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July 17, 2006

Latest reading

Now that I’m back to about a hour on the bus each day, I’ve been reading. Here’s the latest:

“The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine” isn’t worth your time. It’s history writing of the dullest kind: a series of facts chronologically presented. First this happened, then this other thing, then something else. Well, that’s true as far as it goes, but it’s remarkably dry. There’s no poetry in it. It’s too bad, because I hadn’t realized the really important role the chess-playing automaton had in the history of technology. I wish that Standage had used the Turk as a jumping-off point to talk about other strands of tech history, and not just the obvious subsequent history of chess-playing machines: the closing chapter on Deep Blue feels utterly perfunctory that might as well read “and in 1997, they actually built one. The End.”

It’s fascinating that the original mechanical Turk seems also to have been the first “tech demo roadshow”, where a complex machine was paraded around to audiences. Of course, the thing was a fake, a magician’s prop, and those demos nothing more than carefully orchestrated conjuring shows. Of course, there’s still a lot of stage magic (and maybe real magic )in the technology demo, subtle misdirection, rehearsed patter, and a careful handling of details and context. I’d have loved Standage to look at how little has changed in the selling of technology since the 1700’s.

Chris Anderson spoke at Amazon a couple of weeks ago, and I got an advance copy of “The Long Tail”. Even for a pop-business book, it’s pretty slim, and largely just fills out his Wired article with more data. And frankly, it tends to feel like the same data chapter after chapter: Rhapsody, iTunes, and Amazon. The ideas are still compelling, but there’s not a lot of actionable information here besides: “offer more stuff, and make it findable and filterable.”

I also finally got around to reading “The Wisdom of Crowds”, which really is the most relevent of these three to Mechanical Turk, the project I work on at Amazon. I love stuff that debunks common sense and simultaneously suggests all kinds of new ways to think about certain kinds of problems. I remember Mike’s exhortation to us at Design Engaged two years ago to “run to the light of complexity.” Group-aggregation (“crowdsourcing”) is one compelling way to tackle complexity, sort of a human-powered quantum computing. Jaron Lanier’s dire warnings notwithstanding, “Wisdom of Crowds” is really convincing, and James Surowiecki is a teriffic writer. I know I’m two years late to the party on “Wisdom”, but if you haven’t read it, it’s worth it.

Posted by Andrew at July 17, 2006 10:55 AM

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Comments

Curious as to what you took from Surowiecki. I found it an interesting read, but once I stepped back from it all I really took was that crowds can be really good at averaging numbers.

Posted by: Abe [TypeKey Profile Page] at July 17, 2006 04:26 PM