Gladwell’s latest article discusses how Davids beat Goliaths. Like all his writing, it is pleasant and stimulating.

I recommend reading the whole thing. Lots of nice examples of finding asymmetries to exploit. One detail that Gladwell glosses over that deserves further thought: formal vs. informal rules. In the David vs. Goliath case, David broke the informal norms of how duels were conducted. In other examples (full court presses in basketball and computer-designed fleets for the tabletop war game) there were formal rule sets.

While a formal rule set provides a fixed framework within which competitive behavior runs free, it excludes the most basic form of competitive interaction: namely, who sets the rules. While the press offered Ranadive’s team a way of hiding their weakness, an even better way to hide their weakness would have been to change the rules of the game more dramatically. A baseball pitcher, for example, would love to move the mound closer to the batter to get an advantage. He can’t because the formal rules prohibit it, so he’s left looking for loop-holes or ill-defined areas for finding a competitive advantage.

The war game example has two potential interpretations:

(1) The success of the computer-generated fleets was an artifact of the artificiality of the rules. The computer search algorithm found an unexpected and unintended consequence of the set of rules chosen by the designers. In this case, all we have learned is that it is hard to design rules that will produce the desired dynamics (in this case, stylized space warfare that looks similar to WWII-era naval warfare).

(2) The rules accurately described some environment that we care about. In this case, we have actually learned something about what strategies will succeed in that environment (unless, of course, in simplifying the environment we’ve left out some key consideration that makes the freak strategy successful in the sim and not in real life. I actually expected Gladwell’s story to explain that the swarms of little gun boats didn’t work (despite seeming to be a logical response to the game’s rules), much as Jefferson’s gunboat defense failed in the face of the British Navy.

—
Gladwell also makes interesting reference to Ivan Arreguin-Toft’s work on the success rate of “David” strategies. Deserves some further reading.

In a duo of articles that are sure to up the alley of those in the publishing world, the Economist examines the challenges newspapers face in adapting to the information age.

What strikes me is that the original business model of newspapers packaged content (a module of information combining current events, business news, classifieds and sports) with a delivery vehicle (printed text on broadsheet). The internet offers a new delivery vehicle, but there is still the need for the content newspapers provide. The challenge they face is how to decouple their content from their delivery vehicle.

I think that some sort of aggregator, mediated by some editorial perspective, would be the best answer. At the very least, it is what I would want. Sort of like the EarlyBird, except with a specifiable scope. So someone could say, “I live in Boston so I want local news, Red Sox, Celtics and Pats coverage, but I also want defense-focused news as well as the standard 5 pages of front-page and national news I’d find from the NY Times, WSJ, WaPo and Financial Times.” It would also be great if I could get that as a package either on my desktop, laptop, handheld or Kindle. And for sanity’s sake, it should be self-contained so I know when I’m done.

That is one of the challenges of the internet age: when have you read enough? Sitting in the sea of content, you can easily get so far away from shore that you lose all bearing. So some structure would be useful. With a solid foundation like I described above, it would be much easier to control my blog consumption through my bloglines account. And then I might be able to better say when enough is enough and I’ve done my reading for the day.

Shloky looks at the business of piracy. It reminds me that I’ve been meaning to post on my current reading material: The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates by Peter Leeson. It’s Freakanomics meets Illicit. Lesson explains how the pursuit of self-interest and profit led pirates to create their own systems of goverance, even though they lived outside of any government structure. It is well written and stimulating - recommended.

A month ago, Barry Watts of CSBA kicked up some dust when he wrote this article criticizing DoD for not building good strategists.

Jason weighed in productively and created some good give-and-take in his comments.

I tossed up two posts recognizing the work but didn’t have time for extended commentary.

This morning, however, I had the following realization. Watts draws the intriguing distinction between intuitive decision making and “aha” decision making. The former represents the product of work done by Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky and Gary Klein, showing that in time-pressured situations where leaders can develop a body of relevant experience, “intuitive” decision methods dominate traditional rational comparison of alternatives. The latter describes work done more recently by Mark Jung-Beeman and John Kournios (whose work I am not familiar with) that focuses on problem solving that requires some flash of insight.

The environments amenable to intuitive decision-making methods are already fairly well-defined and the military uses training methods influenced by Klein to maximize the usefulness of training opportunities for these sorts of tactical situations. Strategic situations, on the other hand, require a different approach and therefore different training methods. At least that is what the argument implies.

I had a relevant experience during a game of go last night. I hadn’t played for a while and so started off rusty. During the first third of the game I held my own but was feeling very pessimistic because I was coming out the worse in every tactical engagement. My opponent was building up good shape while I was wasting stones in heavy formations just to avoid a rout. Then, looking at the entire board, I had an “aha” moment where I realized that while my shape was worse and I had lost many more stones than my opponent up to that point, I had more potential territory than he did. With this strategic insight, I changed my tactics to play more conservatively to maximize my territory while reducing (instead of invading) my opponent’s territory.

This, by the way, is why I argue that go is a better game for strategic thinking than chess. Go’s potential to serve as a metaphor for the complex, murky and surprising dynamics of human conflict exceeds that of chess. An analyst I met a few years back summed it up wonderfully by saying that chess is a tactical and operational game of attrition while go involves all three levels (tactical, operational and strategic) in a game of influence and territory control. What I’m wondering about is whether games like go can be built into some curriculum to train strategists in developing their capacity for “aha” moments. Of course, the first question to answer in such a program would be whether capacity for such insights can be trained or whether it is largely innate [1].

[1] Chapter VI, Nuclear Heuristics.

More ideas about how to create maritime domain awareness systems, this time from Defensetech. I’ve written about similar efforts before.

Also useful:
US Coast Guard visualization of shipping traffic
ICC Commercial Crime Services Live Piracy Map

While total information awareness is impossible, these building blocks indicate to me that there is the exciting potential to build an open platform that tracks commercial shipping and facilitates securing that shipping (the threat of piracy being just one security threat).

Important article about the clash between economic growth and an aging population in China. Barnett points out that the clock is ticking on China’s window of opportunity.

When making forecasts or constructing future scenarios, some of the most important choices are which variables you will hold fixed (or increase/decrease linearly) and which ones you’ll change. Put another way, how much can you hold constant? Predictions of China’s domination of the globe rarely address this because they fixate on how many Chinese there are or their growth rates over the past 30 years.