crytical

Many decades ago, I spent what seemed like a great deal of time under a scorching sun, watching groups of sweaty soldiers as they solved a problem. I was doing my national service in the Israeli army at the time. I had completed an undergraduate degree in psychology, and was assigned to the army’s psychology branch, where one of my duties was to help evaluate candidates for officer training. We used methods that had been developed by the British army in the second world war.
One test, called the “leaderless group challenge”, was conducted on an obstacle field. Eight candidates, strangers to one another, were instructed to lift a long log from the ground and carry it to a wall about six feet high. The entire group had to get to the other side of the wall without the log touching either the ground or the wall, and without anyone touching the wall. If any of these things happened, they had to declare it and start again.
There was more than one way to solve the problem. A common solution was for the team to send several men to the other side by crawling over the log as it was held at an angle, like a giant fishing rod, by other members of the group. Or else some soldiers would climb on to someone’s shoulders and jump across. The last man would then have to jump up at the pole, held up at an angle by the rest of the group, shin his way along its length as the others kept him and the pole suspended in the air, and leap safely to the other side. Failure was common at this point, which required them to start all over again.
As a colleague and I monitored the exercise, we made a note of who took charge, who tried to lead but was rebuffed, how cooperative each soldier was in contributing to the group effort. We saw who seemed to be stubborn, submissive, arrogant, patient, hot-tempered, persistent, or a quitter.
We sometimes saw competitive spite when someone whose idea had been rejected by the group no longer worked very hard. And we saw reactions to crisis: who berated a comrade whose mistake had caused the whole group to fail, who stepped forward to lead when the exhausted team had to start over. Under the stress of the event, we felt, each man’s true nature revealed itself.
After watching the candidates make several attempts, we had to summarise our impressions of soldiers’ leadership abilities and determine, with a score, who should be eligible for officer training. The task was not difficult, because we felt we had already seen each soldier’s leadership skills.
Some of the men had looked like strong leaders, others had seemed like wimps or arrogant fools, others mediocre but not hopeless. Quite a few looked so weak that we ruled them out as candidates for officer rank. When our multiple observations of each candidate converged on a coherent story, we were confident in our evaluations and felt that what we had seen pointed to the future. The soldier who took over when the group was in trouble and led the team over the wall was a leader at that moment. The obvious best guess about how he would do in training, or in combat, was that he would be as effective then as he had been at the wall. Any other prediction seemed inconsistent with the evidence before our eyes.
Because our impressions of how well each soldier had performed were generally coherent and clear, our formal predictions were just as definite. We rarely experienced doubts or formed conflicting impressions. We were quite willing to declare: “This one will never make it,” “That fellow is mediocre, but he should do OK,” or “He will be a star.” We felt no need to question our forecasts, moderate them, or equivocate. If challenged, however, we were prepared to admit: “But of course anything could happen.”
We were willing to make that admission because, despite our definite impressions about individual candidates, we knew with certainty that our forecasts were largely useless. The evidence was overwhelming. Every few months we had a feedback session in which we learned how the cadets were doing at the officer training school and could compare our assessments against the opinions of commanders who had been monitoring them for some time. The story was always the same: our ability to predict performance at the school was negligible. Our forecasts were not much better than blind guesses.

We were downcast for a while after receiving the discouraging news. But this was the army. Useful or not, there was a routine to be followed and orders to be obeyed. Another batch of candidates arrived the next day. We took them to the obstacle field, we faced them with the wall, they lifted the log, and within a few minutes we saw their true natures revealed, as clearly as before. The dismal truth about the quality of our predictions had no effect whatsoever on how we evaluated candidates and very little effect on the confidence we felt in our judgments and predictions.
What happened was remarkable. The evidence of our previous failure should have shaken our confidence in our judgments of the candidates, but it did not. It should also have caused us to moderate our predictions, but it did not. We knew as a general fact that our predictions were little better than random guesses, but we continued to feel and act as if each of our specific predictions was valid. I had discovered my first cognitive illusion.
Looking back, the most striking part of the story is that our knowledge of the general rule that we could not predict had no effect on our confidence in individual cases. We were reluctant to infer the particular from the general. Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct. Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.
In 1984, my collaborator Amos Tversky and I, and our friend Richard Thaler, now a guru of behavioural economics and co-originator of “nudge” theory, visited a Wall Street firm. Our host, a senior investment manager, had invited us to discuss the role of judgment biases in investing. I knew so little about finance that I did not even know what to ask him, but I remember one exchange. “When you sell a stock,” I asked, “who buys it?” He answered with a wave in the vague direction of the window, indicating that he expected the buyer to be someone else very much like him. That was odd: what made one person buy and the other sell? Most of the buyers and sellers know that they have the same information; they exchange the stocks primarily because they have different opinions. The buyers think the price is too low and likely to rise, while the sellers think the price is high and likely to drop. The puzzle is why buyers and sellers alike think the current price is wrong. What makes them believe they know more about what the price should be than the market does? For most of them, that belief is an illusion.
Most people in the investment business have read Burton Malkiel’s wonderful book A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Malkiel’s central idea is that a stock’s price incorporates all the available knowledge about the value of the company and the best predictions about the future of the stock. If some people believe that the price of a stock will be higher tomorrow, they will buy more of it today.
This, in turn, will cause its price to rise. If all assets in a market are correctly priced, no one can expect either to gain or to lose by trading. Perfect prices leave no scope for cleverness, but they also protect fools from their own folly. We now know, however, that the theory is not quite right. Many individual investors lose consistently by trading. The first demonstration of this startling conclusion was collected by Terry Odean, a finance professor at University of California Berkeley who was once my student.
Odean began by studying the trading records of 10,000 brokerage accounts of individual investors spanning a seven-year period. He was able to analyse every transaction the investors executed through that firm, nearly 163,000 trades. This rich set of data allowed Odean to identify all instances in which an investor sold some of his holdings in one stock and soon afterward bought another stock. By these actions the investor revealed that he (most of the investors were men) had a definite idea about the future of the two stocks: he expected the stock that he chose to buy to do better than the stock he chose to sell.
To determine whether those ideas were well founded, Odean compared the returns of the two stocks over the course of one year after the transaction. The results were unequivocally bad. On average, the shares that individual traders sold did better than those they bought, by a very substantial margin: 3.2 percentage points per year, above and beyond the significant costs of executing the two trades.
It is important to remember that this is a statement about averages: some individuals did much better, others did much worse. However, it is clear that for the large majority of individual investors, taking a shower and doing nothing would have been a better policy than implementing the ideas that came to their minds. Later research by Odean and his colleague Brad Barber supported this conclusion. In a paper titled “Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth” they showed that, on average, the most active traders had the poorest results, while the investors who traded the least earned the highest returns. In another paper, titled “Boys Will Be Boys“, they showed that men acted on their useless ideas significantly more often than women, and that as a result women achieved better investment results than men.
Of course, there is always someone on the other side of each transaction; in general, it’s financial institutions and professional investors, ready to take advantage of the mistakes that individual traders make in choosing a stock to sell and another stock to buy. Further research by Barber and Odean has shed light on these mistakes. Individual investors like to lock in their gains by selling “winners”, stocks that have appreciated since they were purchased, and they hang on to their losers. Unfortunately for them, recent winners tend to do better than recent losers in the short run, so individuals sell the wrong stocks. They also buy the wrong stocks.
Few stock pickers, if any, have the skill needed to beat the market consistently, year after year. Professional investors, including fund managers, fail a basic test of skill: persistent achievement. The diagnostic for the existence of any skill is the consistency of individual differences in achievement. The logic is simple: if individual differences in any one year are due entirely to luck, the ranking of investors and funds will vary erratically and the year-to-year correlation will be zero. Where there is skill, however, the rankings will be more stable. The persistence of individual differences is the measure by which we confirm the existence of skill among car salespeople, orthodontists or golfers.
Mutual funds are run by highly experienced and hardworking professionals who buy and sell stocks to achieve the best possible results for their clients. Nevertheless, the evidence from more than 50 years of research is conclusive: for a large majority of fund managers, the selection of stocks is more like rolling dice than like playing poker. Typically at least two out of every three mutual funds underperform the overall market in any given year.
More important, the year-to-year correlation between the outcomes of mutual funds is very small, barely higher than zero. The successful funds in any given year are mostly lucky; they have a good roll of the dice. There is general agreement among researchers that nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not – and few of them do – are playing a game of chance.
The subjective experience of traders is that they are making sensible educated guesses in a situation of great uncertainty. In highly efficient markets, however, educated guesses are no more accurate than blind guesses.
Some years ago I had an unusual opportunity to examine the illusion of financial skill up close. I had been invited to speak to a group of investment advisers in a firm that provided financial advice and other services to very wealthy clients. I asked for some data to prepare my presentation and was granted a small treasure: a spreadsheet summarising the investment outcomes of some 25 anonymous wealth advisers, for each of eight consecutive years. Each adviser’s score for each year was his (most of them were men) main determinant of his year-end bonus. It was a simple matter to rank the advisers by their performance in each year and to determine whether there were persistent differences in skill among them and whether the same advisers consistently achieved better returns for their clients year after year.

To answer the question, I computed correlation coefficients between the rankings in each pair of years: year 1 with year 2, year 1 with year 3, and so on up through year 7 with year 8. That yielded 28 correlation coefficients, one for each pair of years. I knew the theory and was prepared to find weak evidence of persistence of skill. Still, I was surprised to find that the average of the 28 correlations was 0.01. In other words, zero. The consistent correlations that would indicate differences in skill were not to be found. The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.
No one in the firm seemed to be aware of the nature of the game that its stock pickers were playing. The advisers themselves felt they were competent professionals doing a serious job, and their superiors agreed. On the evening before the seminar, Richard Thaler and I had dinner with some of the top executives of the firm, the people who decide on the size of bonuses.
We asked them to guess the year-to-year correlation in the rankings of individual advisers. They thought they knew what was coming and smiled as they said “not very high” or “performance certainly fluctuates”. It quickly became clear, however, that no one expected the average correlation to be zero.
Our message to the executives was that, at least when it came to building portfolios, the firm was rewarding luck as if it were skill. This should have been shocking news to them, but it was not. There was no sign they disbelieved us. How could they? After all, we had analysed their own results, and they were sophisticated enough to see the implications, which we politely refrained from spelling out. We all went on calmly with our dinner, and I have no doubt that both our findings and their implications were quickly swept under the rug and that life in the firm went on as before. The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in their culture. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions – and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem – are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them. This is particularly true of statistical studies of performance, which provide base-rate information that people generally ignore when it clashes with their personal impressions from experience.
The next morning, we reported the findings to the advisers, and their response was equally bland. Their own experience of exercising careful judgment on complex problems was far more compelling to them than an obscure statistical fact. When we were done, one of the executives with whom I had dined the previous evening drove me to the airport. He told me, with a trace of defensiveness: “I have done very well for the firm and no one can take that away from me.” I smiled and said nothing. But I thought: “Well, I took it away from you this morning. If your success was due mostly to chance, how much credit are you entitled to take for it?”
Cognitive illusions can be more stubborn than visual illusions. When my colleagues and I in the army learned that our leadership assessment tests had low validity, we accepted that fact intellectually, but it had no impact on either our feelings or our subsequent actions. The response we encountered in the financial firm was even more extreme. I am convinced that the message that Thaler and I delivered to both the executives and the portfolio managers was instantly put away in a dark corner of memory where it would cause no damage.
Why do investors, both amateur and professional, stubbornly believe that they can do better than the market, contrary to an economic theory that most of them accept, and contrary to what they could learn from a dispassionate evaluation of their personal experience? The most potent psychological cause of the illusion is certainly that the people who pick stocks are exercising high-level skills. They consult economic data and forecasts, they examine income statements and balance sheets, they evaluate the quality of top management, and they assess the competition. All this is serious work that requires extensive training. Unfortunately, skill in evaluating the business prospects of a firm is not sufficient for successful stock trading, where the key question is whether the information about the firm is already incorporated in the price of its stock. Traders apparently lack the skill to answer this crucial question, but they appear to be ignorant of their ignorance. As I had discovered from watching cadets on the obstacle field, subjective confidence of traders is a feeling, not a judgment.
This is an extract from Daniel Kahneman’s new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow
        

guardian.co.uk 31.10.2011

Unknown origin. 19.10.2011

Illustration: Jirayu Koo
The great thing about this cat – the writing one – is that there are a thousand different ways to skin it. In fact, you don’t have to skin it at all – and it doesn’t even need to be a cat! What I mean, in the first instance, is feel free to dispute or ignore everything in this introduction or in the articles that follow. As Tobias Wolff puts it in his masterly novel Old School: “For a writer there is no such thing as an exemplary life … Certain writers do good work at the bottom of a bottle. The outlaws generally write as well as the bankers, though more briefly. Some writers flourish like opportunistic weeds by hiding among the citizens, others by toughing it out in one sort of desert or another.”
This freedom is the challenging perk of the non-job. If you are a tennis player any weakness – an inability, say, to deal with high-bouncing balls to your backhand – will be just that. And so you must devote long hours of practice to making the vulnerable parts of your game less vulnerable. If you are a writer the equivalent weakness can rarely be made good so you are probably better off letting it atrophy and enhancing some other aspect of your performance.
Writers are defined, in large measure, by what they can’t do. The mass of things that lie beyond their abilities force them to concentrate on the things they can. “I can’t do this,” exclaims the distraught Mother-Writer in People Like That Are the Only People Here, Lorrie Moore’s famous story about a young child dying of cancer. “I can do quasi-amusing phone dialogue. I do the careful ironies of daydreams. I do the marshy ideas upon which intimate life is built …” From the sum total of these apparent trivialities emerges a fiction which succeeds in doing precisely what it claims it can’t.
Or take a more extreme example: Franz Kafka. Was ever a writer so consumed by the things he couldn’t do? Stitch together all the things Kafka couldn’t do and you have a draft of War and Peace. The corollary of this is that what he was left with was stuff no one else could do – or had ever done. Stepping over into music, wasn’t it partly Beethoven’s inability to conjure melodies as effortlessly as Mozart that encouraged the development of his transcendent rhythmic power? How reassuring to know that the same problems that afflict journeymen artists also operate at the level of genius.
A spokesman for the former, I have written novels even though I have absolutely no ability to think of – and no interest in – stories and plots. The best I can come up with are situations which tend, with some slight variation of locale, to be just one situation: boy meets girl. Other things – structure and tone – must, in these severely compromised circumstances, take over some of the load-bearing work normally assumed by plot. The same holds true for certain kinds of non-fiction, those animated by – and reliant on more than – the appeal of their ostensible subject matter.
This is another lesson: you don’t have to know what kind of book you are writing until you have written a good deal of it, maybe not until you’ve finished it – maybe not even then. That’s the second sense in which the cat doesn’t have to be a cat. All that matters is that at some point the book generates a form and style uniquely appropriate to its own needs. Why bother offering readers an experience that they can get from someone else? The playwright David Hare once claimed that: “The two most depressing words in the English language are ‘literary fiction’.” Remember this: literary fiction does not set a standard that is to be aspired to; it describes a habit of convention that people – writers and readers alike – collapse into, like a comfy old sofa.
Which, surely, is not such a bad place to be. Except, for writers, the sofa should always be an extension of the desk. Reading is not just part of your apprenticeship; it continues to inform, stimulate and invigorate your writing life – and it is never passive. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion recalls her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, rereading Sophie’s Choice by William Styron, “trying to see how it worked”. To see how Styron got away with it is the more interesting question in my and Martin Amis’s view. (Styron’s novel was, for Amis, “a flapping, gobbling, squawking turkey”.)
There’s a lesson here. One’s reading does not have to be confined to the commanding – and thereby discouraging – heights of the truly great. Take a look also at what’s happening on the lower slopes, even in the crowded troughs. We tend to think of ambition operating in terms of some ultimate destination – the Nobel Prize or bust! – but it also manifests itself incrementally, at the level of pettiness. To read a well-regarded writer and to find the conviction growing in yourself that he or she is second- or third-rate, that, in Bob Dylan’s words, “you can say it just as good”, is both encouraging and, if acted upon, a niggling form of ambition. (If it is not acted upon it becomes simply corrosive.)
As with ambition so with practicalities. It’s a daunting prospect to sit down with the intention of writing a masterpiece. If it has any chance of being realised that ambition is best broken down into achievable increments, such as I will sit here for two hours, or 500 words or whatever. Keep these targets manageable and you will feel good about your progress, even if that progress is, inevitably, measured negatively.
The satisfactions of writing are indistinguishable from its challenges and difficulties. It is constantly testing all your faculties and skills (of expression, concentration, memory, imagination and empathy) on the smallest scale (sentences, words, commas) and the largest (the overall design, structure and purpose of the book) simultaneously. It brings you absolutely and always up against your limitations. That’s why people keep at it – and why it’s far easier to give advice about writing than it is to do it.
guardian.co.uk
14.10.2011

“Today’s Western society has revealed the inequality between the freedom for good deeds and the freedom for evil deeds. A statesman who wants to achieve something highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; thousands of hasty (and irresponsible) critics cling to him at all times; he is constantly rebuffed by parliament and the press. He has to prove his every step is well founded and absolutely flawless. Indeed, an outstanding, truly great person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind does not get any chance to assert himself; dozens of traps will be set for him from the beginning. Thus mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints.”
– Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Deceit and Self-Deception by Robert Trivers
In the mid-20th century an offshoot of zoology, called “ethology”, became hugely popular. Bestselling books were written, mostly by zoologists such as Konrad Lorenz and Desmond Morris, or anthropologists such as Lionel Tiger. They linked studies of animal behaviour to the idea of Darwinian evolutionary principles to tell readers just how very like the beasts we were in our sex lives, our workplaces and our recreational behaviours. We were advised to look at chimps and other primates and derive understanding of ourselves from their apparently culture-free activities and traits. Underneath all our fancy culture and language, we were simply naked apes enacting primitive territorial imperatives.
The reading public lapped it up as both a neat, satisfying narrative, and as an excuse for all manner of not-so-civilised behaviours for which we no longer had to take personal and moral blame. We go to war – well, so do baboons; it’s in our genes, we can try to overcome it, but in the end as in the beginning we’re all just animals. By 1976 we didn’t even have to blame the animal in ourselves: Richard Dawkins gave us the selfish gene, whose sole reason for existence was to reproduce itself. And we, that is the body and brain of you and me, were nothing but vehicles for these genes which compelled us to optimise their chances of replicating. Talk to the gene, the conscience isn’t listening.
Much of this was based on algebraic theories of altruism developed by WD Hamilton, who shifted the mechanism of evolution from making groups fitter to survive to a new insistence on individual inclusive fitness. This was via kin selection, which drills down deeper than the inter-relatedness of individual organisms, to the separate alleles (of which genes are made) in every organism: these preferentially promote only those vehicles which contain alleles most closely related to themselves. Genes were responsible, somehow, for you fighting the whirlwind to save your sister, but probably not your less related cousin, and certainly not the stranger from down the road.
Some people were not crazy about this view of the human race. Genes doing algebra didn’t suit a more macrocosmic idea of a fallible but responsible humanity.
Robert Trivers was the man who produced the unifying theory of kin selection and altruism. Now, decades on, he has arrived at a big, new universal theory, also essentially based on the arithmetic of gene selection. Deceit is useful where telling the (unpleasant) truth would hamper your progress. Progress towards what? Trivers would say your fitness, which is defined as raising the chances of replicating your genes into the next generation.
Your genes, apparently, would agree with him; but they would, wouldn’t they? That is if they were capable of agreeing. I want to hang on to the fact that the building blocks of ourselves do not want or intend anything. Chemicals aren’t conscious, although by amazing chance they can combine to make a conscious organism.
Once self-conscious humans begin to do science, and with the benefit of language, start to describe the nature of the chemicals that make them what they are, but having to use regular language if they want a large audience (maths is a much better language, but fewer people can read it), they cannot help but slide into the notion of intention. Dawkins’s selfish gene gained an absurd life of its own because most people don’t speak arithmetic.
The biological mechanism by which we conceal inconvenient truths from ourselves and others is shown, says Trivers, in functional MRI scans of blood flow associated with neural activity in the brain: “It is estimated that fully ten seconds before consciousness of intent, the neural signals begin that will later give rise to the consciousness and then the behaviour itself.” Freud, who always believed that neurology would discover a physical basis for the unconscious, would be delighted, though according to Trivers, psychoanalysis is nothing more than a money-grabbing hoax. Yet there remains a void between brain chemicals doing what they do and the emergence of the sense we all have of possessing a mind.
Trivers’s theories of deceit and self-deceit are based on multiple gleanings from experimental psychology. A trial with rats shows this, another with students suggests that. The actual experiments are referenced, rather minimally, in page-related endnotes, but Trivers’s writing is full of halting phraseology as he slips from findings in the lab or questionnaire to the generality of human social behaviour.
He suggests from relatedness theory that fathers should show a “slight genetic bias towards their daughters”, but “no one knows if this is true”. General assertions about human behaviour are peppered with such phrases as “One is tempted to imagine …”,  “in mice at least …”, “work still in its infancy …”, “first speculations …”, “Whether any of my speculations are true I have no idea …”. And, really, if he doesn’t, I certainly don’t.
Once he has laid out his evidence, our biologically determined deceit behaviour is ready to account for just about everything Trivers doesn’t like about the world, such as the false justifications for the invasion of Iraq, the self-deceiving use, by the US and UK, of 9/11 to declare war on oil-rich countries and on to torture, religion and stock-market trading. It so happens that Trivers and I dislike much the same things but, though I daresay knowledge is generally better than lack of it, I’m not convinced of the benefits of offering us the excuse of having been manipulated by our genes for our repeatedly scurrilous behaviour.
While the first part of the book explains the theory, and the second part discusses how deceit was responsible for all the political and social injustices both he and I perceive in the world, there is a third element woven through both. An actual individual life, that of Trivers himself, emerges, like a gene in the organism, offered perhaps as a consciously self-deprecating example of what evolutionary pressure to deceive can do to a person. Somehow, though, it comes across as back-handed boasting.
The man whom Trivers calls “I” is a compulsive thief who can’t go into a room without coming away with a trophy. He talks of his “‘inadvertent’ touching of women”, which occurs exclusively with his left (unconscious) hand. Apropos chimps turning their backs to hide an erection from a dominant male, he explains that he finds it very hard “in the presence of a woman with whom I am close, to receive a phone call from another woman with whom I may have, or only wish to have, a relationship, without turning my back to pursue the conversation”.
He understands the male/female gender split by recollecting “trying to poison the minds of my three daughters against their mother”. He nearly killed his girlfriend and nephew by driving the nephew’s “cool car” too fast on a precipitous road, when he noticed her interest in the younger man. And after pages and pages on biological selection, evolutionary pressure and the dangerous deception that is religion, it not only turns out that he prays regularly, but he gives a short lecture on the proper way to say the “Lord’s Prayer” (emphasise “thy”). I wasn’t surprised to discover that he is on prescription antidepressants, as well as using ganja and cocaine.
There will be Iron Johns who read this book and cheer, and although he explains that each sex (abhorring the word “gender”, which he calls a euphemism) contains both male and female genes, my male genes are just too wimpy to find any charm in Trivers’s display of self-disclosure – machismo and pet peeves – dressed up as an important new evolutionary understanding of humanity.
Jenny Diski

guardian.co.uk 10.10.2011

Takashi Amano is a well-known aquarium artist who is able to make otherworldly scenes underwater. With even more precision and care than the most obsessive landscape artist, Takashi sculpts his aquariums into living pieces of art that look like microcosms of a much larger space.

(Images via amanotakashi, geekologie, adana-usa, completeaquarium)
weburbanist.com 6.10.2011

Steve Jobs did not create products. He created an organization that predictably and reliably created emotionally resonant products.
Steve Jobs did not make movies. He made a company that predictably and reliably made blockbusters.        
Steve Jobs did not wrest market share from competitors. He created new markets that attracted and sustained competitors.
Steve Jobs did not design anything. He gave others the freedom to think about what jobs products are hired to do.
Steve Jobs did not re-engineer processes. He brought engineering processes to works of creativity and the creative process to engineering.
Steve Jobs did not develop new management theories. He showed by example that innovation can be managed.
Steve Jobs was not a visionary. He put the dots together and saw where they led.
Steve Jobs was not a futurist. He just built the future one piece at a time.
Steve Jobs did not distort reality. He spoke what he believed would become reality at a time when those beliefs seemed far fetched.
Steve Jobs was not charismatic. He spoke from the heart compelling others to follow him.
Steve Jobs was not a gifted orator. He spoke plainly.
Steve Jobs was not a magician. He practiced, a lot.
He had taste.
He was curious.
He was patient.
He was foolish.
He was hungry.
asymco.com
Horace Dediu 6.10.2011

Bert Jansch, a guitarist whose blend of classical, jazz, blues and traditional British folk music inspired a long list of folk and rock guitarists in the 1960s and ’70s, including Donovan, Jimmy Page, Neil Young and Paul Simon, died on Wednesday in London. He was 67.
The cause was lung cancer, The Associated Press reported.
Mr. Jansch caused an immediate sensation with his first album, “Bert Jansch,” released in 1965. He was a mostly self-taught musician. And his idiosyncratic style, with its intricate finger work and bent notes, as well as his bold reinterpretations of traditional material, exerted a powerful influence on a generation of young guitarists. A founder of the progressive British folk group Pentangle, he remains an almost talismanic figure for today’s young artists like Beth Orton and Devendra Banhart.
“With the release of his first album in 1965 he completely reinvented guitar playing and set a standard that is still unequaled today,” Johnny Marr, the former guitarist for the Smiths, wrote in a foreword to the paperback reissue of the 2000 book “Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British Folk and Blues Revival,” by Colin Harper. “Without Bert Jansch, rock music as it developed in the ’60s and ’70s would have been very different.”
Mr. Jansch (the name rhymes with blanch) became obsessed with the guitar after a teacher in his elementary school in Edinburgh brought one in for a demonstration. His parents could not afford to pay for more than a few lessons, so he tried to construct his own instrument. “The second one I made was even playable, and I learned to chord a D on it,” he told Frets magazine in 1980.
After buying a guitar at age 15, he began listening to records by Woody Guthrie, Big Bill Broonzy, Brownie McGhee and Lead Belly. Gradually he incorporated influences from classical music, jazz and traditional Celtic and British folk songs. He was particularly influenced by Davy Graham, another seminal guitarist, whose composition “Angi” (also spelled “Angie” and “Anji”) became the centerpiece of Mr. Jansch’s first album.
Mr. Jansch remained reserved about describing his style and how it evolved. “Everyone asks that but I’m sorry, it’s a mystery to me how it developed like this,” he told the newspaper Scotland on Sunday in 2004.
Neil Young, who included Mr. Jansch on his American tour last year, once called him the acoustic equivalent of Jimi Hendrix as an influence on guitar players. Donovan recorded a cover version of Mr. Jansch’s protest song “Do You Hear Me Now” on his “Universal Soldier” album and paid tribute to him with “Bert’s Blues” on the album “Sunshine Superman” and “House of Jansch” on “Mellow Yellow.”
Mr. Page, who succumbed to the spell of Mr. Jansch’s first album when it came out, did his own instrumental version of “Blackwaterside,” a traditional song from Mr. Jansch’s third solo album, “Jack Orion” (1966). Retitled “Black Mountain Side,” it appeared on Led Zeppelin’s debut album.
Herbert Jansch was born on Nov. 3, 1943, in Glasgow and grew up in Edinburgh. After leaving school at 15, he became a fixture at the Howff, a local folk club. Two of the club’s regulars, Clive Palmer and Robin Williamson, future members of the Incredible String Band, encouraged him to break out of the narrow Edinburgh scene.
He made his way to London and performed on the streets and in small clubs. After recording “Bert Jansch” on a reel-to-reel tape deck, he teamed up with the singer and guitarist John Renbourn, his second guitarist on “It Don’t Bother Me” and “Jack Orion” and his duet partner on the influential album “Bert and John” (1966).
He and Mr. Renbourn began performing at the Horseshoe Hotel on Tottenham Court Road with the future members of Pentangle: the singer Jacqui McShee, the acoustic bassist Danny Thompson and the drummer Terry Cox.
The group made its debut in a sold-out performance at the Royal Festival Hall on May 27, 1967, and went on to become one of the most dominant folk groups in Britain. It was known for its innovative and eclectic style, which had a marked jazz influence, and for the complex intertwined guitar parts in the “folk baroque” style.
The group’s first album, “Pentangle,” was released in 1968, followed by “Sweet Child,” “Basket of Light,” “Cruel Sister,” “Reflection” and “Solomon’s Seal.”
On New Year’s Day 1973, Mr. Jansch left the group, whose members were buckling under the strain of five world tours. Retreating to a farm in Wales, he returned to a solo career and recorded the album “A Rare Conundrum.” In the late 1970s joined with the fiddler Martin Jenkins to form a duo, Jansch and Jenkins, which became Conundrum after adding the bassist Nigel Smith. For a time Mr. Jansch performed and recorded with various revived versions of Pentangle.
Drinking problems derailed his career for a time, but he rebounded in the 1990s with the album “When the Circus Comes to Town.” He later recorded two critically praised albums, “Crimson Moon” and “The Black Swan,” featuring younger folk-influenced artists.
Mr. Jansch’s first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Loren Auerbach, and two sons, Kieron and Adam
nytimes.com WILLIAM GRIMES 5.10.2011