Beware of Stories too Good to Be True

I recently saw a study that 52 percent of Democrats believe Russia interfered with vote tallies in the presidential election. There is of course, no evidence of vote tally manipulation. There is plenty of evidence of other shenanigans - fake news, hacked emails of the DNC, John Podesta and his lack of understanding of how passwords work etc. But there is zero evidence that Russia - or anyone - hacked voting machines or vote totals. Since the original tweeter seemed to be isolating Democrats, I tweeted, "Conspiracies theories are not subject to the left/right partisan divide. We are all susceptible." (see pic).

The author of the tweet (Kapil Khetan) subsequently accused me (perhaps facetiously) of saying each side was equally gullible and lectured me on my PC'ness. To be fair, saying each side was equally gullible is is exactly what I said - and I meant it!

Actively Studied Topic - Conspiracy and Paranoia. 

As it happens, this is not just the Muse poking at Mr. Khetan (with my apologies to all his settlers). The topic is well known in political science and many studies including very broad surveys have been used to show that conspiracy and paranoia is a general human trait that bridges many gaps - left vs. right, educated vs. non-educated, age, etc.

If I had to pick one for you I would direct you to Oliver and Wood's study titled "Conspiracy Theories and the Paranoid Style(s) of Mass Opinion" from the 2014 American Journal of Political Science. It's en excellent study with few holes in it. According to the authors the greatest predictor of susceptibility to conspiracy theories is a belief in unseen forces and a Manichean world view (roughly - a belief in good or evil). This rolls up a sizable majority of human kind.

The idea of a strong "good vs. evil" vibe being a precursor to being a conspiracy buff rings true if you think about interactions around conspiracies. Conspiracies are used to bludgeon the "other" side - indeed to "otherize" the other side and turn them into an evil force with hidden motives and byzantine machinations.  Folks are never quite so passionate when arguing from objective facts right?

How do you avoid conspiracies?

The Muse rule of thumb is simple. When you really want to believe something because it fits your view of the opposing side ("they" are stupid, bad, want to take my money, want to disenfranchise minorities etc etc ad infinitum), it's time to step back and use your thinking cap. You may conclude that something is indeed true after objecvive analysis - but you may also find yourself saying "how did I almost buy that?"

The men and women the Muse trusts the most are the ones that have a large measure of healthy skepticism about themselves! 

The Myth of Retraining: Joe and Matilda Fuzzypants

One of the oft-cited "solutions" to the loss of traditional manufacturing jobs is "re-training". It sounds helpful and hopeful. If you can't do "A" anymore, we'll just teach you to do "B" and Bob's your uncle. Unfortunately it is not enough to simply teach someone to do something different. They also must be have ability and desire. I want to tread lightly here. I'm a believer in hard work and self-improvement. I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from going back to the drawing board and reinventing themselves. As a re-inventor myself I know it can be rewarding! The problem with many folks however, is the technology curve and the speed of adaptation.

Joe's Saga

To illustrate let's talk about Joe. Joe's coming out of high school with ok grades and he wants to do something to "make good money" so he can feed his video game addiction and marry his cat (don't judge). Joe decides to become a computer programmer. Programming seems like a good choice. He can certainly make a living doing it. Even though Joe has little to no experience with programming, he did take a class in High School. Although he wasn't an "enthusiastic" student, he did eke out a B.

Joe enrolls in the local university as a CS major. Along with everything else Joe learns the basics of programming from three classes in Java. His classes prepare him to build software objects and classes, work with UI's, compile and jar up his code and work with a group. He scrapes by, graduates (Thank God - no more school!), finds a job doing java and marries Matilda Fuzzypants (don't judge).

A few weeks into his job he comes to a startling realization. Only 60 percent of what he learned about Java in school is useful (I'm being generous). His new job consists of "figuring things out", implementing new frameworks, and preparing for the massive changes that are coming with the next version of Java. Far from being done with school he is embroiled in an entirely new learning experience and his job is on the line. He decides programming is too much like being a student, so he and Matilda move back in with Mom and he takes a job at the local Petsmart where his dalliance with a calico is a source of constant domestic tension.

Muse pro-tip: If you are a CS major, by the time you take a job using Java, much of what you have learned will be deprecated (that's how programmers say "useless and out of date").  The next version of Java will be on the horizon. Six months later and you will need to be learning Java 9 (or whatever) in preparation for the upgrade. The next buzz-worthy framework will be peculating through the blogosphere and your manager will ask you "what do you think about retrofitting application A to this new approach?" This is simply what tech jobs are like. In my company we call this the 80/20 rule. 80 percent of the time you are working on something and 20 percent you are preparing for the next thing by learning something new.

Lessons Learned

So in the new economy it's not enough to know something - to have been taught a skill. You must also have the aptitude for change. The most important aspect of this aptitude is curiosity. The best employees of my consulting company are those who are learning because they can't help it. They are just naturally interested. The second most important aspect is "speed leaping" - the ability to grasp a new paradigm, metaphor, approach etc. and know without a book or a seminar how to take advantage of it.

I'm not sure anyone can "train" a worker to succeed at high levels in the new economy without these qualities - at least not at wage levels previously provided by manufacturing (although there are certainly exceptions). Workers have to be equipped to quickly grasp and master new technologies on an ongoing basis. New technologies drive changes in software, systems and management processes. The days are gone when mastering 6 or 7 skills was enough to keep a worker employed. Instead, he or she will need to devote some portion of their time to "staying current".

What happens if you are not personally wired to be curious and make mental leaps? What if you don't pick up a new phone or tablet or laptop and intuitively grasp how it works and the ways you could use it? You end up taking a service job.

This Ain't Weimar Germany

For all those hyperbolic folks looking for a toothbrush mustache on the sandy haired emperor of Trump Tower I have a few thoughts. First a disclaimer. Yes, Trump favors "toughness." Yes, he likes strongmen. Yes, he's said nice things about dictators.Yes he has allowed space for racism to fester in his camp. Yes he has bullied his way to the top. But, to paraphrase Roy (Mathew Quigley), "This ain't  Weimar Germany, and Trump ain't Adolf Hitler." Let's all take a breath shall we?

Like most things in his life (his attempt to look wealthy for example) Trump is a caricature that reminds folks of Hitler. The raucous rallies with sycophantic fans, the hyperbole, and the in-your-face approach to the media, combined with racist overtones hint at a dictator in waiting. Fortunately the similarities end at the shallow end of the pool. Here are some important things to keep in mind.

Hitler Co-opted a Failed State

Weimar Germany existed at a time when communism was a powerful force in Europe. Far from being the "default government system", democracy seemed like an experiment with a real downside. The far right wing was a reaction to communist forces and the uncertainty of democracy. The German hard-right wingers were in favor of strong executive power. Many preferred a return to the monarchy. They saw the rising tide of communism using democracy to eventually take over the state. By the late 20s in Germany, a center right coalition insured that the cabinet and president (Hindenburg) ruled the country through emergency powers with little input from the Reichstag (parliament). The military served as stamp of legitimacy on this arrangement. It was a tenuous structure with a small cadre of true players and it teetered and tottered and threatened to collapse annually.

By 1933 (Hitler finally becomes Chancellor) the Republic had suffered 2 attempted coups in the decade plus since WWI. Hitler himself was central in one of the coups in 1923. He served little more than a year as the leader of a plot to overthrow the republic. Let that sink in. The republic was so weak and unpopular that the government and citizens were willing to give coup plotters an "E" for effort and a slap on the wrist as punishment for failure. That's how very weak Weimar was as a government system.

The US on the other hand, has much less structural weakness. Far from having true power concentrated in a few hands, power in the US is diffused through a dizzying array of states, branches, and bureaucracies. There is no conceivable path to "take over" the US government without a military coup. That seems the least likely of all the scenarios to this writer. Hitler exploited structural weakness to become dictator of Germany. No such weakness in US government is evident.

Hitler had Organized Para-Military Forces

The SA (Sturmabteilung or Storm Detachment aka the Brown Shirts) were three million strong at the beginning of 1933. They had commanders, hierarchy and rank and file "soldiers". They were armed and functioned as military units. They were frequently used as a force to put pressure on local and state government. In essence, they were Hitler's private police force and he used them effectively to implement his will. The SA served as pending threat of civil war - a sword of Damocles - insuring the NAZI party received accommodation.

Trump forces on the fringe are not organized, nor does Trump have any compulsion to control them. He seems to prefer to ignore them altogether. They don't seem to interest him. In spite of press hyperbole, a DC rally in a Washington hotel where Richard Spencer leads seig heil is not the same as men marching in rank through Jewish sectors of a city and smashing windows, or kidnapping, torturing and killing key community members systematically. One is play-acting, the other is deadly serious. One wonders why the press covered the Spencer side show at all.

Hitler's WAS an Ideologue, Trump is not

Trump has a goal of favoring himself within his office. Hitler had a complex (albeit insane) world view that he preached and acted on constantly. Both were opportunists, but Hitler had folks following his ideology. That ideology included overt acts of violence, war and conquest, the creation by force of an "ethnic German community", and the Führerprinzip - a particularly insidious ideology with dire consequences for Europe and the Jews.

In spite of Trumps flaws (and they are legion) he has little if any of these overriding drives. Hitler's world had him seated on an imperial throne ruling the Aryan west with an iron hand and subjugating all people to his will. Trump's vision has him living out his days in Trump Tower fabulously wealthy and finally able to stick his finger in the eye of the fancy pants NY debutantes who have laughed at him all his life. If he has a vision for America it's provincial and it stops at economics.

Conclusion

Historians hate these sort of "It can happen again" comparisons. Yes, there are things about Trump's rise that are troubling and alarm bells should be ringing. Yes we should work to preserve our institutions and push back against any encroachment - it's a slippery slope. But no, Trump is not Hitler. The US electorate should be saying (again paraphrasing Roy), "I said I didn't have much use for constitutional liberty, I didn't say I didn't know how to use it."

Media - You Keep Using That Word...

The Media is a handy whipping boy. Consider these takes:

• Over Coverage - By over-covering Trump's shenanigans the media provided so much coverage that it engineered a Trump win.

• Imbalance - By over covering Clinton's email scandal and under covering Trump's ugly statements about women and minorities the media was in the tank for Trump.

• Corrupt  - The media was clearly anti-Trump post to post and in the tank for Hillary.  Trump won by pointing it out to the common folk who voted for him, ignoring the them completely.

• False Equivalency - The Media, afraid to call a spade a spade, pitched a false equivalency matching (for example) Trump's financial dealings against the Clinton foundation or Trumps misogyny against Clinton's spouse. The result was pulling Hillary down to Trumps level. 

• Bait and Switch - Trump tweets something outrageous to cover for a different, more complicated story that is emerging. The media takes the bait and the better story is buried while the media pontificates about how Trump is silly and incautious.

Examples abound to support each of these narratives. For example, CNN gave airtime to dozens of trump rallies and events - even events promoting his hotel - resulting in billions of dollars (by some estimates) of free publicity. Yet each of these has contra-examples as well - and all of them suffer from a fatal flaw. They misrepresent or narrowly define "the media" and they fail to present an alternative universe where things might be different. 

The Media - You Keep Using that Word.

The first issue is that the media is not one thing. It's not even a cohesive conglomerate of many things. If you think of media as the way people receive information then twitter itself is a direct conduit from news makers to eyeballs. People get their news from Facebook, Instagram, memes, snap-chat, and a Byzantine array of web sites that may or may not be tied to actual news rooms. It's a giant amalgam of technologies, approaches, print, television and new media.

For cost reasons each outlet has to find a niche to serve - conservative, liberal, center, objective, opinion, advocacy etc. All of this serves to blur the line between news and opinion. Meanwhile news has become so varied and outlets so ubiquitous that people are free to window shop for the news that suites them. They pick their own echo chamber, and that outlet happily caters to them. They know who pays the bills. In a competitive landscape where eyeballs matter you choose a constituency and make them happy. What's the incentive to do otherwise.

There is no Illumedianatti

The second issue is collaboration. There is this notion that the media is collaborating on how coverage is handled. In my view this is ridiculous. Media coverage is market driven. Coupled with free speech it may be the best example of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" you could dream up. The idea that there is some overarching subversive goal that all media is working toward is a conspiratorial fantasy - and it exists in spades on both the right and the left. 

Clearly there is no media grand council, no secret meetings, no "illumedianatti" of Machiavellian editors and journalists who are engineering our society from behind the scenes. Instead there are a lot of dedicated professionals trying to do their jobs with a good number of charlatans mixed in. Yes many outlets put forward a point of view - but that is hardly a secret. Breitbart is right, Huffpo is left, CNN in the middle somewhere (I'll get comments on that I'm sure). If such collaboration exists, it would surely be more coherent than our current goulash of views and insights. 

The real question is, if you care about objectivity, what do you do for news?

The Muse Method

If you want my personal view on how to choose news I would say this:

1. Read print journalism - subscribe to the Washington Post, the NYT, the Wall Street Journal and your local paper. The coverage is more complete and there is more thought and less "hot takes." 
2. Don't believe anything that you really really want to believe. If you hate Trump and see a story that says he was caught in a love nest with a hooker and giant wombat you may really want that to be true. That's a reason to check yourself. When your passion becomes a filter for the news you are in real trouble trying staying objective.
3. Follow many sources from all angles. In my twitter feed  I try to follow lots of people from right, left, center and even la la land. It keeps me from buying anything on credit, and keeps me checking facts.

(Thanks to Zeynep Tufekci - @zeynep - of the NYT for stimulating my thoughts in this area)

The Hamilton Kerfuffle

This week I smelled ozone coming from the internet. When I checked it appeared to be lit up because VP Elect Mike Pence, attending Hamilton the musical, was booed by the audience and then lectured by a cast member. With this kindling almost everyone seemed to have a match at the ready. Trump, sensing an opportunity, tweeted his displeasure and demanded an apology.

So what does it mean for people of color artists to lecture the incoming VP on civility and the importance of diversity. How did Trump use or react to the hubbub?

Trump's Play

One media take that seems to be gaining steam is that Trump once again used his mad media skills to suck all the oxygen out of the media landscape, diverting people from his 25 million dollar settlement in the Trump University class action civil suit. To that the Muse says "meh".

A settlement is an end game for the story - a wrap up. Yes, it looks bad for trump, but not as bad as having the suit hanging around. I don't think the story had legs. Did Trump intentionally leverage the Hamilton kerfuffle to take the wind out of the sails of the Civil suit story? I doubt it. He's not the High Sparrow. He's more of a joffrey - A petulant, inwardly focused neophyte with a shallow, un-nuanced view of the world.

I think the media is constantly giving Trump more Machiavellian credit than he deserves. He is a media savant in that he can find an audience, cater to it, and wield it as leverage. But these are intuitions not over acts of planning and discipline. What happens most often is that he stumbles into tiffs, then plays them well.

It is not the media that determines salience. People want to talk about Hamilton and they don't seem to want to talk about the civil suit - which seems old news. Trump, better than those who decry the oxygen sucking ploy, seems to know how people respond better than much of the media. Social media plays the role of alternative platform. The result, hard core, nuanced stories are left out in the cold while everyone is in a tizzy over Hamilton.

The Hamilton Kerfuffle

This week I smelled ozone coming from the internet. When I checked it appeared to be lit up because VP Elect Mike Pence, attending Hamilton the musical, was booed by the audience and then lectured by a cast member. With this kindling almost everyone seemed to have a match at the ready. Trump, sensing an opportunity, tweeted his displeasure and demanded an apology.

So what does it mean for people of color artists to lecture the incoming VP on civility and the importance of diversity. How did Trump use or react to the hubbub?

Trump's Play

One media take that seems to be gaining steam is that Trump once again used his mad media skills to suck all the oxygen out of the media landscape, diverting people from his 25 million dollar settlement in the Trump University class action civil suite. To that the Muse says "meh".

A settlement is an end game for the story - a wrap up. Yes, it looks bad for trump, but not as bad as having the suite hanging around. I don't think the story had legs. Did Trump intentionally leverage the Hamilton kerfuffle to take the wind out of the sails of the Civil suite story? I doubt it. He's not the High Sparrow. He's more of a joffrey - A petulant, inwardly focused neophyte with a shallow, un-nuanced view of the world.

I think the media is constantly giving Trump more Machiavellian credit than he deserves. He is a media savant in that he can find an audience, cater to it, and wield it as leverage. But these are intuitions not over acts of planning and discipline. What happens most often is that he stumbles into tiffs, then plays them well.

It is not the media that determines salience. People want to talk about Hamilton and they don't seem to want to talk about the civil suite - which seems old news. Trump, better than those who decry the oxygen sucking ploy, seems to know how people respond better than much of the media. Social media plays the role of alternative platform. The result, hard core, nuanced stories are left out in the cold while everyone is in a tizzy over Hamilton.

The Internet is the Work of Gnomes

I am continually gobsmacked that politicians are tech-clueless. The world of IT might as well be French Cuisine or the Navajo language for all they appear to know (my apologies to the Navajo - the French are on their own). 

There's no better illustration than the the former Secretary of State (a demonstrably smart and detailed person) choosing to run a private email server in her house -- something to cause the most laissez faire IT professional to recoil in horror. In its current state of understanding the Hill has "virtually" no chance of solving any problem in IT (see this Wired article). Why is our government so stubbornly Luddite when dealing with IT?

Newsflash Senator Doe, your "social media director" is not a technology expert. Tech isn't "what the kids are doing these days". I started making a list of "important IT concepts for legislatures, but let's start with just one - the The ISO Network stack. If I get some positive responses I'll add to this thread and create a series of posts. First the techy stuff:

ISO Networking Stack

The ISO stack is an network model that helps troubleshooters like the Muse think through problems in layers of services or technologies. It helps techs get our arms around the "Big Picture". I won't explain it in detail here - read the Wikipedia article for a full description - but let's talk about why it's important.

Most computer programmers do not actually program "computers" (CPUs). The actual CPU code is  so low level that it consists mostly of instructions to open and shuts little gates in address registers. Instead, most programmers program against a service layer which in turn depends on another service layer and so on. 

Here's an example to keep your eyes from glazing over. Consider a simple task like tweeting. The Muse types "Trump is a Cotton Headed Ninny Muggins" into Tweetdeck and clicks "send". 

Tweetdeck: Yo Chrome, I gotta message here to send to Twitter. My guy thinks he's got an opinion someone cares about - heh. (For some reason my Tweetdeck sounds like Di Niro's Al Capone).

Chrome: Got it Tweetdeck, I'll transpose it into the right format and get it sent down to transport. Hey transport, pretentious Mr. "Muse" thinks he needs to grace the world with his thoughts on twitter again. Here you go.

Transport: Okey dokey, let me fire up the old segment packager and box it up. Hey NIC I gotta another clever tweetery thingy from Mr. smarty pants.   (Transport sounds like Uncle Joe from Petticoat Junction - shows how old I am).

NIC: Sending out packets. Confirming acknowledgement, Message sent and received.  (NIC is at the physical layer. He doesn't have much programming - just a driver - so his personality suffers). 

Of course I've left out many other things that have to happen. Notice that a Tweetdeck programmer didn't have to inform his program of how to segment his message, transcribe it into packets or guarantee it's delivery. He knows one or two things and he "hands off" the process to modules written by other programmers who also know one or two things - but none of them know everything.

This is the entire tech universe. Very few people "get" how the whole stack is intertwined - and no one understands very much. I have 30 developers -engineers working for me but there are only a few that get this "big picture" idea. The rest are "specialist". They can write complex stock option charts in Java or create OLAP cubes for data research, but they are happily stuck specializing at the level they understand. 

So what? Why does this matter? 

No one -- not Linus Torvalds, Bill Gates or Steve Job's ghost -- understands what is actually "there" when we talk about the internet. Even God probably has to consult some ginormous user manual. The net is not some planned city of carefully crafted pieces that fit together. There are dozens of avenues to do any one thing and dozens of ways to circumvent controls that are implemented.

It is as if a crew of gnomes worked independently creating cool things. Instead of showing their work the gnomes exposed only how to use them to each other. Eventually, they all began to use each other's cool things and some larger, cooler thing emerged. Before long they were dependent on the larger, cooler thing to create other cooler things and so on. It is not intelligent design. It's not even innovation writ large. It is evolution and natural selection. 

Understanding this idea is the genesis for common sense solutions. Specific legislation that addresses narrowly specific problems will be obsolete a week after it is signed. There are too many ways to do everything and waaay too many gnomes.

Meanwhile, when it comes to finding broad principles to use we seem to atrophy. What we need is legislatures who see the big picture and are able to work in a non-ideological way toward broad common goals at the same speed as the advancing technology. Also, we need unicorns in the National Zoo.