The Influencing Machine
Brooks Gladstone
Wow... Thanks to my friend Josh Wolfe for recommending "The Influencing Machine" by Brooke Gladstone who I had never heard of but millions have... She is a reporter on NPR - public radio in new york.
What's the "WOW" about anyway.
Well...
This is a powerful punch of sorts taking a look at the history of media in the most simplest of forms (comic strip style)with an extremely tight "I don't want to miss a sentence" style which syncs with the lack of toooooo many sentences. I got thru this ridiculously quick.
So... I could pick a thousand lessons from this but I will halt myself at just a couple for now maybe:
#1. Anytime you hear the number 50,000 associated with some circumstance be wary of it because the media has likely gotten itself wrapped into a self-fulfilling delusion that spins out into real society.
When she traced back for instance "Dateline estimates that at any given time 50,000 predators are on the internet prowling for children" (clearly an inflamatory commerically-grabbing figure that sacres the HECK out of parents) she found no there there... A string back to a wild guess that is not too low to be irrelevant and not too high to be questionable... But there is no evidence for that number. "It wasn't a real small number like 200 and it wasn't a ridiculously large number like 10mn... It was a goldilocks number. Not too hot, not too cold."... As investors we are also presented by such "garbage in" (usually offered by a management team citing the estimate of someone selling a report about the latest tech-acronym that the management actually sponsored)and if we go around quoting non-thoughts and burying those assumptions into our investment decisions we make on the behalf of clients we have a systematic process problem. We often talk about NOT outsourcing insight... A starting point is to question random numbers that come into our brains...
#2 BIASES:
+ commercial bias -- we crave novelty... We do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual.
+ bad news bias -- "we are wired to care about anything that threatens us... This makes the world seem more dangerous than it is"
+ status quo bias -- "the mainstream media never questions the structure of the politica system. The American way is the only way... Alternate points of view about how government might run and what government might do are effectively ignored."
+ access bias -- "reporters believe they must patrol the halls of power, but the price of admission is steep. Antagonize power and the door is barred..."... Sounds like there is a parallel to sell-side analysts behavior... Last week wrote a piece titled "Questions for Management" and I suspect NO sell-side analyst will consider that they will want to ask even one of the nine questions brynne offers in the next month even though they would likely agree to the merit.
+ the narrative bias... Brooke highlights that the BIG scene of the statue of Saddam Hussien coming down which was reshown non-stop by seemingly all media was framed such that it appeared as though a large crowd was gathered in the square when a larger panning of the space would have revealed that the square was virtually empty... This wasn't a mass manifestation at all!
+ fairness bias... Brooke throws water on Tim Russert's role in the matters involving former presidential candidate john kerry's military record AFTER the matter had been settled in favor of Kerry: "if the substance of many of the charges...aren't holding up...why is it resonating so much?"... Distorted the truth in pursuit of the appearance of balance.
#3. Finally for today...
She reminds of words from douglas adams as people stew about the internet's affect on our "minds":
"Anything that is in the world when you are born is normal and ordinary and is just a part of a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things."
#4 OK... Just one more... Brooke throws rocks at the idea of tyranny of choice citing Clay Shirky. He says that people confuse information overload with filter failure.
There is much more in here.
I loved this book. It fully and quickly engaged me.
Lobster Chronicles
Linda Greenlaw
Doesn't get better for me than this... A 40 year old woman returns to her home island off the coast of Maine to transition from a life of swordfishing at sea to that of lobstering. The book is as much about life on a very small maine island (year round population of 40) as it is about anything else. For anyone who hasn't spent significant time on an island - a small island with a handful of people - this is an eye opener and I suspect for those who have you will chuckle at most every turn.
Never Cry Wolf
Farley Mowat
Ok... So here is yet another author that if I was prone to being embarrassed I would say (as has been customary this year)that I am embarrassed not to have read before and I suspect I will read more and more in the years to come.
Farley Mowat... A Canadian naturalist of near epic proportions and in this case I will blame MANY of my Canadian friends (especially Faye and Helen for gosh sakes) for not merely sitting me down with one of his books and forcing me to read ten pages on the spot -- for no more than ten pages was required to get me hooked. This is an old book released in 1963 about Wolves. I like so much about this book it is hard to no where to start but... I love that he is digging for the "truth" -- in this case about wolves... Kelly and I went on a holiday to Anguilla about 7-8 years ago (and I hope to go again!) And during the short holiday I read four books that I loved! And the common connector of these seeming disparate books was that each was digging about digging for the truth. I remember one was about Billy Beane the baseball general manager for the Oakland A's who was question much of the "common wisdom" of baseball by using data to get beyond "common wisdom" and more toward "truth"... I find myself in my work in analyzing and assessing businesses as most passionate and drawn and engage and even compulsive to a point when the entire exercise lives in the space of getting at what the "real truth" is about why a business succeeds or fails and past the surface level chit chat that so dominates daily discourse. To be clear, I don't aim to suggest that I am aiming to get past wide spread fraud or conspiracy (I don't think either is widespread at all) but rather I am so drawn to a next layer beyond commonly and wrongly spouted truisms. In Never Cry Wolf, Farley Mowatt does just this... It breaks up most of the commonly held myths about wolves thru relaying his own intense upfront and personal experience and observations. So far as he comes to learn, wolves are NOTHING close to the image that man has portrayed. I also admire this crazy nutty guy who is dropped in what most of us would call the middle of nowhere unperturbed about his own possibilities of encountering personal survival issues at every turn. You could say he is just "chill" about all the danger he clearly puts himself in front of but he isn't always "chill" --- what he does demonstrate is not allowing his fear get in front of his passion! It is amazing. There are some points he quite humanly reflects some of his fear and I am reading and thinking "well, sure, crawling into the depths of what for me would be a claustrphobic wolf den he thought was empty only to enocunter two wolves face to face at five feet away would most understandably generate a reaction of paralysis and abject terror so far as I was concerned but so would being dropped off by an airplane into the near arctic of Canada three hours from anything that might be called civilization without ANY sense of return would have such a paralysis be ever present in me!!! Don't need to encounter a wolf at all to be terrified in this circumstance from my point of view. I also admired the humor he injected at every turn into his writing which seems a reflection of how he chooses to live his life... Sure, at many points he made fun of the silly thinking people had about wolves but even more so he laughs at himself during his own journey. I also admire that he doesn't pretend to cross the line into science and that is ok by him. We have a lot of folks today spouting pseudo science today as if science itself was the "answer" to some conceived set of human ills and, as such, if story tellers purport that they are "science" when in fact they really aren't they will be accepted as leading us "out" of the darkness... And three or four elements of this thinking bother me but most of all is people purporting to be something that they are not especially toward the end of building their own careers more so than providing a service from their "science" to help others out of the supposed "darkness"... (A fancy way of saying that "science will get us out of the darkness" when the creator is really subsumed with their own careers and that perhaps the narrowness of purpose IS the darkness itself)... Farley Mowat goes at lengths to point out that much of what he does is most certainly not up to scientific standards... He is clear... He is also clear that he isn't going to wait for perfection of science to decide how he will live and the conclusion he will arrive at when he is attacking a "common wisdom" about wolves that clearly did not come from science at all!!!! Finally for now... This was such an easy read... I wish it could have gone on and on and as such I will likely return to his work pretty darn soon.
Reality Is Broken
Jane Mcgonigal
An absolutely superb book that brings us up to date with the 2011 status of the gaming ecosystem, weaves in alternative reality games of all sorts and digs deep in a vision of the ways games can make a significant change in the world. an easy read as well.
The author - Jane Mcgonigal - clearly understands the anthropology behind what she speaks of at a time when most discuss "games" in a very superficial fashion.
A Trip to the Beach: Living on Island Time in the Caribbean
Melinda Blanchard and Robert Blanchard
A couple runs away from it all to start a restaurant on Anguilla... Great restaurant btw - kelly and I went twice
Happiness: Lessons from a New Science
P. R. G. Layard
An economist writes a brilliant book bashing the use of GDP... Think it went anywhere? It didn't -- very sad... There is a lot to be said for following a gross domestic happiness or some alternative measure that does something more than stress economic output single-mindedly as if THAT is a good mental model for human experience.
The Curse of Rocky Colavito: A Loving Look at a Thirty-Year Slump
Terry Pluto
This was written by a superb sports writer documenting the awful fate of the cleveland indians up through the 1980s -- my hometown team! Ironically, just after publication the team became one of the best in all of baseball for about 15 years... He may want to write a fresh version to help them from the recent demise!
My Love Affair With the State of Maine
Scotty Mackenie
A story of goose rocks beach, maine in the 1940s... Our home in maine. The story involves two women who buy the general story and find that folks in maine in the 1940s are a slightly different bunch. The role of local community in days before folks drove 15 minutes routinely to the Home Depot or Walmart is quite pronounced... Local mattered MUCH more then! The story oncludes chronicling of a massive fire that swept through the southern portion of the state and right through Goose Rocks Beach to the ocean.
The New Culture of Desire
Melinda Davis
What are the new themes behind how consumers behave
The Whole Earth Catalogue
Stewart Brand
The defining "catalogue" that captured the culture and spirit of Silly Valley in the late 60s and early 70s
Joystick Nation
J.C. Herz
One of the gaming classics from one of the emerging superb thinkers
How Buildings Learn
Stewart Brand
Change and the world of architecture
Laws of Simplicity
John Maeda
Nice short piece quite consistent with the idea of simplicity itself. I would have loved to have more of his thinking though -- sometimes in takes a while to expand and think thru long and hard before seeing how to break an idea down. My mere two hours to complete left me wanting more.and more.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
John Berendt
The last two paragraphs said it best in suggesting that Savannah (which we recently visited and where the story is set) is happy to remain isolated from the world protecting a way of life that seems to work well for them.
Night
Elie Wiesel
This book is much to powerful for me to put words to. This is Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel's personal experience of being forced into a Nazi concentration camp in 1944.
Blink
Malcom Gladwell
Very easy read about the power of enhanced awareness... popular hit
The Screwtape Letters
CS Lewis
A series of letters from one disciple of the devil to his failing mentee who is losing a battle to capture a human soul in England. CS Lewis brilliantly uses these letters as his vehicle to discuss 1001 abstracts of the individual in the world and what works and what doesn't work.