How We Will Make the Change

It won’t be easy, but this is the way

Posted Nov 13, 10:46 PM in business, environment, human nature, improvements, postmodernism


While I happen to agree with many of the socially progressive sentiments expressed by the American left, it’s time for the discourse to become more nuanced. Many on the left argue with no apparent compunction that businesses and businesspeople are problematic in themselves. These people, unfortunately, have bought into the sort of shallow extremist thinking that they are ostensibly accusing conservatives of.

Businesses are in fact neutral forces, and can do great things and can do awful things. A lot of it depends on what the public as a whole expects of them, and allows them to do. So say what you will about business, but also understand that every person who ever buys from any business is also playing a part in affecting social problems and influencing what happens in the business world. To blame all these social problems on businesses and corporate greed addresses only half of the problem. Consumers as a whole have not lived up to their end of the bargain in being more aware of how their own consumption habits enable or disable businesses to behave the way they do. And to dismiss business as a whole as being inherently evil precludes the idea that business can– and most likely will– be the strongest engine of change in this world one way or another.

But ultimately, the choice is really up to the people to choose what direction our society goes in, and what their role will be in promoting that. As it stands now, businesses are often punished by the market (AKA the people) for ‘doing the right thing.’ As a people, we must decide whether we want to correct that. So don’t blame business for being heartless; they do it because the markets demand it. And that’s all of our faults; we should not just hold businesses accountable, but also our governments, politicians, relatives, neighbors, friends, and more than anyone– ourselves.

It’s completely ridiculous to think that once we tear down our “big, bad business institutions,” we’re going to arrive at some kind of global consciousness. Equally ridiculous is the idea that business is an inherently evil pursuit and will fade away once we have achieved a certain stage of spiritual growth as a people. The fact of the matter is, for our society to make a leap of consciousness, we will need to actively choose it and reprogram our economic incentives system to better enable it to permeate our society. The impetus for that change has to come from within our society, not from some politician, bureaucrat, or businessperson.

At best it’s naive and counterproductive to go around blaming corporations and business for social injustices and the shortcomings of our society; at worst, it’s a harmful, divisive, and inflammatory attitude that dismisses the contributions that business can bring to the table.

Some might respond that my arguments here rely on “rational-choice” economics, in which consumers purchase based on perfect knowledge and conscious thought. Perhaps it is unrealistic— at this stage— to expect otherwise. But it seems quite clear to me that individuals should be responsible for their own actions, and aware of the repercussions of their actions. Far from irrelevant, moving beyond this self-imposed ignorance will be necessary to make the changes championed by the idealistic left. In fact, getting people to raise their own level of awareness is the one change that the world will truly need to move beyond where we are. We will need people– lots of people– to become aware of their impacts on the planet, and we need those people to take action. Finger-pointing and simplistic arguments against business aren’t the solutions. Personal change and sacrifice are.

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A Thought Before the 2008 Presidential Election

Posted Nov 3, 01:41 PM in human nature, politics, postmodernism


What is the link between the following ideas?

Give up? All these things have no basis in fact. Yet, they are all beliefs that people rabidly cling to no matter what evidence comes up to contradict them.

Like the people who believe these things, some moral and political crusaders spend so much of their lives trying to reinforce and justify their pre-existing opinions that they can’t evaluate new information without experiencing profound cognitive dissonance; they then cling to their pre-existing opinions even tighter to ensure the security of their own identities. These people are called extremists, fundamentalists, jihadists, terrorists, racists, bigots, ideologues, and morons.

To these people, the world is not a complex place; it is a place of black and white, good and evil, right and wrong, “it is” or “it isn’t.” The real world is not this; it is a place of often unsettling gray and ambiguity. And to grapple with it in a meaningful way requires serious independent thought, self-reflection, and a willingness to admit that your thoughts might be inaccurate and plain wrong at times. Reality can conflict even with one’s most basic, gut-level knowledge of “truth.” This is deeply troubling to most people. But we all need to take steps to confront the fact that truth has a way of changing depending on what we know. Perhaps if we take the time to learn more, we can change. Alas, most people do not have the capacity to search for truth or the desire to change; they want to hold on to their old, limited conceptions of the world. And to force them on others.

I heard a reporter talking to a college-age boy about his choice for president. “McCain,” the boy remarked. “He doesn’t want to take from the rich to give to the poor.” This comment was made with the underlying assumption that doing this was wrong. He then went on to admit that he came from an affluent background and that played into his decision. It was a moment that caught me a little off guard, because the unstated subtext of his comment (that perhaps he himself was not even aware of) was that if he were someone else— perhaps a poor person— he might have made a different choice.

But then, if our conception of righteousness is so fluid, and subject to change based on our own current situation and how our opinions might personally benefit us, how then can our thoughts and opinions on issues have any value other than the demonstration of opportunistic self-interest? Should our opinions not reflect attitudes that we would hold regardless of their personal impact on us, or what our situation is?

Perhaps it would be useful to consider the words of Mahatma Gandhi, whose life continues to be an inspiration to me:

“In my life, my commitment is to truth, not consistency.”

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Social Networking and Self-Regulation

the crippling problems inherent in the self-policing realms of Digg and Reddit

Posted Sep 28, 12:15 PM in economics, experiences, human nature, improvements, marketing, politics, postmodernism, social networking, unanswered questions


Social networking websites are the big thing right now, not just for armchair sociologists and online businesses, but also for academics. They serve as sort of a vacuum where you can observe interactive behavior from afar in a venue that didn’t even exist just a few years ago.

Two of the sites that get a lot of the attention are Reddit and Digg. These sites are not like Facebook or MySpace, in that they are not pages in which you create profiles for the purpose of having your peers come check you out and find out what music you like. They are essentially link portals that allow users to submit content (links) and allow users to comment on those submissions. They also give users the ability to “upmod” or “downmod” submissions to indicate, respectively, approval or disapproval of said submissions, comments, and links. It’s supposed to be an egalitarian means of aggregating a collective response of the userbase to a submission, and to show others how worthwhile a contribution might be, and to establish a feedback mechanism to the poster.

Keeping count of ups and downs encourages good comments and submissions, and can be seen as a preventative tool to keep out trolls, spammers, and people who say don’t make worthwhile contributions to the public discourse. And like the Roman gladiator battles of old, the idea is that a preponderance of upmods will spare the life of a well-written or interesting contribution, while downmods will effectively slay it, striking it from the viewing grounds.

In theory, it’s a very good thing. Over humanity’s existence, and particularly over the past 15 years, there has been a glut of information flooding into the public sphere at a rate that seems to only accelerate. It become increasingly necessary to more effectively filter what reaches our eyes in order to make our limited time more meaningful. In other words, there’s a lot of junk out there, and you don’t want to waste your time reading it; you want to get to the good stuff immediately (this attitude probably is problematic in its own way, but that’s a different story entirely). These social networking sites help you put mass consciousness to use in achieving that agenda.

For a while this was being considered as the way that private citizens were finally going to wrangle the big bad world wide web and all its anarchic tendencies; finally the masses would be able to collectively wrestle power away from the disproportionately powerful spammers and media corporations, and regain control of the discursive sphere that the internet was always meant to be.

Alas, the debilitating cracks have already formed in the foundations of this well-meaning institution.

Digg was working fine up to a certain point, where articles were being upmodded based on merit and interest, but this utopic system was eventually usurped by an organized network of users operating on a platform of quid pro quo, in which users would agree to upmod another’s comments and submissions in exchange for similar treatment to their own comments and submissions. These rogue networks expanded, using Digg’s proprietary “friend” system, in which a user can befriend other users and monitor each others’ activities with ease. Pretty soon, the entire front page of the site, which was once supposed to house an aggregated list of topics that the entire userbase considered important, was commandeered by people subverting the system through mutual backscratching, thereby annihilating the democratic ideals of the site.

To this day, despite 150,000,000 page views a month and thousands of content submissions per day, the same 20 people’s submissions make it to the front page every day. This, of course, basically makes Digg the equivalent of a mainstream media outlet that uses editorial discretion to filter content, except in this case, it is not exercising supposed meritocratic discretion (“what are the important issues of the day?”) so much as they basically just have a staff of 20 contributors who are going to automatically have their voices heard, while everyone else is basically forced into a consumption role.

So much for that.

It was then that we looked to Reddit to become the site that would cradle our highest democratic ideals. Many Digg users jumped ship to come to Reddit after being disgusted with the downward slide in content quality at Digg. But soon enough, Reddit too was destroyed— but not by the same system as Digg. It was leveled by a much more subtle and insidious form of cancer.

Reddit had always prided itself on being a more thoughtful and educated mass of users than Digg, always mocking Digg for its tendency towards childish humor and ad-hominem verbal sparring. Reddit, on the other hand, was a site that was sophisticated, and more prone to having mature dialogues about subjects that were served more by complex dialectics than verbal drive-bys. But ultimately, this user self-perception and self-selection, combined with the “modding” rights of all users created an ideological vacuum that threatened the very foundation of the site through its own exclusionary behavior.

To understand how this happened, it is relevant for us to first understand what happened in a more concrete sense.

At the moment I am typing this, the front page of Reddit is littered with anti-John McCain/Sarah Palin articles that seem to recite various sensational or seemingly biased positions against them. This is not in itself a problem, but as a supposedly non-partisan site, it has repeatedly been shown that anti-Obama submissions get downmodded into oblivion. Reddit is now essentially a clearinghouse for liberal rhetoric, where every single anti-Republican and anti-progressive screed on the world wide web can be found, being upmodded by users who are probably only reading descriptions of articles rather than full articles, and who are voting based on ideology rather than quality.

Spend a few minutes on the site, and you’ll see liberal comments regularly upmodded (or at least not downmodded), and you’ll see conservative comments downmodded like there’s no tomorrow— with no apparent value put on the complexity or discursive quality of the comment.

Remember, upmodding and downmodding are supposed to be reflections of user opinion on submissions. The issue here is that there are many reasons why users might not like an article, and without consistency in voting patterns, it descends into a meaningless mush of upmod/downmod numbers.

Therein lies the problem with this form of social networking. Upmods and downmods do not carry with them a single unique and transparent value. A downmod does not necessarily mean “I thought this comment was bad on the merits of its thesis”; it could mean “I disagree with you ideologically.” It could even mean “I don’t like this user,” or “I don’t like this user’s username.” All this tends to render whatever submissions are highly upmodded or highly downmodded to be of somewhat ambiguous import— which of course means that anything you are seeing (or not seeing) because of others’ value judgments is based on somewhat arbitrary rationale… which should, in turn, make you wonder why this is such a great medium for brokering dialogue. After all, what if you want to read well-written opinions of people whose ideas differ from the site’s mainstream?

An idealized situation would have separate measures for the any number of factors that might elicit someone’s approval or disapproval: well argued/poorly argued; convincing/not convincing; ideologically agree/disagree; spam/not spam; worthwhile contribution/not worthwhile contribution; stupid username/not stupid username, etc. With such a system, one could theoretically exhibit approval for a contribution on multiple levels but simultaneously disagree on other levels (and let others know it). In this manner, we could read an article that was well argued, but not convincing, that was largely ideologically disagreed with. But we can’t do that now. And that’s too bad, because it forces regular users into intellectual stagnancy. As sociologist Mark Granovetter suggests, it’s actually the people who aren’t in our immediate intellectual circle who are the ones who can teach us things. We already “know” what our ideological peers think.

Of course, this opens up a whole new can of worms because it relies on the ability of users to police themselves in what category of approval or disapproval they choose to give to submissions. Vindictive liberal users might angrily describe an eloquent and well-argued conservative post as “not worthwhile” simply because of their own parochial point of view. This is problematic, and unlikely to be resolved in any meaningful way.

Another reason why this is potentially troubling is because of intersubjective value judgments. What’s worthwhile for you does not match the threshold of what is worthwhile for me. Aggregated over a massive userbase, we’ll end up seeing a sort of middling effect that promotes submissions that basically hug the bottom rung of the ladder of quality. That is, we’ll end up elevating the sorts of things that the most people happen to agree are good. If you listen mainstream radio, read mainstream magazines, and watch mainstream television, you can see why this may not be such a great thing.

Will this ever see resolution? Will humanity’s mainstream be forever condemned to mediocrity in everything it engages in? Will our music, television, movies, literature, politicians, and now content portals all be mediocre? God, I hope not.

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The Space Between Us

The developed world is balanced precariously on a bed of dependency

Posted Sep 17, 05:03 PM in consumerism, environment, human nature, human resources, sustainability


The growth of the number of linkages that our society depends on has been staggering over the past century. If you look back at books that detail the lifestyles of pioneer families in the American West, or farmers in rural India, or peasants in England during medieval times, you’ll notice that there the organizational distance that took any given commodity from its point of growth or manufacture to the end user was quite small, and typically involved only a few parties. Nowadays, there are countless organizational linkages that are involved in any given product we might own.

Take this computer I’m typing on right now, for example. There were probably 100+ manufacturers involved in the creation of this computer if you include all the components and parts, and many of those manufacturers purchased parts from other manufacturers, and so on. When it comes down to it, maybe 50,000 people were involved in building this computer in some way. And while computers might be an extreme case, by no means is it atypical of the amount of organizational growth in the economy.

The number of middlemen and organizations that separate manufacturers from end users has increased dramatically. There are the people that source materials, people who manufacture them, people who store them, people who distribute them, and people who sell them. Compare that to the maybe 25-50 people that were probably involved in the creation and sale of everyday items in simpler times, where blacksmiths bought iron ore from some organization, forged tools from the iron, and sold the tools directly to end users.

Even if you held the number of items constant in a comparison of items in your home to that of a medieval person’s home, the number of people involved in the process of furnishing your home would dwarf the number of people involved in the processing of the home from a distant time ago. Consider even the house itself: your wood, nails, and tiles come from far away, and involve many transporters, salesmen, manufacturers, etc. A peasant’s hut in the middle ages was made from wood from a local forest that didn’t need to be transported far, and essentially crafted from scratch (that is, without many pre-manufactured parts) by locals.

In other words, the number of people who are working for you now is much, much higher that it was for people in the past. This is important for several reasons.

Firstly, this means that there is an interconnectedness in the current economy that was never experienced to this degree in the past. This is what Thomas Friedman describes as the “flattening” of the world (of course, as Matt Taibbi points out, this choice of phrase defies the significance of the word “flat,” since it was actually the roundness of the earth that made us realize the interconnectedness more than previously thought!).

Secondly, it means that there are many, many more things that can go wrong in the functioning of our society. If you are more dependent on more people to get you your daily food and water, it also suggests that there are more places where problems can develop, and many more ways in which the chain can fail. Any such failures in the chain will affect more people, which is bad not only because of the potential magnitude of the inconvenience (or perhaps crisis), but also because the ever extending length of this chain has divorced people from having basic knowledge how they can get what they might need in the absence of the middlemen.

Think about what would happen if there was a crisis in the supply chain that prevented food from getting to all the grocery stores in your area, and you can start to imagine the severity of this problem. Not only are people completely dependent on grocery stores to get them their food, but in the event that the stores are unable to provide, people have no idea how to get the food they need. They might figure out that they need to grow vegetables themselves, but would they know how to do that? Would they have space to do it?

People in third world countries are used to dealing with breakages in the chain. They don’t rely on electricity. They don’t depend on getting water delivered directly to their houses. For that reason, they have organically developed street smarts about how to get what they need whenever they need it, and they are never overreliant, or even confident, that the system will be able to deliver it to them.

While many in developed countries might look down on the apparent primitiveness of this situation, in many ways, it is the Westerners who are at a long-term disadvantage in a survivalist sense. They are the ones who can be easily brought down by something like a terrorist plot, an oil crisis, a natural disaster, or a transportation strike.

A friend of mine described how the recent onset of Hurricane Gustav took out power in her hometown in Indiana last week. As of yesterday— several days later— the power was still out. How well do you think the people were adapting to this? Certainly not as well as my relatives in my parents’ hometown in India would, since, for reasons that have never fully been explained, they don’t have power every Tuesday of the week.

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You are what you say you are? Maybe not.

Posted Sep 9, 05:52 PM in human nature, links, marketing, postmodernism


I found a thought-provoking post over at Violent Acres about the duplicity of so-called ‘personal branding’ and how many people feel comfortable with the idea of defining their character through their own words and ideas rather than through their behavior. The author writes about a hilarious and highly troubling incident with a woman who, deciding she’s a good person, overlooks the absolute heinousness of an action she is planning to undertake as a pet owner. Worth thinking about in relation to your own life.

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On Self-Rationalization and Justification for Moral Lapses

We usually get what we want… somehow.

Posted Sep 7, 03:22 PM in business models, consumerism, economics, experiences, human nature, law, marketing, politics


Some time back, I was sharing an office with someone, and had a shelf next to my desk that I had placed a few books on. One day, I came in to find that the shelf had been moved next to the other guy’s desk, and my books had been tossed upon my desk, along with a note explaining why my officemate needed that shelf more than I did, and how I would be able to get another shelf from some other person in the office if I really needed a shelf (this, of course, invites the question of why he didn’t get the shelf himself from some other person to begin with).

The rationalization in his head followed this trajectory:

1) I want a shelf for my things.
2) There’s a shelf over there.
3) And it only has a few books on it.
4) Given that it only has a few books on it, clearly the owner doesn’t really need that shelf.
5) Given that he doesn’t really need it and I do, I really deserve that shelf more than he does.
6) It’s wrong for him to have that shelf when I need it so much more.
7) I’m just going to take the shelf since I will receive greater utility value than him.

You can see how such self-rationalizing logic has a way of subverting standard social norms such as “ownership” and “right to use.” I was somewhat bothered by this turn of events, but once I started thinking about it, I realized that such behavior happens all the time, and enters into some of our most proverbial ethical dilemmas.

The question of Is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed your family?, for example, is another similar ethical quandary that enters into our popular consciousness.

However, one of the most prevalent examples of this in recent times is the issue of music downloading through P2P networks. The tech-savvy youth of the world, on the whole, have absolutely no problem with downloading copyrighted music from the internet (full disclosure: I have also done it before). This is despite the fact that most of the same people probably recognize stealing items from local stores as morally wrong.

But, comes the argument, this isn’t really theft. In a theft, someone is deprived of an item because someone else takes it. Here, something is being duplicated so I have a copy and the original owner still has his copy.

True. Yet, one could make the same argument about stealing cable, and I have not heard anyone argue that this is morally sound. After all, there are cable companies who have large amount of fixed assets tied up in cable lines, maintenance, and other expenses that come part and parcel of delivering cable. If everyone stole cable, clearly the cable television system would collapse. Is the same not true for the music industry?

Well yeah, but the music industry hasn’t adapted to changes in the market and the way that consumers want to shop.

Maybe, but in every other sphere of the consumer economy, if consumers don’t like the way that a company does business, they simply don’t do business with them. Why is it that you feel justified in stealing property in this case? If you really want a new Ford car, but you really hate Ford dealers, how is it that you are justified in stealing a Ford from their property so as to bypass interacting with the dealers?

Look, I’ll admit that this does hurt the record companies, but you know what? They deserve it. Those suit-and-tie business guys are all about the money; they couldn’t care less about the music, and in fact they’ve have done everything in their power to destroy music! I support the artists, and the record companies just screw them over anyway. Artists only get, like, 10 cents on every CD sale anyway. They make their real money off of touring.

But what gives you the right to decide that the artist shouldn’t have that 10 cents per CD? Sell a million albums, and that’s a lot of money. Isn’t that their decision to make?

Artists who say that are just being greedy! They’re already rich and famous and now they want even more money! Can you believe these guys?

But that’s their job. Surely you’d want to be paid for things you took time to develop and sell, right?

No way! I’m above that. If I were an artist, I’d be happy that people were listening to my music and coming to my shows. It’s all about the art, dude.

Just because it’s ‘all about the art’ for you, doesn’t mean that it’s ‘all about the art’ for everyone. Would you still feel the way you do once you were depending on that income for your livelihood, and your continuing ability to fund that livelihood?

Of course! I’m not looking to make money off records. I’d make my money of touring, and connecting with my fans, and selling merchandise and stuff.

What if you didn’t want to tour?

But that’s how you make money.

That’s one way you make money. The other part is selling records. What if you only want to sell records and that’s all? And don’t you, as the artist, have a right to choose the channels through which you distribute?

Ok, let’s stop this right here. You can see where this is going. Ultimately, the P2P downloader in this conversation is finding ways to justify his decision to download music. He gives all kinds of rationalizations for it, from blaming the companies, to blaming the artists, to giving ideological reasons, to technical explanations of why it’s not bad.

Clearly, this argument was built backwards. The downloader started with the idea of I want to have free, unrestricted access to any music I want whenever I want. From there, he found ways to justify any behavior that led to him getting that. This involved dismissing valid counterarguments through insular and self-justifying means that, while they might apply to his own worldview, are not necessarily shared by those who he is taking from. Nevertheless, he is able to project this ideological view of “how things should be” onto the world, and then convince himself that what he’s doing is actually the valorous thing to do, bravely fighting against an archaic system that enslaves and rips off consumers— when all he really wanted was the music to begin with.

Thus, a base drive to get free music has now taken on an ideological bent and has morphed into some kind of jihadist war on record companies. The guy could just have just admitted he wanted the free music. Why bother blowing all that smoke? Well, he doesn’t realize consciously that he is blowing smoke.

Apologists have this same problem. They’ve decided that George Bush, or Hillary Clinton, or Alex Chiu, or James Dobson, or whoever is right. Now that they’ve come to this conclusion, they can no longer stop to evaluate events critically. Suddenly, they find themselves excusing all kinds of behavior that they would skewer someone else for; and not only will they overlook this behavior, they will defend it— passionately! After all, they wouldn’t want to admit that they were wrong about this person this whole time.

Strange thing, this cognitive dissonance.




Further reading:
Mistakes Were Made by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. Harcourt, 2007.

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For the Love of Money

Why is wanting money a bad thing?

Posted Aug 24, 10:41 PM in business, economics, human nature


Having lived in now three liberal college towns (Berkeley, CA; Bloomington, IN; and Madison, WI), it becomes increasingly apparent to me that political liberals (of which I consider myself one, though definitely not one of the knee-jerk variety, and one who is very open to conservative ideology) have a very bad attitude towards money.

I hate to stereotype, but it’s a mindset that I’ve seen innumerable times in those who consider themselves on the political left, and one that no one is apologetic about. It’s considered crass and scummy to have a desire for money. I’m not denying that I myself carry the weight of this burden to some degree, but I’ve certainly loosened myself, particularly after having studied the role of business and commerce in the fundamental operations of the world.

Some people feel like it’s virtuous to not want money, and in fact to actively push it away. To such people, it’s at best selling out to go after money, at worst, it’s the most ugly possible stain on your very character. But let’s face it; we would all like to have a nice house, great vacations, health care, and good food. It’s hard to deny that we all want such things. The part that some people resist is the money part of the equation. Money of course, is the currency that we use to gain those things.

Alas, after having met greedy people, hearing about countless business scandals, and in general knowing about the ways in which money corrupts people, the indictment has come not upon the character of individuals and their personal responses to money, but the money itself. Money has become conflated with greed, confused with a lack of compassion, seen as the equivalent of misplaced priorities and the absence of decent character. To want such a thing is nothing more than a horrible scar on your name.

There’s good reason for this attitude; however, there’s also great reason why this attitude should no longer exist. Money in itself is a neutral force. It can do amazing things, it can do harmful things; but one thing is undeniable— it is the way to make things happen.

Sure, you could be a jerk like Ken Lay or Donald Trump, but you could also do something amazing like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. Some people would even argue that Bill Gates has done more for humanity than Mother Teresa (this refers to his endowment of billions of dollars in charity, and does not take into account the Windows operating system, which has caused untold damage towards humanity).

If you want to make the world a better place on a large scale, you’d better believe you’re going to need money. And, as a wise person once said, money won’t buy happiness, but a lack of money will definitely cause it. And in my opinion, it’s time money got the credit and respect it deserves. Even if that sounds crass.

Progressives often direct their political anger largely towards those who put “profits before people.” I don’t necessarily find fault with this logic, but the more the left continues to cultivate a negative attitude towards money and reject the idea that having it is anything more than a necessary evil, the more I believe it will actually shift power into the hands of those who have it, and know how to use it.

I’m certainly not saying that it’s okay to be greedy or that anyone should place money at the very apex of their priorities list, but to use an SAT-style metaphor:
“gasoline::car” as “money::life in the modern world.”

Something to think about.

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When in Doubt...

Human beings are creatures that doubt themselves a lot. And when they’re not doubting themselves, they are blindly following others

Posted Aug 22, 06:25 PM in branding, business, consumerism, experiences, human nature, marketing


Here’s an experiment that I’ve personally conducted dozens of times, and it never ceases to give me a brief moment of insane pleasure. Next time you’re standing at a crosswalk and there’s traffic coming, just take a step into the street. Chances are, even if there are cars zooming by at a hundred miles an hour, all the other people at the crosswalk will follow you, lemming-like, to their deaths. Of course, the proper thing to do is to stop before anyone dies, but my point is that people will instinctively follow your lead no matter how foolish you are, whether it is because they chose to discard any evidence of danger that may have presented itself, or because they were just too ignorant to notice the conditions of the road themselves.

This happens all the time.

Human beings are creatures that doubt themselves a lot. And when they’re not doubting themselves, they are blindly following others. That’s why it seems like persons of mediocre intelligence can market their horrible ideas so effectively with their presence and apparent conviction, while people with really good ideas and poor presentation can’t get anyone to listen to them. Politics is an excellent example of this.

A politician who constantly repeats his assertions, even in the presence of strongly contradictory empirical evidence, can manufacture ‘truth.’

Here’s a phrase that might sound familiar:

Iraq possesses of weapons of mass destruction.

Politics aside, we now know this assertion to be false. Nevertheless polls still show that a statistically staggering number of Americans still believe that an invasion of Iraq was necessary. Why? Is it because these people have not read the news? No, it’s because the assertion made by the Bush administration recreated reality in such a way that it effectively supplanted and destroyed any evidence that violated its argument. Any incoming facts that may have called into question the assertion were discarded.

A recent roast of comedian Bob Saget featured a great routine by Gilbert Gottfried in which he repeats a phrase about how Bob Saget “raped and killed a girl in 1990” about 4 times with an increasingly dramatic air. Despite the fact that, in the context of the full sentences, Gottfried is actually saying that this incident didn’t happen at all, this shocking phrase is the one that really makes its mark on you.

Though this was in the context of a joke, it’s not unthinkable that such vivid repetitions of phrases actually hurt people in real life. People are routinely tarred with accusations of being rapists and murderers in the absence of evidence or despite their innocence, and are unable to revert to their former selves in the eyes of others. They will always be psychopaths to those who learned of them in a context that branded them with those epithets through infinite repetition.

An age-old adage from the advertising industry suggested that if you can’t make an argument through logic, use song. That’s one method, but if you ask me, the more effective way is to just repeat something ad nauseum. The public’s internal BS detector will eventually shut off. Tragic and sad, but alas, true.

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Dirt-Digging When Hiring Employees: Why You Shouldn't Do It

Unrealistic expectations, their limitations, and the dangers they promise

Posted Jul 28, 01:12 PM in branding, business, economics, experiences, human nature, human resources, marketing, social networking


The New Reality
I wonder if there are going to be any viable candidates for anything in the future. The accessibility of information on the internet as well as the general ease for one to post information to it, especially at a young age, has led few curious and tech-savvy individuals from the internet generation to have clean, unsearchable online slates. If you’ve observed the behavior of 8-25 year olds recently, I think you will make the reasonable assumption that people of this age group comprise the lion’s share of Facebook’s 36 million users, and MySpace’s 73 million users, and have made their mark online in many other arenas.

And what kind of comments are these people posting on the internet, that would reassure potential employers of this person’s quality? Here’s one from a person I’ll call Ashley Pinsky, 15, from MySpace.

OMG i was so fukced up last nite lol!!!

Granted, this is an extreme example, but not an uncommon one. That offhand comment will probably prevent Ms. Pinsky from ever becoming president. And the nature of the internet is such that this comment may not be easy to find in the future, but it’s never going away. Someone who wanted to find dirt on Ashley Pinsky will find that comment 35 years later, no doubt. It’s not like it was in the good old days, where your exploits and comments could be geographically contained, or confined to the memory of a couple people who overheard your off-color joke in the privacy of your living room. We live in a world of YouTube, digital cameras, hidden recorders, live microphones, and ill-considered internet confessions.



The Problem with Vividness
But in the wise and out-of-context words of Marge Simpson, as long as everyone is videotaping everyone else, justice will be served. Right? Right?

Wrong.

One of the big concerns we should have is our tendency towards misleading vividness. The following is an example, and one that is intended intended as a convenient analogy, not a political screed.

Think about the difference between the respective presidential bids of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, in particular the controversies. We only criticized George Bush for his long history of alcohol abuse and coke-snorting, but we skewered Barack Obama for attending a church that appeared to deliver hateful sermons. Aside from the respective gravity of these apparent violations of character (the weight of them essentially created by the media), there’s one thing that separates them significantly: one was documented on camera and the other was not. We could watch Jeremiah Wright on endless loop, in vivid detail, cementing our impressions of his “hateful” church and its link to Obama.

The Wright tape was so visceral and immediate that it was hard for it to not make an impression somehow— even though it literally represented 2 minutes of the church’s decades-long history, and there was no further proof of similar activity. But all we heard about Bush’s years, possibly decades of hard partying and drug abuse was that he was reputed to be a former cokehead and alcoholic. We had didn’t have 2 minutes of videotape showing Bush snorting lines or stumbling around drunk or emotionally damaging his loved ones. For that, Bush didn’t have to own up to anything, while Obama had to do a lot of dancing around. Due to the vividness, the Wright issue seemed much more real and immediate than the other, so we pressed it much more, and it played a much larger role in our mental construction of Obama’s character.1

My point is not to get into whether these controversies themselves are important to examine in a presidential candidate; instead, I want to explore the economics of hiring techniques which involve the use of vividness and “dirt-digging” to establish character, and the lack of foresight that companies and our electorate may be unwittingly entering into by engaging in such practices that forcibly marry vividness with significance.



No One is Who They Appear to Be at Any Given Time
Our immediate instinct is to say when we find dirt on someone online, or in photographs, or in videos that we use these occurrences as evidence, testimonials to someone’s personality. Did you see that photo of him drunk at a bar? He’s a loose cannon. We can’t possibly trust him with our industrial equipment, or have our clients find out that (outside of work) he behaves in an unprofessional manner.

The problem is that we ascribe too much meaning to these words and images when they come from an unprofessional environment. First of all, it should not come to a surprise to anyone that people behave unprofessionally when they’re not at work. To expect that they don’t is an unrealistic and fairly ridiculous expectation that, when you think about it, demands far too much of someone who is only human. People are not their jobs. They behave themselves at work because they have to. At home and in their leisure time, they feel like they should be able to let loose and be themselves. After all, why should they be evaluated on behavior that does not directly and demonstrably affect the quality of their work?2

This leads me to wonder whether our apparent demands for a sparkling personal history is the result of us actually wanting to hire “clean” individuals for reasons of productivity or wanting to hire individuals who can at least appear clean so as to not horrify outsiders. The difference is that the latter acknowledges the imperfection of humans and settles for someone who can keep his indiscretions private, while the other wants us to be held to unmanageably high standards all the time.

In fact, I doubt seriously that there are completely clean people in this country, or the world. It’s just that much of our ‘dirty’ behavior occurs without documentation. I’m sure that if we all were being filmed all the time for everyone to see, there would be no one out there without some unsavory event connected to their name. If it wasn’t some frowned-upon activity like drug or alcohol use, it would be something else like violence, sexual indiscretion, off-color conversations and asides, shady business dealings, rude behavior, subtle racism, or anger management issues. And it’s not like these people are bad people; we’re talking about isolated moments that would appear damning if documented and replayed— moments that actually permeate all of our lives constantly.

Indeed, what man or woman would not appear foolish, controversial, unreasonable, or perverted if monitored 24/7 and edited to exaggerate the most sensational segments of his day (which is essentially what so-called HR background checks do)? Producers of reality television shows know this. They know how to work Final Cut Pro to make a normal girl seem like a raving bitch, a decent guy into an aggressive, misogynistic hothead, and a neurotic, socially-maladjusted lunatic into Simon Cowell.

Presidential candidates aren’t allowed the normal lapses of speech or judgment that the rest of us are afforded because everything they say is constantly being deconstructed by pundits and played 300 times in succession on news networks, giving every offhand comment a hyperreal, set-in-stone weight that the original probably didn’t have. Just imagine how you or someone you love might come off if every act or word uttered were subjected to the laws of television news overanalysis— every moment of frustration, giddy delight, or agitation there for the world to judge you with. People who have never met you are now basing their perceptions of you on a two second loop of you getting irate at the guy who cut you off on the highway, and it’s been playing all day and night, making you look increasingly psychotic with every repeat. It’s exactly what happened with Michael Jackson and Britney Spears and countless other celebrities, and it unsurprisingly drove them both to madness. It would most likely happen to you too.

Underlying this fundamentally unfair depiction of you is that while you may have lost your cool for that two seconds, you don’t get credit for the nearly 18 hours of collected calm that you exhibited. Nobody’s watching that part. Therefore, you are branded with the scarlet letter of being the psycho who flipped out when someone cut him off.



How HR’s Enthusiasm for Dirt-Digging is Going to Come Back to Bite It
So far, my point in describing all this is not to excuse occasional idiocy, bad judgment, or the appearance of foolishness, out-of-control behavior, or low ethical standards so much as to universalize it. Knowing that our past mistakes are out there and none of us are truly free from them, the only possible outcome from gross and commonplace hiring practices that seek to find our documented dirt is that candidates who are more undocumented (and therefore more unknown) than their competition are the ones who are more likely to get the job. How? Let’s look at these two potential candidates of equal qualification:

Mike — Online research finds that he admits to drinking and womanizing; is prone to occasional off-color jokes; was once arrested for indecent exposure 8 years ago.

Jeff — online research finds absolutely no information, damaging or otherwise.

In the split second you have to make this hiring decision, the chances are you want to hire Jeff. But consider this unsettling truth for a moment: After looking over their backgrounds, you feel more comfortable with the guy you know less about. In fact, it is the absence of information about Jeff that makes you feel unjustifiably secure about hiring him. You don’t know Jeff’s dirt, and therefore you mentally assume there is none. But as science teaches us, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The idea that ‘Jeff must be clean because we did not find any dirt on him’ is clearly false, but it does not stop our conscious mind from elevating him in comparison to Mike.

The problem is, you can almost never be sure whether that decision is justified or not because you simply do not have the information you need to make a legitimate comparison. As it turns out, Jeff might be a) a serial murderer that makes Mike seem like a great guy in comparison, b) an alcoholic with strikes against him just as bad as Mike, or c) a wonderful, clean-cut young man. You simply do not know which, and you continue to base your hiring practices on prejudices built on vividness: You read that Mike got arrested once and drinks a lot, so you now prefer Jeff.

This tendency should bother you; you are favoring someone who has only earned preferential status by information omission rather than information addition. Your lack of knowledge about this individual, who you have chosen after making a faulty comparison with another candidate whose vivid background rubs you the wrong way, might very well result in a poor hiring match for your company, or even a very damaging personality getting the job.

All of which doesn’t mean a lick of difference to you if the only reason you are screening for dirt is to keep up your company’s appearance with outsiders, which in this context, makes your hiring focus seem awfully misguided. Maybe I’m going out on a limb here, but I doubt outsiders give a damn about your employees unless they are dealing with them directly, which again comes back to the question of why you should care about anything your employee does as long as it doesn’t affect his work.



If I Shouldn’t Screen for Dirt, How the Heck Should I Be Hiring?
Hiring someone is a big decision. It can cost a large company between $80,000 to $1,000,000 in training and loss of productivity to bring in new people. It’s not easy. Yet, typical HR departments don’t invest much time or energy in hiring, and tend to do things in ways that are easy rather than effective. Really what they they need is something to judge character on. Ideally, they’d have all the same quantity and quality information about everyone so they could make accurate comparisons. But they don’t. Instead, they look at your resume, ask you some dumb questions, maybe call a couple references, and then search for dirt on you. This automatically— and unfairly— favors people who script their interview responses and who are either careful to hide their dirt, who haven’t gotten caught, or who are lucky enough to not have been documented. This is a very dangerous trend in hiring.

I think that the ideal, but definitely not the most convenient, means of hiring should involve the following:



1. Of course, this wasn’t the only issue that separated the two. There were obvious divisions of racism, classism, and religious fears as well.

2. This is not to imply that we should allow bad behavior at work; order obviously needs to be maintained in a professional environment. It’s just that we need to accept that for most people, there’s a division between work and home, and one that hardly anyone wants bridged. After all, as I mentioned in a previous post, we are different people depending on our environment. Our receptivity to different stimuli differs in different places, which is why we don’t feel compelled to drink at work, but that same beer seems enormously inviting the second we step out the door.

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Minimum Group Theory and the Christian Quandary

If it’s not one thing, it’s another

Posted Jul 15, 12:12 PM in human nature, politics, religion


In a previous post I remarked about the minimum group paradigm, which suggests that people instinctively divide themselves into us and thems in social situations.

Many people in the US are devout Christians (at least in name) and vote accordingly. Many of the same people think that Christian scripture should form the basis of law and public policy, despite the fact that the Constitution allows for and encourages freedom of religion and the separation of church and state. The founding fathers themselves were not all of the same religion, but it does not change the fact that a significant portion of Americans are distrustful and hostile towards non-Christian faiths. Sometimes, you’ll hear religiously-minded people say that all our problems would just go away if everyone was Christian, if we have prayer in school, and if we reinforce the teachings of Christianity in government and society. In other words, if we advocate a religious state.

Of course, the same people who argue this don’t realize the power of the minimum group paradigm, and how it will sabotage their dreams even in the unlikely chance that they get what they want.

Sure, right now it’s about Jesus vs. Allah, but once the Christians banish Allah from their sacred shores and secure themselves in a righteous Christian nation, people— having now no “other” to scapegoat— are going turn on their own. They will, for example, get upset about how evil Anglicans— who worship Jesus— are infiltrating our school boards, or how those bad, bad Mormons— who also worship Jesus— belong to a brainwashing cult, not like us Southern Baptists— who, surprise— worship Jesus. Or Methodists, or Lutherans, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or whatever sub-subset you can think of. And once the Southern Baptists or Lutherans kick out all the other guys, they’ll find some sub-sub-subset of Southern Baptists or Lutherans to fight against. This will never end until there’s just one guy in the whole country. And then he’ll want to bring in other ‘like-minded’ individuals, and the process will begin all over again.

If you ever needed any proof of this in practice, just think back to the Pilgrims. Most of us probably have happy thoughts when we think of the Pilgrims, what with the way they forged their own way after being harassed out of their own country, and the way they befriended the American Indians, and started Thanksgiving. Oh, and those adorable hats and bonnets!

The part that people forget is that despite the fact that the Pilgrims were forced out of England due to religious intolerance, they turned around and did the exact same thing to the American Indians, in a spectacular show of cognitive dissonance. The Pilgrims were the “them” in England, but in America, they were the “us,” and they had a “them” in the American Indians that they needed to take care of. And boy, did they.

If you need any more proof, just look out into the arid deserts of the Middle East, where Muslim Shi’a and Sunnis struggle over supremacy and who are the true believers. Sure, they’re all Muslims, but unbeknownst to most Christians in this country (most of whom aren’t even aware of this division), these two groups can’t stand each other. And where did this rivalry start? Let’s ask Wikipedia:

Sunnis, the largest group of Muslims, believe that the first four caliphs were the rightful successors to Muhammad; since God did not specify any particular leaders to succeed him, those leaders had to be elected.

The Shi’a , who constitute the second-largest branch of Islam, believe in the political and religious leadership of infallible Imams from the progeny of Ali ibn Abi Talib. They believe that he, as the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, was his rightful successor, and they call him the first Imam (leader), rejecting the legitimacy of the previous Muslim caliphs.

And if that isn’t obscure enough, it only goes downhill from there, spiraling into a mess of arcane and esoteric arguments that few understand or want to understand. But of course, why should a lack of understanding of the apparent conflict stop anyone from engaging in it, and mentally and physically blowing the opposing side to bits?

There’s no reason believe that this constant us and them subtext of humanity will ever change, and it is unthinkably naive to base policy on the idea that it ever will.

A Joke Related to the Aforementioned Topic

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump. I ran over and said: “Stop. Don’t do it.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” he asked.

“Well, there’s so much to live for!”

“Like what?”

“Are you religious?”

He said, “Yes.”

I said, “Me too. Are you Christian or Buddhist?”

“Christian.”

“Me too. Are you Catholic or Protestant?”

“Protestant.”

“Me too. Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?”

“Baptist.”

“Wow. Me too. Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?”

“Baptist Church of God.”

“Me too. Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?”

“Reformed Baptist Church of God.”

“Me too. Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?”

He said: “Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915.”

I said: “Die, heretic scum,” and pushed him off.

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