Posts by Tim

Sparta had a great army, lots of places had great olive oil, and plenty of city-states had plebiscite democracy. So why was life in Athens so great?

[Josiah] Ober’s hypothesis is that Athens’s participatory institutions essentially turned the city into a knowledge-generating and knowledge-aggregating machine, and also supported the effective deployment of useful knowledge over time. Athenian institutions and culture functioned so that the right useful knowledge made it to the right people at the right time, resulting in the production of consistently better-than-average decisions. Athenian institutions and culture also functioned to provide an effective balance between innovation, on the one hand, and, on the other, learning or routinization, which brings efficiency. To overcome the problem of dispersed and latent knowledge, the Athenians used “networking and teaming.” To overcome alignment problems, they built up stores of common knowledge through extensive publicity mechanisms and an emphasis on “interpresence”–frequent and large public gatherings–and “intervisibility” in public spaces, the capacity of all members of an audience to see each other as well as the speaker; and these stores of common knowledge worked particularly well to sustain systems of reward and sanction able to motivate ordinary citizens. To minimize transaction costs in areas such as trade, they standardized rules and exchanged practices and widely disseminated knowledge about them. The Athenians invested more resources than did their competitors in ensuring that their laws did not contradict each other, and in archiving and widely publishing final versions.

One particular example that the reviewer Danielle Allen (aka The Smartest Classicist I Know) examines is a ship-building competition authorized by the citizens of Athens: not only did public competitions like these encourage innovation in building, but since they were publicly judged, they helped disseminate expert knowledge throughout the populace, as the people learned what made one ship better than another.

Allen also looks long at what lessons American democracy can learn from Athens; one big (if obvious) conclusion is that the polis is a lot more nimble than an empire or even a republic, but from the interconnected micropolitical structures of the polis, one might actually be able to sustain a the macropolitics of a democratic republic:

As Ober notes, the immediate usefulness of the Athenian model pertains not directly to nation-states that are vastly larger than the city-state of Athens, with its population of approximately 250,000, but to the wide variety of smaller scale organizations that make up the sub-units of any given nation-state. To unleash the full value of participatory democracy at the level of the nation-state, a citizenry would do best to focus on tapping participatory democracy at the local level and throughout the variety of organizational types that make up modern society. Then there would be the further question of how well each of these sub-units is connected to the rest. If participatory democratic practices on a smaller scale and in various contexts do indeed increase the knowledge resources of the citizenry of a nation-state as a whole, then the structures of representative government, too, should function better.

It’s a very Athenian conclusion, that democracy is a function of knowledge (and vice versa), but I think it’s a welcome one.

Clive Thompson on Etsy, microbusiness, and personalized aesthetics.

David Frum, Christopher Shea, and Scott Horton look at Glenn Beck and say, yep, here we go.

Nicholas Sarkozy wants to remake “Le Grand Paris”:

The challenge however is not to reshape Paris, but rather to extend its inherent beauty to its outskirts, les banlieues — a web of small villages, some terribly grand and chic (Neuilly, Versailles, Saint Mand

Matt’s experience at South by Southwest suggests that a lot of the big social networking companies actually don’t have (or won’t share) a whole lot of insight into what their users are doing on line, or how it’s changed their lives. But is this because their systems are too simple (they just host/carry what other folks are doing) or too complex (too much information, too much noise — they can’t monitor it all)?

Clive Thompson’s new article on netbooks and cloud computing suggests that it might be a little bit of both:

In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen famously argued that true breakthroughs almost always come from upstarts, since profitable firms rarely want to upend their business models. “Netbooks are a classic Christensenian disruptive innovation for the PC industry,” says Willy Shih, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied both Quanta’s work on the One Laptop per Child project and Asustek’s development of the netbook…

A really powerful application like Adobe Photoshop demands a much faster processor [than a netbook’s]. But consider my experience: This spring, after my regular Windows XP laptop began crashing twice a day, I reformatted the hard drive. As I went about reinstalling my software, I couldn’t find my Photoshop disc. I forgot about it

“Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” – Clay Shirky:

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word, as books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, expanding the market for all publishers, which heightened the value of literacy still further.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

Also see Shirky ventriloquize our own Matt Thompson: “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.”

Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show has never, in my memory, turned its entire half hour into an interview of a single guest — and they get huge guests. But that’s what they did yesterday for CNBC’s Jim Cramer. And it’s a doozy.

Last week, as part of its Santelli-inspired critique of CNBC, Stewart ran two series of clips of Cramer offering pretty terrible financial advice, first with a bunch of other CNBC pundits, and then (after Cramer loudly and publicly complained) of Cramer by himself. In this interview, Stewart shows unaired clips of Cramer (who used to run a hedge fund) from 2006:

1. talking about how easy it is to manipulate the markets through the media;
2. admitting that he used to do it, particularly to make money on a short sell;
3. suggesting that other hedge fund managers do the same, as it’s a fast and satisfying way to make money;
4. offering specific advice on how to do this right then with a particular stock (Apple Computer).

As Stewart says, we want Jim Cramer the journalist to protect us from Jim Cramer the financial schemer. Instead of being a watchdog, CNBC became a cheerleader.

The entire interview is amazing. I’ve got the clips (including those from previous shows that lead to this) embedded after the jump, but let me also quote James Fallows and Sean Quinn on what went down.

Fallows, “It’s true: Jon Stewart has become Edward R. Murrow”:

Yes, it is cliched to praise Stewart as the “true” voice of news; and, yes, it is too pinata-like to join the smacking of CNBC…. But I found this — the Stewart/Cramer slaughter — incredible…

Just before leaving China — ie, two days ago — I saw with my wife the pirate-video version of Frost/Nixon, showing how difficult it is in real time to ask the kind of questions Stewart did. I know, Frost was dealing with a former president. Still, it couldn’t have been easy to do what Stewart just did. Seeing this interview justified the three-day trip in itself.

Sean Quinn, “Stewart Destroys CNBC, Cramer, Disses ‘Doucheborough'”:

On the day in October 2004 that Jon Stewart made up his mind to end CNN

From Gabriel Josipovici’s TLS review of Samuel Beckett’s Letters (Vol. 1):

In 1929 Beckett had already spent some time in Italy and in Germany, where he had relatives, and, after a dazzling career as a student of French and Italian at Trinity College Dublin, had just settled into a two-year post as exchange lecteur at the

My friend (and fellow Penn Comparative Literature alumnus) Mark Sample on what’s uncritical about the critical essay:

[C]ritical thinking stands in opposition to facile thinking. Critical thinking is difficult thinking. Critical thinking is being comfortable with difficulty. And this is something else that separates the expert learner from the novice learner: experts are at ease with uncertainty, while novices are uncomfortable with what they don

James Fallows on technology, tradition, and the simplification of Chinese written characters :

Increasingly, Chinese people don’t actually have to write (rite? right?) out these characters by hand. More and more, they key them in with mobile phones or at computers. And when they do that, it’s just as easy to ‘write’ a traditional-style, complex, information-dense character as a streamlined new one. (Reason: you key in clues about the character, either its pronunciation or its root form, and then click to choose the one you want.) So — according to current arguments — the technology of computers and mobile phones could actually revive an important, quasi-antique style of writing.

Hmm — Fallows is definitely one-up on me, since he reads Chinese and I don’t, but I wonder whether other considerations (e.g. screen size and corresponding size of characters) might still put some pressure towards some kind of simplification of the character form. A lot of that information-density just turns into noise if it has to be packed into a tiny space.

Alternatively, kids (it’s always kids, at first) might start using “abbreviations” that minimize the number of keystrokes required to type useful phrases — maybe by not choosing the precisely “correct” character but an approximation of it (the root or a related pronunciation or whatever), like our “lol,” “brb,” “btw,” etc.

In short, technology rarely has a purely stabilizing effect on tradition — it might help block a particular chirographic attempt at reform/revolution, but only to displace it in favor of its own matrix. (And yes, I just quoted Spock from The Wrath of Khan.)