True Detective S2 vs S1 - an inventor perspective

True Detective, Season 2 turned out to be a bit of a disappointment and I wanted to understand why. Reading TV critics and blogs didn't give me much insight beyond the typical "oh, the story was not good" or "oh, the director was not good" or "oh, the pace of the action was too slow", etc. Therefore, I decided to put my inventor hat on and compare the two Seasons as Systems. I applied to both TV series the same system analysis techniques I always use in my invention workshops.

I started the analysis by laying out each story as a system of perspectives. That is, each layer of narration in the series represents a Source of information for the viewers (Scalable Innovation, Section 1). Each Source covers the reality of events on the ground. Paradoxically, it turned out that despite Season 2 has more main characters than Season 1, it also has fewer unique Sources of representation.

In Season 1 we had four key perspectives (2 "real" and 2 "virtual"):
1. Detective Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey);
2. Detective Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson);
3. The Official Investigation - a narrative presented by the official police investigation;
4. The Narrator - a director narrative presented by the chronology of events described in an "objective" manner by the video camera and background characters.

The nature of perspectives was also different. All of them were extremely smart but with different flavors. Rust Cohle could be characterized as "weird smart". Marty Hart - "down-to-earth smart". The Investigation - "bureaucracy smart". The Narrator - "visual and story smart". Furthermore, we had variations of each perspective shifted in time and space. In addition to the mystery of the crime, we, as viewers, had to reconcile and process the mysteries of all these Sources that gave us complimentary and conflicting information. The structure of the system provided us with a intricate, intriguing pattern.

Importantly, the system of different perspectives felt natural due to the fact that detectives Cohle and Hart managed to solve their case _because_ they had different perspectives. They also had conflicts _because_ they had different perspectives. Since they broke multiple official rules — and The Narrator shows us how and why — the official investigation perspective provided us with an explanation why a standard bureaucratic police approach to detective work would not solve the mystery. As a result, we had a system of contrasting and explaining Sources that formed a complex but consistent, natural whole.

Finally, the perspectives were not just narrated from a character's point of view. They were SHOWN from that point of view. In short, Season 1 did an excellent job executing the rule "Show, don't tell".

Season 2 had more main characters, but fewer perspectives. Essentially, there was just one perspective - the Narrator, who guided us and the camera through the story. Basically, we had one Source which kept switching microphones and cameras for every character to tell his or her line.
Although the story itself was, arguably, more complicated and somewhat more mysterious, the system of perspectives was no different than in a regular criminal TV piece. As a system, Season 1 turned out to be flat.

Overall, the actors in both Seasons played great, stories were interesting, suspension was adequate for a crime drama, and camera work excellent, especially, the LA aerial shots in Season 2. Unfortunately for Season 2, the script didn't provide a system structure that could support a real thriller of the Season 1 caliber.

tags: system, source, control, entertainment, method

Predicting 30-year tech cycles.

 MIT TR on, presumably, predicted death of PC:

An interesting post from tech commentator Robert X. Cringely reveals how he predicted the death of the personal computer back in 1992, in his book Accidental Empires. He called the death for right about... now.

His logic, based on history, was that transformative information technologies take 30 years to essentially be digested by society. It took three decades before moveable type led to books. It took three decades before telephones truly began to permeate and transform our lives. Similarly, film was born in the last years of the 19^th century but only took off in the 1920s, and TV was invented in the 1920s but didn’t really take off until the 1950s.

 Here, I agree John Geanokoplos, a professor of economics at Yale, that unconditional predictions are shots in the dark. Because there are so many unknowns, esp. at the macro level, that it's much more prudent to work on developing and tracking alternative future scenarios.

tags: s-curve, technology, method, prediction

Invention vs Innovation: a "Martian" approach.

A critically important move that enables V. Propp to make a breakthrough in his analysis of the structure of fairy tales:

... можно сказать, что функций чрезвычайно мало, а персонажей чрезвычайно много. Этим объясняется двоякое качество сказки: ее поразительное многообразие, ее пестрота и красочность, с другой стороны — ее не менее поразительное однообразие, ее повторяемость.

Итак, функции действующих лиц представляют собой основные части сказки, и их мы прежде всего и должны выделить.

Для выделения функций их следует определить. Определение должно исходить из двух точек зрения. Во первых, определение ни в коем случае не должно считаться с персонажем — выполнителем. Определение чаще всего представит собой имя существительное, выражающее действие (запрет, выспрашивание, бегство и проч.). Во вторых, действие не может определяться вне своего положения в ходе повествования. Следует считаться с тем значением, которое данная функция имеет в ходе действия.

 We can use a similar approach to analyze the process of innovation. In human societies the name of the inventor/innovator matters because we motivate people by allocating resources, e.g. property and/or attention, to an individual or a group. For a "martian" who doesn't see people, but sees technologies and ideas, the names don't matter. What matters, though, is the function an invention plays in the evolution of a system.

tags: method, invention, innovation, system,

Invention of the Day: Systematic Doubt.

Descartes (1596-1650), the founder of modern philosophy, invented a method which may still be used with profit—the method of systematic doubt. He determined that he would believe nothing which he did not see quite clearly and distinctly to be true.

Whatever he could bring himself to doubt, he would doubt, until he saw reason for not doubting it. By applying this method he gradually became convinced that the only existence of which he could be quite certain was his own.

He imagined a deceitful demon, who presented unreal things to his senses in a perpetual phantasmagoria; it might be very improbable that such a demon existed, but still it was possible, and therefore doubt concerning things perceived by the senses was possible. (Bertrand Russell. Problems of Philosophy.)

There seems to be a natural tension between systematic doubt, or reductionism, invented by Rene Descartes and "reality distortion field" perfected by Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs. Both approaches require different kinds of creativity.

doubt <--------------------------------o------------------------------>faith

As a side note, I can see how Descartes personalizes an abstract problem, presenting it as a deceitful demon. Similarly, Maxwell personalized his theory of thermodynamics with another demon. Einstein came up with his theory of relativity by imagining somebody sitting on a particle moving with the speed of light. Schrodinger had his cat, Altshuller - tiny mighty men, Kahneman - Systems 1 and 2.

Among all of them, Kahneman, the psychologist, used this approach consciously and deliberately. In the talk I posted in this journal last month he explained that people intuitively understand agents and spaces, but have trouble relating to abstract distributed processes. Therefore, it is useful to invent a personalized agent to explain and understand a difficult concept.
Do you see his point? Paradoxically, we have to distort the reality in order to better understand it. But after that we need somebody like Descartes to apply systematic doubt and destroy this useful, but false understanding.

tags: creativity, invention, philosophy, tools, method

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

I'm almost finished reading the new biography of Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. The book is a good read; it contains a lot of first-hand information, which is useful in reconstructing a creative process. One thing strikes me as odd though. The author and many other characters in the book say that Jobs was a complex man. I think this is incorrect. Jobs acted on a simple principle: to get done what he wanted to be done, he had to push people, including himself, to the limit. There are just two variables in this process: Jobs' ability to push (or manipulate) and the person's limit. He always chose what he called the A team, so that the team could produce, and he drove people on the team to perform at the top of their abilities.

A good illustration would be the early episode with Steve Wozniak when he designed a super circuit board in four days instead of weeks because Jobs gave him this impossible fake deadline. It's a recurring pattern of behavior: pushing somebody to the limit without being afraid to break the person. Some did handle it for a while, many did not. That is also why Jobs easily took credit for other people's work and ideas because he felt it was to his credit to push them above what they thought was possible. Some appreciated it, many didn't.

tags: creativity, business, method, management

A review of The Mystery of Consciousness

Philosopher John R. Searle writes in The New York Review of Books:

Foxes vs Hedgehogs

From an essay by Dan Garner and Philip Tetlock about the depth of our ignorance in forecasts:

Some even persist in using forecasts that are manifestly unreliable, an attitude encountered by the future Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow when he was a young statistician during the Second World War. When Arrow discovered that month-long weather forecasts used by the army were worthless, he warned his superiors against using them. He was rebuffed. “The Commanding General is well aware the forecasts are no good,” he was told. “However, he needs them for planning purposes.”

One of the goals of the Reverse Brainstorming technique is to expose things we don't know. "We don't know X, Y, Z" should be on every problem list the group is considering.

Another point to take from Tetlock's other work on decision pattern analysis would be the distinction b/w "foxes" and "hedgehogs."

“the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

The experts with modest but real predictive insight were the foxes. The experts whose self-concepts of what they could deliver were out of alignment with reality were the hedgehogs.

The Three Magicians, esp., the second one (Climb on the Roof) should be good for finding alternative scenarios, i.e. simulate the "fox" analysis pattern.

tags: magicians, 3x3, innovation, reverse brainstorm, problem, solutions, quote, information, learning, method, detection

How to become an inventor in 5 easy steps.

Popular mechanics has an article on how to become an inventor. Here's an outline:

Intro: Have a metaphorical light bulb go in your head.
Step 1: Cultivate an Idea.
Step 2: Build a Prototype.
Step 3: File a Patent.
Step 4: Test the Market.
Step 5: Sell it or Make it.

The article is a typical media combination of fact and fiction. For example, there's no evidence whatsoever that the proverbial light bulb went off in Edison's head when he came up with his real lightbulb design. Some people experience the Aha moment, some don't. There's no relationship between the intensity of personal experience and quality of an inventive idea.

Nevertheless, a certain patent-related statistics I found illuminating. One out of three patent applications is granted as a patent, with the number of commercially viable patents ranging from 0.2 to 5 percent. In other words, the most optimistic estimate of the overall system efficiency would be 5/3≈1.7%, which is comparable to the efficiency, or more accurately, the inefficiency of Newcomen's steam engine created in 1714.

The good news is the invention revolution is yet to come!

tags: psychology, media, invention, method, patents,

How to Invent: Reverse Brainstorming (part 3). concept diagram.

This diagram (from the electronic version of my upcoming book) shows the conceptual difference between Reverse Brainstorming (circled in red on the left) and Standard Brainstorming (in blue).

Traditional (standard) brainstorming starts with the assumption that the problem has already been selected. It's explicitly recommended that for a brainstorming session to be effective there should be a single well-defined problem for participants eventually to solve (by generating lots of ideas).

The trouble with this approach is that if a wrong problem is selected all ideas turn out to be ... well, not good at all. This happens not because the participants are not creative enough, but because a wrong approach is used for problem definition, which is a common occurrence in uncertain situations.

Reverse Brainstorming addresses this issue by making people starting earlier in the thought process, making sure the right problem is identified for solving.

tags: reverse brainstorm, brainstorming,  book, method,  course

Previous posts on Reverse Brainstorming Howto:
1. How to Invent: Reverse Brainstorming.
2. It may look like this

Creative lying

The New Scientist reports on a recent study connecting lying and increased brain activity:

Our brains are naturally better at telling the truth than lying, but repeated lying can overcome our tendency for veracity, making subsequent lying easier – and possibly undetectable.

Neuroimaging studies have shown that people's brains show considerably more activity when they are lying than when they are not, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, suggesting that lying requires extra cognitive control and inhibition of truth-telling. Lying also takes measurably longer than telling the truth.

Is it possible that good sci-fi and fantasy writers who necessarily have to lie to tell a good story overcome their natural truth-telling "deficiency"? This may also be true of inventors who usually get better at creating new ideas as they move from specific implementations to wider concepts.

On the other hand, consistent use of models, or abstract representations, helps reconcile imagination with the reality because a new idea my represent a "lie" in today's world, but be "truthful" in a future world defined by the model. For example, the Earth's rotation around the Sun is a "lie" in everyday experience, but "truth" in Copernicus' heliocentric planetary system. Reconciliation between these two systems of beliefs has taken over three hundred years, probably because we, the learners, are hardwired to tell "truth."

tags: dilemma, creativity, problem, trade-off, imagination, method, control

Bruno Verschuere, Adriaan Spruyt, Ewout H. Meijer, Henry Otgaar, The ease of lying, Consciousness and Cognition, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 18 November 2010, ISSN 1053-8100, DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2010.10.023.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6WD0-51H00F7-3/2/e1673fbd75cbe1453cb02777362fc265)

Turning bad ideas into great solutions

Scott Adams, the virtual father–and-mother of Dilbert, writes about an interesting creativity technique:

I spent some time working in the television industry, and I learned a technique that writers use. It's called "the bad version." When you feel that a plot solution exists, but you can't yet imagine it, you describe instead a bad version that has no purpose other than stimulating the other writers to imagine a better version.

For example, if your character is stuck on an island, the bad version of his escape might involve monkeys crafting a helicopter out of palm fronds and coconuts. That story idea is obviously bad, but it might stimulate you to think in terms of other engineering solutions, or other monkey-related solutions. The first step in thinking of an idea that will work is to stop fixating on ideas that won't. The bad version of an idea moves your mind to a new vantage point.

Essentially, the goal is to shift your thinking from a real-world implementation to the outcome you want to achieve by whatever means possible: flying monkeys, gnomes, magic wands, and etc. Maxwell's demons would also be great candidates for implementing a "bad version" that eventually leads to great solutions.

TRIZ has at least two tools to accomplish a similar goal: The Ideal Solution technique and The Gnomes method (often called the Smart Little People method - argh! what an ugly translation from the original Russian Метод Маленьких Человечков).



tags: ideality, creativity, imagination, psychology, triz, method,

Problem-solving in context

In one famous experiment, the psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby showed that subjects often had difficulty solving a logical puzzle which required them to identify playing cards that failed to conform to a rule of play (this is called the Wason selection task). However, when the very same logical puzzle was reformulated as a problem of identifying people who had failed to conform to a rule of social behavior, the subjects performed very much better on the test. This led Cosmides and Tooby to conclude that our reasoning abilities are sensitive to context in ways that would have been beneficial for our ability to spot cheats during our evolutionary history.

Wilson, Robert. The Company of Strangers. revised edition. p. 75.

It appears, in many cases we fail to solve a problem because we don't understand - no, understand is not the right word here - we don't internalize the rules, i.e. we don't feel comfortable working and playing within the context in which the problem is presented. Transferred into a familiar context, the problem becomes an easy target. Therefore, finding the right context of a problem should be one of the first steps in a problem-solving process. Stripping the problem of professional jargon, explaining it to an 8-year-old would be good first steps.

tag: creativity, problem, solution, method, process, inertia, psychology, magicians

Creativity as a function of language.

From a recent article in WSJ:

Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs.

It turns out that if you change how people talk, that changes how they think. If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world. When bilingual people switch from one language to another, they start thinking differently, too.

This is a yet another reason to ask problem solvers, e.g. engineers, managers, entrepreneurs, to reformulate the problem in jargon-free terms. Very often their ability to find a solution is constrained by their inability to describe the situation in language that does not imply a specific approach dictated by past professional experiences. Switching from verbal to graphical descriptions, e.g. by using the Three Magicians method or Five Elements analysis, helps overcome this issue.

tags: creativity, method, magicians, five element analysis, problem, solution, example, information

Psychology of creativity

In the Authors at Google series, Rick Hanson, author of Buddha's Brain, talks about brain plasticity, i.e. how consistent thought patterns restructure brain's connections. Among other things, he links creativity (a generative state of mind) to core psychological systems, Avoidance, Approach, Attachment (see below).

Maybe that's why having an attitude, either justified or unjustified, that you can solve any problem often helps to develop breakthrough ideas. In addition to that, this attitude allows to overcome fear and generate a lot of problems during reverse brainstorming sessions.

A related dilemma:

On one hand you don't want to be aware of a lot problems because it activates the threat response and inhibits creativity; on the other hand, you want to be aware of as many problems as possible, so that you don't miss the one or two that represent the greatest opportunities.

tags: creativity, method, psychology, control, mind, brain, reverse brainstorm, stress, dilemma

Experiments in creativity: Lucid Dreaming

Here are some top tips on how to achieve lucid dreaming:

Step 1: The reality test.

Ask yourself whether you are awake or dreaming throughout the day. Later on, in the land of nod, you might find yourself pondering this question. If you succeed, congratulations! You have opened the door to lucid dreams.

Step 2: Focus your thoughts.

People who focus single-mindedly on a task during the day, be it a computer game or playing a musical instrument, are more likely to experience lucid dreams, says Jayne Gackenbach at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada.

Step 3: Plan your fantasy.

Almost as fun as the dreaming itself. Before you go to bed, think about what you want to dream lucidly about, in as much detail as possible.

Step 4: Total recall.

When you wake up, try to recall as many of your dreams as you can.

Step 5: Wake up and get motivated! ...And then go back to bed.

To solve a stubborn problem, on step 3 do a complete problem analysis, e.g. using the Three Magicians technique.

 tags: creativity, tool, method, magicians,  analysis

Mental time travel

Since past is fact and future is fiction, common sense might suggest that different cognitive mechanisms underlie recollection of past events and construction of future ones. There is a fundamental causal asymmetry, and one simply cannot know the future as one knows the past. However, various lines of evidence suggest that mental time travel into the past shares cognitive resources with mental construction of potential future episodes(Suddendorf & Corballis 1997). Normal adults report a decrease in phenomenological richness of both past and future episodes with increased distance from the present (D’Argembeau & Van der Linden 2004). The temporal distribution of past events people envisage follows the same power function as the temporal distribution of anticipated future events (Spreng & Levine 2006).
DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X07001975

It's quite possible that foresight is, at least in part, a skill that allows us to construct imaginary situations, either in the past or in the future. Maybe that is why exercises like The Three Magicians a The Nine-screen View are so useful during invention sessions.

Reference:
DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X07001975 Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007. The evolution of foresight. BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2007) 30, 299–351.

tags: creativity, forecast, magicians, 3x3, technique, teaching, method, quote

The value of aproblem: finance.

From George Soros' book "The Alchemy of Finance" (2003 paper back edition):

The major insight I gained ... is that all human constructs (concepts, business plans or institutional arrangements) are flawed. The flaws may be revealed only after the construct has come into existence... Recognizing the flaws that are likely to appear when a hypothesis becomes reality puts you ahead of the game. p. 37.

This is a good argument for starting a project with Reverse Brainstorming, a technique I've developed to search for problems rather than solutions. In a Reverse Brainstorming session participants are required to generate a 50+ problems within an hour; 100 is my preferred number. The vast majority of the flaws discovered during the session will never be exposed, or will never become important enough to entail a corrective action. But there will be several that will reveal critical issues. Understanding and inventing ways to address them will put us ahead of the game.

tags: reverse brainstorm, method, problem, solution, high value, money

Half full or half empty?

Mark J.Perry cites US patent data and marvels how creative Americans are: "5% of the world's population have received more than 22% of the world's patents."

I look at the growing gap between patent applications filed and patents granted and wonder how much inefficiency is built into the system. Especially, if we take into account that only a very small fraction of patents is useful. We ought to use better methods to invent.

tags: problem, efficiency, process, method, economics, technology

One of many interesting insights from an "in vivo" experiment with the real-life scientific method:

When Dunbar reviewed the transcripts of the meeting, he found that the intellectual mix generated a distinct type of interaction in which the scientists were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves. (That’s because, unlike the E. coli group, the second lab lacked a specialized language that everyone could understand.) These abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.

It is a very difficult task indeed to recognize your own assumptions. That is why systematic methods-metaphors that force you to look at the situation from various perspectives often help us find novel solutions. My own role as a moderator during an ideation session is to shake people out of their normal ways of thinking.

tags: method, metaphor, creativity, example, book, brainstorming, magicians

Is Yoga a technology? Probably, not.
Is psychoanalysis a technology? I don't think so.
Is medicated blood chemistry (cholesterol, sugar, vitamins, hemoglobin, etc.) maintenance a technology. Most likely, yes.

What's the difference? The type of learning that is required to produce consistent results. With technology we have a formal set of repeatable steps, while in a human-centric methodology we've got a series of rules, internalized by apprenticeship and practice.


tags: technology, control, mind, learning, method,  process, education