Category Archives: Evolutionary Psychology

It Took a Decade, but Google Glass is Finally Broken

Did you hear that Google finally pulled the plug on Google Glass?

Probably not. The announcement definitely flew under the radar. It came with much less fanfare than the original roll out in 2013. The technology, which has been quietly on life support as an enterprise tool aimed at select industries, finally had its plug pulled with this simple statement on its support page:

Thank you for over a decade of innovation and partnership. As of March 15, 2023, we will no longer sell Glass Enterprise Edition. We will continue supporting Glass Enterprise Edition until September 15, 2023.

Talk about your ignoble demises. They’re offering a mere 6 months of support for those stubbornly hanging on to their Glass. Glass has been thrown in the ever growing Google Graveyard, along with Google Health, Google+, Google Buzz, Google Wave, Knol – well, you get the idea.

It’s been 10 years, almost to the day, that Google invited 8000 people to become “Glass Explorers” (others had a different name – “Glassholes”) and plunge into the world of augmented reality.

I was not a believer – for a few reasons I talked about way back then. That led me to say, “Google Glass isn’t an adoptable product as it sits.” It took 10 years, but I can finally say, “I told you so.”

I did say that wearable technology, in other forms, would be a game changer. I just didn’t think that Google Glass was the candidate to do that. To be honest, I haven’t really thought that much more about it until I saw the muted news that this particular Glass was a lot more than half empty. I think there are some takeaways about the fading dividing line between technology and humans that we should keep in mind.

First of all, I think we’ve learned a little more about how our brains work with “always on” technologies like Google Glass. The short answer is, they don’t – at least not very well. And this is doubly ironic because according to an Interview with Google Glass product director Steve Lee on The Verge back in 2013, that was the whole point:

“We all know that people love to be connected. Families message each other all the time, sports fanatics are checking live scores for their favorite teams. If you’re a frequent traveler you have to stay up to date on flight status or if your gate changes. Technology allows us to connect in that way. A big problem right now are the distractions that technology causes.”

The theory was that it was much less distracting to have information right in the line of sight, rather than having to go to a connected screen that might be in your pocket.

Lee went on. “We wondered, what if we brought technology closer to your senses? Would that allow you to more quickly get information and connect with other people but do so in a way — with a design — that gets out of your way when you’re not interacting with technology? That’s sort of what led us to Glass.” 

The problem here was one of incompatible operating systems – the one that drove Google Glass and the one we have baked into our brains. It turned out that maybe the technology was a little too close to our senses. A 2016 study (Lewis and Neider) found that trying to split attention between two different types of tasks – one scanning information on a heads up display and one trying to focus on the task at hand – ended up with the brain not being able to focus effectively on either. The researchers ended with this cautionary conclusion: “Our data strongly suggest that caution should be exercised when deploying HUD-based informational displays in circumstances where the primary user task is visual in nature. Just because we can, does not mean we should.”

For anyone who spends even a little time wondering how the brain works, this should not come as a surprise. There is an exhaustive list of research showing that the brain is not that great at multi-tasking. Putting a second cognitive task for the brain in our line of sight simply means the distraction is all that much harder to ignore.

Maybe there’s a lesson here for Google. I think sometimes they get a little starry eyed about their own technological capabilities and forget to factor in the human element. I remember talking to a roomful of Google engineers more than a decade ago about search behaviors. I remember asking them if any of them had heard about Pirolli and Card’s pioneering work on their Information Foraging theory. Not one hand went up. I was gob smacked. That should be essential reading for anyone working on a search interface. Yet, on that day, the crickets were chirping loudly at Mountainview.

If the Glass team had done their human homework, they would have found that the brain needs to focus on one task at a time. If you’re looking to augment reality with additional information, that information has to be synthesized into a single cohesive task for the brain. This means that for augmented reality to be successful, the use case has to be carefully studied to make sure the brain isn’t overloaded.

But I suspect there was another sticking point that prevented Google Glass from being widely adopted. It challenged the very nature of our relationship with technology. We like to believe we control technology, rather than the other way around. We have defined the online world as somewhere we “go” to through our connected devices. We are in control of when and where we do this. Pulling a device out and initiating an action keeps this metaphorical divide in place.

But Google Glass blurred this line in a way that made us uncomfortable. Again, a decade ago, I talked about the inevitable tipping point that will come with the merging of our physical and virtual worlds. Back then, I said, “as our technology becomes more intimate, whether it’s Google Glass, wearable devices or implanted chips, being ‘online’ will cease to be about ‘going’ and will become more about ‘being.’  As our interface with the virtual world becomes less deliberate, the paradigm becomes less about navigating a space that’s under our control and more about being an activated node in a vast network.”

I’m just speculating, but maybe Google Glass was just a step too far in this direction – for now, anyway.

(Feature image: Tim.Reckmann, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Pursuit of Happiness

Last week, I talked about physical places where you can find happiness – places like Fremont, California, the happiest city in the US, or Finland, the happiest country in the world.

But, of course, happiness isn’t a place. It’s a state of mind. You don’t find happiness. You experience happiness. And the nature of that experience is a tough thing to nail down.

That could be why the world Happiness Survey was called “complete crap” by opinion columnist Kyle Smith back in 2017:

“These surveys depend on subjective self-reporting, not to mention eliding cultural differences. In Japan there is a cultural bias against boasting of one’s good fortune, and in East Asia the most common response, by far, is to report one’s happiness as average. In Scandinavia, meanwhile, there is immense societal pressure to tell everyone how happy you are, right up to the moment when you’re sticking your head in the oven.”

Kyle Smith, 2017

And that’s the problem with happiness. It’s kind of like quantum mechanics – the minute you try to measure it, it changes.

Do you ever remember your grandparents trying to measure their happiness? It wasn’t a thing they thought about. Sometimes they were happy, sometimes they weren’t. But they didn’t dwell on it. They had other, more pressing, matters to think about. And if you asked them to self-report their state of happiness, they’d look at you like you had just given birth to a three horned billy goat.

Maybe we think too much about happiness. Maybe we’re setting our expectations too high. A 2011 study (Mauss, Tamir, Anderson & Savino) found that the pursuit of happiness may lead to the opposite outcome, never being happy. “People who highly value happiness set happiness standards that are difficult to obtain, leading them to feel disappointed about how they feel, paradoxically decreasing their happiness the more they want it.”

This is a real problem, especially in today’s media environment. Never in our lives have we been more obsessed with the pursuit of happiness. The problem comes with how we define that happiness. If you look at how media portrays happiness, it’s a pretty self-centred concept. It’s really all about us: what we have, where we are, how we’re feeling, what we’re doing. And all that is measured against what should make us happier.

That’s where the problem of measurement raises its prickly little head. In 1971, social scientists Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell came up with something called the “happiness set point.” They wanted to see if major life events – both negative and positive – actually changed how happy people were. The initial study and follow ups that further explored the question found that after initial shift in happiness after major events such as lottery wins, big promotions or life-altering accidents, people gradually returned to a happiness baseline.

But more recent academic work has found that it’s not quite so simple. First of all, there’s no such thing as a universal happiness “set point.” We all have different baselines of how happy we are. Also, some of us are more apt to respond, either positively or negatively, to major life events.

There are life events that can remove the foundations of happiness – for example, losing your job, causing a significant downtown in your economic status. As I mentioned before, money may not buy happiness, but economic stability is correlated with happiness.

What can make a difference in happiness is what we spend time doing. And in this case, life events can set up the foundations of changes that can either lead to more happiness or less. Generally, anything that leads to more interaction with others generally makes us happier. Anything that leads to social withdrawal tends to make us less happy.

So maybe happiness isn’t so much about how we feel, but rather a product of what we do.

Continuing on this theme, I found a couple of interesting data visualizations by statistician Nathan Yau. The most recent one examined the things that people did at work that made them happy.

If you’re in the legal profession, I have bad news. That ranked highest for stress and low for happiness and meaningfulness. On the other end of the spectrum, hairdressers and manicurists scored high for happiness and low on stress. Construction jobs also seemed to tick the right boxes when it comes to happiness on the job.

For me, the more interesting analysis was one Yau did back in 2018. He looked at a dataset that came from asking 10,000 people what had made them happy in the past 24 hours. Then he parsed the language of those responses to look for the patterns that emerged. The two biggest categories that lead to happiness were “Achievement” and “Affection.”

From this, we start to see some common underpinnings for happiness: doing things for others, achieving the things that are important to us, spending time with our favorite people, bonding over shared experiences.

So let’s get back to the “pursuit of happiness”- something so important to Americans that they enshrined it in the Declaration of Indepedence. But, according to Stanford historian Caroline Winterer, in her 2017 TED talk, that definition of happiness is significantly different than what we currently think of. In her words, that happiness meant, “Every citizen thinking of the larger good, thinking of society, and thinking about the structures of government that would create a society that was peaceful and that would allow as many people as possible to flourish.”

When I think of happiness, that makes more sense. It also matches the other research I shared here. We seem happiest when we’re not focused on ourselves but we’re instead thinking about others. This is especially true when our happiness navel-gazing is measuring how we come up short on happiness when stacked against the unrealistic expectations set by social media.

Like too many things in our society, happiness has morphed from something good and noble into a selfish sense of entitlement.

(Image credit – Creative Commons License – https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenanichols/2722210623)

Finding Your Happy Place

Where can you find happiness? According to a recent study from WalletHub, you’re statistically more likely to find it in Fremont or San Jose, California. It you’re in Madison, Wisconsin, you won’t be quite as happy, but you’ll still be ahead of 98.5% of the US. Fremont, San Jose and Madison are the three happiest cities in America.

If you live in Shreveport, Louisiana, Huntington, West Virginia or Detroit, Michigan, your life may well be a giant sucking hole of despair. Statistically, anyway. Those are the three least happy cities in the US.

Again, WalletHub’s words, not mine.

I know what you’re saying. You see these posts about happy places all the time in your feed. How much credence should you give them?

I’ll be honest. Normally, I scroll right past them. I don’t know what made me look at this one. Maybe it’s because I’ve recently been thinking stock of my own level of happiness. Or maybe I was thinking, “What the hell? I have a few minutes. Let’s try to quantify those whole happiness thing.”

The time might be right. As we claw our way out of a global pandemic and the various other catastrophes that bump up against each other as they jostle for our attention in our news feed, we can’t be blamed for wanting a little more happiness in our lives. I’m pretty sure that’s at least one of the factors behind the great resignation in the wake of Covid.

Also, more of us are choosing to work virtually from home. Wouldn’t it make sense to situate that home in the place where you’re happiest? More and more of our jobs aren’t tied to a physical location. We can live anywhere we want. So why shouldn’t that place be Fremont, California? And I’m told Madison has great cheese curds.

So, today I’m going to help you find that happy place.

First, maybe the focus on cities is a little too narrow. Who says we’re happiest in a city? Recent research has found that yes, in poorer countries, odds are you’ll be happier in a city than in the country. When the whole country is struggling to get by, there’s just more of what you need to survive in a city. But as countries become wealthier, that gap disappears and actually reverses itself, giving a slight happiness edge to those living beyond the city limits. So, if you’re looking for happiness, you might want to consider “movin’ to the country (where you’re) gonna eat a lot of peaches” (obscure pop reference for those of you over 55).

Let’s broaden our focus a mite, out to the happiest states. Luckily, the good folks at Wallet Hub have you covered there too. According to them, the three happiest states are (in order), Hawaii, Maryland and Minnesota. If you live in West Virginia, you better start re-examining your life choices. It scored lowest.

But who says the US is the be all and end all of happiness? Certainly not the World Happiness Report, which has to be the definitive source on all things happy. According to it, the 5 happiest countries on earth are (again in order) – Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The US is quite a bit down the list in the sixteenth slot.

Perhaps happiness is positively correlated with pickled herring and lingonberries.

Now, for reasons I’ll explore in a future post, I urge you to take those whole empirical approach to happiness with a grain of salt, but there must be something to all these happiness rankings. These countries traditionally top the various lists of best places to life. One has to wonder why? Or, at least, this “one” wondered why.

So I put together a spread sheet of the 20 happiest countries in the study and started looking for the common denominator of happiness. I looked at 5 different potential candidates (including some from the Global Sustainability Competitive Index): Gross Domestic Product per Capita, Social Capital, Natural Capital, Governance Performance and Liberal Democracy.

First of all, money may not buy happiness, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. There was a pretty strong correlation between GDP per capita and the happiness score. It seems that, up to a point, we need enough money to be comfortable to be happy. But, as wealth accumulates, happiness begins to plateau. The world’s longest running happiness study has repeatedly shown this. Marc Schulz, author of “The Good Life”, said “money can’t buy us happiness, but it’s a tool that can give us security and safety and a sense of control over lives.”

Another fairly strong correlation was with Natural Capital, which is defined as having adequate access to clean water and air, as well as proximity to forests, oceans and healthy biodiversity. This had a correlation just slightly lower than the one with GDP per capita.

Much as I would have liked it to be a little higher, given my own political leanings, there was a weaker correlation between liberal democracy and happiness. But, in the silver lining category, there was a strong correlation between liberal democracy and governance performance. The world’s happiest places tend to be places with either a constitutional monarchy and/or a parliamentary system overseeing a social democracy. Take that for what it’s worth.

Surprisingly, the weakest correlation was between effective governance and happiness. That said, it was still a significant correlation, so it did play a part in creating the conditions required for happiness.

All of the above factors run the risk of us conflating correlation and causation. There are certain things that are table stakes for happiness. A reasonable degree of good governance, a safe environment and a healthy economy are three of these. We need them to be happy, but they don’t cause us to be happy.

The last factor, which had the strongest correlation by a significant margin, is different. Not surprisingly, social capital is a direct cause of happiness. If you want to be happy, live somewhere where people love and care for each other. Denmark, the second happiest place on earth, is the home of “hygge” – a general sense of coziness. As I’ve said before, the Danes have “created an environment that leads to bumping into each other.”

 It’s in this beneficial societal friction where you’re statistically more likely to find happiness, wherever you live.

(Image https://www.flickr.com/photos/marcygallery/3803517719 – Creative Commons License)

Real Life Usually Lives Beyond The Data

There’s an intriguing little show you’ve probably never heard of on Netflix that might be worth checking out. It’s called Travelers and it’s a Canadian produced Sci-Fi show that ran from 2016 to 2018. The only face in it you’re probably recognize is Eric McCormack, the Will from Will and Grace. He also happens to be the producer of the series.

The premise is this – special operatives from the future (the “travelers”) – travel back in time to the present to prevent the collapse of society. They essential “body snatch” everyday people from our present at the exact moment of their death and use their lives as a cover to fulfill their mission.

And that’s not even the interesting part.

The real intrigue of the show comes from the everyday conflicts which come from an imperfect shoe horning of a stranger into the target’s real-world experience. The show runners do a masterful job of weaving this into their storylines: the joy of eating a hamburger, your stomach turning at the thought of drinking actual milk from a cow, calling your “wife” her real name when you haven’t called her that in all the time you’ve known her.  And it’s in this that I discovered an unexpected parallel to our current approach to marketing.

This is a bit of a detour, so bear with me.

In the future, the research team compiles as much as they can about each of the people they’re going to “borrow” for their operatives. The profiles are compiled from social media, public records and everything they can discover from the data available.

But when the “traveler” actually takes over their life, there are no end of surprises and challenges – made up of all the trivial stuff that didn’t make it into the data profile.

You probably see where I’m going with this. When we rely solely on data to try to understand our customers or prospects, there will always be surprises. You can only learn these little quirks and nuances by diving into their lives.

That’s what A.G. Lafley, CEO of Proctor and Gamble from 2000 to 2010 and then again from 20153 to 2015, knew. In a profile on Lafley which Forbes did in 2002, writer Luisa Kroll said,

“Like the monarch in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs’ Court, Lafley often makes house calls incognito to find out what’s the minds of his subjects. ‘Too much time was being spent inside Procter & Gamble and not enough outside,’ says Lafley who took over during a turbulent period two years ago. ‘I am a broken record when it comes to saying, ‘We have to focus on the customer.'”

It wasn’t a bad way to run a business. Under Lafley’s guidance, P&G doubled their market cap, making them one of the 10 most valuable companies in the world.

Humans are messy and organic. Data isn’t. Data demands to be categorized, organized and columnized. When we deal with data, we necessarily have to treat it like data. And when we do that, we’re going to miss some stuff – probably a lot of stuff. And almost all of it will be the stuff of our lives, the things that drive behavior, the sparks that light our emotions.

It requires two different ways of thinking. Data sits in our prefrontal lobes, demanding the brain to be relentlessly rational. Data reduces behavior to bits and bytes, to be manipulated by algorithms into plotted trendlines and linear graphs. In fact, automation today can totally remove we humans from the process. Data and A.I. work together to pull the levers and push the buttons on our advertising strategies. We just watch the dashboard.

But there’s another way of thinking – one that skulks down in the brain’s subcortical basement, jammed in the corner between the amygdala and the ventral striatum. It’s here where we stack all the stuff that makes us human; all the quirks and emotions, all our manias and motivations. This stuff is not rational, it’s not logical, it’s just life.

That’s the stuff A.G. Lafley found when he walked out the front door of Proctor and Gamble’s headquarters in Cincinnati and into the homes of their customers. And that’s the stuff the showrunners of Travelers had the insight to include in their narratives.

It’s the stuff that can make us sensational or stupid – often at the same time.

Older? Sure. Wiser? Debatable.

I’ve always appreciated Mediapost Editor-in-Chief Joe Mandese’s take on things. It’s usually snarky, cynical and sarcastic, all things which are firmly in my wheelhouse. He also says things I may think but wouldn’t say for the sake of political politeness.

So when Joe gets a full head of steam up, as he did in that recent post which was entitled “Peak Idiocracy?”, I set aside some time to read it. I can vicariously fling aside my Canadian reticence and enjoy a generous helping of Mandesian snarkiness. In this case, the post was a recap of Mediapost’s 2023 Marketing Politics Conference – and the depths that political advertising is sinking to in order to appeal to younger demographics. Without stealing Joe’s thunder (please read the post if you haven’t) one example involved Tiktok and mouth mash-up filters. After the panel where this case study surfaced, Joe posed a question to the panelists.

“If this is how we are electing our representative leaders, do you feel like we’ve reached peak idiocracy in the sense that we are using mouth filters and Harry Potter memes to get their messages across?”

As Joe said, it was an “old guy question.” More than that, it was a cynical, smart, sarcastic old guy question. But the fact remains, it was an old guy question. One of the panelists, DGA Digital Director Laura Carlson responded:

“I don’t think we should discount young voters’ intelligence. I think being able to have fun with the news and have fun with politics and enjoy TikTok and enjoy the platform while also engaging with issues you care about is something I wouldn’t look down on. And I think more of it is better.”

There’s something to this. Maybe a lot to this.

First, I think we have fundamentally different idea of “messaging” from generation to generation. Our generation (technically I’m a Boomer, but the label Generation Jones is a better fit) grew up with the idea that information, whether it be on TV, newspaper, magazine or radio, was delivered as a complete package. There was a scarcity of information, and this bundling of curated information was our only choice for being informed.

That’s not the case for a generation raised with the Internet and social media. Becoming aware and being informed are often decoupled. In an environment jammed with information of all types – good and bad – Information foraging strategies have had to evolve. Now, you have to somehow pierce the information filters we have all put in place in order to spark awareness. If you are successful in doing that and can generate some curiosity, you have umpteen million sources just a few keystrokes away where you can become informed.

Still, we “old guys” (and “old gals” – for the sake of consistency, I’ll use the masculine label, but I mean it in the gender-neutral way) do have a valid perspective that shouldn’t be dismissed as us just being old and grumpy. We’ve been around long enough to see how actions and consequences are correlated. We’ve seen how seemingly trivial trends can have lasting impacts, both good and bad. There is experience here that can prove instructive.

But we also must appreciate that those a few generations behind us have built their own cognitive strategies to deal with information that are probably a better match for the media environment we live in today.

So let me pose a different question. If only one generation could vote, and if everyone’s future depended on that vote, which generation would you choose to give the ballots to? Pew Research did a generational breakdown on awareness of social issues and for me, the answer is clear. I would far rather put my future in the hands of Gen Z and Millennials than in the hands of my own generation. They are more socially aware, more compassionate, more committed to solving our many existential problems and more willing to hold our governments accountable.

So, yes, political advertising might be dumbed down to TikTok level for these younger voters, but they understand how the social media game is played. I think they are savvy enough to know that a TikTok mash up is not something to build a political ideology on. They accept it for what it is, a brazen attempt to scream just a little louder than the competition for their attention; standing out from the cacophony of media intrusiveness that engulfs them. If it has to be silly to do that, so be it.

Sure, the generation of Joe Mandese and myself grew up with “real” journalism: the nightly news with Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw, 60 Minutes, The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, the New York Times, The Washington Post. We were weaned on political debates that dealt with real issues.

And for all that, our generation still put Trump in the White House. So much for the wisdom of “old guys.”

The Eternal Hatred of Interruptive Messages

Spamming and Phishing and Robocalls at Midnight
Pop ups and Autoplays and LinkedIn Requests from Salespeople

These are a few of my least favorite things

We all feel the excruciating pain of unsolicited demands on our attention. In a study of the 50 most annoying things in life of 2000 Brits by online security firm Kapersky, deleting spam email came in at number 4, behind scrubbing the bath, being trapped in voicemail hell and cleaning the oven.

Based on this study, cleanliness is actually next to spamminess.

Granted, Kapersky is a tech security firm so the results are probably biased to the digital side, but for me the results check out. As I ran down the list, I hated all the same things that were listed.

In the same study, Robocalls came in at number 10. Personally, that tops my list, especially phishing robocalls. I hate – hate – hate rushing to my phone only to hear that the IRS is going to prosecute me unless I immediately push 7 on my touchtone phone keyboard.

One, I’m Canadian. Two, go to Hell.

I spend more and more of my life trying to avoid marketers and scammers (the line between the two is often fuzzy) trying desperately to get my attention by any means possible. And it’s only going to get worse. A study just out showed that the ChatGPT AI chatbot could be a game changer for phishing, making scam emails harder to detect. And with Google’s Gmail filters already trapping 100 million phishing emails a day, that is not good news.

The marketers in my audience are probably outrunning Usain Bolt in their dash to distance themselves from spammers, but interruptive demands on our attention are on a spectrum that all share the same baseline. Any demand on our attention that we don’t ask for will annoy us. The only difference is the degree of annoyance.

Let’s look at the psychological mechanisms behind that annoyance.

There is a direct link between the parts of our brain that govern the focusing of attention and the parts that regulate our emotions. At its best, it’s called “flow” – a term coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly that describes a sense of full engagement and purpose. At its worst, it’s a feeling of anger and anxiety when we’re unwilling dragged away from the task at hand.

In a 2017 neurological study by Rejer and Jankowski, they found that when a participant’s cognitive processing of a task was interrupted by online ads, activity in the frontal and prefrontal cortex simply shut down while other parts of the brain significantly shifted activity, indicating a loss of focus and a downward slide in emotions.

Another study, by Edwards, Li and Lee, points the finger at something called Reactance Theory as a possible explanation. Very simply put, when something interrupts us, we perceive a loss of freedom to act as we wish and a loss of control of our environment. Again, we respond by getting angry.

It’s important to note that this negative emotional burden applies to any interruption that derails what we intend to do. It is not specific to advertising, but a lot of advertising falls into that category. It’s the nature of the interruption and our mental engagement with the task that determine the degree of negative emotion.

Take skimming through a news website, for instance. We are there to forage for information. We are not actively engaged in any specific task. And so being interrupted by an ad while in this frame of mind is minimally irritating.

But let’s imagine that a headline catches our attention, and we click to find out more. Suddenly, we’re interrupted by a pop-up or pre-roll video ad that hijacks our attention, forcing us to pause our intention and focus on irrelevant information. Our level of annoyance begins to rise quickly.

Robocalls fall into a different category of annoyance for many reasons. First, we have a conditioned response to phone calls where we hope to be rewarded by hearing from someone we know and care about. That’s what makes it so difficult to ignore a ringing phone.

Secondly, phone calls are extremely interruptive. We must literally drop whatever we’re doing to pick up a phone. When we go to all this effort only to realize we’ve been duped by an unsolicited and irrelevant call, the “red mist” starts to float over us.

You’ll note that – up to this point – I haven’t even dealt with the nature of the message. This has all been focused on the delivery of the message, which immediately puts us in a more negative mood. It doesn’t matter whether the message is about a service special for our vehicle, an opportunity to buy term life insurance or an attempt by a fictitious Nigerian prince to lighten the load of our bank account by several thousand dollars; whatever the message, we start in an irritated state simply due to the nature of the interruption.

Of course, the more nefarious the message that’s delivered, the more negative our emotional response will be. And this has a doubling down effect on any form of intrusive advertising. We learn to associate the delivery mechanism with attempts to defraud us. Any politician that depends on robocalls to raise awareness on the day before an election should ponder their ad-delivery mechanism.

Good News and Bad News about Black Swans

First, the good news. According to a new study we may be able to predict extreme catastrophic events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, massive wildfires and pandemics through machine learning and neural networks.

The problem with these “black swan” type of events (events that are very rare but have extreme consequences) is that there isn’t a lot of data that exists that we can use to predict them. The technical term for these is a “stochastic” event – they are random and are, by definition, very difficult to forecast.

Until now. According to the study’s lead author, George Karniadakis, the researchers may have found a way to give us a heads up by using machine learning to make the most out of the meagre data we do have. “The thrust is not to take every possible data and put it into the system, but to proactively look for events that will signify the rare events,” Karniadakis says. “We may not have many examples of the real event, but we may have those precursors. Through mathematics, we identify them, which together with real events will help us to train this data-hungry operator.”

This means that this science could potentially save thousands – or millions – of lives.

But – and now comes the bad news – we have to listen to it. And we have a horrible track record of doing that.  Let’s take just one black swan – COVID 19. Remember that?

Justsecurity.org is a “online forum for the rigorous analysis of security, democracy, foreign policy, and rights.” In other words, it’s their job to minimize the impact of black swans. And they put together a timeline of the US response to the COVID 19 Pandemic. Now that we know the consequences, it’s a terrifying and maddening read. Without getting into the details, it was months before the US federal government took substantive action against the pandemic, despite repeated alerts from healthcare officials and scientists. This put the U.S. behind pretty much the entire developed world in terms of minimizing the impact of the pandemic and saving lives. All the bells, whistles and sirens were screaming at full volume, but no one wanted to listen.

Why? Because there has been a systemic breakdown in what we call epistemic trust – trust in new information coming to us from what should be a trustworthy and relevant source.

I’ll look at this breakdown on two fronts – trust in government and trust in science. These two things should work together, but all too often they don’t. That was especially true in the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID 19 Pandemic.

Let’s start with trust in government. Based on a recent study across 22 countries by the OECD, on average only about half the citizens trust their government. Trust is highest in countries like Finland, Norway and Luxembourg (where only 20 to 30% of the citizens don’t trust their government) and lowest in countries such as Colombia, Latvia and Austria (where over 60% of citizens have no trust in their government).

You might notice I didn’t mention the U.S. That’s because they weren’t included in the study. But the PEW Research Center has been tracking trust in government since 1958, so let’s look at that.

The erosion of trust in the US federal government started with Lyndon Johnson, with trust in government plummeting with Nixon and Watergate. Interestingly, although separated by ideology, both Republicans and Democrats track similarly when you look at erosion of trust from Nixon through George W. Bush, with the exception being Ronald Reagan. That started to break down with Obama and started to polarize even more with Trump and Biden. Since then, the trends started going in opposite directions, but the overall trend has still been towards lower trust.

Now, let’s look at trust in science. While not as drastic as the decline of trust in government, PEW found that trust in science has also declined, especially in the last few years. Since 2020, the percentage of Americans who had no trust in science had almost doubled, from 12% in April 2020 to 22% in December, 2021.

It’s not that the science got worse in those 20 months. It’s that we didn’t want to hear what the science was telling us. The thing about epistemic trust – our willingness to trust trustworthy information – is that it varies depending on what mood we’re in. The higher our stress level, the less likely we are to accept good information at face value, especially if what it’s trying to tell us will only increase our level of stress.

Inputting new information that disrupts our system of beliefs is hard work under any circumstances. It taxes the brain. And if our brain is already overtaxed, it protects itself by locking the doors and windows that new information may sneak through and doubling down on our existing beliefs. This is what psychologists call Confirmation Bias. We only accept new information if it matches what we already believe. This is doubly true if the new information is not something we really want to hear.

The only thing that may cause us to question our beliefs is a niggling doubt, caused by information that doesn’t fit with our beliefs. But we will go out of our way to find information that does conform to our beliefs so we can ignore the information that doesn’t fit, no matter how trustworthy its source.  The explosion of misinformation that has happened on the internet and through social media has made it easier than ever to stick with our beliefs and willfully ignore information that threatens those beliefs.

The other issue in the systemic breakdown of trust may not always be the message – it might be the messenger. If science is trying to warn us about a threatening Black Swan, that warning is generally going to be delivered in one of two ways, either through a government official or through the media. And that’s probably where we have our biggest problem. Again, referring to research done by PEW, Americans distrusted journalists almost as much as government. Sixty percent of American Adults had little to no trust in journalists, and a whopping 76% had little to no trust in elected officials.

To go back to my opening line, the good news is science can warn us about Black Swan events and save lives. The bad news is, we have to pay attention to those warnings.

Otherwise, it’s just a boy calling “wolf.”

Harry, Meghan and the Curse of Celebrity

The new Netflix series on Harry and Meghan is not exactly playing out according to plan. A few weeks ago, MediaPost TV Columnist Adam Buckman talked about the series, which promised unprecedented intimate view into the lives of the wayward Royal and his partner; it’s aim being, “– to give the rest of us a full-access pass into every nook and cranny of the lives and minds of Harry and Meghan.”

Since then, reviews have been mixed. While it is (according to Netflix) their most watched documentary ever, the world seems to be responding with a collective yawn. It is certainly not turning out to be the PR boost the two were hoping for, at least based on some viewer reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Here is just one sample: “A massive whinge fest based on a string of lies, half-truths, and distortions of reality from two of the most privileged people on the planet.”

What I found interesting in this is the complex concept of celebrity, and how it continues to evolve – or more accurately, devolve – in our culture. This is particularly true when we mix our attitudes of modern celebrity with the hoary construct of royalty.

If it does anything, I think Harry and Meghan shows how the very concept of celebrity has turned toxic and has poisoned whatever nominal value you may find in sustaining a monarchy. And, if we are going to dissect the creeping disease of celebrity, we must go to the root of the problem, the media, because our current concept of celebrity didn’t really exist before modern mass media.

We have evolved to keep an eye on those that are at the top of the societal pyramid. It was a good survival tactic to do so. Our apex figureheads – whether they be heroes or gods – served as role models; a literal case of monkey see, monkey do. But it also ensured political survival. There is a bucketload of psychology tucked up in our brains reinforcing this human trait.

In many mythologies, the line between heroes and gods was pretty fuzzy. Also, interestingly, gods were always carnal creatures. The Greek and Roman mythical gods and heroes ostensibly acted as both role models and moral cautionary tales. With great power came great hedonistic appetites.

This gradually evolved into royalty. With kings and queens, there was a very deliberate physical and societal distance kept between royalty and the average subject.  The messy bits of bad behavior that inevitably come with extreme privilege were always kept well hidden from the average subject.  It pretty much played out that way for thousands of years.

There was a yin and yang duality to this type of celebrity that evolved over time. If we trace the roots of the word notorious, we see the beginnings of this duality and get some hints of when it began to unravel.

Notorious comes from the latin notus – meaning to know. It’s current meaning, to be known for something negative, only started in the 17th century. It seems we could accept the duality of notoriety when it came to the original celebrities – our heroes and gods – but with the rise of Christianity and, later, Puritanism (which also hit its peak in the 17th century) we started a whitewash campaign on our own God’s image This had a trickle-down effect in a more strait-laced society. We held our heroes, our God, as well as our kings and queens to a higher standard. We didn’t want to think of them as carnal creatures.

Then, thanks to the media, things got a lot more complicated.

Up until the 19 century, there was really no thing as a celebrity the way we know them today. Those that care about such things generally agree that French actress Sarah Bernhardt was the first modern celebrity. She became such because she knew how to manipulate media. She was the first to get her picture in the press. She was able to tour the world, with the telegraph spreading the word before her arrival. As the 19th century drew to a close, our modern concept of celebrity as being born.

It took a while for this fascination with celebrity spilled over to monarchies. In the case of the house of Windsor (which is a made-up name. The actual name of the family was Saxe-Coburg – Gotha, a decidedly Germanic name that became problematic when England was at war with Germany in World War I) this problem came to a head rather abruptly with King Edward VIII. This was the first royal who revelled in celebrity and who tried to use the media to his advantage. The worlds of celebrity and royalty collided with his abdication in 1936.

In watching Harry and Meghan, I couldn’t help but recount the many, many collisions between celebrity and the Crown since then. The monarchy has always tried to control their image through the media and one can’t help feeling they have been hopelessly naïve in that attempt. Celebrity feeds on itself – it is the nature of the beast – and control is not an option.

Celebrity gives us the illusion of a false intimacy. We mistakenly believe we know the person who is famous, the same as we know those closest to us in our own social circle. We feel we have the right to judge them based on the distorted image we have of them that comes through the media. Somehow, we believe we know what motivates Harry and Meghan, what their ethics entail, what type of person they are.

I suppose one can’t fault Harry and Meghan for trying – yet again – to add their own narrative to the whirling pool of celebrity that surrounds them. But, if history is any indicator, it’s not really a surprise that it’s not going according to their plan.

It Should Be No Surprise that Musk is Messing Up Twitter

I have to admit – I’m somewhat bemused by all the news rolling out of Elon Musk’s V2.0 edition of Twitter. Here is just a quick round up of headlines grabbed from a Google News search last week:

Elon Musk took over a struggling business with Twitter and has quickly made it worse – CNBC

Elon Musk is Bad at This – The Atlantic

The Elon Musk (Twitter) Era Has Been a Complete Mess – Vanity Fair

Elon Musk “Straight-up Alone,” “Winging” Twitter Changes – Business Insider

To all these, I have to say, “What the Hell did you expect?”

Look, I get that Musk is on a different plane of smart from most of us. No argument there.

The same is true, I suspect, for most tech CEOs who are the original founders of their company. The issue is that the kind of smart they are is not necessarily the kind of smart you need to run a big complex corporation. If you look at the various types of intelligence, they would excel at logical-mathematical intelligence – or what I would call “geek-smart.” But this intelligence can often come at the expense of other kinds of intelligence that would be a better fit in the CEO’s role. Both interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence immediately come to mind.

Musk is not alone. There is a bushel load of Tech CEOs who have pulled off a number of WTF moves. In his article in the Atlantic titled Silicon Valley’s Horrible Bosses, Charlie Warzel gives us a few examples ripped straight from the handbook of the “Elon Musk School of Management.” Most of them involve making hugely impactful HR decisions with little concern for the emotional impact on employees and then doubling down on mistake by choosing to communicate through Twitter.

For most of us with even a modicum of emotional intelligence, this is unimaginable. But if you’re geek-smart, it probably seems logical. Twitter is a perfect communication medium for geek-smart people – it’s one-sided, as black and white as you can get and conveniently limited to 280 characters. There is no room for emotional nuance or context on Twitter.

The disconnect in intelligence types comes in looking at the type of problems a CEO faces. I was CEO of a very small company and even at that scale, with a couple dozen employees, I spent the majority of my time dealing with HR issues. I was constantly trying to navigate my way through these thorny and perplexing issues. I did learn one thing – issues that include people, whether they be employees or customers, generally fall into the category of what is called a “complex problem.”

In 1999, an IBM manager named Dave Snowden realized that not every problem you run into when managing a corporation requires the same approach. He put together a decision-making model to help managers identify the best decision strategy for the issue they’re dealing with. He called the model Cynefin, which is the Welsh word for habitat. In the model, there are five decision domains: Clear, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic and Confusion. Cynefin is really a sense-making tool to help guide managers through problems that are complicated or complex in the hope that chaos can be avoided.

Geek Smart People are very good at complicated problems. This is the domain of the “expert” who can rapidly sift through the “known unknowns.”

Give an expert a complicated problem and they’re the perfect fit for the job. They have the ability to hone in on the relevant details and parse out the things that would distract the rest of us. Cryptography is an example of a complicated problem. So is most coding. This is the natural habitat of the tech engineer.

Tech founders initially become successful because they are very good at solving complicated problems. In fact, in our culture, they are treated like rock stars. They are celebrated for their “expertise.” Typically, this comes with a “smartest person in the room” level of smugness. They have no time for those that don’t see through the complications of the world the same way they do.

Here we run into a cognitive obstacle uncovered by political science writer Philip E. Tetlock in his 2005 book, Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?

As Tetlock discovered, expertise in one domain doesn’t always mean success in another, especially if one domain has complicated problems and the other has complex problems.

Complex problems, like predicting the future or managing people in a massive organization, lie in the realm of “unknown unknowns.” Here, the answer is emergent. These problems are, by their very nature, unpredictable. The very toughest complex problems fall into a category I’ve talked about before: Wicked Problems. And, as Philip Tetlock discovered, experts are no better at dealing with complexity than the rest of us. In fact, in a complex scenario like predicting the future, you’d probably have just as much success with a dart throwing chimpanzee.

But it gets worse. There’s no shame in not being good at complex problems. None of us are. The problem with expertise lies not in a lack of knowledge, but in experts sticking to a cognitive style ill-suited to the task at hand: trying to apply complicated brilliance to complex situations. I call this the “everything is a nail” syndrome. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Tetlock explains, “ They [experts] are just human in the end. They are dazzled by their own brilliance and hate to be wrong. Experts are led astray not by what they believe, but by how they think.”

A Geek-Smart person believes they know the answer better than anyone else because they see the world differently. They are not open to outside input. And it’s just that type of open-minded thinking that is required to wrestle with complex problems.

When you consider all that, is it any wonder that Musk is blowing up Twitter –  and not in a good way?

My Many Problems with the Metaverse

I recently had dinner with a comedian who had just did his first gig in the Metaverse. It was in a new Meta-Comedy Club. He was excited and showed me a recording of the gig.

I have to admit, my inner geek thought it was very cool: disembodied hands clapping with avataresque names floating above, bursts of virtual confetti for the biggest laughs and even a virtual-hook that instantly snagged meta-hecklers, banning them to meta-purgatory until they promised to behave. The comedian said he wanted to record a comedy meta-album in the meta-club to release to his meta-followers.

It was all very meta.

As mentioned, as a geek I’m intrigued by the Metaverse. But as a human who ponders our future (probably more than is healthy) – I have grave concerns on a number of fronts. I have mentioned most of these individually in previous posts, but I thought it might be useful to round them up:

Removed from Reality

My first issue is that the Metaverse just isn’t real. It’s a manufactured reality. This is at the heart of all the other issues to come.

We might think we’re clever, and that we can manufacturer a better world than the one that nature has given us, but my response to that would be Orgel’s Second Rule, courtesy of Sir Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA: “Evolution is cleverer than you are.”

For millions of years, we have evolved to be a good fit in our natural environment. There are thousands of generations of trial and error baked into our DNA that make us effective in our reality. Most of that natural adaptation lies hidden from us, ticking away below the surface of both our bodies and brains, silently correcting course to keep us aligned and functioning well in our world.

But we, in our never-ending human hubris, somehow believe we can engineer an environment better than reality in less than a single generation. If we take Second Life as the first iteration of the metaverse, we’re barely two decades into the engineering of a meta-reality.

If I was placing bets on who is the better environmental designer for us, humans or evolution, my money would be on evolution, every time.

Who’s Law is It Anyway?

One of the biggest selling features of the Metaverse is that it frees us from the restrictions of geography. Physical distance has no meaning when we go meta.

But this also has issues. Societies need laws and our laws have evolved to be grounded within the boundaries of geographical jurisdictions. What happens when those geographical jurisdictions become meaningless? Right now, there are no laws specifically regulating the Metaverse. And even if there are laws in the future, in what jurisdiction would they be enforced?

This is a troubling loophole – and by hole I mean a massive gaping metaverse-sized void. You know who is attracted by a lack of laws? Those who have no regard for the law. If you don’t think that criminals are currently eyeing the metaverse looking for opportunity, I have a beautiful virtual time-share condo in the heart of meta-Boca Raton that I’d love to sell you.

Data is Matter of the Metaverse

Another “selling feature” for the metaverse is the ability to append metadata to our own experiences, enriching them with access to information and opportunities that would be impossible in the real world. In the metaverse, the world is at our fingertips – or in our virtual headset – as the case may be. We can stroll through worlds, real or imagined, and the sum of all our accumulated knowledge is just one user-prompt away.

But here’s the thing about this admittedly intriguing notion: it makes data a commodity and commodities are built to be exchanged based on market value. In order to get something of value, you have to exchange something of value. And for the builders of the metaverse, that value lies in your personal data. The last shreds of personal privacy protection will be gone, forever!

A For-Profit Reality

This brings us to my biggest problem with the Metaverse – the motivation for building it. It is being built not by philanthropists or philosophers, academics or even bureaucrats. The metaverse is being built by corporations, who have to hit quarterly profit projections. They are building it to make a buck, or, more correctly, several billion bucks.

These are the same people who have made social media addictive by taking the dirtiest secrets of Las Vegas casinos and using them to enslave us through our smartphones. They have toppled legitimate governments for the sake of advertising revenue. They have destroyed our concept of truth, bashed apart the soft guardrails of society and are currently dismantling democracy. There is no noble purpose for a corporation – their only purpose is profit.

Do you really want to put your future reality in those hands?