I finally got around to reading The Tipping Point. Gladwell’s book is a quick read and it would be easy to chalk it up as “common sense,” but it’s definitely worth the 2-3 hour read. My notes:

p160 FAE (Fundamental Attribution Error): I agree that we tend to avoid attributing behavior to context. Gladwell believes that we want instead to attribute behavior to “fundamental character traits” — true, but I think what’s more important is that we want to believe that we’re in control of our actions — that as humans, we may observe our environment and it might even make us feel but that we can overcome our surroundings (and our feelings) by conscious, deliberative, rational thought. I tend to agree with John Gray that this is largely nonsense.

*p163 Character:* ‘… is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us _seem_ to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at _controlling our environment_.” Agreed! I’m pretty good at this sort of control myself, but boy is it tiring. I think it’s time for a break, for a lot of us.

*p179 Rule of 150*: Gladwell pulls out some great examples showing that the natural limit on the size of socially functional groups is about 150 people. I’ve always been proud of the way that AdMonsters exemplifies bigger isn’t better, and I think that _the_ reason for our unique success is that we’ve pursued a purely social approach, and kept the size of the [attending] group below this critical threshold.

*p198 Early Adopters*: “the attitude of the Early Adopters and the attitude of the Early Majority are fundamentally incompatible. … All kinds of high-tech products fail because the companies that make them can’t find a way to transform an idea that makes perfect sense to an Early Adopter into one that makes sense to a member of the Early Majority.” Quite so, and someone to keep in mind.

*p241 Parenting*: Gladwell notes the lack of evidence for parents’ ability to influence their childrens’ behavior, and proposes that kids learn behavior primarily not from parents but from social peers. Perhaps, but let’s not forget that families are social too.

There are a bunch of other books I’ve been meaning to write up… maybe I’ll get to that over the summer.

I was struck by a couple of things reading Jagdish Bhagwati’s In Defense of Globalization. First of all, his overwhelming optimism about globalization, and how all will be well as long as governments take ‘appropriate measures’to ensure against “occaisonal downsides.” More importantly, he neglects entirely to address the criticism brought by John Gray in False Dawn: that even if you don’t necessarily end up with a “race to the bottom” brought on by global competition between established countries with a heavy burden of overhead (e.g. social and environmental programs) on one hand, and newer economies without such constraints on production on the other, that, like many other economic transformations, globalization essentially works to eliminate the conditions which favor its initial spread. As globalization spreads greater wealth and common social, environmental, labor, and political norms throughout the world, it gradually smooths over the differences between economies that draw multinational companies into increasingly remote corners of the globe in the first place. As these differences gradually evaporate, the relative advantage of producing a given product in an other place — more distant, versus locally, closer to where it is consumed — diminishes, and thus also does the incentive to globalize.

Perhaps more than anything else the real fear of the "anti-globalizers" is that once globalization has run its course, we’ll be left with a world that is, on average, somewhat richer, but also far less diverse, with even the most local communities subject to the whims of the global market. I suspect that Bhagwati would argue in counterpoint that the degree to which such communities suffer from their involvement in the global market is necessarily less than the degree to which they benefit from it, and that it is exactly this benefit, in terms of prosperity, that enables those who so choose to continue to differentiate themselves from others in the world, and to do so in an economically sustainable fashion, given the reality of the modern economic system. The thing is, as Gray notes, we cannot know in advance if this will be always, or even usually true — and what we do know, as we watch many of the more subtle differences between cultures slowly erode — is that the move towards globalization is an irrevocable one, and so if we discover as time goes on that somehow the picture isn’t as rosy as the one Bhagwati paints, at that point it will be too late. In fact, it already is — a point for which Bhagwati’s argument would have been much stronger if acknowledged.

Just finished reading Joan Didion’s Where I Was From. It’s a great bit of California history, and an insight into the unique nature of the left-coast psyche. She does a good job explaining our particular creation myth. Recommended! Meredith, you should read this one.

A while back I re-read one of my sci-fi favorites, Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix Plus. I used to read tons of mostly “hard” SF when I was a kid. I can’t bring myself to even look at most of Sterling’s other stuff - it looks like junk - but Schismatrix is incredible. Lots of science, body modification both organic and mechanical, and a finely woven subplot about the nature of humanity. One idea I found interesting is that intelligence isn’t necessarily a trait that contributes well to survival in the long term. At geologic time scales, our “intelligent” striving for constant advancement is self-defeating and contradicts the galactic steady state. While I can’t say if that’s true, I’ve certainly felt my own version of that tension often enough.

And now on to Po Bronson’s What Should I Do With My Life? — picked it up in the airport coming back from the east coast the other week. So far, the vignettes are straightforward and honest, insightful, useful, interesting.

It’s getting warm here in Madison, warm and humid. I taught a sailing lesson in the early evening yesterday, great wind, and a great sail. Today I’m planning to head out on an I-20, but they are calling for afternoon thunderstorms. Wind = good. Rain = no problem. Lightning = bad.

After this week, I won’t be doing as much sailing for a little while… I’ve been invited up to a friend’s place on the shore of Lake Superior this weekend. Looking forwards to that, it should be beautiful up there. Plus lots of little country bars, etc. On my return I’ll be heading out to SF for a few days: a little work, and check in with friends and family. Then back to Madison for a week before heading off to Tallinn! I’ve spent at least six hours over the past couple of days trying to find decent, upgradeable flights from MSN to TLL and back… No dice — it looks like I’ll be sitting in back on that trip.