Data is Not Greater. Part 2.

There was a book review in the cheery-neo-fascist Wall Street Journal over the weekend that picks up on my post from yesterday and I think, is well-worth reading. Because the Journal has a paywall that is harder to violate than a Pennsylvania prison, I'll paste the article at the end of this post. 

I believe in supporting journalism and paying for subscriptions. But I'll gladly steal from the Murdoch family. I wouldn't mind if they were somehow tortured like Prometheus bound. That would make me smile and gloat like one of their so-called newscasters. However since Rupert can't be chained to a rock to have his gizzards eaten each day, I'll have to content myself  with pirating his content and making it available.

Yesterday, I wrote a post about athletes giving up their data-driven running watches because the mania around data was destroying their love of their sport. Today, I'm writing a post about a book called "Optimal Illusions." 

To my dumb eyes, it makes at least four points.

One: We should beware the "deification of data."

Two: Optimization is a mathematical procedure purported to be rigorously objective and free of biases. But the mathematical analysis is often divorced from reality. 

Three:  Systems only work fantastically, when everything’s working fantastically.

Most important,

Four: The basic skills needed to manipulate large datasets are taught everywhere today, but few students receive much grounding in the limitations of the data or the ethical implications of their work.

I remember working on a direct marketing campaign thirty years ago for a luxury German car. The data the company received from consumers presupposed that car-buyers based their buying decisions based on one of five qualities: value, safety, performance, comfort and luxury. Their direct responses were tailored based on which single attribute the customer had chosen.

I think a lot of "analytics," even today, is similarly marked by a lack of sophistication. My sense is that buying decisions are made by a complex and ever-changing web of factors. Trying to identify or isolate those factors, or rank them, or tailor marketing to them is all-but futile.

If I were to fill out a survey, I'd answer that I like tall blonde women. But I've been married to a short brunette for nearly 40 years. In fact, my head's been often turned by a variety of shapes, sizes and hues. That doesn't make me a letch, or non-discriminating. It makes me human. 

I'm not out of step with the majority of data, the data is out of step with the majority of humans.

Finally, I'm not anti-data.

I'm anti the "deification of data."

One of my favorite writers, Mark Harris once said, "the only hero is the man without heroes."

In other words, don't wholly put your trust in anything or anyone. Everything and everyone, even the most exalted have flaws. That's even true for me.

Or so I'm told.

----

‘Optimal Illusions’ 

Review: Efficient to a Fault

A mathematician makes the case that our obsession with data and algorithms leads us to miss the bigger picture.

By 

Marc Levinson

Sept. 17, 2023 2:46 pm ET

PHOTO: ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

The logistics business is a creature of mathematics. Algorithms dictate the most efficient plan for unloading boxes from a container ship, stacking them in a freight yard, managing the truck fleets that transport them to distribution centers and delivering their contents to millions of households. Yet when international trade in goods surged during the Covid-19 pandemic, all those algorithms failed to keep supply chains from becoming seriously tangled. Their dictates, it seems, were no longer optimal.

In “Optimal Illusions,” mathematician Coco Krumme explores why the quest for the best so often falls short. The hidden assumption behind optimization, she notes, is that all relevant variables can be identified and accounted for in order to achieve the ideal outcome. Yet unknowns and uncertainties can upend the most carefully laid plans. “Optimization was invented, over time, with the idea of making a system, or a society, more perfect,” she writes. But “we often see the opposite happening.”

Optimization, Ms. Krumme asserts, has arisen from three shifts in how humans conceive of the world. The first shift is an increasingly atomized understanding that leads us to see individuals as assemblages of tiny bits of data. The second is a tendency toward greater abstraction, especially in computer modeling. The third is automation, which changes scale, devaluing the local and the particular. Over time, Ms. Krumme contends, these shifts have led us to understand reality in new ways—and to believe that we can perfect it.

Optimal Illusions: The False Promise of Optimization

By Coco Krumme

Riverhead Books

272 pages

drastically reduced the number of people facing starvation. Eventually, however, it had unforeseen consequences, such as the displacement of diversified family farms by bigger operations growing a single crop with large doses of fertilizers and herbicides.

“The deification of efficiency cast aside traditional methods of letting soil rest and regenerate,” Ms. Krumme writes. “Its focus on increasing yields divorced agriculture from farmers, and farmers from land and place.” Rural communities eroded. Small processors died out. And the surviving farmers, while more prosperous most of the time, became more vulnerable to price swings because their incomes depended on the value of a single crop.

Optimization, Ms. Krumme says, also lies behind the breakdown of the electric grid in Texas during the frigid winter of 2021. The grid sits atop a mountain of algorithms that project power demand, forecast the output of individual generating plants, and allocate energy based on the prices customers and suppliers are willing to pay and receive. “It’s a system optimized to work fantastically, when everything’s working fantastically,” she observes.

But optimizing investment had squeezed out excess generating and transmission capacity, while the models hadn’t accounted for a prolonged spell of sub-freezing temperatures. When customers turned up the heat, the electricity they counted on was to be had only at extortionate prices, if at all. What was optimal in certain circumstances turned out to be suboptimal when the weather changed.

What’s the problem? Optimization is a mathematical procedure purported to be rigorously objective and free of biases. The basic concepts are taught in every calculus class. A simple computer program can do the heavy lifting. “We start off with what we imagine is a blank slate,” Ms. Krumme writes. “We throw in piles of data and let the computer code spit out the ‘best.’ ”

But the mathematical analysis is often divorced from reality. Constraints may be ignored, misunderstood or forgotten. The specific knowledge possessed by individuals who know the idiosyncrasies of a machine or a market is disregarded. And the slate on which a model is built may not be blank at all. While genetically modified crops may be optimal in terms of tons per acre of farmland, how does one weigh the loss to growers who wish to continue planting traditional varieties but cannot do so when the local farm co-op no longer wants to purchase and store what they’ve grown?

Moreover, optimization cannot readily be undone. The Colorado River Compact of 1922 optimized the distribution of water based on the flows and consumption patterns that prevailed at the time, but it became far from optimal once average precipitation declined, Mexico negotiated a share of the river’s flow, and population growth in places like Los Angeles and Las Vegas vastly increased the demand for water.

Ms. Krumme is aware that optimization techniques have brought enormous benefits. Her complaint is that they have also “come with trade-offs: the loss of slack or downtime, the abstracting away of place and particulars.” They have “led to a loss of human scale, making events like the Texas-grid breakdown more frequent.” One reason why, she laments, is that over time the underlying assumptions behind algorithms fade into obscurity, and certain basic questions are no longer asked.

At times, Ms. Krumme veers toward the romantic, longing for a simpler past. Some readers may find her jabs at “efficiency’s overreach” off-putting. Nonetheless, her warning about quantitative excess deserves attention. The basic mathematical and computer skills needed to manipulate large datasets are taught everywhere today, but few of the students who learn these skills receive much grounding in the limitations of the data they are analyzing or the ethical implications of their work. Ms. Krumme’s provocative, brisk and refreshingly nontechnical book offers an important corrective.

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Data is Not Greater. Part 1.

Take a walk to Central Park one sunny weekend and you'll see thousands of runners and bikers of all shapes and sizes, of all different speeds and oxygen capacities, and most of them are strapped to some sort of device that measures about 93 different functions of what they're doing.

Likewise, watch sports on TV, or read an article on sports, and these days it seems like you're dealing more with a data dump than a contest or game.

When I was a boy playing baseball, you knew when you or someone else crushed a ball. You knew by the very sound of ash meeting horsehide.

You knew when someone had a homerun swing. You knew when a pitcher was throwing aspirins.

Today, we have data to quantify all those observations. We know the exit velocity of a ball off a bat. We know the angle of ascent of every batted ball. We know the miles per hour and spin rate of every pitch thrown. 

Has the game improved? Has performance improved? Is viewing or playing more fun? 

Are we better at it?

Just now, I read an article in The New York Times about track stars, perhaps the most-quantified of athletes, ditching their digital tracking devices and just running.

Some of the athletes interviewed in the Times' article said things like: 

“The runs just felt so much longer. That was one of my main problems with it. I wasn’t enjoying myself or looking around. Instead, I was kind of looking at the watch every quarter-mile to see how much longer I had left.”

Or

“I hated that every run I went on, I felt like I had to check my pace and my distance and whatever else. So I just decided that I was going to lay off it for a while...”

Or

“There’s something nice about slowing down and writing it by hand that I find almost endearing. It’s taken a while for me to be less neurotic, but it’s liberating.”

I think there's a larger point here.

I think in running, in much of sports, and certainly in advertising and marketing data has become not merely a tool--like a rung on a ladder--but a Holy banner. We've rallied around the shibboleth of data like medieval Crusaders rallied behind flags that proclaimed "IN HOC SIGNO VINCES." "In this sign, we will conquer."

When creeds are followed as the one true way, whether they're religions or data analytics--people regard them as the truth, no matter what. Just as slaughtering non-Christians and subjugating whole continents was encouraged and endorsed by the sign of the Cross, insulting and badly crafted work is encouraged and endorsed by the stamp of data analytics. 

"It's boring but the data says it works."

"Being followed by ads annoys people, but it works."

"Stealing peoples' data for surveillance purposes is unethical and just wrong and possibly illegal, but it works."

A millennia ago we might have ratified dumb behaviors because they were done under the aegis of certain religious dogma, today we do the same because they're ratified by certain quasi-data-verified dogma.

But let's go back to the quotations above and pull some small bits from them--to make a point.

“I wasn’t enjoying myself or looking around." 

“I hated that every run I went on”

“There’s something nice about slowing down and writing it by hand that I find almost endearing.”

In other words, for too long too many too often have been following logic, not common sense. Or we stopped thinking and started obeying.

We've used the allegedly omnipotent veracity of data to legitimatize the propagation of work that's not only boring, it's also insulting.

Holding Companies (Churches) and their Priests (CEOs) have bought data company after data company like clerical administrations incorporated diocese after diocese to spread their "truth."

In their wake, they've destroyed, despoiled and denigrated the values they were founded to uphold.

I know that's a lot to take away from an article about ditching your running watch. But that's what happens when as a child you were kicked in the head by a horse.

Take it from me, that hurts. 

At least that's what I remember.

Lord, I Was Born a Ramblin' Man.

I haven't traveled much in my life. 

As a boy, while friends would bike through Europe during the summers, or hitchhike around the country looking for women and marijuana, I was playing baseball.

I saw the world via the narrow aperture afforded by two white chalk lines that stretched from home (appropriately enough) to the left and right field foul poles. There's not much but confines within the friendly confines.

In my day, we didn't take six years to graduate from a four-year-college. We didn't take a semester in Ulan Bator. We were programmed to want out, quickly, of any place we were in.

Later, I got married young, had kids young, and was financially-stretched young. My wife and I raised kids in the city and scrounged to send them to the city's best private schools. Again, no travel for me.

Finally, when I was doing well in my career, I never much liked the Pytka-derived shooting junkets. While other agency people flew around the world, I avoided those opportunities, preferring to do what I do best. I chose my craft over the craft table.

Today, at 65, and working for myself, I'm still not traveling. I don't get paid when I don't work. And while I'd like to visit Machu Pichu or Prague or St. Petersburg or Jutland, I choose work and pay over play.

However, all is not lost.

I find time--almost like I am a monk--for at least an hour of silent devotion every day. I call it my restorative niche. That's when I travel the world and fly through time and space and various cognitive spheres through the reading I do.

While I have a field or two of moderate expertise, my reading is peripatetic. When I see a review that seems interesting in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist or The Washington Post, I usually make a PDF of it. Then I usually order the book on Amazon. I finally get around to reading about one in five of the books I order. (That isn't wasting money. It's not profligate. You have to try a lot of things to succeed at a few things.)

Last night, for instance, I was in the West African nation of Ghana, following the exploits of one of the great fraudsters of all-time Ackah Blay-Miezah, as he bilked thousands of people through the Oman Ghana Trust Fund. Blay-Miezah makes Elizabeth Holmes or Sam Bankman-Fried look like your Uncle Phil who does magic tricks.

You can order the book here (unlike Rich Siegel, I won't get a cut of the proceeds from Amazon) and read The New York Times' review here.

--

It's hard to live in what used to be America and not hear, every fifteen minutes or so, something like "How can people still support Donald Trump," or worse, "How can 55-percent of the country believe this man?"

Those are questions that scare the shit out of the remaining 45-percent of the country. 

Last night, reading Anansi's Gold, I tripped upon a mention of a 1956 anthropological study called "When Prophecy Fails." You can buy it here.

Here's what Yepoka Yeebo wrote about the book:

In ...When Prophecy Fails, three scholars monitored the members of a cult whose leader had predicted the end of the world— and how they coped when it didn’t happen. 

"To the observers’ surprise, the cult members’ belief did not disappear when the apocalypse failed to arrive. Instead their belief became stronger. As one put it: “I’ve had to go a long way. I’ve given up just about everything. I’ve cut every tie: I’ve burned every bridge. I’ve turned my back on the world. I can’t afford to doubt. I have to believe. And there isn’t any other truth . . . I can’t afford to doubt. I won’t doubt even if we have to make an announcement to the press tomorrow and admit we were wrong.

"When the day of the apocalypse passed, and the world kept on spinning, the cult members were remarkably insouciant: “Well, all right. Suppose they gave us a wrong date,” one said. “Let’s suppose it happens next year or two years or three or four years from now . . . All I know is that the plan has never gone astray. We have never had a plan changed.” 

My point in all this is both simple and two-fold. 

One, it explains the belief in shams and charlatans and Trumpism. You're in too deep to say you were an idiot.

And two, it explains to some measure the stupidity of our business. The chasing after of the latest shiny object and the failure to recant when an obvious mistake is made.

The proclamations that are delivered but never verified. "Blank is dead. Blank will change everything." From ChatGPT to programmatic to the Metaverse to Barbie.

No one will ever say they miscalculated when they stopped brand advertising and product differentiation and ran instead thumbnail-sized banner ads that say nothing.

No one will ever say people don't want relationships with brands or to have conversations with brands. And we were wrong about that.

No one will ever say they were wrong when proclaimed Facebook likes were the success calculus of our advertising.

No one will ever say they were wrong when they decided to stop paying older people and thousands of years of experience and their expertise were Stalin-like purged from our industry. And replaced with nothing comparable.

No one will ever say, "the open plan office is a crock of shit. It does nothing but make people not want to come in. It's noisy. Partners can't work together. And it's wholly unproductive. Also, people are twice as often sick and every legitimate study says how dumb this is."

No. As Chico once said, "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"

Or,

"I can’t afford to doubt. I have to believe. And there isn’t any other truth . . . I can’t afford to doubt. I won’t doubt even if we have to make an announcement to the press tomorrow and admit we were wrong."

Next time your holding company says something publicly, read it in this light.

When you're done gagging, you'll understand that you don't have to travel to learn about the world.

Procrustes.

I saw this on Thursday and it got me thinking.

Hegarty's line isn't new--I'd seen it before. But just as Heraclitus said we can't step into the same river twice, the meaning of things changes depending on what's happening when we see them.

Of late, without even really thinking about the line above, I've been saying something similar. 

When people ask me how GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company gets its business, I usually answer like this:

"I get 50% from current clients, 50% from referrals and 50% from the ads I write for GeorgeCo. on LinkedIn."

People laugh. 

They get it.

Touch wood, I'm busy.

Just moments ago, I had a bit of a set-to with my wife. Though we have a fair-sized New York City apartment, husbands and wives aren't meant to share a living space and a working space with each other. Certainly, not for 140 out of 168 hours a week.

Like the continents were better off drifting apart and getting some distance from each other, I think that applies to couples too. Even though we spend the day working in separate rooms, we're still too proximate.

What's hard to fathom for many people is how all-consuming work and running your own business can be. 

The work of my business is a full-time job--writing ads, etc., for clients. Running my business is a full-time job--meetings, getting clients, setting my rates, getting paid. And promoting my business is a full-time job--writing GeorgeCo. ads. Writing this blog. Putting myself in front of people--to the head of the line.

50%. 50%. 50%.

It's hard, I think, for people to understand what it takes to make a career work--to make it last until you're ready to say 'I've had enough.'

Years ago I read something about a giant tech firm that classified its employees as finders, minders or grinders. 

Either they find business, they manage business, or they do the work that keeps the business.

I never bought into that demarcation because good people no matter what they're level are always a combination of all three. They're always finding. They're always minding. They're always grinding.

To push you into one slot alone is Procrustean. We need to find our own way. And build our jobs and our lives around that way. It's hard. But it's a damn sight better than conforming.

Procrustes, as I understand him, was a villain who lived in the mountains above Athens. If you were traveling in his neighborhood and needed a place to sleep, he'd offer what became known as the Procrustean bed.

Most jobs are Procrustean beds.

If you were too tall for Procrustes' bed, while you were asleep, he'd sidle over and cut off the parts of you that were hanging over. If you were too small, he'd stretch you until you fit.

Either way, you were tortured to death. 

And you think you have sleep issues.

That's it for today.

Except to wonder which holding company Procrustes was bought out by.

 

A Giant Sucking Sound.

Years and years and years ago an agency I worked at was flying very high, maybe the highest of any agency I ever worked at. Including when I worked at R\GA and Lowe, which before it was merged into obsolescence was one of the world's top agencies.

This agency, unfortunately no longer recognizable, had done a series of spots featuring Jerry Seinfeld. From what I heard--I was nowhere near these spots--the creatives hit it off with Seinfeld and somehow he showed up at the agency Holiday part and did twenty-minutes or so of standup.

Seinfeld really only told one joke. He said he liked advertising because you can basically boil work down two bits of feedback. 

The work is either good. 
Or it sucks.

That was 25 years ago. Not even a blink of time in terms of the history of humans on our benighted planet. But during those 25 years, as an industry, we've derived about 2,500 ways to ignore the obvious.

As an industry, we seem to believe when people see a spot, whatever device they see it on, they don't sort it as Seinfeld observed at that Holiday party back in the early 2000s. They don't say "that's good" or "that sucks." Today, we're way more sophisticated than that and people care and pay much more attention to advertising.

When they're watching TV at night, tired after a long day, maybe stressed out, maybe angry, maybe feeling that 21st-century sense of Marxist alienation, despite all the pressures of the world, they're really paying attention to commercial messages. So consumers, according to the way the ad industry sees them, must view TV and say things like:

"Really great use of data..."

"Wow, generative AI wrote a beautiful piece of all things to all people copy."

"What gorgeous cinematography."

"Thank goodness that Buick will be there on my journey and has three rows of seats."

"Hands-free driving. What a piece of work is man!"

"They must really have a terrific content studio."

"They have amazing virtual activations. I can't wait to see what they do on the metaverse."

When I go online or watch TV, about 99-percent of all messages are as dull as a boarding house steak-knife. For the life of me, I can't see how agencies or clients think anyone will notice these ads, much less get something of value from them. Yet they run them over and over again.

As an industry, it appears this is what we value, this is what we believe in, this is what we do, this is what we think works. Because this is what we make, award, boast about.

And then we wonder why we aren't valued by clients.

Whatever framework you go by, Seinfeld's "Good/Suck," the traditional A.I.D.A. (attention/interest/desire/action) or Trott's Impact/Communication/Persuasion--most ads fail abysmally.

They have no stopping power.

They make no promise.

They don't differentiate.

They don't persuade.

To quote Macbeth...

....it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

i.e. It sucks.

Hi, Hierarchy.

Once a week for about the last forty years I've spent a forty-five-minute hour with someone much wiser than myself.

Most of us have creative directors at work. Good creative directors have some distance away from the work problems we have to solve. That lets them bring a perspective you might not think of. 

Steve Simpson, the former CCO of Ogilvy, was amazing at that. 

I would present a manifesto to him. A film, a dozen commercials, twenty print ads, a speech delivered by a CEO or a kid's book explaining Quantum computing. In twelve minutes he'd walk over to my desk with his tiny extra-fine-point fountain pen markings in my document.

Every so often, he would "fix" some small something I didn't even know was broken. 

"How'd you do that?" I'd ask. "I couldn't make it work."

"You had it," he'd answer. "You just didn't have the distance to see it."

Like I said, when you have a good work creative director, you're lucky. When you have a good LIFE creative director, you're even luckier. 

You have someone with distance.

Back in 1996, I got a freelance job writing a website for a major corporation via a major agency. Not only had I never written a website before, I had barely even been online. It was that long ago.

So, when faced with this assignment, I was nervous.

My life creative director said something to me that I think about all the time. "The problem with the internet," he said, "is that there's no hierarchy. Everything just is and everything is equal."

You see this every day, even if you don't notice it. All these articles in The Times were within two-inches of each other online.

I'll probably get some flak for this. But lack of hierarchy is one of the issues of our world today. Dancing with the Stars to many people is more pressing than the worldwide systems failure. They're butting up against each other. How are we supposed to know which is more important?

One way I personally combat lack of hierarchy is to surround myself with hierarchy I can understand. That's why I like books. And why I especially like when the great publisher Taschen has a sale like they did a few weeks ago. 

While there's a randomness to what I ordered, there's an order to searching what I randomly chose. I ordered all this and got it delivered to my door for about $120. 

As more and more clients are abandoning the practice of appointing Agencies of Records, more and more agencies like GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company have an unfair advantage.

Purposefully small agencies like my own don't follow the hodgepodge mayhemmy way of modern Un-think. We don't rely on AI or the same standard stimulus as everyone else to excite us, to learn. We play a sort of "can you top this" with a whole wide world, not just the world wide web, as stimulation.

Most important, we aren't reading business books to learn about business. We're reading books about life and applying them to business. We aren't learning from decks and white papers. We're learning from the subway, from people, from <er> empathy.

We also have the freedom and the finances to do something the giant $10 billion market cap holding companies can't do. We can buy books. We can go for a walk. We can visit a museum. We can talk to people outside of our field and hire them because they're different. We can spend $120 on books without going through six weeks of approval and six more weeks of Concur-derived reimbursement.

In other words, we have a hierarchy. 

We put creativity first.