Stephen Baker

When I was working on The Numerati, my editor was emphatic about one thing: There had to be a chapter on the data hunt for love. So I enlisted my reluctant wife into an experiment. We both signed up for Chemistry.com, and then waited (and waited and waited, as it turned out) for the algorithms to match us.

Now I get a press release about a new Web app called WotWentWrong. Taking a page from Customer Relationship Management, it gives people a customizable form to send to the people they went out with who.... just stopped calling. The idea is simple. Let's say you had a date or two, and you thought it went really well. And then the other person appears to vanish from the scene. If you're the nervy sort, you call, and you might pick up the phone or even knock on the door and experience an excruciating exchange full of "um, well...etc." More likely, you don't call or visit, and you're left worrying: What was about me that he/she didn't like???

photo: BigStock.com

Now, using WotWentWrong, failed dating gets a feedback system similar to what users of Amazon or Netflix have been known for years. Dating, in this view, is a consumer experience, and the customer--or shopper--must optimize his or her own "offering" in order to achieve the desired goals. Some of this could no doubt be useful. On the standard template, the person doing the snubbing is asked to weigh in on what went wrong. The choices:

1) You don't pay for dinner when we go out
2) You don't make enough time for me
3) Too much fighting
4) You are selfish
5) You text instead of calling

But there can also be positive feedback, such as:
1) You are attractive
2) You are insightful
3) You are enthusiastic

Here's what's weird about this for me. For a million years or so, we have developed the most sophisticed systems imaginable to "read" other humans. First, we have our animal awareness. We pick up odors, postures, eye movements, casual touching, all of the things that fall under the rubric of "chemistry." Then we have richly textured and nuanced language, something our most sophisticated supercomputers (like Watson) still struggle with. Human-to-human communication is deep, especially when the parties are face to face. This process is analog.

In much of our lives, we deal with big organizations that understand us largely by means of standardized forms and metrics. Employees in large companies suffer through annual performance reviews, in which they are placed into boxes that never seem to fit. The IRS sends more boxes to check. The Numerati take fairly primitive data and then put us into tribes (ie. The people who give five stars to Godfather II, Moonstruck and The Seventh Seal). Sometimes they can predict our desires. But they really don't know us as individuals. Compared to the miraculous complexity of analog communications, all of these formal systems are crude.

Yet we're growing used to them and sometimes find them less theatening. They're disembodied. Perhaps bad news hurts less when it comes as a set of symbols, and not a distracted glance, a bored tone, a note of sarcasm or a slap in the face. But we learn more and live far more richly when we brave the analog world, even when things go wrong.

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Stuck in Seattle

January 23, 2012

I flew to Seattle last week wearing a watch that runs slow. The watch was the least of my problems. I caught the flight, and when I stepped off, six hours later, I turned on my phone and saw a message that the Big Data roundtable discussion I was going to, sponsored by the Markle Foundation, had been cancelled due to the coming storm.

So I had two days to kill in a Seattle that would soon be snowy and dysfunctional--so dysfunctional, as it turned out, that I my return flight would be cancelled, giving me four days in the city. What to do?

First, a word about slow-moving watches: They serve a function. If they tell you you're running late, you are. That's useful to know. (And you might be even later than they say.) On the other hand, don't trust them if they tell you you're early. (This reminds me of another limited-use technology: the bicycle rear-view mirror. If it shows a truck barreling up behind you, you can bank on it. But if it indicates that the coast is clear, don't trust it. Turn around and look.)

I had a lot of writing to do last week. So a couple of days in the Vintage Park Hotel, across the street from Seattle's wonderful public library, sounded just fine.

The view from my hotel room

One trouble. When it snows in Seattle, things shut down, including the library. This was unfortunate for me, but much worse for all the street people there who find not only warmth and comfort in the library, but also reading material and Web access. (Once when I worked at a newspaper in El Paso, I wrote about a Thanksgiving dinner at a soup kitchen. I sat next to a ranchhand-turned- hobo, who told me that the holidays were the worst of times, because libraries were closed for so many days. He was a big reader, as I recall.)

Outside Seattle's Library

A few other things I did in Seattle. I read a great book, John Vaillant's The Tiger. It changed the way I think about cats, human evolution, Russia, Perestroika, hunting, and many other things. The writing is wonderful, though I did find a few too many Russia names to digest. On a related note, I saw Werner Herzog's 3D documentary, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It takes you inside the fabulous Chauvet cave in southern France, where the art is 30,000 years old. It's worth seeing, even with Herzog's whimsical and awe-struck narration.

I also went to the Seattle Art Museum. A few items I liked there:

Caterpillar Suit, by Walter Oltmann, 2007

Detail from Paolo Uccello panel, from around 1450. (Did you know that he was also a mathematician?)

An ancient Greek who might look beautiful in the Caterpillar Suit.

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The secret Jeopardy match: One year ago, Watson won

January 13, 2012

Jeopardy book

Last winter it snowed every week. And I remember tossing and turning in bed, worrying whether a storm might cause me to me the match between IBM's Jeopardy machine, Watson, and its human foes, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. If I missed the match, which took place a year ago this week, my book project would be highly compromised.

I was full of worries. There was the very real concern that Jeopardy executives, fearful that the results of the match might leak before it came out on TV a month later, would block me out. That possibility, it turned out, was very real, IBM sources told me later. Big Blue had to lean on Jeopardy to get me a seat at the performance, held at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, NY. If it had been held at the Jeopardy studio, in Culver City, Calif., as originally plan, I have little doubt that I would have been blocked. As far as the Jeopardy team was concerned, I represented risk.

If I missed the show, the book would have been a mess. I had written 9/10 of Final Jeopardy, and it had gone through the editing process. But the last chapter hinged on the match. It was to take place on a Friday. I was to write the last chapter over the following two days and submit a draft on Monday. That would be edited and added to the book. A couple of weeks later, the public would be able to buy the partial ebook--everything except for the last chapter--online, and then would be sent the last chapter when the physical book came out, the day after the televised match. It was tight scheduling. For it to work, I had to get into the show.

My other fear was that Watson would lose. The machine lost about 30% of its matches against tournament of champion competitors in its last series of sparring matches. I had seen its vulnerabilities. Despite its strengths, entire categories could confound Watson. What's more, Jennings and Rutter were the best players on earth. Following the match, I've read lots of opinions on social media that IBM had fixed the match, and wouldn't have played it if there was a chance that Watson could lose. This is not true. And if Watson lost, my book would be the story of a machine that failed. Hardly a selling point.

I drove up to Yorktown from my home in NJ and didn't relax until I had gotten through security and was inside IBM Research. By that point, I figured that even if Jeopardy kept me out of the studio, I could watch on TV monitors in the overflow room. I wasn't particular. But I was concerned about capturing the data. I had a digital recorder, and for backup, I'd downloaded a recording app on my iPad. I would have to recreate the match, with the precise clues and scoring at each juncture, from the audio.

Much of the rest of that day I included in the final chapter: A wound up David Ferrucci, Watson's chief developer, crying as the make-up woman worked on his face; IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, as Watson steamrolled the humans, telling one of the researchers, "Maybe we should have toned it down a notch:" Jeopardy host Alex Trebek gamely entertaining the restive crowd with his stand-up routine during the seemingly endless technical glitches; an exhausted Jennings and Rutter, standing in a lonely hallway, waiting to do more video interviews after losing the marathon match, this while the happy IBM crowd was upstairs drinking cocktails and toasting the victor. Here are Jennings' memories.

As I drove home 52 weeks ago, I leaned out of the window and took one last picture of IBM Research on a winter night.

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Free the dogs

January 11, 2012

If American dogs shared a language and history, they would tell a sad story. For them, the last generation has ushered in dramatic change: confinement, in homes and even crates. In the dog Bible, this would be a period of bondage. I see no sign of a canine Moses on the horizon. But what do I know?

Here's what I do know. When I was a kid, dogs, for the most part, ran free. You got to know the neighbor dogs. The dogs had their friends and routines. When I was in 11th grade, my neighbor's wonderful dog, John, trailed along behind my parents as they walked our dog, Tanya. (Tanya and he were close.) Then he saw a squirrel across busy Montgomery Avenue and was killed instantly as he chased it. (Freedom has its risks; deer, if they could talk, would be the first to tell you.) My friend later learned that John, once or twice a week, joined a blind professor at Bryn Mawr college for cross-campus strolls. It was part of his weekly routine.

That's history now, at least in the suburbs. Suburban dogs now live more like their urban cousins, who have been under tight control for many decades, at least in the U.S. (I used to live in Quito, Ecuador. Sometimes on my midnight strolls I would come across dogs patrolling the city streets in large packs. That was a little scary.)

What brought this dog business to mind was an experience this morning. We looked out our window and saw a reddish mutt wandering loose in our front yard. It was sniffing, peeing, sniffing some more, carrying on usual dog business. This would have been utterly normal in the '70s. But today it filled us with something akin to dread. What do to? Should we call it and check the tag on its collar? It might BITE. It might have RABIES. Or even FLEAS. After all, it looks dreadfully SKINNY, perhaps SICK. We called a neighbor, and learned that the whole neighborhood is on alert. This beast must be returned to captivity. Perhaps I could go out there, let it smell my hand, gently look at the collar and give its owner a call. But I don't dare. Dogs aren't free and we live in fear of them.

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How computers share our prejudices

January 4, 2012

Let's say you're looking up a friend, or a prospective employer, on Google. As you type the name, the search engine ever so helpfully tries to anticipate your complete search, adding "anti-semite," "terrorist," or "pedophile." Does that affect your thinking in any way?

Microsoft Research's danah boyd writes about this algorithmic guilt through association. The problem is that the search engine "learns" from our own input. This statistical approach is blind to concepts of fairness or slander. Anyone doubting this might search the surprise runner-up in Iowa's Reublican caucases. (Santorum)

In the world of search engines, repitition is a proxy for "truth" (or, perhaps, to avoid that problematic word, the "best answer.") But in this way, the machines have something in common with us. As I learned in Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, when humans hear the same message again and again, we begin to interpret it as truth. What's more, we tend to spend our time with people--online, on TV and in person--who see things the same way. This intensifies the repitition, and the misconceptions. Search engine algorithms don't cause this distortion, but they reinforce it.

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Writers' New Years resolutions

January 3, 2012

The LA Times asked 25 writers for their New Years resolutions. One common thread was to turn down (or off) the Internet, and to focus on old-fashioned reading, even if it is on a new device. Evan Ratliff writes:

It's building on something I started late this year, which is to carve out specific, disconnected, undistracted time to read every day. Sometimes it's sitting outside with a paperback, having left the phone and all other devices back at the office. Sometimes it's actually reading a book on the phone (as you might imagine, I'm a big fan of reading books on the phone!), but having turned off all the phone's connections. It's like exercise, for me: The whole day gets better if I set aside the time for it. And as much as I love reading digital texts, it's not the same if I stop three times in the middle to deal with some seemingly-urgent-but-not-really email.

A few talked about short stories. Why, in a time of shrinking attention spans, aren't they more popular? James Hannaham writes:

"This year I want to figure out why, when an author says the phrase "working on a story collection," as in "I'm working on a story collection," everyone in publishing reacts as if they have instead heard the phrase "molesting several children."

Some talk about reading classics, including Moby Dick, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and Anthony Powell's 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time. Said Sayrafiezadeh, perhaps a tad more open than the others, says: "Stop looking at so much porn."

My own resolutions:

* Make nearly enough money to sustain our suburban living
* Write prequel to my novel, The Boost (to be published in '13)
* Take at least one trip to a place I've never been. Somewhere in Asia, perhaps, or the Galapagos.
* Read Don Quixote in Spanish (I'm on about page 14...)
* Come up with non-fiction project

I'll add more as they occur to me.

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Books around the tree

December 25, 2011

Here are the books we opened this morning.

At Home, Bill Bryson
Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald
Neighbors: the Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne Poland, Jan T. Gross
Bully! The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt
In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson
Eden, Yael Hedaya
The Housekeeper and the Professor, Yoko Ogawa
The Tiger, John Vaillant
Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day, Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois
The Emperor, Ryszard Kupuscinski
Vermeer, a View of Delft, Anthony Bailey
Life and Death on the Prairie, by Stephen Longmire

But I can't get to any of them until I read a Dutch novel, The Discovery of Heaven, by Harry Mulisch. It was given to me by Emma Punt, my Dutch editor, at Maven Publishing (They've just published an updated version of The Numerati, called De Datameesters). The Mulisch book is more than 700 pages, which means that it'll be at least a couple of days before I crack open any of the others.

Update: A new one just arrived in the mail. It's The Quark and the Jaguar--Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, by Murray Gell-Mann.

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Books over the holidays

December 23, 2011

I'm reluctant to dive into a big book just days before Christmas, because on Sunday morning I might find myself with something else I want to read even more. I hope I do. In any case, here's what I've been reading of late:

My son, who's just finishing up a Polish history course at NYU, gave me a dog-earred copy of Isaac Bashivis Singer's The Slave. It's a wonderful and lyrical book about love, freedom and religion. Of course, to appreciate their value, he places the story at a time and place--17th century Poland--where love is a struggle, freedom elusive, and religion both a source of comfort and persecution. It reads almost like a folk tale. I was well into it before I realized that it was a historical novel. Still, the images it brings to mind are paintings by Marc Chagall.

Following the Judaism theme (since we traveled to Israel in October) I read The Unmaking of Israel, by Gershom Gorenberg. A compelling and very depressing book, it makes that case that Israel's policies are leading the country away from democracy, stability and the vision of its founders.

I've been working recently on a psychology project. To prepare for it, I read Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. It had a lot of good information about the way we think, and how we often trick ourselves. I'd done some research on the topic for Final Jeopardy, and he even mentions a couple of the tricks I cited in the book. For example: How many of each animal did Moses take on the ark? If your answer is "two," instead of, "You dummy, it was Noah on the ark, not Moses," you fell for it. The idea, of course, is that our minds take short-cuts, which work most of the time (even on Jeopardy). But they can get us into trouble. And Kahneman's book is good for understanding all the mischief our minds can get us into, often while we're thinking about something else.

That said, the book was about 50% too long. I think editors can be a bit timid when it comes to snipping the manuscript of a Nobel laureate.

As I mentioned in earlier post, I enjoyed Robert Hughes' excellent biography of the Spanish painter, Francisco Goya. For anyone interested in Goya in the New York area, by the way, I'd recommend a visit to the Hispanic Society, at 155th and Broadway. It's a gorgeous museum, and free.They have paintings by Goya, Velazquez, Zurbaran, El Greco, along with lots of objects, including this door-knocker (below).

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No evidence that Mitt Romney is polygamist

December 10, 2011

A hypothetical argument:

This is Mitt Romney's family, at least the part of his family he has made public. Romney, a devout Mormon, is running for president. The Mormon Church renounced the practice of polygamy in 1890, and although several thousand in Mormon splinter groups continue the practice, mainstream Mormons today are monogamous. There is no evidence that Romney has more than one wife, Ann, to whom he's been married since 1969. But since the issue of polygamy is so controversial and one of Romney's great grandfathers had five wives, would the Romneys both agree to submit to a battery of polygraph tests on the matter, and perhaps provide documents accounting for how much time Mitt Romney spent apart from Ann over the past 42 years? Would that be too much to ask? If they resist, would it be fair to ask: Why don't they come clean over the polygamy issue? What are the Romneys hiding?

Now of course the line of thinking here is unfair to the point of being monstruous. It's very similar to the "birther" campaign launched against President Obama. Given the state of U.S. politics, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this very discussion of Romney surface at some level of the campaign.

This argument came to mind while reading Thinking Fast and Slow, by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman. He explores tics and shortcuts of the human mind, what sort of evidence we rely on to make judgments and decisions (many of them foolish). One point he makes:

"A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth."

Naturally, these messages are more likely to sink in if they fit a person's tastes and opinions. If we hear something damning about someone we dislike, we tend to accept it without submitting it to rigorous analysis. So I guess that's a bit of good news for Romney and Obama: Most of the people who pay attention to the slander campaigns against them aren't likely to vote for them them in the first place.

As far as the Kahneman book goes, I find it interesting, but a bit repetitive. (I would remove at least one-third of the examples, perhaps putting them in notes at the end.) This overstuffing is a common problem with popular science books. Perhaps some of you feel the same way about mine (even though they're pretty skinny). The part that most interests me (and I haven't gotten to it yet) is how we mold our lives from our memories.

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Does living abroad make illegal immigrants more creative?

December 5, 2011

Lots of artists, including Paul Gauguin (above), found inspiration in foreign lands. And now I read research from Adam Galinsky's team at Northwestern's Kellogg School indicating that living abroad sparks creativity. The idea is that people have to expand their thinking to adapt to a different culture. More reason to take a college year abroad.

This research would indicate that those of us living in our home country, driving to work, the gym or the supermarket on automatic pilot, mastering the TV remote and having all of our important numbers on speed-dial, that we're not being challenged much to adapt. And yet many of us are surrounded by immigrants, and many of them--as certain cable personalities never tire of telling us--are here without the right papers. So it would seem to me that the immigrants should be, on average, more creative than the rest of us. Presumably society benefits from this.

And which immigrants are under the most pressure to adapt? I would say the illegal ones. They have to pretend they know things they don't. They have to avoid people and situations that could expose them. This requires enormous flexibility and creativity. If you go back far enough, all of us had ancestors who endured similar struggles (or worse) in one Darwinian wringer or another, and came out the stronger for it. I guess they will too.

One more question. Does living in a comfortable and modern English-speaking country like Canada or the UK enhance an American's creativity? Not to dispute the the "foreign-ness" of those places, but I'd bet they're not as challenging as, say, Afghanistan or New Guinea. In fact, I could think of a few U.S. locales that would feel culturally more foreign to me than Toronto or Vancouver.

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