The Nebulous Kingdom

Chicago vs. LSE

11/28/2009

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If the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics had a bastard son, I would marry him in a heartbeat.  He would be brilliant and intellectually honest, yet multifaceted and full of compassion for the everyman.  He would seek to change the world through the power of ideas backed with rigorous analytics, inspiring audiences with speeches with anecdotes drawn from the annals of history and peppered with quirky and endearing British humor.  

The near-perfection of this chimera draws into relief the differences between two schools that are far more alike than they are different.  Both are top-flight internationally renowned schools with brilliant professors, as well as a healthy respect for the economic profession.  Each has a distinct idiosyncratic culture driven by an active student body over-weighted with graduate students.Their differences are deeply philosophical.  The Chicago approach is rigorous, rational and individualistic.  Implicit in its approach is the recognition of tradeoffs that need to be made, daily, hourly, at all levels, in every discussion, in personal life as well as work.  Chicagoists are constantly optimizing.  There is a spirit of fierce intellectual honesty and democratic debate between Nobel Laureates and graduate students, and the hopeful sense that things can be known.  If a question apparently cannot be answered, we will still kick the living daylights out of it just to make sure.  The reputation of Chicago as a cult-like enclave of yes-men to free-market creed couldn’t be more wrong; there’s nothing Chicagoists like more than a good fight.  It is home to leading free-market theorists and behavioral economists alike.  At the same time, Chicagoists are deeply humanist; there is a profound, abiding respect for the individual, the idea that free will defines our lives and any limitation on one’s freedom to decide and act is a travesty and must be justified with vehement thoroughness.  

LSE, on the other hand, is humanist in a more traditional sense.  There’s a culture of contribution, of giving back to the community, of building something great together.  It has a sense of self-deprecating British pride in its history and place, yet still allows plenty of room for the annual flood of colorful, young, hip, irreverent activists looking to have a good time and make their stamp.  It is empathetic and tolerant, where rules can be stretched in the right circumstance and student antics are generally met with dry wit and possibly a slap on the wrist.  When a 60-lb penguin sculpture on campus was stolen in a (presumed) alcohol-induced prank, it resulted in an uproar, a lively general union meeting where students demanded that union officers investigate the matter and return the penguin to safety, and a settlement whereby two aluminum penguins were purchased in replacement.  This is in stark contrast to Chicago, which is not dry but would never be called colorful.  However, things tend to run like a well-oiled machine at Chicago, whereas the LSE infrastructure is more like a shiny <insert notoriously unreliable Italian sportscar here>.  In regards to scholarship, where Chicagoists seek to answer, LSE-ers will investigate.  They will respectfully survey the body of knowledge, seek the advice of learned experts, and craft beautifully constructed academic papers with long bibliographies that reference and build on the existing corpus.  At LSE, a well-reasoned argument can be as good or better than a quantitative model.  It asks the big questions - some would say the unanswerable questions, though it can sometimes verge on the esoteric and overly theoretical.  

As we have increasingly seen in the market, diversity of thought is a valuable asset.  Rather than enemies, LSE and the University of Chicago are ideal partners, a union whose fruit has the potential to change the world.  It would be fascinating to watch their offspring grow up.
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Black cabs in the most confusing city in the world

11/27/2009

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The back part of my hippocampus must be tiny.  

"For those of us who have grown up in the reassuring embrace of grid-patterned streets that run straight and don’t change names every two blocks, Old World cities like London—recently declared the most confusing city in the world by a 12,500-person Nokia Maps survey—present huge challenges. So pity London’s cabbies. Before getting behind the wheel of a black cab, would-be drivers have to pass a test called the Knowledge, which requires them to memorize some 25,000 streets and thousands of landmarks, a task that takes two to four years.

A cognitive map featuring that level of detail, as you might imagine, requires a fair amount of storage space, and, sure enough, University College London neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire found that the back part of the hippocampus in London taxi drivers is enlarged compared with that of the general population. The longer they’ve been driving, the bigger the gap. Maguire also found, though, that the front part of the hippocampus gets correspondingly smaller. “So there is a price to pay for their expertise,” she says."

http://www.theweek.com/article/index/102501/The_last_word_This_is_your_brain_on_GPS

(h/t Tim O'Reilly)
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The Big Shift

11/26/2009

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"If the logic of the Big Shift holds true, we are moving from a relatively stable business environment to one characterized by rapid rates of change with ever more disruptions generating increasing uncertainty and unpredictability. The economic imperatives and the management practices and institutional arrangements required to address those imperatives will lead to more instability rather than less."
- John Hagel
http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2009/08/defining-the-big-shift.html


The Deloitte Shift Index 2009:
http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_US/us/About/Catalyst-for-Innovation/Center-for-the-Edge/article/f142fcb75ef22210VgnVCM200000bb42f00aRCRD.htm

The Deloitte Shift Index 2009 - Industry Metrics & Perspectives:
http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_US/us/About/Catalyst-for-Innovation/Center-for-the-Edge/article/7d7b5da0117b4210VgnVCM100000ba42f00aRCRD.htm
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Preparing for impending nebulosity

11/25/2009

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One shopping trip, four items, one hat wardrobe - complete.
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The Nebulous Kingdom

11/24/2009

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/world/city_guides/results.shtml

neb·u·lous (nby-ls) adj. 
1. Cloudy, misty, or hazy. 
2. Lacking definite form or limits; vague

[Middle English, from Latin nebulsus, from nebula, cloud; see nebh- in Indo-European roots.] 

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.
 All rights reserved.

---

My new home for this school year is inarguably nebulous, according to American Heritage's first definition, and the data proves this out (note in particular the second and far right columns above).  

But my home for the rest of my life is nebulous in concordance with the second definition above, that is, a world of immense and deep uncertainty.  Though I've come here to LSE in the hope of contributing a bit of order to this environment, I recognize that this massive uncertainty will be a constant going forward - one of few constants, truly.

When I was seven, I believed that adults and experts knew mostly everything.  Maybe there were one or two gaps in knowledge that were left unfilled so we could grow up and make our own stamp on the body of human knowledge.

As I approach the state of being grown-up and my friends have become doctors and lawyers and VPs and politicians without getting noticeably smarter, it has become frighteningly clear to me the stuff that we do know is the anomaly and the gaps are the status quo.  We know virtually nothing next to what we do not know, small sandy atolls in vast oceans of ignorance.  

When I stop to consider it, it blows me away.

A sampling of the things we don’t know includes:
  • Virtually all that is to come in future eons;
  • Nearly all that has happened in the past;
  • Everything beyond our physical reach within this vast universe; 
  • That which is present here and today but permanently out of the scope of our limited senses and understanding—like color to a blind man.  Or like a 16-dimensional reality to a 4-dimensional creature.  Scientists, keep in mind that the limits of testing are not the limits of inquiry;
  • And oh yes, all the things that we could know and capture, and could learn eventually if we made the effort and our species is not extinguished in some future millennia, but happen to not know today.  Not a small quantity.
There is not a single discipline that we have plumbed to the bottom in the centuries they have existed – not biology, physics, mathematics, history or astronomy.  Empirically, it does seem that the more we learn, the more we discover we don’t know.  If we draw out that trend-line, it doesn’t seem to lead to our eventual omnipotence.

If humanity knows so little, then how little do we as individuals know.  And don’t forget, the little we do know is frequently tainted by faulty sensors, leaky data storage and shoddy analysis – e.g. optical illusion, fading memory, egocentric self-delusion.  It’s a wonder how we even manage to survive in an objective reality.

We live and will likely continue to live in a perpetual state of incomplete information.  Because of this, the phenomena we experience in our lives often appear to be random.  Given that life is so short and apparently random, we are all faced with the question:  How do we live?  
 
The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman once said, "I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong."  He saw that to live rationally is to operate within the conditions and limitations of uncertainty.  This has implications for how we treat our lives and other people. 
 
My thesis is that the optimal strategy in an environment of high uncertainty, advancing digital infrastructure, and growing transparency is trustworthiness.  There is an obvious moral foundation, but there is increasingly a cogent economic argument as well.  More to come.
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    I'm interested in uncertainty, time, trust, consistency, strategy, economics, empathy, philosophy, education, technology, story-telling, and fractals.
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