[ Cover: A hazy day in Hyderabad, crossing over the Musi river into the old city. ]

JARGON

Bashtag. When an ordinary Twitter hashtag (#label) becomes a way of publicising criticism, sometimes criticism of the hashtag creator (example).

Best-practicitis. In Aid on the Edge of Chaos (2014), Ben Ramalingam uses the term “best-practicitis” for the trap of thinking that a deftly delivered “best practice” conceived in one place will adequately solve an intractable problem elsewhere. Ramalingam rightly points out that there’s an inherent contradiction between “best-practice” standardisation and the creation of “learning organisations” within developing countries. I like the part of the book where the Ethiopian chattering class refers to best-practice peddlars as the “permanent entourage” and “the circus that never leaves town.” Ramalingam on the “epidemic”: “organizations spend all their time looking for the single right answer rather than diverse solutions; people spend more time trying to do things right than doing the right things; there is much more focus on knowledge transfer than on knowledge creation; the whole enterprise is underpinned by a search for efficiency and cost-based value-for-money measures that assume that what is known is needed (and should be cheap, although that is another issue). Limits are placed on the kind of learning that is acknowledged and rewarded, and the creation of new technological systems, handbooks, and guidelines simultaneously take precedence over and undermine any attempts to change existing culture of incentives in favour of interaction and dialogue.” (p. 26) Few in public administration circles want to do proper evidence-based management: too expensive and time-consuming, plus no one wants to be shamed by a disappointing result.

Collapsitarians. Collapsitarians are those prophesying that mass society will implode because it will run out of resources, much like the examples of reckless societies cited in Jarod Diamond’s book Collapse (2011). A new book about post-collapse society, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember (2014) by Annalee Newitz, would be collapsitarian. I notice a trend within the chattering classes towards distilling a complicated argument down into an easily mocked label. For example, the people behind the Human Security Report labeled Steven Pinker a “declinist”. That’s because his last book, Better Angels of Our Nature (2012), argued that human conflict has been declining throughout history. As another example, those who no longer want to be online all the time are being called “disconnectionists”. What do you think happens to a debate when a claim becomes a “them”?

Euracism. This is the European political word of the month: being racist towards fellow Europeans, despite the passing resemblance. The Indian political word of the month is “sickular”, which means that treating everyone as equal, regardless of religion, has seen better days because of creeping ethno-religious-caste tribalism, or “communalism”.

Eye Bytes. Limited attention spans, amongst other things, produced the soundbite. According to Michael Rosenwald, we now parse the visual field looking for these small bites of information, or “bytes” given that we’re usually parsing information on a screen. The argument is that we’re developing an “eye-byte culture”, an argument I think is plausible but too easy to overstate. I also don’t think the mixed metaphor makes any sense: eyes don’t bite. Why not “eye-blink culture” or “glance culture”?

Hyper-pigmentation. Sellers of skin-lighteners (example) are trying to reframe naturally dark skin as a medical malady without sounding racist (very unsuccessfully, in my opinion).

Ohnosecond. The moment you realise that you’ve made a big mistake and there isn’t an “undo” button to press.

Poptimism. This is Saul Austerlitz’s term for liking something because of its mainstream appeal and, crucially, taking offence at those who dare to criticise that popular liking. This isn’t so much a bandwagon effect as it is a celebration and defence of the average. I like Bret Easton Ellis’ riff on this phenomenon. And we can all thank Jose Ortega Y Gasset for the heads-up warning (The Revolt of the Masses, 1929).

Shenaniganiser. Maker of elaborate mischief, with a touch of Celtic waywardness.

Stunt Food. Stephanie Gray’s term for menu items and food products that are extremely decadent in order to get attention. She also wins an award for the most gratuitous jargon in a single newspaper headline: “If ‘stunt foods’ are attention-trolling, then foodie criticism is concern-trolling.” You really have to be up on your jargon to understand that simile.

Yoroshiku onegai shimasu. Japanese. It means “Favourably please”, with the subject left open-ended. It’s a less snide version of “good luck with that, whatever that is” (from this list of interesting Japanese words).

Also see … this commentary about new terms that cause moral panics.

Also use … this text editor that limits you to the thousand most popular words in English. As an exercise, write a blurb about what you do for a living: your occupation and so forth.

HEAD SPACE

Wu-wei & De. Edward Slingerland’s Trying Not To Try (2014) explores the topic of effortless and unselfconscious spontaneity. We’re talking about radiating charisma while at ease. And inspired breakthroughs that come from being “in the zone” or “finding flow”. And flourishes of craftsmanship that come from tacit knowing. According to Slingerland, modern society is preoccupied with exerting effort to achieve planned goals. I like how Taleb puts it in The Bed of Procrustees (2010): “Only in recent history has ‘working hard’ signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse, and, mostly, sprezzatura.” Slingerland’s book is all about the sprezzatura, but he doesn’t use that term because it’s Italian and he wants us to think that Western thinking is myopically rationalistic. Instead, he has two Chinese terms: wu-wei (pron. “ooo-way”) and de (“duh”). The former refers to spontaneous action: “the dynamic, effortless, and unselfconscious state of mind of a person who is optimally active and effective” (Taleb’s talent and finesse) The latter is the ability to radiate the relaxed confidence (sprezzatura). These terms come from Daoism (Taoism) and Confucianism, although underlying dynamics are very different in each: the wu-wei of Daoism is about instinctual and naturalistic ways of acting, the Confucian version is more about the application of tacit knowledge and skill. Slingerland adds some science talk, but not much from the “smart heuristics” research in vogue at the moment. He also adds lots of American pop-culture references and a bit of bourgeois-bohemian spiritualism (that starts with a sense of awe when in proximity to oceans and fine wines).

SOCIAL SPACE

Popular Opinion vs Oligarchy. In the United States, popular opinion has virtually no impact on policy at the national level unless it’s also the opinion of the economic elite: “[Our] evidence does not indicate that in U.S. policy making the average citizen always loses out. Since the preferences of ordinary citizens tend to be positively correlated with the preferences of economic elites, ordinary citizens often win the policies they want, even if they are more or less coincidental beneficiaries rather than causes of the victory. There is not necessarily any contradiction at all between our findings and past bivariate findings of a roughly two-thirds correspondence between actual policy and the wishes of the general public, or of a close correspondence between the liberal/conservative ‘mood’ of the public and changes in policy making. Our main point concerns causal inference: if interpreted in terms of actual causal impact, the prior findings appear to be largely or wholly spurious.” (p. 17) This forthcoming paper by Gilens & Page is worth a read, if for no other reason than to empirically debunk some of the textbook models of American politics, especially those premised on the influence of the median voter and counter-balancing interests.

WORKPLACE

Systematic Squandering. I blogged about some research on how time wasting ripples throughout an organisation. Much of my current research on organisational performance is about this sort of pathology.

Workforce Management. The Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends 2014 report (2014) talks about workforce management. With all this talk about leadership “pipelines” and “pathways”, I wonder if the purpose of “leadership at all levels” is to identify leaders throughout the organisation … so that they can be moved to positions of power.

Manual Intensive Workspace. Toyota is reintroducing work processes that deliberately have higher levels of task complexity. The reason: to prevent deskilling of workers that, amongst other things, prevent them from developing a sophisticated diagnostic ability. Turning donkey work into knowledge work, instead of the other way around, can have many benefits. How agile do you think your company can be if work tasks are designed for human drones?

Forward-thinking Lag. An Ottawa think-tank has published a wish-list of Canada’s technocratic elite. People think I exaggerate when I say that there’s a twenty-year lag in thinking between the cutting-edge and Ottawa’s prevailing wisdom. Indeed, I remember doing research on some of those topics for some of those people back in the 1990s.

TRENDS

Learn 2050. A report from the future by Arnold Wasserman about how an educational system can go from a “test meritocracy” to a “talent meritocracy”. The talk of creative industries and open learning seem very now-ish, however.

Kenya 2030. There are plans afoot for biz-tech “zones”. Konza Techno City. Machakos New City. And then there is the Chinese-built satellite of Nairobi. How important are metropoles to development? And high-tech ones? I recommend Michel & Beuret’s China Safari (2010) and Deborah Brautigam’s The Dragon’s Gift (2011) if you’re looking for a background briefing for China’s African involvement; a major trend, but too often an overstated one. While on the subject of development and cities, check out this new article by David Stasavage about the role of autonomous cities.

Post-antibiotic Era. Scene one. Bacteria evolve quickly. Misuse of antibiotics is rife. Resistant strains are growing. Big Pharma doesn’t want to continue the arms race. Scene two. Maryn McKenna: “Without the protection offered by antibiotics, entire categories of medical practice would be rethought.” (A good way to keep current on this topic, by the way, is to listen to the This Week in Virology podcast.)

DESIGN

Tree Diagrams. There’s a genre of information-design book whereby the author takes one diagram type and looks deeply into its history and variations. I’m a fan because it helps me reflect on what works and what doesn’t while absorbing all the historical precedent. For example, Rosenberg & Grafton’s Cartographies of Time (2012) is a great exploration of the timeline chart. Now, serial graph-collector Manuel Lima has published book on the tree diagram, The Book of Trees (2014). Lima covers quite a bit of ground, including concept maps, radial mind-maps, and tree-maps. He even covers concept maps drawn on hyperbolic plains, such as The Brain.

Typography. This month’s highlight is Nikola Kostic’s Briller, a wide serif to compete with Hoeffler & Company’s caps-only Idlewild. The designer of Idlewild, Tobias Frere-Jones, has launched a new blog. Eduilson Wessler Coan’s Bommer Slab is a great text slab, much like Guardian Egyptian (the house face of the Guardian newspaper). I found another alternative to Helvetica that I’d actually use: Stawix Ruecha’s Crique Grotesk. I recently wrote a long report in Type Dynamic’s Revisal, which got a lot of kudos for its clean and readable style. Their new one, Lasiver, is just as nice. It isn’t as chunky as Latinotype’s similar Antartida, which is better suited to signage than long tracts of text.

FITNESS

Food Substitute. Soylent, the meal replacement shake, is shipping. After you. (If nothing else, this experiment raises lots of interesting questions about nutrient essentials versus whole-food eating.)

QUOTATIONS

Crafting Good Ideas. “One of the things that really hurt Apple was … the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 percent of the work. … [There] is just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it and you also find there is tremendous trade-offs that you have to make. … And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.” — Steve Jobs (from this)

Opinion. “I am offended by your opinion, and since I couldn’t possibly ignore you or control my emotions, I demand you never express your opinion again.” — Ricky Gervais (from twitter)

Numbers Plus Nuance. “Longer term, we must ask how we can bring together big data approaches with small data studies — computational social science with traditional qualitative methods. We know that data insights can be found at multiple levels of granularity, and by combining methods such as ethnography with analytics, or conducting semi-structured interviews paired with information retrieval techniques, we can add depth to the data we collect. We get a much richer sense of the world when we ask people the why and the how not just the ‘how many’. This goes beyond merely conducting focus groups to confirm what you already want to see in a big data set. It means complementing data sources with rigorous qualitative research. Social science methodologies may make the challenge of understanding big data more complex, but they also bring context-awareness to our research to address serious signal problems.” — Kate Crawford (from this commentary about the problem of “data fundamentalism”)

Old Age. “‘How great you’re looking! Wow, tell me your secret!’ they kindly cry when they happen upon me crossing the street or exiting a dinghy or departing an X-ray room, while the little balloon over their heads reads, ‘Holy shit—he’s still vertical!’” — Roger Angell (from this essay about decrepitude)

Alive. “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who come alive.” — Howard Thurman

Lonely Press Play. “So much of our abstractions, in an everyday sense, are related to pressing ‘play’, whether it’s sitting down, watching a DVD. Or putting a radio on. Or, obviously, on a computer. Or when you’re passing time playing a game on The Tube, or whatever. Symbols, like the triangle, have become so synonymous with abstraction and ‘time out’. They’re so powerful yet we accept them on such a universal level. People press the triangle when they’re on their own and do whatever they do when they press the triange, whether it’s listening to music, whatever.” — Damon Albarn (from this interview about the songs of his new solo album, Everyday Robots, which purportedly contains lots of references to mobile phone culture)

Design For Diversity. “When any design—be it a car, a chair, a phone, a room, or a street—frustrates people, makes them feel small and stupid, and makes others hate them for their ineptness, it is bad design. Let’s not keep talking about good design until designers, manufacturers, and city planners recognize that they’re in the service of humanity, in all its marvelous and confounding variety.” — Susan Szenasy (from this commentary about New York’s so-called accessible cabs; I used this quotation in a piece I wrote about social distance)

FORTHCOMING

Writing Style. What sentence structures are easier to read? What narrative styles are easier to understand? Steven Pinker’s forthcoming style manual (A Sense of Style) is about the cognitive aspects of good and bad writing, not just the intuitions and opinions of skilled writers (think William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, 1976, or Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences, 2006). For example, he says it’s good to cut down on the “meta discourse” (e.g., telling the reader about the number of points you’re about to make) which disrupts the flow of reading. Pinker offers other examples towards the end of this interview. More here. The book will be published at the end of September.