The curse of busy-ness

Why do powerful, intelligent, and accomplished people so often exhibit cluelessness or ignorance? (Examples can be supplied on demand, in the unlikely event you need them.)

I don’t mean to rip on powerful people, many of whom become powerful because of outstanding personal traits. But I do think it’s worth understanding the puzzle of why so many people do great things in their youth, and then do apparently sillier things as they get older.

I think my post about the bias towards power contains a partial explanation: powerful people’s ideas often aren’t tested as rigorously as those of the less powerful, and they find it easier to act while ignoring good advice. As an example, a regular Joe with an idea for starting a company has to convince other people of the idea in order to attract investment. A wealthy entrepeneur finds it much easier to get silly ideas funded, in part by investing their own wealth, and in part because other people give undue weight to their words.

(This is also why superheros like Spiderman are interesting: they show what happens when basically well-intentioned people can act without constraint. The results often aren’t pretty.)

However, I think the bias towards power is only part of an explanation. Another part is that powerful people are often far too busy and focused. If you don’t create time just to fool around (“purposeless delectation in ideas” was Gian-Carlo Rota’s lovely phrase), you end up narrow, clueless, and irrelevant. It’s funny to hear that CNN’s Larry King has never used the net, or that George Bush (the elder) was amazed by supermarket barcode scanners in 1992, but, really, these people must have some massive blind spots.

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Creative collaboration: ideals and reality

I’ve been reading Keith Sawyer’s book “Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration”, and thinking about what makes some collaborations work, and others fail.

In this post I describe two principles governing group collaboration. Both principles are obvious and self-evident. Unfortunately, and this is the point of the post, they’re often systematically disobeyed in scientific collaborations, and this may prevent such collaborations from achieving what Sawyer calls “group flow”, a state in which groups collaborate effectively, producing creative works beyond any of the individual members of the group.

Principle: Collaboration should recognize individual effort appropriately

In a jazz performance, it is for the most part transparent who is contributing what to the performance. If someone is slacking off, or trying to hog the limelight, this becomes obvious to the audience.

Science is much less transparent. There are no generally agreed upon norms governing how people are given credit in a paper, and as a result individuals in a group may not feel secure that their role will be properly acknolwedged. To be sure, in some fields there are rules of thumb – for example, in many experimental papers, the principal investigator who runs the lab in which the experiments were performed is often listed as the last author on the paper. But this is a long way short of a full and fair accounting of who contributed what.

This lack of transparency causes all sorts of problems. A common example is the “author” who was in the room when some critical breakthrough happened, but who actually contributed little, and lacks the grace to refuse authorship. Another common example is the author who contributes just enough to deserve authorship, and then goes on their merry way, leaving the bulk of the work to be done by others. Many multi-author papers are primarily the work of a single individual, yet that individual may not be distinguished at all in a long list of 5-10 (or even more) authors.

Some scientific journals, such as Nature, are beginning to address this problem, experimenting with systems whereby each author on a paper is asked to detail what they contributed to the paper. It will be interesting to see whether this creates more incentive for people to contribute in a full and fair fashion to papers on which they are authors.

Principle: collaboration should involve people with complementary skills

This is so obvious that it would seem to fall into the “well, duh!” category. In fact, institutions often systematically violate this principle on such a large scale that it becomes an accepted and almost invisible part of the institutional culture.

Exhibit A is Australian science. I’m picking on Australian science here because I know it well – similar remarks hold true in many other countries. A peculiar feature of the funding system for nearly all Australian Universities is that departments are financially rewarded for keeping their own students within a department. As a result, it’s not uncommon to go into a large research group, and discover (say) 5 PhD students, virtual academic clones of one another, having graduated from the same academic department, often within a year or two of each other, and often with essentially the same list of undergraduate courses. Not a good recipe for reaping the benefits of complementary expertise! The contrast with top American research departments is striking, with students even within a given research group often having quite heterogeneous backgrounds.

Exhibit B is the disciplinary structure of science itself. Most disciplines and subdisciplines have a canon of material, which experts are expected to understand. Unfortunately, in most fields learning the canon requires an enormous amount of time, which leaves little room for learning more individualized skills. It’s interesting to recall that the physicist Richard Feynman famously claimed not to understand either group theory or the standard integration techniques from complex analysis, two skills that are certainly canonical for particle physicists. Perhaps he spent his time learning a more individualized set of skills that made him better able to contribute in a unique way to the collaborative enterprise of science.

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Categorized as Science

New blogs

Sean Caroll and Chad Orzel both have posts up asking readers to suggest new blogs in comments.

Let me ask the same, but with an added twist: what are your favourite specialty blogs? What do you think is a really great and insightful read, but maybe in some unusual area? Know of a great blog on knitting (or Lego, or kite-flying, or marathoning, or publishing, or whatever)? Please leave it in the comments.

One thing I really enjoy about blogs is that I get to read stuff from experts on pretty much any subject. I love reading about economics (e.g., John Quiggin, Brad DeLong and Greg Mankiw), marketing (e.g., Seth Godin, HorsePigCow), writing (Confident Writing), libraries (John Dupuis, Science Library Pad, Google Librarian blog), machine learning (Machine Learning), and lots and lots of other subjects. Pretty much every subject in the world can be fascinating, providing you’re talking to the right person!

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Deference, defiance, and power

Robin Hanson has some thoughts related to my recent post about the consequences of the bias towards power:

People relate to power two ways, via deference and defiance. When we defer to power, we are indeed biased to give it too much inferential weight, but when we defy power, we give it too little inferential weight. We listen too much to the powers that we feel allied with, and too little to powers we feel allied against. To think more objectively, become less allied.

Robin’s comments implicitly highlight the fact that we may be for or against power, but we rarely ignore it. Of course, being ignored is all-too-often the fate of ideas, even very good ideas, expressed by the less powerful.

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Adventures in phase space

Aggie Branczyk has an awesome video illustrating some ideas from quantum optics. You’ll need to know what a Wigner function is to fully get this, otherwise you can just admire the pretty animation:

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Categorized as Physics

Biweekly links for 03/10/2008

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Biweekly links for 03/07/2008

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WMAP 5-year results: live lecture

Yesterday, Sean Caroll wrote an informative post about the WMAP 5-year data release. This morning at 9:30am (local time) Perimeter Institute will be doing a live broadcast of a talk on the subject by Eiichiro Komatsu of the WMAP team. A second live broadcast will follow Saturday at 2:10pm.

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Categorized as News

More things everyone should know about science

Chad Orzel has a great response to Eva’s question for SciBarCamp, “What are the ten things everyone should know about science?”:

I have three suggestions, which are really all part of one big idea:

1) Science is a Process, Not a Collection of Facts The essence of science, broadly defined, is that it is a systematic approach to figuring out how the world works:

1. look at the world around you

2. come up with an idea for why it might work that way.

3. test your idea against reality.

… making sure you do everything in your power to prove your idea in 2 wrong. When it’s your own ideas you’re testing, the easiest person in the world to fool is yourself.

(I know Chad didn’t intend this as a complete description, and I feel like I’m being pedantic with my addition. I’m on a bit of a kick right now thinking about how biases, especially confirmation bias, affect our view of the world, and how important skepticism is to the conduct of science.)

4. tell everybody you know the results of the test.

Put those steps together, over and over, and you have the best method ever devised for increasing our store of reliable knowledge. The precise facts found by this method are not as important as the process for finding them– given the process, and enough time, you can reconstruct whatever facts you need. The facts without the process are worse than useless, they’re dangerous.

2) Science is an essential human activity. You’ll often hear people who study art and literature wax rhapsodic about how the arts are the core of what makes us human– Harold Bloom attributes it all to Shakespeare, but you can find similar arguments for every field of art. Great paintings, famous sculptures, great works of music (classical only, mind– none of that noise you kids listen to)– all of these are held to capture the essence of humanity.

You don’t hear that said about science, but you should. Science is essential to our nature, because at its most basic, science consists of looking at the world and saying “Huh. I wonder why that happened?” Science is applied curiosity, and there’s no more human quality than that. (“Bloody-mindedness” is a close second.)

(And, from a purely practical point of view, science and the products thereof are the reason why we have the free time to sit around making and appreciating works of art. Without science, we’d still be plains apes scavanging the kills of more efficient predators than us.)

3) Anyone can do science. Science doesn’t depend on race and it doesn’t depend on gender. You don’t need to be rich to do science. You don’t even need to be good at math.

And, I might add, you don’t need to be “smart”. Every 3 year old kid pretty much applies the scientific method as Chad describes (well, they don’t usually publish). Scientists are just a lot more systematic and dedicated than most people. If there’s something that distinguishes them it’s that they appreciate the scientific method, and understand what goes wrong when you start to vary steps.

Science is, fundamentally, nothing more than a systematic approach to looking at the world around us and figuring out how it works. Money and mathematics are tools that can help with this process, but the core of the enterprise is nothing more than a habit of mind.

One of the most pernicious lies told by our culture is that science is an elite and exclusive activity only available to a few. It leads to scientists being stigmatized as “nerds” or “geeks,” set apart from the rest of humanity, and it leads to tenured professors with Ph.D.’s in the humanities to say with a laugh “I just don’t understand science.”

Science does not require innate abilities beyond the standard-issue human genome. If you have the full complement of senses and a brain, you can do science. In fact, the core business of humanities scholars– sifting through texts looking for evidence to support a particular argument– is not really any different than the business of science. You come up with a theory of what’s going on in a particular work of literature, and then you check to see whether that holds up by systematically evaluating the evidence found in the text. That’s one step removed from doing science.

You may not understand a particular set of facts produced by science, but see point #1 above: Science is a process, not a collection of facts. You won’t necessarily understand all the facts of a particular science outside your own field of expertise– I don’t understand microbiology worth a damn– but if you have the brain power necessary to function as an autonomous adult, the process is within your grasp.

And again, if you have the process, you have the ability to eventually understand the facts. I don’t understand microbiology, because I haven’t been trained in those facts, but I know that I could understand it, and if I ever need that understanding, I know the process by which to get it. For that matter, I don’t understand feminist literary criticism, but I know that I could if I needed to, using the same mental toolbox.

Biweekly links for 03/03/2008

Click here for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

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