Posted on

Paradigm Shifting

Last night, I attended an online class led by Steve Thomason of St. Mark’s cathedral in Seattle. He mentioned Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts as a tool for understanding the forty-seventh presidency.

Simply mentioning “paradigm shift” brought me back to my first university classes in the late 1960s. A reading was Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most discussed and cited books of the twentieth century.

Up until that class reading, I understood science as a steady progression of discoveries starting from formulating a hypothesis, then confirming or disproving the hypothesis with experiments that eventually led to established scientific law; science forever changing as knowledge accumulates, but a gradual incremental process.

Oh how naive that farm boy was.

Kuhn ended that neat scenario. Instead of a steady progression, he amazed me with a series of revolutions from Aristotle to Galileo, on to Newton and Einstein. Each revolution came as an abrupt change following a period of a growing doubt that the reigning paradigm could answer or explain increasingly pressing issues.

I liked the notion of paradigms so much that twenty years later I jumped on the bandwagon to name one the first software products I designed and developed. We called it “Paradigm Trouble Ticketing.”

A paradigm shift is shifty. (Sorry. I can’t help myself.) During a shift, the obvious and important is in flux, making paradigm spotting difficult while the shift occurs and seldom plain until the dust has settled.

This morning, I decided play the fool and declare my choice for the 2025 paradigm shift.

G. K. Chesterton, an incorrigible polemicist who I think often thought clearly, wrote in 1928:

“The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.”

I am afraid that America’s “unconscious democracy” is the paradigm that is going by the wayside, destroyed by the 2024 election. I fear that the assumption of equality that sustained the United States for the previous century has been rejected and replaced by faith in oligarchy, government by the wealthy.

We saw it in the conclave of billionaires at the inauguration, we read it in the executive order to abolish the directive against racial discrimination in federal hiring.

But paradigms don’t only move away from old assumptions. They also move to something new. I don’t know what the new paradigm will be, but I have my eyes open. I hope I will not be blinded.

Posted on

Business Success: P.T. Barnum v. Trump

The other day, I wrote about W. Edwards Deming on business success. Today, I thought of another great American businessman. I’ll bet many of my readers think of P.T. Barnum as the great huckster, the progenitor of Donald Trump, which Barnum probably was. The two characters use similar tactics, but Barnum’s enterprises were roaring business successes that changed the nation. Trump is such a business bungler, he bankrupted New Jersey casinos. 

Daniel Boorstin, the renowned American social historian and Librarian of Congress, dubbed Barnum as “a genius at making pseudo-events,” in his book The Image. Trump, who announced digital trading cards with comic depictions of himself last August, also makes pseudo-events.

There’s no evidence that Barnum ever said “never give a sucker an even break,” or “there’s a sucker born every second,” but he was a master at using gimmicks and distortions to get attention. Boorstin reports that Barnum sent a man out to ostentatiously move single bricks stationed around his American Museum in Manhattan (now the American Museum of Natural History) to draw a crowd which would follow him inside every hour attempting to discover what the man was doing and also paying the entrance fee. The stunt paid for itself and greatly increased the notoriety of the museum.

The brick stunt was harmless, but Barnum also generated empty publicity– pseudo-events if you like Boorstin’s term—around racism and people with physical oddities such as dwarfism. In this, Barnum was cruel, but perhaps not perceived as cruel during the 1830-1880 period when Barnum was active. To his credit, Barnum successfully ran for public office on anti-slavery and fair treatment for former slaves.

Barnum readily admitted that some of his stunts were outright fakes, or humbugs as he called them, and the public seemed to accept his chicanery as good-natured entertainment.  His museums captured the public favor. He raised the stature of the theater, which became acceptable middle and upper class entertainment through his guidance and publicity. He brought the famed Swedish opera singer, Jenny Lind, to the U. S. on a popular tour that was immensely profitable for both Barnum and Lind. And, of course, the Barnum Bailey Circus was a crowd-pleasing success.

Both Trump and Barnum published books on how to succeed in rough and tumble business. Barnum had no ghost writer; he wrote The Art of Money Getting himself. Unlike Trump, who has reviled factual news platforms, Barnum wrote:

Always take a trustworthy newspaper, and thus keep thoroughly posted in regard to the transactions of the world. He who is without a newspaper is cut off from his species. In these days of telegraphs and steam, many important inventions and improvements in every branch of trade are being made, and he who don’t consult the newspapers will soon find himself and his business left out in the cold.

This brings up an important point that may help folks who do not look forward to the 47th presidency. Follow Barnum’s advice and seek verifiable facts. They influence business (and life) far more than false “alternate facts.” People who act on false information are cut off from their species and make poor decisions, both in life and business. Barnum knew that.

Notice, like Boorstin, that pseudo-events, only generate publicity. Pay attention to events, not pseudo-events; your life will be easier.

Posted on

Bye Bye Facebook

2025 is a year for shedding extraneous baggage; I deleted my Facebook account. Facebook has been circling around my cancel drain hole from the day I first signed on. Mark Zuckerberg’s recent decision to cancel fact-checking was the straw that broke this old camel’s aching back. Read on for my complicated position on Facebook and justification for my decision.

You might guess from my dithering, I’m still not certain I made the right decision– I invite your comments.

To begin, my software engineer self has never admired Facebook. Their technology has never impressed me like Google’s search engine cleverness or Microsoft’s steady improvement of their operating system and office utilities. I took Zuckerberg’s motto, “move fast and break things,” as an insult to the software profession. Any idiot can move fast and break things. Engineers move fast and make things.

Facebook was a bulletin board with a graphic interface. La di dah.

For the next fifteen years, I was tolerant. Facebook provides a simple entrance to computer communications for folks who know little about computers. It gathered up family and friend diasporas, giving them an opportunity to exchange news and photos of babies, kittens, memorable meals, and birthday parties without taking a class on computers. A misguided cousin uses Facebook as a platform to broadcast groan inducing puns and dad jokes. Other friends voice snarky commentary on late-stage capitalism and income inequality. I enjoyed looking in on and occasionally sneaking in my “likes” and comments.

I don’t begrudge the targeted advertising on Facebook pages; everyone, even a billionaire, is entitled to make a buck to survive in this hostile world. With little to hide, I don’t fret much about privacy. On the technical side, I was impressed with the reliability of the service as it scaled to manage peta and zettabytes of data.

Facebook code running on servers in data centers all over the U.S. and the world improves lives without requiring their users to know anything of markup languages or programming logic.

The dark side of Facebook is the feed. If all I ever saw when I open Facebook were posts from me and my friends, I wouldn’t have a quarrel with Facebook. I wouldn’t want fact checking. I already know who among my friends are trustworthy. The ones I don’t trust, I like to keep tabs on their lies.

But my feed is cluttered with posts from people and entities that are not my friends and whom I know nothing about. Facebook has chosen these posts for me with their feed stuffing algorithm. I resent that Facebook chooses stuff that attracts my attention like house wiring diagrams or woodworking demonstrations to post on my feed. These tempting posts waste my time. I’m irritated when I discover I’ve spent ten minutes futzing on Facebook when I could have been in the kitchen refining my recipe for scratch-made bean with bacon soup or deciding which infinitives are worth splitting.

I frequently asked myself if my cousin’s puns and jokes were worth imperfect bean with bacon soup. Up until now, since I have never cared whether an infinitive is split or not, I stuck with my cousin.

When I read that the unasked for crap on my Facebook feed would no longer be fact checked, that Mark Zuckerberg no longer cares if my feed is filled with malicious twists on truth, I realized that my bean with bacon soup needs serious work.

Maybe a touch of cayenne.

Bye bye Facebook.