Scott Berkun's Blog, page 36

July 25, 2013

Thoughts on Death to Bullshit & Information Overload

I recently watched Brad Frost’s interesting talk Death To Bullshit (slides). He takes strong positions about information overload and advertising, and with down to earth charm, explores the evidence he’s found.


Since I’ve written before about detecting bullshitcalling bullshit on gurus and BS social media experts I had commentary to offer. You’ll benefit from watching his talk first, but since we’re talking about information overload I doubt you’ll do that right now. I’ll remind you later, just in case.


I had 5 points in response.


 1. Our brains are primarily information filters

Frost offered various statistics about the ridiculous amount of information we produce, like this one:


facebook photos

And these facts are always stunning.


What Frost overlooks is even knowing this fact doesn’t obligate me to look at any of those photos. Or emails. Or whatever it is I’m supposed to be intimidated by. In fact I probably couldn’t look at most Facebook photos even if I wanted to, since I’m not friends with most of the people on the planet.


My point is my brain, sitting here at my desk, consumes only the information I put in front of it, or that happens to land within my line of sight.


And our brains primarily filter information out:



We don’t see infa-red light, or ultraviolet, or most light actually.
Our field of vision is about 140 degrees, meaning we’re blind to 220 degrees. We’re mostly blind.
Dogs, cats and most animals hear and smell a much wider range of information than we do.

We are information filtering machines. We filter out far more than we consume, even when we consume more than we should. Even when we feel stressed and overwhelmed, our brains are filtering out far more than we take in.


2. Overload depends on what you consider information

Frost offers this scary chart. It’s accurate if you define information, as we commonly do, by only counting man made information.


info load

But consider taking a walk in the park.


For most of us a walk in the park is relaxing. There’s is plenty of information in nature, but we don’t experience overload. Why? In part because we’re just visiting, but also because we’re ignorant of all the information there. If you were a botanist, arborist, or entomologist you’d find loads of data in every patch of grass, every tall tree, and every ant hill.  Even a child with a magnifying glass can spend hours in a small patch of forest, examining the fascinating amounts of information in every strip of bark, spider web or pine cone.


There are amazing amounts of information everywhere depending on what you know, what you choose to look at, and how you choose to look at it. Overload then is a matter of your attitude towards the information. Does it scare you? Does it excite you? Does it fill you with stress, or with desire? Your information attitude matters more than the amount of information around you.


One popular theory about our universe is that there is a fixed amount of matter in it. All that changes over time is the state and position of particular atoms. For example, every molecule in you came from a star and has existed for millions of years. If you considered atoms as information, you could make a chart like this one below. The net information in the universe might be fixed:


revised info over

This seems strange of course. And boring. It doesn’t make humans seem important, which is why we rarely think about information this way. But if you do, even for a moment, you realize our assumptions about what information is, and therefore, what overload means.


Neil Postman wrote “Information is a form of garbage” and I agree in a sense. It’s cheap. It’s everywhere. Information without knowledge or wisdom has very little value, despite how often we’re sold on buying things because of the volumes of information they contain. We always have a surplus of information around us and we should be aggressive about ignoring it from sources we don’t trust.


Strangely we are compulsive information hoarders. We still pretend information is scarce. It isn’t. It never was. Even if you limit it to human produced information, for the last few centuries if you could read and had a nearby library, you had several lifetimes of information available to you.


3. There was information overload before our grandparents were born

As an author I’m constantly reminded of intimidating statistics for how much competition there is. Tens of thousands of books are published in the U.S. every year, and as Frost pointed out, there are several hundred million books in the world.


books in the world

But what’s overlooked is on the day you were born, or your grandparents were born, there were already more books in print than you or they could possibly read, even you or they dedicated your entire lives to reading books. The same is true for places on earth to visit, languages to learn, meals to try, dances to dance, and on it goes.


In this sense we are born “information overloaded.”


An obvious question then is: why the hell would we care, today, about information from ordinary dead people we’ll never meet? We shouldn’t. And the same goes for the millions of people we don’t know in the present who create these massive piles of information. The presumption of all information should be it’s unworthy noise. Frost references Sturgeon’s law, that 90% of everything is crap, and this should warrant a general lack of interest in the majority of information produced by anyone, anywhere.


Our true disorder is information insecurity: we are insecure about what we have and compulsively consume to fill a hole that doesn’t exist.


4. People’s capacity for bullshit is constant

The later half of Frost’s talk is critiques of bad design and advertising as examples of bullshit. He closes by offering two claims:



People’s capacity for bullshit is diminishing
It’s harder and harder to be an asshole

These are tough claims to support. They’d require their own presentations.


I don’t agree with either claim, but my position isn’t any easier to argue for. People’s capacity for bullshit is as high as it always has been, on average, across our species. Freedom of information in democracies has certainly improved access to and interest in “the truth”, but technology is great for bullshit. Twitter, Facebook and the web are filled with it, as media transmits lies just as effectively as truths. Tech progress is indifferent to bullshit. And of course one person’s bullshit might just be some other person’s wisdom.


Much of the bullshit we consume comes in soft, sugary chunks we’re all too happy to consume. We like to hear what we like to hear. We prefer comfort to discomfort, and well crafted bullshit goes down far easier than tough truths or complex realities. There’s great profit to be made from being the kinds of assholes that produce and sell bullshit and as long as that’s true, there will be plenty of people working in BS production.


5. The final truth is we control the off switch

It’s is righteous to criticize producers of garbage sold as wisdom. It’s good to share advice that helps with the challenges of finding signal in the noise.


But these problems are largely self-inflicted. We flip the on switch for every device we feel overloaded by. And we can flip them off too.


A fascinating exercise for complaints about overload: ask, can I turn this off?


Unsubscribe from that email list. Watch one less television show, subscribe to one less podcast. Prioritize time offline with people you like and love over other things. Often our first response to this suggestion is an impulsive, self-righteous defense for why we really really really need each and every thing we don’t have time to consume, even in multiple lifetimes. This should reveal our insane and self-inflicted habits of destruction. The first step is to acknowledge who really has the problem.  It’s us, not them.


See Also: Attention and Sex and Does Information Overload Matter?


[h/t to Ario for pointing me to Frost's talk]


Watch Frosts’s talk (or view slides)

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Published on July 25, 2013 13:45

July 24, 2013

Are Hospitals More Important Than Art?

Each week I take the top voted question from readers and answer it (submit yours here).  With 35 votes, this week’s winner was “Are Hospitals More Important Than Art?” submitted by awesome reader Sara Vermeylen.


Questions like this are fun, even if absurd. Like Street Smarts vs. Book Smarts, it’s a kind of false dichotomy. But like the game Zobmando where you must decide between two ridiculous choices, you can have great intellectual fun in crafting arguments for one side or the other (or both).


Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa2If survival is at stake, I’d choose hospitals. A hospital, assuming it comes with smart doctors and fancy equipment, keeps a popular healthy, lengthens lifespans, improves the survival odds of reproduction, and provides a core public service everyone needs. If everyone is sick and dying, art has limited value, and of course it’s harder for sick and dying artists to make art than healthy ones.


But art is a critical part of what it is to be human. As miserable as conditions were for our ancestors 30,000 years ago, they took time to make elaborate cave paintings. If art were meaningless, why did they bother way back then? The answer is we are both social creatures and tool makers. Central to our survival has been the ability to communicate ideas, and art is one tool for developing the ability to imagine, observe, record and communicate thoughts. Art is also a tool of expression, a way to capture ideas, feelings, memories and dreams for others to see. Art, in the form of tattoos, face-paint, and even flags, has helped us throughout history to define our identity and remind us of shared connections. Music, books, paintings and movies are forms of art we depend on to help us understand who we are and how we want to live. We are aspirational creatures and a primary way we define what is possible for ourselves is through the art our artists makes for us.


What do you think?

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Published on July 24, 2013 08:25

July 23, 2013

Why Do Some Innovations Spread Slowly?

I’m a fan of Atul Gawande (here’s my review of Checklist Manifesto) and I’ve read all his books. His recent essay in the New Yorker, Slow Ideas, is about why some good ideas spread slowly. It’s about his experience with ideas in medicine, and struggles he’s observed with gaining adoption. Like Gladwell he winds a well told narrative around a simple concept, and depending on your interests you either find this mesmerizing or much ado about little, but either way it’s an enjoyable read.


I take the opposite position to his central question of why some ideas move slowly. The default state of an idea is non-adoption. Most ideas travel slowly, if at all, and technological change is an overstated exception. We are conservative creatures and resist change. Adoption of most knowledge, including social and philosophical beliefs, often shift only when the young become old and the new ideas they bring with them enter the center of culture.


But of most importance to this post is midway through Gawande’s article he makes a hat tip to Everett Rogers:


“…incentive programs are not enough. “Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation,” wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are communicated and spread. Mass media can introduce a new idea to people.


But, Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up. Every change requires effort, and the decision to make that effort is a social process. This is something that salespeople understand well.”


It’s an all too brief mention if you work with ideas. If you want to understand the mechanics of how innovations spread, an overview of Rogers is what you need.


Rogers work as an anthropologist is the basis for modern marketing. Dozens of business books have borrowed or stolen from his classic book Diffusion of Innovation. In a tight nutshell, he pointed out 5 factors that explains the adoption of innovation, or more precisely, the factors that if absent prevent an idea from being adopted:



Relative Advantage: this is perceived advantage. Marketing usually tries to tell you this explicitly (“save time”, “save money”, “double your income”)
Compatibility: How much effort is required? If the perceived cost of change is higher than the perceived relative advantage, most people won’t even try. Marketing typically attacks this too (“Free money back guarantee”, “Even a child could do it”)
Complexity: How much learning is required to apply the innovation? (“Easy to learn”, “5 of 6 people like you”)
Trial-ability: Is it easy to try out? Most clothing stores let you try things on, and many products have free trial offers.
Observability: How visible are the results of the innovation? Fashion fads are highly visible which helps them spread. Tech gadgets benefit from this too.

To Gawande’s central point, you need both leaders and salespeople to actively participate in pushing for adoption. Without the support of influencers in a culture, and a sustained effort to convince people of the 5 factors, ideas tend not to be adopted no matter how beneficial they are.


Rodger’s also coined the term Early Adopter, as part of his breakdown for the sub-groups that form around new ideas.


800px-Diffusion_of_ideas

 


If you want more depth on Innovation adoption I have three recommendations:



The Diffusion of Innovation wikipedia page is excellent
Roger’s classic book, The Diffusion of Innovation, is more about anthropology than business. But if you like Gawande’s story, the book has many similar ones (including a story about convincing tribes to adopt the use of boiling water. Hey, everything was once an innovation).
You can download Chapter 4 of The Myths of Innovation for free. It explains why we resist new ideas and what you can do about it. 

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Published on July 23, 2013 09:26

How to make smart project decisions: the checklist


Yesterday I was working on a complex project and found myself stuck. I was out of time and had to make a tough decision. I’d been thinking it over and over in my mind for days but was still unsure. Then I remembered: I’ve done all this before. In my book Making Things Happen I wrote an entire chapter about how to make good decisions as a project manager. And to write that chapter I’d read dozens of books on decision making and overcoming project challenges. Even writers forget the things they’ve written.


In Chapter 8 of Making Things Happen, there’s this list, perfect for a quick skim when stuck on a big choice:



What problem is at the core of the decision? Decisions often arise in response to new information, narrowing your thinking on what the decision actually is. Someone might realize “We’ don’t have time to fix all 50 issues before launch”, which sets many managers off in frantic scramble to hand pick which to fix. But a better, and less narrow problem, is “we don’t have a criteria for triaging issues”. Deciding on that criteria will make dozens of other decisions easier and delegatable. Ask questions like: What caused this problem? Is it isolated or will we deal with this again? Did we already make this decision? If so, do we truly have grounds for reconsidering it?
How long will this decision impact the project? The longer the impact, the more time you should spend considering the decision.
If you’re wrong, what’s the impact? The more possible damage in being wrong, the more time you should spend on the decision. The phrase “death by a 1000 paper cuts” refers to a series of small decisions that seem inconsequential individually, but if the same failure is made in dozens of them a compounded and serious problem arises.
What other decisions will be harder? easier? Some decisions avoid big issues and make them harder to deal with later. Other decisions take on my responsibility in the present, and make things easier in the future. Walk ahead a few weeks in your mind for each option you’re considering and compare.
What is the window of opportunity? If you wait too long to make the decision, it might be made for you. Big decisions don’t necessarily come with commensurate amounts of time to consider them. And sometimes the speed of making a decision is more important than the quality of the decision itself.
Have we made this kind of decision before? This is the arrogance test. If stranded on an island you had to perform heart surgery to save your friends life, how confident would you be? There’s no shame in admitting you’ve never done the thing you need to do right now. If a decision maker admits ignorance or inexperience there’s a chance someone else can fill the gap or offer advice based on what they’ve done before. Don’t pretend you know everything: you make worse decisions for the project when you do. Do some reading or networking to find someone who has been in the situation you’re in now.
Who has the expert opinion? (Is this really my decision?). Just because someone asks you to decide doesn’t mean you’re the best person to make the call. Often the best decision possible is to delegate it to someone better able to make the decision. Or to at least pause the proceedings until you can get the advice of the best expert available.
Whose approval do we need? In large organizations it’s just as hard or harder to get the approvals you need to make something happen as it is to sort out the decision itself.  The sooner you know the map of the hills you need to run up to get everything approved, the greater the odds you’ll be able to make a good decision in time for it to matter.
Make a pro/con list and use it to get feedback on your thinking. It’s a grade school technique but forces you to clarify both sides, and gives you an easy too for getting feedback on your thinking from other people. Often just explaining your thinking to another person forces you to think more clearly and you’ll find better alternatives or more confidence in an already proposed choice.

And I’d add:



The bigger the decision, plan more time for exploring alternatives. Some people think spending time seeking alternatives when they already have a good choice is waste. Spending time exploring other options always raises good questions about the choice you have in hand and improves your thinking. Even if you stay on the same path, you’ll likely improve the details of the path based on what you learned while looking at alternatives. 

If you liked this, get the book Making Things Happen, my bestseller on leading project teams. You can read a free chapter on the amazon page.


 

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Published on July 23, 2013 08:03

July 22, 2013

Best Book On Self Publishing: APE – Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur

KAWASAKI-WELCH-APE-HOW-TO-PUBLISH-A-BOOKI was pleased when I heard that Guy Kawasaki was working (with Shawn Welch) on a book about self-publishing. He’d written many popular business books and had a straightforward and no nonsense approach to most topics he covered, and I expected he’d an interesting perspective on self-publishing. I was right.


This is the single book I’d recommend to anyone considering self-publishing, for the first time or any time. It’s far better than any single book on the topic I’ve seen.


The title is a reference to how self-publishing comprises three distinct roles. Many self published books fail because the author only takes responsibility for one or two. Kawasaki comprehensively explains all of the dimensions, the common mistakes, and frames each role around tasks and tools that he himself has used or reviewed. He also includes actual numbers from his experiments with different marketing approaches and other efforts. It’s a truly honest guide to a topic where there’s too much snake oil and bogus theories.


The balance of APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepeneur, is pragmatic and focused on the confusing decisions that are hard to find good advice on, like pricing, which services to use, how to hire needed experts, and this  is balanced by the perspective of a very successful published author. Many books on self-publishing are written by people who had little success in the traditional publishing world and can’t offer a comparison, or shed light on how to approximate the advantages of traditional publishing when working alone. Kawasakai can, and did, in this book.


Like Kawasaki, I’ve successfully done both traditional and self publishing, but even I learned quite a few things from APE.


Much of the book is comprised of handy lists that support a particular decision point. Sometimes theses lists are mini-reviews of tools, other times they’re shorthand notes for rules of thumb for different ways to make decisions. Depending on where you are in the process some of these lists won’t be useful now, or ever, and you might even make a quick read of the book, easily digesting the sections relevant to your particular situation. But the comprehensive nature of the book makes it something you know you’ll want to keep around as a reference for future projects.


Get APE from Amazon or check out the book’s website.


[Disclosure: Kawasaki has endorsed several of of my books]

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Published on July 22, 2013 08:30

July 20, 2013

How to read an amazon.com book review

We read for different reasons, but we often write reviews as if everyone in the world is just like us.


A review that says “I hated this book” suggests the book is bad, but if the reviewer is a Yankee fan and the book is about how awesome the Boston Red Sox are, it likely reflects their biases more than anything about the book. And of course a review that says “This is the best book ever” written by the mother of the author is cute, but has enough positive bias to be useless.


A good reviewer frames their opinion with context so you can see if your sensibilities and needs match theirs. Some readers like to be challenged, some don’t. Some readers want an introductory book, others want something very advanced. If you’re in one group and base your decisions on reviews written by the other, you’ll miss books that might be perfect for you.


Since most book reviews are narrowly written we’re responsible for asking the clarifying questions ourselves.


Before you let an amazon review influence you, consider:



Does the reviewer have a strong point of view? How does it match yours?
What level of expertise did they have compared to you?
Are they rating on how inspired they feel or what they learned?
Are they rating because they were entertained or because they got value?
Do they emphasize their response to the concept of the book, or it’s execution?
Did a single minor disappointment that you might not care about distort their perception of the book?
How is their star rating calibrated? Do they often give  5 stars or 1 star reviews? Or is a 4 star review exceptional for them?

What other questions do you ask to get the most out of amazon.com reviews for a book?

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Published on July 20, 2013 01:31

July 19, 2013

Understanding Detroit: Detropia (documentary review)

I watched the documentary Detropia on Netflix Streaming recently and I highly recommend it.  With the recent news of Detroit declaring bankruptcy, something shocking for a major city, the stories and images from the film rose again in my mind.


If you want to understand how a great city has fallen and how good people have been struggling to turn things around, this is the film for you. Film has storytelling powers beyond what headlines and news reports can match. If you’re interest in cities, economies, globalization, design and the future of America, don’t miss this.


I visited Detroit in 2010 and it was an urban experience unlike any I’ve ever had. The city had a population of 1.8 million in 1950, but now is barely half that. Walking the downtown streets past abandoned buildings that happen to be some of the best art-deco architecture in America was both disturbing and mesmerizing. If you have any interest in design or urban planning, you can’t help wonder: how would you turn the city around? How would you redesign infrastructure of a huge city to work now at a smaller scale? What policies and failures set Detroit on this course and what can other  cities in America learn?


The film deftly frames the story of the city around the lives of a handful of citizens, a business owner, an artist, an activist, and a union official, and lets them lead the telling of the story, anchored lightly by facts, history and some stunning cinematography. Even if you don’t agree with the assumptions offered, I guarantee the film will raise plenty of excellent questions to make it worth your while.


Watch the movie trailer below. The film airs on PBS and is downloadable from various online stores:


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Published on July 19, 2013 11:09

July 18, 2013

What is the meaning of life? (and why do people keep asking)

Each week I take the top voted topic from readers and answer it.  With 45 votes, this week’s winner was “What is the meaning of life (and why do people continually ask this question)”.


I’ve yet to hear my dog ask this question. He seems pretty damn satisfied with existence. You could conclude that we’re better off not even asking about meaning. Kids don’t ask it, at least not with the same angst adults do. There is mild merit to the phrase ignorance is bliss, as ignorance comes in both pleasant and painful forms, and if yours is the former, and you don’t fear boredom, you can float with contentment along the surface of existence never exploring what lurks beneath. There’s a zen proverb that says “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water” and I consider this saying often. No matter how much you understand or don’t about your life, you still have to do the living.


Most of living involves simple tasks. The answer to the question might just be there is no meaning other than living life for it’s simple pleasures and responsibilities, and modern life is filled with people who need kindness, and skills that can be learned and put to benevolent use. To make use of enlightenment still requires putting that enlightenment into action*.


The people who ask the titular question most often are those who have a life successful enough to be beyond struggling to survive. You don’t hear this question much from people struggling to find work, scavenging for food, or running for their lives every few minutes. Most living things in the history of the planet never bothered to need to ask this question in part because they were too busy trying to stay alive to have a need to occupy their minds with a supremely abstract question.


Kafka (possibly) wrote “the meaning of life is that it ends” which I love. Our choices matter because they are finite. The time I spent writing this post was time I will never get back and eventually I will die. That time is gone from me forever. Even if no one reads this post, or I decide later I hate it, it still has meaning to me because I it’s where I chose to put part of my life. How I prioritize my time defines what my life means, or doesn’t. This is pragmatic meaning. Meaning is not an ideal or platitude but something that I manifest in actions I take, or don’t take. In other words, the meaning of life is who you talked to, who you loved, who you helped, who you hurt, what  you built, what you destroyed, and on it goes. Camus wrote “Don’t wait for the last judgement, it takes places every day”.


Socrates said “the life that is unexamined is not worth living” which appeals to me. However I think it’d be worth living unexamined, as my dog’s daily life, or a weekend in Hawaii, are proof of the joys of hedonism, it’s just that the examined life offers superior pleasures in many ways. Unwavering pleasure loses it’s meaning as we need contrasting experiences to fully realize what we have. No meal is better than one after a fast.


Following Socrates lead, the fundamental flaw in the question is that it’s asked in the singular. As if there was one meaning, written on a sacred mountain, visible only with a special magic spell, and all we need to do find the secret map, cast the spell, and reveal the meaning for 6 billion people as if it were a crackerjack prize. It’s an absurd premise. There are an infinite number of meanings to life. You can have several of them that serve you in different ways, or that are useful at different times. The meanings of life for an 17 year old boy, is different than for a 27 year old woman, and on it goes. We go through many meanings during life and people who have fulfilling lives take ownership of the process of shedding old meanings and cultivating new ones.


Once you ask “what are the meanings of life?”, seeking multiple answers instead of singular, doors open. It’s easy to see that different people find different meanings, and that you have to do the legwork of trying different ones out, or even crafting meanings of your own based on what you learn from others and your own experience with what has meaning for you.


The reason people keep asking the question is it’s a cliche’. It’s the most well known phrase for attempting a philosophical discussion with someone. Most people, even when discussing philosophy, stay in the abstract, shy of sharing their own personal meanings, which contributes to the frequency of the question. We ridicule people who ramble about meaning as navel gazers, but the mistake is merely being shy of the personal and the specific. It’s always fascinating to hear how people translate meaning into the actions of their daily lives, as generally we fail at the process, distracted by shiny objects, status symbols, fears and entertainments. We so rarely share our personal struggles with the inconsistencies of our beliefs and behaviors, but it’s in those conversations the meanings we seek can always be found.

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Published on July 18, 2013 13:39

What To Expect If You Follow Me on Twitter

Twitter is a curious place. It’s used in so many different ways that when I follow people whose work I admire I never know what I’m going to get. I stumbled on this post by Wil Wheaton that offers an explanation to would-be followers and I though it was wise. It does seem both pompous and useful, and I hope you find it more of the later than the former.


1. I’m an independent writer and I use twitter to help make a living.  About 30-40% of what I tweet about is entirely about me. Either new things I’ve written, places I’m giving a lecture, or news about upcoming books or previous ones. I’m conscious of the balance and try to keep it reasonable. When I have a new book coming out, books being the primary way I make a living, it definitely goes higher during the critical first few weeks, but then trends back down.


2. Twitter is unreliable – you never see all of someone’s tweets or even the best ones. If you’re thinking of following me to make sure you hear about big news, sign up for the email newsletter that 20k people currently subscribe to. That guarantees every few weeks you’ll get a skim-able list of the important things and my best posts since the last newsletter.


3. I hate the term follower and don’t think of twitter that way. I’d have preferred the word “listener” or even “fan” since follower makes me think of cults and drinking kool-aid (if you don’t know where that saying comes from, click the link. you might not use that phrase again). I’m thrilled anyone pays attention to what I do on twitter, but I know you’re all just a click away from leaving.


4. I use twitter to point to good work. I read voraciously and try to spread awareness of good things I find that people who like my work will also like. I rarely post about things I don’t like, or disappoint me, unless it’s about jargonmyths or lies. Twitter is in many ways an extension of this blog, with similar topics, themes and vibes. Of course when I RT (retweet) things it’s not an endorsement, I assume you give me the benefit of the doubt about why I’m sharing something. And I generally read any link I send.


5. I don’t follow many people on Twitter. I often check the profiles of new followers and read some of their past stream. If I love it of course I’ll follow, but I won’t do this as a courtesy – it’d be disingenuous if I did. Twitter by design is non-reciprocal: you can follow people who don’t follow you and that makes sense to me. I do look at all @berkun messages, and like when people cc: me on a tweet about a link they know I’d be interested in (and that isn’t purely self-promotional).


6. I frequently tweet aphorisms and observations. These are simply interesting  units of thought to kick around with other people. Sometimes I’m passionate about the idea, but often it’s just a thought I have no stake in, or find interesting even though I disagree with it. Don’t read too much into them or what it means about my current state of mind. If I tweet a quote by someone else, I generally try to verify it’s real before I do.


7. If you’re responding to a post, I prefer blog comments to tweets. Tweets are ephemeral. They get lost.  Leaving a comment on a blog lasts forever and guarantees I’ll respond and do it more thoughtfully. Some people reply to a tweet about a new post I’ve written with complex questions like “Did you consider X, Y and Z in context of the transverse Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?” or something similarly thoughtful and challenging, and I often think it’s a shame the question, and my answer, will simply float by in twitter. On twitter few will see that excellent question, or my reply. But if it’s a comment on the blog, most people who reads the post that inspired your question will see it, and they’ll also see my more than 140 characters worth of response. I sometimes even hand copy the tweet of a great question to the comment section to ensure it’s preserved.


8. If I’m on twitter I’ll banter, debate and play. But often I’m not on twitter. People forget twitter is a stream and it’s easy for even @ messages to get lost. DMs frequently get lost too. I see twitter as transient – I’d never ask an important question or make an important request there. If you have something important contact me the reliable way. If you have a topic you want me to write about, ask about it here.


9. I often repeat tweets and link to older work. I sometimes use buffer to schedule things on twitter. I do this because few people are on twitter 24/7 and things get missed. People in different time zones read more at different times. I post older work because I have a decade of of good writing on evergreen topics: for a new follower it’s just as worthy to them as something I posted fresh that morning. I generally mark old posts with #archive so it’s easy to flag if you’ve been reading me a long time. I periodically tweet about the Best of Berkun list since it’s the easiest introduction for people new to my writing.


But this is merely my view of what I do on Twitter. Does it match your experience? Is there something else you wish I did? Or did less of? Leave a comment.

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Published on July 18, 2013 11:20

July 15, 2013

The law does not guarantee justice

“The court doesn’t exist to give them justice… But to give them a chance at justice.”


-Galvin (Paul Newman), The Verdict


America suffers from superficial assumptions about not only our criminal laws, but the details of individual cases. We base our “knowledge” on headlines and soundbites, a thin stream of ignorance for evaluating someone’s guilt or innocence. We forget that the jury is sequestered away from the news, and that we in the public have different information than what the jury hears. Even the same information is expressed differently to juries. Our view of a trial from the outside is a watered down, over-simplified and twisted mess that bears little resemblance to the environment where these important decisions are made. As sad as I am about the entire case, I’m grateful we don’t let our emotional, thoughtless mob at large decide much of anything.


I’ve seen dozens of proclamations for what the Zimmerman verdict means, as if the entire 300+ million citizenry of America (or the 1000 people running the show if you believe in conspiracy theories) met together in Florida and agreed on a plan for how to ruin our nation through a single decision. Perhaps the most glaring oversight in our outrage is that a jury trial puts the burden of judgement into a handful of people. The six or twelve members of a jury are alone empowered to judge, which explains why most lawyers, victims and accused criminals avoid them (only 10% of cases go to trial, which, against my point,  could also indicate something is wrong with our system). Whatever was wrong with America before the trial was wrong regardless of the outcome of this case. And unless those six people are a secret cabal running our nation, they never had the power to change America at large no matter what they decided.


Before you judge me and the tone of this post, if it matters, I think Zimmerman should have been charged at least with manslaughter. But what I think is irrelevant. as I was not on that jury. That’s my point.


There is no law that can guarantee everyone, or even a majority’s, sense of justice will be carried out. Instead we have laws that attempt to do the heavy lifting in providing a machine that gives everyone a chance at justice. A chance to make their case. And it’s not about what you know or believe but what you can prove to the satisfaction of the members of the jury. This means skill is a critical. It’s not the most righteous who wins, it’s who has the most skill in proving righteousness to the satisfaction of the jury. Is this fair? No. But it is clear.


If you read even a cursory critique of the prosecutions case against Zimmerman you’ll find reasonable questions about the actual evidence in the case, and how the prosecution used, or didn’t use it. Forget whether you agree with this critique or not, the outcome of the case means the jury likely did agree with some of it, and that’s all that matters.


In America we believe in reasonable doubt, and what a burden it is against immediate justice. Reasonable doubt means the job is on the prosecution to prove guilt, not on the defendant to prove innocence. The defense has the much easier job. Even the presentation of conflicting evidence and testimony can quickly create reasonable doubt on a jury, and there was plenty of conflicting testimony in the Zimmerman trial.


Reasonable doubt is unfair because it puts the prosecution at a disadvantage, but it’s unfair by design. Reasonable doubt prefers to let some accused people go free at the expense of preventing the innocent from being sent to prison. Reasonable doubt has its problems but it’s objective is clear, and it has been part of our legal system since its beginnings. It bets the sacrifice of justice of some guilty going free is more than compensated by preventing the innocent from being found guilty. Even if you don’t agree this is as good bet, it is the bet we have.


I am aware of the deep problems with racism, guns and crime in America. I understand why people feel outraged by the verdict and I feel sadness for everyone personally involved. But I won’t let one decision decided by six Florida citizens define much of anything for me or my country. I wish most of all for us to use our brains as much as our hearts in sorting our what the verdict means and what work we have to do to make our nation safe for everyone.

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Published on July 15, 2013 12:05