Category Archives: risk

October 9, 2010 · 2:53 am

The truth and stones

With relation to stones, we observe two kinds of people:  those who cast them and those who collect them.  Of those who cast stones, some do so from fear, while others do so strategically.

The fearful cast their stones either from glass houses or at glass houses.  The former are the hypocrites, while the latter are self-righteous, and both are equally insufferable.  The fearful cast their stones in reaction to something and not because of a belief in something, less from the solidity of their own convictions than from a nagging sense of their fragility.  The fear that causes these stones to be cast comes from inside the throwers and, like the stones they throw, is projected outward into a hostile and alien world.

The strategically inclined cast their stones either from a position of strength or at a position of strength.  Both tend to claim truth as their ally, and the truth tends to flee equally from either, for the truth is seldom on the side of casting stones.  Truth, being what truth is, can win its battles without stones, or in spite of them, because all positions of strength are time-bound and predicated on illusion.  The emperors will never wear clothes.  Their castles will all be made of sand—and glass, as we know, is nothing but sand.

The collectors of stones are mainly of two kinds.  They are either martyrs or future throwers of stones.

Of martyrs, there are two types, the situational and the pure.  The former are those who, upon being showered with stones, simply die because they are overcome.  They die because nothing else is possible, regardless of the degree or intensity or their fervor.  No one can prove whether situational martyrs were committed to a cause, or if they just happened to be in the way of an angry mob.  Situational martyrs die in the right time at the right place before they can get bored or do something that would cast aspersions on their martyrability.  A great many narcissists have achieved sainthood this way.

Pure martyrs collect stones in order to cleanse the world and remove hatred so that the rest of us can live in peace.  While their service to humanity is well-recognized, in life most of them are indistinguishable from narcissists.  The pure martyr is only revealed in death, for in death their purity is preserved.  Die young, stay pretty. Pure or situational, martyrs are the scissors-carriers of the world.  Yet as our mothers told us, running with scissors will be no escape, for those with scissors will always be crushed by those throwing stones.

The future throwers of stones are the paper carriers.  They cover stones and rocks to avoid martyrdom.  For more than a few, not coincidentally, throwing stones is a second career taken up after re-assessing the limitations of an earlier vocation to martyrdom.  They cover the stones that have been cast at them, but then they tear away their paper covers and cast those stones back again.  Thus we observe the cycle of stone-throwing and fear in which victims recycle what has happened to them, joining the ranks of oppressors and casting off the stones they once hid beneath paper.  Write what you know, as the saying goes.

It is thus that we arrive at the central problem facing humankind:  In a world of human conflict, no one will win.  Neither the throwers nor collectors of stones can vanquish the other.  Neither righteousness nor evil will win the day, which may be some comfort for those who wish to avoid evil but not so much for those who wish to achieve righteous glory.  This is because victory by either side—stone throwers or stone collectors—would require settling differences among adversaries in ways that are not possible to achieve.

The stone throwers face each other in glass houses, which before long will lay about their feet in shards and pieces.  Of those who collect stones, the paper carriers who are the future throwers of stones will allow the stone throwers to crush those with scissors, who in martyrdom provide the narratives and scripts that give the rest of us hope.  Yet once all the martyrs are gone the future throwers of stones will become simply the throwers of stone and new martyrs will emerge with sharper scissors to cut the old paper into bits.

The fortunate thing is that we are defined not only by our relation to stones, conflicts, or disagreements.  We are bigger than this.  Our world is increasingly one made of glass in which the things we wear and say and claim dissipate around our bodies like lost auras or the blinding penumbrae of lives best viewed through smoke-colored glasses.  Seeking truth in this haze is both a worthy and a necessary endeavor, though a thankless and quite possibly never-ending one as well, whose value lay more in the seeking than in the finding.

Notes and credits

The photographs of rocks and stones and scissors were taken by the author.  The photograph of Philip Johnson’s  Glass House is from the Wikimedia Commons and is available for common usage.  The Sandcastles are also courtesy of Wiki Commons.

Rock/paper/scissors—RPL as it is commonly known —is a game of strategy, cunning, and skill. Or so the World RPS Society would have us believe.  Apparently, RPS has been used to resolve disputes for hundreds of years, supplanting dueling and other more barbarian forms of conflict resolution.  If only Alexander Hamilton had known.

The math whizzes at PlayRPS.com have devised a simple playable RPS game that allows anyone to use the method to resolve their disputes.  To the naive, this could be very useful, for example, in the current Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, greatly facilitating Hillary Clinton’s job.  The only problem is that while on average RPS tends toward random distribution of the results (i.e. on average rock, paper, and scissors even out over time), in any one instance the odds are overwhelmingly that one outcome will have more wins than the others.  For example, the odds that the results after 99 efforts will be 33-33-33 are slimmer than the odds that it will be unbalanced and favor someone.  Level results happen only if the total number is divisible by 3, which further narrows the odds.  Any odd number of games (and any idiot who agrees to play with an even number of games deserves to lose) that isn’t divisible by three guarantees that someone will have more wins than the others.

RPS actually exemplifies the perfect mathematical expression of the futility of human design and intentionality:  It is a conflict resolution device almost perfectly designed to engender more conflict.  RPS is more elegant than “Murphy’s Law,” which operates by way of categorical affirmations and a priori givens, without any justification or proof whatsoever.  While offering the masses a palliative notion of conflict resolution, RPS actually encodes the perfect mathematical explanation of why conflict resolution is almost completely impossible. It’s like politics in America rendered in a way that both children and adults can believe in.  Randall Munroe demonstrates this in his XKCD comic strip, “Improvised,” in which RPS doesn’t do Han Solo much good in figuring out how to reply to Princess Leia in a famously tight moment, though in Han’s defense this is not the kind of proposition that is easy to deal with even under the most relaxed of circumstances.

At least one financial analyst has chosen to analyze our current economic crisis as a relationship between currency and gold as one of rock (gold), paper (currency), and scissors (economic turmoil).  And the television show Big Bang Theory just made it all seem silly, as it does with most things.

The Rock-Paper-Scissors playing glove is a technological innovation that serves at least two purposes.  It should help indecisive people make decisions in crucial moments.  It is also something that Senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell of Delaware might find use in helping people to avoid masturbating by giving them something useful to do with their hands.  (Scissors and masturbation?  Oops.)  If the mathematical logical I outlined above holds, the glove will keep them playing forever, thus ensuring the inavailability of the hands for other, more profane purposes.

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May 13, 2010 · 3:28 am

E/F – The glass of writing

“… let no mournful yesterdays
disturb thy peaceful heart.”

Ellen M. Huntington Gates, “Sleep Sweet”

“Of the making of many books there is no end,
and in much study there is weariness for the flesh.”

Ecclesiastes 12:12

When the glass is empty the writer searches, at times desperately, for some truth or experience to put on the page.  The writer writes to make life real.  It is an alchemy that turns nothing into something.  Without writing, the writer is hollow, small, almost nothing.

When the glass is full the writer becomes like a god, though not so much a god of creation as one who reorders worlds that already exist.  The writer recreates what he or she has known in order to say something about it.  At the end of the day, it is a gratifying act.

Reverie

In 1967, Gloria Steinem interviewed Truman Capote for an article that was published in McCall’s.  It was a candid interview.  She asked him how he would like to be described as a writer and as a person—adding “without false modesty,” just in case.  Capote replied with grace and clarity.

“As a writer, that I’m a good artist, a serious craftsman; that my writing gives pleasure in itself, regardless of what I’m writing about.  I spend a great deal of time with that object in mind.  Because to me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make.”

Early in his career, Capote was praised for the beauty of his sentences.  His prose was impeccable and his writing almost alone brought him into social circumstances the likes of which he never could have dreamed as the model for Dill in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a lonely child of divorce in a small Alabama town.

But Capote flew too close to sun.  In a terrific irony—the exception that proves the rule, it seems—Capote’s downfall came when he tried to write what he (thought he) knew.  The serialized chapters of his long-awaited novel, Answered Prayers, hewed too closely to the real lives of his New York socialite crowd.  Scandalized, Capote’s supposed friends abandoned him and he learned how far, indeed, Monroeville, Alabama, was from New York’s Upper East Side.

Capote had abandoned the “inner music” of his words for a cloying attempt that was less writing what he knew than writing what he both coveted and hated.  Such is vanity.

Vanity

To write is to be like a god, one of those fundamental acts of hubris that always results in a fall, whether in the Garden of Eden or Greek mythology.  The “inner music” of Capotean reverie was to Franz Kafka a siren call to vanity and self-worship through the admiration of others.  To his close friend and ally, Max Brod, Kafka wrote in 1922—

“Writing is a sweet and wonderful reward, but a reward for what?  Last night it was as clear to me as the catechism learned in childhood that it is a reward for devil worship. This descent to the powers of darkness, the dubious embraces, and all the other things that doubtless occur down below and which we know nothing about up here when we write our stories in the sunshine.  Perhaps there are other kinds of writing, this is only one I know…”

The writer was oblivious to this affliction, mindlessly scribbling away beneath a penumbra of vanity that surrounded the sun itself.  Like sex, writing was at once a sensual and gratifying pact with the devil that was utterly essential to living experience—and at the same time, an act that obscured and defamed the very essence of love itself.

“It is the vanity and the hedonism, which flutter around and around either one’s own or another’s form in a ceaseless search for pleasure until in the end, by this constant repetition, a whole planetary system of vanity is created.”

Kafka’s life was filled with deep and vital relationships, with both women and men.  His Madonna-whore complex notwithstanding, he knew how to connect with others, recoiling only from those women he thought of marrying.  Writing was Kafka’s only salvation, the only thing that made him seem real to himself.

As a writer, however, Kafka was a failure in his own estimation.  His work remains for us mainly because his close friend and literary executor, Max Brod, famously chose to ignore to Kafka’s request to destroy all the remaining manuscripts, which included his novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika.

Prayer, a writerly cup

The photo of the cup of tea at the beginning of this post was given to me by a friend, Maghan Lusk.  She is from South Carolina.  In 2008-09, she wrote a blog called “[a creative writer’s] life, uncensored.”  On the blog, she wrote about writing, managing seamlessly to intersperse her own experiences with topical matter.  Her writing and point of view suggested a very thoughtful person who took the time to understand why people were doing what they did, rather than judging them and tossing off opinions.

In 2009, she shut down her blog to work on her first novel, which she has now completed.  Of her desk and cup she wrote—

“When I sit down to write, I make a pot of Ceylon orange pekoe (2 tbsp of loose tea, 1 tbsp of lemon curd, 1 tbsp of honey).  And I warm the pot before I add the boiling water – it’s a highly methodical process.  I like the color, so I always drink from a glass tea cup.  The pot in the back belonged to my mom before she married my dad (27 years ago).”

Before Maghan turned the pot to the support of her writer’s craft, her mother used it to warm the water she soaked her feet with.  Behind the pot, on the edge of the chest-of-drawers, is a framed poem, “Sleep Sweet,” by Ellen M. Huntington Gates.

The desk itself is piled high with the artifacts of Maghan’s life and work.  In the stack of books are admired pieces, atop which sits Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, the much-celebrated novel set in Iowa, in which the Rev. John Ames writes out a family history for his young son.  The Reverend’s wife calculated that all the sermons he had written across his life of preaching would come to 67,500 pages of prose, or 225 books by the Rev.’s own calculation, “which puts me up there with Augustine and Calvin for quantity.”  In Robinson’s prose, Rev. Ames takes us to a place in writing so much finer and wonderful than Kafka’s, less self-involved than Capote’s, more human and more in touch with the real reasons we write—to reach out to someone else.

“For me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn’t writing prayers, as I was often enough.  You feel that you are with someone.  I feel that I am with you now, whatever that can mean …”

Feeding the Wolves

There is a famous Cherokee fable that goes like this.

An elder Cherokee was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them, “A fight is going on inside me. It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves.  One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.  The other stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. This same fight is going on inside you, and inside every other person, too.”

The children thought about it for a minute and then one child asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

Capote fed both wolves, with his life and with his words.  He was as destroyed by writing as he was acclaimed for it.  The same thing happened to Hemingway.  Kafka—and possibly Faulkner—fed the wolves with words alone, leaving their lives to become shambles of unrequited desire.

Sylvia Plath fed both wolves.  She fed them with her words and her flesh.  She married a man, Ted Hughes, who believed that a writer had the duty to live beyond all morality, to use his or her own life to build the experiences that would come to life in words.

To be an artist is a dangerous thing.  It is a special role, a special calling that cannot be resisted.  From the beginning of time—Lascaux to the Bible to Pynchon and Picasso and Joe Strummer—artists have helped us know who we are and how we live.  Some of them handle the role better than others.

Notes and Credits

I owe thanks to Maghan Lusk for sharing her photos and story for this posting, as well as for insightful correspondence over issues of writing, spirituality, and living in the Deep South over the last year or so.

Capote’s interview was by Gloria Steinem, “‘Go Right Ahead and Ask Me Anything.’  (And So She Did) An Interview with Truman Capote.”  McCall’s 95 (November 1967), 76-77, 148-52, 154.

Kafka from: Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922, in Franz Kafka, I Am a Memory Come Alive:  Autobiographical Writings, ed. N Glatzer (New York:  Schocken, 1974), p. 223.  An interesting source for Kafka information (though not the only one I used, of course) and condominiums in Miami can be found here.

Gilead quotation:  p. 19 of the Picador, 2004, edition.

The Cherokee fable of the two wolves is widely known.  The version posted here was taken from a website called “First People, The Legends.”  The story is the much the same in its various posting around the Web.

The photographs of books were taken by the author, on his own desk.  Disclosure:  I have not read Gilead, but I will do so shortly.  I have not read In Cold Blood, but I saw the movie with Robert Blake a long time ago on late-night tv.  I have not seen the movies of Capote’s life, neither Toby Jones’s nor Philip Seymour Hoffman’s.  The copy of In Cold Blood in the photograph was found on the sidewalk in Park Slope one day.  I have read much of Kafka’s writing—novels, stories, and letters, and I saw the movie.

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August 11, 2009 · 4:00 am

The truth and chickens, coda: The Road

chicken-red

The following five questions and topics address a very old issue involving a chicken and a road.  In spite of many hours given to thinking about this topic, by myself and legions of others, many issues are unresolved even as we speak (or write).  One brave chicken, one empty road, and a million synapses firing all at once all lead us to this juncture.  Follow the links and then contribute something to help finish the story:

Twitter your immediate thoughts and include #chickenroad in your Tweet …

Leave a comment if there’s something you want to highlight for readers, or warn them about …

Write a story that addresses the following points and/or questions and send it to jguidry.7@gmail.com.  We’ll talk about it, but mainly I’ll be looking to repost your story here.

Now … here we go.

First:  Which of the following roads (paths, lanes, etc.) was the chicken trying to cross, and in what way did it matter?  Each link takes you to the appropriate song (or book).

•    the road less travelled
•    the hillbilly highway
•    the long and winding road
•    the path of least resistance
•    the lost highway
•    the road to nowhere
•    highway 61 revisited

Second:  When the bear went over the mountain, he saw the other side of the mountain, to be sure, but winding through the valley below was one of the aforementioned roads (paths, lanes, etc.).  Alongside the road was a chicken.  Note:  the bear was hungry.

Third:  In the middle of the road is Paul McCartney.  Do they do it in the road?  Or not? And what is “it,” specifically?

Fourth:  As the bear reaches the road in the valley below, along with the chicken and Paul McCartney, “she” is coming round the mountain, when she comes, when she comes, driving eight white horses, and etc.  What happened next?  Who is “she?” And why were the horses white?

Fifth:  Should any character in your story “live happily ever after,” please explain how, and why, in precise terms.

Notes and Credits

Photograph of chicken in the road:  Ian Britton, August 29, 2004.

The drawings in the Bob Dylan video for Highway 61 Revisited are by a man named Giovanni Rabuffetti.  I can’t find a home page for him or a Wiki entry, but I found this entry on him on a blog called White Rabbit by a guy named Andrew Keogh.  I think it’s beautiful art, and there’s a lot of hits for drawings by Rabuffetti if you google him, including this video with animation by Rabuffetti for “All Along the Watchtower.”

One of the featured videos here is from The Beatelles, an all female Beatles tribute band from Liverpool.  You can learn a lot more about them here and here.  And if you like this, see The Beladies, who were the first all-woman Beatles band, hailing from Buenos Argentina.

And considering the road and highway theme of this posting, I can’t resist the temptation to post another favorite highway song by a favorite songwriter, Steve Earle, “The Long Lonesome Highway Blues.”  Enjoy.


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July 7, 2009 · 2:57 am

The truth and Mr. McNamara

things that get destroyed by war, Ann Arbor, January-February 1991

things that get destroyed in war, Ann Arbor, January-February 1991

“Every quantitative measurement we have shows we’re winning this war …” Robert S. McNamara, 1962

Few people with the power to make change have placed so much faith in science as a force for public good.  Few have wreaked so much havoc and destroyed so many lives with their belief in science.  Many fewer still are those who have tried to grapple publicly with the damage they did.

These were thoughts that occurred to me as I read the obituaries of Robert S. McNamara yesterday morning.  It brought me back to Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, which I recently spent three days watching, over and over, for a different project.

In Morris’s film, McNamara narrates his life around 11 “principles” that he learned from his involvement with war, both the Second World War and Vietnam.  The first is “empathize with your enemy,” and this is the vantage from which I prefer to think about McNamara himself.  Rhetorically speaking, this makes him my enemy, which I know he is not, but like any enemy he is the object of my perplexed and sometimes angry thoughts, a person I likely would have “opposed” had I been of an age to do so.

To the extent that McNamara is an object of anyone’s judgment, however, empathy is the perhaps the best way one might understand how a person as remarkable as McNamara could also be, as David Halberstam put it, “a fool.”  Yet to remember McNamara only in anger or glib, anti-intellectual sniping at the fact that brilliance is no guarantee against foolishness gains nothing for the world.  Most brilliant fools will never, in the manner of Mr. McNamara, admit and more importantly explore their mistakes for the good of the public.

McNamara’s reckoning with his own illusions of scientific truth led him to conclude, among other things, that “rationality will not save us,” that “belief and seeing are often both wrong,” and that one should “be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.”  These are his lessons from war, but they would serve us well in ordinary life, too.

From the mid-1990s forward, McNamara became immersed in debating the issues around nuclear war, as well as Vietnam, and the documentary he made with Errol Morris was released right about the time the Bush administration began the invasion of Iraq in 2003.  McNamara’s ultimate conclusion from a life of war and science was this:

“What ‘the fog of war’ means is: war is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables. Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.”

In his dreams and goals and desires, in his patriotism and sense of duty, McNamara was no different than most people.  His own peculiar acumen, however, put him in an extraordinary position to affect the lives of others.  The hubris of his belief in science was perhaps no more or less than Richard Dawkins’s own arrogance, but circumstance and ambition have placed Dawkins in a relatively benign position that mainly involves preaching to his own choir of fellow travelers.

We might serve Mr. McNamara, and ourselves, best – whether from the view that he was an inhuman monster or the more reflective position that he seemed to wish we would have – by listening to the things he had to say during the last 15 years of his life, from the time of his autobiography, In Retrospect (1995), forward.

Late or not – 27 years elapsed between the end of McNamara’s tenure as Secretary of Defense and his autobiography – McNamara at least tried to help the world understand what he did, without making excuses for himself or (for the most part) fudging the facts in a self-serving way.

One could only wish that other powerful true believers would do the same, but the likelihood is that Alan Greenspan, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld won’t go where Mr. McNamara finally chose to go.

Personal disclosure

I was not yet born when Robert McNamara assumed the post of Secretary of Defense.  My first memories of television, however, are of war reporting.  I recall a picture of an empty field, with the rat-a-tatt-tatt of machine guns firing in the distance and the gravelly voice of a war correspondent trying to explain what we weren’t seeing.

The first time I went to Washington DC was in 1990 or 1991, quite possibly for the Washington Mall protest against the Persian Gulf War, part 1 (Desert Storm), though I don’t recall.  There was a wedding I went to around that time, which might have been the first trip to DC.

What I do remember is this:  As we drove from Michigan to Washington, we listened to the 10,000 Maniacs album Blind Man’s Zoo.  “The Long Parade,” a song about watching people pass along the Vietnam Memorial, stuck in my head.  By the time I reached the end of my own walk along the wall, I was in tears, as much for the tragedy spelled out in the 50,000+ names on the wall as for the one name I knew was not there.

My own father served in the US Army from 1962 to 1967.  He wasn’t sent to Vietnam, though he trained soldiers who went there from the place of my birth, Fort Hood, Texas.  Later, he was sent to West Germany where, for a couple of years, he stood with the first line of defense in the event of Soviet invasion.

Notes and Credits

These are the obituaries I read in preparation for this posting:  Thomas Lippman in the Washington Post, Tim Weiner in the New York Times, and Fred Kaplan in Slate.com.

The photograph at the head of this post is of a wall that I helped to build in Ann Arbor at the beginning of Operation Desert Storm, the First Persian Gulf War, in 1991.  The idea for this piece of public art was Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s.  At the time, Jeff and I were both graduate students in political science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  A group of us built the wall and attached to it all of the things that get destroyed in war.  It was located on the central lawn of the Ann Arbor campus, the “Diag” as we called it, for the the diagonal pathways that cross the lawn to connect the buildings.

things that get destoyed in war, close up

things that get destoyed in war, close up

The wall stayed up for only a few days, being torn down by ROTC members on the one night that people didn’t camp out there to protect it – at the time, it was terrifically cold, in the single digits every night.

The university, however, didn’t clean it up, and it remained for another few weeks.  As a pile of rubble it actually accomplished its goal even more effectively.  During this time, no one crossed the Diag without stopping to talk about the war.

Richard Dawkins is among the best and brightest evolutionary scientists of his generation.  I’ve read some of his books and have enjoyed them – The Selfish Gene, The Ancestor’s Tale – but I have found his unoriginal assessments of religion and the stupidity of people who choose to believe in God (even if they also believe in evolution) to be, at the most generous, tiresome.  For an example of hollow, rude intellectual badgering, see his video on Google.  It’s like a supernerd bully picking on crippled jock bullies and, frankly, I found the original much more entertaining.

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July 2, 2009 · 2:40 pm

The truth and Twitter, part 2: Truth Default Swaps

newspaper

The truth will not be verified.

On January 28, 2009, a group of journalists and media professionals gathered in New York to talk about how the new social media were changing the field.  The conversation was abuzz with Twitter, which was creating fascinating new possibilities for breaking and sourcing stories.  Yet the same technology responsible for social media was killing off the newspapers by destroying their revenue base, and the rot was moving up the media’s trunk to broadcast and cable news.  No journalist’s job was safe now. The issue, said Jay Rosen, one of the panelists, was that no one knew how we were going to pay for “verified truth.”

This month, the Ann Arbor News will complete its transformation into “AnnArbor.com,” a Web-based news organization and community platform that brings together traditional journalism, digital media, and freelance bloggers.  The paper itself will be printed twice a week, on Sundays and Thursdays.  This is a first in the country for a market its size.

How AnnArbor.com intends to verify truth is not clear, but their constituents appear to have other concerns:  as of noon on June 27, 2009, the site’s “feedback forum” showed that “print the newspaper” had received 209 votes (more than any other category), while “ensure that all paid content is reviewed for accuracy” came in fifth at 80, and “investigate/analyze local issues” came in much further down the line at 21.

Perhaps some people prefer to go about verifying their own truth, on their own time, rather than trusting an institution to do so.  Social media is, after all, a DIY culture.  People who care most of about the accuracy of what they believe have always looked for news in multiple places:  papers, on-line, television, etc.  Some even read books (paper and Kindle).

At the 140 Characters Conference on June 16 and 17, Moeed Ahmad of Al-Jazeera gave a short presentation on how they used Twitter during the Gaza War of late 2008.  He discussed how they are working on a method to verify Tweets, by creating a table format for the feeds, including a column for each entry stating whether or not it was “verified.”  In the mayehm of the Iran uprising, the major news organizations in the US have started posting pieces from YouTube and reader-contributers, noting that the organization isn’t responsible for the content.  It’s the only compelling content that can be found; if you don’t post it, your competitor will.

What if reading the news became like swimming on a beach with no lifeguard?  I don’t think this is what will happen, but just consider the possibility.  Think about truth as a risk proposition:  what I believe should inform what I do, and therefore what I do is only as good as what I know.  Bad info = bad action.  This is not new – people always have worked very hard to create ways to mitigate the risk of believing things.

To deal with this risk, we create truth:  value-based, self-interested calculations about events that make sense to people and mitigate the dangers of belief and action.  Some of us construct that “sense” with a lot of external research (fact checking, asking friends, etc.).  Others rely on their internal “sense” of “The Truth” (moral codes, principle, etc.).  Still others mix these processes or switch from one to the other when it’s convenient.

Twitter doesn’t change the way we go about trying to verify truth in everyday life, nor will it stop us from needing to do so.  Rather, Twitter speeds up the capture and dissemination of information, magnifying both the potential gains and risks of believing something we read.

In a hyper-competitive world of individually-based incentives, motives, and pay-offs, Twitter allows people to become more risky.  Social media allow us to believe that we have dispersed the risk of belief through crowd sourcing, and in turn, we’re less worried about acting on the wrong information than not acting on the latest information.  Crowd sourcing creates something like “truth default swaps,” in which risk is carved up and transferred to so many people that it seems to disappear.

This works for a while, probably most of the time, but mistakes happen.  To wit:  the New York Daily News appears to have reported Farrah Fawcett’s death about a half hour before it actually happened, though it appears their reporting was accurate, if out of time.  Fortunately, the Daily News‘ slip in time did not involve the firing (alleged or real) of nuclear weapons.

On October 28, 2008, Blythe Masters, one of the young turks at J. P. Morgan who was involved in creating the mechanisms and structures of credit default swaps in the 1990s, addressed the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association’s annual meeting.  She emphasized that “it is important to distinguish between tools and their users.  We need to remember that innovation has created tools for managing risk.”  Masters’ point was that people in the industry behaved as if they had eliminated risk, instead of recognizing that risk never truly went away.

The issue for journalists and citizens alike in the age of social media is similar.  In a world where information is flowing much more quickly than anyone’s ability to verify it, will we use the new technology to manage the risk of belief or ignore it?

Either way:  The truth will be derived.


Notes and Credits

This is the second of three posts on Twitter.  In the third and final installment, truthandrocketscience will get its own twitter account.  Also, I am a big fan of lifeguardless beaches.

The newspaper pictured at the top of the posting was generated with the Fodey.com newpaper generator, which I find especially useful when mixing up a new batch of truth.

The panel on January 28 was hosted by MediaBistro, a professional service organization for journalists.  The panel was called “Journalists and Social Media:  Sources, Skills, and the Writer,” and it featured Jay Rosen of NYU and his PressThink blog, Shirley Brady of BusinessWeek.com, Andy Carvin of NPR, and Rachel Sklar of The Daily Beast and other media endeavors.

Apart from the 300 or so people who have “voted” on the AnnArbor.com site, there are approximately 99,700 other Ann Arborites who have not yet registered their preferences (this grants that each of the votes is a unique individual, which is most likely not the case).  Perhaps they are reading the Detroit Free Press, on paper.   Or freep.com.

Further:  One might interpret the general interest in “print[ing] the newspaper” at the top of the feedback poll as a desire for all that old fashioned newspapers represented, which would automatically include “verified truth” and local investigative reporting.  But one would have to ask and explore more deeply to figure it all out.

My interest in the Ann Arbor News is partly personal.  I lived in Ann Arbor from 1988 to 1996, during which time I was a graduate student in political science.  Besides reading the News, I once appeared in the paper, in a photograph of Gulf War protestors in December of 1991.  I saved the paper that day, but somewhere along the way in moves around the upper Midwest and finally to New York, I lost it.  But every Christmas, when I unwrap the creche to put beneath my tree, I look at the the shreds of a 20-year old Ann Arbor News page and remember my days there.

The story of Blythe Masters and the group at J.P. Morgan who created the credit derivatives that figured so prominently in the financial crash of 2007-08 has been documented (and verified) by Gillian Tett of the FInancial Times, in her book, Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe (Free Press, 2009).  Tett quotes Masters’ SIFMA address on p. 250.  It’s a gripping book that also has the best explanation of all the different complex securities that were part of the story:  credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, asset-backed securities, etc.  Tett was interviewed about the book by Terry Gross for Fresh Air.

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