another lesson in less is more?

The US and South Korea are gearing up to show North Korea some military muscle - and North Korea is gearing up to throw some version of a temper tantrum in response.

At this time I'm giving the US State Department the benefit of the doubt that their planned military exercise will have some short or long-term positive impact on North and South relations, but now I'm having a hard time seeing it. I suspect, instead, that the US may be victim of the "do something" bias - that is, do something is better than doing nothing. But sometimes doing nothing is the better way to go.

in praise of stovepipes

The Washington Post two year investigation that laid out the vast complexity and "overgrowth" of the US intelligence system has generally been received with gasps of disbelief and sighs of despair. Certainly, at first glance one wonders how 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies could possibly coordinate activities and efficiently share information. Surely they must be doing duplicative work. Even worse, if not all the agencies are sharing information and letting each other put the pieces together, surely terrorists will slip through their fingers.

But are duplication and stovepiping really bad things? A couple of other familiar concepts suggest not: markets and groupthink.

In markets, when there are multiple companies working to develop smartphones, no one complains about duplication of work. Of course not; we all understand the advantages of a market where firms can compete to bring us the best product. Even if competition for the almighty dollar is taken out of the picture, there are tons of examples of where we prefer to let many entities try out different solutions, knowing that some will work out better than others. Indeed that's one of the advantages of having 50 states acting as laboratories for public policy.

But building a better smartphone or experimenting with public policy is not the same as putting together information to stop potential acts of terrorism, one might respond. Unlike the smartphone and policy, there's no saying what's the best version, so trying out many kinds and seeing what sticks makes sense. But with terrorists, it's not like you're looking for theoretical terrorists - there are actual ones out there that you need to find, and fast. True, but while you can't experiment with hypothetical terrorists, you can experiment with how best to find them. Finding a terrorist needle in the haystack is as much art as science; it may be to our advantage if many groups of spooks are putting their minds together in different ways to find the bad guys - the more creative teams out there, the more likely one will find the bad guys before they find us.

Admittedly, the fact that so many agencies don't have access to each others' intelligence is more of a problem - but it could also be a good thing. Psychologists have long known that we have a number of biases that lead us to believe misinformation; "groupthink", "social proof", "confirmation bias" all predispose us to believe what others believe (without deeply questioning) and to believe only what fits our theories. Even more oddly, our instinct is just to believe things - so once we've heard something, even if we think "that can't be true", part of our brain takes it as truth. All of this adds up to one of our great cognitive traps - "the inadvertent acceptance of the nearly correct," as Janet Metcalfe calls it. In other words, we think more information equals more knowledge, but it paradoxically can lead to "overconfidence"; as we plateau or even lose knowledge we believe we know more.

Any Team Will Do

Any one who's been to a sports game, knows the power of team spirit.

I was barely a baseball fan and one that could have cared less about the Mets when I was invited to the 6th game of the 1986 World Series. By the seventh inning I remember clasping my hands and praying that the Mets would win (I don't pray), and when Bill Buckner let an easy out roll through his legs, letting the Mets take the lead in the final innings I - along with 50,000 other possessed fans in Shea Stadium - responded as if Christ had descended onto right field (I don't believe in Christ either). I believe I haven't watched a Mets game since.

What happened in Queens that night, of course, happens in college basketball games and professional football games (of the US and World varieties) every day. Our ability to turn into writhing and screaming fanatics no doubt has much to do with the chemistry of the crowd. But at possibly a deeper level - and what the crowd taps into - is our remarkable urge to be on a team.

Any team will do. We're not limited to sports; political parties, schools, musical preferences, hair styles - and of course nations and religions - all give us plenty of opportunity to identify with a group and, because every game needs an opponent, take down the other guys.

Yesterday a thin, somewhat amusing New York Post article about New Yorkers turning their kitchens into closets turned into a battle ground for suburbanites and urbanistas to go to war against each other.

A suburban fired the first shot: "I feel sorry for these people, they're living like animals in a cage."

It was early in the game, so only a half-hearted volley came in response: "People living NYC are barely home. These apartments are just like hotel rooms where you hold your stuff and sleep every now and then."

But things were just heating up: "My bathroom is bigger than her apartment. I feel sorry for them They don't know how to live."

And then team NYC fully jumped into the fray: "For us Manhattan-ites, a tiny apartment in Manhattan is our heaven. A spacious Mc-Mansion in the suburbs would be our hell!"

Gloves were off: "Sooo, you never make coffee, never have a bottle of white wine you need to chill, never want cold water in summer, never even make toast? You obviously never entertain, or know the joys of a beautifully prepared romantic dinner. Never will enjoy the privacy of an intimate dinner for two; you would have share those moments with an entire restaurant."

And it just got uglier: "I can't imagine living in a city full of people willing to live in that city."

Ending with what almost sounds like a wishful thinking for city-cide? "I just wonder what will happen when some disaster closes the restaurants? Will you riot? Or just sit down and starve? NYC is only 4 hours from starvation. My house is 6 months."

Of course, we need to take a deep breath, remember that this is all just in response to a fluff article about a few people that store their shoes in their refrigerators and that the commenters are all, presumably, well off enough to afford homes with heating, electricity and running water - and are even fairly literate. I, who like to imagine myself a level-headed reasonable person, was even in the process of registering with then NYPost so I could come to the defense of my urban compadres -when I stopped myself (and wrote this post instead).

What is happening here? If we can so easily exercised over apartment sizes and residential choices, what else cannot get us up in arms? Not much. The power of identity - and of belonging to a team that shares that identity - will creep up wherever it can.

In a class I took last fall, the professor split us into two groups to play a 5 minute game. I won't go into the details of the game - but it wasn't very intense; none of us had to get out of our seats, most of us didn't even have to speak, and those that did speak only had to make a negotiation offer or accept/reject that offer. The game wasn't so interesting, but what was surprising was the immediate feelings that arose about the "other" side - that included disdain, distrust and even anger.

In that case the only thing to identify ourselves as part of the team was the professor saying "everyone on this side of the room is on team "A."

The Gmail Effect?

When Gmail first hit, it was not for everyone. If you can remember back that far, to get a Gmail account you first had to be invited by a Gmailing friend, who was - at least for the moment - cooler than you. I was too cool to ask for an invite, but I wanted one, just because... well... I couldn't get one.

Marketers have always known that exclusivity (and its sister, scarcity) are powerful tools. What we can easily get we may not want - but what's doled out to the few and lucky (whether by connections or pricey tags) has this sudden allure.

Policy makers rarely stoop to such manipulative levels - but they should do so more often. I suspect Arnie Duncan had marketing in mind when the Education Department decided, as reported in today's Washington Post, to grant just two Race to the Top awards. Delaware and Tennessee will be turning their education systems inside out for a small bucket of cash - and they're proud of it. But when 50 states were told they had to do the same under No Child Left Behind, there was revolution in school superintendents' offices across the nation. The difference? Maybe Delaware and Tennessee were happy with NCLB too (I don't know for sure, but my guess is not). More likely Delaware and Tennessee are happier with Race to the Top and for two reasons: because they had more room to innovate their own ideas and because they get the "exclusive" pot o' money.

Could it be that by making reform exclusive, Duncan will make states suddenly hot to reform - where they once were cool?

Reading a review of Timothy Ferris' "The Science of Liberty" - which argues both that liberty has a debt to the scientific method and that science provides a model for democracy - and I'm brought back to that age old question "where did the West get this notion of liberty in the first place?"

Did our belief in the scientific method (the idea that truth could be gotten at through experimentation) contribute to the notion that we all might have something important to say or to add to conversation? It seems that notion had broader, unscientific, roots. Martin Luther, most notably, was a non-scientific-method advocate for the individual's ability to think for himself. And the idea that each of us can think for ourselves seems, to me, to be the root of individual liberty.

But still the question lingers - why did the pre-eminence of the individual thinker (and actor) rise in the West? Robert Wright made an argument in Nonzero that what set the West on a separate trajectory from the East was the happenstance of power being divided between the church (Rome) and the state (France, Prussia, etc.) - whereas the norm everywhere else was to have the state and church (or whatever spiritual cosmology was practiced) one and the same. I wonder if it was merely this split - and that individuals had to think for themselves to reconcile the differences between the Pope and the King - that sprouted the idea that the individual and his thoughts were to be valued and respected. If the powers that be can't figure things out for us and we have to think for ourselves, by george, let us think for ourselves. Voila, liberte.

a democratic paradox

Just a quick observation that leads to a bunch of questions:

We, as citizens, trust our elected officials less than we trust, well, pretty much anyone else - appointed judges, the military, even the media.

There's a fundamental paradox there; the people we choose ourselves (and presumable have the most control over) are the people we trust least. Is that because we feel betrayed when they don't act the way we'd like them to? Is there a pragmatic instinct inside of us that makes us content with things we can't control and frustrated with what we can? Or is it simply that we see and hear a lot more from our politicians - and getting to know anyone in power, particularly those cow-towing to us, means getting to dislike them.

Are citizen participation and deliberative democracy at odds?

I never thought I'd ask the question. Indeed, I never thought the question existed. But are citizen participation and deliberative democracy at odds?

The two, in my mind at least, seemed to go hand in hand; with greater citizen involvement in the democratic process, the more discussion and deliberation would be need to make decisions.

But a (fantastic) article I'm in the middle of reading (pdf), suggests the opposite: that the more you cushion decisions from the democratic process, the more potential there is to demand deliberative decisions. Huh.

I'm not sure, but I think the logic is thus: democratically made decisions risk happening at the whim of an impassioned electorate or wily politicians (not necessarily working in the best interest of the nation, but decisions made by institutions a step away from politics - courts, the Federal Reserve, etc - can have the space to dis-impassionedly think through the complexities of an issue.

The key here is who gets to be deliberative. In this view, citizens are out of the process - and the wonks in the institutions are in. I'm assuming that two caveats are implied. One, that the semi-independent agencies have to be public with their thinking process and that, by extension, if they're really unconvincing that that a public backlash could get them to backtrack.