ginsudo

Over the last several years, many people have engaged in discussion and debate about whether “the Internet makes us stupid.”  What is this debate really about?

The first volley in the debate may have encapsulated the entirety of its substance.  Doris Lessing, in accepting the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, asked:

How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by this Internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free . . .

As the vanguard and finest defender of the cutting edge, TechCrunch boiled down Lessing’s careful rumination into “the Internet makes us dumb,” and crafted the exquisitely reasoned rejoinder:  ”Meh.“

The following year, Nicholas Carr kicked the debate into high gear by asking, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  Carr noticed that after years of using the Internet as his main source of information, he’d become less able to apply sustained concentration to reading lengthy articles and books.  He found anecdotes and early research that suggested that the constant browsing and skimming of information so typical of Internet reading exercised the brain in a different (arguably more shallow) way than the “deep” reading of books.

Carr himself noted people often feared that new technologies would limit human progress, without being able to imagine the ways those technologies would expand our knowledge and further progress:  Socrates complained that writing allowed people to cease exercising their memories; the Gutenberg press was once decried as a tool of intellectual laziness.

Nevertheless, now two years later, Carr has more firmly concluded that the Internet has rewired our brains to crave new and trivial information, at the expense of deep analysis and critical thinking.  From Carr’s original article through the recent publication of his book The Shallows, the question has become a matter of popular, academic and public concern. TechCrunch continued its proud tradition in this debate, dismissing Carr’s question as merely his “axe to grind.”

This is the kind of debate that can go on for a very long time, because the titular question is ironically stupid, though in a clever, link-baiting, book-selling way.  Knowing what “stupid” is requires defining “intelligence,” which is a concept so malleable that anyone who isn’t stupid (and many who are) can argue without end that the other side is being stupid (or at least, isn’t being smart about what stupid is).  Carr is not actually stupid, and I think his question isn’t designed to be answered.

However, there is one way that the Internet has broken a chain that began thousands of years ago:  for the first time since the invention of writing, good writing is no longer crucial to the transmission of knowledge.

When information is available everywhere from anyone at little cost, the power of good writing is diminished as a vehicle for knowledge.  Think of it this way:  Was Plato the smartest of Socrates’ students, or was he merely the best writer?  If all of the philosophers of Ancient Greece had blogs and Twitter, would we even know who Plato was?  Would we hold any single one of them in such high regard?  I think not.  And yet, I think we would still have the full breadth and depth of Greek philosophy in our human knowledge base.

The constraints of physical media, from stone tablets to wood pulp, meant that only the best writing could survive the culling of editors, libraries, wars and time.  So only good writers could pass their knowledge through the generations.  Now that anyone can publish and everything is stored forever and can be found easily, anyone can transmit knowledge so long as it is relevant, and regardless of whether it is the best-written statement of the concept.  If that were the case in Socrates’ time, we might have heard about the Cave from any one of his students – or maybe a dozen of them would have tweeted about it simultaneously.  So we would know the allegory of the cave without knowing or caring who the author was.

This thought must torture good writers everywhere, including Nick Carr, so maybe that’s what his question is really about.  The Internet isn’t making us stupid, and to be precise, it isn’t really making us bad writers.  But it does make good writing matter less.  Oh sure, you can argue that there’s an art to a good blog post or tweet or status update.  But this isn’t like defining “stupid” – there really is a meaningful standard of good writing that people of taste and discernment agree upon, and people who argue otherwise are stupid, for lack of a better word.

The highest challenge in writing – as an act and art separate from the communication of information – is a lengthy work that commands sustained interest and concentration from a reader who enters the writer’s world, rather than the other way around.  The Internet is a reader’s world, and that probably does make readers smarter.  But it makes good writing for writing’s sake matter less, so people who otherwise would have had to be good writers to communicate their ideas can now just get their ideas out in 140 characters.  Is that a bad thing?

I’ve been in this cave my whole life, but now I’m free. OMG, everything I thought was real was only shadows on the wall!! via @Socrates

I am fascinated by a concept I recently came across in Eating The Dinosaur.  Author Chuck Klosterman and documentary filmmaker Errol Morris discuss whether people have “privileged access” to their own minds.

Privileged access is a weighty philosophical matter that is popularly stated as a question of whether a person has special access to his or her own thoughts that other people do not have.  An intuitive answer is, “Of course I know my own thoughts better than anyone else does!”  But this isn’t simply a question of what you are thinking at any given moment; it’s about whether what you think about yourself is more accurate than what any other people think about you.

Here’s a thought experiment:  Do you know what you would do if you found a paper bag containing $10,000?  What amounts would lead to a different decision, and why?

I think I would keep it. I would rationalize this action (which is probably illegal) by noting that there is almost never a legitimate reason to carry around that much in cash in a paper bag – this is almost certainly drug dealer money, and why should I give drug dealers a chance to recover it?

I would definitely keep, say, five dollars – maybe I would give it to a panhandler, maybe I would buy a sandwich, but I wouldn’t leave it on the ground.  Unless someone nearby might have dropped it, I wouldn’t consider trying to find the owner, or turning the money in to the police – no one will ever come to claim $5.  In contrast, if I found $100,000, I would definitely turn it in.  When that much money gets lost, someone will look for it hard enough to make me uncomfortable – I don’t want to end up in jail, or worse, facing the guys who stole this money before I did (these guys would give up on $10K, but they would seek $100K with violent diligence).  Even more complicated, I think that I would turn in $5000.  There are plenty of legitimate reasons that a law-abiding person could be carrying that amount around, and I would want that person to have every opportunity to recover that money.

So in short, I think I would make a risk and fairness assessment, and act with a mixture of pragmatism and greed.  (Don’t get me wrong – none of this is what I want to do.  I want to believe that I would ignore any amount too small to turn in, and turn in any amount too large to ignore.  But I’m not so self-deluded to think that I always live up to my ideal self-image.)

This thought experiment has one more part:  If you polled a dozen people who know you best on the same questions, what would they say you would do?  Who is likelier to be right, them or you?

I think the majority of this group would say I would turn in the $10K.  In fact, I would guess that a plurality of people would say I would keep or ignore any amount under $100 and turn in any amount over $1000 – their assessment would be closer to my own ideal self, which I feel quite certain is not accurate.  Their reasons for my choices would vary broadly, much more broadly than the pragmatic greed I expressed, and would include reasons that I would not expect.

Is this group likelier to be right about me than I am myself?  I can’t answer that with an intuitive “I know my thoughts – I know myself – better than anyone else.”  There have been too many times when I have been surprised to discover that someone was a better predictor of my actions than I was.

Now, I don’t think that I have particularly poor self-knowledge.  In fact, as this post perhaps deplorably illustrates, I can examine my own navel to exacting excess.  But where does that leave me if the fact that I know myself particularly well only means that I am especially aware that I don’t know myself any better than other people do?  Makes my head hurt.

“The Streisand Effect” refers to an attempt to censor a piece of information that backfires because it brings more attention to the information than would have occurred without the attempted censorship.

At the risk of Streisanding the hell out a minor comment, I’ll talk about something I’d rather censor.  Noting the rather dated news of my departure from my prior company, an anonymous commenter to an anonymous and erroneous blog post recently said:

Thank goodness they finally got rid of this guy. He was the worst hire the company ever made.

Here’s what I have to say about that:  I like to think it could very well be true.

I like the idea that there are some people who took a good hard look at the history and said, ‘Yep, this guy was terrible, he almost destroyed the place, good bye and good riddance!’ Because that would mean that I was in a position to make some important decisions, and that I made decisions at the risk of being unpopular – that I did much more with the opportunity than just quietly collect a paycheck.

Now, please don’t misunderstand this:  I’m not saying that the critics are wrong, that they don’t understand, that I was both righteous and right.  Even my own review of my Linden tenure welcomes ambiguous judgment.  Obviously, I think and I hope that I did good things, but I could certainly be wrong, I could certainly be delusional.

But the one thing I don’t want to be is simply in the middle.  I don’t want anyone’s assessment to be, ‘Well, he was neither among the worst nor among the best, he was just there and he didn’t do a damn thing.’ To me, that’s a lot worse than being the worst.

So, if you had any opportunity to think about my work, and you thought I was the worst, then I thank you.  Let me give you my special gift in return:

Simple enough, yes?  Forget Streisand, I call this the Safety Dance.

And you can act real rude and totally removed
And I can act like an imbecile

The NY Times asks what we should name this decade.  I’m going to go with The Age of Illusions.  It certainly matches the experience of those of us in the United States.

In the very first minute of the decade, we found out that the looming Y2K disaster wasn’t real.  Then the dot-com bubble burst, proving that vast paper fortunes weren’t real.  Most of us voted against GWB for president in 2000, but he took office anyway, showing that popular democracy isn’t real.  The September 11 attacks seemed too horrible to be true, and we began a War on Terrorism with no real evidence that our target was involved in the attacks.  But the real illusion turned out to be the hope that “nothing will ever be the same again” – we quickly returned to ironic humor and emotional distance.

The Web 2.0 bubble came and went without a meaningful public company being created.  Massive investments in complex financial instruments that ultimately had no real basis for valuation led to a worldwide financial crisis.  A nation that stands as the apotheosis of capitalism turned to massive government bailouts, ultimately saving at least one sector of the economy:  big banking, whose leaders rewarded themselves handsomely for work they didn’t do.

Yep, the Age of Illusions it is.  Naughty Aughties, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Craig Johnson passed away this weekend – in the peak of his career, he was one of the great startup company advisors of Silicon Valley.  In the late ’90s he left legal giant Wilson Sonsini to form “a new kind of law firm” that supplied both legal necessities and business advice to growing startups.

I joined Craig’s firm in Menlo Park a few years after beginning my career in New York.  In the large Manhattan firms, the partners have big offices with spectacular views of the city.  Craig opened Venture Law Group in a modest suburban office park, and he liked to change his own office location from time to time, to dispel the office politics around a physical locus of power.  At one point soon after I joined, he occupied the small office right next to mine, making me a very lucky neophyte to Silicon Valley.  He was always kind and generous with his time and advice.  There are two bits of his wisdom that I particularly remember:

Timing and sequence are as critical as any other factors in building a successful venture. People tend to obsess over having the right idea, and building the right pieces to pursue those ideas.  And undoubtedly, it matters greatly that you pursue the right idea, building the right pieces, with the right people.  But all of those things can be right, and you can still fail if you start at the wrong time.  And more subtly, even being in the right time is not enough – you have to do things in the right order.  Attention to timing and sequence requires extraordinary strategic focus and discipline.

You are an undiversifiable piece of human capital.  This advice grows out of the notion that we are all investors in our own careers.  And one of the first principles of good investment management is portfolio diversification – by distributing your investment across asset classes with varying risk profiles, you can maximize your return while minimizing overall risk.  But as a human being with one life, you have a limited number of opportunities to diversify your career portfolio.  Life is about risk in a deeper way than rational investments.

Craig inspired us with his humility and gentle wisdom.  He carried his great experience lightly, with a twinkle in his eye at the chance to share a new thought with you.  Most of all, I’ll remember the boyish enthusiasm he always had for helping new ideas become realities.  Rest in peace, Craig Johnson.

I was talking with a friend tonight about “The Iron Quadrangle” – my name for a concept that I’ve read about and pondered over the years.  Unfortunately, I can’t remember where I first saw it; happily, we agreed that this means I can restate it without attribution . . .

So here is the rule of the Iron Quadrangle:

Friends, family, work and health are the four most meaningful areas of pursuit in life.  The very best that most people can achieve is to be outstanding in two areas, mediocre in one, and barely tolerable in the last.

Be wary of any advice that rigidly proclaims to know which combination is best for everyone.  For example, a lot of well-meaning homilies put family and health above all other values.  But the Iron Quadrangle means that all four values are connected; activity in any one informs all of the others.

Keep in mind that health includes physical and mental health; and that work includes all vocation, whether in pursuit of profit or pursuit of a cause.  Meaningful and lasting friendships are a critical contributor to lifelong health.  Pursuit of your true calling in work should be both emotionally enriching and intellectually revitalizing.

So maximizing your pursuit of family and health, to the exclusion of full effort with friends and work, can limit your achievement in the areas you would want to advance the most.  Would you have given all that you could to your life partner and your children if you never tested your mettle with the greatest challenges at work, or failed to develop rich friendships outside of your family?

Some will try to argue for picking work and family, or friends and family, or health and friends.  Some would claim that the limitation to two outstanding areas is false.  But in my experience and observation, the Iron Quadrangle is pitiless and brooks very few exceptions – and what exceptions I have seen are more a result of extremely fortuitous circumstances than the result of thought and effort.

This isn’t a pessimistic message, but rather a reflection on avoiding regret.  Many high-achieving people in every area look upon their accomplishments with regret for the areas in which they did not excel.  I think regret is only appropriate where people made choices while lying to themselves about the consequences for the other areas.

Faith is often mischaracterized as the opposite of reason, a belief held outside of rationality. But irrational belief is not faith, it’s just simpleminded credulity. And those who have no reasons other than reason are no less simple.

Faith and reason, properly understood, are intertwined sources of truth. The encyclical Fides et Ratio states this more elegantly:

Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth

In this light, I contemplated Fred Wilson’s note about investing on faith. The implication for some may be that this is investing without reason. However, Wilson’s leap of faith is no less legitimate than “pure” reason. Unlike religion, truth for startups has an ultimate arbiter in this plane of existence: return on investment. There are legions of startups that had all the reasons in the world to succeed – great idea, huge market, killer team – and yet they failed nonetheless. I’d bet that experienced startup investors have succeeded as many times on what Wilson calls faith as they have by stacking up reasons.

Coincidentally, the next day, Steve Blank posted on the startup transition from faith to facts. It might seem hard to argue with his view that startups begin on faith and must quickly move to facts to succeed. Again, I wouldn’t draw the divide that sharply. I’d say faith is a requirement throughout the journey, and so are facts. From day one, you must believe in what you’re doing, have faith informed by reason. And also from day one, you must engage with the facts; endlessly and relentlessly collect, examine and act on available facts with all your reason supported by your faith.

I tweeted a friend’s WSJ post, and he asked me why the update didn’t show up on my Facebook status.  Damn, I was afraid someone would ask me that someday.  The reason is that I use extremely precise and entirely idiosyncratic rules for how I publish personal social media.  Here is a cheat sheet:

To the untrained eye, this may seem somewhat insane – that’s ridiculous, it’s completely insane.

Updated 29 Apr 2010: Finally decided what I wanted to do since Facebook acquired FriendFeed.  Going to hook up blog, Flickr and Twitter directly to Facebook, disconnect FriendFeed app from Facebook.  This means that the things that I previously shared to siloed audiences, I now share to all audiences, and I share them through Facebook as a central sharing point.  Which of course, is exactly what Facebook wanted from the FriendFeed acquisition.

Why bother?

Blogging’s dead, isn’t it?  Calcanis quit, hating the haters.  Arrington was pushed out by unreasonable expectations and expectoration.  The 250 have moved on to Twitter, where they are all already plotting to move off to the next big thing that you don’t know about.

So there’s no glory to gain here.  In fact, for me there’s only downside to exposure.  I’ve got a prominent role at a company that’s still climbing out of its hype cycle.  I’ll have to avoid some of the topics that I’m most familiar with, since I’m not going to say too much about my work.  And it’s not like I have a whole lot of interesting hobbies to fill the gap, notwithstanding a minor OCD compulsion to pick sentences out of The Great Gatsby.  This is just asking for ridicule.  So again:  Why bother?

The best answer I can give has to do with how I used to pick bars in New York.  This was more than a decade ago, but it’s probably still the same today:  When a hot new nightspot opens up in NYC, you can’t get in.  They put up the velvet ropes, celebs on the A-list get ushered past the line, the bouncers don’t let anyone in, so everyone else can only read the gossip rags about just how cool the place is.

But in less than a year or so, the hot new place isn’t so new or so hot anymore.  The A-list has moved on to the next place.  Now you can get in, but you probably don’t want to.  The place is stuffed with bridge-and-tunnel dorks, assorted Eurotrash, and other doofi who are overjoyed to stand where their favorite star stood just months ago, thrilled to wait in line to fight the crowd to catch the bartender to overpay for watery drinks.

I developed this fine theory Temple Bar, at Lafayette and Houston in NYC.

Ah but then, but then . . . in another year or so, the doofi have moved on.  And the place has some good bones:  the owners invested some coin in this place, and it shows.  Good location, swank interior, broad top-shelf selection, attractive service.  They’ve fired the bouncers, mothballed the velvet ropes, and lowered their prices.  The status-seekers and tourists wouldn’t be caught dead in this place.  The locals are starting to check the place out, some are becoming regulars, and they’re a friendly, interesting group.  Now it’s a good time to go.

And that’s how I think of blogging now.  Well past its coolest days, but man it’s easy to get to, everything’s clean and works well, and you sure can’t complain about the price.