Madness From The Measure

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I’m posting this before the 2024 election and everyone is talking about polls. Movements of a tenth of a point garner news stories. Questionable polls flood the zone. Everyone is looking at a few numbers and asking “what does it mean?”

So we know what that means here, I get to talk about the Unaccountability Machine again! If you’re new here, it’s a book on why organizations go stark raving bonkers, which seems pretty relevant now.

One of the many bits of wisdom in the Unaccountability Machine is focus on a limited metric makes an organization go insane. The author is usually talking about shareholder value, which is easily maximized by doing things that don’t actually involve doing useful things. A business can completely undermine itself, especially if it has enough money, and end up propped up by investors while not doing anything. At least until things fall apart.

Going mad from focusing on one number? Sounds a lot like polls doesn’t it?

We’re obsessed with polls, wanting to see the future, to know. Of course these are snapshots in time, and snapshots weighed and changed and tweaked to try to make them accurate. In the end someone asks a few people and then tries to model what their responses mean for the population as a whole. If that sounds vaguely crazy, congratulations, you’re starting to get it.

Trying to get the number right will make you mad, as we’ve seen quite a few times. And you know who I mean.

But also we follow the polls. We want to know what it means, and when you have a margin of error of 2% or more that often becomes meaningless. But boy as we look at those numbers, we all start to go a little crazy one way or another. We’re trying to see the future made by people either lying or trying, but not by those who know.

Watching the number will make you insane as will knowing it may be completely made up.

Finally, yes, there are manipulated polls. It’s been fairly obvious that happens for awhile, but any idiot can call themselves a pollster, and some pollsters are already a few bricks shy of a moral or mental load. So there may also be lots of B.S., making everyone else further crazy.

And then how many of the liars or propagandists are already slamming the kool-aid, believing what they lie about – or knowing they’re lying but not being sure of anything.

I’m really getting all the “nose to the grindstone, get out the vote people” this year. You just ignore the polls unless there are useful extremes and work hard. And boy in 2024, it seems like there’s a lot of weird things where margins of error tell us how much we can do or don’t know so we might as well get to work.

But the magic number tells us nothing, though it will make us and a lot of other people crazy.

What is finally crazy-making is maybe we could actually try to do stuff that works for people in politics. That maybe we need to discuss our poll obsession, or what works. But horseraces make for exciting news and endless amounts of fundraising letters. The news media makes bank on all this, but we keep talking numbers not people.

Which makes it all more crazy.

Steven Savage

Channeling Innovation

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I came across this fascinating paper that suggests innovation is the result of collective interaction (shared knowledge, exchange of ideas, etc.). Think of it this way – we’ve got all this stored knowledge, cultural interactions, kind of a shared brain, that leads to innovation. People may carry it out, but it doesn’t come from them – a bit like channeling or “being ridden” in spiritual terminology.

Having worked in everything from medical research to tech to writing, I find the paper compelling not just for its citations, but how it fits my own experiences. I’ve watched creatives – including myself – “come up” with ideas that are the results of inputs and experiences, evolving into something. I’ve seen tech changed over the years, watching interaction across time and space result in great – and stupid – things that can’t be really traced to a single “cause.” The ideas may appear in people, but it doesn’t arise from anyone, but the time itself.

I’ve often been skeptical of people who think they’re some kind of linchpin of history. I know what goes on in my own head when I get inspired, and so much “isn’t me.” I know many people get where they are due to wealth, luck, the time, and so on. I know where my own luck and privilege has benefited me.

We may be the carriers of innovation, or where it finally manifests, but we’re not its owners – nor its masters as many a person possessed by an idea knows.

With this idea in mind (ha!), I’d like to take a look at something I’ve oft complained about – the lack of innovation and anything interesting in the tech industry in, well, the last ten or fifteen years.

Consider what happens if we believe that some Great Innovators are the source or all good things. We will seek these Great Innovators, pay attention to them, and then rely on them even if they aren’t producing good ideas. Because we seek them, anyone who fits the idea in their head is someone we listen to and assume they know what they’re doing. This of course leaves room for plenty of liars and grifters – maybe most of them.

Do that long enough and you not only lack innovation, you have a kind of anti-innovation. People with fame and money are not innovating, but now have the fame, money, and regard to propagate non-innovative ideas. The non-innovators can buy technology and access and even crush places where innovation originates.

Meanwhile, we’re not working on a culture and a world that increases innovation. We’re too busy looking for the Big Heroic Idea Person as opposed to a society where innovation can be realized. Everything becomes about finding heroes – which don’t exist – and things get less innovative and interesting.

It seems awful familiar, doesn’t it?

Steven Savage

The Un-Measurable Cost of Bullshit

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

As my regular readers are painfully aware, I feel a lot of the world is awash in bullshit, and the technology world triply so. We’re sold products we don’t need, that don’t do what we want, from companies who will then collapse and be sold off for parts. Meanwhile too much of the media celebrates innovations that basically burn money and forests while delivering nothing but stock prices. And if you think you know what I’m talking about, once again don’t be so sure, I have a long list of grievances.

And I wonder how much does this stuff cost us? I’m not just talking money, but time, social damage, environmental damage, and having to clean up after it all falls apart.

I think it’s hard to measure because a lot of the economic bullshit is now a loop.

Investors invest in each other and the people they know to get a return, even if a service won’t provide anything. Media breathlessly starts a hype cycle about nothing, and will do it again weeks or months later having learned little. Bookkeeping flummery keeps the real costs off of the books and out of view. Environmental impact is exported. There’s a giant cycle that occupies a lot of time and resources to keep people from asking what time and resources are being consumed.

And we do it all over again repeatedly and more rapidly.

We can’t measure costs of all this meaninglessness as it moves too fast, doesn’t have enough data, because of made-up data, and because we’ll do it all again anyway. We know there’s bullshit in the economy, but we can’t penetrate the veil of it to figure what it costs us until the bill becomes due the hard way.

It’s enough to make you wish you could yell “stop” and we’d all just stop inventing stuff for ten years so we could pick up the pieces and see how much people were lying. And yes, I thought about how long that freeze should be.

I have the unsettling feeling that an enormous amount of our economy is waste that yields little more than line go up for a tiny amount of people. But I’d like if we could pause and find out.

Pause voluntarily, that is. Judging by the way our climate is changing, we’re gonna get a pretty hard pause involuntarily.

Steven Savage