Rules Schmules

There is a joke among business consultants that when you go into an organization, figure out if they are a top down organization where decisions flow from above, or a bottoms up organization where individual units have a great deal of autonomy. If a business is top down you recommend it become more bottoms up so that individual units can understand and respond to the marketplace more quickly. If it is bottoms up you recommend that it become more top down to avoid chaotic redundancy and lack of focus.

There is a lot of truth in this. There is no ideal organization. Every organizational structure has problems. Over time, organizations tend to oscillate between structures based on the current set of problems. The same is true in other aspects of life. Should dictionaries be descriptive or prescriptive? How much freedom should parents allow their children?

This note is about the balance between individual freedom and enforced order. Based on what I see in the United States, I think the pendulum has swung too far toward order and it is time to move toward more freedom of action. I think the current situation is largely based on unreasonable fears combined with a desire to make the world safer for ourselves and our children. The end result is not a safer society, but a society with less freedom and more rigidity of thought.

I think the current situation is based on widespread misunderstanding of humans and their capabilities. As a species we are remarkable in our ability to exist in social groups and to flexibly react to each other and the environment. Despite the fact that we are capable of unspeakable cruelty, on the whole we are extremely kind and cooperative with each other. We are also protective, particularly of the most vulnerable among us. I do not deny the atrocities and cruelty, the scams, the sociopathic behavior of both individuals and groups. I merely say that these are anomalies. Bad behavior makes the news and becomes a focus of our thoughts precisely because it is uncommon in a stable society like the US.

As individuals we also misunderstand risk and emotionally overreact to perceived danger. Lately Hans Monderman has been in the news. For example, Wired Magazine. Monderman was a Dutch traffic engineer who died in January 2008. Monderman improved safety by removing traffic controls. That's right, he removed speed limit and other traffic signs and signals to make the roads safer. At a busy intersection there is nothing to segregate pedestrian, bicycle, auto and truck traffic. He has a stunt to prove his point to reporters. I have seen several separate reports on this, but from the wired article:

We drive on to another project Monderman designed, this one in the nearby village of Oosterwolde. What was once a conventional road junction with traffic lights has been turned into something resembling a public square that mixes cars, pedestrians, and cyclists. About 5,000 cars pass through the square each day, with no serious accidents since the redesign in 1999. "To my mind, there is one crucial test of a design such as this," Monderman says. "Here, I will show you." With that, Monderman tucks his hands behind his back and begins to walk into the square - backward - straight into traffic, without being able to see oncoming vehicles. A stream of motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians ease around him, instinctively yielding to a man with the courage of his convictions.

From the International Tribune.

"Who has the right of way?" he asked rhetorically. "I don't care. People here have to find their own way, negotiate for themselves, use their own brains."

When asked, people who use these uncontrolled intersections say they are not safe, despite the statistics to the contrary. The fact that people do not feel as safe, as controlled, leads them to be more careful. Take off the explicit controls and people use their own judgment to behave in ways that increase safety rather than the perception of safety.

We have allowed our fears to distort our behavior and our society in ways that I find unacceptable. One example of this is the way we treat our children. As a seven or eight year old child I had large amounts of time that were unsupervised. My mother had a bell to call us in for dinner. As long as I was within earshot of the bell at that time, I could do what I wanted. When I got my first bicycle at about the age of seven, my world expanded and I was allowed to roam at will as long as I was home at designated times. Because our family was a large tribe I had more freedom than most, but I was not alone. At Halloween groups of children, without parental accompaniment, roamed miles from their homes to scour the best neighborhoods for candy. Neighborhood children organized their own games without supervision.

The United States has changed, but it has not become less safe. I do not believe that the rate of child kidnapping or abuse by strangers has increased. There is more traffic, but I do not believe that our neighborhoods present more dangers. What has changed is the level of fear. We have institutionalized the belief that the world is unsafe and children cannot be trusted to operate without constant supervision. As a result, elementary school children are not allowed to walk a quarter mile to school by themselves. Because parents believe that children can never be left alone, activities outside of school are supervised and, as a result, expensive. The constant supervision also diminishes the development of conflict resolution skills. I am not saying that adults should not look out for children. To the contrary, each of us has a responsibility to keep everyone around us safe, especially the young and defenseless. The world is unsafe. Children do not understand much of what is going on around them. But it is safe enough and we are here to help them.

The same attitudes and fears have helped turn children into incipient economic units. The current school debates focus on more time in school and more controlled school environments. This regimentation devalues the children and, in the long run, will hurt us economically. The genius of the American economy is our flexibility and inventiveness. As we become more regimented, as children's education become more standardized, I believe we lose that flexibility and inventiveness.

I recognize that I am neither typical nor a role model. In a sense that is my point. Few of us are typical. Only a few people think I am stupid or incompetent. I do well in a field that requires both constant education and inventiveness. I consider myself to be reasonably well educated. I also didn't do homework until I entered the university. Homework was assigned, I just never did it. My grades through high school were spotty, but performance on tests seemed to overrule the bad homework grades. As far as I know, no one ever considered holding me back. Based on college entrance tests, I was admitted to the university after my junior year in high school.

In junior high school instead doing my homework, I was reading a book a day. I read all the science fiction, "boy in the country", and biographies in the school library. In high school I was reading the daily newspaper, two to three weekly news magazines, and several monthly magazines including Scientific American and the Atlantic Monthly (it used to be a monthly). I also studied mathematics on my own. Had I spent more supervised time in school or had more structured after school activities, I would not have had time to get my real education. Looking back, I think I could have benefited from better schools. By better schools I mean those populated by more educated, and flexible teachers. I do not believe I would have benefited by more structure or more hours in school.

As a society we seem to have grown more and more rule bound. By rule bound I mean respecting and enforcing rules without looking at the sense of the situation. I have always followed Bob Dylan's dictum "To live outside the law you must be honest". A simple example from my masters swim group. We rent lanes at one of the pools in town. In addition to the pool life guards, we provide our own coach on the deck. The lifeguards and pool administration have recently gotten upset because some of our swimmers did not enter the pool feet first as the rules require. This is an experienced group of swimmers, many of them competitive. In my several years of swimming with the group, I have not seen a dangerous entry into the pool. The lifeguards either have no idea what is dangerous, have no idea why the rule exists, or are simply complaining about infractions for the sake of the rule itself.

As Monderman's practical experiments with traffic show us, posting and enforcing rules does not always make us safer. We are at our best when we take the time and effort to understand and respond to the particular circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Rules are a means to an end, not the end itself. The valid reasons behind the rules should be obeyed and enforced. If a rule is about safety and you are in a position to enforce, enforce safety not the rule. This is not a slide down a slippery slope toward anarchy. It is a slide down the slope toward respect and humanity. As with all things, you must do this intelligently and with awareness of your own limitations. Don't let your like or dislike of a person cause you to abuse your power and selectively enforce the rules.

If you are in a position to make rules, make sure that you are addressing a real problem, not the perception of a problem. Do not make rules in the mistaken belief that you can enforce conflict out of existence (the homeowners association fallacy). In work environments, try not to rigidly enforce standard practice at the expense of better solutions.

In our day to day lives each of us should remember the old saying, "People who like sausage and respect the law should never watch either of them being made". Rigid order is both impossible and overrated. Do the right thing. Help and protect those around you. This has nothing to do with rules, it has to do with humanity.

It is Your Civic Duty - Lie to Political Pollsters

It is your civic duty to lie to political pollsters to make polls as unreliable as possible. It is not enough to refuse to answer the questions, you have to lie.

The rest of this article deals with why, but I want to take a moment on the practical - how to lie. There are several amusing techniques for this. Here are two. The most reliable one is to pretend you are someone else, but completely stereotype their views. Choose your crazy Aunt Myrtle or your grandmother who votes for the "most handsome" candidate. The important thing is that their views do not agree with yours. This technique has the advantage of a coherent, if mildly insane, point of view. That makes it hard for pollsters to simply discard your answers as nonsensical. I suspect that most polling techniques do not allow for throwing out responses. That allows for more extreme techniques. I choose random numbers, the digits of pi for example, and use those to determine my answers. If the next digit is 3 and there are three choices, I answer with the third one. If there are only two answers I choose the first because 3 and 1 are both odd numbers. The other day I owned a company with over 100 employees, but made less than 20 thousand a year and had no health insurance.

At first you may find it hard to give an answer that you absolutely and positively disagree with, but I assure you, you get over it and it becomes fun after a while.


Here is what I want from political candidates and the media that covers elections. I want to know how the candidates think about the world and our place in it, and how they are likely to vote on issues I care about. Political polling makes it less likely that I will get what I want from the media, from political parties, and from the candidates themselves. Each of us should do what we can to remove polling from the political landscape. Lying is the easiest and most effective way I can think of to make the polls disappear.


The Media:

Media coverage of elections is bad and not getting better. From "A First Look at Coverage of the 2008 Presidential Campaign".


Just 12% of stories examined were presented in a way that explained how citizens might be affected by the election, while nearly nine-out-of-ten stories (86%) focused on matters that largely impacted only the parties and the candidates. Those numbers, incidentally, match almost exactly the campaign-centric orientation of coverage found on the eve of the primaries eight years ago.

Here is what we get from the media

• Horserace coverage. Candidate Smith is 3% up in the polls, candidate Jones is gaining in a final stretch surge in the polls. Candidate McMurry wins by a nose. Candidate Rostnikov outdid candidate McMurry in fund-raising in the month of June.



• Political strategy coverage. Polling shows 27% of the electorate is "very concerned" about issue "Horses that have left the barn". The Animal party intends to take advantage of this with a direct mail campaign to people who do not own horses emphasizing their position that barn doors should be self closing.



• Discussion of the polls. After a poll proves unreliable, the media spend a lot of time talking about why. This is particularly corrosive because it uses up time that could be used discussing something of importance. It is also completely vacuous because if the pollsters knew why they were wrong they would have corrected for it before the poll was published. My goal is to stop this discussion by making ALL political polls unreliable.



• Reporting of partisan polls. Many polls are commissioned by people with an axe to grind. Questions are created that invite a particular answer, then it is reported that "By a vast majority, the electorate oppose beating dead horses."

Nonsensical explanations. Poll results are often analyzed as though the polls were answered by a single person and that person had a coherent set of beliefs. This invented person if often called "the electorate". For example, "The electorate seem to feels that taxes are too high." In fact, poll results do not reflect anyone's views. They are an aggregate measure.

Parties and Special Interest Groups

Here is what we get from the parties and special interest groups:

• Attack ads on targeted, hot-button topics. "Candidate Rostnikov voted to allow horses to escape, often to be killed". These ads invariably inflame passion, distort the candidates views, and cheapen the debate. Here is a simple rule. There is nothing meaningful that can be learned about a candidate in 30 seconds.



• Feel good ads. These are essentially selling the candidate with the same techniques as Coca Cola. There are some general techniques: attractive smiling people doing good things, flags waving, children and a better future. Polling and focus groups allow the political machines to tune these ads like a drug formula.



• Pandering. Here is a definition of pandering: "To cater to the lower tastes and desires of others or exploit their weaknesses." Pandering is often subtle, but sometimes not. If someone offers you money "A $1000 tax rebate" or "repeal/suspend a tax", they are pandering. "Lower tastes and desires" are easy to figure out. In politics, money usually does the trick. But, effective pandering requires some excuse so you feel justified in receiving the the largess. That is where polling comes in.



• Very specific targeting of particular people. Based on your answers to political polls, you will categorized. This allows you to be targeted very specifically. If a candidate Hernandez knows that it is very important to you that koala bears remain a symbol of affection and comfort, you may be targeted with a koala bear ad. It will paint the opposing candidate, Walenski, with some plausible evidence, as someone who just doesn't care about koalas. Hernandez is counting on your affection for koalas to motivate you to support him and oppose Walenski. A closer examimination of the candidates voting records may show that Hernandez is likely to vote for a measure that will cost you your job, but he does like those koalas and Walenski seems to hate them.

A few interesting links to follow if you are interested in the topic:

• Polling Politics, Media, and Election Campaigns


• Poll-obsessed media focus on strategy over substance


• Horse race reporting - 92 election

Understanding vs. Procedure

I was an early adopter of broadband home internet. The first service that became available in my area was DSL and, at the beginning, it wasn't very reliable. The situation was complicated by the fact that I didn't have the standard configuration at the time. DSL was being sold as a way to connect your home computer (singular) to the internet. I was running a network of several computers behind my broadband connection.

Often, the service would go down. When it did, I would first make sure that the network and equipment were working on my side. Once I knew the problem was on the phone company side, I would call. The first level support personnel would run me through a checklist. These checklists assumed the standard, single computer configuration and were designed to rule out problems on my end. On my first calls, I tried to explain my situation and what I had done to diagnose the problem. This served no purpose. Often they asked me to do something that was inapplicable to my configuration. I would say things like "Let's pretend I've done that. What is the next step? " The first level support at that time could not affect anything in the phone company. If the scripted procedures failed, you were directed to second level support. Second level support had people who could get information about your actual connection and do some simple reconfiguration. On one occasion I got to a third level when the problem was failed hardware in a phone company facility.

At any given level in this hierarchy, there were standard procedures (ask this question, if the response is ...). The people who created the procedures understood the working of the system at that level and how to diagnose problems. That knowledge was codified into the procedures that could be followed by people who did not understand either the system or its failures. At each level the procedures were designed to attack particular problems. Presumably the first level support solved the most common problems, most of which had nothing to do with the phone company. The second level diagnosed less common problems where there were simple connection problems. The third level was reserved for more rare occurrences.

The introduction of procedures serves several functions. It codifies the most effective way to approach a particular problem. It also reduces the amount of thought necessary to perform the task, making it easier to find people who can perform it. Sometimes systems are so complex that a single person cannot understand the whole. Even in simpler systems, procedures allow people to concentrate all their energy on a particular part without having to understand all the relationships to other parts.

All of us reduce understanding to procedure. Consider a grocery list for dinner. I want salad, so put down greens, mushrooms, onion ... At the grocery store I do not have to consider the process of making the salad (though I may double check and modify based on what is available). The part of the process that is important in the store is buying the material. I can simply get the items on the list and be assured of success. In effect, I do the up front work of preparing the list (procedure) at a time and place where I can adequately consider the question, then I delegate the task to a less capable me who is distracted by the people and things in the grocery store.

In business, less skilled generally means cheaper. This drives a movement toward procedure instead of understanding. Because simple procedures require less thought and attention than complex procedures, the tendency is to make procedures as simple as possible. Forty years ago grocery store clerks had to type in every price and were expected to know the current price of all produce. By printing machine readable product identifiers on each item and computerizing the association between product and price, the clerks job has been reduced to scanning items and either remembering or looking up produce codes. The procedures have become simple enough so that customers are now doing it themselves.

A side effect of this tendency is that understanding is concentrated in fewer and fewer people. This is one of the drivers for the increasing income rift in the United States. A more fantastic danger was explored by Robert Heinlein in his Foundation Trilogy where people with understanding virtually vanished from a technological society. An actual example occurred in Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge killed the educated and were left with no one who could run or repair a water system. For the world as a whole, this is not likely to become a problem. The large population and increased wages attached to specialized understanding assures a continuous supply of the educated.

A more mundane and common side effect of reduction of understanding to procedure is nonsense. Some time ago I had the opportunity to examine, in detail, ordering and payment procedures at a number of companies. In broad outlines, the problem is clear. Someone in the company needs something. This could be a pencil or could be raw materials for a manufacturing process. The product is purchased from someplace, it arrives, is delivered internally, and paid for. In a large company this involves a number of independent areas. These include the person or department that needs the item, a procurement department, accounting, and receiving. Pretty universally, no one understood the whole process in detail. They simply followed the appropriate procedures. Over time, business needs change. When some department found the procedures no longer worked properly, they would force a change to fix their problem. Because systemic changes require coordination and approval, they are avoided by sensible people. All of the processes studied ended up with nonsensical procedures and supporting material.

If understanding can produce procedure, can procedure produce understanding? I think the answer is yes, but only understanding of the area covered by the procedure. From the first level support questions used by the phone company, it should be possible to induce a model of the home network connections to the phone company. From the second level procedures it should be possible to induce a model of the connection itself. More global understanding requires more global study.

Lest anyone feel smug about human (or their own) understanding, I have a simple contention. There is no single person who understands, in detail, what happens between when you type a letter on your keyboard and that letter appears in your word processor. There are people who understand key codes and processor interrupts. There are people who understand word processors and the mapping of characters to glyphs. There are few people who understand both of those, and there are many other layers in between (process swapping in the operating system, control of graphics devices ...).