By GEORGE PACKER
NY Times: May 19, 2013

THE Roaring ’20s was the decade when modern celebrity was invented in America. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby” is full of magazine spreads of tennis players and socialites, popular song lyrics, movie stars, paparazzi, gangsters and sports scandals — machine-made by technology, advertising and public relations. Gatsby, a mysterious bootlegger who makes a meteoric ascent from Midwestern obscurity to the palatial splendor of West Egg, exemplifies one part of the celebrity code: it’s inherently illicit. Fitzgerald intuited that, with the old restraining deities of the 19th century dead and his generation’s faith in man shaken by World War I, celebrities were the new household gods.

What are celebrities, after all? They dominate the landscape, like giant monuments to aspiration, fulfillment and overreach. They are as intimate as they are grand, and they offer themselves for worship by ordinary people searching for a suitable object of devotion. But in times of widespread opportunity, the distance between gods and mortals closes, the monuments shrink closer to human size and the centrality of celebrities in the culture recedes. They loom larger in times like now, when inequality is soaring and trust in institutions — governments, corporations, schools, the press — is falling.

The Depression that ended Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age yielded to a new order that might be called the Roosevelt Republic. In the quarter-century after World War II, the country established collective structures, not individual monuments, that channeled the aspirations of ordinary people: state universities, progressive taxation, interstate highways, collective bargaining, health insurance for the elderly, credible news organizations.

One virtue of those hated things called bureaucracies is that they oblige everyone to follow a common set of rules, regardless of station or background; they are inherently equalizing. Books like William H. Whyte’s “Organization Man” and C. Wright Mills’s “White Collar” warned of the loss of individual identity, but those middle-class anxieties were possible only because of the great leveling. The “stars” continued to fascinate, especially with the arrival of TV, but they were not essential. Henry Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Jimmy Stewart, Perry Como, Joe DiMaggio, Jack Paar, Doris Day and Dick Clark rose with Americans — not from them — and their successes and screw-ups were a sideshow, not the main event.

Our age is lousy with celebrities. They can be found in every sector of society, including ones that seem less than glamorous. We have celebrity bankers (Jamie Dimon), computer engineers (Sergey Brin), real estate developers/conspiracy theorists (Donald J. Trump), media executives (Arianna Huffington), journalists (Anderson Cooper), mayors (Cory A. Booker), economists (Jeffrey D. Sachs), biologists (J. Craig Venter) and chefs (Mario Batali).

There is a quality of self-invention to their rise: Mark Zuckerberg went from awkward geek to the subject of a Hollywood hit; Shawn Carter turned into Jay-Z; Martha Kostyra became Martha Stewart, and then Martha Stewart Living. The person evolves into a persona, then a brand, then an empire, with the business imperative of grow or die — a process of expansion and commodification that transgresses boundaries by substituting celebrity for institutions. Instead of robust public education, we have Mr. Zuckerberg’s “rescue” of Newark’s schools. Instead of a vibrant literary culture, we have Oprah’s book club. Instead of investments in public health, we have the Gates Foundation. Celebrities either buy institutions, or “disrupt” them.

After all, if you are the institution, you don’t need to play by its rules. Mr. Zuckerberg’s foundation myth begins with a disciplinary proceeding at Harvard, which leads him to drop out and found a company whose motto is “Move fast and break things.” Jay-Z’s history as a crack dealer isn’t just a hard-luck story — it’s celebrated by fans (and not least himself) as an early sign of hustle and smarts. Martha Stewart’s jail time for perjury merely proved that her will to win was indomitable. These new celebrities are all more or less start-up entrepreneurs, and they live by the hacker’s code: ask forgiveness, not permission.

The obsession with celebrities goes far beyond supermarket tabloids, gossip Web sites and reality TV. It obliterates old distinctions between high and low culture, serious and trivial endeavors, profit making and philanthropy, leading to the phenomenon of being famous for being famous. An activist singer (Bono) is given a lucrative role in Facebook’s initial public offering. A patrician politician (Al Gore) becomes a plutocratic media executive and tech investor. One of America’s richest men (Michael R. Bloomberg) rules its largest city.

This jet-setting, Davos-attending crowd constitutes its own superclass, who hang out at the same TED talks, big-idea conferences and fund-raising galas, appear on the same talk shows, invest in one another’s projects, wear one another’s brand apparel, champion one another’s causes, marry and cheat on one another. “The New Digital Age,” the new guide to the future by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen of Google, carries blurbs from such technology experts as Henry A. Kissinger and Tony Blair. The inevitable next step is for Kim Kardashian to sit on the board of a tech start-up, host a global-poverty-awareness event and write a book on behavioral neuroscience.

This new kind of celebrity is the ultimate costume ball, far more exclusive and decadent than even the most potent magnates of Hollywood’s studio era could have dreamed up. Their superficial diversity dangles before us the myth that in America, anything is possible — even as the American dream quietly dies, a victim of the calcification of a class system that is nearly hereditary.

As mindless diversions from a sluggish economy and chronic malaise, the new aristocrats play a useful role. But their advent suggests that, after decades of widening income gaps, unequal distributions of opportunity and reward, and corroding public institutions, we have gone back to Gatsby’s time — or something far more perverse. The celebrity monuments of our age have grown so huge that they dwarf the aspirations of ordinary people, who are asked to yield their dreams to the gods: to flash their favorite singer’s corporate logo at concerts, to pour open their lives (and data) on Facebook, to adopt Apple as a lifestyle. We know our stars aren’t inviting us to think we can be just like them. Their success is based on leaving the rest of us behind.

By: David Brooks

NY Times, February 18, 2013

Data struggles with context. Human decisions are not discrete events. They are embedded in sequences and contexts. The human brain has evolved to account for this reality. People are really good at telling stories that weave together multiple causes and multiple contexts. Data analysis is pretty bad at narrative and emergent thinking, and it cannot match the explanatory suppleness of even a mediocre novel.

Data creates bigger haystacks. This is a point Nassim Taleb, the author of “Antifragile,” has made. As we acquire more data, we have the ability to find many, many more statistically significant correlations. Most of these correlations are spurious and deceive us when we’re trying to understand a situation. Falsity grows exponentially the more data we collect. The haystack gets bigger, but the needle we are looking for is still buried deep inside.

One of the features of the era of big data is the number of “significant” findings that don’t replicate the expansion, as Nate Silver would say, of noise to signal.

Big data has trouble with big problems. If you are trying to figure out which e-mail produces the most campaign contributions, you can do a randomized control experiment. But let’s say you are trying to stimulate an economy in a recession. You don’t have an alternate society to use as a control group. For example, we’ve had huge debates over the best economic stimulus, with mountains of data, and as far as I know not a single major player in this debate has been persuaded by data to switch sides.

Data favors memes over masterpieces. Data analysis can detect when large numbers of people take an instant liking to some cultural product. But many important (and profitable) products are hated initially because they are unfamiliar.

Data obscures values. I recently saw an academic book with the excellent title, “ ‘Raw Data’ Is an Oxymoron.” One of the points was that data is never raw; it’s always structured according to somebody’s predispositions and values. The end result looks disinterested, but, in reality, there are value choices all the way through, from construction to interpretation.

This is not to argue that big data isn’t a great tool. It’s just that, like any tool, it’s good at some things and not at others. As the Yale professor Edward Tufte has said, “The world is much more interesting than any one discipline.”

By SUSANA MARTINEZ-CONDE
NY Times: May 17, 2013

YOUR eyes are the sharks of the human body: they never stop moving.

In the past minute alone, your eyes made as many as 240 quick movements called “saccades” (French for “jolts”). In your waking hours today, you will very likely make some 200,000 of them, give or take a few thousand. When you sleep, your eyes keep moving — though in different ways and at varying speeds, depending on the stage of sleep.

A portion of our eye movements we do consciously and are at least aware of on some level: when we follow a moving bird or plane across the sky with our gaze, for instance. But most of these tiny back-and-forths and ups-and-downs — split-second moves that would make the Flying Karamazov Brothers weep with jealousy — are unconscious and nearly imperceptible to us. Our brain suppresses the feeling of our eye jumps, to avoid the sensation that the world is constantly quaking.

Even when we think our gazes are petrified, in fact, we are still making eye motions, including tiny saccades called “microsaccades” — between 60 and 120 of them per minute. Just as we don’t notice most of our breathing, we are almost wholly unaware of this frenetic, nonstop ocular activity.

Without it, though, we couldn’t see a thing.

Humans are hardly unique in this way. Every known visual system depends on movement: we see things either because they move or because our eyes do.

Some of the earliest clues to this came more than two centuries ago. Erasmus Darwin, a grandfather of Charles Darwin, observed in 1794 that staring at a small piece of scarlet silk on white paper for a long time — thereby minimizing (though not stopping) his eye movements — made it grow fainter in color, until it seemed to vanish.

In the early 1950s researchers used technology to counteract eye movements by mounting a tiny slide projector onto a contact lens affixed to the observer’s eye with a suction device. This retinal stabilization technique forces the image to remain still with respect to the eye, even when the eye continues to move. The images, in these experiments, fade away perceptually, because of the lack of neural stimulation.

Some two decades later, the neuroscientist John K. Stevens, at the University of Pennsylvania, underwent the injection of a paralytic drug that obliterated nearly all of his bodily motion, including that of his eyes (he was artificially ventilated during the experiment). An arterial tourniquet prevented blood flow to, and therefore paralysis of, one of his arms, allowing him to communicate with his colleagues by flexing his hand. He found that without eye movements, “image fading became a real problem.”

We see the same result with certain rare diseases that lead to complete ocular paralysis. One woman afflicted with extraocular muscular fibrosis has never made eye movements. She can read and even perform some complex daily activities (like making herself a cup of tea) — but only because she has learned to make saccade-like motions with her head. The head movements provide her brain with the jerky motion it needs to gather information from the environment.

What may be most surprising is that large eye motions and miniature eye jolts help us see the world in similar ways — largely at the same time.

Scientists had long believed that we used two types of oculomotor behavior to sample the visual world, alternating between big saccades to scan our surroundings and tiny ones to fix our gaze on a location of interest. Explore, fixate, repeat, all day, every day.

It seemed to make intuitive sense that we would have one brain system for exploring the environment and another for focusing on specific objects. But it turns out that exploration and gaze-fixation are not all that different processes in the brain.

Three colleagues and I recently published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which volunteers were asked to view images of all sizes, from the massive to the minute, while we measured their eye movements. We found that people’s eyes scanned the scenes with the same general strategy in all cases, whether the images were huge or tiny, or even when they were fixing their gaze.

The findings suggest that exploration and fixation are not fundamentally different behaviors after all, but rather two ends of the same visual scanning continuum. They also imply that the same brain systems control our eye movements when we explore and when we fixate — an insight that may ultimately offer clues to understanding oculomotor dysfunction in neurological diseases, like Parkinson’s, that affect eye movements.

On a more personal level, I’ve often found a bit of inspiration from the biological fact that vision is all about change. If the world stands still, we must manufacture our own motion to perceive it — which would mean that the well-cited spiritual advice, “be the change you wish to see in the world,” often misattributed to Mohandas K. Gandhi, has a sound scientific basis as well.

An accident left Derek Amato with a severe concussion and a surprising ability to play the piano. One theory is that his brain reorganized, making accessible existing memories of music. Another is that his brain no longer filters sensory input, enabling him to hear individual notes rather than melodies.

This is the happiest story you’ve ever read. It’s about two people who led wonderfully fulfilling lives. They had engrossing careers, earned the respect of their friends, and made important contributions to their neighborhood, their country, and their world.

And the odd thing was, they weren’t born geniuses. They did okay on the SAT and IQ tests and that sort of thing, but they had no extraordinary physical or mental gifts. They were fine- looking, but they weren’t beautiful. They played tennis and hiked, but even in high school they weren’t star athletes, and nobody would have picked them out at that young age and said they were destined for greatness in any sphere. Yet they achieved this success, and everyone who met them sensed that they lived blessed lives.

How did they do it? They possessed what economists call noncognitive skills, which is the catchall category for hidden qualities that can’t be easily counted or measured, but which in real life lead to happiness and fulfillment.

First, they had good character. They were energetic, honest, and dependable. They were persistent after setbacks and acknowledged their mistakes. They possessed enough confidence to take risks and enough integrity to live up to their commitments. They tried to recognize their weaknesses, atone for their sins, and control their worst impulses.

Just as important, they had street smarts. They knew how to read people, situations, and ideas. You could put them in front of a crowd, or bury them with a bunch of reports, and they could develop an intuitive feel for the landscape before them—what could go together and what would never go together, what course would be fruitful and what would never be fruitful. The skills a master seaman has to navigate the oceans, they had to navigate the world.

Over the centuries, zillions of books have been written about how to succeed. But these tales are usually told on the surface level of life. They describe the colleges people get into, the professional skills they acquire, the conscious decisions they make, and the tips and techniques they adopt to build connections and get ahead. These books often focus on an outer definition of success, having to do with IQ, wealth, prestige, and worldly accomplishments.

This story is told one level down. This success story emphasizes the role of the inner mind— the unconscious realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, character traits, and social norms. This is the realm where character is formed and street smarts grow.

We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few years, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and others have made great strides in understanding the building blocks of human flourishing. And a core finding of their work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.

The unconscious parts of the mind are not primitive vestiges that need to be conquered in order to make wise decisions. They are not dark caverns of repressed sexual urges. Instead, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind— where most of the decisions and many of the most impressive acts of thinking take place. These submerged processes are the seedbeds of accomplishment.

Excerpted from David Brook’s excellent book, “The Social Animal”.

By: Adrian Wooldridge | Economist | 9 February 2013

THE basic facts of the case seem clear—and as dramatic as any performance of Prokofiev’s “Ivan the Terrible”. Sergei Filin, the Bolshoi ballet’s artistic director, arrived home shortly before midnight on January 17th. A masked man emerged from the shadows and flung sulphuric acid in his face. A car-park attendant tried to wash away the acid with snow. But it was too late. Mr Filin’s face and eyes had been badly burned. He is now recuperating in a German hospital.

Making sense of this horrific assault is tricky. One school of thought blames artistic squabbles. The Bolshoi has seen several nasty incidents. Mr Filin’s tyres have been slashed and his e-mail hacked. In the past, needles have been inserted into costumes and broken glass into the tips of ballet shoes. A dead cat has been tossed onto the stage in lieu of flowers and an alarm clock set off during a quiet scene. Ballet is not for sissies.

A second school focuses on money and power. Scalpers have made wodges from buying and selling tickets—perhaps with inside help. Bigwigs use their muscle to get their pretty daughters jobs as ballerinas. A lavish renovation of the Bolshoi theatre suffered epic delays and went wildly over-budget.

A third school focuses on sex. The ballet is a hothouse of passion and intrigue. Anastasia Volochkova, a former prima ballerina, once called it a “big brothel”. Two years ago Gennady Yanin, a ballet director, resigned when pictures of him engaged in gay sex appeared online. The heterosexual Mr Filin is so good-looking that men and women alike are infatuated with him.

All this is gripping stuff, but what does any of it have to do with business? Why is Schumpeter, whose subject is people in suits, fussing about people in tights? One answer is that peculiar institutions can tell us a lot about more run-of-the-mill ones. And dysfunction is more common in the business world than you might think. Clayton Christensen, of Harvard Business School, says that he has been struck, at alumni reunions, by how many of his fellow HBS graduates and Rhodes scholars had made a mess of their lives. Jeff Skilling, for example, had gone from making $100m a year as boss of Enron to a federal prison.

A quick glance around any office suggests that dark passions lurk everywhere. Gossip and back-stabbing are rife. (Schumpeter could tell you a thing or two about his editor.) In all companies, bosses wield power, which tends to corrupt. One delightful study shows that giving people power makes them more likely to cheat at games. It also makes them keener to suggest harsh punishments for others who are caught cheating.

All these problems are evergreen. However, three modern trends are making them worse. The first is the enthusiasm for rewarding employees for performance. This is driven by the reasonable insight that paying everyone the same spurs no one to excel. Alas, paying for performance can also have perverse consequences. Banks that pay big bonuses for big profits give traders an incentive to take big risks. Institutions that reward relative performance (ie, did you perform better than your colleagues?) encourage unscrupulous co-workers to sabotage each other. Dancers at the Bolshoi are paid primarily according to the amount of time they spend on stage, so an understudy may not be completely heartbroken if the lead ballerina breaks an ankle.

The second is the economic downturn. Towers Watson, a consultancy, says it has created a class of “trauma organisations” that must take drastic measures to survive. Staff at such companies tend to be pessimistic and cliquish—they huddle together for comfort in the storm. Even in non-traumatised companies, many workers resent having to work harder for stagnant pay. Towers Watson reports that only 44% of British workers have confidence in their leaders.

The third trend is the rise of knowledge-intensive companies that run on “economies of ideas” rather than economies of scale. These companies are all hungry for the best and brightest: for the brilliant pharmacologist who can create a blockbuster drug, for the extraordinary investment banker who can engineer an industry-changing merger or for the razor-sharp accountant who can shave millions off a firm’s tax bill.

The need to hire the best means firms have to put up with prima donnas. That has costs. Talent-driven firms can be torn apart by feuds or rendered dysfunctional by egocentric behaviour: clever people are as clever at finding reasons to argue with each other as they are at thinking up new ideas.

Stars can burn you

A creative environment can often be a toxic one. You may have noticed that films about Hollywood always show beautiful people doing ugly things to each other. One assumes that the directors and screenwriters know whereof they speak. Outside Tinseltown, too, some of the most toxic companies have also been some of the most creative. Enron was once revered for revolutionising the energy business. Lehman Brothers was regarded as the smartest of the smart.

Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, was a genius. He was also “frequently obnoxious, rude, selfish and nasty to other people”, according to Walter Isaacson, his biographer. He crushed rivals who stood in his path. He enjoyed humiliating people who were less than A-players. He once stormed into a meeting with suppliers and bellowed that they were “fucking dickless assholes”. Joe Nocera, a journalist, commented on his “almost wilful lack of tact”. But this very abrasiveness was essential to Apple’s success—it kept the company passenger-free and relentlessly focused on producing the next big thing. As the poet John Dryden once put it: “Great wits are sure to madness near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”

There are situations so bad that anything that would end them is justified. Anything.

There is wisdom in facing a threat with a proportionate response. Sure, There Is No Kill Like Overkill, but it’ll likely cause a lot of avoidable collateral damage, and it’ll guarantee that tomorrow the next threat is stronger. But there are times when the threat is so great and things have gone so horribly wrong that there is no appropriate response. The situation is so dire that it justifies the use of any and every thing that might solve it, no matter how crazy, nonsensical, or horrific, regardless of cost or collateral damage.

Things are at the point where even summoning Godzilla, king of monsters and patron saint of collateral damage, could not possibly make the crisis any worse. The situation has crossed the Godzilla Threshold.

Once the Threshold is crossed, ANY plan, with even the smallest possibility of success, no matter how ludicrous, impossible, dangerous or abhorrent, suddenly becomes a valid option. This serves both narrative and authorial purposes. Suppose the heroes have an awesome weapon that nonetheless causes a lot of property damage, like a Kill Sat, or a captured or dormant monster. Or one knows a Dangerous Forbidden Technique that will put his life at risk. They have to use it, but it can’t be done lightly without portraying them as either careless or cruel. So the author contrives to make the situation call for its use in such clear terms the audience understands this was done as a last resort — and, if it’s handled properly, the audience doesn’t even notice.

Often, the threshold is engineered. If done wrong, it can cause some serious Fridge Logic. This is usually the case when the heroes’ actionsor failures to act cause the situation to cross the threshold. Usually, there’s an Idiot Ball (or Idiot Plot), a General Ripper, or Poor Communication Kills to thank for that.

Some plots center around avoiding the Godzilla Threshold and keeping the trigger happy person in charge of the “failsafe” from pushing the button. Sometimes, they even succeed.

The Godzilla Threshold is what happens just before the Willfully Weak character gives the “World of Cardboard” Speech and turns thePower Limiter off, uses the Forbidden Chekhov’s Gun, uses lethal powers, turns to the Nuclear Option, or casts Summon Bigger Fish. When begged, the All-Powerful Bystander may even be willing to lend a hand. In video games, this is the time to use items that are Too Awesome to Use.

Note that, as the Real Life section below attempts to show, using such options tends to create more problems; if the solution ultimately causes more/worse problems then you had before you may have a case of Pyrrhic Victory. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero and Won the War, Lost the Peace can be related in larger-scale stories. Of course, these only apply when the consequences are actually shown to begin with- if they pull it off without problems you may have an Informed Flaw.

Named for the Godzilla films of the late 1980s and 1990s, where Godzilla was evil again (in contrast to his heroic characterizations during the late ’50s, as well as the ’60s and ’70s) but people were still happier to see him because he was usually fighting something far worse.

In the early industrial age, buildings began to spring up all over the east coast. Many of these new buildings were taller than anything ever built before and most had elevators. As buildings got taller and taller, more people began to use elevators. Elevators in those days were pretty darn slow. People were constantly complaining about how slow the elevators were. 

Elevator companies were challenged with this problem and came up with the typical problem statement elevators move too slow. So they went off to design elevators that were faster and safer, but at the time it was very expensive to do so. Several companies went off and running to build a safer and faster elevator, and one elevator company proposed a different problem statement. They may have had a different name for the approach, but they were using the fundamentals of the est problem statement tool. One engineer said, I think our elevator speeds are just fine, people are crazy. 

Then an engineer proposed that they work on a different problem statement. He proposed that the problem was people think elevators move to slow. He inserted two words people think into the problem statement which allowed the design team to approach the problem from a completely different angle and thus a whole new set of ideas. Instead of concentrating on larger motors, slicker pulley designs and such, they concentrated on the passenger in the elevator.

When they looked at the problem from this angle, the ideas started to snowball. Is it really too slow? Why do they think it is slow? How can we distract them? How can we make it more comfortable? Are customers scared of heights?

This lead to some first hand customer research. They found that a lot of people thought the elevators were a lot slower then they actually were. 

They also discovered that people had an exaggerated sense of time because they had nothing to do but stare at the wall and think about the safety of the elevator being suspended in the air, and preoccupied with the fear of falling. 

There wasn’t room for additional equipment of any sort, so they brainstormed on that. This lead to the idea of mirrors in elevators so people would think about something else besides danger. Was their hair combed properly? Did her makeup look okay?

By installing mirrors in the elevators, people became distracted and were no longer preoccupied with the fear of falling. On a follow up survey, customers commented how much faster the new elevators were even though the speed was exactly the same. The elevator design itself had not changed at all.