The last section introduced new characters. One was a curmudgeonly academic economist. The other was an equally curmudgeonly engineering project manager. The economist complained bitterly about the gaping logical holes in the engineer’s argument. Meanwhile, the engineer refused to admit that his novel worldview required logical exposition. He complained equally bitterly that his practical advice was ignored. He failed to even notice something: the logical weakness of his exposition might make his practical suggestions difficult to accept. Their disagreement did not merely consist of differences of worldview. They also disagreed about the rules of engagement for dealing with their differences. As a result, the impasse went unresolved.
This is surprising! One might expect basic disagreements. But one doesn’t expect such disagreements to remain unresolved month after month, year after year, decade after decade. Something about this problem was deeply intractable. The problem worried me. Its apparent intractability terrified me.
For this reason, we will continue to talk about the impasse as a thing in itself. Part of the purpose is to describe further the dynamics which made it so durable. The other part is to sell the reader on my reaction to it: that we should take extraordinary action to get ourselves over this hurdle. And we should do it soon.
Somebody Else’s Problem
In Douglas Adams’s book Life, the Universe, and Everything, at one point a menacing alien spaceship lands in the middle of a cricket game. However, it manages to avoid sparking a panic—or, in fact, any kind of reaction whatsoever. This feat of effective invisibility is the work of a “Somebody Else’s Problem Field”:
The second strangest thing about the ship was watching the Somebody Else’s Problem field at work. They could now clearly see the ship for what it was simply because they knew it was there. It was quite apparent, however, that nobody else could. This wasn’t because it was actually invisible or anything hyper-impossible like that… The Somebody Else’s Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what’s more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people’s natural disposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.
The impasse we have described is akin to Adam’s hypothetical “Somebody Else’s Problem Field.” We see two competing worldviews that fail to make their conflict clear. They lived on such different planes they pass each other by without directly acknowledging their differences. Practitioners like Fred Brooks formulated aphorisms that ruled the lives of project managers. Meanwhile, economists like Paul Krugman formulated fully explicated theories. These two modes of thought are violently in conflict. But somehow they can avoid the kind of direct confrontation which might have forced a clarification and synthesis.
The engineers were suggestible: they could be bullied into agreeing with whatever high-level language the intellectuals chose. And the intellectuals dismissed whatever in-crowd aphorisms bubbled up to their attention. That is to say, they dismissed anything they noticed at all. They each live in their own world and did not interact. They could have struggled to reconcile their differences. But was it anyone’s job to make that happen?
Wasn’t Actually Invisible…
As might be clear from this story, the answer was emphatically “no.” Each side felt empowered to angrily demand that the other side do the hard work. But that work was firmly “Somebody Else’s Problem.” As a result, the problem was effectively invisible.
Later in this book we will talk about psychology as well as worldview. We will build a story of an economy which is “new in a way that was new before.” We will add to it a story of a body politic which is “crazy in a way that people were crazy before.” Sanity is as much a goal of this work as clarification. To this end, we will give a name to the emotional dynamic which makes this impasse so durable.1
Fueling…
We profiled our engineer’s passive-aggressive self-pity: “the jobs where things get done never have formal authority commensurate with responsibility.” Remarkably, he missed a more likely reason for his lack of influence: he had generated a novel worldview he never fully expressed—let alone explained.
However, Brooks never had the goal to create a worldview for the sake of creating a worldview. He backed into it in the process of doing something else. As a result, he had no natural skill or predilection for the task. The sense in which he understood the world made logical exposition difficult. It is arduous to formulate and sell a worldview to skeptical experts. Since they defend their intellectual turf so jealously, that he had no taste for the task might not be surprising. He might reasonably wallow in self-pity: a heavy burden was unexpectedly bestowed on him. His reaction is understandable. What is jaw-dropping is his misattribution of the cause.
Earlier we complained that experts could only see the nail they were best equipped to hammer. Fred Brooks’ problem was opposite. He possessed no hammer to pound down the nail which was actually tripping him up. So he hallucinated a different obstacle with which he felt more emotionally equipped to deal. The standard aphorism about hammers and nails has a converse: “if you don’t have a hammer, nothing looks like a nail.” Not even a nail. In other words, Brooks had neither the ability nor the desire to formulate and sell a new worldview. So he didn’t even notice that he had generated one.
Brooks’s imperiousness and self-pity makes more sense in context. Let us understand the goal which was his single-minded focus. As he explained in the opening of his book, he was grappling with the “surprisingly sticky” problems of software project management. He opened his book with the vivid and famous image of the tar pit:
No scene from prehistory is quite so vivid as that of the mortal struggles of great beasts in the tar pits. In the mind’s eye one sees dinosaurs, mammoths, and saber-toothed tigers struggling against the grip of the tar… Large-system programming has over the past decade been such a tar pit, and many great and powerful beasts have thrashed violently in it. Most have emerged with running systems—few have met goals, schedules, and budgets… No one thing seems to cause the difficulty—any particular paw can be pulled away. But the accumulation of simultaneous and interacting factors brings slower and slower motion. Everyone seems to have been surprised by the stickiness of the problem, and it is hard to discern the nature of it. But we must try to understand it if we are to solve it.
[TODO: get the picture that goes with it?]
Brooks’ task was surprisingly sticky. It required new understanding. It is a challenge to which he rises intelligently. By Krugman’s standards his exposition may fall short. But by the standards of his own community it is marvelously vivid and clear.
So perhaps he had a right to complain. The professional builders of worldviews helped him far less than they might have. And, to add insult to injury, after leaving him do his best as an amateur, they rejected the results of his (admittedly amateur) efforts. Maybe some self-pity was warranted.
Passive Aggression
So maybe Brooks had a right to self-pity. We are trying to be fair. Maybe the more apt complaint is about his passive-aggression. He could have been activist about insisting on influence. But instead he was stoic to a fault. He hallucinates persistent disrespect for his profession. He wallows in resentment over an imagined slight. He justifies his passivity with the attitude “it is always thus.”
But it isn’t always thus. It is actually extremely rare that “jobs that get things done” demand dramatic shifts in worldview. Brooks is strangely blind to the exceptional aspects of his situation. At the time, huge energy fueled the idea that new technology “changes everything.” And the condition of the lives of people like Brooks was dramatically changed. Yet they made no noise about the exceptional nature of the circumstance. As Brooks tells it, “it was always thus.”
This obliviousness, fueled by passive-aggressive self-pity, was ubiquitous in the culture which Brooks epitomizes. At MIT it was expressed as frustration with the “dumb Sloanies.” MIT is geographically divided by a swath of parking lots and arborvitae hedges diagonally down its center/eastern edge. The Sloan School of management was in the south east corner, across this divide. This divide is surprising: elsewhere the campus is notably knit together by tunnels and walkways.2 A denizen of the physical sciences/engineering side who wants to talk to a member of the economics/politics/management section actually has to brave the outdoors. The graduates of Sloan were the people most likely to directly interact with graduates of the engineering schools. As a result, all the inhabitants of this quadrant were dubbed “Sloanies.” The connotations of this designation were not complimentary.
… and Fatalistic Despair
Engineers were furious and frustrated. They thought it unjust that a premier education, additionally augmented by decades of experience in best engineering practices, was not enough to win influence. Their influence would only be undermined by managers who couldn’t (as they saw it) be bothered to learn the basics. There was a brisk discussion about methods to explain the critical ideas to said managers. However it was accompanied by a fatalistic despair that somehow nothing worked. Not only that, but nothing would ever work. As these engineers’ perceived it, when talking to Sloanies, all the ideas they were most anxious to communicate seemed to go in one ear and out the other. To their eyes, there was something stubbornly stupid about Sloanies.
The suffering was grievous. There are many ways a working engineer depends on a shared worldview with his manager. Brooks mentioned one example: the assumptions embedded in procurement protocols. There are a zillion such examples. Each of them may be too minor in themselves to make a big deal about. But together they constitute a major burden on anyone trying to get something done.
… Leading to Separation.
There was the mismatch of worldviews, and no way to bridge it. As a result, the cultures started to separate like oil and water. MIT engineering graduates went of their way to work at companies like Google which were managed by other engineers. They assiduously avoided positions that would make them subordinate to MBAs.
The pervasive passive-aggressiveness of this culture shaped the mandate of Dertouzos, head of the Lab for Computer Science at MIT. He was sent to represent the technologists’ culture to the Davos crowd. One might suppose he’d see it as a chance to communicate. He could have seized the opportunity break the impasse. But one must remember that the engineers’ culture was laser-focused on low-level, practical questions. There were matters they were intensely anxious that “Sloanies” should understand. But they were all matters of software project management, procurement protocols, licensing issues, and so on.
The Davos crowd didn’t ask about things like that. Instead they asked large-scale abstract questions. They asked “Is this really a New Economy?” and “What is the future of productivity growth?” The engineering culture didn’t understand or care about such questions. Remember Brooks’s disdain about those who ignored the consensus of “thoughtful practitioners”? The Davos crowd wasn’t seen as a particularly promising prospect for improving the understanding of “practitioners.”
So Dertouzos wasn’t sent to Davos with any particular mandate to communicate. Instead, he was mostly supposed to say whatever it took to rustle up maximum support for his lab’s projects.
Refer to Point One
Brad DeLong has a rule, which teaches: “mistakes will be avoided if you follow two rules. Rule One: Paul Krugman is right. Point Two: if you think he is wrong, refer to Point One.” This attitude was a major factor in the origin of this book. I don’t doubt my judgment that Krugman didn’t understand something important. After all, he’s basically admitted it himself! But the culture of which I was a part would have claimed more than just that.
They would have been pessimistic to the point of fatalism that he could be induced to understand their point of view. They would have claimed that he was a “Sloanie” who was too “dumb” to ever understand. They would claim that they had wracked their brains and tried everything they could think of to say. Nothing had worked. Then they would say that any further effort was a waste of energy. In short they were violently passive-aggressive—and defensive about their right to be so.
The “Refer to Point One” attitude caused me to break with the thinking of my compatriots. No matter what other complaints I might have, I was sure Krugman is not dumb. My community might have felt that every explanation that they could possibly think of had failed. I was alerted to the possibility that perhaps there was something systematically wrong with the kind of explanations they would generate.
Dismissing Folk Wisdom…
As I said, Krugman is a smart guy. He is even smart enough to tell you why he might not, under exceptional circumstances, seem smart. He helpfully provided a guide to explain circumstances in which he might fail to understand. He even acknowledged that such a failure might make him seem highly unreasonable to a particular kind of person. This guide contained a parable:
The cycle of knowledge lost before it can be regained seems to be an inevitable part of formal model-building. Here’s another story from meteorology. Folk wisdom has always said that you can predict future weather from the aspect of the sky, and had claimed that certain kinds of clouds presaged storms. As meteorology developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries, however—as it made such fundamental discoveries, completely unknown to folk wisdom, as the fact that the winds in a storm blow in a circular path—it basically stopped paying attention to how the sky looked. Serious students of the weather studied wind direction and barometric pressure, not the pretty patterns made by condensing water vapor.
It was not until 1919 that a group of Norwegian scientists realized that the folk wisdom had been right all along—that one could identify the onset and development of a cyclonic storm quite accurately by looking at the shapes and altitude of the cloud cover.
The point is not that a century of research into the weather had only reaffirmed what everyone knew from the beginning. The meteorology of 1919 had learned many things of which folklore was unaware, and dispelled many myths. Nor is the point that meteorologists somehow sinned by not looking at clouds for so long. What happened was simply inevitable: during the process of model-building, there is a narrowing of vision imposed by the limitations of one’s framework and tools, a narrowing that can only be ended definitively by making those tools good enough to transcend those limitations.
Krugman refuses to apologize for this narrowing, saying it is the inevitable consequences of model building.3
For All Its Strangeness…
This observation illuminated our frustration with “Sloanies.” My community thought they had tried everything. Nonetheless everything they had tried was “folk wisdom.” It was all they could muster because it was all they knew. If the “Sloanies” were in the phase of model building Krugman describes, then they would indeed have brushed it off.
After all, as our quotes show, the prevailing folk wisdom was quite strange. Fish leaping upstream! A bogeyman eating the unfortunate fishies! Giant ground sloths stuck in sucking tar pits! These phantasmagoric images are emblems used to refer a shared worldview. But they don’t actually explain that worldview. They only illustrate it.
The underlying logic itself is never fully explicated. None of the connections are explained. Nor does it attempt to address any concerns outside its narrow world of engineers and project managers. As such, it won’t even show up on the radar of policy-oriented intellectuals.
All of this is terribly strange. As a result, it is easy to dismiss. Most of Fred Brooks’s audience is inclined to take him seriously just because he is Fred Brooks, star project manager. However, someone not so inclined would likely think his ideas utterly nuts. As a result, they would deem his worldview safely ignorable.
Is Risky Because…
However, the dismissive should notice something. These proponents of folk wisdom are quite sure of themselves. The things they know, they know.
Admittedly, what they know has an extremely restricted range. That is a characteristic property of folk wisdom. If one asks a fisherman whether it will rain on his shore, he will know. Ask him whether it will rain the next state over, or rain a week from now, and he won’t know. He might even be surprised that prediction is possible. He only knows the here and now.
On the other hand, the things he knows, he knows. He is certain. He has lived so long in the wind and weather that he finds ways to predict its behavior. He must to survive. So he will find a way. His methods are strange. But they work. And though the predictions he can make are limited, the things he can predict, he predicts with certainty.
It Is Experienced…
Another strange property of folk wisdom is that the people submerged in it don’t think of their knowledge as knowledge. To them, it is perception. Imagine a fisherman predicting a storm. If he was operating in Krugman’s mode, he would claim “I have a theory that the early morning red skies predict rain.”
But he isn’t in that mode. He’s unaware of his implicit theorizing. To him, the sky simply looks like rain. Not for a reason. Instead, because the signs of rain are obvious. It is a thing outside of himself which he can’t not see. So he feels no need to justify himself.
He may have other sensory channels that detect signs also: maybe he smells ozone in the air, maybe he feels the drop in barometric pressure in his bones. With enough immersive experience, the human brain is supremely good at picking up signals and making connections—no matter how subtle they may be. The resulting associations lie below the level of consciousness. Such an unconscious process doesn’t necessarily inform the logical mind of the mechanism of its deduction.
So in the fisherman’s experience, he didn’t make an assertion because of deduction from evidence. No: he simply sees the coming rain. He didn’t just see it, he also smells it, and feels it too. It assaults all his senses. It is simply, incontrovertibly there. It is outside himself: impossible not to perceive. Given that he experiences this deduction as a multi-sensory assault, it is unimaginable that he need say anything other than simply: “Look!”
As A Perception Which…
When the person he is addressing refuses to look, he doesn’t think: “oh, we should justify our deductions.” Instead he thinks “what kind of total idiot refuses to look? How can he not see what is undeniably, massively apparent?”
A person in this state has zero consciousness of the sophistication of his deductions. It is hardly easy, for instance, to sense barometric pressure, say, or smell ozone. Or to pick out a specific telling shade of light at the exact right time of day. But a community with sufficiently massive experience won’t be conscious of the sophistication of their deductions. So they will be violently judgmental about anyone who “refuses to look.” They won’t realize that “looking” is far from easy.
Later in this book we will quote a motley assortment of desktop managers, cutting edge Internet experts, and the like. They will say strange things. Stranger still, they will say them with nonchalant certainty. Not only certainty, but an arrogant lack of regard for incomprehension of the listener. Not just a lack of regard, but even the hint of a threat. Our speaker expects the listener to work to learn the “sailors eye.” Anyone who refuses risks being written off as “stupid.” Extracting useful insight from such a person is neither easy nor fun.
Only The “Stupid”…
Soon our reader will experience a shocking shift of focus. We started out with a broad view of the sweep of history. We will move next to a claustrophobic server room. We will stick a microphone in the face of the resident network manager. Nor are we going to ask this guy his opinions about history or economics. Instead, we will ask prosaic questions about software management and procurement philosophy. We will expend immense energy dissecting his answer.
The reader may wonder: why worry about something so plodding? And not only that, why worry so very much? And why so much indulgence for someone so arrogantly inscrutable? The answer is: because this guy knows something.
For sure, he is incoherent and inarticulate. Additionally, his method of imparting knowledge is unhelpful, judgmental, and rude. He is unconscious of the sophistication of his deductions. So he makes no allowance for the listener’s difficulty. As Krugman would say, he’s a “sleepwalker.” Nor does he feel any remorse about his semi-conscious state. His somnambulism is arrogant and demanding. He expects the listener to work hard to emulate his semi-conscious associations. Anyone who doesn’t is “stupid.”
Can’t See.
This is all so unpleasant, we’d wish we could ignore him. But we can’t. What he knows is real. The sphere in which he can make solid claims is extremely limited. But within that sphere his claims are solid. Rock solid. Absolutely certain. Like a fisherman who could die an unexpected storm, his life depends on getting it right. So he gets it right. His shocking arrogance may be unbearable. But it wouldn’t be so widespread and enduring if didn’t have a basis. He knows something we need to know.
This motley folk wisdom is the only solid thing we have. It will be fantastically confusing. My readers may find it, on first encounter, even more fantastically boring. The confusion isn’t even interesting. Or at least economists and policy types won’t find it so. He has nothing to say on the questions that interest them. Or at least it seems like he doesn’t. As we will eventually show [TODO: reference], if we listen carefully we can find out a great deal about these questions. But it wont be easy.
Additionally, the speaker’s arrogant lack of regard for the listener’s discomfort will be at best unpleasant—and at worst unendurable. This exercise won’t be easy.
As promised, we aren’t looking where the light is. We are looking where the certainty is. This claustrophobic server room is where it is at. So that is where we will go. The darkness is deep. Searching there is unpleasant. But that darkness holds our key.
Opportunity Invisible…
The dynamic we described drove enduring alienation. It also suggests an opportunity. Krugman supplied a prescription for ending such an impasse: the model-induced “narrowing of vision… can only be ended definitively by making those tools good enough to transcend those limitations.”
In other words, Krugman’s Rhine model challenge should be seen as an opportunity. His model’s exposition fully explained his tools. Those tools could be fixed up to incorporate Brooks’s discontent.
In other words, if Brooks hated the Waterfall incarnation of the Rhine model, he wasn’t supposed to fume silently. He was supposed to step through its beautifully explicated logic—and identify his point of disagreement.
Or to put it more vividly, it is an opportunity to lift folk wisdom “up into the clouds.” As Randall Munroe explains, folk wisdom aphorisms like “red sky in morning” are describing the effects of unseen clouds. That tell-tale red color is morning light filtered through clouds fisherman can’t yet see. The low-angle sunlight of early morning gives evidence of clouds hidden beyond the curve of the earth. That’s why the observation is an effective forecast: through long experience, the fisherman have learned to detect evidence of key objects that have yet to hie into view. They have learned the link between that tell-tale red light and approaching bad weather.
Note that they might not know anything the object they are detecting. They “see” the hidden clouds. But they also can’t see them. They may have no idea they are there. The mechanisms powering the validity of the aphorism are mysterious. Mysterious perhaps even to its proponents!
Real meteorologists won’t take such aphorisms seriously unless they reference an object that can be pinged with Doppler weather radar. This is an obstacle if the fisherman are honestly unaware of the clouds the Doppler needs to measure. For this reason, it takes work to “lift” folk wisdom observations “into the clouds.” It takes work to generate an hypotheses that can be tested by scientists.
That this work could be done represents a hidden opportunity to get scientist’s attention. Folk wisdom so “lifted” would suddenly become immensely more compelling to the meteorology set. Strangely, this possibility was hidden by a “Somebody Else’s Problem” field. We wish to make it our problem.
We have one more task before we start work, however. As we have been saying, the proponents of folk wisdom tended to explain consequences without causes. They didn’t realize it wasn’t obvious. !fter all, it was obvious to them! In the last essay we presented the more phantasmagorical elements of their worldview: the leaping salmon, the Borg, and the sucking tar pits. What we didn’t include was the force that drove these strange beasts to appear. That is the key we have been seeking: the key lost in the dark. The next essay will shine a light into that darkness.
- After spending a good bit of my twenties discombobulated by this shockingly durable impasse, I was bemused to realize it has a canonical [name](TODO: reference Mercantilism). Naming the force against which we struggle is useful. However, I won’t make too much of the named in this book. By itself, I worry it will just seem manipulative. It needs context to be digestible. ↩︎
- MIT is said to posses more miles of contiguous corridors than anything but the Pentagon or Kremlin. ↩︎
- I have mixed feelings about this refusal to apologize. ↩︎
