The same NYT edition also had this article that makes shallower claims but it’s in the same vein as the one above, and there’s already a reply by Steven Pinker with interesting remarks. Steven points to yet another article, and this was something we thought about posting a stand-alone story about: “We have met the enemy and it is Powerpoint“. Taken together, this is an interesting “linguistic/ communications” debate that we pay attention to because the efficiency of communication is a very important aspect of our business – how we communicate internally, with our clients, our current and potential investors and with our service providers. Spreading the right information at the right time to the people who can make use of it while allowing for some measure of serendipity is something we’ve been working on since our foundation.

Framing the question in another way: know your work/ company/ business well before assuming you need to “Blink”-fy, “Long-Tail”-fy or “whatever-fy” it. The attitude of not “marrying” with any idea – not even your own – and trying to extract and apply the useful part of every bit of knowledge you obsessively seek is a hard one to instill, let alone sustain.

Here’s the link to the working paper by Dan Ariely et. al. that Dan Pink mentions in the video.

Video:

LINKS:

Audio version of the article on Audible.com – At $1.95, seems like a nice price to pay for the convenience of hearing it whenever you want.

Harnessing the Power of Persuasion – an October 2001 Cialdini article in the Harvard Business Review.

The Persuaders: Bob Cialdini – The Times UK, 2007 – It’s not about this particular article or book, but it’s about Influence.

Link to 5 podcasts by Bob Cialdini – The Times UK, 2007 – How to persuade on eBay, by e-mail, etc.

The Gentle Science of Persuasion – a 6-part series from the Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey business school, where Cialdini is, and we quote, “the Regents’ Professor of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University and Distinguished Professor of Marketing in the W. P. Carey School.”

The impacts of such moves are never immediate and almost always underrated at first, and there’s always the risk of data deluge. That said, they’re trying to speed things up via Google and an app development contest, which could lead to interesting uses for all this information.

Data wants to be free, some would say – but still others remember that this was public data to begin with. No doubt some companies will come up with organized, value-added products – in print or online (mobile or not) – that build from this data something greater.

Here’s the video where Bob Zoellick explains the initiative:

In this debate, one aspect appears overlooked: communication. If you don’t have the adequate communication policies/ environment, how does one reap the rewards from all this multidisciplinary goodness?

Again, the article stands out in its own but it made us think of the multidisciplinary approach “debate”. We’ve always tried to build our teams with this in mind, looking for complementary skill sets/ experiences/ backgrounds. Nothing new there. But please bear with us as we follow the “links” this article made us follow.

The diversity prediction theorem by Scott Page states that:

“Collective error = average individual error – prediction diversity” (as stated in Michael Mauboussin’s Think Twice, Chapter 3, page 46)

Some types of problems are better suited for experts and some for “crowdsourcing”. Either way, the theorem above applies. For instance, when diversity doesn’t improve the odds of solving a problem, you can focus on decreasing the first part, i.e. decreasing average individual error or, if you prefer to see it this way, increasing “ability”, as Mauboussin calls it.

But if you think proactively and seek counter-evidences and multidisciplinary approaches yourself, it’s as if you’re increasing the “diversity” part of your own expertise/ skill set/ tool set. At the very least, you could become less prone to fall into the traps of biases and etc.

In the book, Mauboussin recommends reading Scott Page’s book (“The Difference”) and his own text on the subject.

A review of “The Difference” at the Crooked Timber blog mentions in the 8th paragraph the problem with one of the assumptions of the diversity prediction theory (just to be clear, Mauboussin deals with it in his book): it assumes that the diverse crowd interacts/ communicates in a way that the diversity “bonanza” can take place. As we at IP know, that is often far from reality.

Another approach to the same problem was discussed by Julia Kristeva: “One cannot be an amateur, or decide one day ‘Let’s be interdisciplinary’. A university may decide to develop in that direction, but what matters is that each researcher finds and establishes some complicities with other researchers so that interdisciplinarity comes from the base of the pyramid and works its way up. One can only benefit from interdisciplinary practices if researchers meet other researchers whilst learning how to discuss both their competencies and the outcome of their interaction; therefore contributing to the exposure of the risks inherent in an interdisciplinary practice… the first obstacle is often linked to individual competencies coupled with a tendency to jealously protect one’s own domain. Specialists are often too protective of their own prerogative, do not actually work with other colleagues, and therefore do not teach their students to construct a diagonal axis in their methodology.”

At IP, we’ve always taken steps to address this and this blog is part of these efforts. For instance, our team’s interaction in our Intranet today is the source for most of our posts here – this specific one was “built” from the contributions of 4 different members.

The way MIT built its incentive system to recruit people to its “team” is part of the story, of course. They were clever enough to mix both “ego-boost” and “cold, hard cash” incentives (since they would donate some of the proceeds to charity). Other teams apparently had either just the feel-good or just the greedy incentives. Of course, the losing teams complain that they had been working for a while when the MIT Team came out of nowhere and, given the famous backers, got a lot of traditional press attention, giving them a leg up on recruiting “balloon spotters”. Well, it seems good media contacts do play a major role in this part of the challenge, so DARPA probably got a lesson from that as well.

Speculations abound on what DARPA could have learned from this, but whether this will help the US capture the “terrorist that can’t be named” is beyond our scope. What we’re interested in is the wealth of data on crowd-sourcing and information dissemination generated by this contest. We’ve posted before on the subject of Crowdsourcing and the implications on Media, Online Services, Search, Hyper-local advertising, Retailing, Services in general (links below). Here’s hoping the MIT Media Lab team will write a comprehensive paper on this challenge and shed some light on this trend.

LINKS:

With lure of cash, MIT wins Pentagon prize – NY Times (free registration required) on the contest winners – Dec. 6th ’09

“Crowdsourcing” revisited – Our own take on crowdsourcing and its potential shortcomings – Nov. 19th ’09

Netflix’s smart crowdsourcing initiative – Our take on the Netflix contest – Sept. 22nd ’09

MIT’s 2-day course on crowdsourcing – Classes in 2010 for this $2,600, 2-day course called Intelligent Organizations: Collaboration and the Future of Work.

From the book, in Chapter 1: “Languages frame, analyse and colour our views of the world. ‘I have three hearts’, claimed Ennius, an early master poet in Latin, on the strength of his fluency in Latin, Greek and Oscan.” – We couldn’t have said it better. Earlier in the chapter Mr. Ostler quotes perennial favorite Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” – Indeed.

Go on. Break those walls.

We could frame this scientifically as well. If it is true that bilingual/ multilingual persons have a few advantages over monolinguals, could the opposite be true? The “answer” so far comes from the realm of fiction – brilliant, life-changing fiction. Remember George Orwell’s “1984″ and the section on “Newspeak” – that part alone is worth the book’s price many times over. The idea was that reducing/ limiting language could by itself ultimately reduce human intelligence.

It’s not just Facebook, of course. We agree with the NY Times reporter when he compares the already impressive multitude of available data “embedded” in Google searches to the much-richer interactions available on Facebook. Expanding a bit, we’re talking about Google searches, live Twitter monitoring, Delicious tagging, hyper-local mobile search… the fact is that there’s an ever-increasing amount of data produced “for free” by a large community of users (read: consumers). As we’ve seen with Amazon.com, Netflix, Harrah’s Entertainment and many other examples, the creative use of data is a source of value/ competitive advantage.

Another point: people tend to focus on the “capex” side of it. How much do companies such as Amazon or Google have to invest to gather, store, clean up and effectively analyze data? While the amount is certainly relevant, it seems to us that culture is even more so. We’ve seen e-tailers with more scale make less use of this resource than smaller companies with a relentless “data-crazy” culture.

By the way, this NYT article deals with the data analysis part in this world of ever-increasing data generation. Much more technical but no less interesting. The amount of money and brainpower involved – and the tools previously unavailable such as crowdsourcing – should insure that we will see very exciting stuff in the near future.