most importantly though, you beat it at its own game, on its own field : Content. And more precisely : Quality content curation since Hollywood, at the end of the day, is like an excellent museum curator choosing the best for you to view and putting up the right teams to deliver it. Graham goes on to write, and this is worth a read for any entrepreneur :

How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What's going to kill movies and TV is what's already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

There will be several answers, ranging from new ways to produce and distribute shows, through new media (e.g. games) that look a lot like shows but are more interactive, to things (e.g. social sites and apps) that have little in common with movies and TV except competing with them for finite audience attention. Some of the best ideas may initially look like they're serving the movie and TV industries. Microsoft seemed like a technology supplier to IBM before eating their lunch, and Google did the same thing to Yahoo.

It would be great if what people did instead of watching shows was exercise more and spend more time with their friends and families. Maybe they will. All other things being equal, we'd prefer to hear about ideas like that. But all other things are decidedly not equal. Whatever people are going to do for fun in 20 years is probably predetermined. Winning is more a matter of discovering it than making it happen. In this respect at least, you can't push history off its course. You can, however, accelerate it.

What's the most entertaining thing you can build?

One great example of the disruption of the Movie Industry is "Iron Sky" and now "Artemis Eternal" and "The Cosmonaut". These are crowd-funded movies where fans suggested ideas for the script. That's huge ! "Iron Sky" wasn' t a pure success and the script was criticized as being of B-movie quality but it was fan-produced. People made their movie and then went to the cinema to watch it !

Hacking Perception / #Step 1 / The OMG cocktail

There is a scary mix in the works and be sure it'll implode in the face of those who don't leverage it of ignore it. It's not only the result of the what tech is enabling but really the synergy between what is buried inside us and these newly acquired abilities. So for better or worse, here's, exclusively for your hungry eyes, the OMG cocktail :

• The power of the benchmark : We always react relative to a consensus. This is very quantifiable in financial markets : The discrepancy between reality and expectations has a direct impact on the immediate future performance of a given stock. Hence, one should not look at whether a news is good or bad, rather at how it stakes up relative to the consensus. A bad news that is not as bad as expected will actually cause the stock price to increase for example. The benchmark is everything : It is the anchor, the reference, the masses' lighthouse. Now, why are the markets becoming more volatile nowadays ? Because more and more people have access to the markets and because money is able to move more quickly. These are two main ingredients of the OMG cocktail : Speed + Mobs.

• The power of deception : Nelson and Tsay, also Black in 1996, showed how volatility is higher after a fall than after a rise in the price of a stock. This is what you would call a skew in perception. This echoes another behavioral statement saying that the dis-utility of a loss is twice higher than the utility of a gain, in absolute terms. In other terms, the sentiment following a loss is stronger, in absolute value, than the one following a gain. Again : The intensity of your sadness when you lose a $1000 is bigger than intensity of your joy when you win a $1000. And this might also remind marketers of the fact that an unhappy customer will communicate his discontent to much more people than a happy one. That's probably why Facebook hasn't put a dislike button. Imagine a dislike button on a brand's page if it was dealing with activists. it would explode under pressure. The downward curve is much steeper than the upward one. Look at YouTube. The reason why brands apprehend it is because discontent is clear. The big thumb down is right there for everybody to click. No need to g through the comments.

• The power of omission : But though there are more people on the markets, that doesn't mean they are more efficient. Why ? Because there is much more information than can be processed. The exponentiation of information quantity is simply unprecedented and should humble even the largest hedge funds' research labs. Behavioral finance shows we never incorporate all available information. We are not able to. So in a word where it is becoming more abundant, we can expect more and more pricing imprecision. This means more and more under-pricing - and hence more arbitrage opportunities - but also more over-pricing, potential bubbles and crisis.

• The power of form : Funny how a rebate on your mobile is better than a price reduction, even if you end up saving the same sum. Same for financial markets : Announcing a one cent per share gain is more likely than announcing a loss of one cent per share. The latter pervades a negativity the company will prefer to avoid, though in both cases, one cent is just as inconsequential. But words have their weight. Form has its weight. And perception is a very subtle thing to handle.

• The power of repetition : Mistaking repetition for truth, as Daniel Haun, writes is inherent to all of us. It's called the illusion of truth effect. Obviously, this is great when we need to learn things. But when it comes to false news and information, it can be disastrous. I believe in the necessity of a trauma-based approach to economics for example. Repetition is the reason why sometimes the perception of negativity is lasting, even at the scale of a population : The reason why Germans are so reluctant to European interest rate decreases is probably because of the the German hyperinflation trauma which makes them very sensitive to everything relating to inflation. They've heard the story so many times, it seems meddling with it would be the worst decision.

• The power of real-time : The Speed + Mobs equation presented above is the idea of one Edge writer : Alan Alda. Another author also points out that it's much more than the quantity of information. Encyclopedia's have always been there. It's about availability and ease of access. That's the real big leap here. And that is real-time. Le Web's theme for this year was "Faster than real-time" and as you might expect the only way to achieve this is to predict your behavior. To know what you'll want before you want it. You got to a new city and haven't booked an hotel. The second you turn to your phone, you have a list of suggestions.

• The power of the very few : A study based on the US budget decision episode where the Tea Party ended up having the upper hand, showed that all you need is 10%. A solid stubborn 10% can convert a whole crowd. But just keep at it and you'll shift the masses' opinion. This is one of the reason's that makes Reverse marketing so effective as in the example of the "Save the Troy Library" campaign below

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw3zNNO5gX0]

Now if you look back at all the ingredients of the OMG cocktail, you can see that every single determinant of the perception funnel is :

1. Subject to bias
2. Being empowered today

Sketched up, it looks like this :

Hacking Perception / #Step 2 / Overcoming the Hollywood Syndrom

What Hollywood's demise goes on to show however is not only that incumbents will systematically hold on to their forts but rather that industries, companies, individuals who don't listen and act upon feedback are quintessentially doomed. And feedback, which is very dependent upon perception. So since the latter is changing, as we've shown, the former is bound to.

Hence the necessity and the need for experimental marketing. Because of the punctual and reactive nature of social media, people rarely come up with "Red Bull is fun" spontaneously. Their posts and statuses are usually reactions. In this case, one they had after seeing a Red Bull event. So the rationale here is to launch experimental campaigns and monitor and observe reactions through social media. This is one of the best implementations of Nano-economics. Natural-language processing and sentiment analysis  would obviously be part of the equation so it's much more about spotting the trend than understanding what, say, 71% means compared to 89%. It's dynamic not static.

And the idea here is that the tools aren't lacking to make real-time marketing monitoring work. Since Marketing is a budget-heavy department, better be sure it's effective :

• Mobile potential : Today, apps are an efficient data yielding platform, making Marketing accountability much more feasible
• Indicator innovation : Interesting indicators such as Milward Brown's BrandZ study are becoming more relevant. Brown calculates earnings attributable to a brand by taking tangible asset value off a brand's value - how much of the earnings can be attributed to a close bond with its customers and growth potential for the brand-driven earnings
• New platforms : On the other hand, social media analytics companies - such as Lythium, Radian 6, Sysomos, Trendr, Viral heat, Visible Technologies, Crimson Hexagon - are helping clients figure out what's being said about them on the social web
• Enhanced targeting : Twitter's promoted accounts (now being used for e.g. by McDonald Canada) enables advertisers to reach users in particular metropolitan markets. This, in turn, allows to narrow down effectiveness to given marketing areas

One good example here is Microsoft surprisingly who uses Crimson Hexagon's services and several others of the innovations listed above. The old firm has gone from disappointing and boring to overwhelming, focusing on big flashy innovation and huge leaps. When organizations listen and act upon feedback, leveraging the subtleties of perception, they usually win. Why care about this marketing thing ? Advertisers own one third of the web. If they "get" you, you may finally get to enjoy these 33,3% of the web.

Serendipity, Self-organization, Diablo 3 and #Occupy Churches

This has been trotting in my mind now for some time. Is there a track that leads from serendipity, useful yet complete randomness in other terms, to self-organization, and therefore actual structure. What I'm saying here is that chaos, in its essence, its DNA, has a way to reach order. I've always described this process as being the sum of the Triple-P path Dee Hock talks about : Purpose, People, Principles. I believe there's a short walk between Chaos and Purpose, rightly populated by serendipity. The rationale here though, since self-organization occurs within ... organizations, groups is that serendipity is also a group mechanism to reach purpose.

How so ? And why the fascination here ? 3 is a magic number :

1. Serendipity entails will and drive
2. Serendipity means exposure to the different and the foreign
3. Serendipity delivers feedback efficiently

#2 is in no way controversial  /  #1 is mildly so  /  #3 definitely is

1. The first point stems from the natural realization that all of this, for us at least, started in the African Savannah. I've already blogged about the Move, Meet, Mate trio. The tribes that didn't move throughout the Savannah, the natural travelers, didn't end up meeting any new mates, and eventually enriching their own genome through reproduction or mating. These aren't here today to tell their story. What comes before the essential Move part however is what interests me here. Why would someone move in the first place ? Leave their comfort zone ? What gets you out of your house ? On the negative side : Boredom, solitude, fear of isolation. On the positive side : Curiosity, lust. On the negative side, you're escaping something. On the positive side, you're in for a conquest. And that is the kind of feeling that fuels the longest strolls and excursions. Somewhere, up there in your mind, curiosity, lust - in a word desiring the unknown - tinkers with your will and drive. That mysterious void sucks you in. And you jump willingly ... Welcome to the doors of the kingdom of Serendipe
2. So serendipity means you already have what it takes to get there : To the meet and mate part. Meet is the exposure to the different and the foreign. In a way, it's the very accomplishment of serendipity.
3. And what about feedback ? How does serendipity make way for the mechanism that enhances our organizations and ensures their evolution ? Well, here's where another reflection kicks in : I see swarm theory as an illustration of chaos theory. Understand chaos theory as the butterfly effect and the impossibility of predicting the outcome of a system sensitive to initial conditions (one example is the weather, sensitive to the flap of the wings of the smallest butterfly). Understand swarm theory as the wisdom of the crowd (swarms of individually stupid ants). What links both ? Each member of the swarm is somewhat predictable. The swarm isn't. It has proven to be hugely adapting and infinitely modular. It is chaos ... deterministic but organized and damn efficient. Feedback definitely helps the transition from a bunch of stupid ants to an organized group. But does serendipity really allow feedback ? Serendipity is bumping into useful stuff while wandering aimlessly ... Stupid creatures wander aimlessly. Then they bump into other stupid creatures that tells them, using, say, pheromones, that the food that'll allow them to survive, is right behind that corner there

Did you read that last sentence ? Do you see where I'm getting at ? Serendipity is not a cheerful blessing for the mindless entities. It's their very way of living, their Modus Operandi. Serendipity is the OS of the creatures that have made it this far. Wow !

So starting from the end : Self-organization does not occur if members and their ideas and actions don't mate. That does'nt happen if they don't meet. And this certianly wouldn't occur if they didn't move in the first place. So it's move, meet, mate. Put in an equation : Motion + Choc = Life. Motion is movement, choc is meeting and life is mating. Everything about evolution has made sure we move, meet and mate. As TED's Daniel Wolpert puts it, everything in our organism is there to allow movement. The story of evolution is one that aims at guaranteeing movement and collision - that's the attraction part of love in Helen Fisher's TED talk - in order for us to mate. The move, meet, mate trio mirrors Fisher's trio : Sexual attractiveness, romantic love, attachment.

 

Figure 1

This Harvard Business Review article illustrates it beautifully too : What to do when you don't know what to do ? Listen to your most essential reflex : Move. Just move. But we're not only looking at the scale of the individual. We're taking groups into consideration here. And more and more, Serendipity is looking like the first step towards self-organization today. Where ? Mainly in the design field. A fun and chaotic environment like the one Willis Whitney created in GE's R&D offices is one that does not allow for isolation. That's certainly where the magic of open spaces and co-working spaces comes from : Collision. Serendipity raises the odds of people colliding. Collision itself, then, raises the odds of serendipity and ultimately the generation of purpose in a group, the meeting of people, the elaboration of principles and the continual move from inspiration to organization to action. All is said. And a door opens. Now that we got a glimpse at the magic formula serendipity fuels, can we engineer it just as Willis Whitney did ?

Online self-organization - Diablo 3 Case Study

We know today the Web makes it possible. It allows for a continuous move/meet/mate dynamic. And one thing Nano-economics tries to do actually is leverage the Web as a laboratory for social experiments. Ideally now, one would port successful online models to reality as we'll tackle later on in this article. Imagine that ! The Web becoming an actionable laboratory for the world ! In an article on NPR recently, one could read :

Second life and its souped-up successors will become laboratories of sociology, experimental psychology, and their successor disciplines yet to be invented and named. Whole economies, ecologies, and perhaps personalities will exist nowhere other than in virtual space

So imagine two things, one being the inverse of the other :

1. Imagine how video games could use behavioral economics to determine the right amount of pain a player would be satisfied with : How much pain and damage does a player need to inflict to the enemy before he's satisfied and contempt enough to give the final blow with a smile ? This can be studied across gender, age and ethnicity, but it can also be based on the type of character involved in the game itself : Is a player as satisfied after hitting an elf or a sorcerer 5 times and killing them or does each of them need to be hit a specific and distinct number of times before he's satisfied ?
2. Imagine now how video games dynamic could be of use for real-life planning. The way users organize on Diablo 3 and World of Warcraft is very revealing. The optimal number of members in a guild could be of use in studying the relevance of the Dunbar number in focused collaborations.

Further from games, studying all social networks in which a given Internet user is involved can also help us tackle the Dunbar number. What if we can actually manage many 150-person networks, only at different moments in time ? This would go on to show how important filters are in our social interactions, how we instinctively filter the many types of lives and circles we have. Real-life social network design could benefit directly from online social network data collections.

So the reason why Chatroulette failed for example is probably the lack of filters. But one might ask whether Chatroulette, and the recent Airtime.com, aren't actually very serendipitous ! Only think about it : The Chatroulette experience goes on to prove that not giving a damn about users' social filters ends up turning them off. Social serendipity is ... a very personal thing ! It needs to be pre-calibrated. Paradoxical no ? Not really. Filters are there to ensure the right information is delivered. So we don't have to do it ourselves. Filters have made the Internet into the useful tool it is today.

Why mention this however when I've spent an hour saying serendipity is the best thing there is. Filters are the enemies of serendipity aren't they ? Well this leads me to talk about nudges. You may have heard about Thaler's book Nudge. It says a lot about what we are at the end of the day. We are here to move as we've said earlier and taking Thaler's contribution into consideration, a simple nudge is enough to make us move ... a lot. As if we've evolved to be these very unstable creatures, in a constant de-equilibrium, ready to roll whenever we're touched. So if serendipity is our OS and movement our gift and curse, maybe our evolved minds, which really are information filters at the end of the day, are here to make sure we do move, yes, but in the direction we find best.

Reverse - Engineering Self-Organization Offline - Start with Serendipity, #occupy Churches

Going back to the great Willis Whitney example, Ethan Zuckerman puts it wonderfully in his "My heart's in Accra" speech :

Louis Pasteur observed, “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.” Merton believed that serendipity emerged both from a prepared mind and from circumstances and structures conducive to discovery. In “The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity”, he and Barber explore discovery in a General Electric laboratory under the leadership of Willis Whitney, who encouraged a work environment that focused as much on fun as it did on discovery. A healthy blend of anarchy and structure was necessary for discovery, and over-planning was anathema as “the policy of leaving nothing to chance is inherently doomed by failure.”

Whitney tried to engineer Serendipity, knowing that it would lead to more innovative findings or at least to more interesting encounters for each of the lab's members. And cities and laboratories are not that different. By favoring serendipity, one could ultimately yield self-organization. Wait a second here. You're saying serendipity, anarchy, leads to structure and self-organization. Yes. I'm saying you have to start somewhere and the best place is actually the other extreme of the spectrum. And this, I believe, was the vision behind David Cameron's Big Society. Many criticize it saying it's a shameless way for the government to withdraw from public life and transfer the weight of major projects to smaller communities. And it may very well be. What is certain though is that the idea is very compelling. In a talk at the RSA, several speakers speak about that vision.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2t9T7I9NZw&feature=player_embedded]

 Here's a primer :

The utopian Big Society vision now needs to take concrete form, but where will the promised civic flourishing actually take place? What kind of buildings do its builders need? What meeting places, halls or facilities strengthen social cohesion and promote enterprise? In the age of dynamic networks and electronic exchange, is the social role of architecture and the built environment diminished? Does the Big Society need buildings at all? Using urban and rural case studies from the Churches Conservation Trust's Regeneration Task Force, the Trust's Chair, Loyd Grossman, argues that historic churches are the perfect place for the Big Society to meet: liminal, iconic and at the heart of our cities, towns and villages.

Did you read that ? Churches ! Isn't that smart ? Churches are already community spaces and 80% of the week, they're empty ! So, why not use them ? Why not #occupy churches ? They'd become the hubs of the new society. The places where the hive would move to, meet and ... well, mate. At least the ideas. For so long, city designers have tried to create spaces to enable people to meet more. And friction is good here. Friction means collision. You don't want a city designed in a way that doesn't allow people to meet. One full of highways for example (Dubaï's a bit like that). Zuckerman says :

Jacobs’s [Jane Jacobs] vision of a livable city has been a major influence on urban design since the early 1980s, with the rise of “New Urbanism” and the walkable cities movement. These cities – and Vancouver, where we’re having this conference is a prominent example of one – tend to favor public transit over private automobiles, and create spaces that encourage people to interact and mix, in mixed-use neighborhoods and pedestrian-friendly shopping streets. As urban planner David Walters observes, they’re designed to help individuals linger and mix: “Casual encounters in shared spaces are the heart of community life, and if urban spaces are poorly designed, people will hurry through them as quickly as possible.”

I think the key word here is mixed-use. Just as the labs that enable serendipity best are the ones with scientists from different, mixed backgrounds, the neighborhoods that yield the most serendipity are also mixed use. They're populated by residences, commerce, schools ... Now is that enough data and information to kick-start a serendipitous city ? Probably not. I keep being reminded of Martin Nowak's super-cooperators. Cooperation is a platform of our evolution. It is downright essential and we've grown around that ability to cooperate. So this is something we need to consider in the design we're trying to unlock - the one that'll characterize the ultimate city and enable optimal self-organization. Cooperation both structures our relationships and gets shaped by them. At its core, it is driven by how and how often we collide.

Online to offline - Bridging experiences

Going back to the online self-organization case study above, I am reminded of software-based attempts at engineering self-organization and this excerpt of an article from the Economist :

Could software-based mediation spread from divorce settlements and utility pricing to resolving political and military disputes? Game theorists, who consider all these to be variations of the same kind of problem, have developed an intriguing conceptual model of war. The “principle of convergence”, as it is known, holds that armed conflict is, in essence, an information-gathering exercise. Belligerents fight to determine the military strength and political resolve of their opponents; when all sides have “converged” on accurate and identical assessments, a surrender or peace deal can be hammered out. Each belligerent has a strong motivation to hit the enemy hard to show that it values victory very highly. Such a model might be said to reflect poorly on human nature. But some game theorists believe that the model could be harnessed to make diplomatic negotiations a more viable substitute for armed conflict.

Collision is and has always been a way for us to gather information. In Figure 1 up there with plenty of arrows, information is probably the hidden red thread. Isn't it always the case ? And :

• Collision leads to information
• Information enriches feedback
• Feedback enhances structure and organization

One initiative of the Big Society is actually to build interest graphs in society. Structures that are beyond ethnic and socio-economic graphs. And using churches might or might not be the vector of such an advance but the idea is to create a new platform for collaboration, self-organization and social innovation. The internet is full of interest graphs. Rachel Botsman explains how the internet is making total strangers share and in a way that is an example of successful collaboration at a level very remote from any ethnic or socio-economic affinities. The question is whether efficient city design can port these interest graphs into reality and make offline a realm for online's utopia.

Wait a second. Did I write Utopia. I just got a couch request from a traveler on couch-surfing. So here's to online to offline shift. Wait and see. Trust Serendipity. It's all in the works.

What is left to invent ?

You've been in one of these discussions where you marvel with a friend at all these new start-ups and discuss their founders' incredible stories. Then suddenly realize you're roughly the same age as they are and start throwing out ideas, convinced you too just might be able to pull off the next big thing. "If they did it, why can't we ?" But the ideas narrow down and the next billion dollar business always seems to already have been invented. That's when you decide to go for a despair-sinking drink because, you know, really : "What's left to invent ?"

I've grown fond of the word 'Disrupt' lately, probably because of reading Techcrunch so often. It feels so powerful : It's both a welcome and an un-welcome questionning of the old rotten status-quo. A breath of fresh air for the ones depending on a given industry's products and services and a shivering cold down the back of the neck of those holding the traditionnal reins. What's left to invent ? Probably nothing. But more because nothing has ever been invented really. Everything is a re-invention. Just  as there are no original ideas, there are no inventions in this world. Yes. Everything is a re-mix. So what's left to disrupt ? And here the answer is every effing thing you can possibly think off. Boundaries ? Your imagination and the Unrestfulness of your soul. But here's a list to inspire you anyways :

• Education : Where are personalized tests and courses ? Customization is the big new feature in every software we've seen, yet it is lagging in the one field where unified content doesn't make sense. We recognize two iphone users won't want the same background but have trouble establishing the necessity for differenciated learning material ! The potential disuptor will start by taking the classroom to the cloud, implement videos so that every student can lear at his own pace and most importantly, personalized learning tracks with curated videos for inspiration at every new node or "level up" in the track. That way, students can better decide which track they want to follow. Inspiration-powered education, imagine that !
• The News : Again ? Physical newspapers already lost their readers, what more do you want ? Well, I'm after the guts of the industry. Did you know that some journalists still waste time with meanial tasks such as collecting hyperlocal news (John Smith died in XX neighborhood 2 days ago, WW church is organizing an expo on thursday ...). This should be transfered to everyday people and local communities (churches, associations …). The crowd can take care of that. Also, adaptive evolving news hasn't taken its toll yet. Everything you read should include at some point a variant of the like / unlike buttons : but not for sharing. Rather for the software to remember and learn from your preference in order to better target your taste.
• Payments : A lot is being done. From Square to NFC to fingerpint based payments (really). But check out seconds and its founder's recent article in Techcrunch. Towards the end, he talks about payment being linked to location and specific merchants to such a point that it would appear as a button next to a restaurant's name for example when you search Google maps. Imagine the menu of the restaurant pops out on the map, imagien you choose your favorite, pay, and go collect your order. Appetude is halfway there, foodspotting should think about it. Integration with Google maps should be a no-brainer.
• Your wallet : Why do we still carry wallets ? Seriously. Isn't 2012 the future yet ? Loyalty cards, credit cards, membership cards. Every card type is a billion dollar business to conquer. Check out all the credit-card linked apps out there.

• Your calendar : Your calendar is empty and boring and missing all the events happening now and here, just near you ! Imagine an app delivering integrating personalized or/and curated nearby events into your calendar.
• E-mail : I don't even want to get started. The most time-consuming human invention needs a overhaul.
• The TV :  At this point, TV is looking more and more like a bigger computer screen with a much less intuitive, right to the point UI. Google TV is a welcome revolution in that sense but it's still far from what it should be. Porting Android to yet another device is not the solution. The TV hardware in and by itself needs to be much more versatile. Actually, looking at Windows 8, the one place where this UX actually belongs is not my PC but rather the TV where the Desktop tile would stand for TV channels instead. I think Microsoft Smartglass is a step in the right direction towards the sound convergence of the 3 screens (Tablet/PC, phone, TV).
• TV content : Can you even imagine that broadcast TV and Youtube videos live in two separate worlds all because the TV in your living room is a stronghold of TV broadcasters. A device you don't really own and can't hack, though you paid for it ! I personally don't watch TV. I watch Yotube videos. What's truly relevant here though are : Curated channels (redux), Personalized channels (cull.tv). Yes, I believe curation still has a place in a world where personalizatin seems to be conquering everything. I see high-quality curation as a guarantee of serendipity. That's why I read Brain pickings.
• The Health Business : Transferable medical records, genome sequencing, personalized medication. Your doctor owns your data. Seriously. You can't move it from one to the other because it's on your doctors PC ! Doctors are much worse than Facebook in that sense since health data is much more vital to you.
• The Cell Carriers : The smartphones you have are computers, they aren’t phones. No need for cell networks, you just need the internet. You can text using whatsapp and the likes and call using Skype and its bretherens. The only time where you actually need a cell network is when you don’t have access to wi-fi. That’s ... what ? 30% of the time ? Is it worth paying 20 to 60 euros a month for that ? Wi-fi will end up being eveyrwhere one day. The day 4G is everywhere, there will be no need for the cell network. See these bars in the top right ? The'll disappear and just be replaced by a wi-fi signal. It's all you need anyway. Look up Fon and Republic Wireless.
• Scientific research : Yes, I mean science : Tubes and chemicals and stuff. A paper needs 12 months to be published. It is done only on a single medium. A researcher modelling a new protein has to describe it in written form when he could use a 3D interactive model to actually relay his idea. But he can’t because peer-reviewed research is not compatible with the best kind of medium. This is a perfect example of a sub-optimal process slowing down a whole field and hampering its adaption to new technology.

 

• Real-life Networking : I don't want to pass a physical business card anymore. Poor trees and poor wallet. I have a phone in my righ hand, why put it in my pocket to reach some physical cards when I can pass a digital version of all my contacts.
• Dating : Haven't been there but dating online still feels awkward. Something needs to be done towards making it more natural. We're laready friending people online, dating is the next step but still : It doesn't feel right for the moment.
• Weddings : Haven't been there yet but organizing tables, setting up an ugly website, calling people, making sure they mix an mingle, and enjoy their time, buy you gifts ... A paper-free wedding should be possible. Check out Appy couple
• Gifting : Both for sending a creative, thoughtful gift and coming up with the friend fund to finance one for a common buddy. Not on the high street is an interesting website for gift inspiration and apps such as Wrapp, Dropgifts and the gift project offer the possibility to gather funds and gift things among friends.
• Recruitment : Recruitment is sub-optimal too. Businessses just can't find
• Recommendations : Of what ? Of everything : travel, personnal finance ... Personnal cosultants in general are nowhere to be found when you need them and too expensive to afford when they're actually useful. Even descision making needs some diruption I'm not doing justice to each of these sections by listing them and their potential disruptions so briefly.

And the list goes on and on really. And all this is to answer the title of the post : What is left to invent ? What's not ? There is no final design, there is no final solution, everything is unstable, waiting to be re-imagined. By who ? By you. This is a democracy. The citizens are the users and they have a right of say and may in every business that affects them. You are a walking menace. Only voicing things out isn't bringing about any change.

Nietzsche in a way is behind the very concept of disruption. In "Thus Spake Zarathustra", the child is the last stage of a being's evolution. He starts off as a camel, enduring, taking in all the conventions and agreed-upon paradigms. Then he becomes a Lion. Courageous, insolent, ready to vanquish the dragon that ruled him and washed his mind. But he end up as a child. Because courage is not enough. You need a new eye to tackle things. A naive, intuitive way of looking at life. And just like a kid : scramble everyhting and start all over again.

Why we should keep fighting

Lately, I've been obsessing about what the next Twitter will look like. Even writing this poses some questions : Was Twitter the new new thing everybody jumped on ? The latest must-have fad ? Or did it capture a quintessnetial human need other services hadn't figured out hence attracting the crowd ? In other terms, did it appeal to our nature or to our superficial sheepish habits ? As always, it was probably both.

And the next Twitter will probably leverage both of these trends. Only it'll have to appeal to something more fundamental than our shortening 140-character long shortening attention span. What might that be ? Our belligerent souls. This is from a recent article in The Economist discussing advancements in game theory and software-based solutions the field has been developping :

Could software-based mediation spread from divorce settlements and utility pricing to resolving political and military disputes? Game theorists, who consider all these to be variations of the same kind of problem, have developed an intriguing conceptual model of war. The “principle of convergence”, as it is known, holds that armed conflict is, in essence, an information-gathering exercise. Belligerents fight to determine the military strength and political resolve of their opponents; when all sides have “converged” on accurate and identical assessments, a surrender or peace deal can be hammered out. Each belligerent has a strong motivation to hit the enemy hard to show that it values victory very highly. Such a model might be said to reflect poorly on human nature. But some game theorists believe that the model could be harnessed to make diplomatic negotiations a more viable substitute for armed conflict.

Just as direct reciprocity ("I'll scratch your back and you scratch mine") has helped us get through the first stages of our tribe-centered evolution, direct, proportional retaliation was a mechanism just as important in ensuring our survival ("an eye for an eye" or "hit me and expect me to hit you at least as hard"). And this come as no surprise since both are based on feedback. We are an empathetic species with mirror neurons ... mirroring what we see and whom we interact with.

So the recent non-controversial manifastation of that meaty desire for fights is, of course : the civilized debate. A fresh French website is actually trying to recreate Internet debate : Newsring.fr. And it is right in doing so, though I don't think it does it well : Internet debate is broken.  Look at blog comments, which are actually supposed to host Internet debates, they are linear and refutals are simple indents inside other commenter's posts. This is ridiculous and Nick Denton, who heads the blogging empire Gawker, is looking to disrupting it by turning commenters into debate curators. This is smart and better than what's been tried beofre i.e. the gamification of commenting through badges which doesn't draw the best commenters to the table.

In The Edge's "Is the Internet changing the way you think ?", Eric Drexler talks about the next Wikipedia and describes it as a debate arena. Why ? Because Wikipedia is incomplete : It shows evidence of presence and helps you confirmp what you've been thinking about. only it doesn't show you the anti-arguments. The potential balck swans that might contradict you. Only a debate can do that. Only a debate can bring out an evidence of absence. Only a debate arena can flesh out the black swans related to a given interrogation or issue. How deep and beautiful is that ? Debate is the soundest error-proof platform of intellectual evolution.

Beyond the civilized debate however, our belligerent souls often express themselves without being aimed at anybody, and without refuting any argument. Just by expressing an extreme opinion. Like a shout of anger, the warrior's rage morphed into a scream in the middle of the ancient savannah (... !). That is what the Amen app helps exert.

Techcrunch decribes Amen by writing :

Put simply, Amen is about finding the best of everything, often via arguments over the worst. [...] Here’s how it works : You fire up the app on the iPhone or web browser and say a person, place or thing is “the best” or “the worst” ever, like, the Best Dubstep track ever. Or perhaps, as actress Demi Moore (a beta user) puts it, “After Sex is the Best State For Amening Ever.” Hubbie Ashton Kutcher – an investor – “Led Zeppelin is the best rock band ever.” You can agree with this statement with an “Amen”. But with a “Hell no” you have to suggest an alternative answer. It’s a rigid structure, but you can post whatever you want.

Of course, Amen leverages a very simple aspect of our belligerent souls : Just like all of this universe's entities, we are one effing lazy species that'll always try to do the most with the least energy. So instead of refuting arguments, we'll just state our view of things aloud and in an extreme manner. We like simplicity + we like expressing our opinion : Welcome to Amen. Plus, Aknowledgement comes easier with extreme opinions. People nod more quickly when someone is confident about his opinion. Seems like a recipe for virality. Btw, the next illustration is such an easy way to illustrate what I just wrote (told you we were a lazy species).

Since the original form of debates were fights, at this point, many readers' thoughts might have wandered to the ultimate fight movie : Fight Club. But though I believe in the importance the movie's script gives to the revival of physicality and direct physical contact, this isn't where i'm getting at. Of course, at the heart of my argument is the fact that we are meat. "What what what ?" Stay with me. Yeap. We are meat. Touch your skin. You are, primarily a body. One always swimming in its thoughts, lost in its mind. But first and foremost, you are a body. Antonin Artaud tried to remind the French nation that fact decades ago. To no avail. We are lost in our minds. And by the way, this needs to be struck out of the Internet's to do list : a picture of Fight Club and Antonin Artaud side by side.

That's why we look for debates and fights, naturally. Somthing inside us tells us we need blood on our fists. I'm not joking. You've been there and you know it. And if you haven't, you lineage has been lucky to stay alive this long you gentle pacifist. May the world hold more people like you. Seriously. This changes nothing to the fact that at heart, we, as a species, are collevtivly, constantly, looking for a fight. Why are fights so important ? Evolution-wise they prove we deserve to survive ... Only if we win. So they force us to focus. Because the winner is never the strongest fellow, it's the guy who's mind and focus will snap last. And since it helps us focus : Fights allow us to become ourselves. Fight on !

Mathematcial Dots, Human Focus, Happiness ... and the next Twitter

I've always been amazed by dots. Actually by the dot. The mathematical conception of a dot. The "point" as the French put it. Can you imagine the dot ? Take your pen. Press it against a piece of paper. Here's your dot. But that thing is humongous. It's made up of billions of atoms. The abstract mathematical notion of a dot is so much more subtle and incredibly more elegant. It can hardly be fathomed. A dot is smaller than an atom actually, smaller than a gluon or any of these nanoscopic entities. But how much smaller ? Picture it. You have a blank space and somewhere there, a single trace of blackness. A single trace. One single trace. Not a dot more, not a dot less.

Isn't amazing that we use it to 'end' a sentence ? Why do we use a dot ? Wikipedia to the rescue !

The full stop symbol derives from Aristophanes of Byzantium who invented the system of punctuation where the height of placement of a dot on the line determined its meaning. The high dot (^.) was called a "periodos" and indicated a finished thought or sentence, the middle dot (·) was called a "kolon" and indicated part of a complete thought, while the low dot (.) was called a "telia" and also indicated part of a complete thought.

The position of the dot indicates the completeness of a thought ! Then how much more amazing is it that we use it to separate the whole from the part in mathematics : 1.2 ! Amazing ! Good thing my mother doesn't read this blog ! Dots are not the standard way to end a thought however. Aristophanes' reach was not that great :

In some Asian languages, notably Chinese and Japanese, a small circle is used instead of a solid dot: "。". Notably, in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao usage, the full stop is written at center height instead of on the line. In the Devanagari script, used to write Hindi, Sanskrit and some other Indian languages, a vertical line ("।") is used to mark the end of a sentence. In Hindi, it is known as poorna viraam (full stop). Some Indian languages also use the full stop, such as Marathi. In Tamil it is known as "Mutrupulli", which means End Dot. In Sinhala, it is known as kundaliya:"෴ " ((U+0DF4) symbol "full stop").Period were later introduced into Sinhala script after the introduction of paper due to the influence of Western languages. Urdu uses ("۔") symbol. In Thai, no symbol corresponding to the full stop is used as terminal punctuation. A sentence is written without spaces, and a space is typically used to mark the end of a clause or sentence.

Then why this obsession with dots ? The dot has no area, no volume, no thickness. And no perimeter. So there's no line limiting it. How amazing is that ! A dot is limitless nothing-ness ! It is all yet it is not. The ultimate contradiction, the two extremes of the known (and unknown) merging in a single entity yet just lying there, eternally escaping our grasp. A chimera that'll always be beyond our reach ! But you're waiting to read about the next Twitter right ? Well, it has a lot to do with the dot.

Look at your browser right now. How many tabs are open ? A lot. Maybe several windows with several tabs each. If not now, it's usually like this. Why so many tabs though ? Though you know that you're not giving full attention to each and sort of skimming through each. Why so many tabs ?

1. Because you can
2. Because you need to

As a species, choosing is not out main strenght. We have trouble settling actually. Both physically and mentally. As long as we can keep all doors open, we will. And the formula to happiness is no mystery : Low expectations. In other terms : Choose & Settle for your choice ! This is synonymous of embracing our greatest fear : Uncertainty. The reason why we try to predict the future compulsively. Choosing = Embracing Uncertainty. And the single tab theory of happiness embraces uncertainty. In other terms : Not being afraid anymore to 'miss out' on what we could discover if we don't settle. If we don't choose. Masters of Uncertainty are masters of choice. They choose a path and follow it. A master of uncertainty is also a master of happiness. Why ?

Well consider this passage by Thomas Metzinger in The Edge's "Is the internet changing the way you think?". His piece is called "Public dreaming" and his claim is this :

The core of the problem is not cognitive style, but something else: attention management. The ability to attend to our environment, to our own feelings, and to those of others is a naturally evolved feature of the human brain. Attention is a finite commodity, and it is absolutely essential to living a good life. We need attention in order to truly listen to others and and even to ourselves. We need attention to truly enjoy sensory pleasures, as well as for efficient learning. We need it in order to be truly present during sex, or to be in love, or when we are just contemplating nature. Our brains can generate only a limited amount of this precious resource every day. Today, the advertisement and entertainment industries are attacking the very foundations of our capacity for experience, drawing us into the vast and confusing media jungle. They are trying to rob us of as much of our scarce resource as possible, and they are doing so in ever more persistent and intelligent ways. We know all that. But here is something we are just beginning to understand: that the Internet affects our sense of selfhood, and on a deep functional level.

Also in that same book is David Darlymple's idea of knowledge and focus. Knowledge is a lesser issue today. It's "out there", in the external connected cloud-based part of our brain. However, as knowledge is being outsourced out of us, focus is becoming more and more important :

How well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is

The thing is however, we're not trying to fight this erosion of focus. Rather, our tools are adapting to it and profiting from its rise. Look at how the "Like" button has conquered the Internet. Anton Zeilinger writes that :

We should  expect that our brain function will significantly be reduced in the coming decades to very simple decision making

Am I saying we're becoming dumber ? Rather that our decision matrix is becoming more and more binary. We expect the decision process to be as easy as a this "like" button. Complicated User Interfaces irritate us. Think of your behavior lately and tell me you haven't had any trouble focusing on a long piece of text or a book or a complicated Excel sheet. Right ? And this brings me to the next big thing. The next Twitter. It is one that will leverage, not our need to self-promote through bite-sized thoughts, but rather our urge to decide as fast as possible based on bite-sized data. One app that does this very well is "Thumb" which has been getting traction. But it's no more than a time-killer :

The killer apps to come are the decision and motivation aids such as :

• Trumpet from Hunybe Labs : A platform that tallies up your friends to help you decide

• Everest : Aplatform that actually plans the steps for you to accomplish your dreams, selling you the necessary material on the way of course :

So here it is:

1. The Internet today is leading to a loss of attention and focus / Our tools and apps are leveraging rather then fighting this trend
2. Loss of attention and focus means loss of selfhood
3. Loss of selfhood means loss of happiness

Which brings me to my last point actually : Meditation. I've been thinking about it lately and the more I read, the more it looks like meditation is not a process through which you forget the self and "think of nothing" but rather an exercise where you focus very deeply on something. One thing actually. And increasing your focus helps you dive deeeper into yourself. So maybe we should dig there a bit. Maybe that "x" button in the upper right corner is the first step. Sitting on a compfortable chair and closing your eyes (or not) the second. And focusing on one dead simple idea until you feel uplifted the third. Tell me where you end up.

Of the Eternal Importance of Clowns

Information is not meaning. The first is the vessel which transports the second. An example? “Waka doko jenerico” is information. It isn’t meaning. At least not to you. Nor to me really. These are three words I just came up with. “The car is dumb” is information. It’s also meaning. That we know however. But the interesting point is why “Waka doko jenerico” represents information. That’s because it is a difference. In the continuum of time and space, in the universe of events going on, it is a quirk that modifies the once prevailing status quo. A world with “Waka doko jenerico” out there is different from a world without it.

Same for a world with the Big Bang compared to a world without the Big Bang. Yes, the Big Bang is information. Same for a gene mutation. And these other examples instruct us as to what information actually is. It isn’t only a difference, it’s a difference that makes a difference. Meaning is useless in both of these scenarios. Whether there is meaning or not, a gene mutation, which represents a difference in the gene sequence, will lead to a difference in phenotype and, maybe, to a different feature in a given species.

1.  For millions of years, gene mutations had no meaning since they were not perceived or understood by any species. Even ours. It is only after we decoded the genome that gene mutations became meaningful. Because, finally, they were perceivable. But that is not enough for information to have meaning.
2. The information needs to be readable by the recipient. Having not been able to decode and read the genome, there was no way our ancestral selves could ever reach the meaning of a mutation.
3. And the information also needs to be understandable. It has to be coherent with the comprehension grid of the information recipient.

These are the three conditions for meaning to emerge. So a CD with Bach’s symphonies on it, sent into space and found by an extraterrestrial will probably be meaningless since she/he, though able to perceive it, won’t be able to read it. She/he has no CD player. And even if she/he had, the question remains whether his grid of comprehension will allow him to understand what the content of this CD is about. Especially if there's some Rihanna songs in there ("you da one, you da one ...")

A CD player in that case, just as the proteins that transform DNA into other proteins, are revelators of the information. They are the elements that make it readable. They reveal it. As it is for the clowns of our world. What ?!

Enter the Heyoka (The Holy Fool):

In ancient America, Indians were a highly advanced, deeply sustainable society. They would not kill more buffalos than they needed to feed their tribes. They understood their impact on the world around them. But every society, just like every system, however virtuous it is, will not last, without an effective feedback mechanism. And that is what clowns do. Clowns provide feedback in their own way. The Indian clowns were called Heyokas and were perceived as sacred.

Typically, on a very hot day, the Heyokas would put their warmest cloths on while they’d walk naked on a very cold day. They would laugh when something sad happens and weep when something good occurs. They were contrarians, helping people to constantly remember there was another side to every story. They used their imagination to reveal the difference. Their actions were differences that made a difference. Heyokas were pure information. Whether the Indians always understood their actions and saw meaning in them is unsure. The Indian reality was surely modified however as a consequence of the actions of the Heyokas.

Clowns are ... Important ?

In many ways, society has a debt towards those who imagine:

• Sci-fi writers push progress forward. They open a world of possibilities through their stories. The nuclear bomb, skyscrapers, submarines … were all imagined and detailed by science fiction writers way before they were actually invented (Thank you Yasser Bahjatt)
• Clowns (and humorists in general) fix the present by criticizing it
• Historians imagine the past. Indeed, however precise they get to be, there’s always some improvisation involved. And that is how they are able to reveal our societies’ past.

The future, the present and the past can be seen as meaningful because the people gifted with imagination take them from simply perceivable to readable and hence understandable. That is to say, a political election (clearly perceivable by all of us) is seen differently once a humorist starts criticizing it putting forward the ridicule of the candidates’ messages. What he did was make that ridicule, though it’s always been perceived, readable and hence understandable. One can see Don Quichotte as a more modern Heyoka and Comedians as nowaday's Heyokas.

What are you getting at ?

We owe clowns, sci-fi writers and historians much more than we think. One might think all they do is reveal something that’s there and give it some meaning. Only that’s the interesting part: If not revealed, meaning will never come into existence. It’ll never emerge from information. It’ll stay there, hanging, not as a hypothetical possibility but as an unexploited potential of evolution. The gene mutation won’t ever lead to new humans, the Bach symphony on a CD will remain unheard and the credibility of the ridiculous candidate will remain unquestioned.

Difference unleashes evolution. Different is beautiful. You are beautiful

How Trust will shape our Future

Collaborative consumption seems like a late hype though it's probably not. The first academic paper traces back as far as 1978, way before  Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers (co-authors of "what's mine is yours : The Rise of Collaborative Consumption") tackled the subject. But the reason why CC has been so discrete for so long and has only emerged around 2005 with its full strength is because the two problems undermining it hadn't been solved. Problem #1 : Trust Well first of all, trust is very difficult to define. Here's an attempt though :) Right ... Now that this is out of the way, let's try and tackle the real problem : how do you develop trust ? And thinking about it, trust has a 5-part nature :

1. The closer the referee, the more you trust (if it's your best friend telling you X is a good bargain, you' ll buy into it faster than if some blogger says he is)
2. There's an exception though : The more knowledgeable the referee, the more you trust (if your friend knows jack s**t about what you're seeking and tells you X is trust-worthy, you won't buy into his advice as much as some blogger whose an expert on what you're seeking; typical example : nutrition and weight training; don't trust your friends; period)
3. When there is no referee and the only reference is a bunch of strangers, trust needs critical mass to get in place (you're much more likely to buy a toothbrush that's been reviewed by 50 persons than another that's got 2 reviews on Amazon)
4. Trust is viral (once you're convinced, you want to convince)

(5. ? Later). So of course, you might think "it's obvious ! Look at number 1" and deduce that the way to go about implementing and developing trust in a collective consumption marketplace is through social mechanisms. Make sure people's friends join in too and you'll develop trust faster. Maybe. Only there's this ... other thing that's there to stay even if all my friends are part of the marketplace : "I don't know who the other people are !" There's this great post by Charles Hudson back at his Weblog about his experience with Taskrabbit. Taskrabbit presents itself as a CC website. It really is a marketplace for people trying to get small tasks done (fold your laundry, wash your car, water your plants, pick up the dry cleaning). But as he puts it, it's hard to, personally, find a task that sits at the intersection of the three circles below (hope Charles doesn't mind) : It's true. I don't want a stranger folding my laundry, or coming to my house to water my plants (and I'm not likely to pay for that ... and I don't have plants ... but assume, assume) ... Now Charles ended up finding the one situation where he could use the service : asking strangers to put up IKEA furniture when he moved to his new house (new house, so no stuff to fret over). But this is such a specific situation that might lead Charles to use Taskrabbit more in the future. The problem is here to stay though : Trusting strangers. And it is a function of personal preferences, probably until you try it. It's the case with first time couch surfers. Until they realize people are ... actually nice ! Actually, most people are. Non-couch surfers just don't know it. And I'm not talking about this : So here's the problem then : How do you get people to try for the first time ? I finally found my answer on a SXSW panel featured on triplepundit. It's actually a four-step process :

• Set up a good vetting process. TaskRabbit, a peer-to-peer marketplace for personal services, has a four-step vetting process for its new “Rabbits.” There’s a social security check, a background check, and various quizzes and training.
• Allow people to build a reputation. Ideally, you want many of the market participants to be repeat players, who can build a reputation over time. Options here include ratings, reviews, social proof, and gamification. And it’s important to consider both recent and historical reputation. At thredUP, a marketplace for used kids’ clothes, for example, users receive an overall rating and a separate rating for the three most recent transactions.
• Tap into existing social information. As sites begin to integrate with Facebook, they’re finding that users who connect up their “real life” Facebook profile are more trusted, and ultimately make more money.
• Don’t be afraid to enforce norms. TaskRabbit has a “two strikes and you’re out” policy, whereby users are banned from the site for two instances of bad behavior (not showing up on time, doing a lousy job on a task, etc.). Airbnb has a team of customer service people and a community on the ground to enforce cooperative norms.

In other words (my own) : Checking, Promotion, Feedback, Response. Do I need to go further ? Any reader of this blog will have remembered by now all these natural systems I've talked about for so long : Bacteria, bees, brains ... All of it. Control the entities coming into the system, let the other entities promote them if they're efficient through feedback, react to that feedback. Rinse, Repeat. It's beautiful. And Taskrabbit isn't alone. Airbnb, Thredup and all CC marketplaces are facing the same problematic. And another one ... Problem #2 : Inventory No one's going to visit your shop if it's empty. So you'd better get the supply and demand going. But this one's an easy one actually : Expansion. Once trust is in place, geographic expansion but also platform expansion (Social, Location, Mobile ... SoLoMo as the industry calls it but I tend to see each as a platform) will do the trick. Problems solved ? Botsman's idea is that new technology has made Collaborative Consumption easier. It's probably because it's made it easier to put the trust development mechanisms in place. It's easy to hide your reputation in the real world. You don't walk around with 2 stars on your forehead on a 5-star scale. It's harder to do so online. Unless you mes up the feedback mechanism which in turn messes up the whole system's reliability. A personal story: I bought a shaver on Amazon a year ago which turned out to be Very bad. Left a single star on Amazon. with a bad comment. Two days later, the seller contacted me offering me a reimbursement and a new, free, shaver. So I change my comment (though Amazon said "beware !") and wait ... to no avail. The seller never sent anything back. And I can't change my comment anymore. The system is only as reliable as its members. I believe CC marketplaces today learned a lot from Couchsurfing.com. Hypothetically speaking, there's nothing more risky than letting a complete stranger sleep at your place for the night. Millions of people do exactly that though. And it's partly because of the reviews, the detailed profile. People sleep at a host's place because he's verified, or has badges. The equation is simple : the more thorough the entry check, the easier it is to leave a feedback, the more efficient the promotion mechanism and the stricter the rules, the better the system. Because here's the 5th feature about trust I still haven't put up: 5. Trust is fragile

Trails : Browsers, E-commerce's and Everyone's Next Battlefield

One of the TED books from last year was "Is the Internet changing the way you think ?" which was published by Edge and edited by John Brockman. The idea sprung from a desire to gather the world's 100 smartest persons and make them ask questions to each other in order to make intellectual progress (The World Question Center). With time, this became a group of smart / thoughtful people (Edge) to whom a single important question is asked each year. Their answers are published in a book. The three first texts of last year's book are written by Clay Shirky, Nicholas Carr and Richard Dawkins and all mention the distracting nature of the Web. It's true. Look at how many tabs are open in your browser right now, think about how you got to this text and see if you'll read it till the end with no interruption (unlikely). I believe, and would like to show in the following article, that someone, might be leveraging that aspect of the Web however.

In a (very old) article, The Economist pointed out that three things were convincing fashion lovers, once thought to be the ultimate physical shop-goers (because of their need to feel the material and try clothes on), to finally shop online :

• Excellent service
• Highest quality
• Cutting-edge selection

These three things, Net-a-porter.com, The Economist's main example, offers. And it is probably why it has succeeded this far:

• Excellent service is a function of the website's design : User interface, price/product filtering and selection, basket visibility, final price break-down and transparency, delivery cost
• Highest quality depends on the e-tailer's market strategy : Net-a-porter sells designer apparel such as Jimmy Choo, Channel ...
• Cutting-edge selection can be put forward through banners and home page promotions. Cutting-edge selection needs to be wide and deep. Also, items need to be available. So in other words e-tailers need to avoid retailer mistakes such as "out of sale" banners or "unavailable" items.

To me these three features summarize any e-commerce site's success. But that's e-commerce 101. E-commerce has always thrived on an advantage digital gives it compared to the physical world : algorithmic filtering. As Chris Anderson points out in "The Long Tail", filters have been and will be gigantically effective in converting people to online shopping. Anyone would prefer clicking to find his heart's desire instead of scrutinizing isles and isles worth of items. But old-good filtering was only the beginning of the story, the thing that differentiated an online catalog from a physical catalog. And one must admit that isn't Such a big advantage. The rest of the story, in timely order, is what made e-shopping into a fierce opponent :

1. Digital mail-order catalogs
2. Social feedback + collective filtering (Amazon)
3. Online auctions (E-bay)
4. Flash sales (Vente Privee, Gilt)
5. Collective buying (Groupon)
6. Social commerce + Friend 2 Friend marketing (Dropgift, Wrapp, Giftly)
7. Sampling (Glossy-box)
8. Collaborative consumption, which can be broken down into :

• Product service systems (Zipcar)
• Redistribution markets (Swapstyle)
• Collaborative lifestyles (Couchsurfing)

(One trend I might have overseen is Gamification simply because it hasn't been leveraged properly in e-commerce yet)

The features above are, in a sense, the way the e-commerce Software evolved. This has made online retailers (e-tailers) gain substantial ground and differentiate. Moreover, it has allowed them to attract the real-world retailers. I'm not talking about the retailers that launched online shops however :

During the economic crisis for example, some fancy restaurants were losing clients. But, thanks to e-commerce sites such as Gilt, they could fire-sell tables and seats in their restaurants (Tribecca Grill owned by Robert De Niro for example sold menus at half-price on Gilt). The reason why fancy restaurants ventured in fire sales however is that it could be done in all discretion since it was only marketed to the targeted / concerned members of the Gilt community. In other words, online retailers are able to carry out network-based or targeted campaigns much more efficiently than real-world retailers, they are also able to implement laser-focused behavioral strategies.

The three trends I'm listing now are the three major Hardware leaps to come. When mentioning these, The Economist's describes them as the grounds where the Web's coming battles will be held :

• Mobile payments (Apple, Square)
• Location
• Augmented Reality

Looking at e-commerce Software And Hardware-wise, one realizes the potential is huge. In a Long tail world (one where we are heading to niches) and in a smaller world where ideas meet more often, the opportunities are, simply put, everywhere. For example, cross, say, 'sampling' with 'location' and you get a box of half-sampled food specifically chosen to fit where you are for the moment or where you're coming back from : If your phone tells the retailer you were at the gym on that day, the box will contain high-glycemic index food to replenish your muscles' glycogen for example. And that's One example.

Going back to distraction however, I believe one late e-commerce initiative got it right. Pinterest is  on everybody's lips today. And probably for a good reason. You surf the web today, encountering many ideas and items. You leave a trail that might be traced thanks to your Google searches or your Facebook likes or even your re-tweets or your Evernote Web-clips.

Enter "trail-leveraging" e-commerce :

However, no tool allowed you to keep in mind everything you'd like to buy later if not a bookmark you left or the (quite conventional and boring) Amazon wish list extension. Until Pinterest and Pinspire came along.

More importantly though, what Pinterest brings to the game is that you can see other people's pins and are hence confronted to a sort of serendipity. Maybe if serendipity was only about seeing things that resemble what you wanted to buy, it would be uninteresting but the community's pictures make it a glossy colorful magazine where your dream dress or pants lie awaiting until you click on the "Gifts" part of the website.

But what about "trail-browsing" :

The Internet, maybe because of its hyper-linking essence, is a distracting beast, at least when you're not using it actively but rather surfing through it passively. Any tool that enables you to keep track of your trail through this maze is a godsend. That's why there was so much excitement around Microsoft's courier project which gave the recent Tapose (the first 20 seconds make my point) :

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQO0hzKFHiw]

However, as Tapose reminds us, the Web is a multi-dimension & multi-support medium (Audio, pictures, text ...), Pinterest for example captures a single dimension : Pictures. A successful way for an e-commerce initiative to leverage the distracting nature of the web or for a tool to cater it, would be to trace your trail through everything and anything that might interest you. Because everything is susceptible to lead to a purchase in e-commerce's case or to an idea in the case of browsing in general.

A post-browsing Prezi experience :

You may have heard about Prezi. Imagine a post-Prezi-experience of an hour of web-surfing. You can see all the videos, pictures and texts you kept on the side and reorganize them on a canvas for further reflection. An e-commerce actor would use that trail to suggest a half-serendipitous list of products (half-serendipitous because it would be half inspired by your social network friends and half inspired by total strangers). Maybe buying would then become something of an experience again. But more importantly, maybe then, you would have a holistic view of you reflection, a canvas no Evernote extension offers and thanks to which you could finally translate the trail of our thought (as generated by your web-surfing) into an idea.

Bees, Brains, Bacteria and Boneheads : How decisions take shape

It's hard to conceal one's fascination by the world's universality. The fact that things which are seemingly unrelated actually have so much in common. I think it becomes a way of reading the world after a while. Just as the conspiracy theory bunch of folks sees conspiracies everywhere, we universalists see echos all around us. Mandelbrot must have been one of us. If we were a nation, our flag would have a fractal on it. Or it would be something like Jasper John's magnificent "Three flags" :

To me this painting had always represented American imperialism as shown by its belligerent foreign actions and international military presence.  But I'd love to read your opinion about it. Feel free to populate the comments with your views.

For now, back to universalism and to, yes, the book I'm still reading for the moment: Gödel, Escher, Bach. 800 pages mind you. Hofstadter  talks about an anthill at one moment. He explains how every ant is actually stupid to the point that it thinks the anthill is going to eat it. This we know. However, the chapter becomes interesting when Hofstadter draws a parallel with the brain's neurons. For the thing about neurons is that they are individually incapable of any thought, devoid of intelligence. We don't need them to be individually intelligent however in order to be smart creatures. Hence, just as for ants, there must a mechanism that allows neurons to produce useful output. And sure enough : There is.

Enter the eternal guinea pig :

One interesting experiment related to our subject is the one led by neurologists on a monkey. Yes, that eternal guinea pig. When trained to indicate, or follow the movement of arrows (↗←↑↖→↙↓↘) appearing on a screen with his eyes, the monkey's brain fires up and an incredibly interesting interaction takes place :

1. A first category of neurons, called MT,  located in the median temporal lobe and focused on a specific visual field 'detects' the direction. The way this happens is that some of these neurons fire up when an arrow pointing left appears and another, distinct, bunch does so when an arrow pointing right appears.
2. This information is then transmitted to another group of neurons, called LIP ans also organised into two groups, each receiving the signal of the corresponding 'left MT neuron' or 'right MT neuron'. The two groups of LIP neurons actually inhibit each other. In other terms, if there are more 'right LIP neurons' receiving a signal then 'left LIP neurons', the remaining signal,once the two opposite groups have cancelled out is a 'right LIP neuron' signal.
3. And when the discharge rate (the firing up) of one LIP group surpasses another, the neurons responsible for the eye's motion are activated. Hence, the monkey looks in a given direction.

That's how it looks on paper. I owe my understanding of this to an awesome blog called "Le webinet des curiosités" by the way.

Enter the eternal enemies :

Now, when you look at bacteria as Bonnie Bassler did, you also see that kind of behavior. Bacteria are individually incapable. The reason why they are so effective once they invade our bodies is that they know the exact right moment to attack us. The way they do this is by sensing chemicals emitted by their bacterial buddies. Once the frequency of these chemicals' detection, through each bacteria's receptor, crosses a certain threshold, they understand that it's time for action.

[ted id=509]

What's really interesting here, and the reason why I put "a certain threshold" in italic, is that Bassler talks about Quorum sensing. Not majority, not democracy but quorum. And this, to me, is of the utmost importance. But let us see why by looking at the bee kingdom.

Enter the eternal dancing army :

Thomas Seeley studies bees. We know already some generalities about the little dancing beasts. We've heard about their dances, their hive, the honey production ... Less known is how they actually decide to move to a new hive. And that is very relevant to our subject and to that "certain threshold" we're trying to understand. Because, the way bees decide on a new hive and eventually find the best hive is :

1. By sending a group of bees to explore nearby locations
2. Looking at them dance once they come back
3. Bee dances actually being directions and information about the potential new hives each bee visited, the other bees go and visit the hives based on these indications
4. The other bees then come back and join one of the dancing groups of bees to indicate that they adhere to their hive choice
5. Once a quorum is reached for a given hive, all the bees move to the new location

Seeley made experiments precisely to understand whether it was the emergence of a majority that determined the hive choice or the appearance of a quorum. And sure enough it's a quorum. Explorer bees won't make their specific humming sound to signal the move to a new hive until they've seen a 20-ish group of bees decide on it. Seeley determined that by building five similar hives and waiting to see which one the bees would choose and how :

20 is the bees' number then. But what's ours ? What is the human number for quorum sensing ? When do we decide to move ? When do we chose a group over another ? How does conviction spread ? Is there even a magic number ? Yes. There is.

Enter the House of Republicans :

In July 2011, a roaring debate in the US was taking place. The House of Republicans was threatening to sink John Boehner's (Speaker of the United States House of Representatives) budget proposal. At around the same time, a study  done by scientists at RPI’s Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC), was published in the journal Physical Review E. The abstract, among other things, said this :

We show how the prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a small fraction p of randomly distributed committed agents who consistently proselytize the opposing opinion and are immune to influence. Specifically, we show that when the committed fraction grows beyond a critical value p_c=10%, there is a dramatic decrease in the time T_c taken for the entire population to adopt the committed opinion. In particular, for complete graphs we show that when p<p_c, T_c~exp[a(p)N], whereas for p>p_c, T_c~lnN. We conclude with simulation results for Erdos-Rényi random graphs and scale-free networks which show qualitatively similar behavior.

Wow ! In many ways, this is very revealing. Graphically, it looks like this :

Going back to the bees actually and falling for that universalist manic, maybe 20 is a proportion explorer bees need to detect in order to move. Maybe it's actually ... 10% ! Or maybe not. The point is though that democracy is an illusion when it comes to decisions. A certain quorum, a given proportion, is the element that will ultimately determine which decision will be taken. And it does so only if the group holding that opinion is dedicated, borderline fanatic.

Enter the boneheads :

Bonehead, according to the free dictionary, refers to "a stupid or obstinate person". Obstinate. To me obstinacy is key. Not that it's an awesome character to have in life but rather that it's essential to win the quorum battle when it comes to collective decision making. Why ?

Think about it. What's more important than information spread here ? Bees with their dances, Bacteria with their chemicals, Brain neurons with their discharges, Republicans with their human actions ... all of these are mediums, means to spread information. Means for each group to convey their information, their version of it, their opinion of it or their relationship to it.

In the end however, one version, one opinion dominates and becomes the group's decision. The reason why that version of information spreads is because ... the rest of the information is lost. As simple as that :) but infinitely and deeply more complex than it seems. Because just as important as information spread is information loss. It's the way it gets out of the system or gets recycled into it.

Bees whose hives haven't been chosen get tired and join the winning hive dancing group, neurons which signal isn't the right one get cancelled out by the other neurons' discharges, bacteria who want to start the pathogenic attack can't because the chemical threshold hasn't been reached, politicians with the losing, less convinced, opinion ... shut up. Information loss it is an essential feature of an efficient decision making system with no central command.

It shows the less convinced, tired bunch and since these most probably hold a worse opinion that the obstinate, dynamic, fighting bunch (or at least it ends up being so), they lose out, along with their version of the information.

I find this stunning :) please share you thoughts in the comments. It'd be great to start a discussion about this.

2012 / Trend#3 / Data is the new Black

It's no wonder Karl Lagarfeld was at LeWeb this year ! Fashion breathes the air we breathe and makes something different out of it. Our air today is heavy with all things digital and data related. One must be there to stay up to date with the times. The data deluge has already made the headlines in recent years. What is to come however is of a very different nature. The easiness of data use is trickling down thanks to user-friendly applications. Data is reaching the long tail at light speed. We should get ready for yet another flood, not of data however but of data-based products.

In a recent publication, Mike Loukides tackles " the evolution of data products " and tries to establish a minimalist taxonomy. His reflection is a mix of three elements:

1. Data is disappearing. It is becoming invisible. The user has no idea how much data is involved even is the simplest mobile applications he uses (finding a place to park on your smartphone is a great example in that sense; it mobilizes around 5 to 10 gigantic data sets provided by 10 to 15 organizations)
2. Data is being combined (like in the example above, and needless to say that the more we go down this road, the cleverer the combinations that will emerge; keep an eye on hackatons for that purpose)
3. Data is personalized (Back to Eli Pariser's " Filter bubble ")

Loukides makes the point that original exploitation of data based on these 3 criteria will be the differentiating factor in years to come. Looking back at the data though, the latter's origin is instrumental in determining its use:

1. Some data products are simply based on existing data: Transport data, traffic data or weather data ... are products in themselves
2. Other data products need user-generated data to make sense: The " Quantified Self " movement is big in that category. Here you'd delve into all the calorie-counting, sleep-optimizing, blood pressure-measuring ... apps where you enter personal data in order for the app to generate some useful information

Both kinds of data products will soar since both the user-generated data and the, well, non-user-generated data are skyrocketing in size. But to better understand where the innovation is happening, one enlightening example might be the social networking data taxonomy Bruce Schneier came up with:

• Service data is the data you give to a social networking site in order to use it. Such data might include your legal name, your age, and your credit-card number
• Disclosed data is what you post on your own pages: blog entries, photographs, messages, comments, and so on
• Entrusted data is what you post on other people's pages. It's basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don't have control over the data once you post it -- another user does
• Incidental data is what other people post about you: a paragraph about you that someone else writes, a picture of you that someone else takes and posts. Again, it's basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don't have control over it, and you didn't create it in the first place
• Behavioral data is data the site collects about your habits by recording what you do and who you do it with. It might include games you play, topics you write about, news articles you access (and what that says about your political leanings), and so on
• Derived data is data about you that is derived from all the other data. For example, if 80 percent of your friends self-identify as gay, you're likely gay yourself

Disclosed, Entrusted and Incidental, Behavioral are user-generated data. Service data is also user-generated only it's the same kind of "cold" data a government is likely to have in its files (legal name, your age, and your credit-card number), it's personal but not too personal, it doesn't define who you are in its essence.  Derived data is not user-generated but rather algorithm-induced. That last kind is a data product. It is the stuff of the future.

Being personally obsessed by the predictive power of data, reading all what I've read, it was the only thing I wanted to see and the killer app of data products I secretly desired. And looking at all these notes in front of me, it seems like that's the real trend to come. We've all heard Eric Shmidt's famous quote:

Google needs to move beyond the current search format of you entering a query and getting 10 results. The ideal would be us knowing what you want before you search for it...

Only Google isn't the only organization with data. Governments, marketing companies and entertainment companies also have substantial quantities. The companies have been been tracking your clicks, the government should know everything there is to know about you if they source all the material from the State's different departments. This last fact is what is now being called algorithmic government or put more simply : organized human behavior predictability. If Google can predict what you will want to search for based on how much they know about you, given what the data the government has, you can bet they have a shot at guessing what you're about to do. Especially that they now have the tools for it.

And no, I'm not talking about the satellites but rather about the data integration software able to handle Petabytes and crunch it in seconds. But prediction will always be an art (i.e. it's not a science) and two practices are frequently used :

1. Qualitative work based on nugget-finding (mainly human dependent because of the complexity of the conclusions that need to be drawn). Software like Recorded future is able to do that now. This is an incredible company that has the ability to semantically detect future-turned sentences on the web and federate it in order to generate insight about what will probably make the news tomorrow. This is actually the technique fortune-tellers use : based on clues they pick up from the discussion with their client, they can make nugget-based predictions. Hence the inaccuracy seeing the scarcity of the data.
2. Quantitative work based on machine learning and heavy data use (mainly machine dependent, because if the mass of data). Here you'd find the likes of bit.ly, the short link generator which uses all these links to simply see what's trending, you also find Google Flu trends which finds the places where flu is hitting by seeing where searches for the word "flu" are the most frequent in every possible language. It's based on word counts and localisation, so the results are generated for humans to read and analyze, not to decipher as in Recorded Future's case. Machines are prone to mistakes of course and to something data miners call over-fitting : wanting to fit data to a model they've induced based on previous learning even though sample size (and logic !) does not allow for that type of conclusion. Here's a striking example :)

Needless to say the best tools of the coming years are combinations of the two. These are the tools which will allow a symbiotic interaction of human and machine in order to analyze the data, whereas the machine would take the repetitive, boring work out of the analyst's way, letting him focus on what he's really good at : thinking. We won't be able to unlock the future. I know that now. But we can see the present in a clearer way in order to avoid the pitfalls to come. That's why we need to machines not to replace but to support our insight-generating minds.

As Karl Lagerfeld puts it : "Somebody still needs to find the ideas, and it's not the machines who are going to do it"

2012 / Trend #2 / Small is the new Big

So here's the second installment of the 3-part trend series. The first one was about the rise of algorithms and how these mental process replicators are kicking us out of our own systems. This blog is about a second trend, a parallel one, but surely a more perceivable one.

1) Enter Tahrir Square :

Yes,you've seen it and heard about it. And you got to the point where you figured out that no, Twitter did not start the Egyptian revolution. Fed up people started the Egyptian revolution. Twitter merely helped a small bit of them, though a significant bit, organize and talk. But this is the tip of the iceberg. It's one big tip I agree, but a tip nonetheless.

2) Enter Yuri Milner :

Yuri Milner is a Russian investor who made a fortune investing in social networks and young companies (baby Facebook, Twitter and Zynga) by making them offers they couldn't refuse. Not in a godfather way of course. He's a very smart business man but nonetheless he has nothing to do with this article if not for this: Milner got it ! That's probably why he's making so much money (apart from the fact he had some to invest initially). Milner figured out that "everybody will be talking to everybody" pretty soon now. No boundaries. No constraints. As Pierre-Louis Desprez put it, the world is looking like this:

Imagine the world is a solution, a chemical one that is, and that we're molecules in that solution. The smaller the worldly recipient, the bigger the chances we collide. This is what has been happening. I'm no prophet here. Every book about globalization and new medias right from "the world is flat" to "Tribes" tackles this. But collisions are the first step to collaboration. Again, simply the tip of the iceberg. Here's my TEDx video about how small things meet to create big things :

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6iQUtJRUh8]

Dee Hock described that triple P action : Purpose, People, Principles. The DIY trend I've tackled previously (1 and 2) is all about small things doing big stuff. Everything you've heard about collaboration, wisdom of the mass and emergence will be scaled up. Yes ! But the idea here is that out of quantitative change, qualitative change will emerge. Because these growing collisions in a smaller recipient, due to the way we function, will create new forms of organization.

3) Enter the ¨£µ%^ banks

You know financial issues are taking a new dimension when even a new scientist article talks about them. For as you might have heard, banks have been restricting credits. But this is a new world. A world very much like water : It finds a way out, sooner or later. Banks say no ? Ditch the banks. Ask fellow citizens for cash.

Yes : People lending to people. This is the future. Issues about individuals' ratings must be solved of course. But there is every reason to believe the phones in your hands, the data from your card and bank account can be computed by a very reliable, non-banking institution, and fed back to the new Peer to Peer lending system.

Cross this new trend with the growing #occupy movement and the 99% ... Exactly. There are no boundaries to what the small can do especially when the big is failing. But wait

Who's the big now anyways ? Right. There's this thing called Macropathy Rick Falkvinge : It is the disease of being too big, the sickness of being too large. The term was coined by Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Lobaczewski:

" Governing such a country creates its own unavoidable problems; giants suffer from what could be called permanent macropathy (giant sickness), since the principal authorities are far away from any individual or local matters. The main symptom is the proliferation of regulations required for administration; they may appear proper in the capital but are often meaningless in outlying districts or when applied to individual matters. Officials are forced to follow regulations blindly; the scope of using their human reason and differentiating real problems becomes very narrow indeed."

Laws are a form of algorithms. Algorithms are getting out of control. And laws, like these formal systems we create to replicate our mental processes and get the weight off our shoulders, become the blind spots of our institutions.

4) Enter the trauma

Institutions failed beautifully these last few years. And some surprises lie ahead I believe. And the idea here, if you look back at the three last points is this :

1. Small is getting bigger
2. Small is doing big stuff
3. Big is failing
4. ?

Well, 4) is about the fact that small won't forget it this time. Forgetfulness is key to history's iteration. But this time is too big to be forgotten.This time, small will remember. It has every reason to. This is as big as it gets and, heck, it's about to get bigger. A branch of economics called behavioral economics explains civilization's reaction to particular sets of events through collective memory of large events. The Germans fear inflationary measures because of the hyperinflation they wen through. The French still recall the French Revolution when they hit the streets. The US has this phobia of anything that might look like the great depression. Countries have learned to remember. That's why we won't have another Holocaust : Books, testimonies and movies make sure of that. And same here : We won't forget that Big failed us.

4. Small won't forget

So what ? So the final corner stone is in place. A massive (1) efficient (2) disillusioned (3) and un-forgetful/unforgiving (4)  crowd is up on its feet. It does not forget ! It does not forgive ! Expect it

2012 / Trend # 1 / Algorithms are the new machines

I'm currently reading a book by Douglas Hofstadter called "Godel, Escher, Bach". The title and the cover of the book are enough I guess to give you an idea of how mind-boggling this book is

At page 60, Hofstadter lays down the question that will occupy him for much of the rest of the book:

In Chapters to come, we will lay out a formal system that ( 1 ) includes a stylized vocabulary in which all statements about natural numbers can be expressed, and (2) has rules corresponding to all the types of reasoning which seem necessary. A very important question will be whether the rules for symbol manipulation which we have then formulated are really of equal power (as far as number theory is concerned) to our usual mental reasoning abilities-or, more generally, whether it is theoretically possible to attain the level of our thinking abilities, by using some formal system.

This last sentence "whether it is theoretically possible to attain the level of our thinking abilities, by using a formal system" is probably the the most important question of the next century. To what extent can we replicate the human mind's functioning and abilities ? And hidden in this very question however is the preliminary step that is driving much of today's innovations and design thinking : Can we formalize our mental processes ? And since mathematics is the language we are using to accomplish this formalization and feed it to computers, the question translates into : Is it possible to express every single human mental ability in terms of a mathematical algorithm ?

Now beforehand, I had read Charles Munger's 1994 speech to the USC Business School graduates “A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business”. This isn't a random speaker by the way : Charlie Munger is Warren Buffet's "secret weapon". He is probably one of Berkshire Hathaway's most valuable assets and one of the greatest investment minds today. In his USC speech, he actually explains how he thinks ... You read that right : It's worth a read. This single quote summarizes the whole thing though :

What is elementary, worldly wisdom?  Well, the first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back.  If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form.

You've got to have models in your head.  And you've got to array your experience ‑ both vicarious and direct ‑ on this latticework of models.  You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life.  You've got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.

What are the models?  Well, the first rule is that you've got to have multiple models ‑ because if you just have one or two that you're using, the nature of human psychology is such that you'll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you'll think it does. You become the equivalent of a chiropractor who, of course, is the great boob in medicine.

To be clear however, mental models, which in a way are Munger's equivalent of Hofstadter's formal systems, are not the way we think. They are probably, however, the best way we have to think, analyze data and reach decisions. Indeed, our brains are responsive to stories and in its essence, the latticework of models Munger suggests we use is a story-building stratagem.

Models or formal systems are interesting however not only because they are efficient but also because they demonstrate a certain ability to replicate the world. Nowadays, algorithms are also one such attempt to do so in the realm of human thinking. Here's some insight into an upcoming trend:

1. Economist William Brian Arthur recently published an article in McKinsey Quarterly about "The second economy". An economy parallel to ours where algorithms have taken everything in charge. Whereas humans used to handle your airplane ticket reservation, dozens of algorithms talk to each other in order to make that reservation nowadays. Arthur argues that this might raise unemployment in the long term. That's in part where this blog's title gets its inspiration from: Just as machines replaced workers in the industrial sector, algorithms are about to replace workers in the services sector.
2. A Wired article titled "Algorithms take control of Wall Street" goes further and explains that not only are we being kicked out of the system by algorithms but moreover that this trend is here to stay : "Today Wall Street is ruled by thousands of little algorithms, and they've created a new market—volatile, unpredictable, and impossible for humans to comprehend" and "We may be able to slow it down, but we can never contain, control, or comprehend it. It’s the machines’ market now; we just trade in it."

Arthur's article is interesting in that he understands that in a world where algorithms are taking over our jobs, we need to imagine a new world where prosperity and revenue distribution would be reconfigured. Wired's article reminds us of the imperfections of our inventions. Just like us, algorithms are not infallible :

For individual investors, trading with algorithms has been a boon: Today, they can buy and sell stocks much faster, cheaper, and easier than ever before. But from a systemic perspective, the stock market risks spinning out of control. Even if each individual algorithm makes perfect sense, collectively they obey an emergent logic—artificial intelligence, but not artificial human intelligence. It is, simply, alien, operating at the natural scale of silicon, not neurons and synapses.

That is how we ended up with the May 6 flash crash :

The May 6 flash crash. The culprit, the report determined, was a “large fundamental trader” that had used an algorithm to hedge its stock market position. The trade was executed in just 20 minutes—an extremely aggressive time frame, which triggered a market plunge as other algorithms reacted, first to the sale and then to one another’s behavior. The chaos produced seemingly nonsensical trades—shares of Accenture were sold for a penny, for instance, while shares of Apple were purchased for $100,000 each. (Both trades were subsequently canceled.) The activity briefly paralyzed the entire financial system.

And an excellent TED talk by Kevin Slavin about the subject (I know I'm always linking to these :) but they do tend to be exhaustive) :

[ted id=1194]

Will this end in a Terminator-style algorithm-controlled robots versus humanity ? I think/hope we're smart enough to avoid unpleasant surprises :) More seriously I believe the only limit to :

1. Algorithms' development
2. Their replication of human abilities
3. Their conquest of the services sector

is the question Hofstadter asks : "whether it is theoretically possible to attain the level of our thinking abilities, by using a formal system". And this greatly echoes with an article I read not long ago : Neuroscience versus Philosophy : Taking aim at free will. An awesome read about how some neuro-scientists are challenging the idea of free will. One interesting experiment shows how our decision to move a hand is determined seconds before we actually take the decision to move our hand. Neuro-scientists spot parts of the brain, distinct from the decision-taking parts, flaring up beforehand.

What if free will does not exist ? The question is most probably an out-stretch but shouldn't be ignored. Especially in our case. If free will doesn't exist, it means our mental frameworks can be entirely computed and there is simply no limit to what algorithms can do and consequently to how obsolete and redundant we might become.

I'm serious here ! A moral and ethics algorithm is perfectly imaginable, a motherly love algorithm implanted into a robot too (don't get too lyrical about these things) ... possibilities are infinite if and only if we can figure out a formal system to replicate our mental processes. Till then let's hope that these replicas/algorithms we'll have created won't sum up to a latticework with a singular ability to out-smart us.

Big step for me, small step for Humanity

This post is about the future. Literally though. I'm not talikng about this kind of thing :

We often think about what our clothes and cars and robots and ... stuff will look like when we think about the future. We rarely realize that the future we've got to today, these surrealistic phones we have in our hands, aren't as much a leap in appearance as much as they are a leap in design. Design is the future's warranty. But there's more to it.

I heard an awesome sentence lately by Wade Davis. Re-counting what Tibetan monks had told him : " They said, at one point, you know, we don't really believe you went to the moon, but you did. You may not believe that we achieve enlightenment in one lifetime, but we do". He goes on to talk about the spiritual advancements of the East as an equivalent to the technological wizardry of the West. What we've accomplished through physical industry is an outcome of our collective beings. That same collective the people of the East have used to overcome their spiritual limitations.

Spiritual technology is what we'll be craving very soon. The future will be one that understands and satiates that need. A discussion with Kaos consultant Pierre-Louis Desprez lately brought me some incredible insght. He laid a wonderful quote by Pierre Levy : "La technique pense en moi". Technology thinks in me. I believe I'll encounter this ideashortly when I'll start reading "Is the Internet changing the way we think ?". It is. It certainly is.

We are what we own. But we become what we use. This is how impact-ful mass production is. When you think about searching for something, you start thinking about key words in sentences people are likely to use often. Why ? Because that's what you'll be typing in Google.

When we interact with people, it's starting to feel as if there's a Facebook-like meta-structure to our discussions. When we're working with others, we think about common To Do lists we'll be able to share. When you want to present something, you're already designing the Power point slides in your mind. When you want automate the solution of a problem, the Excel sheet and techniques pop up in your mind.

We are what we own. We become what we use. And our expectations are modeled by that very usage. Look at how you expect everything to be as responsive and intuitive as your smartphone interface. You brand new TV feels like a century old because of its buggy Operating System.

As Pierre-Louis puts it, in a world where communication has deserted the physical realm, where messages don't need a donkey to travel from a village to another, the world is shrinking that much that collisions are becoming much more frequent. The world simply will not be the same anymore. More interactions lead to a whole new game.

This is a post about the future :

1. The future of our objects
2. The future of our design, both technological and spiritual
3. The future of our interactions

But the post is already over. The prediction game isn't one I excel at. I am an economist. I'd rather lay down thought frameworks. The way you go from 1 to 2 to 3 is through implications and compound effects actually : What you own, how you use it and how it links you to the world will model our future. That way it's neat and simple. Just like the future should be I guess. Big step for me, small step for Humanity.

Hacking Happiness : A dog named Tintin

There's a question that's always troubled me : "Are dogs happier than humans ?" It seemed obvious for a long time that it was the case. Dogs don't even know what happiness is. Not having to wonder about whether they're happy or not, they certainly are. But after having lived with my uncle's dog for some time, Tintin, I started realizing he too had ups and downs. I could probably measure his happiness by the number of times he wagged his tail (going for walks, seeing new people ...). And that gave me sort of a framework to think about human happiness :

What is happiness ? Is it the constant plateau, that ongoing feeling or state we have throughout the day, characterized by a certain level (a) or is happiness defined by the spikes or the number of spikes (b), the highs that we have during a day ? And there started my quest. I had to hack happiness.

I didn't want to tackle the question philosophically however. And since I've been convinced for some time that our food has so much to do with our food, I started digging there. Now the way food affects our mood of course is by altering our biology. At the other end of the continuum, my beginner self thought depression must be the opposite of happiness. So I discovered that a low level or a very high level of serotonin leads to depression. But there was a way to keep Serotonin balanced :

Exercise for instance has been shown to be very helpful in keeping serotonin levels balanced. Tryptophan, Leucin and Phenylalanine are the building blocks. You can find a list of foods rich in Tryptophan, which is often cited, here. The other hormone whose spikes cause happiness is dopamine and it too is very influenced by one's diet:

It feels as if Serotonin is responsible for state (a) in The Happy Scale above and Dopamine for spikes (b). And there comes a pretty interesting discovery, courtesy of Doctor Jack Russe also known as The Quilt on the Paleohacks forum. Russe says Dopamine is the Neuro-transmitter of the newest part of our brains : the frontal lobe. But Dopamine is the pleasure hormone, the one responsible for the spikes, not the steady state (a). And it got me thinking about whether pleasure had been the final step of our evolution. If pleasure had lead us to become who we are or if the pursuit of pleasure (an ephemeral form of happiness) allowed us to survive this far.

At about the same time, I fell on a talk by Martin Nowak at RSA about the mathematics of evolution. Simply astonishing:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3plwTxdSO4]

In a word, Nowak explains that evolution needs cooperation. Yes ! Cooperation. Meaning selflessness. Of course, evolution will always favor defectors, meaning liars and foxy people. They end up winning because they wait for trust to establish then betray their counter-party and profit from it. Only that's not a strategy for the long term and even they end up understanding it. Nowak calls us super-cooperators because language allowed to develop a new platform for evolution (a horizontal rather than a vertical one).

For evolution to happen, you need cooperation (so selflessness at one moment). It establishes a structure. Sort of a meta-architecture for evolution. Cooperation might not be there to stay but it is an essential stage. "Aha moment". But species don't figure out that kind of things by themselves. Some kind of biological mechanism inside them is supposed to lead them towards choosing to cooperate. That's where Nancy Etcoff comes in:

[ted id=570]

There's this moment where she explains how it was observed that charitable activities light up reward circuits of the brain. Actually, Dopamine increases when you help others. In other terms, when you cooperate with others. We have an inner mechanism that makes us "want" to help others more. Oh yes! Because Dopamine is actually the hormone that controls cravings. The one that makes you want chocolate, pastries, cigarette, cocaine, your romantic lover. Yeap! It's the same hormone and same circuits for romantic love, chocolate and Ben&Jerry's vanilla ice cream ladies. Cooperation, in a way, might be addictive. Which is great for evolution since it strives on self-organized emerging organizations that spur from cooperation. The hormone Oxytocin also has something to do with that.

Then came the corner-stone that was going to make everything make sense. Helen Fisher :

[ted id=16]

Besides all the valuable information Fisher brings, there's a sentence she says that has the potential to change lives: "We aren't an animal built to be happy. We were built to reproduce". Touche! And in that she meets Nowak. At one moment she talks about "attachment" as being the third stage of what is commonly known as "love" (the first two being sexual attractiveness and romantic love). Attachment is the stage where your focus on that one individual you met (romantic love) turns into a mere tolerance. And That precisely is why we were built to reproduce, not be happy. Why is tolerance of the spouse or husband essential ? Because you need a solid family to raise the child. Here's evolution for you:

1. Sexual attractiveness awakens your interest for the other sex
2. Romantic love focuses your energy on one person
3. Attachment keeps you with him/her so you can reproduce and raise your children

You might find marriage to be miserable but evolution doesn't care. The kids are there to stay: Mission accomplished.

But what's important here is that third stage. Attachment is a form of cooperation. And we are only capable of that because of a mixture of phenomena in our brains, I believe:

• The RTPJ part of the brain
• The Oxytocin hormone

Those two in conjunction are pretty much responsible for what we call empathy, the basis of any cooperative movement. You won't help anyone if you aren't able to feel what she or he feels. "But what's this have to do with happiness?" I'm getting there ! If empathy-induced cooperation raises your Dopamine, this allows for a new framework to think about happiness:

So we know evolution makes us happy when we interact with others, help them or more generally cooperate with them. You've noticed how miserable you get when you spend too much time alone and how much time you spend on Facebook right ? But one the other hand, when it comes to the self, besides food, there must be a way to raise the level of state (a) say from 10 to 20 constantly no ? More spikes (b) we know how to do: cocaine (kidding), extreme sensations, love, helping others (it's the Dopamine part). But what if I want to be constantly more happy. Well, that's the ultimate hack. It's born out of three talks I've watched lately and I have to link to them because I owe them this.

Dan Gilbert :

[ted id=97]

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

[ted id=366]

And of course, Barry Shwartz:

[ted id=93]

Here'show the triangle of happiness hack stacks up:

• Dan Gilbert introduces the idea that we are capable of synthesizing happiness. And it is in no way inferior to "natural happiness". Incredibly enough, amnesic people who were given the choice a painting then asked, after having forgot which painting they would choose consistently chose the painting they had been given earlier. We too tend to end up adapting to and being happy with what we end up with (our PC, though we wanted a mac, our HTC, though we wanted an Iphone ...). Synthetic happiness is very real
• Mihaly introduces the idea of flow with the following graph :Flow is a state of immersion and genuine happiness that emerges when we do what we truly love. And notice how Flow is a condition whereas 1) the challenges we pick correspond to our skills 2) they are hard enough for us to feel we are doing something not anyone can do (this echoes Richard Layard's idea that it's not how rich you are but where you are in the pecking order that characterizes how happy you are)
• Barry Shwartz uses this drawing to illustrate his point :This fishbowl illustrates exactly what happiness is. Shwartz says the following :  "If you shatter this fishbowl so that everything is possible,you decrease satisfaction. You increase paralysis, and you decrease satisfaction. Everybody needs a fishbowl. This one is almost certainly too limited --perhaps even for the fish, certainly for us. But the absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery, and, I suspect, disaster."

So here it is for you, in all its counter-intuitive Nanominded glory : To be happy, you have to limit your ambitions.

"What ?"

Yes. And you have to be strict about it. You want to be rich. Put a specific number on it. You want to get married. Choose your wife or husband's precise characteristics and settle for whom you end up with. The secret to happiness is this: Satisfaction (I suspect it releases serotonin). This is the key. Why ? Because once you settle, your brain will take care of synthesizing happiness, Gilbert is right. And that's why Mihaly is so right. The only work that will make you happy is one you can actually accomplish, and well : one where the challenges are as high as your skills. One where you can hence have a fixed objective. Caus' there is nothing harder than to aim at a moving target.

Limit your ambition. Fix the target. Aim. Shoot. Reach. Smile. Be happy.

Movement : The physical sound of your inner symphony

Think about this : The stretch between "What makes you want things ?" and "What makes you do things ?". How does "want" affect "do". How does desire translate into action. And is desire necessary for action to take place? The reflection started during a presentation about Jacques Rancière, a French philosopher. In his book "The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation", Rancière describes one of Joseph Jacotot's expriments. Jacotot, a French pedagogue was trying to teach French to Belgian students whose language he didn't speak and who didn't speak any French at all. This was a long time ago. So he gave them a book in French and its translation in their language (Flemish I believe, a Dutch dialect) asking them to hand in their opinion about the book later ... in French !

Amazingly, they did. Jacotot concluded three principles :

1. All men have equal intelligence
2. Every man has received from God the faculty of being able to instruct himself
3. Everything is in everything (there is no distinction to be made between learning mathematics and literature for example)

Clearly what enabled the students to learn by themselves is trial and error. Our same old evolutionary trick. The students tried to identify similarities, failed some time, tried again, honed their comparisons, reached conclusions. Trial and Error. And Sugata Mitra, an Indian pedagogue, in an incredible TED talk, also makes this process clear:

[ted id=175]

In a sentence : "Education-as-usual assumes that kids are empty vessels who need to be sat down in a room and filled with curricular content. Dr. Mitra's experiments prove that wrong." (Linux Journal). The groups children form, and the way they imitate each other and emulate positive behavior is the consequence of a phenomenon this blog has tackled over and over. In a world, you might say empathy. But empathy isn't the Holy Ghost. It is very real and the doing of very specific neural phenomena caused by mirror neurons as VS Ramachandran explains in his TED talk:

[ted id=724]

So if education is self-organizing as Mitra explains and that our beings guarantee such an organization will occur as Ramachandran  explains, what's the use of a teacher ? Let me be clear. In my view of things, a teacher speeds up the process. So speed-wise, you can accomplish more with guidance. Only quality-wise, a kid or kids will never learn as well as when he or they learn on their own.

Why ? Because it is only when They decide to learn, only when They make the move to get something that they actually end up owning it. They make things their own when they move on their own. And the key word here is Movement. In the "to move your a** and do something" sense of the term. Which takes us back to our question : "What makes you do things ?" or "What makes you move ?"

If you look at these Indian kids learning how to use a PC on their own in Mitra's experiments, and when you think of self-learning Belgian students in Jacotot's classes, you start wondering whether it is desire, a "want" that leads them to "do"  or to move. And that's when Vagina monologues come in.

Wait. What ? Yes. Listen to Eve Ensler's take on security:

[ted id=217]

I think what makes these Indian kids and these Belgian students "want" to learn is : Curiosity. And I think Curiosity comes as a stark opposition to Security. But what is happening in the backstage of that confrontation is more fundamental. It actually rests on a single notion that frees the one that masters it. A stupid story helped me understand:

There's a book you'll hesitate to read called "Who moved my cheese?". It's the story of two mice whose cheese was moved in a maze. While Hem, one of the mice, starts ranting, since its cheese isn't there anymore and the status quo changed, Ham, the other mouse, imitates its friend until it realizes something : There is no Cheese here anymore. If he moves, he loses nothing. In other terms, he has absolutely Nothing To Lose. And this single realization is what sets up a series of reactions leading to his decision to Move. Hem and Haw are obviously two sides of our beings.

We haven't evolved to Know but to Move. Every step in our evolution and hence every feature we've preserved contributed in one way or another to carving a species of survivors. How would a knowledge seeking creature possibly survive through the dangers of the primal savannas? It can't. Instinct, light-speed reflexes, split-second decisions that engage our whole being : That is what moves us. Our brain is not a thinking machine, it is a movement enhancer device. But don't take my word for it, listen to Daniel Wolpert talk about it:

[ted id=1261]

It's all about optimizing movement by enriching the process with meaningful feedback. Every memory your brain holds, every emotion it has, every reasoning it's capable of ... everything that amazed you about it for so long is meant to optimize your movement. Actually : "People go about their lives planning movement so as to minimize the amount of noise". Because movement is stems from an external feedback, our brains have developed an internal way to strip that signal from its imprecision: memory. Which itself is enriched by experience. What I'm trying to say, as a sub-set of this whole logic: We are, by nature, uncertainty avoiding machines (Bayesian inferring machines as Wolpert would put it) . We abhor change. We all do. Because it hinders our movement optimization process.  Movement Is evolution's real achievement. Not reasoning. Not logic. Not Sudoku solving skills. Movement.

So what ? "So what ?" !

We evolved to move the best we can, avoiding uncertainty and possible sources of change during the process. We are uncertainty phobia. All of us. So when we chose to move in an other direction. A new direction. When we adopt change, we are doing something Very original. We are going down a new path. We are giving evolution a tap on the shoulder and saying, I'll take it from here. We're giving the finger to all of humanity. In the financial world, that's called contrarian investment I guess. And it's a winning strategy. Very often. Why ? Because you're doing it differently. Playing evolution's game by borrowing the least crowded path. It may not be the winning path. But if it is, you've beaten the whole crowd to it.

But in order to chose that path, in order to move, I believe it isn't possible, meaning you don't make that move, you don't start learning, you don' t take a risk, until you realize, or train your brain to realize that you have nothing to lose, relatively to what you are about to win. Until you switch its Bayesian probabilistic, utilitarian approach and make it understand that what you could gain surpasses what you are losing. You have nothing to lose. Evolutionary speaking, what's made us make the first step the dark moments when we were stuck was realizing we have nothing to lose.

My twitter handle is @iamfrankenstyle. I am Frankenstyle :) "Frankenstein with style". It's a name I came up with some years ago. It stuck around. I used it to describe a new way to dance I was trying. The idea was to move in the style of Frankenstein. Frankenstyle.

Dancing is an act very similar to painting. You paint music with your movements. It is ephemeral of course. But the feeling you inspire in the people around you and the feeling you get out of it are just as durable as the ones you get after staring at a painting. The reason is Movement. Movement is powerful. It's what made us stick around all these years. And what's great about dance is what Eve Ensler expresses in a sentence at the end of her talk : "I realized it absolutely didn't matter where I was going, or where I had come from because we are all essentially permanently displaced people". We didn't evolve to rot in a house or an office. We are not goal driven. The top pf the Everest is not what draws us. It's the trip, the bloodied hands, the sizzling breath. Sedentarism is an artifice we invented. Nomadism is our first nature.

To those of you who are still reading: Join the Movement

How smiles survived

When you get obsessed with evolution, you Really get obsessed with evolution. You start wanting to apply the theory to everything you see and think about. And, this far, it has shown its test proof. The latest test has been about 'feelings'. How did they get here and how did evolution cherry-pick them ? A Harvard Business Review article I've read lately tackles leadership. It explains how important emotional intelligence is for, say, a CEO. Upbeat, positive leader attitudes, as experiments have come to show, yield more profit than tyrant-like behaviors, at least in the long term. This stems from two fundamental ideas your humble servant is fond of :

1) The first is what Dee Hock calls "purpose". Every community needs a purpose to ignite its self-organizing abilities. This is what will eventually Lead it to organized action. The "purpose" is personified by the leader. In a traditional organization, the group doesn't pick its "source of inspiration". Rather a board of directors gets that job done for them, for better or for worse. Does artificially setting the "purpose" rather than letting it emerge from within the organization takes away all the advantages of natural self-organization ? I think the 3 coming years and some nano-work will allow us to answer this question : whether traditional organizations are more efficient then self-organized communities 2) The second one is "people", which need to be emitter-transmitters of information for the group to start organizing. This is not the problematic here however, since the boss is organizing things. However, the transmission is still there and communication must be happening thanks to something. The article introduces a new dimension. Something more than mere discussions : Emotion. See ? Emotion as a form of information ! See what I mean. Here's a quote from the article :

"From this body of research, we discovered that emotional intelligence is carried through an organization like electricity through wires. To be more specific, the leader’s mood is quite literally contagious, spreading quickly and inexorably throughout the business."

Ants communicate through pheromones to pass on a message and self-organize. Emotions are one of the pheromones of our organizations. But this isn't the end of the story. Look at this description of the design an organization's community:

The open-loop design serves the same purpose today as it did thousands of years ago. Research in intensive care units has shown, for example, that the comforting presence of another person not only lowers the patient’s blood pressure but also slows the secretion of fatty acids that block arteries. Another study found that three or more incidents of intense stress within a year (for example, serious financial trouble, being fired, or a divorce) triples the death rate in socially isolated middle-aged men, but it has no impact on the death rate of men with many close relationships.

And this :

Scientists describe the open loop as “interpersonal limbic regulation”; one person transmits signals that can alter hormone levels, cardiovascular functions, sleep rhythms, even immune functions, inside the body of another. That’s how couples are able to trigger surges of oxytocin in each other’s brains, creating a pleasant, affectionate feeling. But in all aspects of social life, our physiologies intermingle. Our limbic system’s open-loop design lets other people change our very physiology and hence, our emotions.

And this :

Even though the open loop is so much a part of our lives, we usually don’t notice the process. Scientists have captured the attunement of emotions in the laboratory by measuring the physiology—such as heart rate—of two people sharing a good conversation. As the interaction begins, their bodies operate at different rhythms. But after 15 minutes, the physiological profiles of their bodies look remarkably similar.

And even more amazingly, a friggin' TED talk about oxytocin !

[ted id=1259]

You see what I mean ? Our connections are Very physical. Our emotions are actually Very physical. In fact, they are manifestations of physical phenomena in our bodies. Our "interpersonal lymbic regulation" is a the closed-loop system that has allowed us to improve our communities through effective feedback. Why "effective" ? Because if a bad emotion is passed on, we all sense its bad effect in a community. And since it hurts (enough to affect our bodies), we realize that we'd better do something about it. In other terms, feedback is effective when negative feedback Hurts and when positive feedback makes you feel Real Good.

And this is where it gets Interesting :

Did you know laughter is the most contagious of all emotions ? "The most ?" Yes "the most". Why ? Because not all emotions spread with the same ease. Let me write that again : Not all emotions spread with the same ease. Just as not all creatures get by through life with the same ease ... And some end up being extinct. See what I mean ? If laughter is the most contagious of all emotions, it means natural selection got it there. Evolution made it so laughter could be the most contagious emotion. And you can see why. Laughter and smiles cement relationships, strengthen alliances and are the best way for a community to stay united, and in term to survive. Remember the group you've been part of and you've enjoyed the most in your life. Yeap ! It's the one where you laughed the most.

Emotions are one our most effective pheromone. But I'm wondering. If emotions are subject to evolution, it means some emotions might have gone extinct. But that's the question, did they go extinct within the homo sapiens community or did the community that used to hold them fail to survive because these emotions were detrimental to its proper functioning. Were Neanderthal's emotions effed up ?

3) The third is "principles" (I love this framework :) it's a great way of thinking about complex systems : Purpose, People, Principles). But nothing extraordinary there. "Principles" in an organization are set by the commander in charge. Some arise from within of course, in the margins of the organization. It'd be interesting to see which are actually more efficient, which make the organization go froward. I'd bet it's the ones set by the group itself after trials and errors and not the "rules" the CEO came up with and artificially imposed.

So that's a tour of how complex systems exist in traditional organizations, how looking at our communities in such a context helps us understand so very much about our feelings, emotions and survival. And so very much about our common history. Comment at will fellow homo sapiens :)

My problem with your feelings

Contemplate the concept of a number. It is a representation of reality. It is reality made sound or symbol. Ever thought how absurd a negative number such as -2 is ? Can it be represented in reality ? -2 pineapples ? Impossible.  The number represents two missing fruits but it cannot be represented in reality. The representation is uni-directional. How is representing -2 different from representing -3 pineapples ? It isn't. I would have to show you the same empty space where previously lied 2 or 3 pineapples. Numbers are a tough abstraction of very physical things.

Now your feelings. You might think they're floating intangible things. They're not. Love, greed, lust, fear ... Each feeling has a physical equivalent. Each of your feelings is synonymous with a given physical state, more specifically, each will activate a given part, or several given parts, of your brain. Your feelings are very 'tangible'. Think of them as muscles you can train. Seriously. Read this excerpt of a paper on Primal Leadership :

Studies on the brain affirm the benefits of Tom’s visualization technique: Imagining something in vivid detail can fire the same brain cells actually involved in doing that activity. The new brain circuitry appears to go through its paces, strengthening connections, even when we merely repeat the sequence in our minds. So to alleviate the fears associated with trying out riskier ways of leading, we should first visualize some likely scenarios. Doing so will make us feel less awkward when we actually put the new skills into practice.

So think of that guy / gal you despise. Imagine yourself standing in front of him / her and imagine yourself smiling to him / her and feeling love towards him /her. Do it several times. The day you'll meet him / her, you'll be able to mobilize this positive feeling more easily. Your feelings are very physical.

Numbers = abstraction of physical things. Feelings = physical. So, normally, I should be able to quantify your feelings. Hourray ? Nope. My problem with your feelings is that you express them. Joking. Not really. When you tweet or write a Facebook status and do express your feelings about something, you use words most frequently. Words are yet another representation. So when I want to analyze your feelings using Web data (which what Nanoeconomics is all about), I need to analyze words (potential problem #1), allocate them to feelings (potential problem #2), then count them and re-analyze them with indicators (potential problem #3). So it's a representation twice removed. James Gleick writes about something similar in "The Information":

Paleolithic people began at least 30,000 years ago to scratch and paint shapes that recalled to the eye images of horses, fishes, and hunters. These signs in clay and on cave walls served purposes of art or magic, and historians are loath to call them writing, but they began the recording ofmental states in external media. In another way, knots in cords and notches in sticks served as aids to memory. These could be carried as messages. Marks in pottery and masonry could signify ownership. Marks, images, pictographs, petroglyphs—as these forms grew stylized,conventional, and thus increasingly abstract, they approached what we understand as writing, but one more transition was crucial, from the representation of things to the representation of spoken language: that is, representation twice removed. There is a progression from pictographic,writing the picture; to ideographic, writing the idea; and then logographic, writing the word.

So when we analyze sentiment using Web semantics, we are not facing "pure" information but rather "noisy" information. Impure and corrupted. Representation does that. So imagine the effect of several representations.

Cool. Thanks. But why am I reading this ? Well because feelings are the coming "bug" in the tech and economic realms. On three levels:

1. A nationwide scale : Everybody's complaining today about how mis-representative of well-being the GDP is. Indicators are flowering to promote the survey of populations' feelings. Feelings. For it is thought, and rightly so actually, that this might be the best way to evaluate policies' effectiveness. Not economic value creation but rather well-being creation. We need to quantify feelings.
2. A enterprise scale : At company level today, for brands that are actually interested by that aspect, there is an overflow of social data coming their way. Tweets that mention them, blogs criticizing their products, rankings on price comparators, opinions on online retailers' websites. Considering the mass of data, automation looks like a viable solution and feelings soon get translated into numbers. Hence the current obsession with a social media ROI. We need to quantify feelings.
3. A personal scale : Brace yourselves for this one. A big hack is underway. At the human scale, communities everywhere are sharing experiences, learning from each other, setting best practices to : enhance their bodies, their sex life, their dating life, their social skills, their IQ, their lifespan, their ... Do I go on ? You've heard about the "Quantified Self" movement. Initially a sub-set of the body-hacking community, it will soon span out to embrace ... yes, the rest of the human dimensions. Including feelings. The next hack, the ultimate hack I guess, is of one that would tackle the very management of feelings. And for that you need measurements. We need to quantify feelings.

Summary ? We need to quantify feelings ! Now ! But we can't. Not well enough. Not until we succeed in hiding a sensor in your smartphone to track brain waves :) Joking. Really. Truth is : the solution is not quantification. It's rather a de-quantification. Something completely different. An evolution in how we perceive indicators.

• Enterprise level : Yesterday at Ignite Paris 13, Damien Douani talked about ROA (Return on Attention), about ROE (Return on Engagement) and about ROO (Return on Objective). His talk shows how ROI is incompatible with social media. Social Media doesn't yield quantifiable stuff. It yields human reactions and feelings. Quantify that ! Well, Damien explains, since you can't you need to locate which other numbers Social Media will affect. For example : Collaboration on Social Network creates self-help groups and online forums eliminate the need of some consumers to call the call center. Hence, a drop in calls indicates social media's positive yield.
• Nationwide scale : You can measure the number of visits to museums and movies to see if people's well-being is improving.
• Personal scale : I wish I knew a cheaper alternative than MRI to track brain activity and act upon that information to enhance feeling management. Till then, you can use your memory ... your brain :)

In conclusion, we've been thinking that the flood of information must be countered by a flood of indicators, numbers that will represent them and hence reduce their dimension and volume. The thing is the quantity is not the only problem. The flooding information is also of a different nature. It's a quality issue. Truth is it's the most interesting kind of information we've yet had to deal with. What I'm saying is : I care about your feelings :)