Category: Books

The Smart Mobs in Howard Rheingold’s book don’t seem so smart.
Swarms of people with mobile gizmos can mass to overthrow governments and on a smaller scale, co-ordinate dinner, or turnstile jumping, or soccer riots.
A Smart Mob can take down a government, but can it govern? The Seattle protesters were nimble, but their platforms weren’t that coherent (contrary opinions with pointers to cogent sources most welcome).
What processes for thinking and co-ordination are required to make decentralized action really smart, not just co-ordinated and impulsive?

In an email, David Weinberger corrected the urban legend version of his bio, which is that he left philosophy to write jokes for Woody Allen.

“Well, it’s a nice myth, but I wrote gags for WA’s comic strip while I was teaching. I left teaching because there were no tenure slots open where I taught.”

Too bad, I like the fictional version better. Not that far off though.
David thinks that I misunderstand his intend regarding authenticity:

…she takes “authenticity” in a way that I don’t quite get and don’t think I intended. She seems to think I mean by it something having to do with the purity of one’s roots when in fact I use it as something like taking ownership for who one is.

No, I don’t think at all that he meant that. I do think that there’s a tension between expressing our “authentic” identities and participating in groups, both of which are good things. For example, I wrote about synagogue on Saturday. If I post the article on Saturday afternoon, I offend the sensibilities of my more observant friends. By writing the story at all, I offend the sensibilities of my rigorously secular friends. Yup, writing is taking ownership of an identity, which brings conflict as well solidarity. Means making choices about who to piss off when.
Since writing the essay, I read some of the other reviews and interviews in the sidebar. The interesting thing about the interviews is that the book’s flippant yet deep style didn’t come easily at all. Weinberger wrote and shredded a couple drafts in Serious Mode and was on the verge of chucking the project when he came up with the voice for the book.
Makes it easier to handle my envy for Weinberger’s light touch; I grew up without much television; conversations about movie stars send me off to the corner to read books with big words. If he had to work to tune the flippancy meter, the crowdpleasing is easier to handle.
I should also say in interest of full disclosure, David is an occasional mentor and is an advisor to an early start-up project that I’m involved with.

I recently read Small Pieces Loosely Joined, by David Weinberger.
This piece is in part a review, and in part a reflection and extension of Weinberger’s themes.
“Small Pieces” is a meditation on the influence of the internet on our understanding of the world, which sounds a lot heavier than the book reads. To appreciate the tone of the book, keep Dr. Weinberger’s bio in mind; he ditched a career as a philosophy professor to write jokes for Woody Allen; and has followed the high-tech marketing route to become a sort of “maggid of new media.” (maggid = itinerant storytelling hassidic preacher), interpreting the events of the day to convey an important message in an entertaining way. The message is an irreverent yet faithful humanism: “this is the web’s nature; for everything on it was put there by a human being for a reason.”
Summary
The book is organized by theme, contrasting our experience of the internet with the assumptions of the “default philosophy” we hold in our heads.

• Space. We understand the web using a spatial metaphor; websites feel like places. Yet the space of the web is measured by emotions and interests, rather than rather the impersonal lines of surveyor’s grid
• Time. On the internet, time isn’t measured in industrial clock-time; it is experienced as parallel, overlapping threads, and comprehended through stories that make sense of time.
• Knowledge. The internet isn’t a dry library of objective facts, instead, knowledge is fleshed out with passions and opinions; and
  readers use their judgement to filter the relevant from the wacky.
• Perfection. Instead of the phony perfection of glossy marketing materials; the web celebrates real human imperfection.
• Togetherness. In contrast to the myth of individual identity; the web is a thoroughly social place where our identities are built in relation to others. In contrast to physical space, where we lose our individuality when we’re a face in the crowd; the internet lets us retain our individuality in the group.
• Matter. In contrast to our conventional realist, materialist assumption that things you can drop on your toe are realer than thoughts, feelings and meanings, the web is a world that consists of stories and interpretations of stories.
• Hope. In contrast to modern solipsism and alienation; the web is based on the social bonds that are the foundations of morality.

Commentary
David Weinberger has the insight that the web is about conversation and stories. It seems to me that this brings to common humanity a set of genres and insights that were pioneered by the rabbis of the talmud.
Weinberger argues against the cold, empirical, rationalist tradition that has come down to us from the Greeks through western philosophy. Yet the structure of the book is in the tradition of the Greeks. The chapter titles are big, abstract philosophical concepts; space, time, matter, knowledge, hope.
In classical Rabbinic writing, the abstract is reached by way of the concrete. Instead of abstract discussion of “justice” and “beauty”, the talmud containes two main genre categories.
* Aggada: stories, legends, commentary
* Halacha: ritual and ethical practice, expressed as arguments about law
I’d like to propose an alternative reading, using the categories of talmudic writing, to agree with Weinberger’s main points, and to take them a few steps further in a couple of directions.
Aggada/Culture
Weinberger is thoroughly right that the web is a place where people gather to create shared meaning. There are sites celebrating the
Metropolitan Opera and Melanie Griffith; and weblogs where people create meaning from personal stories about cats, life, and loss. There is nothing more human than people creating culture; using drums in the African forests, pianos in 19th century parlors, Passion plays and Passover seders, playing and retelling the culture’s myths to the group.
The Talmud’s form reminds us that philosophy and meaning is conveyed by means of stories and interpretations, rather than through logical, linear arguments.
We’ve been living with a wierd anomaly for the last century or so in which culture has been mass-produced and distributed via mass media. We expect our culture to come from a corporate studio, rather than collective storytelling. The internet brings back ancient traditions of humans working and playing together tell stories and make our culture.
Halacha
A large part of the Talmud’s content consists of discussions of halacha, Jewish law. The scope of halacha is different from western law; it includes rituals (holidays, life cycle rituals, prayers); ethics (business practices, interpersonal relationships); as well as categories that are familiar in western law: civil law, criminal law, family law.
The translatable aspect of halacha for our purposes is the emphasis on action rather than abstraction, and its categories of ritual and ethical actions.
Halacha/ritual
Weinberger talks about how the web enables the exchange of holiday letters, stories of birth and death, sharing congratulations and
condolences. These are online expressions of the seasonal and lifecycle rituals that humans observe; except connected across distance, and recorded in a persistent medium.
It will be interesting to see how people will make use of the web’s persistence: when will we build persistent shrines, continually refreshing the old; when will we use forms, like weblogs,
that celebrate the new; when will we apply search and editing to discover wisdom in the voices of the past, and and when will we simply walk away from last year’s conversations, leaving a clutter of jumbled archives and old sites with rotted links.
Halacha/ethical action
In Weinberger’s argument, the web is a moral place. It expresses peoples desires to associate in groups, and to care about our fellows. (This is true for better and worse; al Qaeda and the KKK have mutual bonds and care about their fellows, as well). If the web’s social nature has moral consequences, then we’ve got the “aggada” — group story-telling, to learn from each others’ experiece. But we but we have not yet fully developed the halacha; we are missing some of the needed mechanisms to turn our online caring into action.
The internet gives us some hyper-efficient ways to automate errands and business tasks, such as ordering books and renewing drivers’
licenses online. But we need to develop more effective ways to link online storytelling and conversation with real-world action action.
Early examples of this are MoveOn, a site that makes it easy for people to make political donations and sign advocacy petitions, and MeetUp, which makes it easy for online interest groups (whose interests might be social, or cultural, or political), to arrange local meetings.
The limits of the metaphor
A big difference between the Talmud’s genres and Weinberger’s world is the role of individuality. The Rabbis did not have a well-developed sense of individual identity. Individual characters had personalities, to be sure, but character is seen primarily as a set of moral attributes, rather than an expression of an inner world. Weinberger’s focus on the expression of our individuality in the context of our communities is more modern, and appealing in its modernity.
Also, halacha is normative. The rabbis debated ritual and ethical actions to determine which actions were required, which were permitted, and which were forbidden. Of course, all human subcultures have community norms and rules, but many cultures are not as interested in this sort of imperative structure.
These interpretations — aggada as culture and halacha as action — are secularized and universalized versions of the Talmudic concepts. On some level I think that is what the internet is doing — it is taking a set of hypertext-based cultural forms that pioneered by the Rabbis of the talmud, and bringing them to society at large.
Authenticity and Romanticism
Small Pieces makes the case that the web is a place; with its territory marked out by our interests and passions. In a heartwarming and very American fashion, Weinberger assumes and takes for granted that our interests are democratic and plural. It is worth pausing, noticing and appreciating the fact that our “interests” aren’t just identified with geography, ethnicity; political affiliation; gender; or work, but are a mixtures of bits and pieces.
As in the Cluetrain Manifesto, Weinberger is a big fan of the internet as the home of our true, passionate, authentic voices. But when one’s identity is plural, what does “authentic” mean? Second-generation hyphenated Americans, like me or, say, Miko, are acutely conscious of the problem involved in the term “authenticity,” which is
often used as a bludgeon by people with a parochial interest in arguing that you are not American enough or Jewish enough or Japanese enough or whatever. The same goes for any non-binary component of identity.
The focus on “authenticity” is a symptom of the book’s underlying romanticism, which is a pretty big flaw in the argument. Weinberger
argues with 18th century enlightenment rationalism and 20th century managerial scientism; using some traditional arguments out of Romantic philosophy and esthetics; the glorification of passion, individual voice, and communal ethic. The book raises these romantic contradictions to enlightenment convention as though they were brand new insights; whereas romanticism is just as much a part of our default philosophy as realism is. Furthermore, romanticism, in its 19th century nationalist guise and its 60s individualist guise has already showed its limitations in its tendencies toward lethal idealism and countercultural hedonism.
In citing the multi-threaded nature of time on the internet, Weinberger pays no attention to the contributions of post-modernist thinkers. To be fair, Weinberger is attacking our “default philosophy”, and pomo arguably hasn’t reached that broadly and deeply into conventional wisdom. Nevertheless, the playful ironies and sampled mixes of postmodernism are a significant influence in the playful, self-mocking style of .Zannah; the writer of the prototypical weblog, #!/usr/bin/girl, that Weinberger cites, as well as the the tasty stew of popular and intellectual culture found in weblogs by folks like Peter Merholz and David Weinberger himself.
Conclusion
The book achieves an entertaining balance of philosophy and wit, sometimes at the expense of fleshing out its ideas. I wish some of the ideas were developed more fully, but then it would have been a different book, and who am I to argue with the populist instincts of a writer who’s achieved #6 on the Business Week best-seller list.
Also (as others have noted) the book’s audience focus is uneven; Weinberger takes pages to explain the basics of internet technology; as if the audience consisted of “the in-laws”; ordinary, intelligent people who use the internet but don’t know how it works. Yet the book also assumes familiarity and interest in the tactics and culture of high-tech marketing; as if the audience consisted of fellow e-business mavens.
These quibbles are mostly beside the point, since I think the book largely achieves its own objectives. Like Weinberger’s best writing and public speaking, it made me think and it made me laugh.

My very favorite non-fiction books are based on a foundation of substantive research, knit together by compelling human stories (Common Ground; J. Anthony Lukas on the Boston busing crisis), or an interesting and persuasive argument (More Work for Mother, Ruth Schwartz Cowan on the impact of technology on housework).
There are many books that I like very much that don’t live up to this standard. Then again, Lukas’ standards were so high that it took him more than a decade to write his next book, after which he committed suicide, perhaps because he was unable to live up to that standard of perfection. I need to reread More Work for Mother one of these days to see if its brilliance holds up to five more years of additional reading.
What are your criteria for favorite books?

I recently read the one-volume synopsis of SD Goitein’s five-volume masterwork summarizing Goitein’s research in the Cairo Geniza. A geniza is a synagogue’s repository of worn-out texts. In the Jewish tradition it is forbidden to dispose of texts that mention the name of God; and ordinary legal documents, business documents, and personal letters often mentioned the deity. The Cairo Geniza is a trove of documents holding evidence about the daily life in the Jewish community of medieval Cairo between the 10th and 13th centuries.
A Mediterranean Society, edited and abridged by Jacob Lassner, portrays the texture of life of that time for Jews, Muslims, and Christians, and the surrounding world which was linked by commercial and communal bonds.
Topics include the family, social life, education, business, community organization, and law. Christian and Jewish minorities were largely self-governing with respect to civil law, family law, and social services and well-integrated with respect to residential patterns and business dealings. In the 11th and 12th centuries, conditions were more stable; later on, as the surrounding society declined, the Jews experienced economic hardship and persecution.
Following Peterme’s train of thought, one of the things that stands out most about the Geniza world is the efforts of the Jewish community to take care of people in need. The community ran a multi-layered charitable system, providing food and clothing on a daily and weekly basis, and making longer-term provisions to house refugees, to educate orphan children, to support the marriage of orphan girls and to ransom of captives at a time when piracy and war-related kidnapping was endemic.
Maimonides, the great Jewish scholar and leader of the Egyptian community in the late 12th century wrote that the best way to bring someone out of poverty was to give them the tools to be self-sufficient. But that perspective did not get in the way of ongoing, systematic efforts to feed the hungry and house the homeless.
Another notable thing is the vibrancy of economic life. Janet Abu Lughod wrote an birds-eye view of the world economic system between 1250 and 1350, describing a trade system that tied together Europe, the Muslim world, and the East. Goitein portrays the day-to-day reality of that system for the people who lived it; weddings scheduled for early Spring so merchants can leave in time to catch the favorable winds to India; marital troubles and divorces among couples who were separated by travel most of the time.
Goitein counted 450 occupations mentioned in the Geniza, which is the largest number of job categories in any pre-modern city. Jews participated in an array of activities including manufacturing: textiles, metals, glass, pottery, paper; construction; agriculture (flax, wheat, olives); trade; civil service, medicine, education. Jews in Medieval Egypt participated in most sectors of the economy; often in business partnerships with Muslims and Christians. The situation was quite unlike medieval Europe, where Jews were forbidden from owning land and participating in trade guilds, leaving finance among the few ways to make a living. Unfortunately, Lassner condensed Goitein’s sections on economic life more than the other sections of the book, assuming that readers would find it dull. Not this reader. I may eventually have to find and read that volume of the Goitein series.
The Geniza provides a tantalizing window on the social life of the time. Pilgrimages were quite popular, although less reverant than the purist clergy wished. A ruling was issued regarding one of the more popular pilgrimage sites,

• All should attend solely for devotion. No merrymaking will be tolerated
• Marionette shows and similar entertainments are not permitted
• No beer should be brewed there
• No visitor should be accompanied by a gentile or an apostate
• No woman should be admitted except when accompanied by a father, husband, brother, or an adult son, unless she is a very old woman.
• Making a noise by hitting something with a bang or clapping hands is disapproved
• No instrumental music
• No dancing

Clearly, people were having a lot of fun doing all of the things the clergy didn’t approve of!
The divorce rate was quite high; as evidenced by the number of second and subsequent marriages found in Geniza documents. Goitein attributes the divorce rate to the custom to marry women off when very young to men they didn’t know, and to the prevalence of travel that kept couples apart for months and years at a time.
The figure of Moses Maimonides occurs frequently in the book’s pages. Maimonides is most famous as philosopher who incorporated the rationalism of Greek philosophy into the revelation-based monotheistic Jewish tradition. In the Jewish tradition, Maimonides reputation rests on his work as as a commentator and jurist; he was one of the leaders in the medieval project to organize the vast textual sprawl of the Talmud into a systematic legal code.
In Goitein, however, Maimonides makes frequent appearances as a communal leader; making judgements that are often fair and wise. For example, a judge in a town refused to allow a twice-widowed woman to remarry, because of a custom that considered a twice-widowed woman a “killer wife.” Maimonides ruled that the couple should marry before two witnesses (legal according to Jewish law), and should then have this marriage ratified by the court. In another example, a cantor newly appointed to a town protested to Maimonides that his congregation enjoyed non-traditional poems inserted into the liturgy; Maimonides replied that the addition was improper, but keeping the poems was prefereable to the strife that would accompany an attempt to prohibit them.
However, Maimonides’ judgements sometimes reflect the stricter social norms of Morocco, where his family lived before emigrating to Egypt. For example, Maimonides bans games of chance that were popular on the sabbath in Egypt, and favors wife-beating, which was apparently more socially acceptable in Morocco than in Egypt.
The book reads rather like a collection of encyclopedia entries, on the family, judicial system, communal structure, and other topics related to the life in the Geniza community. If you’re interested in the subject of the book, you’ll enjoy it. If you’re lukewarm on the topic, the book doesn’t have spine-tingling plot twists or insightful arguments; just rich portraits of a distant world.

… this afternoon, looking for a book on Perl, for some weekend entertainment that I’ll tell you about if and when it’s closer to working.
In the computer aisle, a retired gentleman approached me and asked me for advice. He did some hobbyist programming in BASIC 20 years ago, balancing his checkbook and doing calculations for a rather complicated-sounding home construction project (had to do with calculating the fluid volume in pipes).
He wanted to do some programming as mental exercise, and asked what I would recommend. I showed him the Microsoft VBasic.NET books, and Python, and PERL. Then I described the Computational Beauty of Nature, and his eyes lit up.
That was a good “neighbor moment.”

A conversation yesterday with Pete Kaminski brought to mind one of the more interesting books I’ve read in the last few years.
The book is called Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, by Gary Klein, a social science researcher and consultant. The book is badly named. It’s not a neo-Machiavellian business manual; it’s fascinating social science research on how people (really) make decisions, in contrast to how we think people make decisions, influenced by our mental models of people as computers.
Spoiler: people make and share decisions with stories
Klein started out looking to find experimental evidence for the way people make decisions, based on long-established academic work on decision theory. The conventional theory predicts that people compare alternatives, and make a rational choice among alternatives. The conventional wisdom is bolstered by a mental model of the brain as a computer, which methodically compares choices in a decision algorithm.
Klein’s group did fieldwork among experienced professionals who make frequent life-and-death decisions as part of their job — intensive care nurses, fire-fighters, military tank commanders. What they found, to their suprise, is that people’s decision-making process is nothing like the textbook model.
Klein made two interesting discoveries — about how experts make decisions, and how they communicate with co-workers.
Expert decision-makers don’t analyze and evaluate alternative options. Instead, they visualize a picture of the situation in their minds eye, envision a single course of action, and run a mental movie carrying out the action. If the scenario plays out, they quickly act. They never consider a second alternative. If there is a problem with the mental scenario, they visualize a second course of action, and implement it instantly if the mental movie plays through.
The experts mental images are very rich; an experienced fire-fighter will imagine the structural stresses on various parts of the building based on the appearance and sound of the fire. An experienced intensive care nurse will visualize a diagnosis based on few clues about a baby’s skin color, breathing, and vital signs. When the experts visualize the image, they don’t think about the components, one-by-one; they quickly identify “points of leverage” — what aspects of the system are most subject to change.
Post-mortem analysis shows that the “first-choice” decisions by experienced experts are most often right; the second-best choices identified in case study analysis are less good than the expert’s first choice.
Klein’s group found that the rational, comparative method of decision-making was followed, not by experts, but by novices first learning the field. Despite the fact that novices were following a more analytical method, the highly considered choices of novices were more likely to be wrong than the expert’s first choice.
When experts troubleshoot a problem, they also diverge from the textbook model. Instead of analyzing the components of the problem, they tell a story to explain the various facts. When expert mentors teach novices, in the field and by the water cooler, they communicate their lessons by means of stories.
I particularly liked the way Klein summarized the difference between computerized decision making methods (define a closed-problem space, break the space into sub-spaces, search the sub-spaces) and human decision-making (pattern-match based on experience, simulate scenarios using imagination, use an iterative process to reach goal, change the goal if necessary; and communicate learning using stories.
However, there is a significant limitation to Klein’s observations.
The decision-making methods that Klein describes enable experts to make quick, effective decisions under pressure. But those skills support preset strategies. The commander of a fire-fighting unit can save the lives of his team and extinguish the fire; but he can’t say whether the Forest Service should have a fire-suppression policy in the first place. Sometimes the intuition of experts can lead them astray, when the situation calls for a truly novel response.
By the way, I was referred to the book by my friend David Blank-Edelman, the author of Perl for System Administration, who used the book’s concepts in a conference presentation on the similarity between network administration and veterinary medicine.