Transcendental Generalization

I recently read Clayton M. Christensen’s The Innovator’s Solution (sequel to his The Innovator’s Dilemma) and re-read Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm. I have also been involved in the development of two fledgeling businesses which faced some of the challenges described by these authors. Based on these experiences, I developed a simple model contrasting the hope of product development with the reality.

Product developers frequently hope that incremental addition of features will grow revenue, that certain sets of features will allow entry into new markets, and that entry into new markets will cause jumps in revenue. Graphically, this hope could be represented as below:

Unfortunately, such a hope is frequently rewarded by investors eager for entry into new markets and revenue growth in general. What tends to happen in reality is that, with the addition of features, the product becomes “jack of all markets, master of none”. It may get a few customers in new markets, due to its general applicability. However, it fails to meet key needs of the vast majority of participants in each market. In pursuing a miniscule number of customers in brand new markets, product developers increase their management and overhead costs and find it increasingly difficult to satisfy the diverse demands of existing customers. The result looks something like this:

Preoccupation with entry into new markets through the addition of features leads product developers to throw good money after bad, neglecting benefits that could be gained from investments in marketing instead of product development. Marketing here means more than just advertising campaigns. It means a deep understanding of customer needs, what Christensen calls “the job” for which the product is to be “hired”. Continued investment in product development also creates maintenance costs and constraints on pricing.

The key lesson to take from Moore and Christensen is that product developers must focus on incremental growth in the addressed market, not incremental growth in product features. Revenue growth comes from meeting the needs of the majority of participants in larger markets.

Product developers must overcome three key challenges:

• Shift focus from product development, which is an internally-facing function whose results are relatively easy to control, to product marketing, which is an externally-facing function whose results are relatively difficult to control.
• Resist the belief that a market is captured when the first participant becomes a customer. The revenue growth from market domination will required additional investment to meet the needs of the majority of participants in new markets.
• Overcome fear of the sudden increases in product features that are occasionally required to address even a slightly larger market. Channel partnerships, packaging changes, and marketing communication changes are all relatively cheap ways to reposition an existing product for additional markets. Technology partnerships and acquisitions can help rapidly build up feature sets required by the majority of participants in new markets.

A friend referred me to this fascinating article about the Gigapxl Project. Graham Flint is travelling across America taking pictures, but he’s doing it with an aerial camera, producing 9-inch by 18-inch negatives from a $1,200 roll of film. The results are images well-suited for Google Earth, letting you zoom from a complete view of a baseball game down to the writing on the T-shirt of some one sitting in the stands. Visit the GigaPxl Project gallery for more samples.

I’ve been watching The West Wing for the first time, on DVD. The opening episode of the third season was a special one in recognition of the 9/11 tragedy. There was some good dialogue and debate on the sources of terrorism, which sparked a discussion in my household.

Fundamentalism is rooted in an extreme and rigid mindset that doesn’t seem sustainable. Even the most homogeneous of societies include diverse interests, and it seems inevitable that a rigid mindset would either bend or break under daily buffetting from opinions and ideas that conflict with it or divert it. Its seems natural that a person with a rigid mindset opposed to the common interests (as the Declaration of Independence put it, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) of his society would be shunned, isolated, and thereby rendered harmless.

How is it, then, that fundamentalists are able to enlist the political and financial support of large populations, including fanatics willing to kill or die for their cause? How is it that they can motivate large groups of people to abandon their normal life and wage war or commit genocide?

At least one answer was discussed in the episode and succinctly illustrated in the movie Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters). They gain this support by promising social standing to those who are marginalized, freedom to those who are oppressed, wealth to those who are poor, and, generally, hope for a better life to those who are ignorant of alternatives. If such groups form a large part of a society, then it is fertile ground for fundamentalism. In making their promises, fundamentalists exploit religious myth because it is

• generally accepted without proof by believers,
• frequently ambiguous, and therefore easily bent to the fundamentalists’ political, economic, or psychopathic aims, and
• frequently concerned with the rewards of the afterlife, meaning fundamentalists needn’t actually deliver on their promises. (That is left to God.)

The hypothesis discussed in The West Wing is that once these marginalized, oppressed, poor, and ignorant populations see alternative, realistic paths to these promises (in this life), they abandon support of fundamentalists, whose brittle systems of thought are easily shattered.

Davidson Loehr eloquently described the relationship between fascism and religious fundamentalism in his sermon, Living Under Fascism.

It is both accurate and helpful for us to understand fundamentalism as religious fascism, and fascism as political fundamentalism. They both come from very primitive parts of us that have always been the default setting of our species: amity toward our in-group, enmity toward out-groups, hierarchical deference to alpha male figures, a powerful identification with our territory, and so forth. It is that brutal default setting that all civilizations have tried to raise us above, but it is always a fragile thing, civilization, and has to be achieved over and over and over again.

I particularly appreciated his suggestion that these phenomena have roots in the primal human nature. Indeed, Freud dedicated his entire book, Civilization and its Discontents, to the relationship between civilization and primal human nature.

I read The Satanic Verses immediately after it was published, and it turned me off to Salman Rushdie for many years. No one should be forced into hiding for fear of being murdered by religious zealots. But Rushdie suffered this very fate for writing careless stream-of-consciousness passages in a really bad book. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry… (Not to mention that the man acts incredibly pretentious every time I see him on TV.)

However, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is excellent. It describes events in India from the point of view of Saleem Sinai who, along with hundreds of other “midnight children,” is born at the moment of India’s independence. The midnight children represent diverse hopes, dreams, plans, and talents. These are set in motion when the children are born and remain intertwined with their lives as the nation suffers social and political upheavals, until their decimation during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency.

Rushdie’s writing style freely mixes historical fact and realistic events with myth, metaphor, and bizarre coincidence. In The Satanic Verses, this technique seemed inane, detracting from the book’s literary value. Here, it adds humor and enriches the historical and cultural setting of the book. What is metaphor to us is real in the world of Midnight’s Children, but the book retains a bounty of metaphor of relevance to the real world.

• In The Satanic Verses (published in 1989) as well as Midnight’s Children (published in 1980) a hapless and excessively self-absorbed main character manages barely to survive a world that seems bent on his destruction. Hence, the real life controversy following publication of The Satanic Verses is entirely consistent with the plot of these books.
• [Spoiler] At the end of Midnight’s Children, published in 1980, Saleem marries a woman named Padma. In 2004, Rushdie married actress/model Padma Lakshmi.

Perhaps, like Andy Kaufman, Rushdie intends to blur the distinction between his art and his life.

Lawrence Lessig is a Stanford Law School professor who argues eloquently against copyright restrictions and for allowing people to produce newer and better creative works by building upon existing work. This article on NPR’s Morning Edition bolsters his case, discussing how great composers borrowed and even “stole” from their predecessors.

I like the idea discussed in this segment on NPR’s Morning Edition: try going 24 hours without buying anything. At the very least, it will raise your consciousness of how much you consume on a daily basis.

If you do venture out, be kind to the people you run into, especially the employees serving you at the checkout counter or in the aisles. They’re putting in a long day starting very early in the morning. They’re dealing with large numbers of holiday shoppers who are often aggressive or irate and who have very high expectations of the bargains they’ll find. I like to think that a smile, a patient attitude, a friendly or sympathetic comment, and use of “please” and “thank you” are things that cost nothing, but go a long way toward improving the experience for every one.

The word discriminate has a dual nature. It can have a positive connotation, as when we speak of a “discriminating collector of rare books.” However, in modern America, its usage seems primarily negative, referring to unfair racial or sexual discrimination.

The dual nature of this word has intrigued me ever since I heard of Shankaraachaarya’s text, Vivekachudaamani. Shankaraachaarya was the most famous scholar of the philosophy of Advaita Vedaanta, which places paramount importance on discriminating between reality and illusion. Hence, the title of his work, which translates as Crown Jewel of Discrimination. (Indeed, Vivek is a name commonly given to Hindu males, and it means “discrimination” in this very positive sense.)

It was strange for me to hear of discrimination as a desirable practice while experiencing racial discrimination first-hand, becoming more aware of sexual discrimination and its injustices, especially in the workplace, and learning the profoundly destructive role played by religious discrimination in world history.

How could the same word be used for both? Could these good and evil sides of discrimination be reconciled in some way?

A key insight came from my study of artificial intelligence. Human beings, and other intelligent organisms, must make rapid judgements on the basis of incomplete information. The ability to do so is built into our sensory systems and appears critical to intelligence in general. Indeed, noted AI researcher Roger Schank described conceptual structures or stereotypes that could be used to rapidly assess situations and predict outcomes. Furthermore, rapid and superficial discrimination is a powerful survival mechanism for animals living in primal conditions, a category in which our distant ancestors are included. Animals in the wild cannot afford to say, “The last lion bit my leg off. But not all lions are bad, so I’ll still be friendly to this next one.” Because it is a critical survival mechanism, any genetic contributors to the mechanism of rapid and superficial discrimination would definitely have been passed down through the generations.

Although it served an important adaptive purpose for our distant ancestors, rapid and superficial discrimination is frequently wrong, leading to incorrect generalizations. As Mark Twain said,

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

It appears, then, that rapid and superficial discrimination is deeply ingrained in human beings. It helped our ancestors survive and continues to play a critical role in our wondrous capacity for perception and inference. However, it is frequently wrong. And when we make sweeping judgements about groups of people on the basis of a single experience, or about individuals on the basis of nothing more than their skin color, sex, sexual orientation, age, or religion, we are as foolish as Twain’s cat.

Although this is a reasonable explanation for numerous misjudgements, it seems insufficient to explain the gross injustice and evil in human history, all stemming from rapid and superficial discrimination. A cat may avoid stoves and may even bully weaker cats, but cats have never committed mass murder of other cats.

The factor missing from these considerations is the human ability to communicate and empathize. This important ability allows us to respond to and learn from the experiences of others largely as if they were our own. Unfortunately, communication and empathy are not perfectly reliable. If miscommunication results in misunderstanding, or if an empathic response exaggerates the emotional state of another, it may lead to a human being responding to things that never happened to any one, or responding with an intensity unwarranted by reality. This is why people can successfully teach their children prejudice and racial hatred, even when the children have had no first-hand experiences—positive or negative—with the people they learn to hate.

Take a predisposition toward rapid and superficial discrimination, deeply ingrained and with genetic motivators. Combine it with the capacity to respond on the imperfect bases of communication and empathy. Now throw in the idea that under stress, behavior regresses to a primal state. Is it any wonder that rapid and superficial discrimination, leading to the injustices of racial and sexual prejudice, are rampant in modern human populations?

I regret that this analysis suggests no novel ways to eliminate these injustices. It does, however, reinforce conventional wisdom for avoiding them:

1. Genetic predispositions cannot (today) be undone. However, if rapid and superficial discrimination is a primal response, and if people regress to primal responses under stress, then we may reduce unfair discrimination by maintaining low-stress interactions with people. This means making a conscious effort to adopt an attitude of acceptance, compassion, and good humor, as opposed to exclusive or hostile attitudes.
2. By questioning the fidelity of communications and the intensity of empathic responses, we may stop drawing conclusions that lack basis in reality.
3. By making decisions slowly and deliberately, we may avoid the pitfalls of gross generalizations. It is true that rapid decisions are often desirable, but it should at least be noted that they are vulnerable to superficial information.

While passing through the Atlanta airport, I saw a Zoom Systems vending machine selling, among other things, Sony headphones and Apple iPods Shuffle. (It appeared to have sold all of its Nanos.) Here’s what it looked like:

Bryan Collinsworth made an eloquent request for people to get beyond literal interpretation of the Bible in this article on AlterNet. I would take a similar position against literal interpretation of any scripture of any religion.

If we insist on approaching the tale of Adam and Eve as literal truth, we come out of the story with little more than frustration that our ancestors could be so stupid as to condemn all humanity by trusting a talking snake. But if we let go of this literalist fixation and dig to the moral and spiritual heart of the story, we confront a fundamental tenet of Christianity: that the Garden of Eden drama is played out every day, by our neighbors and ourselves; that we are not just condemned by the temptation and sin of our predecessors but by humanity’s perpetual weakness in choosing evil over good; that we have all made choices to eat forbidden fruit for which we desperately want and need redemption.

Previously in Transcendental Generalization…

[In Kansas,] the board of education actually re-wrote the definition of the word science so that they could meet this requirement [that the curriculum’s standard must include Intelligent Design]

Looks like the Annals of Improbable Research folks have known about Kansas all along. They awarded the Kansas State Board of Education their Ig Nobel Prize for Science Education back in 1999.