US is a presentationcracy

GW Bush decided to attack Irak because he claimed there were weapons of mass destruction. Later it turned out to be false and then Bush defended himself that the presentations he got from his intelligence people claimed that there should have been....

Well, I guess it’s up to each and every one of us to decide, whether we believe that Bush told the whole story when saying that, but I believe it could have been a truth. Namely that is how leaders all over the world make decisions: They make judgements based on the presentations that the people make for them. Then you could say that it is the presentations that have the power to lead decision making to this or that direction...it is the presentations and consequently the people who make them, who are in charge.

So that means then that our organizations are in fact managed and even led by making presentations. Sounds possible, doesn’t it...but hold on. Shouldn’t organizations be run based on facts?!! I think that yes, of course they should be. Mere presentations can lack or belittle critical and relevant factual information. A good example is the story about how the explosion of space shuttle Columbia is said to have happened because some crucial points had been missing in a ppt presentation that was done for NASA managers. The Washington Post article about it [1] seems to blame mostly the practise of using .ppt as a presentation media, but I claim that the problem is much bigger and deeper. I think the problem is the fact that the everywhere the world is more and more operating based on presentations and presentations alone.

As a European dealing with organizations and management practises both US, Europe and previously even Asia, I can tell that many here in Europe often think that the management US businesses often revolves around making convincing presentations rather than good presentations (we don’t tell this out loud to US colleagues in order not to offend them, because they wouldn’t understand anyway). With this distinction I mean that a convincing presentation is something that makes the listeners convinced, but a good presentation is such that it covers all the relevant facts as thoroughly as possible. A bit similar distinction is used in organizational behaviour literature to separate between successful managers and good managers. Successful managers make career and look good within the organization and the good ones make things really work...and oftentimes the succesfull and good managers are not the same people! (More about this for example in a great basic text book [2]). What makes things tricky is that in order to be convincing (or successful) there always needs to be at least some substance and facts - but not necessarily everything that is critical to make the right decision. A convincing but not very good presentation can also be biased or drive hidden agendas... so oftentimes in practise it is hard to separate beforehand a truly good presentation from a convincing one. But there are telltales of course….

I think that for the overall good of the organization, we should strive for making good presentations. Yet in practise it is the convincing presentations that usually get rewarded and lead the decision making. But in the long term doesn’t this build bubbles inside the organization? Relevant information gets missing because of the presentations are convincing rather than good? Risky and sometimes even false proposals get accepted - like in the shuttle case, or perhaps even Irak war case? I think it very much does, and I even suspect that this could be one of the very fundamental reasons why we see our economical structures collapse right now. So much air and risk has been built within our system because of the last 20-30 decades of mismanagement embracing convincing presentations instead of good presentations. It’s not just subprimes….it’s everywhere!

Related to this, I must refer to a book, which I read just recently, namely ”Black Swan” by Nicholas Nassim Taleb [3], . Taleb makes good job in proving that indeed we do have a tendency to love convincing narrative rather than assess facts and risks objectively. I think he is talking about the same phenomena as I that we love convincing presentations to a point that we often blind ourselves from risks. And that this trend has now become vastly emphasized in the global economy and politics as a result of faster technology, networking, globalization, and all. Taleb makes nice analysis how us in general and many scholars in economic sciences in particular tend to base our thinking in ”platonized” (as he expresses) models and induction. Taleb goes also rather philosophical with many of the cases he discusses, and even though I 'm not sure if I would sign all of his ideas, I think he has broken important ground to really critically rethink how we manage organizations today. My view is more narrowly from practical office life. I see everyday how everything is managed based on presentations – and presentations alone.

The power of presentations goes so deep into both the public sector and business life that I would call our current western societies with a name presentationcracy...In a presentationcracy it is the presentations which rule the world and hence the power is held by the people with presentation skills instead of the people who have the best ideas or most knowledge. Not a new idea I think, but it still gives you the creeps if you think how pervasive this phenomena is down to the grass root level, even when people decide about small municipal issues or minute company spending or risk taking.

Ok. But why do I title this rant that it is specifically US that is the presentationcracy? Aren’t all nations? Yes, I think so, all are, but US is leading. I think it is perhaps because we in Europe and Asia have been usually slower to develop our market economy (because we are so culturally brainwashed to respect unconditionally our bureaucracy and governement led ”official” knowledge) we have not fully given up ”the other information” namely top-down dictated unquestionable wisdom that our national states and the official school system has taught us. So besides the information that the ”presentationcracy” produces we have had also some other kind of "true" information available that has been (at least sometimes) produced by different kind of logic.... yet I’m not saying at all that this often nationalistic official wisdom’s had in general been any better for decision making, (usually on the contrary), but perhaps it has given the decision makers perspective, another way to look at things, at least on the grass root level.

I think that since the days of Thatcher our stuffy European bureaucracy has been most often perceived as bad thing...and rightfully so I thinkm since the economic activity in Europe in the 70s was pretty constrained and my guess is that all businesses had been lost to Asia an US altogether if things hadn’t changed to be more market driven...but now I think it is US in turn, who is about to go bellyup with it’s purely business driven ethos. Recently most businesses seem to embrace shortsightedness, risk taking, opportunism over strategy and presentationcracy (and I’m far from being alone with this view). Look for example what all the business schools teach...and how! Lot of the business management teaching is driven by slogans like ”you deserve what you can negotiate”which encourages directly to make convincing presentations instead of good ones and in many places most management teaching is only case studies thus building ”inductive knowledge” from the convincing narrative of individual events. Since this is a blog and not a scientific article I happily go even further and claim that making things convincing instead if good has become a part of people’s values – in US particularly. Ok, making it convincing might be a good philosophy for sales people, but not for managers or leaders who should also try to protect owner’s money (or in public organizations people’s tax money) by assessing facts and risks realistically, too.

Well, based on the little I have heard mr. Obama talk, it might be that he indeed does have a clue...at least some of the way. But if you agree to what I just presented here even partly, you must realize that he has a much much more massive task ahead than just making some legislative hat tricks and spending money in dying industries ;-) He has to somehow adjust the whole culture how management is done in US. And not just at high govt or corporate level but everywhere.

I do hope Obama will succeed. I would be absolutetely horrified of the view that the world economy in general would slide back to a Sovietunion kind of a stagnation, where everything is measured only by it’s bureaucratic merits. The way I see for example how the EU administrative monster is currently being built with Lisbon treaty and all, I would say it doesn’t look too good... but that’s another story altogether =)))

So how would I myself fix things then? I think Obama and other leaders would need to think ways how the organizations woudl and could start rewarding good presentations rather than convincing ones. I could tell some ideas if you want to know how that could be accomplished, ....but then I would need to ask to make a consultancy agreement with me first :-)

references:
[1] Washington Post article, available in internet feb 17th: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/29/AR2005082901444.html
[2] Robbins, S. and Judge, T. Organizational behavior, Pearson Education
[3] Taleb, N.T. Black Swan, Random House, April 17 2007

Probability of a deterministic world

Every now and then the discussion at PH has turned to the question: Is our world deterministic or not? I say it is.... and at the same time it isn’t. I mean I find most compelling the kind of a model that determinism exists, but it is not necessary. Once in PH I boasted that I can ”mathematically” prove using David Lewis’s many worlds semantics that the probability for a ”fully determinismic” world is practically zero. Fully deterministic world means here a kind of world where every event is necessarily deterministically linked to each other... So in order not to loose face, I will put my proof here.

But before doing that, I suppose I should first define what I mean by determinism. I would use the definition from Wikipedia: Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition and behavior, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences [1] [2]. I think it would be also important to note that with causation I mean here the philosophical causation, not just a logical causation. In my understanding the logical causation is limited just to formal logical language, which is made of statements like A entails B (A => B), which in words means that if A is true then B is true, when A and B are logical sentences, within the formal language of the logic. But philosophical causation is a more complex thing since A and B are not just sentences of a formal language, but events or states in an actual world (or universe). I have heard at least two kind of definitions for causal relation: B is causally dependent from A (A -> B) means either that
a) A and B are events in an actual world and If A occurs, then B occurs too
b) A and B are events in an actual world and If A doesn’t occur, then B doesn’t either

So now that we are proving something about our world, we would be obviously be talking about causation in a philosophical sense…but which variety a) or b) should we use? Both definitions have their proponents among philosophers... suspicion rises that something fishy is going on with causality….but I think I don’t necessarily need to go into more details about the differences of a) and b) type of causality for my proof (I might be wrong though =).

So here are my assumptions:
1) Only logically possible worlds can be actual worlds.
- It means that I assume that logical reasoning holds in any possible world that we can actually exist. Like 2+2=4 holds for all possible worlds
2) Indeterministic events are logically possible
- which I think entails that coincedental events should be assumed logically possible and we should use modal logic as our formal language

To help thinking how the probabilities could be calculated I hypothesize a kind of a Laplace’s demon (L-demon) that knows every event that has happened and is happening at the present moment in the universe and it has an unlimited, even unworldy, efficient calculation power to solve equations based on the initial conditions.

First let’s assume a “full indeterminism”. It would mean that none of the events A and B in the world are causally related. The fact that things are as they are at the present is just a huge coincidence. I would then say that it’s possible but the likelyhood is 1 / [the sum of all the individual events that have occurred and are occurring at the present], which is a very small number indeed. But if we assume that our actual universe has only a finite age (like for example big bang theory suggests) then there has been only a finite number of events so far and the likelyhood for full indeterminism with our present knowledge is > 0. Let’s denote that number as P[full indeterminism]. Now our L-demon would know what this number is….but since full indeterminism holds also to the future, L-demon cannot say anything about the future! Future is completely incalculably open and all futures are equally possible. Thus the number P[full indeterminism] at the present time is still a finite number. Future does not add anything to that

Secondly we could assume that there are both causally dependent events á la A -> B, which can form long chains A->… -> Z ->…. that coexist at the same time with smaller chains or even individual indeterministic events O that are not causally linked to any other events at all. I would imagine that these events O go actually completely unnoticed within the world, (except that our L-demon would know them). I would say that the likelyhood for the existence of all such worlds among all possible worlds is huge. It could contain an infinite amount of individual causally unrelated events O arranged different ways. the Causal chains could have been combined or separated in a myriad way during the history of universe, yet resulting to the exact state of affairs things are at the present time. The mechanism how the causal chains separate and combine is different depending which type of causality a) or b) you prefer to use, but regardless it is easy to think examples where different series of events lead to same states of affairs as end result (redundancy) or where one event kicks of several causal chains. (For a learned contemporary discussion about this I recommend [3]). So the probability for our actual world being one of such worlds where both determinism and indeterminism coexists is P[partial indeterminism] = (integral over causally linked chains + sum of all causally unrelated finite event chains and single events) – P[full indeterminism] – P[full determinism]. Seems like a huge number….our L-demon again would know what this number and it would be even able to make very good predictions to the future. Even deterministic chaos theory would not bother it’s calculations since it knows exactly all the initial conditions and has an infinite calculation power…but the indeterministic events future that will occur in the future would eventually destroy the accuracy of L-demon's predictions. Little by little the indeterministic events and even chains that pop up into the world will make the demon’s predictions only probabilistic and over time the prediction power will go to zero. Thus the causality holds only to one direction. Past is defined, but future is uncertain and an infinite number of possible futures exist also for all partially indeterministic worlds.

Thirdly how big is P[full determinism] then? As far as the past concerns the likelyhood should be the same as for full indeterminism, in other words 1 / [the sum of all the events that have occurred and are occurring at the present]. A small number, but finite….so far! But if full determinism holds it means that also all the future events are defined. Our L-demon can calculate the state of affairs in any given instance in the future, which means that only one future is possible. But then how to separate the arrow of causation? I doubt that it’s not possible, which would then imply that the probability P[full determinism] at the present moment should be multiplied also with a figure 1 / [integral over logically possible futures] which approaches infinity when time approaches infinity. Thus the probability for P[full determinism] at the present time and according to L-demons calculations should be 1 / ([the sum of all the events that have occurred and are occurring at the present] * [integral over logically possible futures] ….which approaches 0 if the future is infinitely long. Thus it’s even more unlikely than full indeterminism!!!

And I haven’t even treated possibilities that world is deterministic or indeterministic up to a certain time t and then changes….all combinations just push the likelyhood for full determinism further away….QED

[1] internet page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism , feb 6th 2009,
[2] Van Inwagen, Peter, 1983, An Essay on Free Will, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
[3] Causation and Counterfactuals, edited by John Collins, Ned Hall, L. A. Paul, MIT Press, 2004

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In fact I didn’t come up with the idea for a proof on my own, but it is probably been presented somewhere, since I have heard the elements of this general idea in a discussion….but I haven’t found it written down anywhere before….

Anyways, some say that fully deterministic world is intuitively right for them. But I don’t feel that way at all and I could make a long list of arguments based on our current knowledge of science and mathematics why I think assuming the existence of indeterministic events is far more intuitively appealing to me. Full determinism would imply to me that the whole existence of our actual world is actually only one event with fully determined past and predestined future. If even just one quantum at anytime over the whole lifetime of our world would appear spontaneously – or perhaps leak from another world, it would mean the destruction of the fully determined future for our world. Seems very unlikely to me….infinetely unlikely even!

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Sorry for typos and all….I will publish this already as a draft . So if you see changes later, it is not that I would like to change the content, but just make it more readable.

Quint

Pomo discussion with Franz Shippe: What did Prinn really say?

One tuesday morning Linden time everyone in PH was using their Pomo generators. I and Franz couldn't quite agree how Prinn should be interpreted.....


[8:04] SeanBrian Flatley: However, the destruction/creation distinction intrinsic to Beverly Hills 90210 emerges again in Melrose Place. Bataille uses the term 'the capitalist paradigm of discourse' to denote the meaninglessness of precultural society. In a sense, the primary theme of the works of Spelling is the bridge between class and sexual identity. It could be said that Prinn [6]implies that we have to choose between Lacanist obscurity and neosemioticist objectivism.
[8:04] Quintessential Sorbet: oh I'm not sure...but why not
[8:04] Quintessential Sorbet: I have to study that in detail
[8:05] Franz Shippe: I am in awe, Sean!
[8:05] Quintessential Sorbet: I have to check the reference [6]
[8:05] SeanBrian Flatley: but if you want to step up a gear.... The main theme of Reicher's [9]analysis of conceptual dematerialism is not dematerialism, but neodematerialism. Thus, an abundance of desublimations concerning Lacanist obscurity may be revealed. Foucault's critique of capitalist materialism implies that the State is part of the absurdity of art, but only if culture is distinct from language; otherwise, we can assume that the raison d'etre of the observer is significant form. But the subject is contextualised into a pretextual theory that includes sexuality as a whole. The dialectic, and some would say the economy, of dialectic constructive theory depicted in JFK is also evident in Natural Born Killers.
[8:05] Quintessential Sorbet: I think Prinn did not imply what you said
[8:05] Spokesman Salomon: Speak properly Sean:
[8:06] Spokesman Salomon: there's a coflex accent on "etre".
[8:06] Quintessential Sorbet: AHHA....I cannot find Prinn's paper on that
[8:06] SeanBrian Flatley: it's a UK character set - proper etres are off - and so is the soup - loki burnt it
[8:06] Franz Shippe: LOL
[8:07] Dar Innis: Class is fundamentally impossible,” says Debord; however, according to la Fournier[1] , it is not so much class that is fundamentally impossible, but rather the paradigm, and therefore the economy, of class. In a sense, the dialectic of capitalist dematerialism depicted in Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet is also evident in The Moor’s Last Sigh, although in a more preconceptualist sense.
[8:07] SeanBrian Flatley: you got it dar
[8:07] Quintessential Sorbet: errr.....*trying to find La fournier's article [1]
[8:07] Dar Innis: The primary theme of the works of Rushdie is the role of the observer as poet. Dialectic theory implies that the significance of the participant is social comment, given that Foucault’s essay on semantic capitalism is invalid. Thus, a number of theories concerning the difference between sexual identity and reality may be discovered.
[8:08] Quintessential Sorbet: here I have it...this is what Prinn truly said SB: Prinn[4] states that we have to choose between Batailleist `powerful communication’ and the predialectic paradigm of discourse. But Marx uses the term ‘the posttextual paradigm of reality’ to denote not, in fact, discourse, but subdiscourse.
[8:08] Dar Innis: Marx uses the term ‘neocultural discourse’ to denote the role of the artist as reader. Therefore, in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie deconstructs the predeconstructive paradigm of reality; in The Moor’s Last Sigh, however, he affirms dialectic theory.
[8:09] Lokifluff Clarity: i have been inducted into communications from nowhere only today... 'tis genius
[8:09] SeanBrian Flatley: oh - and quint...6. Prinn, H. Y. ed. (1973) Lacanist obscurity and conceptual dematerialism.
And/Or Press
[8:09] Franz Shippe: Quint, I aver that your interpretation of Prinn has missed the central point about Batailleist communication theory. Your analysis appeals to the outdated pre-post-structuralist view of Deridavian semantic forms.
[8:10] Quintessential Sorbet: Nonsense franz!!!!!! Prinn clearly states that The premise of modernist precapitalist theory implies that consciousness may be used to marginalize the Other. But the example of the posttextual paradigm of reality prevalent in Madonna’s Material Girl emerges again in Sex, although in a more dialectic sense.
[8:13] Franz Shippe: Quint, in his well known unpublished works, available heretofor only to a select few, Prinn noted the exceptions to precapitalist semantic theories implied by the epistemic noosphere created by the internet. The assumption that language and culture can be analyzed independently of the psychoeconomic social structures implicit in......
[8:13] Quintessential Sorbet: oh!
[8:15] Quintessential Sorbet: I must confess that I'm getting a little annoyed you misquoting Prinn so constantly....no doubt to serve your own hidden agendas....namely Prinn said that If one examines semanticist desituationism, one is faced with a choice: either reject the posttextual paradigm of reality or conclude that government is capable of intention. Baudrillard promotes the use of Batailleist `powerful communication’ to attack hierarchy. Thus, a number of appropriations concerning a self-sufficient totality may be discovered
[8:18] Franz Shippe: Hidden agenda? But quint, you are evidently acquainted only with Prinn's early, and somewhat pedantic and puerile works. Had you taken the time to delve into his analysis of post capitalist semantic hierarchy theory, you would have found that the self- sufficient transcendental appropriations involved in posttextual choice are in fact merely desituated communications misappropriated by the capitalist forms, implied by the post-sexualized and sublimated works of Blerufarge.
[8:21] Quintessential Sorbet: aww Franz....I' think you are running the agenda of construction withou subconstruction without accepting the semiotic discourse....Prinn would never have accepted that...
[8:22] Quintessential Sorbet: aww...I have to go now...a teleconference....of meaty nature :-((
[8:22] Franz Shippe: So long, Quint.
[8:23] Quintessential Sorbet: bybyee.....talk to you later
[8:23] Franz Shippe: You might bone up on Prinn's later works, eh?


What do you think, which of us was right?

If you have difficulties with forming an opinion, you can get help here www.elsewhere.org/pomo


Thanks for the permission to publish this dialog Franz....if anyone of my friends likes to remove his/her part, just IM me.

Quint