Just Tech it - Simplify, Then Exaggerate

 

Academics is built on honesty and integrity, a journey towards the pursuit of truth. This was the romantic view of scholarship that I had as an undergraduate student of computer science back in 2000. I was weaving a narrative to convince myself that academicians were cast from an unblemished stone, unlike “experts” in tech-companies. Why was I imagining such a virtuous view of academia? There was an economic angle to it. Academic was and is a low-paying sector for similar level of expertise. It was natural to think why else anyone would choose academia (over tech-companies) unless there was unwavering dedication to scholarly work. Another virtue I imagined was that academia seemed to produce less exaggeration. The noise was less. But the major attraction was that academicians seemed to be able to deconstruct complex process effortlessly. How could anyone write equations to predict weather a minute, a day or a week from now. That seemed like magic. As I later understood, it was not effortless or magic but result of decades of work to get better observations and building numerical models that could use those observations. Simplification looked to be an indispensable tenet of scholarly work. This was a naïve and a narrow view of academia (and tech-companies on the flip side) but that was what I believed at the time.

I was not wrong then and still not wrong about simplification. It is easy, even though sometimes the task can be like searching for the proverbial needle in an exponentially growing (digital) haystack, to find a paper that beautifully deconstructs a complex process. Deconstructing a complex process is still how science/engineering proceeds to understand society and nature. I was however naïve about the limit people could go to sell “thoughts” as “innovation” and “emptiness” as “simplification”. It is common to hear the claim that “we have simplified the complex process in discovering the innovation”. One needs to look closely, just momentarily, to see that the assembly is held only by sellotape. There is no deconstruction behind the simplification. It works till it comes crashing down. When it crashes the rubble is swept under the rug.

It is unsurprising why we have thousands of “thoughts” (a hunch) to one problem and none of them are “solutions”. A few of these innovations will however make their innovators a millionaire. Some of them take the thought to the level of an “idea”. The innovation process stops at this point. There is not much to gain in proceeding further. That person is now an established “expert”. This is widespread in the digital tech-sector. The more I hear tech-“gurus” and tech-“experts” talk the more I am certain that tech-startup is a statistical phenomenon and not a solution seeking enterprise. It does not need to be. A few will almost always succeed in selling ideas as solutions. New startups replace those who fail and the innovation seeking enterprise keeps marching on. The growth is like the head of Hydra. When one head is chopped-off two grows in its place. Startup-Hydra probably grows ten heads, daunting even for the mighty Hercules.  

It is worrying that people who are proclaimed as tech-“gurus”, "experts”, "innovators" and “authorities”, usually a hindsight view created by a narrow definition of success, have distanced themselves from modesty and humility and choose to exaggerate. Why is this the case? Much has to do with the institutions prizing novelty over quality, ideas over solutions. They are conditioned as well as they position themselves to this pursuit. If a startup has a “novel” (aka sellable) idea, they could raise millions in a short period of time with venture capitalists knocking at the door. Quality will emerge out of ether eventually, left as a side-effect. It becomes an after-thought. If it does not emerge, there is nothing to worry. A new novel idea will replace the old novel idea. An innovation will be born.

Novelty is therefore synonymous with being sellable, even if it means reinventing the wheel. Reinvention is not the problem, it is the exaggeration of ideas as solutions. Take this scenario. One is proclaimed as an expert on wheels if he has made a fortune by selling the idea of a square wheel. If you think, hang on, no sane person would buy a square wheel to drive on our roads. How could he have sold square wheels? Well then, they will show you how when your vehicle stops you do not need to apply parking brakes. They will then present a graph where the increase in friction improves stability by ten-folds when the car is going downhill. They will show you the picture of a road where square wheels work and convince you that it is the existing roads that is stifling progress. We often forget that the buyer is a non-expert on tech, however successful he may be in the business. When an expert whispers the words like “growth”, “productivity”, “innovation” and “transformation”, the buyer’s ears are going to perk up. Exaggeration has a big say on if something is worth selling.

Exaggeration is preceded by simplification of the problem being solved. The tech-simplification is not the same as simplification made by Einstein in building his theory of Brownian motion, thereby establishing the existence of atoms. Einstein’s simplification was based on analogy with osmosis. It allowed deconstruction of a complex process which otherwise would not have been possible. The tech-expert’s simplification has newsworthy headlines, something that can be sold or drive clicks, as the primary purpose. Einstein did not exaggerate in his proposal. Irrespective of how he was in real life, he was modest about his achievements. His work maintained the tradition that “we stand on the shoulders of giants”.

If we were to ask billions of non-experts (Earth’s human inhabitants) who the greatest scientist is, Einstein would overwhelm the competitors despite not knowing what he has done. Indeed, a lot of it is down to visibility. We hear about him a lot more than any other physicist. Maybe Newton comes close. His work has been critiqued from all imaginable directions by experts. His work has stood the test of time. His deconstructions and simplifications are what makes his theories so easy to comprehend and critique. It really does take unwavering dedication over a long time to simplify a difficult problem. We may call that greatness. Simplification is largely a fruit of labour. For tech-industry the right time is always “now”. There is no luxury of sitting down and deconstructing a complex process. It is not surprising that simplification is hard to come by in such a frantic environment. But it should not have to take greatness to be modest.

Don’t get me wrong here. There are a lot of modest people in the technology sector who are experts. We just do not hear from them or hear about them. But pseudo-experts, who have managed to convince non-experts that they are “legitimate” experts, swamp the world around us. Those people overwhelm the innovation fairs, conferences, workshops and the digital space. Even academia is not spared. It is becoming a skill just to be able to identify the few people you should hear and the many you should avoid. I worry about my students who are naïve, as I was when I was an undergraduate student. They are easily misled. It is increasingly a challenge for me explain to my students that “emptiness” is not “simplification”. Repeated claims, even when they are wrong, are likely to be considered true. This claim then establishes itself as an instrument to infer validity. Any new claim that refutes this established truth is discarded. Similar is the case for who we legitimize as experts. The legitimization acts as a yardstick to decide who else can get the label of an expert.

How do you then spot a pseudo-expert? Well, if you have sat in a presentation where the presenter spends most of the time on his achievements, then proceeds to show slides full of empty jargons and slogans (many of them made by himself and some by someone he idolizes), nothing terms that closely resemble what you hear in poor marketing (like the three S’s to guaranteed success), conflates ideas with solutions and gives circular definitions, you are likely seeing a pseudo-expert. If you are an engineer or know a bit of statistics, ask yourself when you sit in a presentation, “is his idea statistically any better than a random idea?”. Most of the time it is not. In fact, most of the time all he presents are his “thoughts”. He has not even moved to the ideas stage.

How do you spot a expert? I give you two heuristics. In answer to questions of the form “does X solve Y?”, such as, “does planting trees solve climate change?” her answer is “it depends”. There are hard limits on how much CO₂ forests can store. The process is not as simple as “take in CO₂, give out O₂”. We also have to think about the soil which also stores carbon. It depends on what we plan to do with the new trees that grow. “It depends” is the correct answer though it does not grab attention. Second, she will not claim “ideas” as “solutions”. “An idea is like a parasite. Resilient, highly contagious, and once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it’s almost impossible to eradicate.” If this quote seems familiar, then you have watched the movie Inception or heard it from someone who has watched it.

Ideas quickly starts to appear as solutions. It takes training to not fall in this trap but more so modesty and humility. Often, we hear that a “strong” leader is the one who has courage, compassion and humility. My interest is not if this statement is true or false, but why have we placed humility alongside courage and compassion. I believe it is because it requires self-control over ego and vanity, and honest self-reflection to be humble. A humble expert (or simply expert in my opinion) is unlikely to masquerade “thoughts” or “ideas” as “solutions”. Selling is not an issue here, it is the deliberate masquerading of thoughts as solutions.

“Simplify, then exaggerate” is a successful mantra. It is viral in tech-industry where people are encouraged to sell “ideas” as “innovations” and “innovations” as “solutions”. In most cases, it is not even ideas, it is just “thoughts” draped in a shiny and expensive pashmina weaved from circular arguments and a list of nothing terms. They claim to have transformed the process thereby unlocking growth through innovation or similar productivity-lingo. They claim to have solved the problem by simplification. It takes humility to not say that. Humility allows us to spot emptiness pretending to be fullness. It is increasingly a challenge to meet someone who can say “it depends”, like in the case of CO₂ example above, and can give a sound explanation to why she thinks that is the case and on what it depends. It is not because there are no such people. There are many but finding one can be like looking for a needle in a haystack the size of a city. There is just too much noise. You are statistically way more likely to bump into a pseudo-expert.

A narrow definition of “success” has given unwarranted authority to pseudo-experts. A (humble) expert is not the currency even in academia, specifically the engineering and technology education. If you want to be legitimized as an expert, you are expected to produce noise. You are an expert if the industry geared towards producing experts recognize you. If is the awards that decides whether a book or a movie is good, then we have a serious problem. It should be the other way around, a good movie should get awards. I was naïve twenty years ago. I have a different view of what tech-industry is and academia is from when I started as an undergraduate student. It is a challenge as an academic to ensure my students stay modest and humble. It is a challenge to get them to focus on deconstruction and simplification, a laborious and tedious task. These seem tangentially different from what the “industry” is demanding, what the “experts” are preaching. It is a challenge to ensure my students remain students and let go of the constant need to become entrepreneurs and innovators.