Bart: That Israel/Hebrew ad is seriously unintended hilarity. I like visualization methods, but I guess my primary lens for looking at such stuff (though I like schematics etc.) is narrative exploration. I find that reflective storytelling is the best way for me to understand complexity. The visual analogy is a “radioactive tracer” experiment. You understand certain bodily pathologies by sending a tracer through. You understand beyond-human complexity by becoming a tracer yourself and living a story through the system…

Venkat

The reactions you encountered reminded me of my trip in the 1980s to Adi Shankara’s birthplace Kaladi in Kerala, a bus trip I undertook from my cousin’s home in Cochin, despite potential language glitches and despite discouraging sounds from people who had been there. A simple and quiet temple, adjoining a serene pond where legend has it that young Shankara, apparently with a leg seized by a crocodile (probably a floating log?), extracted permission from his mother to become a monk. There was absolutely not a single soul anywhere, even in the tiny bookshop in the temple premises so I had to wait in order to buy a book (my usual way of paying respect to codifiers and spreaders of knowledge).

I was also reminded of another recent experience on a trip to Pratapgad fort near the touristy hill station Mahabaleshwar, where the official tour guide, a descendant of the original soldiers of Shivaji, rattled off 5 or 6 design principles behind the construction of the fort entrance. The sheer pride in his voice throughout the tour was worth more than the under 5 dollar tip.

I’ll let the connection there speak for itself.

As for the piece itself, I wonder whether it’s something that only a born acolyte of infrastructural design can fully appreciate. For most people, I think, if you showed them a cutaway or “exploded” picture of some physical object, they’d think it was mildly interesting. And a few would become enthusiastic on seeing how the physical pieces fit together to form a complete working object.

But far, far fewer (in my experience) would begin to be able to appreciate the terrific satisfaction that the infrastructure designer feels on seeing a representation of some vast and complex process made real. The amazing thing about the Bailey Yard is not how many trains there are or the details of their physical connection — it’s grasping the scope of the process of their interactions that’s exciting. A map of this facility is not interesting merely because it’s complicated; such a map fascinates the infrastructurist because it reveals something of the dynamic structure of a complex but functional system.

Other representations can have a similar effect: schematic diagrams of aircraft or rockets; org charts (for sufficiently complex organizations); a photograph of a microprocessor; a social network map; representations in different contexts of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System — all of these and more are forms of infrastructure enabling various kinds of complex processes to occur. (Check out Google Images of “complex systems” or — a favorite site of mine — A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for more examples of repesentations of the inner workings of complex systems.)

Very, very few people are inspired by images like these. So it’s a pleasure to run into someone like Venkat who not only groks the appeal, but who is able to articulate some of the reason for that appeal. Most folks see a representation of a complex, abstract, dynamic process and dismiss it as “complicated” and not really relevant to real-world concerns.

It’s nice to run into someone who can see and appreciate the beauty of the dance… even in systems whose functional result may not be beautiful at all.

Joe: I believe the 3rd commandment in the religion of infrastructure is “thou shalt laugh at every commandment.” AdSense is also a piece of infrastructure worth both kneeling before and laughing at. I view it as a badge of honor that my content is usually capable of breaking Google’s relevance algorithms.

Evil Rocks: That is a borderline weird comment. I will definitely NOT be attempting to walk across the Manhattan bridge with my pants off.

scientology.org

No idea if the ads are content-sensitive, but I thought I’d share the smile.

So from where I sit, an “end of the dominant civilization” is not an “end of the world”. An “end of the world,” to me, is something that would kill most of the life, including most of the intelligent life, on the planet. This is the category where AGW and Malthusian scenarios go. We haven’t had one of those yet, and hopefully never will. If we were going that route, I would definitely fight, because I want to live. No other reason is necessary.

As for “the end of everything?” There are some cosmological theories that hypothesize that that will happen, billions of years in the future. I’m not sure whether I believe them or not.

Am enjoying your sidebar discussion, but it is quite obscure to me since I am n0t a gamer. I think the correlation between personality types with gervais principle dynamics is weak to non-existent. I am personally a Keirsey NT, and have seen NTs who have maneuvered into the C-suite, but I’ve seen examples of the other 3 types as well. It depends on context. There is much stronger correlation between Keirsey and professional track though. Whether you rise to CEO via engineering or marketing or sales or HR depends strongly on type, but all those paths are possible.

The only connection I’ve been able to develop between GP and personality is more Freudian in spirit than Jungian. I have an S/C/L development theory (or rather arrested development theory) that I am polishing up to post.

Finally, re: pessimism, I prefer to call it “cheerfully dystopian.” That said, mood and happiness have nothing to do with valuable production. Slaves built the pyramids and the American cotton-based economy, and I am sure they held a pretty pessimistic worldview while doing it. The organization is this screwed up BECAUSE it needs to actually produce. Organizations that produce nothing are pretty happy places. They’re called parties.

Venkat

Kiersey scales on a completely different dimension , as does the strengths scale . Even a 2×2 matrix like compliant/aggressive x conforming/non-conforming doesn’t map well to Kiersey.

Quigley has a lot to say about the arbitrariness of scale and dimension in social science, but he was also operating in a far more intellectually naive culture, particularly regarding linguistics and data visualization. Which is not to fault his 3-choice model – I think that’s at least functionally sound if not necessarily theoretically sound.

regards,
Greg
ENTJ
Strategic | Input | Communication | Learning | Command

Thanks for this ntertaining and illuminating comment. My drummer/dancer thinking is probably far too informed by Indian classical music, where drumming is usually a solo act, accompanying dancers. I studied tabla for about 5 years, but never got good enough to take it up seriously.

I’ve been to a couple of drumming circles in the US, but I must have some Eric “goddamn hippies” Cartman in me, because I absolutely hated the culture and never went again. Maybe because I am so used to solo drumming.

That said, I think the basic metaphor still works… you are either carrying the rhythm, or following it, or are tone-deaf. I’ll just have to make sure I adequately account for the real dynamics in music/drumming/dance performance around the world so the metaphor works for everyone.

Or I may drop the metaphor altogether… who knows. This book is just a twinkle in my eye at the moment. Gotta get the first book finished and shipped first.

Venkat

I’m not at all sure about the drummer/dancer implications, though. I’m empiricist enough to compare my own experiences in performance and ritual to the model, and it doesn’t quite feel right. My experience includes decades of playing bass or drumming on stage, in dance clubs, random drum circles, jam sessions, studios, religious services, etc. It also includes the dancer side of the expression, since for physical reasons I couldn’t play for longer than 15 minutes for about a decade. (Which kind of limits your career, outside the studio.)

Within a public drum circle you’ll see the sociopaths, clueless, and losers. Let 20 percussionists come together and jam – 2 to 4 of them, typically, are controlling the energy and beat. The others either entrain to it (clueless), or drop out/irritate the others (losers). The sociopaths communicate with each other non-verbally, and usually make acknowledgment eye contact at least once. They have the beat, and they “throw” the lead to each other in the same way NBA players throw no-look passes on a fast break. When a clueless tries to lead, or a loser, they tend to stop playing, the dancers leave, the energy goes down, and then they restart. It’s incredibly elitist in that sense, because they are the only ones who get it among the percussionists.

I’ve shifted terminology from “drummer” to “percussionist” to make a point. I can walk into any open drum circle, determine quickly who is actually “running” it, and join them – with only claves. I’m lazy, and an actual drum is too much work While the clueless have their Big Drums and way too much busyness, I can mold the rhythm with only a few beats – or one – per measure.

The same dynamic applies among the dancers. Frequently the “lead dancers” – the ones who dance when no one else is – will move in the circle to be in the best position to respond to the lead percussionists. They’re the ones who get watched by the losers, and followed by the clueless. They are *collaborating* in the performance. And they stop dancing when the lead percussionists stop playing. If you’re a lead percussionist, you’ll play with them. It’s all nonverbal, but usually quite conscious.

The “wallflowers” are the group best considered losers, in this case, and sociopath/clueless distribute between the dancers and drummers.

YMMV, of course.

As the aforementioned Flatfingers (thanks for the cite, Rodrigo!), I should note that the model I’ve put together of four playstyles in the computer gaming context are explicitly not a hierarchy. The four styles (which I consider to be four gameplay-context subsets of the four “temperaments” described by David Keirsey) are co-equal in value — they’re not behaviors, they’re motivations, and as such none is more “advanced” than another. Furthermore, I don’t see people changing their innate motivations at all. So I don’t think my player/personality types model is analogous to the hierarchical models that Venkat is exploring in the Gervais Chronicles.

Having said that my model is not hierarchical, however, I have to point out that Richard Bartle — the man behind the four original Bartle Types used to describe the preferred playstyles of computer gamers — believes that there *is* a specific hierarchy among the playstyles. In fact, when he extended his original four-type system to eight, he was able develop a specific graph showing his impression of the path by which a person changes from one type of player to another. You can read his thoughts on this at his working site: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/selfware.htm .

I’m actually working on writing a book that talks about personality styles in the workplace, which relates Keirsey’s four temperaments to Charles Handy’s four types of organizational culture. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_culture#Charles_Handy ) If you assume that there is a “natural style” associated with Losers, Clueless, and Sociopaths, regardless of where they may be in the corporate hierarchy at any particular moment in time, then I think we might be able to see a correlation between those types and Keirsey’s temperaments as follows:

Sociopaths = Artisans (gambler-type, sensation-seeking) : Power culture
Clueless = Guardians (“Organization Man,” security-seeking) : Role culture
Losers = combination of Rationals (knowledge-seeking) and Idealists (identity-seeking) : Task and People cultures

Seem interesting?

Perhaps more usefully, I’d like to mention one of the greatest works of organizational analysis I’ve ever seen: The Evolution of Civilizations by the late Georgetown professor Carroll Quigley. If you go Googling Quigley, you’ll run into his Rhodes/CFR/Trilateral Commission stuff that the black-helicopter crowd gets excited about; that’s not relevant here.

What The Evolution of Civilizations points out is that where Spengler and Toynbee saw civilizations going inexorably from birth to maturity to death, Quigley recognized that while civilizations are always headed toward failure, it’s not inevitable — there are a couple of ways to reverse course away from extinction and to restart the engine of growth.

There are two key elements to Quigley’s thoughts on this process. First, he posits that civilizations enter a period of growth when they develop an “instrument of expansion.” An instrument of expansion generates a surplus for some people which they then reinvest into the civilization for additional invention.

Secondly, however, this process always tends over time to those who control the surplus using more of it for personal desires instead of reinvestment. When this happens, the instrument becomes an “institution,” and that civilization heads toward a crisis moment. At that point, one of three things happens:

1. The civilization reforms the broken institution by making it an instrument again (reapplying the surplus to invention).
2. The civilization circumvents the broken institution by creating a new instrument of expansion, leaving the visible perks of the institution to its owners.
3. The civilization preserves the broken institution, achieves a brief Golden Age by eating its seed corn, then is destroyed and consumed by other civilizations with their own functional instruments of expansion.

I mention all this because I think what Quigley was really onto was not just civilizations, but organizations generally. This goes back to what Venkat discussed in the “From the Whyte School to The Gervais Principle” section in Gervais 1: when organizations grow too disconnected from reality (i.e., an instrument of expansion becomes institutionalized), they are torn apart by other organizations that are in a growth mode (Schumpeter’s “creative destruction”).

In MacLeodian terms, Organizational death comes when there are so many Clueless surrounding the decision-making Sociopaths that reality no longer plays a role in how the organization adapts to the external world of customers and competitors. (I like to call this the “Reality Distortion Field” effect — organizational size tends to be proportional to RDF levels.) The Losers can see reality because they are least insulated by it, but they are also least able to change the organization to respond to changes in that reality. And the Clueless care only about maintaining the Organization as it currently exists.

Finally, as someone who actually functions in a large organization (and I don’t know whether I’m a Loser or one of the Clueless!), I have to say that this entire series by Venkat is remarkably pessimistic and cynical given that organizations sometimes actually do work. Real things that real people really do want, which would be impossible without some form of human organization of planning and labor, actually do get created.

Shouldn’t a completely mature theory of the organization, with all its flaws, explain its capacity for success as well?

That said… this whole series so far has been one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever read on the haphazard collection of ones and zeros that is the Internet. Nicely done, Venkat!

The CIA, I read somewhere, has lately been doing a lot more scenario planning around food and water wars than Iraq or Afghanistan. That says something.

I agree with most of what you say, though I still think the iPad will remain a niche hit. Your point about the 4 things input devices do is deep enough to deserve a stand-alone post (interested in guesting it?)

Only two minor quibbles. One, you suggest that XP is not tinkery enough for the geeks, and too tinkery for the ‘just work dammit’ crowd, but the product has not performed like a no-man’s land product caught between a rock and a hard place. In fact, it is still the dominant end-user OS. We have to honestly ask why, and I think the answer is that end-user computing is still in enough of a growth phase that end users, whether they like it or not, still have to do significant tinkering. Like back in the model T ford days when everybody, mechanically minded or not, had to be a bit of a mechanic to adopt the innovation. Apple, from that POV, is prematurely optimizing an immature product category… OTOH you might believe we are in the equivalent of the 70s 80s era of automobiles and that there is some stupid inertia effect holding us back. I don’t know.

The same sort of point for my second quibble. You are making a time-honored sort of false analogy between cars and computers (my use of the analogy I think, is less problematic). Your comparison is in the vein of that famous (apocryphal?) exchange between Bill Gates and GM about “if cars were like windows”.

The computer is fundamentally a younger product with a FAR higher maturity ceiling that will probably take a millenium, rather than a century, to reach. We’re going to be on the growth part of the curve for a long time. When we’re done, we may be in a place where the prototypical “computer” may be unrecognizable (perhaps a diffuse ghost in the machine, permeating everything in your life, from clothes to refrigerators, via some mix of cloud intelligence, swarm intelligence in devices and so forth).

Point of that techno visioning is that I will NOT accept life-threatening “atavastic world is complex” design in my car (except to the extent that the car IS a soft-real-time computer), but I expect and want it in my computing. I am not settling for a temporary plateau at 50 years, when I dream of a real plateau 500 years in the future…

But we are now down to a deeper theological divide than the Apple-Windows divide I think.

BTW, practically speaking, I am an agnostic too. Except that I’ve never found a use case in my personal life (barring an iTouch that I won in a contest that’s useful for occasional quick email checks if I am too lazy to turn on my computer). That may change… my wife is getting into photography seriously, and I am telling her to consider a Mac…

Venkat