Dan Erwin

2018 Was a Banner Year for Algorithmic Prediction

Harvard’s Jill Lepore, one of the most fascinating and actually humorous historical writers, has superb explanatory insight on algorithmic prediction. That’s not a surprise. She approaches history from perspectives that have never crossed this historian’s mind--and does it with a lot of verve. She’s one of the few with a steady hand when the rest of us are lurching around with churning stomachs about artificial intelligence and moronic politicians.

With two algorithmic geniuses in my own family, a son-in-law and a recently minted CMU data-scientist grandson, with whom I spent an hour listening and trying to make sense of their conversation over Christmas, Lepore is an absolute delight at algorithmic explanation. 

She regularly seems to have the ability to...

Thomas Jefferson vs. Antonin Scalia: an Immaculate Misconception

When a case comes to me, I don't do whatever I feel like doing. I have a standard. That standard is what would the people at the time the Constitution was enacted have said.

    --Antonin Scalia, Speech at the University of Fribourg, March 8, 2008

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched.

The Codependency Myth

One of my young friends recently related to me that his girlfriend had left him because the relationship was "too codependent." He wondered whether he could reconcile. I rolled my eyes and commented "probably not." She had implied that he was toxic and that the relationship could not continue. I doubted the labeling because I knew him rather well and had worked with him on several projects. In addition, I knew he wasn't using drugs. Furthermore, I also knew that counselor misdiagnoses were at the 60-80% error level. Even the physician level of error, with blood tests and imaging is at least 40%. A med school faculty friend of mine was surprised. He thought  the medical level of error would be more than that. But anyway, knowing my extensive psychological background in personality theory and social psychology, my young friend asked about the codependency theory and therapy.

Codependency is one of those very popular self-help movements that, though providing enough support for people to feel good and try on a number of personas for a short time, is ultimately damaging and harmful. That statement won't go down well with thousands of people, but it's true anyway--and there's lots of research that comes up with the same conclusion. The thinking of some is that since it's a very popular approach, it must be good. Popularity is rarely a basis for validating much. Sugared cola drinks are very popular, as are cigarettes, but millions of people suffer horrible, physical diseases as a result of their use.

These codependency "experts" offer counseling that goes something like this: Your happiness is something that should come from within you and should not be dependent on your lover or mate. In effect, these "experts" pathologize love and caring. So your well-being is not your partner's responsibility and their well-being is not your responsibility. Furthermore, you should not let your inner peace be disturbed or undermined by the person you are close to. If you can't do that, there might be something wrong with you. You might be too enmeshed with the other person, so you must learn to set better boundaries. You should be able to distance or, if necessary, separate yourself from the other person....

When Your Best Career Theory is Wrong. Dead Wrong!

As a research-based consultant, I’m used to getting my ideas tweaked by new research. After all, I think of myself as a fairly flexible, open guy, so a small adjustment to my theories and ideas is usually illuminating. But unknown to Harvard’s Rosabeth Kanter, she took a Shillelagh, a big club to one of my big ideas. Her blog, Why running a family doesn’t help you run a business, knocked me back on my heels. And I yelled a silent Aaargh!, knowing full well that she was quite correct and I was quite wrong. So there, I admitted it Prof Kanter.

Kanter lays out her case with panache, acknowledging the conventional wisdom first. Here’s her argument:

In theory, those years of family work at home could look great on a resume. Consider the skills required: setting priorities, training others, organizing complex logistics and schedules, and using interpersonal sensitivity to handle difficult people problems. Indeed, some advocates have argued that the time women with advanced degrees spend out of the workplace managing a family is valuable experience for managing back in the paid work world.

I agree it is valuable experience — if the paid job one returns to involves managing a handful of people who are vulnerable and can't leave. Otherwise, the operating skills for family manager are nothing like the qualifications for workplace professionals.

Her reasoning and...

The Arc of Policy Is Long But Bends Toward Justice

But the current statistics are quite problematic. And not easily sloughed off.

I’ve read the journal, Foreign Affairs, off and on for more than thirty years. It’s neither Conservative nor Liberal—and also presents opposing perspectives. Sometimes the different perspectives are in the same journal, other times they appear over a few months. But they are inevitably written by an expert in the field, an academic, government official or a business expert. And here’s one on which every business person needs to do some reflecting.

The article to which I refer in the title, America’s Social Democratic Future, is by Lane Kenworthy, Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Arizona. Kenworthy initially steps above the fray to look at the national policy over the past 100 years, demonstrating that the opponents of our unique, American-style social democracy are fighting a losing battle. But then he digs into the current problems we face. I’ve reread the article at least three times, not least because his economic, statistical interpretations are especially meaningful.

Here is his interpretation of three problematic issues we currently face.

First, the United ...

How Social Science Sneaks Up on All of Us

For many people in business and politics, social science doesn’t appear particularly impressive. Its relevance for practice and the nitty-gritty of business may seem doubtful. But the fact of the matter is that social science impacts reality in profound ways that most never see, never think about or are even willing to believe—at least when first faced with the facts. Social science, however, profoundly influences how we think about ourselves, how we think about our world and how we act. And that’s true whether or not a given theory is right or wrong.

Ferraro, Pfeffer and Sutton devote a paper on economics’ language and assumptions, showing how social science drives our perspective on economics. I was reminded of their study when I read the latest blog by Roger Martin on How to win the argument with Milton Friedman. Martin notes that the argument that the trade-offs between shareholders and the rest of society, the particularly framing of Friedman’s argument, has won the last 50 years. It is, he writes, a very clever way of setting up his argument, but won’t stand up to scrutiny. And he sets out to debunk the framing. Of course, it drives some of his readers nuts, but that’s ...

Older--And Sometimes Wiser

I was both intrigued and amused by the article in the NYTimes Magazine by Yiren Lu on the growing gap between youngers and olders in Silicon Valley. Olders being more than 50 years old. The article was written by a “younger,” a recent college grad still in her twenties. And that gave it both a peculiar set of useful insights and also a peculiar set of missing insights.

Although her insights about youthful Silicon Valley coders and techies were illuminating, she was evidently unaware that most entrepreneurs and successful start-ups are initiated by those 40 years old or older. No surprise on that, especially since most people believe in the Zuckerberg and late-teen fantasies. I suspect that Bill Gates was one of the very few college-age entrepreneurs that became successful without the heavy hand of a supervising adult.

I was in my sixties when I worked in my first start-up with a bunch of twenty-year olds. It ...

The Hidden Side of the SAT

When David Coleman took over the College Board, home of the SAT, he did so with an awareness of the many criticisms leveled at their testing programs. He was especially interested in what MIT's Les Perelman had to say about the testing. Prof. Perelman is primary author of the first hypertext technical writing handbook, The Mayfield Guide to Technical and Scientific Writing. He has published articles on technical communication, computers and writing, the history of rhetoric, sociolinguistic theory, and medieval literature. Perelman's article in the LA Times on an earlier version of the SAT, New SAT: Write Long, Badly and Prosper is a must-read.  

It's fairly well-known that the SAT meaningfully predicts a student's first-year college grade point average. As one psychologist writes, that is "an astonishing achievement that can't be ignored." 

But what few seem to recognize is that SAT scores are as much a reflection of family income as they are of a student's knowledge. The College Board openly shared this chart comparing SAT scores with family income in Sunday's NYTimes Magazine.

Colleges deal with this information in different ways. Some no longer ...

Intellectually Curious? A Potpourri of Insights for the End of the Year

The Eavesdropper: Saving the lost art of conversation. Sherry Turkle, MIT’s digital psychologist, (an academic interested in the relationship between humans and machines) has an enlightening interview with Atlantic’s Megan Garber. Conversation is messy, full of pauses, interruptions and topic changes, she admits. So Turkle and Garber take us on a tour through a local Apple stores, noting that everybody’s talking, but nobody’s talking about anything except what’s on the machines—to prove her point. My protégé recently responded quite affirmatively to my comment that techies are usually the poorest conversationalists in an organization, especially when compared with folk in, say. . . marketing. But I have no complaints. Their inadequacies brought in big consulting bucks. In her new book she’s going to “out” herself as a “partisan of conversation.” Why do you think that’s actually important? I can give you a pot full of reasons.

In a formal recant, Ross Douthat gives us Confessions of a Columnist. I suspect he’s taking a tip from David Brooks’ paean for humility. Douthat intrigues us with several important big mistakes which he made in 2013. He told us, in effect, that he’s a poor predictor. . .

Why We (Sometimes!) Need the Nanny State

Here’s the underlying question to 32 oz sugary drinks and all kinds of other issues: are there valid reasons for being told what to do when it will serve the greater good? Put another way, what’s all the fuss about Bloomberg’s attempt to impose a ban on large “sugary drinks?”

It’s a really, really cultural thing. Americans resist being told what to do like it was the bubonic plague. It’s in our DNA. But surprisingly, the majority of world cultures don’t have a knee-jerk response to regularly being told what to do. Even our good friends, the Canadians, are far less resistant to nanny than us Americans.

So, the gloriously redneck—and mean--state of Mississippi has passed a ban on bans—its cities cannot place restrictions of any sort of food or drink.

But as Sarah Conly of Bowdoin has noted in The nanny state: why we need it, it’s not about soda.