MisEntropy

The Aphorism Factory #6

Input: Networking on the train and in the world

Output: What doesn't keep us apart, only brings us closer.

[For a brief intro to Aphorism Factory, please click here.]

For want of an aphorism

So, the travesty that was this years Formula One world championship has finally come to end.

But long before this seeming drama wound to an anti-climatic finish in a courtroom, the victors and the losers in this year's championship had already moved on. Even as McLaren lodged their appeal over a month ago, Hamilton had already made it clear that he wants to win 'fair' and on the track.

But what he didn't reveal was whether he had grasped or learnt why he didn't win the world championship in his rookie year - an unprecendented feat that he more than richly deserved.

Other people would see differently. But as  someone interested in seeing how, why and where information flows and also a firm believer in the power of aphorisms (see my white paper 'The Intranets of Babel'), I think the failure was not just Lewis' and McLaren's alone but of the entire F1 knowledge ecosystem. After 57 years of competition, F1 should have distilled the wisdom that would point to how a championship leader should conduct his title chase - and more precisely how he shouldn't. (Contrast that with chess, which has reams and reams of literature on how precisely to conduct an endgame - from every possible position, and especially from positions where one is ahead. And that logic extends to world championship matches too.)

It's Jackie Stewart who's supposed to have said that 'one should win a motor race by the least amount of margin possible.' (Unfortunately I couldn't find any place online where I could find the exact quote.) For casual fans of the sport that might sound like a ridiculous thing to suggest - after all, what else is Formula One but a contest of raw speed?

If F1 was ever that, it has moved on. It's a contest of strategies and tactics - and in a minor way - of speed. What Jackie Stewart's smart observation notes is that after the strategies have unfolded (pretty much after the last set of pitstops), building a huge lead over the second-placed rival behind you pays no extra incentive - either in points or money. On the other hand, persisting in driving a car to its limit puts the very win one is chasing in jeopardy - by straining the machinery, which at best walks a thin line between fragility and reliability. That risk, even to the dumbest driver, is not worth taking.

That's the reason why, more often than not, one sees the leading driver in a grand prix slowing down drastically in the last few laps. Having put his nose in front, his task now is to do the minimum it takes to keep it there.

After his brilliant rookie year in F1, someone (Ron Dennis perhaps?) should have whispered in young Lewis' ear an aphosrism that extends Jackie's astute observation. This championship cliniching wonder-drug is a simple statement that re-inforces an essential truth - 'one should win a world championship by the least number of points possible.'

If Lewis had grasped that reality he would have raced differently - very differently - at the Chinese Grand Prix. When you are leading by 12 points over your nearest rival and there are a maximum of 20 points available (from the two remaining grand prixs) all Hamilton had to do was aim at scoring a total of 9 more points in the remaining two grand prixs. That way no matter what Alonso did (including win both the races), he would be the champion.

But taken in by talk in the press about the possibility of sealing his championship in the penultimate race itslef, Hamilton chased a race win and put himself under tremedous pressure - a move made all the more riskier considering the fickle weather conditions. Even that would have been fine, as long as things were going their way.

And when rain threatened, McLaren would have been better advised to heed the aforementioned aphorism and change tactics - by ensuring Lewis takes the safest route possible (which in this case was a speedy change of tyres regardless of whether the rain came or not) and scores a minimum of 5 points (out of the 9 he needed for the championship). Rather than trying to outwit the competition in a short-sighted bid for a victory in the race - which is what they ended up doing.

The result is, of course, well-known. The ridiculous sight of F1's wonderboy lying beached in a gravel trap - the humiliation furthered by the fact that he was driving in the pitlane when it happened.

Ron Dennis later admitted that they were racing primarily against Alonso - a tactic I found absolutely stupid. If anything, they should have let Alonso pass at the earliest - thereby putting him under pressure to chase a race win. Remember, Alonso needs to win both races - and chances are that in trying to do that he'll break his car down (as it happened Alonso didn't win either race). Meanwhile, Lewis should have been doing just the optimum necessary to keep his championship on track.

For Formula One's sake I really do hope someone has noted down one more line to add to the collective Formula One wisdom in the paddock. A simple aphorism that might make a difference to someone else's championship in the future.

From the Aphorism Factory #5

Input : The Attention Crash & Human attention does not obey  Moore's Law & Web 2.0 has become too big for one man

Output : Human beings don't scale; mankind does.

[For a brief intro to Aphorism Factory, please click here.]

Input : The Attention Crash & Human attention does not obey  Moore's Law & Web 2.0 has become too big for one man

Output : Human beings don't scale; mankind does.

[For a brief intro to Aphorism Factory, please click here.]

From the Aphorism Factory #4

Input : How to be a great audience

Output : The speaker is an audience of one who goes to watch a few hundred people perform.

[For a brief intro to Aphorism Factory, please click here.]

From the Aphorism Factory #3

Input : You should write an ebook

Ouput : If you are looking for a publisher for your book, you're looking in the wrong place.

[For a brief intro to Aphorism Factory, please click here.]

From the Aphorism Factory #2

Input : Art that's not for sale

Output : Money is a form of currency, not vice versa.

[For an intro to Aphorism Factory, please click here.]

The Aphorism Factory #1

Input: The Microsoft Memo: Some choose radical transparency, some have it thrust upon them

Output: A striptease at a nudist party has something to hide, not something to reveal.

[The Aphorism Factory is a project born out of my belief that the only sensible way to store information in a word overflowing with it is to make it collapsible like an umbrella - by compressing it in size while storing it and unfurling it open when you need to use it (You can download my white paper on the subject here.) Pithy aphorisms, in my opinion, represent the best way to do that. They discard the details of the moment and encapsulate the useful - so it can pass through the bottlenecks of memory, best-seller lists and short-attention spans to the time and place where it might be needed again.]

The Aphorism Files

Don't bet against the Internet.
- Silicon Valley saying

Aphorisms on blogging

Some time ago, I wrote a paper on the use of aphorisms as information carriers. The central argument of the paper was that aphorisms fare better as repositories of wisdom as compared to traditional information systems, particularly intranets.

A related project that has interested me since then, is collecting epigrammatic wisdom about blogging - a recent field of activity with a fair bit of widely known and shared information, very little of which is in aphoristic form.

The aphorisms that follow are meant to kickstart that process - with a little help from wise men through the generations. I would love to hear from all of you about which ones hit the mark, and which ones don't. And if you have aphoristic advice to bloggers, do pass it on and I'll be glad to add it to the body of aphoristic wisdom on blogging.

Aphorisms on blogging:

* Fortune favours the blogger.

* A wise blogger knows everything; a shrewd blogger knows everyone.

* The secret to a good blog is to have more beginnings than ends.

* Blogging is a device for combining solitude with good company.

* If you want to work on your blog, work on your life.

* No blogger is ever too small, no blog ever too big.

* A blogger cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

* No two persons ever read the same blog.

* Hyperlinks are wonderful things; they make what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

* Don't judge a man until you have followed his blog for two moons.

* Everything in the world exists in order to end up on a blog.

* A blog is a thread on which we string our experiences.

* A sufficiently advanced blog will be indistinguishable from the blogger.

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The un-simplicity of Aphorisms

Some time ago, I had written a white paper on intranets and how aphorisms can come to the rescue in information storage and retrieval. Richard Huntington, who is a believer in aphorisms himself, recently wrote a post alluding to the paper and arguing for the power of aphorisms.

His post drew a comment questioning if aphorisms simplify things to the point of being simplistic - in a world where consumers are looking for some complexity in the messages they receive. Gareth Kay and Graham Furlong have clarified in their comments that aphorisms 'compress' rather than 'reduce' and the best ones are often packed with meaning.

Reading all these comments reminded me of a further quality of aphorisms which I omitted mentioning in 'The Intranets Of Babel' - because I felt it was outside the purview of the paper.

While they seem one-dimensional to begin with, the very best aphorisms, in fact, embody a multi-faceted nature that becomes apparent only with time. For aphorisms to survive in the evolutionary battle between other aphorisms, they need to display a 'chameleon-like' ability to be different things to different people at different times.

Take the aphorism 'Honesty is the best policy' for eg. Nothing can be simpler - and there doesn't seem to be much written between the lines. But there is.

At its most basic, the aphorism reminds people that being honest is good - for the God-fearing, there also is the hidden warning that not being honest means not making it to heaven.

At another level, the aphorism is also stating that honesty is the best policy simply because you don't have to keep track of the lies one has told - to whom, when and about what.

And there's more. Honesty is also the best policy not because of what it does to you but because it helps other people cope with reality - something that won't happen if you are hiding it from them.

It is to accomodomate this plurality of applications that this particular aphorism is stated in the way it is. And not as 'Honesty is the ticket to heaven', for eg.

An aphorism, therefore, is a master key that opens many different locks - it is a line of code that runs in mind's operating system yielding different results in different circumstances. The beauty of the aphorism structure is that all the locks don't have be unlocked for it to be useful - it is useful, no matter at what level you access it.

Of course, aphorisms may have limited applicability in advertising. But that's because the processes of creation of the best advertising and best aphorisms are at two ends of the spectrum.

The very best aphorisms are created through the process of continuous and dynamic evolution - constant repetition and mutation, coupled with the survival of the 'fittest'. Advertising on the other hand is the result of 'intelligent design' (and worse, is shortsighted) - and therefore, in my opinion, unfit to create aphorisms.

Quote Martialled!

Readers of the The Practical Futurist column written by Michael Rogers have given a thumbs down to his assertion that reading is an over-valued skill probably because they find it unpalatable. (At the time of my writing this, about 508 readers have collectively given the piece a rating of 1 out of 5.)

Junius says "There is a holy mistaken zeal in politics as well as in religion. By persuading others, we convince ourselves." (Being guilty of the mistaken and zealous persuasion of the value of reading myself, I know it's true of more than just politics and religion.)

Quote Martialled!

After reading a piece in The New York Times about the impending extinction of Zoroastrianism, Seth Godin posts about how to create ideaviruses that don't suffer the same fate.

A couple of thousand years ago, Gautama Buddha said, "Everything that's born must die."

Quote Martialled!

Mike Coulter at Digital Agency pronounces a bleak future for consumer generated content, wondering aloud if it will "ever be as classy" as this new spot for Lexus.

Henry Ford once said, "Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t – you are right."

Quote Martialled!

Russell Davies says he still isn't convinced about memetics being useful after listening to Susan Blackmore's energetic introduction of the subject.

John Cage, experimental music composer, says "The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature in her manner of operation."

Quote Martialled!

John Goodman says here that he worries about thin air being the only barrier between the pedestrian and motorable zones in Tokyo.

Charles Schulz said, "No problem is so formidable you can't walk away from it."