Paul Natsuo Kishimoto - misc

Listening tour

2016-11-10T00:00:00+01:00

Echoing Robert Stavins, I have only a narrow area of expertise,¹ and it does not include political science. I know that some of the following turns on empirical questions that can be answered with data and rigorous analysis, and that there are researchers trying to do just this. I should, and will, acquaint myself with the knowledge they have produced; but that will be a gradual project.

In the meantime, I and others need to make decisions about how to get by in a world that seems, suddenly, different from the one some thought we lived in. We each make our hasty guesses and generalizations about what exists, and why; how things could change, and what our role might be in that change. Many people have less time, training, and resources than I do to access the academic literature and update our assumptions—but still the sense of agency, however limited, resulting from these thoughts is important to our well-being.

Two busy days on social media

It's been a comfort this week to have thoughtful and nuanced conversations with my colleagues, and to see people, even Canadians back home, process their emotions openly, yet with maturity and respect. I won't link to every example, but there have been many.

I want to try to tie together four things I've seen that appear to be in tension:

Mirroring the aftermath of the Brexit referendum—there has been an uptick in reports of hate crimes in the past couple of days, targeting all the unfortunate groups one would expect.
I have heard pained stories from friends and colleagues who grew up outside of the Northeast, and have rural, white family members and childhood friends who voted for Donald Trump. Their lives, as described, are worse than those of anyone I've known closely.⁴ My friends—with more cause for disappointment and anger than most—swear that their relatives would not commit hate crimes; I believe them.
Many people have shared articles like this one explaining how “economic anxiety” or disenfranchisment of rural, white Americans led them to not vote, or vote for Trump. Almost every time, someone offers the rebuttal, citing exit polls, that voters in the lowest income brackets went for Clinton, and higher earners for Trump.
Finally, I've seen both calls for empathy and understanding (I made one myself), and on the other hand statements that there is no empathizing with anyone who is filled with hatred, and that we should not reward displays of hate (i.e., a Trump vote) with attention.

Morally satisfying vs. effective responses

We know that identity politics was successful in this election. We also know that social media, designed to show us as many ads as possible, encourages us to construct filter bubbles around ourselves, within which we interact only with the like-minded.² This long, thorough reflection explains how we find it easier to experience a rich and vivid dislike for an outgroup that's close enough for us to recognize.

So would not be easy to even meet Trump voters, for those who would choose to do so, much less come to empathize with them. In my post yesterday, I didn't mean to suggest this would be easy. Nor—I can't stress this enough—do I mean to say that anyone should be subject to hate or misogyny. Every human should be safe from these things. And we each must choose how much effort we devote to keeping people safe, versus reaching for members of outgroups.

I will borrow an idea from ecomodernists who, convincingly, point out that a strong stance against nuclear power is a self-imposed handicap in the fight against climate change—an uninformed and unnecessary one.

In the current context, I think to write off people as prima facie irredeemable xenopobhes, racists, misogynists, Islamophobes, anti-Semites, etc., necessarily handicaps the response to Trumpism. Without doubt, the worst examples of each of these joined the Trump camp, were emboldened by him, and are among his noisiest supporters, especially online.

“Shy” Trump voters were not stopped by these displays. It is, obviously, satisfying or comforting to many to condemn their vote by saying it endorses those deplorable views. I can't disagree that it does; but people vote for a mix of many reasons, so I also cannot agree that it should be viewed only as such an endorsement.

More importantly, will it be possible to build a society that protects everyone whom progressives care about, without turning some of these shy voters away from Trump and his ilk? To this, I can't help but answer, no.

Per #4 above, I know that it seems wildly unjust and dissatisfying to some people to reward a Trump vote with compassion; but I think the distinction should be made between a response which provides us with a comforting feeling of righteousness in the short term, and one which stands a chance of doing durable good for more people in the long term.

Trust and leadership

How would that work? My leadership education emphasized the importance trust between a leader and those led. The metaphor of a bank account was often used: certain actions by the leader build up trust; and it is drawn down when one asks others to follow.

Little to no trust exists between strangers; indeed, one could argue, members of an outgroup start with a negative 'balance' in their account. For people to entertain different or new political ideas requires effort and cognitive dissonance. It is an ask; it requires trust.³ Asking people to stand and endure condemnation, even if it is just and deserved condemnation, also requires a balance in the account.

Anyone who might want to lead some small fraction of Tuesday's 59 million—so that they might stop voting for Trump, and become allies of progress—needs to build trust. I don't think that would be easy; it would require a lot of patient listening to words that might sometimes echo the worst propaganda of Fox News or Breitbart. One would need to hear these things in silence, listening for the person underneath the canned lines. If the hearer felt compelled by conscience to interrupt, for instance to object to a direct call for violence against minorities, then she or he must; but this necessarily would slow the accumulation of trust.

This is not work for politicians, I think. That kind of trust can't be developed by speaking to people, or in groups of more than two or three, or even by listening for an hour or a day (though that's a start). It would require people to go, sit with, and come to closely know other individuals who have just voted for policies that will hurt the people they care most about.

If done on a large enough scale, I believe it would work. At the same time, I won't be surprised if few want to do it.

Certainly, narrower than Stavins'! ↩
Think of the people you interact with on social media with whom you have substantive disagreements. They are likely to be people you know from "meatspace." (Disagreement with anonymous trolls is rarely substantive.) Anyone you've befriended online is apt to be like-minded. ↩
The converse explains why filter bubbles are durable: an emphatic statement of something you already believe is a tasty morsel that goes down easy. It requires little effort to consume—you can do it over and over again. ↩
I am not saying that there are not others—gays, people of colour, the undocumented, etc.—who have it worse. ↩

On the 2016 U.S. Election

2016-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

My American friends, and friends in America,

Think about your neighbours—women, the poor, immigrants, Muslims, Latinos, queers, trans people, and others. Think of the people in other countries who depend on U.S. aid, diplomacy and action for their survival or security—including from the threat of climate change. Think of their faces and their names. (If you don't know their names, resolve to learn them.)

You may be tired after a 20-month campaign. They are, too. You may wish you could have a break, to recover yourself and your equilibrium. They won't get one. Trump, and the worst of the people he has energized, will be after them—immediately, and relentlessly.

Remember Niemöller's words. But remember also the words of Jack Layton, echoing the great leaders of our time—many of whom were channeling the precepts of the world's old religions.

Now is not for you to seek for your own comfort. Instead, now—today, this hour and moment—is for you to look to your neighbours and ask how you can help them. Every day for the next four years you have the option to act for their sake; or to be an armchair advocate, a virtue-signaller, or a clicktivist—acting to salve your conscience but not their real & coming wounds.

This also extends to those who voted for Trump. You can opt to retweet the best, sharpest words condemning them; or you can seek to find, meet, speak to, understand, empathize with and ultimately sway them to better choices. The latter course is immensely more difficult; but it is the only thing that will put an end to the situation we wake up in today.

Like prayers, these are decisions to be made, and renewed, every day.

Fun & Politics with Augmented Reality

2016-08-05T00:00:00+02:00

Pokémon GO is sweeping the world, and generating a lot of interesting headlines. Here's one:

Holocaust Museum to visitors: Please stop catching Pokémon here

Reactions to this—and other stories of Pokémon trainers falling into empty swimming pools, invading their neighbours' back yards, and committing other faux pas—varied. Some joked and punned, while one indignant Facebook commenter demanded to know, "Who gave them [Nintendo & Niantic, the game's creators] the right to impose AR [augmented reality] there?" (emphasis added)

Implicit in the phrasing of this remark is the idea that one has a right to control AR content associated¹ with real-world locations over which one has property rights. To some this might seem to be an intuitive, sensible and just idea; yet it is not yet enshrined in law or policy, and others will disagree.

In simple terms, it's clear that the game is changing the incentives that people (its players) face for interacting with spaces in the world around them. Fear of a mugging is a reason to avoid a dark alley at night; worry about your neighbour's glare and disapproval might keep you out of her back yard. Now, for the avid Pokémon GO player, these incentives are balanced against the possibility of catching a rare Pokémon in those places. Facing the new set of options, people are making different choices.

Costs

An initial reaction of some friends to the story was, "Well, why didn't Nintendo simply avoid placing game items in the museum?"

As far as I understand, game features are distributed using data from a prior Niantic game (Ingress) and map features extracted by GIS. For instance, water-type Pokémon are placed with high probability near the edges of bodies of water, and with low density elsewhere. It's straightforward to write such rules, implement them in software, and then run that software on available maps.

However, it would be more difficult and—critically—costly for Nintendo to hand-check the results, across the entire inhabitated world. This would require:

Anticipating the behavioural changes of game players (perhaps through play-testing),
Understanding which property owners would object strongly to having Pokémon trainers on their property, given said behaviour,
Deciding which of these objections was worth accommodating by changing the game, and
Implementing those changes.

It's evident that Nintendo chose not to do these things.

Recourse

Nor were they obliged to. So what about the Gastly behaviour at the Holocaust Museum? Is there something the museum, or other property owners, can do, beyond putting up strongly-worded signs? On what basis can they argue for changes? These questions started a energetic debate over drinks at the Muddy Charles, during which this was posted:

Source: Facebook/Michael Davidson

To make the matter a little simpler, and abstract it from the details of the game, consider: if my friend can already draw virtual graffiti on my face and post it on Facebook, Twitter or a personal website, how is this made any worse by the prospect of widespread adoption of AR technology?

One answer lies in the audience. On Facebook, my friend's contacts and his privacy settings determine who can see the photo;² on Twitter, it's shown by default to only his followers; and on a personal website, he'd have to attract viewers to the page to view it.

On the other hand, through an AR platform with near-universal adoption, any person walking through the bar with a smart phone³ could see the virtual "KICK ME!" sign on my back, regardless of whether they knew my friend or I. I might like my chances, amongst our mutual Facebook contacts, of shaming my friend for his behaviour, or of laughing the matter off—yet I could still be unhappy about the impression left on the strangers at the bar.

By the same token, I could float a large virtual billboard in the air over your house with embarrassing, yet not quite libelous, words or images; or racists could float markers over the homes of blacks, Jews, or activists.

It's easy to say that the creators and operators of AR platforms should not allow these uses. It will be far more difficult to write widely-accepted, general rules for them to apply when accepting and displaying user-generated locative content; and profit-oriented firms will want to have those rules in software, rather than involving expensive human judgement in the loop.

Art & protest

My imagination is inspired in this, as in many other things, by William Gibson. In his novel Spook Country (2007) (which you should buy), protagonist Hollis Henry is shown an example of 'locative' art in Los Angeles:

“Now,” he said, and she heard him tap the laptop’s keyboard. Something shivered, in her field of vision. “Look. Look here.”

She turned, following his gesture, and saw a slender, dark-haired body, facedown on the sidewalk.

“Alloween night, 1993,” said Odile.

Hollis approached the body. That wasn’t there. But was. Alberto was following her with the laptop, careful of the cable. She felt as if he were holding his breath. She was holding hers.

The boy seemed birdlike, in death, the arch of his cheekbone, as she bent forward, casting its own small shadow. His hair was very dark. He wore dark, pin-striped trousers and a dark shirt. “Who?” she asked, finding her breath.

“River Phoenix,” said Alberto, quietly.

She looked up, toward the marquee of the Whiskey, then down again, struck by the fragility of the white neck. “River Phoenix was blond,” she said.

“He’d dyed it,” Alberto said. “Dyed it for a role.”

An idea popped into my head shortly after reading this. In classic form, I've it carried around there until it has turned out to be stale and unoriginal.

Tiananmen SquARed (1, 2, 3), by a collective calling themselves 4Gentlemen, was designed for Beijing and later shown in Venice, Cairo, Boston and New York. It involves 3D models of the Goddess of Democracy statue erected by the 1989 protesters, and of the iconic Tank Man. Like Gibson's fictional River Phoenix piece, visitors using a particular AR app can view and walk around these recreations in the place where the historical events tooks place.

From the screenshots, the 2010/2011 iteration doesn't achieve the verisimilitude that would prompt the visceral reaction that Gibson writes about, but this is only a matter of resources and sufficiently powerful hardware.

The financial success of Pokémon GO will accelerate interest in locative content, and efforts to develop the technology. As AR becomes ubiquitious and eventually melds with what we currently consider social media, subversive pieces like Tiananment SquARed will have greater reach and cultural currency, provoking correspondingly stronger reactions from governments.

Facebook's policies on allowing, removing or censoring content in response to, or in anticipation of, protests from individuals, governments and other actors have become a notable arena for societal conflict. In the same way, locative AR will give rise to new debates arising from different ideas about the relationship between real and virtual space, and what consitutes appropriate behaviour in each. It should be fascinating to watch.

To be clear, it is possible to have non-locative AR. For instance, Coca Cola might release an app that displayed a little interactive 3-D animation anytime it recognized a bottle or can of the company's product, no matter where it was. Here, I am mostly concerned with locative AR. ↩
Try clicking the link, if you're not logged in. ↩
These days, it almost suffices to say "any person walking through the bar". ↩

Teaching Philosophy Statement

2015-06-14T00:00:00+02:00

I view my teaching as a process of continual development, in which I seek to become more able to create authentic experiences for my students; respond flexibly to their needs; judiciously incorporate new technology, techniques and research; and convey to them my passion for the topics I choose to teach.

Continual development

My graduate student teaching is in the areas of engineering & public policy, and engineering leadership development;¹ my undergraduate teaching includes these areas and also fundamentals of engineering analysis. I am familiar with and appreciate many of the criticisms of “traditional” engineering education in Canada and the United States; but—and I have been guilty of this—it is too easy to critique a straw man or stereotype.

In fact, there are exemplary engineering educators at most institutions, and many programs, groups and researchers seeking to explore and rigorously test new curriculum designs, course structures, and classroom activities. Given that I also have substantial research responsibilities, there is too much such material for me to study in-depth—I am not an engineering education researcher. Therefore, instead of a goal to radically transform my teaching in a short time, I aim to continually develop my teaching abilities throughout my career. In practice, this entails:

Never teaching the same course twice—building on prior content, methods, format, order, etc. through incremental changes aimed at better student achievement of ILOs (and also evolving the ILOs);
Finding regular opportunities to observe other instructors in action, and examining their teaching for particular techniques I can incorporate into my own; and
Also regularly reviewing the academic literature on engineering education, so that my improvements are informed by validated research, and not only my own anecdotal experience.

Technology

The process of continual improvement is not random experimentation. In order to not risk failing to educate entire classes of students, I make only judicious changes that I have high confidence will lead to outcomes at least as good as my existing approach (or one inherited from another instructor).

Although it is an appropriate strategy for the competitive, entrepreneurial world of mobile apps and devices, the adoption of new technologies “just to see what happens” is not suitable for the classroom—unless that is the sole learning objective. In the vast majority of other cases, there is some other ILO that should not be compromised.

Superficial adoption of technology can also yield a strong negative “gimmick” reaction. Understood cognitively, this actively undermines learning by interrupting students' efforts to keep new concepts in their working memory. Therefore, I think carefully about the student's experience of learning without, and with, any new tool—and only adopt it if the latter is richer.

Authentic student experience

Recent reflections on the academic job market sometimes argue² against the notion of student as ‘customer’. I agree, but further believe in treating university students—undergraduate and graduate—as adults, or future professionals and researchers. This perspective guides the creation of classroom activities and evaluation which are professional activities, in microcosm.

To be clear, authentic classroom activities³ need not be fun or creative. There is some degree of drudgery⁴ in engineering and public policy research and analysis—crunching data, carefully constructing models, reading through legislation or long documents with stakeholder perspectives. But authentic activities can show students why professionals and researchers voluntarily choose to engage in this ‘tedious’ work: because it prepares one for problem (re)framing, making persuasive and cogent arguments, or proposing innovative solutions.

Having seen both quantitative and qualitative successes in a variety of courses at UofT and MIT, I seek to construct my own examples by actively thinking about cases which allow this kind of authentic learning. These cases are designed within the constraints of available resources (including classroom, instructor and TA time) and students' level of knowledge; they are refined and evolved based on student feedback.

Passion and motivation

Professionals and researchers also—ideally!—approach their work from a standpoint of intrinsic motivation.⁵ As future professionals and researchers, students are both learning content, and searching for topics and questions that align well enough with their personal values to let them to develop intrinsic motivation.

As an instructor, my role in this procedure differs according to context—whether students are graduates or undergraduates, in elective or mandatory programs and courses. I have my own research interests—topics towards which I am intrinsically motivated—that may not align with the future career foci of my students. In an elective graduate seminar, I can take a student's enrolment as a sign that they have a strong interest in the subject, and design the course and teach it in a way makes my passion for the topic a model for their own.

In a mandatory undergraduate course, by contrast, many students will be at lower levels of extrinsic motivation.⁶ In such cases, an expectation that student behaviour reflects passion for the topic will inevitably be disappointed. Instead I can seek to present the material in a more neutral manner, and explicitly guide students in evaluating their reaction/level of interest—leading them to answer, “Is this something I want to learn more about?”

Flexibility

Workplaces of committed professionals with passion for their work are, today, decreasingly hierarchical. Individuals can be encouraged to be actively entrepreneurial in their work—Google's “20-percent time” is the oft-cited example. In addition, engineering and public policy work, and certainly leadership, involve work with stakeholders wherein authority relationships are ambiguous.

For all these reasons a syllabus predetermined by me, the instructor, and followed to the letter, is inauthentic. To the extent possible—and in balance with delivering promised content and experiences—I aim to allow course material to evolve within an offering, and even within particular classes. This allows me to be flexible and responsive to students' speed of learning, particular needs and interests, demonstrating my respect for them and modelling collegial behaviour. Yet, at the same time, I aim to show them how to respectfully request such changes of direction or elaboration—in a way that is mindful of their peers' needs in balance with their own.

These very different topics call for very different course designs, classroom activities, and evaluation; therefore this statement focuses on higher-level elements of my philosophy, common across topics. ↩
For instance, this piece at Vox. ↩
McClymer & Knoles. “Ersatz Learning, Inauthentic Testing,” in Journal on Excellence In College Teaching, 3:33–50, 1992. URL ↩
That is, thinking at the lower levels of Bloom's taxonomy. ↩
Ryan & Deci. “Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being,” in American Psychologist, 55(1):68–78, 2000. 10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68 ↩
In fact, my own role as instructor in such courses may be extrinsically motivated; i.e. by departmental obligation… ↩

Platform 2015

2015-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Following the good advice of an instructor from last term, I am resolving for 2015 to write for 15 minutes every day!

To be precise, the advice was to write material with a non-zero probability of appearing in my thesis. I realized that I already do spend more than 15 minutes writing each day, but without much focus. Instead, I comment in various places, or write blurbs to frame articles and other links shared on Facebook.

Though I probably spend more time on these non-research-related words than I should, that doesn't make them valueless. In fact, I usually choose to share or comment on things that strongly interest me—in 2014, these included transportation debates in the Toronto mayoral election, and government science and science policy in Canada, among many others.

A more pertinent problem is that I am contributing "content" to others' websites in a way that doesn't help me to review my own writing. For instance, on the topics mentioned, it is hard to know how many times I have banged a particular drum, or to check how my views (or my ways of presenting them) have evolved.

So, in order to centralize some of that miscellaneous writing, and to create a venue to use when I don't have anything thesis-related to write, I am resurrecting the blog (yet again).

One theme that will feature:

Platform 2015

Canada's next federal election is on Monday, October 19, 2015. In 2011, I set out to write one post per day of the 36-day campaign and—predictably—failed within a week. It was too high a volume to promise, and probably began too late to make a difference.

This year, my goal will be to highlight, earlier, issues that I think should be important in the election. Again, many will stem from the current government's failures, but it is not enough to simply point these out. It would be quite dangerous for the opposition Liberals or NDP to skate to power solely on criticism of the Conservatives' record. In doing so, they would avoid making concrete policy promises they could be held to, once in office.

So my task is to make not negative but instead positive statements—to describe a platform I would gladly vote for. Doing so before the campaign officially begins and the parties' strategies are set in stone, I might convince you to write to candidates and others, asking them to state a clear position on these topics.

I don't promise any particular schedule (i.e., tomorrow's 15 minutes may not produce a Platform 2015 post), but would welcome feedback and topic suggestions—please leave a comment!

‘The Second Machine Age’

2014-11-12T00:00:00+01:00

Reviewed:¹ Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2014. Hardcover, 320 pp.

“The factory of the future will only have two employees, a man, and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.” —Warren G. Bennis³

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“The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.” —Karl Marx⁴

In their new book, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee draw from the Industrial Revolution, its intellectual legacy, and recent research to set expectations for a new, digital revolution. Only now hitting full steam, this Second Machine Age will lead to a fresh transformation of the relations of production, with economic and social challenges no less drastic or far-reaching.

Their treatment is in three parts: the drivers of the digital revolution; its individual and economic consequences; and recommendations for the men and dogs looking to retain their jobs in Warren Bennis' factory (less caricature, it seems, than inevitability).

Two main drivers are exponential increases in computing power, represented by Moore's famous law, and the advent of big data—digitized information about the real world, with additional, wholly-digital layers. Crucially, information technology (IT) is identified as “general-purpose;” with improvements in business models, organizations and worker skills, it enables “recombinant innovation.” Brynjolfsson and McAfee present nuanced thinking on these factors, and argue persuasively that we should expect only shattered expectations and predictions falsified by astounding technical progress.

Next, through an accessible, math-free survey of labour, productivity and growth economics, the authors give implications of technological change for growth (labeled “The Bounty”) and inequality (“The Spread”). The Spread encompasses two dynamics. First, the winner-take-all nature of highly-scalable digital markets leaves second-best musicians, newspapers and social networks far behind number-ones, giving us society with not the industrial capitalist—but the global superstar. Second, the automation of a broad variety of routine jobs, physical or mental, endangers the 40-hour workweek of today's middle class.

So what's a poor, replaceable worker to do? Hope is found in a chess story: after Garry Kasparov was definitively bested by IBM's Deep Blue, ‘freestyle’ tournaments revealed that amateur players making savvy use of multiple machines could do even better. We must, then, learn to “race with computers,” instead of letting technology race ahead. The complementarity of human ingenuity and digital technology, in well-designed symbiosis, will unlock the full, recombinant potential of the Second Machine Age. What's more, labor scarcity will lead to decent wages for those physical jobs that resist automation.

Surely, this is all possible and desirable. But while the authors weakly disclaim technological determinism (p.255) and dismantle several happy illusions advanced by others,² they fail to let on that the way is exceedingly narrow. Substantial blind spots hide threats on all sides.

These become clear in the third part, which lays out prescriptions for action. In order to race with computers, individuals are counselled to get the best education available, developing their uniquely-human creativity. Policy recommendations are, disappointingly, straight from Silicon Valley's latest lobbying playbook. U.S. immigration reform appears—H1-B visas for digital-economy workers but not, perhaps, Latin American laborers. The country's uneven public education system should be rebooted (with technology) to teach creativity—an admission that “best available” education is scarce. A discussion of tax reform dances around the question of whether the lopsided gains awarded by winner-take-all markets should be spread across The Spread.

The U.S. framing omits larger challenges. For instance, the authors correctly argue (Chapter 8) that the metric of GDP fails to capture a substantial amount of intangible value linked to digital interactions. Only Internet advertising has proved a viable way to monetize this activity; the king of online advertising is, of course, Google. Can enough new markets, and business models, be found for each country to have its Google, Baidu or Publicis? It's heartening to be told that intangibles have real value, but uncaptured value does not buy food.

The authors also observe that automation, by eroding the attraction of cheap labour, can “bring manufacturing back to America” (p.185). This is presented as benign. Will foreign workers be content to see winners in the United States, or China, take all? Will other nations—lacking robust, universal education that fosters creativity—greet “skill-biased technical change” warmly? In the global view, The Bounty predicted by Brynjolfsson & McAfee seems much smaller, and The Spread dauntingly wide.

The Second Machine Age will be most useful to those in digital business: corporate decision-makers facing the unenviable challenge of keeping their firms and (one hopes) employees afloat in a greatly uncertain future. Other readers can expect clear thinking on digital innovation and insights into the changing nature of work—but an incomplete, though skilful, elaboration of the far-reaching impacts. Brynjolfsson & McAfee have no solutions equal to the challenge…but then, who does?

(754 words, 77 in quotes)

for ESD.83, the Engineering Systems doctoral seminar, Fall 2014. ↩
Such as the optimistic “strong bounty” view (p.166) that growing inequality can be overlooked because of continual improvement for the poorest. ↩
in Mark Fisher, The Millionaire's Book of Quotations, Thorsons, London, 1991, p.15. ↩
The Poverty of Philosophy, Paris, 1847. ↩

‘Everything Is Obvious’

2014-10-08T00:00:00+02:00

Reviewed:¹ Duncan Watts, Everything Is Obvious (Once You Know The Answer), Crown Business, New York, 2011. Paperback, 269 pp. plus bibliography, notes and index.

Lest we be paralyzed with indecision, we confidently go about our everyday lives making assumptions, reasoning from the few to the many, seeking regularity and choosing, optimistically, to interpret the outcomes of our decisions as confirmation that our haphazard approach was the best one. What's more, we do the same—and eagerly accept arguments developed in the same way—when we aim to digest current events and important societal trends.

'Twas ever thus, from childhood's hour. In Everything Is Obvious (Once You Know The Answer), Duncan Watts—sociologist, and researcher at first Yahoo!, now Microsoft—walks readers fondly through the decay of this confidence in common-sense explanations of phenomena from politics, history, economics, culture and policy. A litany of cognitive biases, logical fallacies, unpredictable emergent behaviours and irreducible complexities are invoked to show how attractively simple explanations are, quite often, dead wrong. Making use of results from social science research, psychology, network theory and management literature—both famous and not, new and old—Everything is Obvious lays out the limits of prediction, planning and causal reasoning in a complex world.

Watts' attention ranges widely, from the philosophy of Arthur Danto, to Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's Freakonomics and back to John Rawls. Tolstoy and Harry Potter; the Mars Climate Orbiter and Twitter; Enron and AIG; Steve Jobs, Jane Jacobs, Newton and Paul Revere all make appearances. But though his cautionary messages may seem discouraging, Watts' style is welcoming and accessible. His explanations of the many obstacles to social science are developed in simple language, moving easily from familiar examples to general concepts and their implications. In the numerous endnotes are acknowledgements of the larger rhetorical leaps and, for the curious reader or academic, extra implications, caveats and references to an extensive bibliography. Later chapters reach back to earlier concepts, authors and references to tie the work together, and the author's several descriptions of his own research fit neatly into the flow of the book.

Lest he be mistaken for other authors bridging the gap between social science and the under-appreciated complexity of everyday affairs, Watts reserves his most direct criticism for Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, and “gadfly” statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan. Gladwell's “law of the few” (suggesting that a few ‘super-influencers’ can cause the viral takeoff of a trend) is debunked, in a chapter on “Special People,” as a hopeful fable that ignores the structure of real-world social networks and ultimately proves a post-hoc fallacy. Black swans—rare, highly unlikely but equally consequential events—are only visible from the far side of the paradigm shifts they trigger, and even then vanish into their context on close inspection or suffer from imprecise labelling. Everything is hard, it seems, and even that which is deceptively obvious may deceive for one of many reasons.

In the latter half, Watts moves to outline what (little) can be done, in light of the challenges laid out—and it's here that his enthusiasm for the opportunities of information technology gets the better of his methodical approach and the care that marks the opening chapters. A chapter on “The Measure of All Things” focuses heavily on the efforts of Internet advertisers to act on the voluminous user data from website visitors. Even if this content is useful for improving the same mechanism that generated it, its usefulness beyond advertising is not argued. Watts acknowledges, but does not thoroughly deal with, the objection that the “friendships” and “likes” of social media users may bear little or irregular relationship to social interactions in the offline world—and he omits that the companies creating these services may profit from creating and eliding such differences.

The chapter on “Fairness and Justice” treats the example of a New York City police officer convicted of drunk driving, but fails to examine the fairness and justice of the same force's stop-and-frisk policy—surely a more consequential topic. Similarly, after dispelling “The Dream of Prediction,” Watts advises that readers “don't predict; react,” or at least not aim to do more than to “predict the present.” Yet on uncertain, global issues such as overpopulation² or the “super wicked” problem³ of climate change, the luxury to retreat into reaction may not exist; or even if it does, could entail abandoning whole categories of effective and just solutions.

Still, in dealing with these problems—as in daily life—we will need to understand the surprising behaviours of crowds, networks, and ourselves, and Watts' well-written book serves well as a spotter's guide to the inevitable missteps.

(786 words)

for ESD.83, the Engineering Systems doctoral seminar, Fall 2014. ↩
Gerland et al. “World population stabilization unlikely this century,” in Science, September 18, 2014. 10.1126/science.1257469. ↩
Levin, Cashore, Bernstein, and Auld. “Overcoming the tragedy of super wicked problems: constraining our future selves to ameliorate global climate change,” in Policy Sciences 45:123–152, 2012. 10.1007/s11077-012-9151-0. ↩

The Colour of Television

2013-04-29T00:00:00+02:00

Source: Feng Li/Getty Images, via The Atlantic)

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

—Neuromancer, opening lines.

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The air beyond the window touches each source of light with a faint hepatic corona, a tint of jaundice edging imperceptibly into brownish translucence. Fine dry flakes of fecal snow, billowing in from the sewage flats, have lodged in the lens of night.

—Virtual Light, p.1.

William Gibson, one of my favourite authors and Canadian by choice to (a)boot, is sometimes referred to as a "noir prophet" for his work in the genre of "cyberpunk." His excellent writing is ill-served when filed away as 'just' science fiction—for instance, right before that quote from Virtual Light is the very clever line, "business as usual, world without end."

In both novels, a description of the physical atmosphere is key to the dystopian setting, and while he writes about Tokyo and Mexico City respectively, the words (maybe excepting "fecal flakes") could well apply to Beijing. The city's infamous air pollution both touches on the research that brings me and the experience of living here—less dramatic and more immediate than fiction.

A lot of ink has been spilled over Beijing's air quality; you can read these these articles or look at these photos for a general introduction. Personally, I felt a real shortness of breath when I arrived in late February. Jet lag, hanging around in smoky cafés, and a cold I picked up on a crowded Line 13 subway all contributed, but so did three of perhaps five or six "Beyond Index" (or "Crazy Bad") days that have occurred in the past two months."¹ I missed the January "airpocalypse" that is the subject of the In Focus photos.

Cycling around or climbing several flights of stairs made the effect more noticeable, and I soon developed the habit of checking the AQI before I left the house, and throwing on my handy N95 respirator if necessary. We also bought an air purifier and sat around it in the conference room.

In mid-March, central heating is turned off almost everywhere, regardless of the temperature.² I bundled up to go to bed, wore a hat in my apartment, but also noticed that the frequency and severity of very bad AQ days seemed to lessen, perhaps as coal burning decreased. Days with high winds often also had "Good" AQI—although a couple of times the winds also brought sand and grit from the Gobi Desert over the mountains to the northwest of Beijing and a sky that was more brown than grey.

Writing and talking about the pollution is hard, because it is easy to fall into the terms we use to discuss the weather. The difference—perhaps the critical difference—is that, unlike the weather, the pollution has entirely human origins. These are a subject of active research, but attention from scientists is different from the everyday or popular awareness that drives policy. No one is responsible for a stretch of cloudy days, but many are responsible for the haze, so it's important not to conflate the two.

A rough summary of the science: some of the PM does not enter the atmosphere in the same form it enters the lungs of Beijingers, but is the result of chemical reactions. The "precursors" of these reactions can come from a variety of sources—especially factories, electric power plants…and vehicles!—and will be carried around by the wind and weather. What's breathed in Beijing may have come out of a tailpipe in Tianjin, which makes addressing pollution an especially sticky problem even after governments decide to do it.

My small role in this involves modelling transportation activity in each of China's provinces. We can use this together with atmospheric transport/chemistry models³ to estimate how much, for instance, cleaner or fewer auto emissions in Beijing would affect the air, both nearby and far away. We can also connect this to the health impacts of pollution, which are considerable. A WHO study called the "Global Burden of Disease" lists ischemic heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lower respiratory infections and lung cancer among the top 8 causes of death in China in 2010,⁴ and attributes 1.2 million annual deaths in China to these and other diseases related to air pollution. There's a number to make you catch your breath.

Family and a couple friends have asked if I'm worried for my own health—I am not. Besides being young, healthy, rich enough to afford masks, air purifiers, etc., I am only a visitor. While research will certainly bring me back, I didn't grow up breathing the poor air, nor will I have to (unless I choose to) I am old and infirm. Enough time spent in the clear air of Toronto or Boston should spare me most of the risk.

Beyond Index" means the air quality index (AQI) is above 500 on a scale where 151-200 is already "Unhealthy". The numbers are dimensionless but roughly correspond to the amount of particulate matter 2.5 microns in size or smaller (PM2.5) measured in micrograms per cubic metre (μg/m³). ↩
Clever economists have used this 'natural experiment' to do various analyses, e.g. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1327498 ↩
To make things more confusing, "transport[ation]" is used in one field to mean the movement of goods and people from place to place, and in another the movement of chemicals and particles over long distances in the atmosphere. ↩
Road accidents are seventh. ↩

“What better place than here? What better time than now?”

2013-04-15T00:00:00+02:00

One of the ways terrorism works—yes—is by provoking a reflexive reaction whereby the targets, out of terror or anger, compromise their values. The availability heuristic leads them to worry that more violence is imminent and that they face a choice between principle and safety. From my untutored perspective, the chief reason terrorism fails is that these reactions—especially revenge—don't tend to help alleviate the conditions that brought its perpetrators to anger and then violence against its targets. However, this doesn't diminish the schadenfreude felt by terrorists as victims harm themselves.

So as we respond we must not simply trust to our better natures but, with heightened self-awareness, choose to express caring, concern and love, while using our reason to temper harmful emotion—fear, anger, suspicion and hate. After the December shooting in Newtown, I was encouraged by public figures, political leaders and those appearing in my Facebook news feed who brushed aside objections that it was too soon to discuss gun control, and instead calmly. persistently proceeded on the premise that in fact there was no better opportunity for a hard look at gun culture in the U.S. This has led to a more thorough discussion of whether "the security of a free State" is guaranteed by unregulated access to assault weapons, or compromised by the high and unceasing toll of gun violence.

In that discussion, observers were at pains to combat the availability heuristic by providing information on that latter point. Here I try to convince you to now do the same for yourself. The New York Times quotes a Dr. Alasdair Conn of Massachusetts General Hospital:

“This is like a bomb explosion we hear about in Baghdad or Israel or other tragic points in the world,” Dr. Conn said, adding that he had never seen such carnage in Boston.

In the tense minutes spent waiting for news of my mother, who was less than a kilometre from the finish line when the explosions occurred, I had this same thought. But then I wondered, "how much is this like bombings at tragic points in the world?" I realized I didn't know. The way I informed myself was to open Google News and search for "iraq bomb", "afghanistan bomb", "israel bomb", "pakistan bomb", etc. Seeing the results, I realized how the Copley Square bombing was not like those we "hear about":

We actually heard about it. News spread quickly around the world on social media, and even those with no personal connection expressed their support.
Victims had access to extremely well-trained medical care from those like Dr. Conn at MGH.
The death toll was much lower.

I make this last observation not to minimize the tragedy of what happened, but to give context we cannot ignore as we react. One story notes that car bombs in Iraq on Sunday "kill[ed] at least 55[, making it] the deadliest day in nearly a month." To belabour the obvious, that indicates that less than a month ago, 56 or more people died violently in Iraq in a single day. Not so in the U.S. or Canada, although perhaps to a lesser extent in parts of Mexico which we also hear too little about.

The 55 dead Iraqis are part of another continuing tragedy occasioned by military adventurism that began after another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. We should both feel gratitude for our relative safety, and ask ourselves in what part it derives from a War on Terror; from particular technologies of government surveillance; from watchful, ethical and well-trained, or militarized, police; from the coherence and mutual support of communities, and so on. We should ask whether racial and religious accusations serve our safety or undermine that mutual support, and consider how much safer we have become through having others die.

If you believe, as do many of the people I admire, in the value of human life and the equality of people regardless of where they happen to be born (or who they are born as), these are not easy questions.

Last night in Beijing I also finished a long research paper that's eaten all my waking hours over the past week, so soon I can return to the promised, regular blogging about life in China. Thanks for reading.

你好 from 北京!

2013-03-30T00:00:00+01:00

I am in Beijing, China from 22 February to 15 July this year (with some side-trips) to do research. My institutional host is the 清华大学能源环境经济研究所 (qīnghuá dàxué néngyuán huánjìng jīngjì yánjiū suǒ, Tsinghua University Institute of Energy, Environment and Economy), and I am mostly funded by the MISTI/MIT-China program. I am subletting a room about a kilometre east of the university.

Though I promised many I would blog about my experiences, so far I have only given commentary on some photos (please follow them, too!). But after a month of first surviving, then being generally bewildered, I finally have a bit of time and headspace to write about some of the more striking differences between here and home, and my attempts to explore the city. I should also tip my hat to Danielle and Adrian, who despite being far busier than I set a good example by blogging regularly.

The first, not-so-bite-size observation is that Beijing is big. We had a research workshop attended by senior staff for Beijing's Environmental Protection Bureau; I reflected that their constituency, at about 20 million, is 60% of the entire population of Canada. The urban districts (in orange and red here) are twice to five times as dense as Toronto, but the enormous population and broad streets (more on them later) make it quite a hike to get from place to place. Bicycle, subways—I haven't chanced the bus system yet—and taxis are critical.

More soon! Please give a "What up!" in the comments below so I know that you're following, and who I'm writing for.

Letter to Eve Adams, Olivia Chow

2012-06-12T00:00:00+02:00

Ms Adams, Ms Chow;

I grew up in Mississauga, living and voting in Ms Adams' riding; for seven years while attending the University of Toronto, I lived in Ms Chow's. Despite a keen interest in policy and consequent hypersensitivity to politics, this is my first time writing to my Member(s) of Parliament. The occasion is Bill C-38, which may have passed by the time you receive this; nevertheless I want to detail why I find the bill personally offensive.

Ms Adams doubtless knows from her time as a councillor that the City of Mississauga's 2010 strategic plan, Our Future Mississauga, included the following “strategic pillars for change” (goals):

Developing a transit-oriented city.
Completing our neighbourhoods.
Living green.

As a child in Mississauga, I was aware of the need for these changes on a personal but unconscious level. Although I was raised in a comfortable subdivision it was difficult, until I earned my driver's license, for me to get anywhere in the city to shop, to spend time with friends, or to pursue my involvement with the Royal Canadian Air Cadets. Even once I had my license, I was only able to drive because my family was wealthy enough to own two vehicles—many of my friends weren't so lucky.

It was not until my engineering undergraduate that I realized this situation wasn't merely a fact of life; it was a result _of planning (or inattention to planning) that allowed much of Mississauga to be covered with auto-oriented but transit-, cycling- and walking-unfriendly developments. This process continued even as _Our Future Mississauga was drafted, and now—the science of urban planning and public policy tells us—it will be expensive and contentious to update existing neighbourhoods to be comfortably livable for an aging population, and those who cannot afford cars.

I tell this story because it represents a failure to use existing knowledge and expertise to provide the best possible life for Canadians. By the time my parents' neighbourhood was built in the early 1980s, the study of cities had been established by such intelligent people as Jane Jacobs (whose advocacy against the proposed Spadina Expressway strongly affects the present state of Ms Chow's riding). Yet governments allowed it to be built in an unsustainable form, when they could have done better.

Spurred by this and similar realizations, I now study in the Technology & Policy Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writing my master's thesis on the future of transportation in China. Doing so, I have learned that China—whatever its democratic deficits—is a nation which does not need to be told that science, engineering, policy analysis and rational decision-making are necessary to achieve economic growth and improved quality of life for its people. Living in the United States, I have also learned about the U.S. Environmental Protection Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and other laws, and how they underpin a long legal and regulatory tradition of which Americans are justifiably proud.

This brings me to Bill C-38, in particular the sections which repeal the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, and also those which grant power to Cabinet to override decisions of the National Energy Board with respect to pipeline permitting.

In both China and the U.S., as mentioned, there are considerable political pressures on decision-makers to provide economic growth, and this goal often clashes with that of environmental protection. Canada is no different. This is why processes of assessment and evaluation are put in place; they create a sober forum where rational thought can prevail; where level-headed consideration of alternatives is possible.

Bill C-38 does not emphasize efficiency while maintaining such safeguards; instead, it substantially weakens environmental assessment, allowing the well-being of future Canadians to be very easily sacrificed by the mere invocation (without proof) of “efficiency” or “economic growth.” It would allow existing knowledge and expert input to be discarded in response to short-term political pressure, over the legitimate objections of Canadians.

These changes are wrong, and they would allow Canadians to come to harm. They would create situations where we look back with regret, saying, “We knew better, and could have done better.” Further, I feel it is unconscionable and undemocratic to hide them in an unrelated, omnibus budget bill, when they would be soundly defeated if proposed alone. As my representatives, I ask for an expression of your agreement with the foregoing, and of your intent to vote to remove these provisions from the bill.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Natsuo Kishimoto

Photo

2012-05-08T00:00:00+02:00

Source: MarlaYuriko.

Rhetorical question

2012-05-07T00:00:00+02:00

[Posting again after yet another year-long hiatus, some site updates, a new comment system, etc.]

To test-drive all this, a question: are the ideas of work-life balance and a person's life's work compatible?