Choosing Control

Bust of Emperor Augustus wearing the Corona Civica, on display in the Musei Capitolini (Rome). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The future really is almost here.

We now have flying cars, self-driving cars, and floating concept cars. Of course, the latter’s  technology would in my ideal world be used to create Back to the Future hoverboards just in time for 2015, but I digress…

The point is that our technological sophistication is extraordinary. Other examples would the powerful miniature computers we carry around (even if most people just browse Facebook, play Angry Birds, and make the occasional telephone call on them), the bionic exoskeleton that let a paralysed woman complete a marathon and motion capture technology that should make teleconferencing more useful. And as the sheer quantity of data exchanged across the internet increases, our ability to continuously access this data also advances by leaps and bounds.

Increasingly, the problem we face is one of control. The weakest link in all the above technologies are the human beings using them; we simply can’t crunch information as quickly as a computer. Our advantage lies in being able to prioritise data once we have a manageable amount to deal with. But we need help to winnow the initial mass down. This is why manipulating the flow of information is crucial. It explains the rise of search engines, automated control systems, and social networking sites. All of them personalise what information enters your conscious sphere; an invisible filter on the world.

The dilemma individuals face is how to retain a broad enough overview of the world to have a balanced perspective while not getting bogged down with excessive detail.

It’s impossible to ignore new technologies. Unless you are an avowed Luddite, you’re exposed to it daily. However, it is possible to prioritise. The world is tipping in favour of those who can correctly decide what is important. They can choose what data to exchange, adjusting their degree of privacy to accomodate this. And they can choose when to let automation run their lives and when to actively intervene to change course. These people will get the benefit of technological sophistication. Everyone else will be prone to becoming lost and homogenised within a morass of data and control systems.

What do you actually want to achieve, and why?

Life can be so fast-paced that people spend all their time running to stand still. Decide your goals. Then figure out what information you need to allow into life to facilitate them. For example, if you don’t need 100 different apps, don’t get them. It’s clutter; rubbish filling your mind and clouding it.

Do not be a human magpie attracted to the newest shiny object, and then instantly forgetting it.

Augustus Caesar’s personal motto of festina lente (“hurry slowly”) is more relevant than ever. A sense of control is not achieved by trying to do everything quickly, but by actively choosing when and how to act. Take the time to plan ahead and life simplifies. And technology returns to being a tool rather than a master.

Changing Opinions

Sitting on the Fence (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

How often do you change your mind about something?

I don’t mean having difficulty deciding something and bouncing between a couple of options while doing so. I mean, once you’ve made you mind up, how often do you really change it?

If you’re like most people, the answer is, “not often”. Most people try to make big decisions in a moderately rational way. The bigger the decision, the more they try to apply logic to solve it. Small decisions like whether to order a latte or americano today, tend to be left to the more primitive parts of our brain. For the big issues, though, we like to go through a vaguely scientific process of asking a question, acquiring relevant information, balancing the information against preferred outcomes, and deciding what to do. Trouble is, most big issues are big because they’re difficult to solve logically, which means we end up having to make a final “gut instinct” judgement call in order to finally decide our opinion about the problem facing us. We end up using a heuristic rather than purely algorithmic approach; I’ve discussed such Wicked Problems before.

Heuristic problem-solving is inherently fraught with uncertainty; it’s based on a pattern-recognition approach, the validity of which varies according to the mind of the person applying the heuristic filter. Put simply, the wiser the person, the more likely they are to reach a correct result. But if the problem is truly wicked, then one can never test the result, and so we can never definitively prove who is wisest.

There are many proxy markers for wisdom, including reported or perceived happiness, wealth, position and/or influence in the eyes of others, and how well words stand the test of time. None of these is entirely satisfactory, for self-evident reasons, which means that definining wisdom itself ultimately becomes a matter of consensus and opinion. This is clearly troubling if one is concerned about creating an objective yardstick by which to measure human progress.

However, it is empowering if you are more concerned about making changes that chime in with your own personal opinion. Firstly, it allows you to define the frame of reference for success and failure. Secondly, it promotes uncertainty in other people’s decision-making, creating a space for you to influence their judgement. And lastly – if you are interested in making large-scale rather than personal changes – it provides you with a long-term tool by which to modify the broader cultural perception of what is ethically correct. As a culture, we have even given a name to this last process: Politics.

Politics is the art of persuading a sufficiently large number of people that your opinions are culturally correct. This actually applies as much to a tyranny as it does to the kinds of limited/representative democracies most readers will live in. It’s just that the violence and speed of the mechanisms of changing government that varies: revolution in the former; elections in the latter. But more than this, far-sighted politicians also understand that the optimal way of persuading people of their rightness is to modify the cultural mindset within which the choice is made. Alter the frame of reference, and you can ensure a specific answer will always emerge. This is also something tyrannies and democracies share, with only superficial differences between the two: tyrannies tend to use coercive force and single-party elections; democracies use advertising and other softer propaganda like manipulating the flow of information.

All the above is no more than I would expect an average teenager to grasp, and I actually think many do (at least on an unconscious level), even if the usual response is anomic cynicism rather than recognising the empowering potential. The more thoughtful will recognise another implication, however: even quite severe unpopularity in the short-term is irrelevant, provided you can sufficiently alter the mindset of a large enough group of people to influence their long-term cultural mindset in your favour to protect your long-term survival. This applies to individual lives as much as it does to organisations and to political parties.

Coming full circle to the start of this post, changing someone’s mind is very difficult in the short-term. Instead, you have to alter the way they make decisions. The more time you have to do this, the easier it becomes. This is partly what accounts for incumbency effect in politics: it’s harder to dislodge a known politician from a post than if two unknowns are fighting for the same position. It’s not usually that incumbents have really proven anything about whether they’re right or not; it’s just that they’ve become part of the mental furniture of voters. Even if they’re unpopular in some respects, the incumbent still usually retains a higher chance of retaining power than if they didn’t have that mindshare of reality. In a US Election year, it’s worth noting that this is a big part of the reason that most US Presidents tend to get re-elected for a second term, even if at mid-term it seems like they’re unpopular. UK politics frequently operates similarly: being in government allows you to craft the narrative in a much deeper way than being in opposition, and you can see it in many of the Budget 2012 changes being announced today (esp. personal tax statements, reducing reliefs & benefits and increasing personal allowances), despite the potential for some other changes to be unpopular in the short term. And even when the longer-term cycle of change occurs, political parties never reverse even a majority of changes imposed by their predecessors, no matter how vehemently they may have opposed them at time of their introduction.

Reality is like chewing gum: sticky but malleable.

The ultimate expression of this thesis of persuasion is that tactics should always be secondary to strategy, and that strategy should be guided by clear long-term insightful aims. Only that will allow you to gradually work on altering the perception of enough people for them to reach what you would consider correct decisions. Logic and argument is a poor convincer of anyone except a computer. Persuasion through modifying the frame of reference of the argument works much better on human beings. Next time you disagree with someone, or need to negotiate with them, remember these principles rather than attempting to argue with them. You won’t convince them today, but you might just change their mind tomorrow.

Choosing Wisdom

Hermes Trismegistus, floor mosaic, Siena Cathedral, via Wikipedia

‘I will build the Zodiac…

The lives of men,

from birth to final destruction,

shall be controlled

by the hidden workings of this mechanism.’

Destiny and Necessity are cemented together.

Destiny sows the seed.

Necessity compels the result.

Few can escape their fate

or guard against

the terrible influence of the Zodiac…

If, however,

the rational part of a man’s soul

is illuminated…

… the working of these gods is as nothing.

But such men are few.

Most are led and driven by the gods

which govern earthly life…

To my way of thinking, however,

it is our duty not simply to acquiesce

in our human state,

but, through intense contemplation

of divine things,

to detach ourselves from our merely mortal nature.

Hermes Trismegistus in The Hermetica, as translated by Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy

Borrowed from the library of Dr Neel Burton

Compiled thousands of years ago at the time of the Pharoahs, is there any more prescient statement of Man’s current condition?

Beyond the mortal influences of genetic nature (Destiny) and environmental nurture with its unconscious influence on behaviour (Necessity), lies choice.

It is up to us to choose to think, to act freely, to gain insight, and so also gain Enlightenment.

Few make that choice.

Libya Ceasefire? Gaddafi plays Joker in the Pack

International Diplomacy is evolving from a stately Great Game into Speed Chess.

With the destabilising ramifications of Japan’s earthquake taking a temporary step back from the limelight, Libya has again taken centre stage.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have achieved something I thought extraordinarily unlikely a week ago, passing a UN resolution authorising a no-fly zone over Libya.

Not just that, but the detailed wording enables a remarkably broad range of potential triggers to intervention.

This wrong-footed me. I had assumed that their efforts were words not action, designed to bolster an impression of determined humanitarian activity that would play well with their home audiences, but in reality done with an expectation of failure at the UN. And to which they would then be able to say “well, at least we tried our best”. Russia, China and Germany (and to some extent even the USA) instead all chose to call the UK and France’s bluff.

That put the ball back into their court, leading to rumours that British and French jets would be over Libya within hours. Instead, they paused to co-ordinate plans. I wonder if there was an element of realpolitik here; perhaps an expectation that the pause would allow Gaddafi to quickly take Benghazi, and so negate the practical need for any serious military intervention.

Instead, and to my even greater surprise, it is Gaddafi who has blinked first, by declaring a ceasefire.

At this stage, I admit that what happens next is beyond my ken. The situation – and Gaddafi himself – remains too unpredictable. Part of me thinks he is saying whatever it takes to prevent international airstrikes, with actual attacks continuing to take place on the ground. If this happens, will the US/UK/France deploy their forces to the fullest extent authorised by UN Resolution 1973 or will they back-pedal and implement only the barest skeleton of a no-fly zone?

It really is a compelling real-time example of international brinkmanship. It displays how nations can get swept up into a ratcheting spiral of engagement. In this kind of rapidly-evolving game, unpredictability can overwhelm careful planning and Gaddafi is a past-master at putting a spanner into the works.

Drawing parallels with individuals in crisis situations, and my professional experience in that field, the best way to contain unpredictable and dangerous behaviour is for everyone else involved to act in a co-ordinated and highly-boundaried manner. This contains the unpredictability and allows a safe management plan to be implemented to solve the problem. But this requires everyone else involved in the situation to want the same outcome, so they have the motivation to speak with one voice. In the case of Libya, each party has its own vested interests, many of which are in conflict. The danger is that this permits unpredictable behaviour to easily get an upper hand.

Hope, Happiness and the Potential of Man

Friedrich Schiller, Image via Wikipedia

It is commonly suggested that Man can be characterised as either an Introvert or an Extrovert. The validity of making such a distinction rests on the potential utility such taxonomy may bring; I am not interested in abstruse cataloguing without meaningful purpose. Does the attempt to divide Man into two broad groups help us understand him and the challenges he faces? Will it make him happy?

Carl Jung, drawing partly on Friedrich Schiller’s fertile correspondence with Goethe, suggested that the conscious mind of the introvert is driven largely by his ego (his internal sense of self)  while his sense of “relatedness” (affective/emotional responses) to objects in the external world is diminished. The extrovert, by contrast, is captivated by the world and his relationship to it, and the ego becomes secondary to this. Thus, “the extrovert discovers himself in the fluctuating and the changeable; the introvert in the constant”. Affectivity is “positively painful” to the introvert, while for the extrovert “it must on no account be missed”.

There is no better statement of this difference in approach to the world than that expressed when Schiller, the archetypal introvert, wrote to extroverted Goethe: “You have a kingdom to rule, and I only a somewhat numerous family of ideas which I would like to expand into a little universe”.

The introvert feels driven to externalise all the ideas he possesses within his mind, and make them manifest in the outside world. The extrovert yearns to internalise the world and consume it utterly. At their extremes, therefore, both the introvert and extrovert are autocrats, ruthlessly desiring absolute complete control, and unable to settle for nothing less.

A crucial point is that these drives and responses are functions of the conscious mind; they are how we overtly interpret in the world. But our opposite, inferior, nature can be found in the relatively submerged subconscious mind. So the extrovert finds harmony not just when emotionally exposed to a changing and vibrant external world ecology, but when he can come to intellectual terms with the impact and meaning of those emotions upon him. And the introvert waxes lyrical when he feels the emotional pleasure of appreciating an elegant rational system.

It is when the conscious drive moves in the same direction as the subconscious that this true pleasure results. Unfortunately, many of the systems in which we function do not encourage this dual approach to life. Schiller noted this, Jung remarked that it was worse by his time, and I may be bold enough to suggest that the situation has deteriorated further since. Jung said, “the differentiated function procures the possibility of a collective existence, but not that satisfaction and joie de vivre which the development of individual values alone can give”. Or, the need to earn money means that people gravitate to the roles and professions they are superficially productive at; the jobs that make the most use of their introverted or extraverted nature. They do these jobs to the practical satisfaction of their superiors, but not to the satisfaction of their inner self which demands more than this, and so they are unhappy.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, being a crisper wordsmith than I, phrased it thus: “You must choose between making a Man or a Citizen; you cannot make both at once”.

If both conscious and subconscious drives exists, both must be satisfied for our minds to be at peace. The challenge is therefore to find ways of living that allow for the exploration of this dual, yet intertwined, nature of our psyche. Schiller proposed that “creative play” or “wise play” (such as that involved in appreciating or making Art, or Beauty) would enable this. Both the extrovert and the introvert can express their inferior, subsconscious, selves through this process. Indeed, Jung postulated that this process is a conduit to expressing an inner symbolic representation of our true (whole) self.

The trouble is that to be wise when playing suggests the requirement of insight into what the end-point of our play should be. And that is a very circular argument as it is the creative play itself that is supposed to align our conscious and subconscious minds in this fashion. It is suggestive of an iterative process of incrementally improving wisdom and insight, whereby the act of play opens new avenues of thought, which in turn suggest new types of play, and so on.

It is worth pausing here to note that most people are not yet ready to even begin to play wisely. So Jung warns: “for them seriousness must occupy the middle place instead of play”; they must first think about their rational and emotional natures and the tension between them, before they are ready to use creativity to begin to meld the different parts together. This again reinforces the value of insight, and encourages self-reflection.

But if one is ready, the potential reward is individuation and self-actualisation. True individuality results from the ability to both be, and be separate from, the two opposing functions of our conscious and unconscious minds. Interaction between individuals would only occur when creative play was the aim of the meeting.

Is this achievable?

I suggest not in this lifetime! To be so fully cognisant and accepting of ourselves may theoretically be possible, but suggests to me such a differentiation from humanity as to be divinity.

But think of this: Man is the only beast to even contemplate such heights. We have the gall to wish to strive beyond ourselves, to fulfil our ultimate potential, to become god-like. The only collective community that would satisfy us would be the liberty of Mount Olympus. That is the truly remarkable thing about our species, and why typology and psychology are not mere taxonomy, but tools we can use to understand our potential.

It is this hope within us that fires our creativity. Eternal happiness may be the ultimate reward for all that effort, but for now, it is enough to know that splendid things will result from just the creative potential.

Roman Roulette

Image via Wikipedia

There are times where one must simply choose: which fork in the road of life do we follow?

Often, these crucial decisions can be delayed or the terms of the choice reframed so as to offer a more palatable contrast. And by planning ahead and understanding both yourself and your hopes for the future, the right answer can become self-evident.

But sometimes, even the wisest and most artful can find themselves faced with a crossroads that they have done little to prepare for, and a solution must be extemporised.

So it was with Josephus, a commander of the Jews in their rebellion against Roman rule in the 1st century AD. Legions led first by Vespasian and later his son Titus (both future Emperors) were wreaking revenge across Judaea, razing cities and massacring local populations. Josephus and 40 of his comrades found themselves cornered in a hideout in the city of Jotapata. He had predicted that the city would fall on the 47th day of the Roman siege, and his prediction had now come true.

Josephus, a moderate man, wanted to surrender and seek clemency. His colleagues felt death by suicide was the only honourable option. A man at ease with words, Josephus attempted to persuade them away from this decision, arguing it would be against God’s will to suicide. He failed in that line of argument, but convinced them that rather than each man killing himself, they should instead kill each other as this would be less likely to offend God.

We will never know whether what happened next was pure luck or brilliant inspiration, though the circumstances are all so odd that I rather suspect the latter. Josephus said that they should all stand in a circle and then every third man should be killed by his neighbour.

The brilliance lies in where Josephus stood in that circle. By positioning himself correctly, he ensured that every time the count went round, he was never the third man, and so was never killed. He and one other man were the last two survivors and with only one man left to persuade, he was now able to argue successfully in favour of surrender.

He lived, became a Roman citizen and left several important histories of the age behind. Some have painted him as a traitor, others as an opportunist. Perhaps he was. But I have to admire his skill and tenacity in surviving such a lethal situation. True, we’re unlikely to ever be in the exact same situation (though if you are, I recommend standing either 16th or 31st in the circle), but the ability to improvise and to persuade remains vital to survival.

The painting is The Triumph of Titus, 1885, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and can be clicked for a larger image

Good Connections

What is a good connection?

Last time I noted the increasingly interconnected and interdependent world we live in. Our lives are improved incrementally by ever more delicately balanced and efficient systems. Little did I know that a couple of days after writing that entry, I would experience a personal example of the fragility of the modern world.

As I type, I have the good fortune to see blue skies, swaying palms and a clear blue sea beyond. It is hard to be anomic in the sunshine of Mauritius. But mankind has a way of bringing trouble with him. Due to various techinical glitches, it took me quite some time to get my internet connection working properly. I was surprised by how frustrated that made me feel.

After all, there is little better than the prospect of some weeks in the sunshine, with no greater hassle than deciding when to go for a swim. Yet here I was feeling irritated and frustrated by an inability to check my email. This is a wonderful example of dependency on a technological web of connectivity. I dare say I am not alone in this, and as our society becomes ever more finely balanced in our human supply chain, we will all experience a corresponding increase in our dependency on these logistics systems.

One of the hardest challenges in life is choosing to put aside difficulty and frustration. Mankind has a love-hate relationship with uncertainty, to the extent that when it is not present, there is a tendency to find something new to think about and become concerned with.

To prevent this constant receding from view of happiness, value judgements must be made about the challenges we face. In truth, going without regular internet and email access for a couple of weeks or so would have been no great trouble. In fact, it would probably have been a very useful exercise in some respects. And yet, I was very satisfied when I managed to get the settings working and my umbilical cord to the internet womb was re-establised.

Connections are important; they permit transactions (both personal and financial) that make our lives more efficient and so can drive up quality of existence. But they are also ties that bind; golden handcuffs that we can be irrationally unwilling to be released from. The true test of any connection – be it a personal or a business relationship – is not whether it can be made successfully or not. It is not even whether it delivers net happiness when present. It must also be weighed against the net unhappiness when it is not present and due consideration given to how reliably present it is.

Fear of discarding bad connections can lead to an accumulation of mental detritus, and limit our freedom. Look liberty in the eye, and welcome it.

Beyond the Tipping Point: preventing a global collapse

The fundamental principle by which the modern world works is that increased efficiency reduces costs and therefore quality of life increases as each individual can either afford more of what they like or they can step up to improved quality at the same cost.

This is the basic driver behind every business endeavour: the delivery of content that would be too inefficient in terms of overall cost to quality of life for an individual to provide for themselves, and for which they are therefore willing to pay another to provide to them.

This core function of any financial transaction is true regardless of technological level, historical era, or magnitude of transaction. It applies just as much to the wool trade of mediaeval England, as it does to a hedge fund in 2011; and to the purchase of a loaf of bread by a citizen in the Roman Empire, as to buying a house today. Even hunter-gatherer tribal societies apply this principle by dividing the hunting and gathering (and other tasks of life) between different subsets of the tribe, thus improving overall tribal efficiency. Communist societies are no different either, with the profit motive being abstracted into (and distorted by) a central authority, still existing through quota allocations. While there exists a limited amount of resources to be divided amongst a number of people, the drive for efficiency will always accompany humanity.

There is therefore a permanent drive built into society to increase efficiency as to do so increases the economic power of any given transaction. This is to the benefit of both the seller and the purchaser as both have potential to get more out of the transaction: more service gained by the buyer, and more profit accrued to the vendor.

The limiting factor to this activity is the stability of the mechanism by which efficiency is increased. For every step up in efficiency, there is an increase in complexity. A highly unstable mechanism becomes unpredictable, and so costs rise, negating the initial efficiency gain. Risks to the system occur when unstable mechanisms are implemented in an attempt to extract the efficiency gain (and so extra profit) before the system is stable enough to endure implementation. If this happens, the net cost to both parties actually increases: the buyer purchases a faulty item or service, and the seller has to fix the problem.

This is the root of moral hazard, the financial risk associated with implementing any new system. It is the loss of this connection between risk and return that concerned central bankers so much during the financial crisis (both with regard to the way debt was repackaged/resold and with the bank bailouts thereafter), and continues to ripple outwards in examples as diverse (but connected) as the risks attached to European sovereign debt levels and credit availability in the mortgage market.

A more prosaic example can be found in the recent discovery of toxic dioxins in German eggs used in various products in the UK. Here the system is the interconnected nature of the global food industry, and the efficiency gained by leveraging mass industrial processes to feed populations at a cost they will tolerate. Without this complex logistic web, food would be significantly more expensive. The flipside is that the when the system fails, the negative effect ripples outwards much more than it would have in an earlier era.

Technological advances drive efficiency gains, which lead to more refined and extended logistics chains, delivering more affordable products to more people, driving up purchasing power and so, quality of life. The challenge is how to ensure systems that are implemented to improve efficiency are also sufficiently robust to reduce the risk of systemic collapse to a tolerable level. In other words, how not to push the system beyond the tipping point.

The question is what level of risk is tolerable? Any logistics chain is inherently risky. Equally, surviving independently of a wider economic network would be a subsistence and lonely existence. Redundant systems (or their abstract corollary, the insurance industry) stabilise complex system, but carry their own costs and so are themselves prone to the same failings (viz. the failure of collateralised debt obligations/CDOs to protect the banks in the way they expected).

Understanding how complex and chaotic systems interact with each other will be crucial to safeguarding our ever more complex and interdependent society.

But even that does not provide a solution to the fundamental conflict between efficiency and stability. I wonder if such a solution exists?

The only possible theoretical way out I can think of would be a the equivalent of a perpetual motion machine: a way to get something for nothing, a lifting off the pressure on resources. Perhaps developing fusion power would allow that, at least for a while? Virtually free unlimited power would increase efficiency of every other system, though of course we would then be dependent on yet another fragile system (the fusion power generation network). Still, I think it no random coincidence that every single major world power is investing in that fusion research. Certainly, I can think of no other project that has unified China, the EU, the USA, Russia, Japan, Korea and India in common purpose.

New Year’s is for amateurs, and not just the Eve

Image via Wikipedia

As anyone who works in the health, law enforcement or hospitality sectors knows full well, New Year’s Eve is Amateur Night. Millions who do not go out regularly, and have no idea how to pace themselves, decide that they are obliged to pretend that they have something to enjoy and so proceed to get as plastered as possible, preferably well before the chimes of midnight.

All in search of a mythically perfect NYE celebration, many end up welcoming the New Year from a toilet bowl, a gutter, a police cell or an Emergency Department.

However, the amateurism isn’t limited to the Eve. It also occurs on New Year’s Day, when millions decide on their New Year’s Resolutions. Perennial candidates for inclusion are stopping smoking, losing weight, doing more exercise, finding a more satisfying job, and so on. The trouble is that while lists are easy to compose, they are rarely adhered to. Surveys suggest the failure rate approaches 90%.

Why so bad?

Simply because the Resolutions are made with the same amateurism that characterises the Eve before. People make them with little real plan as to how the Resolution will be implemented. If you seriously want to stick to your Resolutions, here is my advice, based on the SMART criteria beloved of project managers worldwide:

• Be Specific: for example, “losing weight” is meaningless. Set a specific weight loss target, and a timeframe for achieving it
• Make sure your resolution is Measurable: chart your progress as you go, and avoid resolutions that can’t be measured. “Being a better person” is all very well, but “donating to charity once a week” can be measured.
• Keep it Achievable: picking a resolution that is simply too difficult is to set yourself up to fail. If in your heart of hearts, you don’t really want to quit smoking, you won’t. Perhaps it might be better to limit yourself to a packet a week?
• Stay Relevant: don’t pick a resolution that has no beneficial outcome. You won’t invest the effort it requires. Resolving to joining a gym is a waste of money if you never go to it; choosing to use the stairs rather than the elevator at work, or cycling to the train station instead of driving, may be more relevant to your lifestyle.
• Apply a Time-limit: open-ended resolutions will be very hard to stick to as you’ll easily find reasons to postpone acting on them. Instead of “wanting a new job”, break that task down into identifying what your strengths and weaknesses are, and so what job you might prefer, by the end of February, with smaller time-limited tasks along the way.

Don’t be an amateur in your partying tonight, and be equally professional about your Resolutions tomorrow.

Good luck, and Happy New Year to you all!

Risk and Reward

Human beings cope best with causal black-and-white relationships: “if I eat that bright-red berry, I get sick”; “if I see a sabre-toothed tiger chasing me, I must run”; “if I have a job and a family; I will be happy”. They are much worse at understanding probabilities and weighing up opportunity cost: “red berries (and families) can either be tasty or poisonous; if I take the risk of having one at random, I need to know how debilitating the poison might be, before judging whether the potential benefit of being lucky enough to get a tasty one is worth it”.

This more nuanced view of the world requires a high level of both insight and cognitive processing, and an acceptance of uncertainty and risk. Most people can intellectually grasp the necessity of such an approach but recoil from implementing it in their daily lives. It is much simpler to operate under certainties, and most people’s daily lives are so busy that they lack the opportunity for reflection.

Modern society reinforces this intellectual laziness. We cram a vast quantity of multi-tasked activity into a day, and still feel the need for more. Adults have become infantilised, desperate for the reassurance of an umbilical connection to an omniscient and omnipresent mother, except this parental figure is now the disembodied social network of the internet, mediated via our phones and laptops, by Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and other media.

I note in passing that Mark Zuckerberg, the inventor of Facebook, has just been named Time’s Person of the Year, which reflects how pervasive his worldview of “connectivity = benefit” has become.

The similarity of our relationship to the internet to that of the child to the parent under Bowlby’s Attachment Theory and Mary Ainsworth‘s Strange Situation experiments is striking. When separated from the connection to maternal, even womb-like, presence of the internet, even adults show all the signs of a child bereft of a maternal presence: feeling somewhat lost, alone, unsettled, uncertain and ultimately glad of reconnection. Anyone who has lost their mobile phone will be familiar with this phenomenon.

This child-like regression shows that we have ceded more and more active processing of the world to intemediaries, and now expect those systems to solve our problems for us. Our willingness to take personal responsibility and balance risk against reward has diminished. Nowhere is this more striking in our collective response to the risk of terrorist atrocity. Since 9/11, there has been an implicit assumption that preventing another terrorist attack has overriding importance.

This is absurd. Terrorism is a fact of life, and its probability of occurence cannot be reduced to zero. Reducing its risk comes at a cost, both financial and societal. We recently saw this in the furore about airport security measures such as body-scanning and pat-downs. Defenders of the policy always fell back on a variant of “we must do everything we can to protect our skies” without acknowledging that this simply isn’t true. A more accurate statement would be “we must do everything we can to protect our skies, providing that doing so doesn’t damage our ability to live our lives freely any more than we as a society are willing to accept”.

In other words, when judging how much security is required, one needs to quantity the extent of the damage caused by 9/11, and compare that to the small but cumulative damage caused by irritating large numbers of passengers. Quantifying these matters is complex, and touches upon the difficulty of assigning worth to non-tangibles, something I discussed yesterday. The refrain of “if it saves one life, it’s worth it” is plainly false, as if that were true, the way to achieve it would be to ban all air travel completely.

IATA is now planning the introduction of a much more sensible, risk/reward based approach to passenger screening. It sounds a far better way to deal with the issue than existing systems, but when it goes wrong – and no system can be perfect, as the risk is always higher than zero – it will face criticism that “we didn’t do enough” and the temptation will again be to add more layers, rather than deciding what level of risk is acceptable.

Leaving air travel aside, the more fundamental point is that the best way to progress as an intelligent society would be to encourage the understanding of probability, risk and opportunity cost. Not to mention encouraging independence of thought and a willingness to take personal responsibility for one’s actions. I have my doubts as to whether a critical mass of the population will do so. As rewarding as it is, such liberty is also frightening and that may be a step too far for most.