Re: MIA/POW - former smn'ers

In article
<67a5181f-dad8-48f7-a465-53a0674464d2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Chris <cmanteuf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jul 14, 8:47 am, Alan Lothian <alanloth...@xxxxxxx> wrote:

I have a horrible feeling (as clearly does Eugene upthread) that this
is precisely what is happening. Long live November, say I!

I think that Mr. Womack is undoubtedly correct downthread- keeping up
with a newsgroup like SMN is really hard.

Really? Once upon a time, perhaps, but there's so little traffic now.
Your comments on S:N ratio noted, though, and by no means disagreed
with. I hope to respond to Tom Womack later day, assuming I finish
writing something I actually might get paid for :(


<snippaggio>


But then again, I've also gotten married and now have a job (which I'm
intent on keeping) which take up lots more time that was unallocated
back in high school.

First and foremost, heartiest congratulations. I wish you joy of it,
Sir. As for time.... ho ho ho. Just wait until the next generation
comes along, the little buggers. (Merely a Briticism, and no
implication as to anal activities.)


Practically *everything* about honest communication is all
too hard for the kiddywinks, who relate to each other in strange, sad
ways. Huge issue. The Web has woven.

It is NOT just my generation. Decision makers today (meaning people
your generation, not mine) get their information in pretty poor ways
too.

You have an excellent point here. My own mentor, a generation older
than myself, Brooklyn Jew, ex US marine sergeant and great designer,
had an excellent line when it came to the receipt of poorly presented
or digested information (and design, in the most profound sense, is
always about information). Lou just snarled "What is this fucking
horse***?"


I was just recently talking to my dad about the decline of the
3-4 page position paper into a 30 slide PPT presentation.

Say no more. PPT is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord, never mind
my own. (I have actually seen a PPT job on the New Testament; made a
chap think longingly back to burning, stakes, etc.)

As for position papers: it is deeply instructive to read old Civil
Service assessments/memos, where the chaps (and back then rarely
chapesses) did exactly the kind of thing whose absence you lament in
your next paragraph.


There is a
major loss in cognitive complexity in the transition.

That's almost like saying that the Titanic suffered a major loss in
flotation capability. Very charitably put.

Writing long
form forces you think to a depth and complexity that almost no one has
any time for, either as producers or consumers.

Time, eh? We'll get to that in a minute.

(My sister is a
freelance journalist, so I can see the problems from the producers
perspective as well as the consumers.)

I've been a freelance writer on and off for quite a while myself and I
can tell you right now that time is only one part of the problem;
indeed it's more an excuse than a problem in and of itself.

There is a lovely story told by David Magarshak, Russian emigre and
among other things translator of great note. On arriving at Victoria
Station in London from the boat train, he was anxious to try out his
English. Seeing a stout, respectable-looking gentleman, and forgetting
that English unlike his native Russian makes considerable use of the
definite article, he asked the fellow: "Excuse, plis. What is time?" To
which the English gent, after a moment's reflection, replied: "Ah, my
friend, you have asked a profound and imponderable question."

On management time, let me take the liberty of interpolating a piece of
unpublished work, written back in the dawn of PPT.

<begin self-indulgent quote from own work>

On corporate credulity:

To become a senior executive in a major business organization, and
even more, to *stay* a senior executive in that demanding environment,
you have to devote a great deal of energy and ingenuity to high-level
office politics: at least eight hours a day, and far more than that at
times of crisis.

I cannot stress too much that this is not a trivial occupation. You
have long ago left behind you such basic strategies as toadying to the
boss, stealing your subordinates' ideas and all the rest of Office
Politics 101. As a successful player, you have an admirable capacity
for long-range planning, as well as an uncanny ability to keep track of
a dozen or more unstable alliances and a water-diviner's sensitivity to
the shifting channels through which corporate power actually flows,
something that never shows up on an organization chart.

You will have to spend what little time remains to you in making sure
the corporation you work for actually makes a profit, or at least not
too outrageous a loss, in order to keep the shareholders off your back.
Fortunately, this side of things, which outsiders foolishly imagine to
be your actual purpose in life, is not too difficult if that strange,
incomprehensible and unknowable thing "the economy" is booming. If "the
economy" is in a slump, you can always blame your company's failure on
that. There is of course a risk that economic failure will kick you out
on the street but only if you have got things wrong in the politics
department.

Since these two activities, especially the first one, take up all your
waking hours and then some, you have no time left to read anything or
even to talk to people who are not fellow-players in the corporate
game. That is why senior executives are notoriously among the most
ignorant of all men.

<end self-indulgent quote>

The reason, I think, for the rise of powerpoint is we're all being
graded on volume now.

Yes, but... what you're being graded on is something that can be
measured. If your only tool is a hammer, at least nails get hit. If
your only tool is a measuring tape, then all you will ever get are
whatever can be counted in inches or centimetres. The hammer-wielder at
least has to employ sufficient judgement to keep his thumb out of the
way. The measurer merely has to produce something that fills
appropriate tick-boxes that a higher-level box-ticker can appreciate.

<snippaggio of entirely interesting and to me quite resonant points
about house purchase; be warned that house sales are the same, mutatis
mutandis>

The downside is, that because there has been
less effort at distillation by the staff, and less effort at
understanding by the actual decision-maker, poorer overall decisions
are being made. People don't understand the negative consequences of
their decisions nearly as well, and so they take fewer efforts to
mitigate them. Our quest for efficiency and being 'lean' has negative
side effects that I think we're just now starting to explore.

But then there are decision makers, and there are decision makers. A
long, long time ago, I briefly worked for an American oil exploration
company in the early stages of North Sea oil. My job was nothing more
exciting than rolling out hundreds of feet of seismi sheets and
colouring in the Jurassic/Triassic divide, or whatever the hell it was.
The genial band of US geophysicists and geologists I worked for had to
decide where to drill a hole, cost then around a megabuck. They
couldn't. They had to fly back to Dallas where a junior VP, who knew
nothing of the North Sea, made the decision. That was what he got paid
(and fired, occasionally) for doing. FWIW the hole was a blank.


http://www.afji.com/2009/07/4061641

is an interesting article on the problems that soldiers have with
powerpoint presentations. I've said, only half jokingly, that the
problems with the invasion of Iraq came about because of powerpoint-
because it made it easy for the guys doing the briefings to hide the
weaknesses in planning that they had done.

I think you can delete the joking entirely. That's exactly what
happened. The quickness of the PPT deceives the eye.... and mind. But
sooner or later soldiers figure things out, and it's usually sooner. I
will leave it to others on the group to take up that particular cudgel.

In my professional
experience, I trace several poor decisions made by our customer back
to bad powerpoint leaving them ill-informed of the actual costs and
benefits of the decisions they were making.

I know of at least one major finance outfit that (at one time, look
what's happened since) banned Powerpoint presentations for precisely
that reason, with the associated observation that people spent far more
time making the thing pretty than thinking anything through.

It isn't the fault of the tool, obviously, it's the fault of the tool
users, but this is a major fear that I have for the future of
engineering. Too many powerpoint engineers, too few metal-and-bits
engineers.

You might like to take a look at this, a book review, if you haven't
already:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/books/review/Fukuyama-t.html?_r=1&page
wanted=all

It's written by Francis Fukuyama, on whose fan list I do not stand very
high, but there are some well-made points there which will be grist to
your mill. Ah, metaphor. Careful: the poor man's powerpoint :)

<more snippaggio of good, thoughtful stuff that will keep my old brain
festering for a day or two>

What's different is that the internet had brought this sort of power,
once reserved for the elite, is now available to everyone.

Now here I must disagree. It has brought *the illusion* of power to
every fuckwit with a keyboard. In fact, the net, and most specifically
the web, is perhaps the greatest agent of disempowerment the world has
ever known, precisely because all those fools delude themselves into
grandiose ideas of their liberated importance. You can hit me with a tu
quoque on that, Chris, but I doubt you'll make it stick.

I will
admit that when I started out on this newsgroup, almost 15 years ago,
one of the attractions was that people who knew things would pay
attention to my opinions- which to a 13 year old was hugely important.
Now, most of what I said back then was wrong, and was (mostly) gently
corrected, but the idea that I could discuss as an equal with people
who were just as passionate as I was- it was amazing. It was why I
kept coming back. To learn more, sure, but to have people listen to
what I had to say. So, even though I was posting under my own name, I
too was creating a new me, one that wasn't a student but that was a
peer of adults who had been reading and studying for decades.


Seriously: you should expand this post into a proper essay and get it
published. It would do a lot of people a lot of good. Hell, it's
already a damned good essay, and I do not mean that in any patronizing
way whatsoever.

The "new me" thing is probably the cultural key to all sorts of things.
I've seen enough of it. Interestingly, and perhaps hypocritically, I
play online bridge with the pseudonym Bampot. Now, my real name is
easily available to any other player (I absolutely wouldn't have it any
other way) but I rather enjoy being addressed as "Bam", "Bammer" etc.
The other extreme, or perhaps another side to the same extreme (at my
age, you have to allow me the odd Kenwood Special metaphor) is the
power of names. I am thinking of "young persons" here. The giving of a
real name seems to both giver and receiver to have an almost literally
magical quality.


And speaking of real people, and younger generations, I'd be really
interested to read what ChrisManteuffel(whom I know to be a real
person) makes of all this.

Heh. I don't have a blog, a facebook account, a twitter account, a
MySpace account, or anything like that. I don't think that any of
those are really a good idea (seriously, 140 characters? What the hell
is the point?). But I seem to be in the minority among people my age.
(My wife claims that I think like a 60 year old.)

Not yet, Chris. Just hang on in there.... :)

If I want to
bloviate onto the internet, I'll do it in Usenet, as long as it's
around.

Well, reports of deaths are often exaggerated. Thanks for a superb post.

--
"The past resembles the future as water resembles water" -- Ibn Khaldun

If you wish to email me, try putting a dot between alan and lothian.
Blueyonder is a thing of the past.
.

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