Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

Innovation, random drift & Isaac Newton

HT Gareth and Katy for this lovely animation of how a line drawn by 500 people one after another changes and evolves. HERD fans who've seen the live show might remember a very silly game I've used to make the same poi 
nt [about 6 minutes into this video or right at the end of this one...or after 12 or so minutes here].

Random Drift is the geneticists' term for the kind of change we observe in a population's genes which is driven by a series of neutral [i.e. small accidental] changes [one following another], rather than as the result of important changes in the environment which encouraged the selection of a particular gene over another.

The big moral is this: because we are social creatures who cannot escape the world of others in to which we are born [or indeed turn off our own tendency to copy what's going on around us]  much of what we call new or innovative is really just a miscopy of what's gone before - this despite all our efforts at being creative, original and innovative, 

Of course, you can tell yourself you are different (and gain some kudos from being seen to be so) but maybe you might just follow Isaac Newton's confession:

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Is our rush to encourage and champion [deliberate or intentional] "innovation" perhaps missing the point?

 

 

 

 

The future of music (redux)

Nice (if not entirely earth-shattering) piece in yesterday's Observer highlighting the need for the music industry to move on from the mass-production/rights enforcement gig that the likes of (poor old) Feargal Sharkey is forced to defend.

As Billy Bragg points out, it really is a matter of rethinking how artists & businesses earn money in this space

I've recently recorded half a dozen new songs – and I gave them away on my website. Meanwhile, I've got six different types of T-shirt that I sell for about £20 a time when you add in postage. I have to say I sometimes wonder what business I'm in.

Chimes squarely with what artists like Trent Reznor have been doing and what commentators like Gerd have been banging on about for ages (also, handily with some work we're doing at the moment with a bunch of groovy cats...more soon)

Put simply:

So you make music or help others do? How are you going to earn money, assuming that much of the recorded stuff is going to be accessed for free? And - btw there's no simple or single answer.

 

UPDATE: John W's got a nice rumination on this subject here (and link to a good shoe-ing of Bain & Co's analysis on the subject)

What the audience do with your data

Pic c/o Ancrack.co.uk

Caught up with last week's New Scientist yesterday and was struck by the relevance of the lead editorial's challenge to scientists about how their data is used (not just what it is, how clean it is or how it is obtained)

It is tempting to lay the blame solely at the feet of ignorant politicians or an irresponsible media. They do indeed play a significant role, often perpetuating mistakes, muddles and misunderstandings.

But journalists and policymakers can only work with what they are given. Scientists need to bear in mind how their statistics can be abused - or perhaps unintentionally read the wrong way.

The same point is equally valid for market researchers (as an old paper of mine suggested) or anyone who's creating information for other people inside or outside their organisation.

It's not an either/or: you've got to make sure your data is sound and clean but you've also got to recognise that it's what they do with it that matters (and they will do stuff with it if it it is to spread).

Data is never just data - it will have a human social context if it is to go beyond your desktop. So design the human in, please.

 

People stories vs. Thing stories

Talking last week to a good chum who's done some great stuff applying storytelling to brands prompted me to dig out this paper from Alex Mesoudi and the great Robin Dunbar. Download Mesoudi_whiten_dunbar_BJP_2006

Essentially, the learning for you and me in our storytelling activities on behalf of brands, organisations and our own ideas is this: people remember the people details not the thing details.

So use 'em or lose 'em, as the adage goes (and don't get hung up on the fact that people are more interested in each other than in you and your brand/policy).

 

Social Science's to do list

Top ten social-science questions according to the journal Nature (HT Alex)

1. How can we induce people to look after their health?

2. How do societies create effective and resilient institutions, such as governments?

3. How can humanity increase its collective wisdom?

4. How do we reduce the ‘skill gap’ between black and white people in America?

5. How can we aggregate information possessed by individuals to make the best decisions?

6. How can we understand the human capacity to create and articulate knowledge?

7. Why do so many female workers still earn less than male workers?

8. How and why does the ‘social’ become ‘biological’?

9. How can we be robust against ‘black swans’ — rare events that have extreme consequences?

10. Why do social processes, in particular civil violence, either persist over time or suddenly change?

We're working on a number of these issues, directly or indirectly. What about you? Are you increasing the body of knowledge and how? And if not, why not?

Montaigne, mimicry and the mirror neurons

Nice piece in the papers by Saul Frampton a couple of weeks ago, whose book on the French philosopher and essayist Montaigne is now out.

In it, he highlights Montaigne's grasp of the roots of human empathy and mimicry:

As he [Montaigne]looks into himself he recognises his "aping and imitative character"; "whatever I contemplate, I adopt – a foolish expression, a disagreeable grimace, a ridiculous way of speaking"; "I often usurp the sensations of another person". He sees that such capacities lie behind the power of theatre: how sorrow, anger, hatred, pass though writer, actor and audience, like a chain of magnetised needles, "suspended one from the other", causing us to weep for those we care little about. For Montaigne, as for contemporary neuroscientists, humans thus have an inbuilt imitative, sympathetic capacity

Can't wait to read the book itself

Nudge nudge wink wink: more criticism

Pic c/o etsy

Another week, another HMGovernment policy paper awash with nudging and nudges [HT Bob Pickett]

Nice piece here which highlights some important criticisms of Nudge and nudging [raised in this BMJ article] by a number of leading academic authorities on health-related behaviour change (including Prof Theresa Marteau, whom I had the good fortune to meet last year).

Here's the first para of the the BMJ piece's conclusions:

"Nudge and similar recent popular texts have stimulated policymakers to think about altering environments to change behaviour. These developments are to be welcomed. Evidence to support the effectiveness of nudging as a means to improve population health and reduce health inequalities is, however, weak. This reflects absence of evidence as well as evidence of little or no effect..." [my italics]

Part of the reason cited in the BMJ for the weakness of nudging as a frame for behaviour change tool is the fact [as suggested here previously] that largely ignores the social world in which we live  and insists on considering individual behaviour as the appropriate level of granulation to think about human behaviour (the other big argument here is that the light-touch interventions that nudge tends to favour tend to skip around doing the politically difficult and often unpopular context-changing things like introducing smoking bans yet at the same time ignoring the competitive nudges e.g. what beer marketers use to steal the virtuous away...)

And - so you don't go away with the impression that this is the scientific equivalent of a local neighbourhood quarrel - the interview rightly highlights the underlying attraction of  cheap and the simple fixes, which much nudging seems to offer policy makers 

 “This is why this idea has caught on, because it’s selling a very attractive [cheap and easy] proposition...It’s a political philosophy rather than behavioral science”

Political philosophy rather than behavioral science, indeed.