The Relentless, Fruitless Search for Facts

In my younger days, I was something of a know-it-all. (I can hear my wife now, saying, "are you counting yesterday as your 'younger days'?) In school, or talking with my family, I couldn't resist lobbing in the facts of whatever was being discussed. From which, of course, I learned that you shouldn't do that if you want people to stay in the same room as you. To be honest, though, what I eventually learned is that much of what I thought of as facts, or more accurately as truth, didn't deserve that lofty title.

I was led to think about this yesterday when I had a brief chat with a respected colleague about the Republican convention, and in particular Paul Ryan. He liked Ryan, overall, but said (the following quote, being from memory, is not a fact), "I'm really disappointed that he lied about that GM factory closing. I don't know why he had to do that." Having seen Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz condemn him as a liar the night before, I told him that I thought the timeline was not as black and white as some were saying, and that Ryan hadn't played with the facts. 

But I had a further thought after we parted: we have created a political (and really a social) culture where opinions are valued, as my dad used to say, "like assholes...everyone's got one, and they usually stink." Contrasted to opinions are facts, which we say are the only things that really matter. So people on both sides of any debate work incredibly hard to have their beliefs, theories and explanations enshrined as facts, and the other side's declared mere opinion, or (in the case of Paul Ryan) smeared as mere falsehood.

Let's go back to the Paul Ryan speech to see what I mean. (The link has an interesting analysis of competing truth claims from NPR). He said: 

"President Barack Obama came to office during an economic crisis, as he has reminded us a time or two. Those were very tough days, and any fair measure of his record has to take that into account. My home state voted for President Obama. When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, [Wis.], where we were about to lose a major factory.
"A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: 'I believe that if our government is there to support you ... this plant will be here for another hundred years.' That's what he said in 2008.
"Well, as it turned out, that plant didn't last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that's how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight." (emphasis from source article)

So if we wanted to map it out a bit, we could say that Ryan, first, acknowledged that we have to acknowledge the President didn't have it easy, noted that the factory was imperiled, stated that then-candidate Obama offered a (somewhat conditional) pledge to save that factory, and then noted that the factory was soon closed for good. If you read NPR's analysis, or any other, I don't think you will find that anyone is saying those statements were, in the basic sense of the word, false.

The dispute, such as it is, can be found in this passage from the Washington Post's Fact Check: 

In his acceptance speech, GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan appeared to suggest that President Obama was responsible for the closing of a GM plant in Ryan’s home town of Janesville, Wis.
Obama gave his speech in February 2008, and he did say those words. But Ryan’s phrasing, referring to the fact the plant did not last another year, certainly suggests it was shut down in 2009, when Obama was president.
Ryan, in fact, issued a news release in June 2008, urging GM to keep the plant open after the automaker announced it would close it.
The plant was largely closed in December 2008 when production of General Motors SUVs ceased — before Obama was sworn in. A small crew of about 100 workers completed a contract for production of medium-duty trucks for Isuzu Motors, a contract that ended in April 2009.

To break it down, again, the writer claims that Ryan, "appeared to suggest" Obama's responsibility, then acknowledges Obama was accurately quoted by Ryan, then again says Ryan's phrasing "suggests" the plant was shut down in 2009, points out the plant was planned to be closed before then, finds that the plant was "largely closed" at the end of 2008, and acknowledges in fact 100 people were working in 2009. 

The first thing you might observe is that the "fact check" is longer and more ambiguous than the speech it attempts to clarify. The second is that most of the facts on offer are in fact opinions about what Ryan meant, or Clintonesque convolutions about what the word "closed" might mean. 

But what you might miss, in all of this, is that by the time we can all agree that there was no flagrant, intentional violation of established facts on Ryan's part (and if I haven't convinced you of that, please give up on me now) we have completely forgotten about the point he was trying to make. If I was inclined to be cynical, I'd say maybe that was the desired result: distract us from the ideas being discussed by raising the alarm that the truth is being hijacked. But I think there's a deeper issue: as a society, we've become extremely uncomfortable in thinking about and evaluating ideas.

Ryan's idea, if I can be so bold as to interpret it, is that government, held out by Democrats as an essential part of promoting innovation, creating jobs and building businesses, will in fact sap our vitality and harm our economy if it becomes too central. The anecdote he offers here resembles a small morality tale: an aspiring ruler promises a community that he can save their factory and their jobs, they enthusiastically support him, the factory closes anyway. The moral is that we should not put our faith in any leader, but rely on ourselves (and on the entrepreneurs who are held up as the people who can really create jobs.)

Now, none of this is factual, but that doesn't mean it is mere, useless opinion. It is an argument, a principle, a philosophy of governing, or (as Jonah Goldberg might say) an ideology. In a world where the facts alone cannot tell us which politician to vote for, we shouldn't look down our noses at belief systems that help us make sense of a complex world and determine a plan of action. In fact, they are absolutely essential, and choosing a belief system to follow is the proper task of this (and every) election. We used to be more comfortable talking about competing philosophies and using our values and life experience to choose between them, but now we dig, frantically, for the fool's gold of facts that aren't really facts at all.

I believe the desire to declare "facts" where none (or few) exist can be traced back to our respect for science. We see scientists answering some of the most complex questions of the natural world and want to do the same thing to the political and social worlds. While understanding that impulse, I would offer a note: we refer to the great revolutions of science with labels like, "The Theory of Evolution" or "The Theory of Relativity" because those breakthroughs are not facts. They are models that best explain the observations made by countless scientists, that are confirmed by abundant experiments. Saying that evolution is not a fact does not mean that it is on equal footing with Creationism: the vast preponderance of facts support evolution, while Creationism rests entirely on questionable religious authority. But it acknowledges that someday, a theory may come along that builds on what we currently know, and will better explain the facts than evolution does. 

There is no such preponderance of facts to support either "The Theory of Market-Driven Growth" (aka Republicanism) or "The Theory of Government-Guided Economic Stability" (aka Democratism). So place your faith not in the self-appointed fact checkers, but in your own ability to weigh the two candidates' philosophies and determine which one you trust.

Messaging verus Brand-Building: A Lesson from Politics

I've nothing original to say about the presidential race, so don't worry: this isn't that kind of a post. But I am curious about why our political debates seem so unpleasant and uninspiring, and why our trust in our leaders seems to be at an all time low. My contention is that we can track the problem to the constant polling and struggles to "win the news cycle": in other words an emphasis on messaging instead of--and in truth at the expense of--brand building.

David Brooks, in a recent column reinforcing a point made by Peggy Noonan, wrote about his "...attitude toward this presidential campaign: It’s incredibly consequential and incredibly boring all at the same time." He has a number of theories why, but I'd like to focus on one:

Third, increased focus on the uninformed. Four years ago, Barack Obama gave a sophisticated major speech on race. Mitt Romney did one on religion. This year, the candidates do not feel compelled to give major speeches. The prevailing view is that anybody who would pay attention to such a speech is already committed to a candidate. It’s more efficient to focus on the undecided voters, who don’t really follow politics or the news. 

Brooks doesn't get into how they target the uninformed, but I think we know: create a sensational claim about your opponent that fires up the media, and hope that the media will run with it to the point that it enters the consciousness of the uninformed voter. And, to drive the point home, run lots of ads echoing the attack.

As a marketer, I both understand this approach and am appalled by it. I understand because, unlike just about any other decision you make, presidential elections are a binary choice. The electorate "buys" one candidate or another. Individual voters have the option of staying home, but to a candidate's political operation, a non-voter is much better than a voter for the other guy, so that's alright. If, in contrast, I'm trying to sell a Toyota Camry, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to attack the Honda Accord, because the buyer can just go and buy a Nissan Maxima (or buy nothing, which is just as bad for you as if they buy a competitor.) You have to make a sale, so you might compare when you're better (especially when you're "best in class") but you won't just go negative.

But, as I said, I find it appalling that a campaign would go this route, not from any moral squeamishness (though many attacks cross a moral line) but because it is ultimately counter-productive. To be an effective political leader, you have to be a brand.

The ironic thing is that Barack Obama aspired to be a brand in 2008. In the classic marketing formulation, a brand should provide a rational, emotional and self-expressive benefit. How did Obama want to do this? His rational benefit was that he claimed the power to bridge an increasingly divided America. His classic line was, "there is no Red America and Blue America, just the United States of America." In other words, he was a centrist, a pragmatist, and would find solutions acceptable to both sides. You could argue that this was the "change" he often spoke of: not just the change from George W. Bush, but the change from ideological conflict to rational, solution-oriented governance.

The emotional benefit he offered was his other buzzword, "hope". This tapped into something deep within the country's psyche, because I'd contend we were feeling particularly hopeless after the wars, natural disasters and economic strains of the Bush years. But to achieve the emotional benefit he aspired to, Obama would need to deliver on the rational benefit. Part of our hopelessness was that our very system seemed to be failing.

Let me explain self-expressive benefits before I tackle what Obama offered: they are essentially what affiliation with a brand says about you. Nike has a famous self-expressive benefit: when I wear Nike gear, I'm showing the world that I'm a committed, hard-working athlete. Obama had a unique self-expressive benefit. His supporters were able to say, "I'm the kind of person who sees past labels (whether Democrat and Republican or black and white) and makes a visionary choice." A vote for Obama was saying you were on the side of tomorrow.

But a brand has to be very careful not to over-promise, because people don't like it when they fall for a brand only to feel it has let them down. I'd say Obama's failure (in the minds of a majority of Americans) to deliver on his promised rational benefit has tainted the emotional and self-expressive benefits he offered. If I was giving him advice, I'd say that his best bet is to go out with a certain amount of humility, and say, "I think we've accomplished some important things, but I pledged to change the attitude in DC and that is, to put it mildly, still a work in progress. I haven't done that as well as I wish I had. But one big initiative of my second term is going to be (pick issue with broad bipartisan support), and I hope if I am fortunate enough to still be the leader of this great country, that my Republican colleagues will sit down with me, share their thoughts, and give my proposals a fair shake." If he was really thinking about his brand, that issue would be deficit reduction, and he'd find a way to make a proposal that would make at least some Republicans say, "Damn, that's not such a bad idea."

But it seems obvious at this point that Obama's strategy is to say that Republicans are impossible to work with, and that they want only to help the rich and return us to the bad old days of George W. Bush's presidency. He doesn't seem to care that his message is poisoning what is left of his brand.

So, what about Romney? His challenge is that he is an essentially cautious man, and those types of executives tend not to focus on brand-building because good brands take a strong position, and by nature don't please everyone. Even the company he started, Bain Capital, borrowed the brand name of a famous consultancy. So it's not surprising that his brand is poorly defined. There seems some chance that the selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate might help him to define it, but his lack of brand-building before the pick means the pair is vulnerable to being defined as benefit-slashing, heartless tools of the wealthy. I'd advise them to make their rational value "sustainability", though you could equally say "preservation" could work: essentially, that we are going to find ways to sustain America's greatness and America's promise to her people. Our entitlements, our security, our freedoms and our place in the world could all be defined as unsustainable on the path we're on now. I'd relentlessly make the point that both Republican and Democratic leadership have made decisions that put our wealth, our freedoms, our safety net and our security at risk, and the Romney/Ryan administration will retrench us in a way that they are on sure footing.

That easily enables an emotional benefit of: "unleashing potential". People want to believe that we could do a lot better, that the system or the decisions of our leadership are hamstringing us. Give them faith that you have a solution.

Republicans typically try to tap into a self-expressive benefit of patriotism: I think it's fair to say a lot of Republicans harbor suspicions that Democrats like the America that they think will exist in the future, when we fix it, not the country that exists now. My guess is you'll see that again this year, but I think that'd be a missed opportunity. It doesn't appeal to anyone worried about their job or their family or their debt. I think they need to make people feel that a vote for Romney is a vote for optimism. That not all our options are miserable, that we can rearrange things so that more people are more successful and happier.

The trick is, to build that type of a brand the Romney campaign would have to stop focusing on Obama's flaws and say how he would make things better. And have the facts and conviction to make the case compellingly, and keep making it despite all the fleeting issues that will pop up during the campaign. But there is no reason to expect this to happen. Instead, we should anticipate the daily messaging efforts to continue. Here's Brooks again:

Both campaigns fervently believe that more spending leads to more votes. They also believe that if they can carpet bomb swing voters with enough negative ads, then eventually the sheer weight of the barrage will produce movement in their direction. There’s little evidence that these prejudices are true. But the campaigns are like World War I generals. If something isn’t working, the answer must be to try more of it.

 Maybe things will change, but it is more likely we'll keep getting messaged by both sides, and keep feeling worse and worse about where our politics and our country are going.

The Collapse of Our Institutions

A few months ago, I came across this article, compellingly titled "In Nothing We Trust", which catalogues our widespread lack of faith in the institutions of public life. Here's a sample:

People have lost faith in their institutions. Government, politics, corporations, the media, organized religion, organized labor, banks, businesses, and other mainstays of a healthy society are failing. It’s not just that the institutions are corrupt or broken; those clichés oversimplify an existential problem: With few notable exceptions, the nation’s onetime social pillars are ill-equipped for the 21st century. Most critically, they are failing to adapt quickly enough for a population buffeted by wrenching economic, technological, and demographic change.

The article goes on to highlight all the ways our institutions seem to be failing us. And who can deny that the pillars of civic life listed above are failing badly? Anecdotally, I speak to many people who feel as though we don't have the will or the ability to accomplish great things -- or even necessary things -- collectively.

The authors imply that this is a failure of adaptation: we need to change but we won't. But I think it is more fundamentally a failure of communication. We are increasingly incapable of telling others what we need and what we can offer. We don't have the shared assumptions, or the shared vocabulary, necessary to accomplish much institutionally.

An example: there was recently a dust-up about whether government created the Internet. An article by Farhad Manjoo ridiculed conservatives who challenged Obama's claim that the Internet was a fruit of government spending. He correctly points out that most of the fundamental technologies that allowed the Internet to develop were created by government agencies or government-sponsored research. But let's look at the original Obama quote that sparked the controversy:

“The Internet didn’t get invented on its own,” Obama said. “Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”

This was part of Obama's now (in)famous Virginia speech, where he uttered the often-quoted words, "You didn't build that." Conservatives have spent the month or so insisting that the speech revealed Obama holds to a liberal worldview that the government is the prime mover of society. Liberals pushed back by saying he was making a totally uncontroversial point about the role of infrastructure and basic research in allowing society to function and advance smoothly. But let's go back to the quote above: Obama uses the phrase "so that", implying that (to a conservative's ears) the purpose of the Internet was to allow private enterprise a new opportunity to make money. That's pretty clearly not true: the basic technologies of the Internet were invented to allow easier communication between a group of academics and researchers, and additional technologies and programs were, over decades, layered on top of it to create much of our current online experience. Conservatives are objecting both to the apparent diminishing of that private contribution, as well as the notion that government was far-sighted enough to develop the Internet for the private economy's gain. But again, liberals hear the same words and take away only that the government's efforts were a necessary precursor to private entrepreneurship.

The schism in the electorate exemplified by the above controversy suggest it is going to be near-impossible to get the two sides to agree on anything. Which leaves institutions two options: choose a side or try to split the difference. Choosing a side, of course, infuriates the other, while attempting to be "objective" just invites endless gotcha moments whenever one side thinks you've failed to live up to that ideal. It leads to a culture marked by scorekeeping and interminable squabbles over details rather than the progress that comes from a clear and widely accepted purpose. What we have now is two adversarial social tribes, each searching for a way to win.

To some degree, this tribal combat has always existed, but it is enhanced and made more toxic by information overload. Try to figure out, for example, the potential impacts of Obamacare on our budget and deficit. Read the Congressional Budget Office analysis, which alone will overwhelm you. (I'll be honest, I haven't read it all and don't plan to.) Now look at the responses from conservatives who criticize its more optimistic assumptions, and liberals who don't think the CBO credits certain cost-saving measures enough. Who's right? They'll all make at least superficially plausible arguments (unless you wade into the depths of the blogosphere) but there's no final answer. When there were relatively few information sources to choose from, consensus was at least possible, or you would have two or three arguments, a number manageable enough to consume and judge. Now, there's always another voice clamoring to be heard, and so most people throw up their hands and trust the folks representing their tribe to be right.

I'm taking a Coursera class on fantasy literature taught by Eric Rabkin, of the University of Michigan. For our first class we read Grimms' Fairy Tales, and he lectured that part of the purpose of the Tales was to forge the basis for a common German identity. The stories we tell each other, the fundamental beliefs that inform how we process information and make decisions, those are the basis for agreement and the starting point for institutions that can function well. Nowadays, though, we don't have any common stories, and even the words we hear mean different things depending on our politics. We seem doomed to fight over who is right while our institutions collapse around us.

A Bit More on Online Education and the Future of College

I often wait a week or two between when I find a topic and when I write about it, in large part because there are so many other interesting perspectives on any topic that I want to get a more complete picture. But my last post, on the ways online courses will change the way we think about education, went from seed to sprout more quickly, and I didn't get a chance to consider this post by Benjamin Lima. He writes about the unbundling of higher education (and uses the term the same way I use disaggregation), and makes some great points. First, that education is much more than a bundle of courses, it is a bundle of different benefits and experiences: 

A college education has traditionally bundled several different kinds of goods together: 

1. The curriculum: mastery of specific knowledge and development of more general reasoning, analytical, and communication skills.
2. The extra-curriculum: a network of friends and contacts, and experience gained from clubs, sports, internships and other activities.
3. The signaling process: validation of general talent or status by completing all of the above at a “better” or highly ranked college.
4. The college experience: everything that is personally interesting, enjoyable or rewarding about living in a certain place with certain people, and having experiences that are personally valuable to the college student, regardless of their value to anyone else or to society at large—everything from late-night conversations about the meaning of life, to road trips, to pranks, sports rivalries, and “school spirit.”

Traditionally, colleges provided all of these goods in a bundle, simply because the best way to provide them was to expensively gather a lot of students, faculty and resources in one place for several years at a time. But now, with the internet, is the logic of bundling starting to break down?

I think this is a great summary of why we consume college, and he goes on to note that the Internet can probably do a good job of unbundling #1 from the other three benefits, but those other three benefits still retain significant value. He additionally notes that the second and third benefits (arguably, at least) have value to society and are thus worth supporting in some way, while "the college experience" is essentially personal consumption, comprable to travel. Therefore, it is unlikely society will continue to subsidize it once it is unbundled from the other benefits. His conclusion, then, is worth noting:

Top colleges might be able to continue to use their vast resources (in the words of Kevin Carey: wealth, prestige, and exclusivity) to provide an expensive, valuable college experience (category 4) that helps attract top students, high-paying students, top faculty, and donations, in a self-reinforcing cycle as the rich get richer. This self-reinforcing cycle might very well increase the stratification among colleges, as fewer and fewer colleges are able to “play the game” and attract scarce “stars” among students and faculty. Over recent years, one could argue that this has already been happening, as top public universities in the U.S. are less and less able to compete with top private universities.  These top universities provide their students with bundle that includes both a lot of “college experience” to consume, and a high return on their human-capital investment.

If I was an administrator at, say, Providence College, this would terrify me. My alma mater is a good school, that offers a solid combination of the four benefits listed above. But it doesn't have the massive endowment of many schools in the Northeast, and it doesn't offer any elite academic programs, its alumni can't necessarily open a lot of doors for new graduates, the name doesn't cause HR directors to stop and take notice, and Providence, while wonderful, can't compete with Boston as a host for the full college experience. So how does it continue to fill its classrooms when those same students can virtually enroll in Ivy League courses? (If they hired me to do their strategy, I'd give a long look at doubling down on their Catholic identity, on the theory that there will always be parents who want their children to be morally educated and will steer them away from schools that indoctrinate their students in liberal secular humanism.)

Elsewhere, Walter Russell Mead, who inspired the original post, notes that studies indicate students learn as much from online courses as they do when they park their butts in the classroom, removing one obvious objection to online learning.

Online Education and Student Psychology

The always thought-provoking Walter Russell Mead wrote a little ways back about the coming revolution in education. (He also points out the challenge of building a viable economic model around online courses.) His thesis is that the advent of high-quality online courses and the ubiquity of the technology needed to access them will make education cheaper, more readily available, more customizable...just BETTER, for the most part. In his words: 

Online ed will accelerate rather than retard the transformation of American higher ed. Education needs to be cheaper and higher quality than most of it now is; there is no way universities can meet that demand without fundamental change.

 Mead has written about the topic at length, and sees expanding online education as a solution to the problem of the "higher education bubble" pointed out by Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) and others. The absurdity of paying so much for a degree that may not even reliably provide opportunities for well-compensated employment is now undeniable, but so is the reality that moving to online courses may dissolve the business model of bricks-and-mortar higher education, with unpredictable results.

However, the economics of online education is not my primary interest, it's the psychology. How will our perceptions of the value and importance of higher education change if it moves into cyberspace? (And how often do you hear anyone use that term anymore? I miss cyberspace...) A few thoughts:

1) The perceived value of an online education is likely to be lower even if, and maybe especially if, you earn your online degree from a prestigious school. Live attendance is likely to become a status marker, as well as enhancing the social bonds between those who did so while making them resentful of others who took what they will perceive as shortcuts. You can imagine an interviewer probing a candidate who lists MIT on their resume to see if they literally went there.

2) Pretty much every generation after World War II was brought up to function within an institutional setting. The basic model is that the institution (school, corporation, etc.) sets the rules by which success is judged, and the best rule followers succeed. But online education promises to take away the guiding role of institutions. Don't like what Harvard says a well-rounded education entails? Then take just the class or two from Harvard that you really have interest in, and don't worry about their degree. Feel constrained by what you need to do to get a psychology degree? Some university will probably help you design your own curriculum, pulling from a variety of sources, to help you achieve the education you want. This is a variation of the same disaggregation that has devastated newspapers, the music industry, and anyone else who makes money by bundling content. So what's the problem? We'll all be able to get our custom-fitted educations, and be more fulfilled, right? Well, while we might be comfortable mixing news from a bunch of different sources, educational institutions have a much more powerful claim to authority than the media does: their role is to teach us what we need to know. How, then, can we choose what classes we prefer without leaving holes in our education? My prediction is that students and professors will look for new ways to create virtual institutions that still set norms and aggregate classes into coherent programs of study. The alternative turns education into an overly self-centered exercise.

3) In an online educational world, we will see an odd race to the bottom to attract students with money to spend on education but without the wisdom to know what they really need to learn. Get ready for students taking classes on critical television analysis and the like. While many educators will no doubt look to online education as a way to positively influence more young minds, there will be many more who see that creating courses that pander to students' existing knowledge and interests is a quick way to make a buck. After all, a professor probably needs only a few hundred enrollees to make an online course a profitable venture. The division, already so familiar to anyone who goes to college, between people who are determined to push themselves (the minority) and those who navigate the easiest path to their degree, may be exacerbated.

4) The long-term psychological shift that is likely to play out is to greater, but more sporadic, consumption of education, with more value placed on utility and less on the badge value of the institution hosting the course. I'll use myself as an example. I went to a reasonably well-respected Catholic college, majoring in English, with the intent to be a journalist or writer. I'm now a marketer, and while the skills I learned have broad application to my work, I was never formally schooled on the ins and outs of my craft. I have no strong interest in an MBA and no ability to suspend my career to pursue a masters degree in Anthropology, which I'm otherwise interested in. Now, imagine I was living in a world of disaggregated higher ed. I may well have gotten an English degree, and maybe, if I could afford it, would have spent some time physically on campus. But at some point I might well have switched to taking classes online while I took my first steps into marketing. Then, periodically, as my career advanced, I would be likely to seek specific knowledge that might aid my advancement (and I'd feel pressure to take courses because a lot of other people would be doing it). Eventually, I might work with an institution to define a degree program incorporating some of the one-off classes I already took with a more focused course of study. And if I'm interested in pursuing a new career, I could take a course or two to test the water before I really commit. Suddenly your education becomes scalable to the scope of your ambition, because not everything needs to be oriented towards getting a degree.

In short, the short term reaction to disaggregated online education is likely to be mixed, with people's excitement tempered by online being seen as second rate and with a tendency to create courses that are easily marketed rather than rigorous, challenging options. But as we come to accept that the notion of young adults sequestering themselves on a campus for four years is an arbitrary, and maybe not even ideal, way to deliver education, I think we may see a culture that begins to prize relevant, on-demand learning over a lifetime. In response, traditional educational institutions for young people will be joined by new organizations poised to help adults identify and personalize more results-oriented educational programs.

And, if the casualty of this change is that many colleges cease to exist, or offer traditional on-site education, those campuses will be lovely communities to live in, with many amenities for those no longer burdened by massive student loan debts.

How Much Control Do We Have Over Our Brains?

There is a significant trend in neuroscience, and maybe even more so among the commentators who use that science to justify their political or social beliefs, of denying that we are really responsible for our own behavior. The usual argument goes like this: when a person does X, their brain scans light up in a certain way. People with brain damage to that area don't do X, or do it differently. Therefore we don't really have control of ourselves, our decisions or beliefs are just a function of our anatomy. I have written critically about these Just-So Science Stories here. Other writers (ok, better writers), in a political context, have pointed out that some liberal social scientists have started using this same approach to define conservatism as a disease.


However, just because science can be manipulated to support certain dubious conclusions doesn't mean there isn't a lot of interesting work being done in understanding how the brain works. And one such finding has to do with how a parasite in our brains might be responsible for our positive reactions to the scents of certain wines and perfumes. As writer Patrick House puts it:

Why is it that the elite French perfumers (known as “noses”) and sommeliers (“upturned noses”) of the world spend so much of their time inhaling cat effluvia from expensive glass bottles? A guess: It may have to do with a mind-control parasite called Toxoplasma gondii. The tiny protozoan may be getting into our brains and tricking us into liking cats—not to mention certain perfumes and wines.

In a recent study, Czech scientists gave men and women towels scented with the urine of various animals—horses, lions, hyenas, cats, dogs—which they rated for “pleasantness.” Turns out, men who tested positive for Toxo found the smell of cat urine more pleasant than men without Toxo. For Toxo researchers like me, this was a shock but not entirely surprising. Why? Toxo does approximately the same thing to rats.

You'll have to read the article to get the full theory of why Toxo does what it does, but the implications are staggering: a single-celled organism might be altering way our brain processes information from our senses. Think of it: could we find a bacteria that lowers the speed at which our neurons fire, influencing how fast we remember or respond to stimuli? Could we find a parasite that alters our hearing our sight?

Or think of the commercial issues. Some perfume and wine companies would presumably do better if more people were infected by Toxo. Maybe Chanel will start working with animal adoption organizations to try to get cats into more homes, increasing their likely customer base.

If we begin to discover that some significant portion of the way we perceive the world is influenced by outside organisms, will we attempt to purge them all to standardize the way the human mind works? Will we search for those with favorable impacts and try to infect everyone with them? Could this be the next frontier in pharmaceutical development? Or is this a one-off, and our mental machinery is basically unaltered by microscopic invaders? I guess we just have to wait and see.

Why We Believe We Are Entitled to Health Care

I learned the Supreme Court voted to uphold Obamacare today while I was in a brainstorming session for a drug that will launch next year. I had the same thought I've had on other occasions when people define the "right" to health care: how can someone have a right to a product that has just been invented, or to a skill that certain individuals study for decades to acquire and perfect? Of course, if we want to be strict with our language, Obamacare doesn't give anyone a right to health care, it creates a new entitlement to health care.

I've always had a problem with the notion of a government entitlement. It implies, to my ears, that the State determines what people need to get by in life, and then sets out to give it to them. And that the people have to be vigilant in making sure that they get what's coming to them. I hear, in my head, a smart but whiny teenager, "If my sister is getting a new car, then I'm entitled to one, too!"

But leave aside my grumpy dislike of the word: should there be an entitlement to health care? And what would we include (and exclude) within that entitlement? A lot of people clearly believe there should be a very broad health care entitlement, including medicines like contraception that stretch that entitlement far beyond life-and-death issues. So, are we entitled to all pharmaceutical products? Even this one? Is every surgery part of that entitlement? Even this one? Suddenly it becomes hard to find the line.

I kept sitting in my meeting, thinking about these issues and (as it happens) eating a wonderful chipwich. My mind went to FDR's Four Freedoms, and specifically the Freedom from Want. That idea is largely defined as implying a right to adequate food, clothing and shelter, and sometimes to the right to a job that pays a living wage. It seems odd, first of all, that we would push for universal healthcare before we would push for universal access to those more basic elements of survival. But it also seems apparent, if we defined a food entitlement as broadly as we define the health care entitlement, that we would be enshrining universal access to chipwiches into law. Of course, people like me would love that, and I'm sure the chipwich people would love that (and clearly, the pharmaceutical industry was bullish on the notion of increasing their potential market with Obamacare), but that doesn't mean it makes economic or practical sense.

Forgive me for going on, but I'm trying to make the argument that we have very muddle-headed thinking about what a health care entitlement should actually do, and what it should (or shouldn't) cover. I'm going to assume that my chipwich analogy has you convinced that we can't give all people access to everything that falls under the header of health care. But why isn't this instantly apparent to people?

Well, I'd like to offer two completely speculative suggestions. The first is that health care consumption is much more passive for most people than is their consumption of food, clothing, shelter and other basic necessities. If you need food, you go out and buy what you think is best and what you can afford. Even if you are on food stamps, the choice of food and the act of getting it is still in your hands. But taking charge of your health in a similar way is almost impossible. You very rarely even know what you need until someone else tells you: if you feel "bad", you go to a doctor who pronounces what you need, and then hands you a piece of paper which you docilely take to a pharmacist, who hands you a bottle of nondescript pills that you assume will do what everyone told you to do. And most of this is paid for by your insurance, so you don't even really know what it costs. Essentially, your health is already basically someone else's problem, so taking the step of saying it is the government's responsibility isn't really that dramatic.

The second possibility is that improving our health through popping pills or invasive surgery is evolutionarily novel. The psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa has developed the theory that intelligence evolved to deal with evolutionarily novel problems, the type of things we wouldn't have to deal with every day. As he puts it:

We know what to do when it comes to mating.  We know what to do when it comes to parenting and learning a language associated with other people. All these things our ancestors did already have ready-made solutions in our brain, but occasionally there are novel problems that required our ancestors to think and that’s how intelligence evolves. Some people who could think and reason and solve these evolutionary novel problems did better occasionally, so my contention is that intelligence evolved to deal with novel problems and as a result more intelligent people are more likely to recognize evolutionarily novel entities and situations.

So, you'd expect that, faced with the proliferation of new treatments, intelligent people would be more comfortable dealing with them and coming up with ways to make them more accessible. But he continues:

The key part of the equation is that intelligence leads individuals to seek novel solutions and as a result they become more likely to adopt novel preferences and values, so intelligence makes people do unnatural things.

I read this to imply that, in the face of evolutionarily novel situations, people are willing to try something different, but we aren't automatically going to pick the right or most workable solution to the problem we face. People generally know what to do to get food, clothing and shelter, but the novelty of accessing health solutions might make us willing to consider "unnatural" alternatives.

To go back to food analogies: we would never say that everyone has the right to prime rib and lobster every day, because we all intuitively understand we'd go broke. But the novelty of health care makes us blind to that simple truth. Of course, eventually economic reality will overwhelm our confusion and the good intentions that have led us to this point.

Is Buzz Dead?

In the digital world, you are never very far from the masses turning on you. Anything that gets popular seems guaranteed to spark a backlash. (For a good example, consider Stop Kony.) But could the legions of skeptics and critics out there actually overwhelm the initial benefit of publicity and viral popularity? That's the entertaining thesis of this post, arguing that buzz is dead. The author, Richard Rushfield, extends the theory from the obvious realm of pop culture (where backlashes against emerging trends are as old as disco) to politics. Rushfield observes: 

A poll today revealed that Mitt Romney’s favorable ratings have risen over the past few weeks, during a time when he’s largely been off center stage.   There’s been the Bain brouhaha, but Romney himself has mostly let others take on the fight, with Pres. Obama and Romney surrogates occupying the foreground, while he’s taken a step or two back. Compared to the primary battles when he was standing in the floodlights every day. 

Likewise, I’ve seen it demonstrated before that Obama’s approval rating tends to go up when he was out of the limelight, during the Republican primaries or when he’s been on vacation for instance.   

Looking at this it seems very clear that there is no such thing as positive attention in the Twitter age; that anyone who sticks their head up is going to just have it picked apart by 100,000,000 gnats.  The internet has largely become a roving lynch mob and you can’t stop a lynch mob with comedy GIF’s.

Rushfield then goes on to suggest a few antidotes to getting caught up in an anti-buzz backlash, including appealing to a group that isn't interested in broader societal acceptance (what he calls the "Game of Thrones model"), being intentionally ironic in gaining buzz in the first place, or just being really, really good. I'd note that none of these models seems particularly applicable to politics, the last in particular.
But why should we be so quick to turn on the hot trends of the moment? Why, I'm so happy you asked! It just so happens I have a theory:


1) Social media elevates people (or, in the case of politics, sound bytes) too quickly: There have always been one-hit wonders. But now social media amplifies the effect even further, as videos go viral and people want to share the latest thing. But the problem is there is no deep loyalty to these artists, and so when the backlash of criticism comes no one has much reason to defend them. That's why I would guess Gotye isn't going to be selling out arenas in three years, while the Black Keys will. The latter have been building a fan base for a long time, and those people will sustain them even when the snark inevitably starts building up. (A quick aside on how this works in politics: a campaign puts out a "talking point" that tested well in a focus group. In the real world, it gets promoted by that side's partisans, but the opposition attacks it for being artificial and the vast majority of America either doesn't care or else agrees that the point is phony. Talking point goes away, partisans complain that their campaign doesn't know how to communicate.)


2) Attention is a zero sum game: People only have 24 hours in a day. Every time you watch a stupid video because it is popular, you get annoyed: someone stole that time from you! Even worse, other people are now going to watch this "popular" thing when they could be watching some much better and underappreciated thing that you like. So, before you move on, you attack that awful thing that wasted your time. 


3) People don't always want to like what you like: Sure, if you post that your mom just got out of the hospital or put up some amusing meme, people will probably "like" it without concern about their digital self-image. But a lot of your friends probably think the bands you like, the politicians you like, the clothes you like and the celebrities you like are boring, stupid or worse. So, through a combination of wanting to assert their originality and wanting to passive aggressively criticize your taste, they post a snarky comment. Of course, not on your page (because that's how friendships end) but on the video's page.


That combination is deadly to marketers and promoters trying to build buzz on social networks. The interesting thing, when you're in a marketing brainstorm meeting that flits on to social media, is that most marketers ascribe to "consumers" behavior that they would never imagine themselves doing. Would you "like" Weight Watchers on Facebook out of solidarity with your dieting friend? Aren't you at least a little skeptical of any post that includes, "Everybody make this your status today to show the world..."? How often do you check out an artist that your friend likes, versus the number of times you roll your eyes and congratulate yourself on your superior taste? (Well, that last one might be mostly me, as my wife says I'm a music snob...)

Bottom line: you can, if you understand social media and the Internet well enough, manufacture a surge in attention for a brand, a cause, or a piece of content. What you cannot do is trick people into liking it once they see it, and you might, by pushing it too hard and too fast, alienate someone who might have eventually come around if they hadn't felt it was overhyped. Buzz isn't dead, but it is dangerous.

Believe in Digital, not Facebook

In my own modest way, I'm something of a digital evangelist: I think marketing, even in conservative areas like healthcare, will be fundamentally a digital activity by the end of the decade. And what does it mean for marketing to be digital? Simply that it is targeted to the point of personalization, highly measurable, and allows a big role for customer interaction and feedback. I think a lot of people who would basically agree with that description look at Facebook, and its over 1 billion users, and believe that they're looking at the future of marketing. And yet I think Facebook is ultimately way over-valued and will be a small part of most brands' marketing budgets. So how can I believe in digital and not in Facebook?


Now, lots of people don't like Facebook. Some of it is jealousy: you can't make $100 billion in your IPO without bringing out the haters. (Of course, some people are upset because it now seems their initial valuation might have been based on withholding some more negative forecasts.) But I am on record as hating Facebook before it was cool, writing about how Facebook may not be able to live up to the hype back in 2010, and last year speculating that Facebook's brand will not allow it to become a place where people buy things. My dislike is grounded not (just) in jealousy, but it real questions about their business model.


If I were to break down the logic that has made so many people think Facebook is worth so much, it is this: they have gotten a billion people to reveal tons of information about their lives, which will let companies conduct personal marketing at scale, reaching millions of relevant customers with exactly the right message. But one of my favorite authors, David Goldman (aka Spengler) makes an interesting point challenging that assumption:

No one is likely to learn much about anyone else by reading their Facebook page, or, indeed, by becoming their Facebook "friend". A Facebook page is constructed to maximize our appeal and white out our warts. We learn as little from the pages of Facebook "friends" as prospective employers learn about job candidates from a resume.

Later, he crystalizes the central paradox of Facebook:

[Facebook] attracts hundreds of millions of users by providing them with a platform for narcissism and the means to lie about themselves more persuasively, but it hopes to make money by learning what it is that they really like, the better to show them advertisements. Sadly, the system is worth a great deal of money, but not 100 times earnings.

I said earlier that digital marketing has three pillars: personalization, measurability, and interactivity. Facebook superficially seems to offer those things, but does it really? As people worry more and more about what their Facebook profiles are telling marketers (and family, and potential employers) they are likely to curate their digital selves more and more, stripping out a lot of the quirky or embarrassing details that would help marketers understand them as individuals. So much for personalization.


But Facebook is certainly measurable, right? Well, you get a lot of data from marketing on Facebook, which is good. But unlike search marketing on Google, for example, there isn't a clear answer for the question, "How much is a Like worth on Facebook?" People who really get it know you can probably define the value of that relationship for your brand if you're willing to crunch the numbers, but what people want is someone to say, "It's $8!" so you can build some assumptions into a marketing plan. But I would contend that since any marketing activity on Facebook (for most brands) is going to be geared towards generating goodwill and brand equity, rather than a direct response sale, measuring the value of Facebook marketing is going to be as squishy as measuring other forms of brand-building tends to be.


Finally, interactivity. Surely Facebook wins here, right? Well, for some brands. Brands that can take a point of view and be controversial, or have a large enough "cool factor" that those folks using Facebook as a personal advertisement want to associate with it. But there's a catch: the more brands that are in the conversation, the less attention there is for each brand. And unless you can define a unique audience segment you want to talk to and be consistently relevant and interesting, you're likely to be talking to yourself. So while some brands may develop a cohort of engaged followers, Facebook can't guarantee followers the way TV can guarantee eyeballs or Google can guarantee clicks.


Maybe so maybe there's a reason that a lot of companies, most recently GM, are saying that their Facebook ads aren't working. Of course, it might be that they don't know how to use the platform, but if a large and sophisticated company like GM fails on Facebook, we should expect a lot of other marketers will, as well. That hardly makes it a universal platform, and calls into question whether it will ever live up to that huge valuation.


I believe Facebook can be a tool to help you find your audience in the digital world, but it is hardly the only tool, and it frequently may be the wrong tool. It has fundamental limitations that will keep it from being a one-stop shop for marketers. But digital is much, much bigger than Facebook: it includes everything from online video to search and display ads to niche social media to this humble blog, and within those multitudes is a solution to most any marketing challenge. So go ahead, doubt Facebook along with me if you'd like, but don't let that stop moving you towards the digital future.

Is Your Decaying White Matter Making You Afraid of the Unfamiliar?

If you write about the inner workings of the brain, you soon find out that we don't actually know all that much about how it works. Sure, we have a reasonably good theory of how the brain processes sensory information, and we think we're starting to understand which parts of the brain do what, but how the elements of the brain interact and how all those processes lead up to consciousness is still largely the province of informed speculation.

So it is good to be humble when we theorize about the brain. Especially since we're still finding out things about its function that surprise us. For example, a recent study found out that the white matter of the brain, long treated as the unimportant part, seems to be the basis for the brain's overall "processing speed" (I use the quotes because we should also be careful with the mind-as-computer metaphors) and attention span. Thus, say the researchers, the increasing degeneration of the white matter in the aging brain can lead to, among other things, trouble coping with unfamiliar situations.

The prevailing theory of why people become, in common terms, stuck in their ways in old age is that we develop hard-to-change habits of mind. I've read a number of articles that imply that repeated behavior strengthens neurological pathways that lead to habitual processes, sometimes called "chunking". In other words, the brain forms habits to aid cognition, and sometimes we create bad habits through the same process of repeated behavior. And while this study doesn't undermine that theory, it does offer a complement to it: degeneration of white matter might make it harder to form new habits and leave us more reliant on the old.

Think, for a moment, of what that implies: your mind may inhibit you from comfortably doing something different from what you've done before as you get older. That's somewhat different, and more negative, than the idea that habits are hard to break. It also has implications for marketing: when targeting an older audience, the disruptive techniques that work so well to get the attention of the young might actually be upsetting or disorienting. Not a fun notion for those of us advertising to the baby boomer audience.

The good news, at the individual level, is that scientists believe that cognitive training may help resist white matter decay. But this study provides sobering evidence to support the notion that aging societies (and most societies globally are aging) will be more resistant to what's new and more uncomfortable with change. Which doesn't bode well for those of us who believe some pretty profound changes are necessary.

Apple Gets an FDA Letter

April 23, 2012

Mr. Tim Cook
CEO, Apple Inc
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014

Mr. Cook:

As I hope you are aware, under USC Title 15, Chapter 48, Section 2101, Congress has expanded the FDA's regulatory powers to cover all businesses that a consumer could reasonably (or unreasonably) believe are in some way involved in the production or distribution of ingested substances. Obviously, a company named Apple is now well within our purview. (And, if I may be frank with you, the use of a business name that creates the expectation of nutritional value when none is provided may, in and of itself, be the violation of several key regulations.)

However, it is my purpose today to provide a warning about Apple's current non-compliant marketing practices, hereafter to be referred to as NCMPs, and an order to cease and desist all such practices immediately. As these issues may be unfamiliar to a businessman who has not had previous dealings, I would encourage you to discuss the contents of this letter (subject to the counsel of your internal legal department) with executives from any pharmaceutical company, who are more than familiar with these regulations and how to comply with them.

Topic A: Promotion of product feature "Siri" included with Apple iPhone 4s

Our regulators have been deeply disturbed by numerous NCMPs associated with your introduction of "Siri". First, our scientific advisors challenge the often-repeated notion that this application represents "artificial intelligence" in any meaningful way. The literature on AI is well-established, and establishing that a device demonstrates it requires, at minimum, that it pass a Turing Test.  As there is no evidence Siri has done so, you are hereby not allowed to use this phrasing, or any similar phrasing, in promotional messages. Additionally, it is an NCMP to refer to Siri as a "personal assistant", as this implies human characteristics and abilities that it cannot possess. (You may use the word "assist" to describe the applications MOA.) To avoid any possible confusion, all television advertisements depicting human users easily and naturally interacting with Siri are deemed not compliant and must be removed from all media immediately. Finally, there is a lack of fair balance in your Siri-related communications. To avoid future NCMPs, you must include the rate at which Siri misinterprets commands given to it, and any possible safety risks associated with such errors.

Topic B: Promotion of "The New iPad"

First, we find the naming of the iPad problematic, and ask you to find a more suitable name within 90 days to avoid the product being withdrawn from the market and the levying of significant financial penalties. As you should realize, there is a high risk of confusion between the iPad and the iPod, which is a completely distinct product with a different indication. Without being too prescriptive, we would suggest that a name like "TouchTablet" would be more clear, and thus in the best interests of users. Additionally, it is a significant NCMP to use the neologism "Resolutionary" to promote the product. The obvious intent is to imply that this is a revolutionary product, when most experts believe that a sharper screen and better cameras represent, at best, an incremental improvement over previous models

Topic C: The Apple Store

An audit of your retail locations has unearthed a number of violations that must be addressed immediately. First, it seems you have been offering free setup of your products for some time, which is an obvious NCMP. Any incentive to purchase a product other than offering certain permitted discounts is a violation of regulations. Second, you are henceforth no longer permitted to call your technical support area a "Genius Bar" unless you can document that the average IQ of your support staff is over 135.

We find that these are the most severe regulatory violations, although we would strongly suggest you establish a registry to help investigators determine whether, as some initial studies indicate, your iPhone products are in fact addictive.

The attached 274 page form should help you get started in your reply to this letter. We look forward to working with you to clear up these violations, and ensure, for the good of the consumer, that your future marketing efforts are conducted in a more thoughtful and balanced way.

Sincerely,

Dan Reed
High Inquisitor for Ridiculously Regulated Products


Editor's Note: I have fortunately never received an FDA letter myself, and I'm sure they're a bit more nuanced than my parody. But all of these theoretical violations on Apple's part do parallel the type of rules that pharmaceutical companies have to comply with when they want to talk about their products. So here's my question for my readers: do you think strictly limiting communications in this way actually helps consumers? Or, as I believe, do these rules actually makes it harder to communicate clearly about how health products can help people?

Reflections on My Next Decade in Advertising

Last year, I wrote two posts about the state of the advertising industry, and why I felt like it might be a good time to get out of it. At the time, I was moving to Google, and wondered if and when I would ever haunt the halls of an ad agency again.

It didn't take very long. I'm now back at my old agency, and as I reread those two posts this morning, I started thinking about what was right and wrong about my not-so-old take on the business. So I wanted to take the time to revisit those ideas, and sketch out why I think advertising has a bright future.

First, a note for those of you who think that advertising as a business is going to be dismantled by tech companies like Google: you are missing out on amazing opportunities to build brands and do more meaningful work because you're in love with old, unaccountable media. Right now, media supply is the constraining factor for most marketers, meaning you have to spend a lot to connect with the right people. With the improvements in targeting (which moving into the offline world as well) along with the explosion of engaging content, it will be increasingly possible to spend less in reaching your audience. With less money going into buying your reach, it leaves more to create content your audience might actually enjoy, even seek out. This should be a great thing for advertising agencies. (And if you don't believe this is possible at mass audience scale, don't believe me, believe P&G, which has already moved pretty far down this path.)

Second, a little bit of self-criticism. Last year, I wrote:

What do I mean about 'relationships before reach'? Simply put, that the number of people who saw your ad is no longer the standard for evaluating success. A campaign should be winning over converts, true believers who will help advocate for your brand. If you have a great product, this is very doable. Just create the story of why your product can improve your customers' lives, put the product in their hands, and watch the fireworks. (Easier said than done, I know.)

This now strikes me as a bit of digital magical thinking (and there's a lot of that out there) that isn't supported by the way we actually live. For example, I'm a big fan of Narragansett Beer. I follow them on Facebook, read their blog, and ask for my wife to go out-of-state to buy me some as a Christmas present. I am as much of an advocate as they can reasonably hope for, and yet as far as I can tell I haven't influenced anyone to go out and buy the stuff. Now, I'm sure they have other advocates who do drive sales for them, but activating your true believers is not often going to be enough to build your brand in a competitive marketplace unless your product is truly extraordinary. Like, "This pill made me grow five inches, cleared my skin, boosted my IQ and healed my broken leg," extraordinary. Otherwise, you're still going to want to get your message out their to a lot of people who have never heard of you before, which means reach still matters. A lot.

So what is the next decade going to hold? Well, last year I wrote: "What is this illness [in the advertising industry]? In short, it is a business model that is predicated on gaining efficiencies through scale, when that scale is likely to prove inefficient for the indefinite future."Advertising folks have made a lot of money because they could navigate the complexities of the 20th century communications world and get a message out there. As I wrote then, there is going to be pain as the models built up over decades collapse. But we can now reach consumers more efficiently, though the path to do so is often even more complex than the old model. So, I anticipate spending the next chunk of my career answering two questions:

1. How do we reach the right people at the moments when they're receptive to what we have to say?
2. How do we delight them once they've given us their attention?

A few people have started to figure this out. But there's lots of room for innovation, and the only sure way to fail at it is not to try, while the path to success probably involves failing fast. (By the way, I predict "fail fast" will become the new "think outside the box" in the next few years.)

My bedrock belief is that audience attention has replaced media spend as the limiting factor on advertising's success. So our starting question has to evolve from, "What do I want to say and where can I tell it to my audience?" to, "What does my audience care about and how can my brand connect with that?" That shifted focus will cause a cascade of other changes in the business, but ultimately make advertising more enjoyable to make and to consume.

But I'm still thinking all this through, people, so feel free to try and change my mind. Where is advertising going, and how do we get there?

When We Say the Wrong Thing

Did Rick Santorum come this close to calling Barack Obama the slur-that-shall-not-be-named? The answer is probably no, as evidenced by the fact that the media, instead of saying he did, merely pointed to the video and asked its audience, "what do you think?" If this was a blog about politics, I'd spend my time railing against what a scuzzy tactic it is to drive traffic by drumming up a non-existent controversy, or how this type of story reinforces the divisions in our society by implying that the "other side" is secretly thinking awful things.


But this is (supposed to be) a blog about the mind, and now that I've done the savvy blogger thing of connecting my post to a topical event, I'm going to give some time to discussing the "Freudian slip", and whether it is really the telling event we think it is.


I'd be remiss if I didn't say that Julie Sedivy got there first, her excellent post on the topic covers the current science on the subject of speech errors. I particularly liked this analogy:

Speech errors occur because when it comes to talking, the mind cares much more about speed than it does about accuracy. We literally speak before we’re done thinking about what we’re going to say, and this is true not just for the more impetuous amongst us, but for all speakers, all of the time. Speech production really is like an assembly line, but an astoundingly frenzied one in which an incomplete set of blueprints is snatched out of the hands of the designers by workers eager to begin assembling the product before it’s fully sketched out.

This "just in time" language production is inherently risky, in that our minds only have a broad sketch of how they're going to express the thought they have. Believe it or not, an entire book has been written on the topic: Um… Slips, Stumbles, And Verbal Blunders, And What They Mean. In a review by Charles Ester, I learned that we make errors in between 5% and 8% of the words we utter each day. What is generally agreed is that or mistakes as speakers are balanced by our skills as listeners. In other words, we quickly pick out the speaker's intent and discard the incorrect information from all of those slips and disfigurations in speech.


Unless, of course, the mistake ends up being particularly noteworthy or humorous, in which case it will be noticed. George W. Bush might have been at the far side of the bell curve in terms of language assembly errors, but he was known as a poor speaker in part because some of his miscues were very funny (I personally love, "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family") and of course were noteworthy as they were coming from the most powerful man in the world. 


But here's the thing: we knew exactly what caused Bush to mess up. His brain mixed up "put food on your table" and "feed your family" and out came a bizarre visual image. And of course, President Obama and everyone else who speaks in public has their share of mistakes. We recognize these as errors we could just as easily make, and yet we use them to help make our partisan arguments. Why? 


I think, perhaps, we've confused a slip of the tongue, meaning a speech construction error, with a gaffe, meaning a statement where a public figure accidentally says something they would rather not admit in public, or that reinforces the public's reason to dislike that figure. In this (otherwise excellent) Jonah Goldberg column about the "etch-a-sketch" remark made by Romney's communications director, the headline is, "A Fawlty Slip of the Tongue." That remark was not a slip of the tongue, but rather a gaffe, confirming the view of many people that Romney has no core, and just says what he needs to in the pursuit of power. 


In our public life, a gaffe can usefully highlight a fault in a public figure, but we should just let the slips of the tongue pass by without comment. It seems pretty clear from the science, and from common sense, that these errors don't carry the meaning we'd like to assign to them.

On Meaningful Work

Next week, I'm leaving the best company in the country to work for. I didn't quite make it a year. Frankly, though there were plenty of reasons, the simplest reason why is that I wasn't happy at Google. Sure, the food is great, the people are nice and smart, and there are plenty of cool perks. But none of that is sufficient if you don't find the work you're doing engaging, and you think another job can offer that.


In the course of researching this post, I came upon the following anecdote:

Three men are found smashing boulders with iron hammers.  When asked what they are doing, the first man says, "Breaking big rocks into little rocks." The second man says, "Feeding my family." The third man says, "Building a cathedral."

Most of the time, I couldn't shake the feeling I was just smashing rocks at Google, and I tried to feel better by telling myself I was doing it to provide for my loved ones. But I never felt I was building a cathedral here, or even a house. In some ways, Google's cathedral has already been built: their search engine is one of the greatest gifts to the modern world imaginable. And I know the leadership envisions building other ones just as impressive. It is likely that the failing to see past the rocks is mine.


In the same article where I found that story, the author, a psychologist who studies what makes work meaningful, outlines three principles:

First, the work we do must make sense; we must know what's being asked of us and be able to identify the personal or organizational resources we need to do our job.  Second, the work we do must have a point; we must be able to see how the little tasks we engage in build, brick-by-brick if you will, into an important part of the purpose of our company. Finally, the work that we do must benefit some greater good; we must be able to see how our toil helps others, whether that's saving the planet, saving a life, or making our co-workers' jobs easier so that they can go home and really be available for their families and friends.

 A lot of the meaning in work, then, has to come from within. If I can see myself contributing to the welfare of my coworkers, it might matter less that I am bored by the tasks I need to complete during the day. But it would be wise if more companies thought through how they can make a job sensible, purposeful and beneficial. Other researchers have looked at the link between a sense of meaning at work and job performance, and found that productivity rises significantly when employees are engaged in work they find meaningful. And yet most companies look to "sugar high" motivators like perks and bonuses to provide lasting motivation: 

When we asked 669 managers from companies around the world to rank five employee motivators in terms of importance, they ranked “supporting progress” dead last. Fully 95 percent of these managers failed to recognize that progress in meaningful work is the primary motivator, well ahead of traditional incentives like raises and bonuses.

If I worked in HR, I would make it my business to figure out what meaning my best employees found in their work, and try to instill that sense of purpose in as many other people as possible.


So, the last question: why do I think I'll find more meaning in my new role (returning to the advertising agency I left for Google) than I did in this one? Well, I'm going to take my direction from this amazing Clayton Christensen article and use the uncertainty and change in advertising as a chance both to share what I've learned and to learn from others. Here's Christensen's advice:

Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.

I think my life will be judged, by myself and those I care about most, by how I grew as a person, what I built, and who I was able to help. I'm going to a place where I think I can accomplish a lot in all three areas. I can't wait to dive back in.


So my question for you: what do you think makes work (and life) meaningful?