“We are seriously concerned about this most serious outbreak of seriousness”

On his FT blog, Gideon Rachman posts on Alan Beattie’s generic article about any major meeting of an international organization that deserves to be replicated in full here:

An ineffectual international organisation yesterday issued a stark warning about a situation it has absolutely no power to change, the latest in a series of self-serving interventions by toothless intergovernmental bodies.

“We are seriously concerned about this most serious outbreak of seriousness,” said the head of the institution, either a former minister from a developing country or a mid-level European or American bureaucrat. “This is a wake-up call to the world. They must take on board the vital message that my organisation exists.”

The director of the body, based in one of New York, Washington or an agreeable Western European city, was speaking at its annual conference, at which ministers from around the world gather to wring their hands impotently about the most fashionable issue of the day. The organisation has sought to justify its almost completely fruitless existence by joining its many fellow talking-shops in highlighting whatever crisis has recently gained most coverage in the global media.

“Governments around the world must come together to combat whatever this year’s worrying situation has turned out to be,” the director said. “It is not yet time to panic, but if it goes on much further without my institution gaining some credit for sounding off on the issue, we will be justified in labelling it a crisis.”

The organisation, whose existence the White House barely acknowledges and to which hardly any member government intends to give more money or extra powers, has long been fighting a war of attrition against its own irrelevance. By making a big deal out of the fact that the world’s most salient topical issue will be placed on its agenda and then issuing a largely derivative annual report on the subject, it hopes to convey the entirely erroneous impression that it has any influence whatsoever on the situation.

The intervention follows a resounding call to action in the communiqué of the Group of [number goes here] countries at their recent summit in a remote place no-one had previously heard of. The G[number goes here] meeting was preceded by the familiar interminable and inconclusive discussions about whether the G[number goes here] was sufficiently representative of the international community, or whether it should be expanded into a G[number plus 1, 2 or higher goes here] including China, India or any other scary emerging market country that attendees cared to name.

The story was given further padding by a study from an ambulance-chasing Washington think-tank, which warned that it would continue to convene media conference calls until its quixotic and politically suicidal plan to ameliorate whatever crisis was gathering had been given respectful though substantially undeserved attention.

Is Google Making Us Smart?

"Are you using Google to challenge your thinking? Or is the tool just shrinking your attention span and dumbing you down?"

Diane Coutu at the Harvard Business Review editor's blog wants to rebel against the common stereotype or fear that Google is dumbing us down. Google seems to be synonymous and eye-catching enough (because we all use it) to serve as the fall guy for most modern technological distractions. The search engine capable of putting the most remote and obscure information imaginable within the click of a misspelled search or random browsing is at once scrutinized and praised.

From proposing The End of Theory to suggesting that Google Makes Us Stupid, writers know they have a rapt audience when contemplating the ways the Google affects our lives.

Her point is not so much unique as a revisiting of the initial amazement of the useful and productive capabilities of the internet. Isn't the internet wonderful? Isn't it terrifying? Well, yes, both.

As all things, it has the capacity to enhance and cripple our minds depending on how we use it. Her article, though, speaks to more than just Google and the internet. It speaks to the mindset with which we approach our life.

Her suggestions to never be afraid of looking dumb, never stop questioning, and expose yourself to lots of different experiences, sounds a lot like advice you'd hear at a commencement speech or from a freshmen adviser. (Not to say it isn't overwhelmingly TRUE)

The Google Debate, if I can call it that, is really no different than the way people looked at radio or tv when they became easily accessible. The argument and its evolution sounds a lot like the way we view video games, initially with amazement, then horror, and then as possible ways to increase mental agility in the eldery or promote math for children.

The ever present question of whether and how people actually think is what really underlies this discussion. And, of course, some people will, some people won't. Kinda makes you wonder if it isn't just a whole lot of fuss about nothing.

A Fresh Set of Eyes

I should start by admitting that Malcolm Gladwell is pretty brilliant. For those who have read Blink or The Tipping Point, this isn't big news. His article from this May, "In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?" published in the New Yorker only reinforces the fact. The article supposes that, much as he has done, insight is the result of looking at things in new ways.

His claim is that brilliant ideas are a dime a dozen. Some geniuses have the ability to come up with lots of them, hence their genius, but put enough smart people in a room and you can create the same effect. The article begins with a discussion of paleontology. Specifically, one man who decided to look in an area, Montana, that had been thoroughly scavenged for bones. Most people see sandy gravel and think rocks. He saw gravel and thought bones.

"People weren’t finding dinosaur bones, and they assumed that it was because they were rare. But...it was our fault. We didn’t look hard enough."

Maybe we didn't look hard enough. Or maybe we didn't look with the right eyes.

He then talks about Alexander Graham Bell's idea of the telephone and where it originated.

"A large tree had blown down here, creating a natural and completely private belvedere, which [he] had dubbed his 'dreaming place.' Slouched on a wicker chair, his hands in his pockets, he stared unseeing at the swiftly flowing river below him. Far from the bustle of Boston and the pressure of competition from other eager inventors, he mulled over everything he had discovered about sound."

The answer came from relaxation, thought, and perspective. I think of the movie Pi by Darren Aronofsky, where the older mathematician was giving advice to his stressed colleaque on the verge of a huge discovery. He said,

"The king asks Archimedes to determine if a present he's received is actually solid gold. Unsolved problem at the time. It tortures the great Greek mathematician for weeks - insomnia haunts him and he twists and turns in his bed for nights on end. Finally, his equally exhausted wife - she's forced to share a bed with this genius - convinces him to take a bath to relax. While he's entering the tub, Archimedes notices the bath water rise. Displacement, a way to determine volume, and that's a way to determine density - weight over volume. And thus, Archimedes solves the problem. He screams "Eureka" and he is so overwhelmed he runs dripping naked through the streets to the king's palace to report his discovery."

He asks his younger colleague Max what the point of the story is and Max responds, "That a breakthrough will come." Wrong, he says, the point is that he needs to relax. The point is, "listen to your wife, she will give you perspective."

Kind of makes you want to ditch the computer, cell phone, and ipod to enjoy those few precious moments of solitude doesn't it?

But before you run off and seclude yourself in a room waiting for that million dollar idea, Gladwell comes back with another point. He contends that "a scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do. The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight."

Alluding to a group of inventors that get together frequently called Intellectual Ventures, which was founded to test the theory that with enough brilliant people in a room ideas would flow like beer at a bachelor party, Gladwell suggests that this sort of insight can be engineered.

Their success is overwhelming, with patents coming so fast they can hardly handle the logistical demands.

These individuals aren't checking their Blackberry's while making love to their wives. They work hard and spend hours on their research and talking over what must be exhausting dinners about how to bring these ideas to fruition.

Noting all the discoveries that seemed to happen at the same time (the list is long: Bell and Elisha Gray submitted patents for the phone on the same day, Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland. “There were four independent discoveries of sunspots, all in 1611; namely, by Galileo in Italy, Scheiner in Germany, Fabricius in Holland and Harriott in England"), Gladwell suggests that maybe there is something in the air, the culmination and climax of years of groundwork with the right social setting, that creates the proper climate for invention.

Ideas come in waves, perhaps, but bold thinking creates those moments. Whether that means holding a human ear from a cadaver and running up a mountain or putting physicists and surgeons at the same table, it means looking at something in a way that hasn't been done before.

And that, I'm afraid, requires perspective.

Planet Focus: The Art of Attention

Having read up recently on distractions in the workplace and the ills of multitasking, I wondered how businesses can cope with the demand for their employees' attention without appearing overbearing or authoritarian. In other words, without limiting employee access to the internet or regulating device usage. Could they engender a desire to focus in their employees? Today's article in the NYTimes, "Fighting a War Against Distraction," mentions a few ways that innovative companies, such as IBM, are trying to do just that:

"TO combat overload, we also need to look to our environments. That’s why a few pioneering companies are creating places or times for uninterrupted, focused creative thought. I.B.M. employees practice “Think Fridays” worldwide, avoiding or cutting back on e-mail, meetings and interruptions. Other firms are setting aside unwired, quiet rooms."

When I was working in India, my office had three rooms. One for meetings, one for the boss, and one for the ten other employees. Crowded around the table in the center of the room, all ten were writing with pens and paper, dumbfounding me. Now, as India continues to increase its use of technology, we're trying to cut back.

Relating our digital distractions to our lives at home again, the author insists that "split-focus" implies an obvious corollary: "You aren't worth my time."

Remember when you used to memorize phone numbers? You might even be able to recall one or two (I can remember my old land line number and an old girlfriend's number). Those days, you kept in touch with 5 or 6 friends on a day-to-day basis because that is all you could handle. It was never before so easy as it is now to maintain hundreds of superficial relationships. So caught up on not "missing" anything, we rarely take the time to build something meaningful. We don't have time.

On the same note, people know when they are just being kept in touch with for the sake of it. It is pretty obvious who is interested in having a conversation versus who just wants a status update. While there are clearly benefits to maintaining connections with old friends and coworkers, maybe its time to take a look through your contact list and weed out the ones that aren't necessary. As Marci Alboher concludes:

“Wisdom is the art of knowing what to overlook,” wrote William James, the father of American psychology research. Long ago, he identified the foremost challenge of our time: how to allocate our attention. And now, we’re beginning to discover what he foretold: that living distracted just isn’t smart.

Writers, Politics, and Partisanship

Two good political articles that referenced Norman Mailer in very different ways.

David Mamet's March 11 article in the Village Voice, "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal,'" talks about his transition to conservative thought as a function of his realization that, despite (perhaps a result of?) a disdain for the current administration, he was "hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow."

He writes that William Allen White, long-time editor and recent author, understood that

"government should most probably stay out of the way and let them get on with it. But there is such a thing as liberalism, and it may be reduced to these saddest of words: ' . . . and yet . . . '"

His reference to Norman Mailer was to a review of a play he wrote without having seen it. After trashing the play, he had a chance to watch it and changed his mind. Although no longer writing reviews at the time, he took out a full page ad in a paper and detailed his error. Mamet suggests that his conversion is similarly nothing more than acting upon the quote by economist John Maynard Keynes, "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"

In a very different light, a July 3rd Economist article, "White Men Can Vote: Even if they can't dance," quotes Norman Mailer as supposing the reason Republicans garner the overwhelming majority of the white male vote is that, "They talk male talk."

The article suggests other reasons that Republicans have traditionally won the white male vote, such as "President Lyndon Johnson signed laws demanding equal rights for blacks," or because "those crafty Republicans have got them all worked up about silly moral and cultural issues such as abortion, guns and gay marriage," and finally, as the article quotes some voters as saying, "Democrats are associated with an assault on masculinity itself."

(Interestingly, I stumbled upon numbers of books and journals that explore Mamet's issues with masculinity.)

Focus 2.0: Defending Intelligence

No longer is focusing a singular act of concentration. Simply "not seeking" distraction was at one point good enough, but today we must actively avoid it. New technologies are needed to monitor the presence of technological distractions and keep them at bay, leaving a situation that finds us forced to proactively defend our attention span. Many of our most respected intellectuals, both past and present, recognize that the long periods of contemplation that yielded breakthroughs would have been impossible without an environment that they controlled for distractions.

In the same 2006 Time article from the last post, "Help! I've Lost My Focus," the author notes that:

"Some of the world's most creative and productive individuals simply refuse to subject their brains to excess data streams. When a New York Times reporter interviewed several recent winners of MacArthur 'genius' grants, a striking number said they kept cell phones and iPods off or away when in transit so that they could use the downtime for thinking."

In "The Myth of Multitasking," an article appearing in the latest edition of The New Atlantis, the author talks about a letter from Lord Chesterfield to his son that states:

“There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.” To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one’s time; it was a mark of intelligence. “This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.” (emphasis added)

Later in the article, Christine Rosen mentions that Isaac Newton was asked about his particular genius, responding that "if he made any discoveries, it was 'owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.'"

My favorite line from the article:

"When people do their work only in the “interstices of their mind-wandering,” with crumbs of attention rationed out among many competing tasks, their culture may gain in information, but it will surely weaken in wisdom."

Lasting works of genius and innovative ideas may be spurred by activity and mind-wandering, but bringing them to fruition requires mental discipline and concentration. Knowing which is which might be the defining factor of the 21st century genius.

Check your blackberry in bed?

Could the constant attacks on our attention span perhaps also damage our ability to maintain long-term, monogamous relationships? It's not really news that the same devices that claim to increase our productivity can have a similarly detrimental impact. Like anything else in the world, moderation is generally advised. Some additional musings by an older Time article, "Help! I've Lost My Focus" led me to wonder if our decreased attention spans might affect more than just our productivity.

"What sort of toll is all this disruption and mental channel switching taking on our ability to think clearly, work effectively and function as healthy human beings?

I bet "continuous partial attention" (one of Harvard Business Reviews "Breakthrough Ideas" of 2007) has already altered the way we view friendships, relationships, and our social life. I find myself trying to speak with more than one person almost constantly, wondering about another subject and changing topics. Just as I rarely am able to read 100 pages in one sitting anymore, I am also less likely to be able to maintain a conversation about one topic for more than 5 minutes.

As in most things, it is always nice to know that someone else is worse off than you. One patient asked her psychiatrist whether it was "abnormal that her husband brings the Blackberry to bed and lays it next to them while they make love."

Is it only a matter of time until multitasking infringes on our long sacred notion of the bedroom as refuge from the unwieldy demands of our professional lives?

"What do you mean 'why am I checking my e-mail? I told you this isn't my favorite position and I have a report due tomorrow."