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Can’t help seeing parallels between NotW Phone Hacking (#hackgate) affair and the BP Macondo disaster.

It’s about management communications. Clearly multiple layers of management are there to share the load, not to communicate upwards (beyond reporting) every piece of information and decision with which they are involved. They are employed to “deal with it”, and good upper managers delegate to them for that reason.

To some degree as well as the efficiency aspect of the division of labour, there is an element of legitimate “plausible deniability” (*), sharing responsibilities too. Hierarchically lower staff cannot shed responsibility simply by communicating upwards. The buck stops with the responsible. In normal running, things can’t really work any other way. The question is how to spot when things are going wrong, going wrong on a scale that might effectively “bet the whole company”, and raise the communications accordingly. (Same in the Met, same in NewsCorp, same in BP)

Continuing the Parliamentary Committee in real time :

Tom Watson – interviewing Rupert Murdoch – is unfairly insisting he answer “why” questions about decisions made or not made in the operating companies. Murdoch is very patiently trying to answer them, but clearly his son is better placed to respond. Watson should focus on questions of “what” Rupert knew and when, before pursuing why. I agree with Alan Sugar tweeting http://twitter.com/#!/Lord_Sugar that the guy is pointlessly trying to humiliate the old man …

Much better line of questioning by Phillip Davies MP to James Murdoch. And Alan Keen hits the nail on the head with the question of what kinds of thing do have to be reported upwards … and James Murdoch comes back with the scale of the business and delegation issues (above) … hope this line gets pursued further.

Damian Collins too puts is finger on the communication culture question – people communicating what their manager “want” to hear – Rupert correctly pointing it it’s a manager’s job to see through that. Of course the conspiracy theorists want to find all sorts of pre-meditated strategies and cover-ups, but experience says, these will be communications cock-ups, that need to be understood and solved.

Oh and here we go … protester attacks Rupert with a plate of shaving foam … and his wife clocks the perp in the face. Bloody shambles. Well done to all for continuing after only 10 mins break …

And Louise Mensch too hits the right note – culture inured to long-standing illegal blagging and hacking of “fair-game” people in public life (as old as competitive free journalism surely), overstepped into the domain of innocents and victims …

I honestly don’t believe either of the Murdoch’s knew anything or were kept from knowing anything they expected to know, at the time.

Rebekah Brooks coming up …

Now Tom Watson’s questions much better directed, at what we might expect the editor to know – but again hindsight confusing him as he asks questions about the period before she was editor as well.

So much focus now in the use of PI’s and covert means. See separate post on legitimacy.

(*) The illegitimate equivalent of plausible deniability is “wilful blindness” – deliberately ignoring the availability of information you should know. There is a strange sense in the world of social media that because everything can be communicated everybody “should” know everything, whereas reality still demands a “need to know” approach. Clearly, Murdoch is embarrassed to admit there was indeed a good deal more he should have known.

Post Note – the implications about larger and smaller out-of-court settlements – all would have been nominally “confidential” sure, but some people – with Max Clifford on their side – were clearly much better at negotiating the value of any given settlment. The NewsCorp agreement to settle would always have been on legal advice that it was case they would be likely to lose – the actual amount would then have been a negotiation, which probably bore little relation to any “damage” in the content of the case. Again I suspect Murdoch junior is being pretty honest.

I’ve been listening to the parliamentary committee interviews of the Police in connection with the #hackgate affair. Stephenson the recently resigned commissioner, Fedorcio the director of public affairs, and Yates the recently resigned deputy chief police officer.

I have to say they all sound professional and their integrity pretty sound. Yates had already stated the decision to employ Wallis was “crap” with hindsight. Fedorcio clearly squirmed when asked to explain that he got a personal recommendation from Yates to support his “due diligence” (*) in employing Wallis. They clearly hadn’t colluded in getting their story straight on this point (which is a good thing). Fedorcio didn’t say it was a crap decision, but clearly for all three it was an embarrassing decision – with hindsight.

What is crap is al the innuendo from the certain members of the committee and the political correspondent Ian Watson, around the use of personal contacts in recruitment. Procedures guard against “abuse” of such contacts, but they are not a substitute for “who you know”. Nepotism is something quite different.

Also think all the points about real police priorities are genuine, and all the self-righteous hypocrisy from the commentators with the benefit of hindsight really doesn’t help.

[Rapid switch over to the CMSSC Murdoch hearings.]

(*) No-one actually performed due diligence – but the recruit was on a retainer contract, not staff, and previously personally known  to several of those who would be using his occasional specialist service – experience relevant to the specific services, and not-related to #hackgate.

As a practitioner of positive psychology (and an atheist) Jonathan Haidt’s “The Happiness Hypothesis” reads at times like a spiritual self-help book, and in a sense it is, but it is supported by a mass of academic and scientific references.

The Psybertron agenda has been on evolutionary psychology as a description of both epistemology (what is known) and ethics (what is good), so my interest has never really been with psychiatry or treatment of psychological abnormalities. That is, except in so far as; (a) more than a few science writers have used brain abnormalities to enlighten us about the normal workings of mind; and (b) more than a few writers who’ve flown close to understanding epistemology and ethics have had painful brushes with mental illness. (Evo-Psych gets a very bad press these days in over-reaching prescriptive outcomes, dangerous “woo” in the wrong hands, but like so many things there’s fundamental truth. Cybernetics – before there were what we now call computers – is very much about how minds of groups arrive at management decisions and actions.)

There but for grace, etc. In that sense my interest has always been in psychology and it has always been a positive, explanatory and active interest, but I’d not noticed the term “positive psychology” until an old school colleague of mine died earlier this year. Only in his obituaries did I discover he’d been a successful practitioner and published writer in the field. (I now have Chris Mace “Heart and Soul” – Psychological view of philosophy and philosophy as psychotherapy – back to Pirsig and “just write something” as the therapeutic blockage unblocker.)

The reason I mention Chris and positive psychology, is the discovery that Abraham Maslow, like Freud, is being rehabilitated into modern thinking, and the Freudian rehabilitation figures prominently in Chris’s work. Maslow’s Theory of Human Motivation and the hierarchy of human needs that arises from it were standard management theory for some years despite a backlash against mis-use of Maslow’s work – reducing complex theory to a simple diagram with few clumsy words is always open to abuse, but I always felt the underlying principles were sound, whatever his critics.

Maslow, and in particular his “Religions, Values and Peak Experiences” is one of the 10 great ideas in Haidt’s treatise on happiness.

Group Selection is another neo-Darwinian concept being re-habilitated these days, and D S Wilson is another key source for Haidt. He also brings back theories of “virtue” and “aretê” – Al MacIntyre is another source – and the concept of writing our own stories in the cultural narrative also figures highly – hence the need for cultural conservatism as well a liberal freedoms.

Amongst the new atheist evolutionary scientists, Pinker gets used positively but Dawkins and Dennett are ignored. Damasio is a positively recommended source and Haidt manages to write on the subject without invoking the infamously over-used Phineas Gage meme. Probably the main weakness in Haidt’s book is the title, and the dependence on “happiness” as the apparent measure of goodness. He elaborates formulae for happiness that bring in a wide range of factors, naturally, but we never come to another word to better capture the subject – well-being maybe, but not quality say, or aretê or excellence.

Bar that one weakness The Happiness Hypothesis is a good witty read and a great synthesis of ideas – in many cases self-reinforcing for me, since he uses many sources I already use. Particularly notable are two points:

Rehabilitation of the idea of “love” as subject to be taken seriously – all it’s forms – in a book supported by academic references. How many times have I asked “What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?”

Ditto, the rehabilitation of the idea of “divinity” as an axis of experience, orthogonal to the hierarchical levels of evolving knowledge and goodness. As an idea it does put some bones on that intuitive je-ne-sais-quois of experienced quality that never seems quite amenable to objective analysis, and it does it without invoking anything god-like, despite his choice of the term divine. Wonder what the new Humanists would make of this idea, and the fact that Haidt received Templeton funding ? (See also “Reinventing the Sacred” by Stuart Kaufmann, and Haidt’s own “The Righteous Mind“.)

At one point Haidt admits that his book could have been one long recommendation for Buddhism in its entirety, but this is ultimately too passive and by the end you discover his overriding prescription is in fact balance.

Oh and how could I forget, he likes metaphor (incl George Lakoff), and his primary metaphor throughout – rather than Plato’s two horses – is an elephant with a human driver in the saddle (See also “Master and Emissary” by Iain McGilchrist.) The big strong intuitive emotional animal, with the much smaller and much-less-powerful-than-it-thinks rational mind in “control” (also draws on Daniel Wegner).

Modern truth in ancient wisdom. Nothing new under the sun.

Just finished two quite different books recently. Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil, and first, Empire of the Clouds – When Britain’s Aircraft Ruled the World, by James Hamilton-Paterson.

The latter is a memoir of British aviation since the second world war, constructed mainly from anecdotes and memoirs of test pilots involved. Partly it’s a litany of risks and bad management of government funded aircraft projects and piecemeal rationalization of the many independent post-war names – Gloster, Bristol, Fairey, Avro, Handley-Page, etc – and the many dead (crew and bystanders) on whom modern safe civilian air travel depend. Nostaligic for me for 50 years of air-show display aircraft stories – Hunters, Javelins, V-Bombers, Lightnings, all of which I saw in the sixties at Middleton-St-George (Teesside), right up to Harriers. And of course quaint British industrial and management “class” practices. It’s also of interest because I actually left working on Harriers the UK Aero-industry in 1978, due to constant Heath-Wilson government swings in project decisions. The engineering was secondary to the partisan politics. Little did I know then that now, all these anecdotes are part of my sociology and evolutionary-psychology of decision-making agenda. Some great anecdotes that will mean even more when seeing remaining museum examples of some of the marques – the Lightning at Duxford for example – and the story of Alan Pollock – politically invalided out of the RAF in April 1968, after a protest flight without a flight-plan, that took in buzzing Parliament three times before saluting the RAF memorial on the embankment and flying off through Tower Bridge in his Hunter. The book covers right up the 2010 UK Strategic Defence Review. (I have a draft post somewhere on aircraft nostalgia …. the Lightning is still my favourite.)

Beatrice and Virgil on the other hand has a similar feel to Yann Martel’s prize-winning Life of Pi. Although based on a much darker underlying history than the simple(!) youthful journey in Pi, B&V’s agenda is still very much on pushing the limits on what might actually be true in writing a conventional first-person narrative story. In B&V’s case, it’s the play being written within the story, apparently fictional (clearly fictional, since it involves talking animals) but which is an allegory for a darker reality, linked with a twist to its taxidermist-author. Very clever and satisfying to read. (BTW It helps to know that Beatrice and Virgil were originally characters from Dante’s Divine Comedy. PS I also have Martel’s 1996 “Self” to read, which predates LoP.)

Adversarial binary arguments are always motivated.

With all the buzz around Google+ vs Facebook, etc (see previous post) thanks to David Gurteen for this Bill Ives link to a paper / book chapter from Forrester Research. Nothing new under the sun, but paying 500 bucks for the privilege of reading the results does focus the mind. Shock horror – it’s not possible to leapfrog the need for evolution, but indeed the “learning curve” is part of the process of getting there, to solving a problem or exploiting an opportunity, using social media or any other tool.

You can debate the significance of the specific 5 levels – you may prefer to identify 3 or 7 (*) – BUT you can’t jump to the benefits of a final implementation without the learning benefits of preliminary attempts, unless you are very lucky. Think monkeys and typewriters, think stairway to heaven, think making your own luck.

(*) I prefer 3 layers, because even the layers come in 3 layers …. and two 3’s make 5, three 3’s make 7 etc … just a question of granularity / fractality of the issues you address …. and 80/20 view on what you value most in each given distinction …. a longer story.

PS – another good link from David Gurteen to a “Lost in Translation” piece by Nick Milton – also linked earlier.

PPS – and Branson too – no alternative to evolution. Plans most likely mess things up.

Doug Hofstadter’s 6 word autobiography, according to XKCD.

I’m so META,
even this acronym.

aka “The reference implementation of the self-referential joke.”

Thanks to Psybertron Jr for spotting it. Even as recently as two of the last three posts, the word has been meta and the reference has been Hofstadter.

Meta has been the word since 1999/2000 when most other people were distracted by the impending millennium bug, but The Economist no less predicted that “Meta will be the word of the noughties”. We were almost right, maybe in the teenies we’ll get there. No-one in the dot.com-boom spotted the impending explosion in media opportunities to spread memetically the lowest common denominator of obvious “old knowledge” and that this would be a drag on advancing attention on new “meta” knowledge, recognizing the underlying reality of [meta(meta)^n]-knowledge. The Religion vs Science debate has been just as distracting in creating an artificial binary opposition of old knowledge – attention grabbing in the media spotlight.

Thanks to Quine, Hofstadter (and Dennett) got there before most of the rest of us. Attention is the valuable commodity.

Prompted by an F-something-or-other (*1) screaming overhead and out into the North Sea, I was reminded of recent Norwegian and Dutch colleagues mentioning that Russian “reconnaissance” intrusions into northern NATO controlled airspace were happening again – just like the old cold-war days. Fylingdales isn’t what it used to be, but we didn’t have Google then.

This whacky right-wing US site has a collation of reported sightings. Ironically, the Chamorro Bible site is also a plane-spotter’s dream. (Chamorro is hard to navigate, everything is by date, and the links don’t convey the wealth of images they contain – Example Feb 2007 contains some excellent F14 sunset shots, including the “Green Sunset” …. you just have to browse the massive hi-quality collection – every subject under the sun – weather, wildlife, geography, geo-physical events, natural-disasters, relief-aid, hardware – photographed from US military and Nasa platforms.)

Same old TU95 Bear’s but this interceptor here is an F22 Raptor.

(More arty shots as well as this one
– with sunsets and moon backdrops –
in the linked Chamorro collection.)

(*1) At one time my visual acuity and general plane-spotting-geekiness meant I could spot just about any model at any altitude, but sadly the eyesight and knowledge of post-80’s aircraft ain’t what they used to be. (This one was twin-tail-fin, twin-engine, low-fuselage-side-intakes, high-swept / tapered wing, high-forward-fuselage and bubble-canopy, didn’t notice whether tail-planes or forward-canard / extensions, didn’t sound all that heavy – say like an F15 Eagle, or even more like an F18 Hornet, MiG29 Fulcrum or Su27 Flanker 😉 – can’t imagine what any are doing serving over North Yorks – maybe an air-show display visit, or a newer model I don’t recognise ? Not an F14 Tomcat or an F35 JSF / Lightning III(*2) or an F22 Raptor so far as I could tell, none have that “hunched” forward fuselage look.)

(*2) refuse to call it Lightning II since there have already been (at least) two. P38 Lightning and BAC F1/F3/F6/F53 Lightning. BTW this on-line Flight International archive, Flight Global has a great collection of those cutaways – some poster sized with amazing detail – right from 1903 to 2006 (!)

[Post Note June 2013 – Seems the only the active USAF bases in the UK are Mildenhall (Tankers, EWACS and Transports) and Lakenheath (F15’s) – no F22’s or F35’s – so in fact F15 is the reasonable conclusion, seen a few more since.]

Thanks to Dave Gurteen for Tweeting to his LinkedIn stream a link to a Michael Sampson post reviewing a Rajesh Setty post on why “Smart People” sometimes appear bad at sharing knowledge.

It’s because what passes for knowledge becomes removed from current activities. Computation as compression – efficiency in the evolutionary arms race. The more expert / experienced one becomes in a subject the more the “obvious” stuff becomes buried beneath the more interesting / exceptional / creative variations – the more conscious effort is required to go back and unpick the “process” by which the current knowledge was arrived at in terms of its more primitive components (see the linked graphic). This is part “every picture paints a thousand words” – where the picture replaces / stands-for a thousand knowledge-items learned, but it can never “convey” that knowledge to anyone not really already knowing them. It is also part Hofstadter’s tit-for-tat-tabletop – the next move (or the pattern of moves) is ALWAYS a (more) creative metaphor away from the current world situation – away from the table-top or theatre-of-operations in front of you – in a layer of metaphorical abstraction.

Apart from sharing what is already known, any metaphor / abstraction should be original / creative, or it is simply a cliche, a meme. Progress always happens at the meta-level. Only accounting / stubbed-toes / dragged-knuckles occur in the world of here-and-now beans / rocks.

PS just listening to Bertrand Russell’s original 6-part Reeth Lectures archive from 1948. He has that “of course it’s all too obvious to the likes of me” tone of condescention – which also comes across in his cock-sure position on logic, so lampooned by Wittgenstein – BUT, so much of what he said is in fact  too true, nothing new under the sun, plus ca change, etc … ’twas ever thus. Just like the tone I’m now using, What goes around, comes around. Great section in the first lecture on the balance of social authority vs individual freedom. I see MoQ-Discuss is on another endless loop on “free” will vs determinism. Oh for a Hofstadterian strange-loop.

Of course that Seth Godin link from David includes such a loop. Rule 6 says if in doubt ignore rules 1 to 5. That’s normal. Rules are primarily for their exceptions (*). The only reason to learn rules 1 to 6 is to understand why it’s rule 6 that matters. Learning rules 1 to 5 is simply part of the learning process in practice.

(*) That’s not quite what I mean. The interesting aspect of rules are primarily their exceptions, conflicts and harder interpretations, the rules themselves are primarily to record the obvious / background knowledge …. to link back to the original piece.

Irrelevant to the Bin Laden context I reckon, but a worthwhile piece from Baggini on the idea of torture being an absolute no-no as some matter of principle. Of course like all rules, it’s the exceptions we need to be talking about – the old adage that “Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the enslavement of fools.” That and making the distinction between thought experiments and their value in a real world situation, where the decision-maker must live with the consequences.

The paradox that yes, even absolute rules have exceptions.

The truth in “never say never” is that there are no exceptionless rules. But that does not mean there are no rules. Rules matter and to be rules they need to be universal in form: always do this, never do that. But it is foolish to rule out in advance the possibility that an occasion might arise when normal rules just don’t apply. Rules are not there to be broken, but sometimes break them we must.

Foolish = for fools – right?
Breaking rules = something wise people must do.
The more absolute the rule the greater the wisdom needed.

Some good stuff in Baggini’s piece – like even the excluded middle between a binary choice is not just another single third choice, they come in many potential varieties.

These responses �” yes, no and it’s a bad question so I won’t answer �” seem to exhaust the options. But I think there is a fourth option: yes and no, a contradiction that makes as much sense as “never say never”.

(PS – I recall that Harvard Law public lecture series on escalating otherwise very simple moral dilemmas …. must dig up the link.)