Moving

When I started this blog a lot of experienced bloggers told me I should just get my own domain. It's cheap, easy and provides more creative control.

I wasn't sure at the time, but now I know they were right. I finally understand.

So, from now on I'll be blogging at principlesoffailure.com.

Same great content, even better site. Check it out.

Are Better Algorithms the Solution to Information Overload?

As a young child my grandfather would take me to the dump with him and let me wander through the piles of rubbish while he unloaded our trash. Of course we never brought anything but worthless garbage to the dump but I always found a few useful items in other people's waste to take home with us.

Sometimes surfing the internet feels like going to the dump with my grandfather again. I climb over piles and piles of garbage looking for the good stuff.

The promise and curse of the internet is an abundance of information. So much information is available it's not uncommon to hear people referring to this wealth as "information overload." Most often we're not overwhelmed by information, we are overwhelmed by sifting through all the junk trying to find what we want.

One of the early attempts to structure the vast online information landscape was Slashdot (1997), a social bookmarking site that allows users to comment on and vote up popular stories. Following Slashdot, sites like StumbleUpon (2001), del.icio.us (2003), Digg (2004) and Reddit (2005) followed similar methodologies.

These sites allow users to see what other people think is good, noteworthy or worthwhile. What they don’t do is personalize their recommendations to each user. Everyone who visits the site sees exactly the same recommendations.

Today, hundreds of cutting edge applications are taking advantage of recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning--as well as a boom in online social networks--to create even more effective ways of curating our information.

Early Approaches

Before we ever had an internet people were telling us what we would like and what we should do. Reviews of plays, books and movies were popular ways of figuring out what was worthwhile. As America became more mobile travel guides like Michelin provided advice on where to stay and what to eat while on vacation.

These reviews provided a professional opinion but of the least personalized type. The advice was the same no matter who was reading it and was based on the experiences of a cadre of elite experts. Popular opinion was used when available but few venues provided measurable data. Movie theater receipts and record sales were two notable exceptions.

The explosion of connectedness facilitated by the internet however, allows for collaboration and democratization as never before. Rather than recommendations from a handful of elites, we can crowdsource recommendations from the billions of people with access to the internet.

We can get restaurant recommendations that aggregate the combined wisdom and experiences of thousands of people with sites like UrbanSpoon, Zagat and the new Dinevore. These sites use user-generated information to make recommendations (though Zagat still uses professional critics too).

Like box office blockbusters and “Top 40” hits, review sites which rely on user interaction tell us what's popular but not necessarily what we are personally going to like. The whole appeal of recommendations is to find more of the good stuff and avoid the garbage. But what if the garbage is popular? In other words, what if we are in the minority? How do we find the things we like?

Predicting Future Happiness

Knowing what we're going to like is a tough nut to crack. Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert elaborates on how difficult it is in his excellent book, Stumbling on Happiness. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding happiness.

Dan Gilbert claims everyone is bad at knowing what will make us happy in the future, yet we constantly engage in this predictive activity. Not merely for ourselves but for others as well. Whether we're entrepreneurs attempting to make a product people will like or a romantic partner trying to endear ourselves to our lover, we are making predictions about what will please someone else.

Ultimately all of these recommendation systems are trying to do the same thing, predict future pleasure. When prediction systems work well we're thrilled with the recommendation. We go to a restaurant we've never been to before and we love it, we see a movie we knew nothing about and it blows us away.

The problem with using aggregated data is that it frequently misses the point. Sometimes we go to a restaurant for all the wrong reasons; to make someone else happy or send social signals. How many people have eaten at Sardi's for reasons other than the quality of the food or had dinner at Masa as a way of displaying their wealth and status?

What we really need is a structure that takes human bias and subjectivity out of the system, a way to reduce the noise automatically, even mechanically, and see patterns in the way people behave. The computational power and consolidated data available on the internet provides a rich soil for such fruit.

More Complicated Tools

Some recommendations are mechanical in nature. Amazon recommends Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children because you bought Night Circus and other people who bought Night Circus also bought Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.

As opposed to the popularity contest of the "I liked it so you'll like it too" recommendation system, purely mechanical systems follow the "this goes with that" principle. No matter how unpopular your particular niche interest is, people with the same taste reveal implied recommendations through their purchases or viewing habits.

Last.fm is another site that looks at revealed preferences. It recommends music by asking you to pick an artist or song you already like. It matches the music you said you liked with music other people who enjoy that music also like. People who like James Taylor for example, also like Jim Croce.  

This type of algorithm-based recommendation was the first to really make customized recommendations. You may not like Jim Croce, but it only recommended him because you told the algorithm something about yourself--that you liked James Taylor.

Everyone who goes to Amazon or Last.fm get recommendations specific to their tastes as expressed by some input. But everyone who buys that book or selects that song will get the exact same recommendation. In this way it is somewhat customized but not quite personalized.

Bundle is a recommendation site that let's you get a little more specific. It uses aggregated credit card data along with demographic information about the card holder to build mechanical recommendations for products and services. Users can filter their recommendations by specifying the demographic category they fit into and then seeing what similar people bought.

The Ultimate in Personalization

In order for recommendations to accurately predict what you will like, sites need to know a lot more about you. Dan Gilbert concludes his book with the advice that we will be happiest if we follow the recommendations of people who are similar to us. Most of us surround ourselves with people we share interests with and call them friends.

Not surprisingly, as social networking sites became popular people began looking to them for recommendations. These sites provided the crowdsourcing benefits of aggregated input with the customization of being pulled from people similar to ourselves. Surely the websites, movies and music being recommended on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ would be the most accurate.

Aside from knowing how far your high school buddy ran this morning or what he had for breakfast, one of the benefits of social networks is the ability to reduce the internet to a manageable size. Friends acting as curators of the internet naturally recommend things they find interesting. And because our friends are likely to have the same tastes we do, we'll probably find them interesting too.

This combines the curation and up voting aspect of social bookmarking sites with the personalization of our specific network of friends allowing (theoretically) the recommendations we received to be uberspecific to our tastes.

Did I hear a chuckle? Anyone who's been on social media knows it hasn't worked out that way. The logic was sound but didn't take into consideration how our behavior changes online. When developing friendships was constrained to people we personally met and it grew organically from shared interests our friends were a good reflection of our preferences and interests.

But in the online social world things are different. We "friend" people we knew when we were younger but haven't been in touch with in decades, we connect with people at work for political reasons that have nothing to do with shared interests, we follow people because they follow us and following back seems like the right thing to do.

In other words, online friendships mean little when it comes to analyzing our preferences and social media curation is pretty much a joke.

Even under the best of circumstances I wouldn't recommend the same thing to all my friends just because I liked it. If I know my friends well enough to know their preferences I would only recommend things I thought they would like. And those recommendations would be different for different people.

What are the Best Algorithms Now?

The most personalized recommendations will be those which are able to take into account a whole host of factors. Not just what book you bought today, but all the books you've bought in the past and how much you liked them. It will take into consideration which books people who have preferences similar to yours have liked (whether you are friends with them or not).

That's what GoodReads is doing. You tell the site which books you've read and how much you liked them and it matches your library with libraries similar to yours so you can find books you haven't read that those people liked. It creates a specific profile of you so recommendations are different for everyone based on their specific reading history.

One of the most advanced movie recommendation engines is run by Netflix which uses factors such as how much your preferences have changed over time and how likely you are to overrate a good movie after seeing several good movies in a row. The downside is, because these systems are built entirely on your preferences they need you to rate a lot of books and movies before they can accurately predict what you will like.

Pandora Radio on the other hand, creates a profile of your preferences and then "learns" what type of music you'll like by seeing which songs you give a "thumbs up" or a "thumbs down" to. Pandora is built on an index of song characteristics called the "Music Genome Project" which has been so successful many new sites have attempted to map other "genomes."

Jinni recommends movies based on its Movie Genome and StartupGenome attempts to gauge the viability of a startup company based on certain characteristics of its genome. But in many ways these attempts still rely on what people say they like. The real advancements in recommendations will be when machines will be able to learn what our preferences are without us having to tell them. The highest rate of error in prediction technology is the difference between what people say they like and what they actually do.

Future Advancements

We will get this right. It's only a matter of time before artificial intelligence advances sufficiently to predict our future happiness at least as well as we can. In fact, AI will probably be better at it since it will be based on the actual outcomes of choices rather than on a biased perception. But they will only be as good as the data they have to work with.

It will require a lot more information than is currently available including how our personal thought processes works and when we're likely to be lying to ourselves. For example, I may say I'm adventurous when it comes to eating but every time I go to a Filipino restaurant I get something safe. I can continue to rationalize why I got the crispy pata yet again and probably convince myself I'll try the balut another time, but the data of my historical choices reveals my true preferences. (I've never tried balut.)

This collection of preference data is already taking place online. Every time we look something up on Google it stores the search. Recommendation engines (if given access) could build a picture of the things we're interested in by using this data. That's why police detectives always seize suspects' computers and analyze their browsing history. Were the suspects searching for "ways to poison someone with household products" or "how to rob a bank"?

I'm not saying this to be alarmist or to suggest the internet knows too much about us. Quite the contrary, I think it needs to know much more. The more our thought processes get recorded online the better the recommendations will be.

If you're interested in finding out more about AI and Machine Learning, Stanford is offering online classes this fall for free. Go to http://www.ai-class.com to register. But hurry, classes start October 10.

I'll see you there. Or maybe not, last I heard over seventy thousand people had registered to take the course. I'm glad I don't have to grade those papers.

America’s Economic Lottery: A Love Story

[photo by Kirstea]

You can also listen to this post as a podcast below:

This is a story of unrequited love, the story of a lopsided romance. It’s about a man who cherished an idea so deeply he could not see the truth, a man so enamored with the love story in his mind he could not perceive reality. It’s a tragedy from one perspective--as all love stories ultimately are--but it’s also a story of rebirth as illusion gives way to reality.

This is my story. And my erstwhile lover…well, you’ll meet her momentarily. She was both my muse and my demon, my inspiration and my condemnation. You see, every once in a while you meet someone so attractive, so alluring and radiant, so surprisingly blunt they consume your thoughts. They make sense of a chaotic world and make you feel good about yourself. They make your chest swell with pride before you even realize you’re doing it.

“It was all within my grasp, all within my control.”

I was twelve or thirteen when I fell in love with neoclassical economics. She was so elegant, so mature and wise. She was youthful but had an ancient soul. She explained the world to me and I believed it--every bit of it--and it clarified why the world was the way it was. She showed me the future, a land of promise and opportunity, just waiting for someone who really wanted to take it. It was all within my grasp, all within my control. I was limited only by desire. All my efforts would be rewarded.

When I was discouraged, thoughts of her comforted me. When I was successful I could hear her effusive praise. She was the smiling hand that patted my back, the sparkling eyes full of pride. She was the shoulder to assuage me, the hand that cradled my defeated head.

Eventually she let me down. Or rather I let myself down. I realized the world wasn’t what I thought it was when I was with her. Ultimately I realized she was never really what I had made her out to be. Yes, she was elegant and full of promise but the love was never real, the woman was a creation. I misinterpreted her and made her into something she was not. All evidence to the contrary I continued to believe she loved me back and that distorted my thinking.

And that’s how it is with love, you want to believe it so you do.

Walter’s passion

When Walter started a graphic illustration company he didn’t expect to become rich, famous or influential, he was simply doing what he’d seen his peers do and what people in America had always done. He was making a living. In his mind that meant opening a business—if you were fortunate you succeeded, if not you failed and had to start all over again.

To Walter, America had always been an agricultural society where people grew up understanding a simple formula: grow more than you consume, sell the surplus, reinvest in what worked, and pray for good weather. As the economy transitioned into an industrial machine the vagaries of weather patterns mattered less and less. Where previously, prosperity had been closely linked to factors outside of our control, the industrial revolution convinced us our success was completely within our own power to determine.

When Walter’s company failed to attract clients and bills continued to pile up it became apparent his business was a failure. If we believe the deterministic premise above we must conclude it was his own fault. Walter was not the victim of a draught or a late-season frost. He had failed in some fundamental business skill. He had improperly marketed his services, taken on too much debt, expanded too quickly or failed to provide value-added services.

“We see things in successful people, things we don’t see in ourselves.”

But failure was not the end of the road. Determined to succeed he collected himself, dusted himself off, relocated, regrouped and opened another business. He was presumably smarter this time--having learned from his own mistakes--and more business savvy. But his second company fared no better than his first.

There are certain things we see in successful people, attributes we don’t see in ourselves. We look for these missing pieces, these essential ingredients to triumph, and find them in passion, desire, and self-discipline. We tell ourselves, those who succeed are those who want it the most or who force themselves to put in long hours, endure hardship and turn back the approaching tide of failure by sheer force of will.

Everyone will tell you it’s that fire in the belly which gives successful people a divine claim on victory. You cannot justly withhold success from someone who wants it so badly it infects every fiber of their being. As romantic as this notion seems, as right as it feels to our soul, it’s just not true. It is neither passion nor skill alone which guarantees success.

The Library of Smith

From around 300-50 BCE the Library of Alexandria was the repository of all written knowledge and was alleged to have contained every published work of the time. Today the largest library in the world is the United States Library of Congress which holds almost 22 million books but still only claims to preserve a “representative sample” of all published material rather than every book ever published.

Large as these examples are they are infinitesimal compared to a theoretical library conceived by Daniel Dennett. The Library of Babel, as Dennett describes it, contains not books actually written but every book it is possible to write. It contains volumes of every combination of English words possible and therefore, by definition, contains every book ever written and every book which will be written in the future, as well as billions of volumes of nonsense.

Building on Daniel Dennett’s conceptual Library of Babel, Eric Beinhocker uses the Library of Smith (named after the original economist Adam Smith) to represent the landscape of all possible business plans including every conceivable business idea.

“The really great ideas tower above the landscape as mountains rising from flat plains.”

Imagine each business plan were evaluated, rated and plotted on a near-infinite grid using height to represent usefulness. Many business plans would be useless blather but the good ones, the ones society could benefit from, would rise from the landscape of mediocrity. The really great ones would tower above the landscape as mountains rising from flat plains.

On the landscape of the Library of Smith, the winners are those which create a more efficient use of the world’s resources. When this happens the world is better off because less of its resources need to be used to meet people’s needs or alternately the same amount of resources can be used and improve the world’s condition.

The highest peaks in this landscape are the ideas which revolutionize how things are done, that turn conventional wisdom on its head and make Herculean leaps in productivity. These ideas make their discoverers rich but also make society much better off by providing a way to use resources most economically.

Exploring, discovering and inventing

To discover where the highest peaks are on the landscape of the Library of Smith let’s imagine we send out explorers with a simple mandate, find the highest ground. These economic explorers are placed randomly on the grid and simply look around them choosing to step toward a square higher than the one they are on. When there is no higher ground they stay put.

This simplistic exploration would allow us to get to a high state of efficiency but there would remain places which would be out of reach. Peaks surrounded by a lower ridgeline for example. Areas of localized super-performance would trap explorers because once at the peak a step in any direction would be downward.

To give our hypothetical society a better chance of reaching the highest, most economically efficient peaks, we need to prevent explorers from getting caught on intermediate ridgelines. Let’s modify our explorers' mandate. They will continue searching for the highest ground immediately around them, but every so often they will leap in a random direction.

“We want these explorers to succeed but we know many of them will fail, some miserably.”

Wherever these leaping explorers land they start looking again for higher ground. Models have shown this technique to be more effective in producing positive results but it also produces some catastrophic failures. Explorers leap into deep pits or from a relatively high position to a lower one. Still, the overall outcome is positive with more explorers finding previously unreachable peaks.

As a society we want these explorers to succeed because we all benefit from their discoveries. Unfortunately we cannot guarantee their success. In fact we know some of them will fail. And that’s the crux of the capitalistic dichotomy; it creates an economy which is wildly successful in the aggregate, but which requires a small number of people suffer miserably.

Predicting success

No one really knows which businesses are going to succeed. I mean that. No one. I have a friend who keeps the books for a flower shop which has been on the brink of failure for years. Several years ago, when she first started working there, my friend told me, “I’m going to start looking for another job. This place is going to be out of business in a month.”

The shop was in debt, had no inventory controls and had over-purchased underperforming supplies: baskets nobody wanted, miles of ribbon in off colors. The shopkeeper was constantly taking money out of the till for personal expenses and putting off paying business bills and rent. They were doing little to no advertising and provided no customer service. It was only a matter of time. Months perhaps, if not weeks.

But somehow the shop would survive crisis after crisis. It has for years. Whenever I see this friend, who still works for the same florist, she still tells me the store is about to close. Nothing has fundamentally changed about how the store is run over the years, they just seem to get an influx of orders when it’s crucial for their survival.

“No one can predict business success with confidence. No one.”

Now this is just one shop but I could tell you many more similar stories. Other stores that did everything wrong but somehow survived and I could tell you about plenty of stores which were well capitalized with a solid business plan but still didn’t make it. No one can predict business success confidently. Evidence of this is everywhere.

If success could be determined in advance venture capitalists would get the same return as U.S. Treasury bonds. There would be no stock market because everyone would dump the losers and buy the winners. Every investor has access to the same information, but some think company X will succeed, others think it will fail.

But if it’s not effort and passion and knowledge that determine success, why does it look that way? Why does the economy seem to reflect neoclassical theory? Because some people must suffer.

Choosing our glasses

It’s okay to think about suffering if we can assign it to personal failings; the person who doesn’t wear their seat belt, the one who eats raw chicken, the idiots who jump off tall buildings and try to deploy a parachute before hitting the ground. These people make choices which directly cause their own suffering and they get what they have coming. The glasses through which we view the world influence the policies we enact, the causes we support and the way we treat others.

So it makes a huge difference in our attitude whether we think business success is self-determined or random. If we believe success is as random as an explorer arbitrarily jumping onto a high peak we have compassion on the failed businessman. But if success is a product of our own behavior, the losers only get what they deserve. All events are interpreted by the lens through which it is observed.

It’s the same with love. It not only rejuvenates us and makes the world seem much more interesting, but it actually causes us to reshape our perception of events to conform to our beliefs. It literally blinds us to the truth by making it impossible for our brains to see our lover’s actions for what they are. It alters the shape of the lens through which we see the world.

“When attraction strikes, it resonates to our core.”

Who knows what forms our concept of the ideal theory or the ideal woman, what combination of youthful experiences makes us prefer fair skin over a deep tan or hesitant, stilted conversation over polished banter. But whatever shapes our preference for theories or mates must reside deep within us because when attraction strikes it resonates to our core.

Not some superficial attraction but one that works its way to the center of our heart. Subtly at first, invisible to the senses, but then we suddenly we realize we’re in love, that we have been for months and are just now becoming aware of it. Even when we know it’s not real, that the attraction was false and one-sided, the feelings are impossible to ignore. It’s a disease you can survive but never fully recover from. A sickness which only needs a hint of encouragement to return with full force.

We rarely think about these glasses of perception, they develop over time and the things we see through them just seem natural and right. But we can choose to see things differently. We can change our prescription if we want to, if we see a need to.

If at first you don’t succeed

After Walter failed three times you might think he’d get the hint, he wasn’t cut out to be in the animation business. But he started again and this time got a toe hold producing short cartoon features. Before long Walter Disney’s company was making money and becoming well known in the industry. Today The Walt Disney Company is a global empire and while Walter passed away in 1966, no one can dispute he was an extraordinary success.

And that’s the allure of neoclassical theory, the siren song that tells us we were right to believe in hard work and devotion as the determinants of success. I only have to hear her name to feel my body react. My heart races, my mood brightens, I become expectant--though for what I’m never quite sure.

“In order to see the world clearly I must forever fail.”

She says something innocuous to me and I turn it into a love song. I interpret everyday courtesy as a lover’s deference. It’s said perception defines reality but this is only partially true. Our perception does not define other people’s reality, but it does define our own.

I want it to be real, to feel my attraction reciprocated, to fulfill the romantic fantasies of loving looks and implied flirtations. To see the world so simply again, so wonderfully and purely explained. And I know I will never be free. We can reinterpret events so easily, see a compliment as a slight and vice versa depending on how we think the other person feels about us. And amazingly we can revise and reinterpret these memories well into the future as new information impresses itself upon us.

All it takes is a hint of success for me to believe in self-determination again, to think I was right to love her all along. Any crack of sunlight will cause me to believe in love again and I know that would be a mistake. In order to see the world clearly I must forever fail.

Recommended reading:

Michele Boldrin--Against Intellectual Monopoly

Steven Johnson--Where Good Ideas Come From

Kevin Kelly--What Technology Wants

Eric Beinhocker--The Origin of Wealth

Don’t Look at Me

[photo by Zanthia]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast]

My earliest memory is of visiting my great-grandmother Herdegen. She lived in a trailer on my grandfather’s farm in Cheboygan, Michigan. It sat behind his house where the grass grew waist high until the stalks bent under their own weight, their dark green length bowing in apparent deference to a silver egg-like throne. Her home was a remnant of a travel trailer which she shared with a long-haired white lap dog who had a hard time keeping her hair.

The air inside was stale and pungent, the unventilated accumulation of lost dreams and sorrow. Though it was the middle of the day she was lying in her bed at the rear of her home.

“Come here,” she said. Her voice raspy and quavering.

While only in her eighties a hard life had taken its toll and she was pale, wrinkled, and frail. She spent all of her time in the trailer with the shades drawn. Inside it was cluttered and hadn’t been cleaned in years. My great-grandmother was not a messy person but her dog was, and evidence its rude nature was abundant.

"My mind ran toward it, not pulled by what was in front of me but propelled by what was behind."

She held out a hand to me. Not a soft and welcoming hand, not the smooth feminine hand one would appreciate being touched by, but a gnarled and bony hand, its knuckles swollen, its fingers curled in a prolonged muscle spasm. As I appraised the shaky appendage thrust toward me in the dim light, I saw she had feces smeared between her fingers. Whether hers or the dog's I didn't know but I recoiled at the thought of her grasping me in a warm embrace of human or canine excrement.

She was our oldest living relative at the time, the familial doyenne, and though her physical presence had long ago deteriorated the force of her influence was ever present. I looked at her hand and the crap between her bony fingers, I smelled the foulness of it rising over the accumulated stench of her filthy trailer and my mind froze. I could neither advance nor retreat. My legs, stiff as charcoal sticks, were immovable as I clung to my father’s pants. Looking away I hoped she would disappear, that I would wake up and realize I had simply wet my bed again.

“Come here,” I heard again in the back of my mind.

I stared at the carpet and didn’t move. I stared at the crumpled balls of tissue held rigid and tightly packed together with dried snot. I stared at the accumulation of generations of bread crumbs and the frayed edges of her old wool sweater draped over the arm of a chair she never used. And I stared at the white dog hairs that clung to everything like a light dusting of slender, straw-like snow. My mind ran toward it, not pulled by what was in front of me but propelled by what was behind.

My dad said something apologetic and leaned down to kiss her.

Child prodigy

I was never what I wanted to be. Never the object of my own adoration. Art was a refuge from my life and I poured my frustrations out on thick paper. When I was ten my mother convinced an art instructor at Kent State University to allow me to attend his class.

“I know every mother thinks their child is brilliant,” she told him. “But look at some of his work. You’ll see he has…” a gift, she wanted to say but dared not be so presumptuous. “You’ll see he has potential.”

At first I was thrilled to be among adults as an equal, our brooding teacher circling the minefield of easels, his floppy beret cocked just so. His path weaved in and between his students who were intent on a bowl of oranges and a draped sheet, gently cascading to the floor. He stopped to consider my rendition and admired my shading technique.

“Your fabric, it's so light, like a dust,” he gushed. “Very nice.” My cheeks flushed as I imagined my classmates’ jealous stares.

I reveled in my celebrity status as a child prodigy but the college scene proved too much for me. My fellow artists tried too hard to pull off an affected look of arrogance in shabby, second hand clothes, intentionally stained with the feckless evidence of our passion. One classmate’s threadbare jeans were marked just above the right knee with excess paint from the brushes she cleaned there; her slender arm, as she sketched and gazed, absentmindedly placed her pencil against her thigh as though to wipe it clean as well.

"No one is going to encourage you to develop your artistic abilities after the third grade."

The rebellion, the angst, the false gravitas and rhetorical posturing of my fellow students wore on me. And then there was the constant pressure to produce.

“Stop pestering me for my sketches,” I barked at my poor mother one evening. “How am I supposed to find time to sketch when I have to learn how to reduce an improper fraction?”

When my schoolwork began to suffer, art had to take a backseat to academics for a while. I dropped out of my college art class midway through the first semester.

It’s interesting to reflect on the fact so many companies are searching for creative talent these days, when so much emphasis is put on math in schools at the expense of creative pursuits. It's all well and good to occupy yourself with crayons and washable markers while you’re young, but no one is going to encourage you to develop your artistic abilities after the third grade.

Yet regardless of how distasteful it is, or how bad you are at it, every American will be forced to study math until they graduate from high school. This may have been what America needed in the 1950s--mathematicians and engineers--not now. Now computers are taking over math-intensive fields and we’re realizing the mistake of smothering generations of creative development.

Disillusionment

There’s always been a mystique surrounding the creative process. It seems the real masterpieces are produced by tortured individuals holed up in austere solitude, wracked by their own personal torment. They must be either pitied or revered, these creative geniuses. We read their thoughts, their manifest expressions of turmoil, with slack-jawed amazement and shed admiring tears at the product of their disturbed minds. We revel in our fortune at experiencing such artistic perfection and curse a fate which left us with such club-like hands and feeble minds.

My left brain constantly berates my right for its banality. Is it possible you could have an original thought you pathetic imposter? My portraits look like cartoon characters and my landscapes akin to a pitched roof house with four-paned windows framing a door, the sun shining brightly from the upper right corner in straight rays. I wish I’d never had a creative thought than these urges without hope of release.

"This may be one reason so many brilliant artists are frequently despondent."

Where is the originality, the spark? Who can see the world like Amedeo Modigliani or Paul Manship? If only I could paint like that or sculpt. Perhaps if my life were more miserable it would happen. But in the end I take the hint and pack up my childish tools—the charcoal sticks and gum erasers, the sketchbooks and canvases. I put them in boxes marked “Siddhartha’s art stuff” and move them from house to house unopened.

A 2008 study by Modupe Akinola and Wendy Berry Mendes examined the relationship between depression and artistic expression. Their paper The Dark Side of Creativity reveals a link between negative emotions and increased creative output. "Historical and empirical data have linked artistic creativity to depression and other affective disorders" they write, but there is also evidence for "strong situational factors influencing creativity."

Essentially, they found social rejection increased artistic creativity and this effect was strongest in those with a biological propensity toward depression. This may be one reason so many brilliant artists are frequently despondent. Luminaries such as Henri Matisse and Francisco de Goya battled depression and, from what I understand, Hemingway and Dostoyevsky would occasionally feel blue as well.

Resurgence

In my mid-teens I again pursued collegiate art education, this time in Washington, D.C. Closer now to my classmates in age but no better able to relate to them. I had few friends. My social retardation however gave me plenty of time to work and my persistent social rejection fueled my creative drive. Yet for all my forward momentum I was rudderless and still uncertain whether I was more inclined to overthrow the government or paint a masterpiece.

On a class trip to the Corcoran Art Gallery I found what had been missing from my art education: conceptual art. The gallery was displaying a collection of works by Jonathan Borofsky and I was thrust into heaven. Staring at his giant, two-dimensional signature piece, Hammering Man, repetitively hammering without constructing anything, I saw my life. Counting, the three foot tall stack of lined notebook paper containing the meticulously handwritten numbers from 1 to 2,346,502, spoke to my soul.

But I was enthralled by another piece in one of the Corcoran's back rooms. It was a closed door from behind which emanated the muted sounds of intermittent hammering. I stood there for several minutes marveling at the subtle message of workmen laboring in anonymity and then smiled thinking how embarrassed I'd be if it turned out not to be a work of art at all but actual workmen constructing another display on the other side of the wall.

But that's also the beauty of conceptual art. It's not about the artist, it’s about the viewer. It’s about an emotional revelation, a reaction to the observation. It's conveying an idea that naturally wells up from within the observer, not imposed by the artist but facilitated by him. The true art is not in the presentation but in the conceptualization of the experience.

"Beauty does not have to be created, it exists for us to find."

When I left home at sixteen I thought, now is my chance to live an artist’s life. I took a bus to Chicago and lived on the street then traveled south and rented a small house in Augusta, Georgia. There wasn’t a stick of furniture in the house. Not a chair or a table. I slept on a piece of cardboard on the bedroom floor. The nights were interminable, relentlessly hot and unbearably humid. I cultivated an artistic scowl and didn’t wash my hair.

I lived on a pittance reading by the light of a bare bulb and eating raw potatoes. In this artistic atmosphere I was determined to really break out. My intention was to produce a series of paintings, bold canvases in the primary colors, but after Blue I became disillusioned and cynical. I let my mind wander and began noticing art all around me. I saw the beauty in the mildew growing around the edges of the bathroom tile. I marveled at the rigidity of cracked linoleum and the ants which ate dead cockroaches off the floor.

Just as there is beauty in nature, conceptual art can occur organically and unintentionally. I began to see beauty in everything. Rusted air conditioners sitting in forlorn windows, the siding beneath them stained by the rusty discharge. Even bags of garbage whose contents provided the unconstructed but perfect composition of humanity’s discarded byproducts caught my eye. These were as random and enjoyable as the natural world, as fulfilling as a sunset or a mountain skyline. Beauty does not have to be created, it exists for us to find.

Finding art all around us

It was a catharsis of sorts, this realization of art’s omnipresence. My need to create, and to punish myself for my lack of ability to create, withdrew. I left art behind and became a missionary and after a couple years joined the Navy eventually finding myself in Pensacola, Florida as a flight instructor.

An acquaintance was moving and asked for my help which I was happy to provide. When I arrived at his house however I was overwhelmed by the scene. The small depression era house he and his wife were renting was barely 800 square feet. They don’t even make houses that small anymore. The owner, probably realizing the property’s only value was in the land, had let it deteriorate over the years and was renting it for just $300/mo.

It wasn’t the dilapidated condition of the house which amazed me however, it was the amount of detritus inside. Piles upon piles of old newspapers and fast food wrappers. A half used tube of chapstick whose contents had melted out onto the floor collected dog hair and dust balls. A lost sock and a Happy Meal toy sat next to a dusty jar of home canned peaches and I wanted to sit down and just take it all in.

"The earth spins on, I thought, wasting both the trivial and the rare."

I thought taking a break from helping them pack to stare at their cluttered house might make them uncomfortable so I came back later that evening and broke in when I knew they'd be gone. I stood alone in their abandoned refuse and studied it carefully. I thought of the one time I had seen my great-grandmother and remembered her immured in her lonely trailer. I pictured a frightened great-grandson refusing a tender embrace. I imagined the pain of such a moment in the twilight of one’s life.

I thought about that moment and then I imagined leaving her trailer and saw myself looking back over my shoulder to see an old woman with her hand outstretched. I presumed she would be in pain but instead I saw her mouth bent in a gentle smile and in her eyes understanding and contentment. I never saw her after that visit but I like to pretend she understood.

In the Pensacola evening I lay down upon the filthy floor of a squalid house and in the long light of evening’s protracted departure I looked at the lopsided ceiling fan coated in dust and the grease from a hundred smoky dinners and my eyes grew bleary at the beauty of it all. The earth spins on, I thought, wasting both the trivial and the rare.

“Time is the school in which we learn,” wrote Delmore Schwartz. “Time is the fire in which we burn.”* And so it is. All things will pass away, both the common and the divine; but we'll never know the beauty we don’t find.

*From “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day” Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge.

(15:08) Don’t Look at Me

Don't Look At Me by Siddhartha Herdegen
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The Transformative Value of Fine Art

[photo by wallyg]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast]

Americans are passionately, stupefyingly, electrifyingly in love with the rags-to-riches story. It speaks of limitless opportunity, the nobility of the downtrodden and of the inextinguishable hope we harbor for a better tomorrow. We crave these ideas, devour them like ice cream or buttered beets. They represent the apogee of American idealism and are the sine qua non of America's implicit promise: all your hard work will be rewarded.

Born in 1883, Chester Dale was the son of a Manhattan department store salesman. A contumacious, red-headed boy, he could not be constrained. His father sent him to Peekskill Military Academy for some structure but Chester spent most of his time and all his allowance at the nearby horse track. At the age of fourteen he decided Peekskill wasn't for him and made his way to New York City where he got a job on Wall Street as a runner.

"He had a passion for art and the wealth to acquire it."

The stock market wasn't all that different from the race track and he soon worked his way into a job as a broker and, by the age of 35, into a large fortune as well. This was the Roaring 20's and fortunes were being made overnight. He was one of the first to recognize how valuable public utilities could be and soon became a tycoon. Timing, as they say, is everything and Chester had it in spades. He made his money before the Great Depression and had the good fortune to hang onto it when the economy faltered and then fell.

His wife Maud had a passion for art and had piqued his interest in the French Masters years earlier. He began collecting famous French works and then his tastes expanded; in addition to Eugene Delacroix and Jacques-Louis David, Chester bought works by Renoir, Van Gogh and Monet. The catalog of his collection reads like that of a well-funded museum. He acquired modern works from Picasso and Matisse. Salvador Dali painted his portrait as did Diego Rivera and Guy Pène du Bois. He had a passion for art and the wealth to acquire it.

While many former men-of-means were liquidating their estates, Chester Dale was filling his Manhattan apartment with bargain-basement masterpieces. Between 1926 and 1936 Chester bought over 500 paintings and 30 sculptures. When space ran out in his Plaza Hotel apartment, he started filling a five storey mansion at 20 East 79th Street in New York City. During the dark night of America's economic collapse the art world had a new benefactor and his name was Chester Dale.

Shrewd love

But Chester was not just an art enthusiast, he was a skilled investor. With the help of his wife, an artist and art critic, he learned how to recognize works of lasting value. The pieces he acquired throughout his life were worth much more at the time of his death than he had paid for them. So while his collection helped both to conserve prominent, historic works of art and to support the work of living artists, it also served to build his personal fortune.

How good an investment is art? It's a difficult question to answer with art tastes and trends considered fickle at best. To attempt to authoritatively track art as an investment seems a fool's errand. But for several years two NYU professors from the Stern School of Business have been trying to answer that very question with some confidence. Michael Moses and Jiangping Mei looked at repeated sales of the same works of art dating back to the late 19^th Century. The result is the Mei Moses Fine Art Index.

"George Gershwin used to stare at one of Chester's prized Cezannes seeking inspiration."

The index now tracks the recorded sales of thousands of pieces of art and gives annualized returns for a number of art categories. In their latest report (July 2010), the Mei Moses All Art Index is up 13.4% since the end of 2009 with the Contemporary and Impressionist & Modernist Indices leading the way. The long term annualized returns for art are comparable to equities over the past fifty years with stocks narrowly beating out art 9.4% to 8.9%.

The major disadvantage to investing in art, as Mei and Moses point out in their 2002 paper Art as an Investment (.pdf), is the "heterogeneity of artworks and infrequency of trading." Unlike stocks, which trade continuously and behave as fungible commodities in the marketplace, each work of art is unique and can remain off the market for generations as it’s passed from heir to heir. Artwork tends to be cherished by its owners and treated as a part of the family. Chester Dale, who remained childless, at times referred to his paintings as "my children."

But its longevity and singularity is also the upside of owning art; you get to enjoy it. No one ever said, "Step into my study, I want to show you the 200 shares of Intel I just bought." A quality work of art however, can bring years of enjoyment to generations of family members and friends. It can be appreciated by houseguests and a source of endless conversation. George Gershwin used to stare at one of Chester's prized Cezannes seeking inspiration.

National Gallery of Art

Throughout his life Chester lent pieces to various galleries and museums but when he died in 1962 the bulk of it was given to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. I took my daughters to see the Chester Dale exhibit a few weeks ago and it is absolutely extraordinary. The scope of the collection alone is awe inspiring. I tried to imagine what his houses must have looked like with all those magnificent pieces decorating various rooms, glass curio cases filled with delicate Hummels in between I suppose.

The National Gallery categorizes works and displays similar periods together, the East Building displaying 20^th Century artists and the West Building housing Renaissance through early 20^th Century works. Because Chester's collection spans these periods it was split between the two buildings, but this year, and through next July, the entire collection is on display on the ground floor of the West Building.

While Chester welcomed many guests into his home-turned-art-museum, the works he preserved and loved could not be enjoyed by the vast majority of humanity. It’s likely he left his collection to the National Gallery because, as one of the most visited art galleries in the world, so many more people would be able to appreciate the art he had collected during his lifetime. These inspirational and masterfully crafted works were too valuable to be seen by only a few.

"Its virtue is that it makes us feel good."

There’s something to be said for the transformative power of fine art. It’s in the definition of the term itself: “art which serves no practical purpose.” Why then do we have it? We have all seen buildings, furniture, automobiles, and even appliances which could be considered works of art. But in each of these cases they also have some function beyond their aesthetic beauty.

Fine art on the other hand, has no purpose aside from being a work of beauty which pleases the senses. Its virtue is that it makes us feel good. And humans have craved it from the earliest days of our existence. Sure, some cave drawings were communicative in nature and were intended to convey information. The fact we find them beautiful today may only be a function of improved communication technology. But even in these earliest societies there are examples of art produced solely for the pleasure of its visual appeal.

How technology changes art

I’m not an art cognoscente but I know some works are considered “important” as well as being pleasant to view. Some of these challenge the social or political status quo, some usher in new artistic techniques and still others allow us to see inside a world we had never before imagined. They are not merely well crafted examples of the medium, but catalysts which transform the world in which we live.

The invention of photography eliminated the need to reproduce scenes manually, but we still use hand-drawn images for their aesthetic qualities. Sometimes the goal is not to capture an object or scene as it actually looks, but to capture the essence of what we see in it. These pieces move us, they provoke and inspire us, and they distill, from our base natures, nobility. As an aficionado I claim art is as valuable a tool in shaping the world as math or science.

Now, if we truly believe there are works of art which are valuable for humanity, that produce some social benefit beyond their utilitarian functionality and that have the ability to change our world, wouldn’t we want them to be as widely distributed as possible? While we can debate the value of our “advanced” society in terms of individual happiness and social harmony, there is no questioning the fact we are infinitely more knowledgeable and prosperous today than our ancient ancestors.

"The world has advanced on our ability to quickly transfer knowledge from one person to another."

The critical mechanism for humanity's exponential advancement has been the ability to transmit information from one person to another. From the development of written language, which allowed information to be transmitted between people who never personally saw each other, to the printing press, which enabled the mass production and distribution of these writings, the world has advanced on our ability to efficiently transfer knowledge.

The linked computer networks of today have lifted our ability to share ideas to unprecedented levels, providing an almost instantaneous transfer of thoughts from one person to everyone else. Perhaps in some future society technology will have advanced to the point our thoughts will be connected to the consciousness of everyone in our network and when one person learned a new language or skill, everyone would know it.

In the waning days of Chester's life a new generation was being born, a generation through which the world would enter a digital age of enlightenment. The art collection Chester Dale amassed contained many important works, but it was constrained by its physical nature to be viewed by a relatively small audience. With the ability to digitalize information the education and cultural experiences once available only to the rich would soon be available to everyone in the world.

We're all rich now

In the early days of the internet age people were still unsure of the value of such a connected system. What would it be used for? What types of applications were needed? Brewster Kahle graduated from MIT in 1982 with a degree in computer science and engineering. In 1989, Brewster developed the Internet’s first publishing system, Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), and unknowingly set in motion his destiny. In 1996 he began a lifelong project of immense scale and unimaginable ambition--to collect the world's accumulated knowledge in one enormous online database.

Brewster Kahle’s massive archival project, the Internet Archive, is a repository of information on the order of the ancient Library of Alexandria which was fabled to hold every published book of the time. In the 2^nd Century B.C.E. this is impressive but comprehensible. But Brewster’s Internet Archive holds more than just books. It houses movies, television programs, radio shows and even archived internet sites from the web's earliest days. It’s a feat which boggles the mind and is only made possible by the digitalization of information.

Brewster has amassed over 2.5 million publically available texts which are free to download and view on your laptop or eReader. But because Brewster prefers to read physical books he has also devised an ingenious way of getting books into the hands of those without internet access or a local library. His bookmobile, a simple cargo van, travels around dispensing books like a traveling library but without a return date. The van has internet access, a printer and book binding equipment onboard. At a cost of about $0.01/page the bookmobile can print and bind a copy of any book in their archives. That means the accumulated knowledge of humankind is available for about $3 per book.

"During Chester’s lifetime you had to be a multi-millionaire to afford the majestic collection of art he had access to."

Now imagine a similar repository for great works of art and that a traveling van could print and frame an actual-size reproduction of an influential work of art you could hang on the wall in your house. A high quality giclee could provide a cost effective, high quality image produced on canvas or watercolor paper to replicate as closely as possible the original work. Imagine impoverished families living around some of the greatest works of art ever produced. Imagine members of these families inspired to pursue their artistic dreams, develop their own creative talents and to see their value to humanity as more than manual labor.

While their lives barely overlapped, and their paths never crossed, in many ways the dreams of both Chester Dale and Brewster Kahle were the same, to give the public access to the accumulated wisdom of humanity. One through collecting great works, the other through distributing them on a massive scale. During Chester’s lifetime you had to be a multi-millionaire to afford the majestic collection of art he had access to, but today we can all be as richly immersed in fine art through the digitalization, transmission and reproduction technologies Brewster helped develop.

(14:00) The Transformative Value of Fine Art

The Transformative Value Of Fine Art by Siddhartha Herdegen
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