Pattern and Surprise

I love the process of slowly recognizing a pattern in your own cognition and then later discovering an explanation of it that is supported by scientific research. This happened to me the other day when I read that human beings prefer to look at fractal patterns over non-fractal patterns, and we like our fractals with a density of 1.3, which oxymoronically exhibits “low complexity.” Complexity, but not too much. Michael Gazzaniga writes about this in Human: the Science Behind what Makes Us Unique.

Similarly, David Brooks talks about how we prefer music that conforms to traditional patterns of composition while still offering moments of surprise. For a long time, I have noticed that I’ll quickly dislike a piece of music if it is too predictable, even if I know that I enjoy similar works. The parts of music that I love the most are those little divergences in the melody, the playful spots in the rhythm, the interesting pairings of harmony. I have unconsciously smiled countless times when something catches my ear that my head wasn’t expecting.

This is probably part of the reason that culture is so slow to change. There is a great example of the way our brains accept or reject things that don’t conform to our previous experiences. I heard it on an episode of RadioLab. Parisian ballet goers responded to Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring by rioting against it. It was so new and groundbreaking that it is speculated they went momentarily insane. If I remember correctly (I’ll have to go back and listen again), he was received the very next year in the same city with resounding acclaim. And we know the piece best from Disney’s Fantasia.  It’s not so controversial anymore, I suppose, but our brains are certainly picky the first time we encounter something.

Reach and Reciprocity

I feel as if I’ve only just learned how to learn.

I’m currently reading David Brooks’ The Social Animal. In it, Brooks references the idea of Reach and Reciprocity found in Richard Ogle’s Smart World.

“Start with the core knowledge in a field, then venture out and learn something new. Then come back and reintegrate the new morsel with what you already know. Then venture out again. Then return. Back and forth. Again and again. As Ogle argues, too much reciprocity and you wind up in an insular rut. Too much reach and your efforts are scattershot and fruitless.”

For a long time I have intuited the concept of Reach and Reciprocity without it becoming conscious. When I read a book and it seems to have “come into my life at just the right time,” or some such sentimentality, I realize that I had simply reached out to some knowledge that could be effectively integrated with my past experience at that time. In delving into a new topic of interest, I spend a lot of time finding just the right book that will match my current intellectual standing and motivations, that will most efficiently convey a wide, solid foundational understanding.

When I learned to play the banjo, I knew, from having experienced skill level plateaus with the guitar, that it would be essential to start with the fundamentals (I still can’t use my pinky very well to play guitar). I spent two weeks just using my right hand, learning the strumming technique before playing a single chord, let alone a song. With my muscle memory in place, I could let that focus drop away and begin to think about how to position my left hand as the right kept strumming away, bum-ditty bum-ditty bum-ditty.

I wonder how much earlier I would have been capable of this limited self-knowledge. How much earlier I could have learned how to learn, been able to acknowledge and examine, in some small way, the tumultuous processes of synthesis going on in my skull. Can this knowledge of ideas and how the brain develops and organizes information be successfully implemented and passed on in the classroom? Perhaps therein lies the rub. Young minds may simply not be at the point in their development where they can effectively venture out to gather up the concept of reach and reciprocity. To learn how to learn, we must simply do it, and suffer the results of inevitable failed attempts. But the greatest teachers carry this knowledge and serve as excellent guides along the way.

Ethics and Economics

I have noticed in myself a rather strong emotional reaction to the economic crisis, especially as concerns the financial sector. I think I’ve narrowed it down to a disappointment and anxiety over what I see as a lack of ethical principles being applied to the credit system. I don’t like to think that we live in a world where there are a minority of individuals in a supposedly democratic society outside the rule of law as established according to our collective values. It doesn’t even bother me specifically that some individuals within the financial system would choose to flout generally accepted standards of ethics. All types of people make these breaches of ethics all the time if the price is right. What has been so unsettling is to learn that the system put in place to monitor such action and to bring violators to justice has been systematically dismantled over decades.

It is overwhelming to think of how to go about reestablishing the prudent rule of law when a self-interested and seemingly impune minority has so much power and wealth.

However, I am reading Robert Reich’s Aftershock right now and have just finished reading this…

In order to fix what needs fixing, we need to be clear about what broke. The underlying problem is not that financial institutions were reckless, although they were. The ultimate solution, therefore, isn’t just to make them more prudent. Nor is the central problem that consumers borrowed too much, although they did. The solution, therefore, isn’t merely to get Americans to save more and consume less.

To summarize: The fundamental problem is that Americans no longer have the purchasing power to buy what the U.S. economy is capable of producing. The reason is that a larger and larger portion of total income has been going to the top. What’s broken is the basic bargain linking pay to production. The solution is to remake the bargain…

A fundamentally new economy is required — the next stage of capitalism. But how will we get there? And what will it look like when we do?

There are essentially two paths from here. Only one will get us to where we want to be.

To be continued.

On modernism

Until recently, I feel like I’ve really struggled to understand the work of people like Jackson Pollock, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Grant Achatz. In the last couple of months, I have run across two bits of wisdom that have changed the way I view cultural modernism.

The first is a quote from Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead that I read embedded within Jon Kolko’s Thoughts on Interaction Design. Kolko was writing about the integrity of materials in design when he said…

One can’t help but think of the idealistic Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, as he denounces the Parthenon as poorly architected: ‘The famous flutings on the famous columns – what are they made for? To hide the joints in wood – when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble… Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood…’

Reading this was a definite aha moment for me. Modern architecture, and modernism in general, has been an attempt to break the chain, to create solutions from scratch based on available technology and needs of the day. Modern art, from this perspective, can be seen as a deconstruction and calling out of those chains of unquestioned cultural productions.

Pheasant with shallot, cider gelée, and burning oak leaves

The second bit of wisdom came from Grant Achatz, who was being interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air this morning. I was surprised at first to hear Achatz say that he and the others at his restaurant sometimes intentionally create culinary experiences that intimidate. This, Achatz says, is a way to break the monotony of something that we do every day, often without reflection: eating. It is easy to overlook the details in a dish with fork in hand, ready to shovel up the plate’s contents before the waiter can remove his hand from the table. However, if the dish comes out suspended in a wire armature with smoldering oak leaves, you are taken aback, intrigued, intimidated, maybe even turned on.

The power of modernism is in the lack of fear for novelty, the embrace of possibility. Achatz says that they are able to create new and interesting culinary experiences because they never say no to an idea. This is not to say that they put everything they make in front of guests, but that they at least respect the potentiality of ideas and are willing to experiment, to dabble in the unknown.

I also love that Achatz aspires to incorporate all of the senses into his food. He is especially cognizant of aroma, hence the smoldering oak leaves.

Vik Muniz - Sugar Children

Vik Muniz, in the documentary Wasteland, is another artist that is consciously aware of the materials he uses in his art. He is able to create representations out of materials that his subjects have a direct connection with, making the art all the more powerful.

Efficiency and innovation

Classically, in the industrial economy, there have been two choices on the path toward profits, growth, and stability: efficiency and innovation. This is a false choice.

Management has long seen efficiency maximization as the mutually exclusive and economical option. The other option, creating a more valued product that can be sold at a higher margin, is fraught with the cost and risk that is the stuff of executive ulcers the world over. A thorough evaluation of the value and supply chains in an organization is a way of doing more with less, running lean and mean.

Now, while the pursuit of efficiency may seem like the ultimate exercise in augmenting shareholder value, implementation is a minefield of conflicting organizational management philosophies.

Indulge me in some logic for a moment:

According to Roger Martin, long-term success comes from a balance of the efficient exploitation of existing products and services and the pursuit of innovation. Since business owners would all say that they strive for long-term success (despite their behavior), we can conclude that all businesses should strive to balance efficient operations with innovation.

A caller to Tom Ashbrook’s On Point this morning said that, in his experience, owners are not interested in employees that care about products. Rather, they are interested in the number of widgets that can be produced per hour. It is obvious, from Martin’s assertion above, that any business predicated on this model will eventually fail, most likely from being overtaken by an unforeseen competitor’s much better, novel solution. That said, our conclusion is that innovation is a fundamental element of long-term success.

If innovation is a fundamental element of long-term success, then how can it be that success-driver owners would do everything in their power to thwart the efforts of innovative employees in their ranks? Conclusion: Short-sighted and plain old bad business. All across the nation, and I’d venture to guess the world, there are people toiling away in anonymity, the pride in their work waning. These are people who have ever so much to contribute to the organizational conversation, people whose human capital stagnates in so many cubicles.

If management were to incorporate the need for innovation into the analysis of organizational effeciency then this underutilization of human capital would be readily apparent.

How tragic that the great potential of individuals and organizations is squandered simply because of this false dichotomy between efficiency and innovation.

The above approach is rather cold and calculative in an attempt to ground the argument in the world of traditional business management. I also wonder if we haven’t somehow trained businesspeople out of their own value systems. That is to say that I wonder if business education and pressures on the job haven’t created a negative feedback loop in which people straddle an ever widening gap between their personal value system and that of the business. Many people are talking about the shift toward more holistic perspectives in business that take account of things like environmental impact, employee happiness, and the creation of real value. There are even success stories that show this paradigm shift to be profitable, but it is disheartening to see so little of it. What I see is a polarization where the progressive thought leaders go off towards holistic success while the greedy fatcats continue to reap ever larger rewards while creating ever larger externalities making it ever more difficult for us to maintain our integrity.