Why delete my profiles, you may ask? Well, there seems to be some sort of subconscious duty to be active in any community I claim to be a part of. I feel completely delinquent just having a link in my bookmarks but never contributing. I don’t want to be a bad citizen, so I will just relinquish my citizenship.

Deleted:

• Digg. My list of “dugg” articles stands at 10. A great site, to be sure, but I’ll leave the digging up to people with more time/desire than me to sort through the loads of crap. Strangely, Digg won’t let me delete my profile… if you know how, please tell me. Googling “delete digg profile” just turns up conspiracy theories of how “Digg” deletes articles from people “they” don’t like.
• Dodgeball. It never really took off with my social circle. I would get notices from one friend, once a week, saying that he was at Zeitgeist. Plus, Twitter seems to accomplish what I was looking for from Dodgeball, without the stalker potential.
• Tribe. Sniff. So sad. It’s a very cool site… I just never had time for it. Like a plant that has died on me for lack of watering. It could even import blog posts via RSS. In the end, I just didn’t need it for anything.
• Zaadz. I was on it for 52 days and literally the only thing that ever happened was that I got invited to a cuddle party. Even the friend that invited me never friended me back. No, I didn’t go.

Not deleted, but probably doomed:

• LinkedIn. I’d be surprised if I end up ever using this site, but since I just got invited by a friend, like, last week, I’m going to give it a chance. Consider it scheduled for termination in the next round. “LinkedIn, you’re on notice.”
• MySpace. My mouse floated over the button, but like Frodo at Mount Doom I just couldn’t destroy my account. I only log-in once a month to delete fake friend invites, so it’s clearly not serving me—and in fact, doing its evil through me. Still…
• Revver. I like Revver. I like it a lot. I like it better than YouTube. But, unfortunately, it’s not YouTube. It gets a bye this round, and I really hope it takes off in between now and the next purging.

Enough death for today.

The cover of the latest Fortune blasts the bold headline: “Chaos@Google!” But before you sell your favorite stock, read the subtitle: “The inside story of disorder, disarray, and uncertainty at Google. And why it’s all part of the plan.” Indeed, the article implies that the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA is closer to a raucous playground than the austere sanctuary one might expect as the home of arguably the internet’s biggest success story. That’s how they want it. VP for Business Operations Shona Brown even wrote a book on the subject, “Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos“.

But it’s not just talk. Consider what Larry Page’s response to an employee that cost the company millions of dollars:

I’m so glad you made this mistake. Because I want to run a company where we are moving too quickly and doing too much, not being too cautious and doing too little. If we don’t have any of these mistakes, we’re just not taking enough risk.

That’s crazy talk! Millions of dollars and he’s practically happy about it. To the asylum with him!

But he’s not the only one milking madness. Business Week this week (I really don’t normally read so many mainstream, Wall Street-y type magazines, but my officemate had some around) has a whole section called “Inside Innovation“, which seems to be basically a list of crazy ways for suits to get creative—and they’re good! Some of them:

1. Pairing sensible engineers with wacky artists to co-generate ideas.
2. Important rules for brainstorming from Bob Sutton, who has previously suggested ignoring your boss to promote innovation.
3. Apple Designer Jonathan Ive suggests that an innovative idea will likely change the company that produces it.
4. Or just steal good ideas from places like TED, which I’m shocked I haven’t linked to previously.

I feel kind of dirty linking to Fortune and Business Week as proof that chaos, anarchy, and noise have a vital place in the world today. Could it be that Corporate America is making the slow transition from Orange to Green?

My particular project was inspired by James Surowiecki’s amazing work on the wisdom of crowds. It seems that, given the right circumstances, crowds can be remarkably intelligent—quite contrary to popular opinion that, while a person is smart “people” are stupid. I’ve seen other people replicate the “jellybean jar” phenomenon and thought I would give it a try at my office.

Out comes a really big jar and lots of malted milkballs. One hundred seventy-six (176) of them in fact, though I was tempted throughout the process to, uhm, abbreviate the total. The general idea is that, despite the wide range of guesses from the staff on how many milkballs are in the jar, the average of our guesses should be very, very close. Hopefully (since that’s the point of the project) closer than any one guess.

Next I go office to office, stopping people in hallways as need be, and give them the pitch: “Fill out the piece of paper with your name and your guess, using any method you wish for guessing—other than removing the top and counting them one-by-one, however it is of the utmost importance that you discuss neither your guess nor your strategy with any other staff member.” Yes, it was a run-on sentence, but by the end of the morning, I had it down pretty well.

It turns out we had guesses as low as 86 and as high as 275. That’s quite a range. Still, when I averaged all the guesses together, I got 178—only two away from the correct number! That beats both the closest guess (at 168) and the “panel of experts”, meaning the average of the five closest guesses, (at 164). Yes, including the outlier “noise” actually made the guess more accurate.

When people are asked to make a decision, they do so with a certain amount of bias. If they discuss their decision with others, this bias spreads to others. However, in a diverse crowd operating as individuals, these biases cancel one another out, making the group more intelligent. I;’m sure that a memetic analysis would involve memes and anti-memes colliding and exploding.

The staff was overall very appreciative of the experiment/celebration and immediately saw its implications with how we both interact in group decision-making and how we receive feedback from our activist network. They were also quite happy that the lesson ended with the average being closer than any one guess, because that meant we got to split the malted milkballs.

First, there are lots of contexts in which noise specifically contributes to signal. George Lucas often quotes Akira Kurosawa on the notion of “Immaculate Reality”. In an old interview with Wired, Lucas says,

“[O]bviously everything is kind of dirty in the real world, and everything is kind of beat up, and everybody doesn’t drive around in a brand-new car.”

However, isn’t this really just noise serving as signal? The signal in this case is the Immaculate Reality used to convince movie-goers that what they’re seeing is real and a little dirt here and there is “value added”.

The case for noise is better made by the lives of woks and Yixing teapots. A wok is never washed with soap, but instead allowed a patina seasoned by the dishes it has cooked before. Similarly, teapots were traditionally for personal use and would be flavored by the past teas brewed by its owner. Thus the same tea from different teapots might have a subtly different taste. In this case, non-random data (the tea is brewed deliberately) is affecting the current signal in a random way, with the intention of enhancing the content.

Lest you think noise’s only friends are entirely Eastern (though I should mention that Buddhism’s First Noble Truth is Dukkha, or dissatisfaction, before moving on), let us not forget the West’s very own Charles Darwin and the Theory of Evolution. Afterall, if DNA got the signal right every single time we reproduced and there were no mutations, we would not only be just like our parents (scary enough) but our parents would still be single-celled goop. Noise is the driving force of evolution.

The question that is left for me is how noise can be allowed for in digital media. It’s one thing to imitate it with distressed text and bump maps, it’s another to let external forces actually affect your work. Signal vs. Noise has a post about Wabi-sabi, but mainly praising its comfortable simplicity and kind of missing the point. Will a format made out of 1s and 0s ever achieve the chaos of an unprimed canvas? If so, would it be any better than what we’ve got now?