"Time to Think? - Not Likely"

Sydney M. Williams

Thought of the Day

“Time to Think? – Not Likely”

January 4, 2011

All of us, I am sure, are overwhelmed by a plethora of information – stock reports, market commentary from strategists and technicians, lengthy economic treatises, which not only deal with the U.S. but with the global environment and missives like this. IMs and e-mails have the annoying habit of notifying us every few seconds that a new message has arrived. Up-to-date information on every conceivable subject is a click away on the internet. And, of course, every day news papers arrive and stick around waiting to be read. The television is always on, tuned to all-business news-all-the-time channels.

According to most experts, the total wealth of written knowledge doubled between 1750 and 1900 and then doubled again between 1900 and 1950. Eric Johnston, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the mid part of the twentieth century, claimed at the time that knowledge was doubling every ten tears. A year ago Robert Brown, a Dean at the University of North Carolina, suggested that knowledge was doubling every 900 days and predicted that by the year 2020, global knowledge would be doubling every 72 days. Even more aggressively, IBM in a white paper written in 2206 and entitled “The Toxic Terabyte” predicted that by 2010 “the world’s information base would be doubling in size every 11 hours.”

Will man be able to cope with this flood of information? Ray Kurzweil, once described by Forbes as “the ultimate thinking machine” and the author of The Singularity is Near, believes that man will be billions of times more intelligent than he is in today. “Today’s human beings,” he claims, “will be as outmoded as Homo Erectus.”

It could be that Mr. Kurzweil will ultimately be proved correct, but people adapt in evolutionary, not revolutionary, time frames. And we live in the present, not the future. Even today it is humanly impossible to know more than a small fraction of all there is too know. For most people, this has led to narrow areas of specialization and broad areas of ignorance. On Wall Street, it has meant an emphasis on marketing and trading, as opposed to in-depth research. It has promoted high frequency trading platforms and other algorithmic, computer-driven investment programs. Of course, most of us, whether on Wall Street or Main Street, cannot even conceive of the speed of China’s new supercomputer, the Tianhe 1A, which calculates at 2.5 petaflops (or 2,500 trillion operations) per second.

This emphasis on speed has been reflected in the shrinkage of sound bites, first in newsprint and now on TV. The average sound bite during a presidential election was 43 seconds in 1968. Today, it is about nine seconds – roughly the same amount of time it takes to read a 140 character Tweet, one of the newer forms of communication. In politics, have we become more or less knowledgeable about our candidates? Craig Fehrman, in a recent piece in the Boston Globe, quoted two University of Nevada professors who argue that the shrinking sound bite “stems less from a collapse in standards or seriousness than from the rise of a more sophisticated and independent style of journalism – which means the [shrunken] sound bite might not be such a bad thing.”

I remain unconvinced. The Press is invaluable to a free society. Allegedly, Edmund Burke once pointed to the Press gallery in the House of Commons and said that there sits the fourth estate and they are more powerful than any body of government. No one can deny their influence; however, their sense of responsibility is no longer individual but collective – collective in the sense that almost all opinions are represented somewhere, so there may be a “collective” balance. There is very little unadulterated pure news coverage today – everything, whether in print, over the airwaves, or on-line is slanted toward some particular agenda – and that in itself is not bad, if one reads or listens to opposing opinions. The problem is very few people do; so the net effect of shrunken sound bites and fast moving news items is one of further polarizing the populace – using the media to reinforce their preconceptions.

Perhaps it shows my age, but I am of the school that thinks reflection is worthwhile and improves rather than hinders decisions. Perhaps a Tianhe 1A computer could pitch stocks to warren Buffet at speeds approaching a trillion or more a second, but would a programmed algorithmic response provide better returns than those Mr. Buffett achieved over the last fifty years using paper and pencil? Algorithms must be programmed and somewhere during the process a potentially fallible human must be involved – perhaps in designing or writing the program, perhaps in deciding which characteristics to include and which to exclude. Thus, when a mistake is made, the consequences are far direr.

The fact that the level of information is growing faster than our ability to absorb adds to our attention-deficit-disordered condition. We are also living during a time of momentous changes – think of the rise of the East and of the draconian deficits of the West – that will force our people and our nation to adjust behavior, and require thinking through policies and their effects. The successful person, whether in business or politics, will need the ability to explain complex problems in simple, understandable terms – in parables, fables or stories, a practice, ironically, as old as history.

It is true that we live during a pivotal time. As a friend, who manages money in the hills of Montana, put it in an e-mail on Friday, “the coming years will see change beyond anything we can imagine.” The explosion of information will persist. Distinguishing between the wheat and the chaff will not become easier, but will be critical to our futures. Taking a few moments every day to quietly think through events and opportunities should allow one to come to more intelligent and proactive conclusions, and not be simply instinctively responsive.

Even when one is away from one’s desk, the surge of information continues. Newspapers, television and the internet are available. Cell phones are always on, as are IMs. Persistent, ubiquitous and demanding e-mails allow no let up. Tweets never cease twittering. Moments of relief are rare.

Tomorrow I leave for a week of skiing. The information flow will not stop and will follow wherever I go. But my mind, for a few days, will be focused on balancing the thrill of the slope with the need for getting safely down the hill. The growth in information may continue at ever increasing rates. But my principal concern will be that, while the trails may be no steeper than they were, my body begs to differ.