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A couple of days ago, Steven Johnson provided a rousing defense of the death of “deep reading,” to borrow a phrase from Nicholas Carr’s new book.

Mr. Carr argues that the internet is destroying out ability to concentrate on things for long periods of time. This is a problem, because what has made our culture great (technologically speaking, at least), is the ability to concentrate for long periods of time on big ideas. Quantum gravity won’t solve itself, y’know.

Mr. Johnson’s rebuttal is simple:

“most of what we do during the day doesn’t require our full powers of concentration”

The problem with this argument, of course, is that it assumes that everything we do during the day is equally important. What if it’s precisely those things which require our full powers of concentration that are really important? In which case, arguing that the internet has made the unimportant things easier seems to be beside the point.

The second part of Mr. Johnson’s argument is that:

it cannot be denied that good ideas also emerge in networks.

Mr. Johnson cites history. Now, I cannot deny that good ideas have seemed to emerge from crowded places or networks – but it is one thing to say that they emerge from networks, and quite another to say they are invented by networks.

Networks are good at communication. A large, crowded network can – in theory – communicate and compare a large number of ideas. Thus, we would expect good ideas to become popularized by networks.

That does not mean we expect them to be created by such networks.

Indeed, Mr. Johnson’s example – that aims to falsify Mr. Carr’s thesis – demonstrates precisely this point:

the sophistication and nuance of media commentary has grown dramatically over the last 15 years. Mr. Carr’s original essay, published in The Atlantic — along with Clay Shirky’s more optimistic account, which led to the book “Cognitive Surplus” — were intensely discussed throughout the Web when they first appeared as articles, and both books appear to be generating the same level of analysis and engagement in long form.

The ideas established in the longer pieces are being communicated and judged by the networks.

New ideas of similar weight are not being created.

The blogosphere has faced the accusation of “preying upon” the news media for years; it discusses, shares, and links to information gathered by the news media, but does not provide information of a comparable value on its own. With a few exceptions – who are more unaffiliated journalists than bloggers – bloggers excel at communicating information, but not at creating content.

Of course, all of this is a moot. While I agree with Mr. Carr in general, Mr. Johnson raises a very good point:

The intellectual tools for assessing the media, once the province of academics and professional critics, are now far more accessible to the masses

Namely, that the internet has opened the doors for anyone to write something.

However, the growth of blogs does not mean that “deep thinking” is declining. It just means more people are publishing content.

It could be that some people are inclined to think deeply, and some people are not; in which case, the internet may not alter that proportion; it may just increase the material published by those who do not think deeply. Those who communicate more than they create, who share more than they evaluate.

In which case, the internet would be a very good thing. It would not detract from the proportion of people doing the deep thinking, but it would increase the size and scope of the networks which share, evaluate, and popularize the results of deep thinking.

Unfortunately, it’s rather hard to tell which is the case..

Last year, a blog at Harvard Business Review talked about “knowledge flows vs. stocks.”

The idea, briefly, is:

1. Knowledge creation and transfer is happening faster and faster.
2. Stocks of knowledge are outdated faster than they can be capitalized upon.
3. Therefore, the flow is where the value is.
4. But to have access to the flow, you have to participate (which, among other things, means you have to be in geographical proximity).

I think this is a compelling way of looking at the world. It’s true (in some industries) that knowledge of how to do things is progressing faster than that knowledge can be “locked in place” by the organization.

If the organization attempts to control the knowledge – or its flow – it will fail; both because the flow cannot be controlled (by any individual), and because attempting to control it will introduce friction, making the organization(‘s employees) fall behind the cutting edge of the flow – and thus behind where they need to be.

However, I think the analysis is misleading – because it’s incomplete; the domain of analysis is too limited.

What constitutes a knowledge flow is a transaction – a series of transactions – of knowledge between people. Knowledge is unusual because it’s a non-rival good; therefore, new knowledge is highly valued, where old knowledge has little value (assuming no artificial controls on knowledge, e.g. patents).

A “stock of knowledge” is analogous to capital, which you could trade in the knowledge flows. However, because knowledge is non-rival, a knowledge stack shared is no longer a competitive advantage (everyone can use it).

So, while the more knowledge you have (the larger your “stock”) the more value you can add to the knowledge flows, the more you have to lose.

The people who have something to gain from a knowledge-flow market are those who create knowledge, not those who have accumulated knowledge. Think universities, not libraries.

Of course, it may be necessary to have a large knowledge stock to be able to create valuable knowledge (it’s almost guaranteed).

So having a knowledge stock becomes a necessary prerequisite to entering the knowledge flow economy. But creating more knowledge is the way to survive in the knowledge community.

Now, companies with knowledge stocks typically fail to capitalize upon them in time. If you have a stock of knowledge larger than what is publically available, and a knowledge flow market starts outside of your organization, you have no reason to join it (sacrificing the value of your knowledge stock). But the entire purpose of a knowledge-flow market is to increase the volume, increase the innovation – so, essentially by definition, they will devote more resources to creating more knowledge faster. Thus, over time the value of the knowledge stock will decline in comparative value – as the accumulated knowledge in the flow market catches up, then eventually overtakes it. .

(Yes, you can prevent this by investing in knowledge creating to “out-compete” with the knowledge flow economy. Good luck justifying that to stock brokers, though).

The article makes the point that you can’t participate without contributing knowledge. This is true, but it’s misleading (though accurate) to talk about the “free rider problem.” Instead, think of the flow as transactions – and a transaction cannot occur unless both parties agree. If you don’t offer anything, then you don’t get anything.

The currency is just different – it’s knowledge, not money.

Now, the larger picture: This is only possible if the cost of transferring knowledge is very low (thanks, Internet).

If the cost of transferring knowledge is high, then the value is not in knowledge creation, it’s in knowledge aggregation. An aggregation of knowledge is a “stock” of knowledge. As the cost of knowledge communication, the value of the aggregation diminishes because the cost of aggregating also drops.

Now, in some industries, you can also apply technology to perform automatic aggregation and organization of knowledge (such as Google, with the internet). This is not the case with all knowledge, of course.

The governing principle, then, is cost. If the cost of knowledge communication is high, then aggregation is expensive – and therefore value. If it’s low, then the expensive component is the knowledge creation – so that’s valuable.

This explains the distinction the authors make between “tacit” and “explicit” knowledge (which they do, actually, just not clearly). Tacit knowledge requires experience, education, etc. This makes it hard to transfer. But it’s actually pretty easy to get: there may not be many opportunities to get the right experience, but you rarely have to pay for it. The cost of education is likewise dropping (more and more info available online).

In contrast, explicit knowledge is easy to transfer but hard to make. You can go and look at info from the Human Genome Project. But it was damn expensive to get.

The framework of knowledge flow, stock, tacit and explicit knowledge – is not changing. The economics, the logic underlying the system, is remaining constant. What is changing are the value – and on a case by case basis. Yes, the world is different; but the more things change, the more they stay the same.

As a plug, the authors bypass one of problems that cheap knowledge communication introduces: discrimination. A problem that the “knowledge explosion” introduces is the explosion of junk knowledge. So, which knowledge is more valuable than other knowledge? If knowledge is being created so quickly, how to you determine which knowledge to use?

It’s the new version of the aggregation problem: knowing what knowledge to use. You only get one chance.

It’s this question which drove me to my self-determined major.

Recently, I’ve been reading a lot about the psychology of error. It’s interesting that quite a few journalists are publishing books that amount to little more than a summary of the psychological research. A pretty good summary of the very basics are provided in Joseph Hallinan’s Why We Make Mistakes (change blindness, preference for additional layers of explanation, confirmation bias, memory distortion to reduce cognitive dissonance, framing & schemas, quite a bit more).

Yesterday, I read a book which helped me connect the dots between the psychology and the business application. The book, Simplicity, was published a decade ago advocating for a new “simpler” organizational style. By “simplicity,” they meant the practice of focusing on the important stuff and ignoring the unimportant stuff.

The premise (though unstated) was simple: people make mistakes. To reduce the number of mistakes people make, reduce the number of choices they have. Fewer choices  – simplicity – leads to greater clarity, effectiveness, organizational speed, etc.

Another book I read yesterday, The Art of Woo, took a related approach. Because people are bad at making reasonable decisions – in fact, of the five factors people use to make decisions, one is “rationality” – you can, through a strategic application of psychology, persuade people.

And – much more importantly – through a failure to work with human psychology, people can fail to make good decisions. They cite a substantial number of examples of companies failing to shift in response to the market because the people advocating for the shifts simply couldn’t manage the “soft” or “non-rational” aspects – the persuasion.

The take-away is pretty simple: the more you ask people to do (particularly when what they should be doing is unclear, they don’t have enough time to understand the issues, the incentive scheme rewards a byproduct of good performance and not actual good performance, etc), the more they make mistakes.

The biggest casualties are executives, who are asked to navigate an unstructured environment, accomplish a great deal with relatively little guidance, and have a vast array of options of what to do – with little indication with is better until after the fact. Worse still, they are typically promoted or moved away before the long-term consequences of the changes they made impact the organization; making it impossible for them to really learn what works and what doesn’t. (It’s no wonder so much business knowledge seems to reduce to simplistic analogies with little indication of how applicable they are to the current situation).

The shift in my thinking is simple: the focus should not be on making the organization do more. It should be focused on making the people do less – to do a few things very well, and not get bogged down in useless details and meetings which increase the probability that people will make mistakes. The damage from someone making a serious mistake is almost certainly larger than the benefit a company could get from said person doing 10% more.

Or: how do you make the organization people-proof? How do you make it easy for people to work, easy for them to learn what is successful, give them accurate feedback, etc? How do you get people to concentrate on the really important things, and ignore the unimportant things?