False Dichotomies and The Genetics of Politics

Conservatives have a very different view of democracy, which follows their moral system. Their moral system is more complex than ours is. The basic idea in terms of economics is that democracy gives people the liberty to seek their self interest and their own well-being without worrying or being responsible for the well-being or interest of anybody else. Therefore they say everybody has individual responsibility, not social responsibility, therefore you’re on your own. If you make it that’s wonderful. That’s what the market is about. If you don’t make it, that’s your problem.

Actually, Lakoff is oversimplies at first, but then points out that a clear split in left/right poltics is simply another false dichotomy.  There are "hard-core Conservatives" who believe in charity and also desperately want people to be able to succeed, independently, which is different than not caring about what happens to them.  There are liberals who believe in the principle of moving forward together, but don't practice what they preach.

In reality, there's a bit of each perspective - survival-of-the-fittest and success of the collective - in each of us.  Where does the balance lie?  Can it change?  It can change, because of a thing called neuro-plasticity.  Where it resides is in our noggins - hypothamlus, amygdala, neo-cortex.  A process called cognitive behavioural therapy - kind of a physiotherapy for your brain - allows you to consciously repattern your thoughts so that you are less reactive and have more active control over how you feel and how you respond to the world.

Of course, you don't want to become too analytical, or you lose your capacity for action.  But you don't want to be shooting-from-the-hip, either.  So where's the sweet spot?

It's in managing both our biological evolutionary and social evolutionary drives in cheque.

Put in otherwords, it's where the wise folk of history have always taught us - balance lies in the centre.

Leadership: Do the Right Thing

The paradox, I remarked to my campaign team at the time, is this: If you don't go to the site of a disaster, you'll get hammered for staying away and being insensitive. And if you travel to the site of a disaster, you'll get hammered for coming for a photo op and therefore being insensitive. You can't win, in other words.

Whether we like it or not, disasters are social affairs.  The people directly impacted feel the full brunt of an earthquake, a tornado, or a man-made disaster.  Lives are lost, livlihoods are destroyed, people are shaken to their very core.  In the face of disaster, one is justified in wondering how any individual can hope to carry the burden of loss moving forward. 

The people directly impacted face the worst, but the rest of us are reminded that we are just as vulnerable.  When someone gets shot in a public setting, we realize it could easily have been us.  When a mall roof collapses, we think, "my kids shop there."  The illness of another reminds us that we are all mortal.

In times of tragedy, whether ours or someone else's, we all feel a more vulnerable.  We tend to feel more giving, too - it's a genetic thing.  But how?  To who?  For those who have fallen, who amongst us will be there to extend a hand of support?

That's where leaders come in.  True leaders bring people together, reminds us we are not alone and helps us rise up, together.  No man is an island - true leaders bridge the gap. 

In our wired world, it can be hard to do the right thing without thinking of potential self-promotional opportunities.  Every negative or questionable thing leaders do gets dissected and broadcast on the big stage; it's hard to resist the temptation to cast light on the good stuff one does.  In fact, you might say it takes a certain degree of selflessness to do the right thing solely because it is the right thing.

Which brings me to the Highway of Heroes.  Does anyone remember the big, splashy event and after-shock releases that came with the announcement that Premier McGuinty was declaring a section of the 401 in honour of deceased Canadian veterans?  I'd be surprised if you did - there weren't any.

Despite the media-gains that could potentially have come from such an act, Premier McGuinty simply did it because it was the right thing to do.  While he doesn't always get this right, I'd have to say that Dalton McGuinty is the most consistent leader we have in terms of doing the right thing for no reason either than it's the right thing to do.

For all the stuff he does publicly that people either admire or despise, McGuinty is constantly doing the little things that inspire.  If you look on any social media outlet, you'll see the odd mention or picture of him pop up in places that aren't splashy, don't gain him any credit publicly, but are indicative of a man who truly cares.

Which brings me back to Elliot Lake.  In the face of such a horrific tragedy, the Premier had two responsibilities - to the people who suffered, to remind them they are not alone, but also to the people of Ontario, to make it clear that in times of crises, we are all in this together and that we will move forward, together.

In my opinion, McGuinty had to reach out to the families.  He had to speak to the community leaders and offer his support.  Those things didn't have to be publicized; we didn't necessarily need to know he had spoken to the families, only they needed to know their Premier cared.  When it comes to provincial solidarity and seeking responses to avoid future such tragedies, that does have to be public.  The whole province needs to know that someone is looking out for our long-term interests.

Sure, it's possible that best intentions will be misconstrued.  It's quite likely that opposing interests will hammer you in the worst manner possible, no matter what you do - though it doesn't have to be that way.

True leadership isn't about personal wins.  For a true leader, how they are viewed comes second; how their people fare always come first.  Which is why real leadership is a lonely business.

The Master doesn't talk, he acts.
When his work is done,
the people say, "Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!”

When Innovation Fails (by John Kotter)

Incremental changes are referred to as innovations. Tweaks to products are considered innovations. Reorganizations to “better serve customers and markets” or to “align internal capabilities” are intended to make companies more innovative; in fact, they are often touted as innovations in and of themselves. We have missed the point. These are not “innovations” – rather they are simply “improvements.”

First, we lacked enthusiasm. None of us went into the process with a sense of passion that we could, or even should, find something new and different. We were appointed, and as we all know, when you are tapped on the shoulder, you don’t say no, lest you jeopardize your next promotion.

Second, we were all senior. Way too senior. Yes, a senior leader’s perspective is useful, but much more important is that of the many customer-facing people who are dealing with these issues everyday, trying to fix what is broken, seeing what others are doing, and who know (almost without thinking about it) what is wrong with how the company does what it does. They have less to lose by challenging and questioning, and it doesn’t form the basis of what made them successful. Conversely, how eager are leaders to challenge that which made them successful in the first instance?

Third, no-one knew what we were trying to do. Who cared if we had spent 100 hours working on building something new and exciting? The other 14 people, maybe. And those who did know about our little initiative? They looked at us as though we had all the answers; by being placed on the “Innovation Board,” we were seen as the innovative thinkers — and, as a result, others were left feeling that they lacked what it took to generate fresh, game-changing ideas. How wrong.

The way we tried to create innovation — organizing, prescribing, and delegating it — didn’t work. Yes, these groups may improve things — maybe even a lot of things — but rarely is this “innovation.” Producing the next product (like the iPod) or creating a new market (Instagram, without a big team) that had never existed before — that is innovation. Microsoft creating the Surface — not so much innovation, and more catch up? Thinking once an innovator, always an innovator — not a path to success.

Innovation does not come out of a controlled situation. If you want more innovation, allow more chaos. Follow these steps to create that chaos.

1) Use only volunteers. Who in your organization feels excited about trying to build that next product or market? Let THEM — the people on the front lines, who are doing their day jobs, who happen to know your business better than anyone else — into the process. Jim Whitehurst of Red Hat figured this out. Others have too.

2) Sponsor an environment that encourages risk-taking. It’s fantastic if an employee takes initiative and risks making innovation. What do you do if they fail? Are they punished? You can be certain if an employee is punished for taking a risk toward innovation, that other employees will not be taking any risks.

3) Make time for brainstorming. It takes time, and sometimes it takes creating a particular environment to get employees into an innovative mindset.

This approach will foster some truly transformative ideas, and there will be an enthusiastic base of supporters ready to turn those ideas into action.

Now that’s a novel approach. Maybe, dare I say, an innovation.

Russell Raath is a senior engagement leader at Kotter International, a firm that helps leaders accelerate strategy implementation in their organizations.

You can't blame me for enjoying it when what I say fits in with what smarter people are suggesting.  But either way, there it is.

IDIC

Here’s what we usually see: Management decides that they need to innovate. Individuals and teams form a working group, establish a charter, and set out to work on innovation improvement initiatives. The results are usually a rehash of something they are already doing, perhaps with some improvements on the margins, all complicated by Gantt charts, red-yellow-green dashboards and issue logs. If, after some time, these “innovation” teams paused and reflected on their efforts they might even feel some sense of accomplishment — because anything other than achievement would indicate that their efforts were a colossal waste of time.

Incremental change through recombinations.  Idea sex, when you get down to it, follows the same principles as the more physical kind.  What's key to this evolutionary process? 

Mutation: it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to evolve from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, and normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward.

X marks the spot.

The Sanity of Truth

What is funny, sort of, is that it may be insanity that finally saves us. The whole planet is getting very unwieldy, and not only because of toxic fumes. Still, you can look at the world’s craziness as the death of what does not work, making way for new growth (hopefully according to life’s principles).

Life is not about right and wrong. Nor is it about perfection; who wants to live in Pleasantville? When its principles are adhered to, life thrives. When those patterns are disrupted, life withers. In that sense, we are all alike, two-legged, four-legged, multi-legged, winged, slithery, scaled, and rooted.

For people to mentally and emotionally heal and mature, they have to be honest with themselves. Maybe that is the bee in the bonnet here. If we want to live insanely, let us be honest. Though we do not have power over death, we do know what sustains life yet live as if ignorant.

There is nothing complicated about the truth.

And, as they say - the truth will set you free.

Forget Edison: This is How History's Greatest Inventions Really Happened (by Derek Thompson)

The myth of the solitary inventor -- in 8 short stories


The world's most famous inventors are household names. As we all know, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, Alexander Graham Bell invented the phone, and Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin.
Except they didn't. The ideas didn't spring, Athena-like, fully formed from their brains. In fact, they didn't spring fully formed from anybody's brains. That is the myth of the lonely inventor and the eureka moment.
"Simultaneous invention and incremental improvement are the way innovation works, even for radical inventions," Mark A. Lemley writes in his fascinating paper The Myth of the Sole Inventor. Lemley's paper concentrates on the history and problems of patents. But he also chronicles the history of the 19th and 20th century's most famous inventors -- with an emphasis on how their inventions were really neither theirs, nor inventions. Here is a super-quick summary of his wonderful distillation of the last 200 years in collaborative innovation.

COTTON GIN

The fabric cotton comes from cotton fibers that mix with seeds in the pods of cotton plants. To make the fabric, therefore, you have to separate the fibers from the seeds. For centuries this was done mostly by hand, until Eli Whitney "invented" the cotton gin in 1793. But various forms of roller gins (i.e. technologies for separating fibers from seeds) had been around for thousands of years. Five years earlier, in 1788, Joseph Eve developed his own mechanized self-feeding roller gin. Whitney's true innovation was to improve existing cotton gins by "replacing rollers with coarse wire teeth that rotated through slits to pull the fiber from the seed." If this insight was a breakthrough, the glory goes to Whitney only he was faster than his competitors. In 1795, John Barcley filed a patent on a gin featuring circles of teeth -- awfully similar to Whitney's wire-tooth model (see left). In short, the modern cotton gin was a eureka moment that multiple inventors experienced nearly simultaneously and was expedited by their competition.

TELEGRAPH

As the tale goes, Samuel Morse was having dinner with friends and debating electromagnetism (like you do) when he realized that if an electrical signal could travel instantly across a wire, why couldn't information do the same? Like most fun eureka stories, it's a fib. The telegraph was invented by not only Morse, but also Charles Wheatstone, Sir William Fothergill Cooke, Edward Davy, and Carl August von Steinhiel so near to each other that the British Supreme Court refused to issue one patent. It was Joseph Henry, not Morse, who discovered that coiling wire would strengthen electromagnetic induction. Of Morse's key contribution -- the application of Henry's electromagnets to boost signal strength -- Lemley writes that "it is not even clear that he fully understood how that contribution worked."

TELEPHONE

Like Morse, Alexander Graham Bell invented a technology that would later bear his name. But how much did he deserve it? The problem that Bell solved was to turn electrical signals into sounds. But this was such an obvious extension of the telegraph that there were many people working on it. Philip Reis had already designed a sound transmitter in 1860, and Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (one guy) had already built a receiver. Bell's real contribution was "to vary the strength of the current to capture variations in voice and sound," Lemley writes. In this tweak, he was racing against Thomas Edison. Even Bell's final product -- which combined transmitter, fluctuating current, and receiver -- had company. Elisha Gray filed a patent application on the exact same day as Bell, only to lose the patent claim in court. Lemly's conclusion: "Bell's iconic status owes as much to his victories in court and in the marketplace as at the lab bench."

LIGHT-BULB

As just about everyone is taught, Thomas Edison invented the light-bulb. And as just about everyone later learns, Thomas Edison in no way invented the light-bulb. Electric lighting existed before him, incandescent light bulbs existed before him, and when other inventors got wind of Edison's tinkerings, they roundly sued him for patent infringement. So what did Edison actually do? He discovered that a special species of bamboo had a higher resistance to electricity than carbonized paper, which means it could more efficiently produce light. Edison got rich off the bamboo, and filthy disgusting rich from superior manufacturing and marketing of his product. But within a generation other inventors had developed better filaments and today's light-bulbs

THE MOVIE PROJECTOR

Most of these stories here are about how we mistake incremental improvements for eureka moments. But the story of the movie projector is simpler. It's basically a story about theft. Francis Jenkins built what we consider the ur-instrument of the motion-picture industry with a projector that showed strips of films for 1/24th of a second, creating the illusion of moving pictures. But his financial backer stole the Jenkins prototype and sold it to a theater chain, which called it the "Edison Vitascope" for no better reason than the word Edison was familiar and useful for branding. That Edison was tinkering with his own movie projector is true, but besides the point. His legacy here was mostly the work of a thief.

THE AUTOMOBILE

Today's cars bear the names of their founders and innovators: Benz, Peugeot, Renault. But have you ever heard of a Dodge bicycle? Or a Mercedes tricycle? In fact, both companies specialized in bikes before moving the autos. The car industry represents the epitome of incremental innovation. Take a tricycle. Add an engine. You've got a car. (Just look at the picture to the right, of the the original Benz Motorwagen from 1885). Condensing the invention of cars to those six words leaves out a lot of detail and a few main characters. It was Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach who designed the first four-wheel car with a four-stroke engine and Henry Ford who perfected the assembly line. But the long story short is that the car was a typical "invention" that was far too complicated for one person to conceive on his own.

THE AIRPLANE

Speaking of building bikes, that's exactly what Orville and Wilbur Wright did before they became the first team to fly a heavier-than-air machine. But, as we've learned, every great inventor stands on the shoulders of giants. When the Wright brothers asked the Smithsonian for all available information on the history of flight in 1899, they opened a history that had begun with DaVinci's scribbling and continued all the way to the 19th century gliders of Otto Liliental. But the Wrights solved one of the most nagging problems facing airplane developers -- stability -- by having "a single cable warp the wing and turn the rudder at the same time." That was the tweak that put the first plane in the air.

TELEVISION

The "Farnsworth Invention" was named after Philo T. Farnsworth, the nominal father of television. But his invention was neither his nor an invention. Teams of scientists and tinkerers all around the world were working to build, essentially, a radio for images -- i.e.: to combine the technology of a wireless telegraph with the magic of a movie projector. One key was the cathode ray tube, a vacuum with an electron gun that beams images onto screen that can receive or transmit signals. But the cathode ray tube itself has so many fathers that it's difficult to say exactly who invented even the central organ of the television, much less the television itself. In 1927, Farnsworth projected a straight line on a machine he called the Image Dissector, which is truly the basis for the all-electronic television. But, unlike Edison, he was not as gifted at marketing, producing, and becoming a household name for his tweak. "It may be accurate to describe Farnsworth as an inventor of the television, but surely not as the inventor," Lemley writes.

***

At the end of this section, Lemley lists four inventors who, yeah, okay, really were alone. But the funny thing about the exceptions is that they're almost all accidents.

Alexander Fleming discovered the anti-bacterial properties of penicillin because a sample of bacteria had accidentally been contaminated with mold. No one is sure where the mold came from; Fleming's discovery was true serendipity. Even in that case, there is some evidence that others made the same accidental discovery. The adhesive behind the Post-It note was developed in 1968, and languished in 3M for six years before a different 3M employee hit on the idea of putting it to use attaching a bookmark to a book.

Charles Goodyear discovered vulcanized rubber when a batch of rubber was accidentally left on a stove; Goodyear had previously thought that heat was a problem for rubber, not the solution.

Wilson Greatbatch developed the pacemaker when he accidentally grabbed the wrong resistor from a box when he was completing a circuit.

Louis Daguerre invented film when, having failed to produce an image on an iodized silver plate, he put the plate away in a cabinet filled with chemicals and the fumes from a spilled jar of mercury produced an image on the plate.

It would seem that eureka is Greek for "oops."

Images above from top: the cotton gin patent by Eli Whitney; a Morse key; Edison's patent; the Benz patent; the Wright brothers take off, 1905; All credit: Wikimedia Commons

How do you tell when the news is biased? It depends on how you see yourself (by Jonathan Stray)

Jonathan might be Stray, but he's certainly not LOST.


How do you tell when the news is biased? It depends on how you see yourself

Does the quest for balance in news stories open journalists up to claims of bias? It’s all about the framing.

By Jonathan Stray

Email

Take a moment with the headlines from this screenshot of The New York Times homepage from January. Really — it’s a little experiment. Click the image above for a larger view if you need to.

Ready?

How did you feel about these headlines? Does it matter to you to learn that they actually came from Fox News on the same day? (Screenshot for proof.) This faux home page was created by Dan Schultz, the MIT grad student also responsible for Truth Goggles, using his NewsJack point-and-click “remixer.”

Knowing what you know now, do these headlines seem different to you? If so, you’ve just proved that we detect and judge bias based on things other than what journalists actually write.

This effect has been noticed before. At the University of Michigan, William Youmans and Katie Brown showed the same Al Jazeera English news clip to American audiences, but with a catch: Half saw the news with its original Al Jazeera logo intact, and half saw the same video with a CNN logo instead. Viewers who saw the story with the original Al Jazeera logo rated Al Jazeera as more biased than before they had seen the clip. But people who watched the same footage with the fake CNN logo on it rated CNN as less biased than before!

Does this mean that we judge “bias” by brand, not content? Many people have tried to define what media bias is, and attempted to measure it, but I want to try to answer a different question here: not how we can decide if the news is biased, but how each of us actually does decide — and what it means for journalists.

The hostile media effect

During the Lebanese civil war in 1982, Christian militias in Beirut massacred thousands of Palestinian refugees while Israeli solders stood by. In 1985, researchers showed television news coverage of the event to pro-Israeli and pro-Arab viewers. Both sides thought the coverage was biased against them.
This effect — where both sides feel that a neutral story is biased against them — has been replicated so many times, in so many different cultural settings, with so many types of media and stories, that it has its own name: hostile media effect. The same story can make everyone on all sides think the media is attacking them.

Like a lot of experimental psychological research, the hostile media effect suggests we’re not as smart as we think we are. We might like to think of ourselves as impartial judges of credibility and fairness, but the evidence says otherwise. Liberals and conservatives can (and often do) believe the same news report is biased against both their views; they aren’t both right.

But why does this happen? Specifically, why does it happen for some stories and topics and not others? Discussion of climate change often provokes charges of bias, but discussion of other hugely significant science stories, such as the claimed link between vaccination and autism, usually produces a much smaller outcry.

You see bias when you see yourself as part of a group

Communications researcher Scott Reid has proposed that we can explain the hostile media effect through the psychological theory of self-categorization. This is a theory about personal identity and group identity, and it says that we “self-stereotype,” placing conceptual labels on ourselves just as we might make assumptions about other people. We all have multiple identities of this kind: gender, age, political preferences, race, nationality, subculture, and so on.

To test this, he performed a series of recently published experiments with American students. In the first, he used a survey to ask people whether they thought the media was biased, as well as their personal political orientations, both on a numerical scale from liberal to conservative. The catch was different groups got different cover pages with different sets of instructions. The first set of instructions was neutral:

The purpose of this questionnaire is to get your views of the news media in general.

The second set of instructions was designed to play up feelings of partisanship:

In recent times the differences between Republicans and Democrats have become highly polarized. Many of the issues discussed in the media are seen very differently by Republicans and Democrats. In this context, it is important to gauge people’s views of the media.

The third set of instructions was also designed to reinforce an identity, but in this case an identity that might be common to both liberals and conservatives — that of being an “American” versus the rest of the world.

With increasing globalization, it has become apparent that the media differs across countries and cultures. Al Jazeera has become the voice for much of the Arab world, both within the United States and in the Middle East. Given these changes, it is important to gauge people’s views of the news media in the United States.

And, oddly enough, the same survey gave different results, depending on the instructions:

Each of the lines on this graph shows how people’s perception of bias varied with their political orientation. The downward slope means that the more conservative someone was — the farther to the right on the “political position” scale — the more they perceived the media as hostile to Republicans, just as expected.

The surprising thing is that the strength of this perception depended on the framing each group had been given. When people were prompted to think about Republicans and Democrats, they perceived more media bias against their views, as indicated by the steep dashed line. When they were instructed to think about America vs. the world, they perceived slightly less bias then the neutral condition, as indicated by the shallow dotted line. Our perception of bias changes depending on the self-identity we currently have in mind.

This self-categorization explanation also predicts that people who are more partisan perceive greater bias, even when the news is in their favor. In Reid’s second experiment, people read an article about polling numbers for the 2008 presidential primaries, containing language like “among Republicans, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani maintained a 14-point lead over Arizona Sen. John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination,” and similar statements about the Democratic candidates. This time, the source of the information was manipulated: One group saw the poll attributed to the “Economic Policy Institute, a Democrat think tank and polling agency,” while the other was told it came from the “American Enterprise Institute, a Republican think tank and polling agency.”

In this purely factual scenario — dry-as-toast poll numbers, no opinions, no editorializing — respondents still had completely different reactions depending on the source. As you might expect, people who believed that the poll numbers came from the American Enterprise Institute thought that the story was biased towards Giuliani (and vice versa), confirming the hostile media effect. But the perception of favoritism increased not according to whether the reader personally identified as Republican or Democratic, but on how strong this identification was. The implication is that if you feel strongly about your group, you’re likely to see all news as more biased — even when the bias favors you.

Reid’s final experiment tested perceptions of overt attacks. He used a scathing review of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, originally published on Slate, which begins:

One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring.

The copy given to subjects (falsely) claimed the author was a member of either a Democrat or a Republican think tank. (In reality, the author was the late Christopher Hitchens.) As you might expect, people who identified as Republicans saw the review as more neutral, regardless of who they thought wrote it. The strange thing is that strong Democrats actually saw the review as slightly in favor of Democrats when they believed it was written by a Democrat! We interpret criticism completely differently depending on how we see the relationship between ourselves and the author.

What’s a journalist to do?

The first defense against accusations of bias is to report fairly. But the hostile media effect pretty much guarantees that some stories are going to be hated by just about everyone, no matter how they’re written. I suppose this is no surprise for any journalist who reads the comments section, but it has implications for how news organizations might respond to such accusations.

This research also suggests that the longstanding practice of journalists hiding their personal affiliations might actually be effective at reducing perceived bias. But only up to a point: To avoid charges of bias, the audience needs to be able to see the journalist as fundamentally one of them. This might require getting closer to the audience, not hiding from them. If we each live inside of many identities, then there are many possible ways to connect; conversely, it would be helpful to know, empirically, under what conditions a journalist’s politics are actually going to be a problem for readers, and for which readers.

We might also want to consider our framing more carefully. Because perceptions of bias depend on how we are thinking about our identity in that moment, if we can find a way to tell our stories outside of partisan frames, we might also reduce feelings of unfairness. The trick would be to shy away from invoking divisive identities, preferring frames that allow members of a polarized audience to see themselves as part of the same group. (In this regard, the classic “balanced” article that quotes starkly opposing sides might be a particularly bad choice.)

Encouraging the audience to perceive itself as unified — this seems simplistic, or naïve. But the consideration of identity is foundational to fields like mediation and conflict resolution. Experimental evidence suggests that it might be important in journalism too.