Link Dump 5

• How to get free money by pretending to be a charity: The worst charity in America operates from a metal warehouse behind a gas station in Holiday. Every year, Kids Wish Network raises millions of dollars in donations in the name of dying children and their families. Every year, it spends less than 3 cents on the dollar helping kids. Most of the rest gets diverted to enrich the charity's operators and the for-profit companies Kids Wish hires to drum up donations. In the past decade alone, Kids Wish has channeled nearly $110 million donated for sick children to its corporate solicitors. An additional $4.8 million has gone to pay the charity's founder and his own consulting firms. No charity in the nation has siphoned more money away from the needy over a longer period of time. But Kids Wish is not an isolated case
• 'Washington Is a Cesspool of Faux-Experts Who Do Bad Research' by +Conor Friedersdorf: Sweet validation! I've often suspected that official Washington is populated by enough disingenuous, misinformation-spreading hucksters to fill an underground container of organic waste. No one has better standing to render this judgment than Klein, whose earnest, tireless embrace of deep-in-the-weeds wonkery is unsurpassed in his generation. He wouldn't assert a whole cesspool of intellectual waste product without having seen plenty of specific examples.
• How Gangs Took Over Prisons by +Graeme Wood: Originally formed for self-protection, prison gangs have become the unlikely custodians of order behind bars—and of crime on the streets.
• 3D Printed Peristaltic Pump by +Eric Evenchick: One nice thing about this design is that it is printed preassembled. Pop it out of the printer, add some tubing, and you’re ready to pump fluids. On top of the isolated fluid path, this pump gives accurate volume measurement.
• 3 keys to open source success by +Phil Johnson: A new study of GitHub data reveals characteristics of successful open source projects
• The Rise of Open Source Hardware by +Rachel Nuwer: Part of the reason software has led the open source charge is that it has the advantage of being “lightweight,” Petrone explains. “It’s a case of atoms versus bits.”
• Want to Reform the NSA? Give Edward Snowden Immunity by +Yochai Benkler: Edward Snowden's disclosures led to the introduction of dozens of bills in Congress, a judicial opinion, and two executive-branch independent reviews that demanded extensive reforms to surveillance programs...The single most important lesson of Snowden's disclosures is that even well-designed and well-intentioned systems of checks and balances become corroded and subverted over time...Because it is practically impossible for outsiders to check the national-security system, protecting insider whistleblowers is especially critical.
• Learnable Programming by + Bret Victor: Because my work was cited as an inspiration for the Khan system, I felt I should respond...How do we get people to understand programming? We change programming. We turn it into something that's understandable by people. This essay presents a set of design principles for an environment and language suitable for learning.
• The Future Could Work If We Let It by +Farhad Manjoo: One persistent criticism of the tech industry is that it no longer works on big ideas...Matt Rogers and Stefan Heck...put forward the ultimate optimist's case for why the tech industry might substantially improve most of our lives...With the right incentives, the future could be fantastic. Just beware of the pesky humans getting in the way.

Wright is Right. Also, ice cubes.

The thing about people is that they have two sides. One side is emotional and short-sighted and blind to the world outside of its immediate grasp. The other side doesn't exist.

Well, it exists, but it's not very important. We can be rational, we just can't be rational if any one of a number of emotions are out of balance. For example, if you're reading this you're probably not getting angry (not yet). You're probably thinking about things, like ideas or something abstract, and not THAT SUICIDE BOMBER BEHIND YOU!!1

Fear is probably the most commonly experienced emotion in the entire world because the natural reaction to something we don't understand is fear...and there's a lot we don't understand.

Of course, to really be afraid of something we have to become aware of it so that we can know we don't understand it. For most of America, 9/11 was one of those moments. There was the time before 9/11 when most of us were blissfully ignorant of radical Islam, and the time after 9/11 when we realized that THREE religions spun off of Abraham's covenant with God.

And, of course, the previous sentence is totally unfair. it conflates religion with politics, pretends a religion is the same as radical elements of that religion, and is also a bit snarky.

Anywho, I had a point. Yes, the point was that Robert Wright has a point.

As Islamophobia grows, it alienates Muslims, raising the risk of homegrown
terrorism — and homegrown terrorism heightens the Islamophobia, which alienates more Muslims, and so on: a vicious circle that could carry America into the abyss.

Wright goes on to point out that it is no longer cool, in mainstream culture, to be disrespectful to gay people. His thesis is that since gay people were already everwhere, pretty much everyone already knew a gay person, they just didn't know they knew a gay person. When those people started to come out, homophobes realized that it was kind of stupid to be afraid of someone you've known and liked for a long time just because you suddenly became aware of their sexual orientation.

Being nice to gay people is now so important that the President Of The United States made a special video to help out a successful national movement. What he didn't do was make a special video reminding Americans that Muslims are no worse than Christians. He didn't do that because islamophobia is on the rise, and if there's one thing a leader (hope and change!) avoids doing it's making an enlightened but unpopular statement.

I'd like to build on Wright's thesis a bit and suggest that the reason islamophobia is going to get worse before (if) it gets better is that there's little chance any American is going to meet a Muslim. Less than 1% of the population of America is Muslim. And they tend to cluster together. So most Americans only hear about Muslims, and in the same way no one ever hears about all the planes that landed safely yesterday no one ever hears about all the Muslims who didn't blow anything up. But, more importantly, all the Muslims in America represent only 0.2% of the global Muslim population.

This means that there is no real chance Americans will ever think of Muslims as anything other than "them." Even if the Muslim population in America grew and distributed so that most Americans got the chance to live and work with them, all of those new Muslims would still represent an exception.

Now, the monkeysphere. We're only capable of knowing, like, 150 people at any one time. Everyone else is either someone we've forgotten or a stranger. And it's not like people are just going to decide to forget 10 people, it has to happen naturally. So the problem we have is that building up the kind of experience with a stranger that brings them into your monkeysphere takes consistent effort over a long period of time. And it's basically impossible if they're not right next to you.

The population of Muslims is so small, and so concentrated in distinct regions,
that there weren’t enough such encounters to yield statistically significant
data. And, as Putnam and Campbell note, this is a recipe for prejudice. Being a
small and geographically concentrated group makes it hard for many people to
know you, so not much bridging naturally happens.

Since the average American doesn't have the chance to get to know Muslims even if they are currently open to the idea, they have to get an overview from someone who claims to know some Muslims. Most of those overviews are not flattering.

If you think about all of America like one organization (LOL you should) then theories of organizational change are applicable. They all tend to incorporate the unfreeze/refreeze model in one form or another. Basically, people start out in a sort of structure, and if you want them to take on a different structure you have to first shake them up.

Well, the overall situation is quite conductive to structuring Americans around the thought that Muslims are "them." There are a lot, but none of them are nearby, and they tend to disagree with us. None of that is going to change. So, what happens when people get shaken up anyway?

Well, if you let an ice cube melt it will take on a new shape. If it then refreezes in that random shape, instead of the one you wanted (a dinosaur), you've got only yourself to blame. In this case no one individual is responsible for the structure of America, but there are individuals responsible for shaking people up and then, at best, not giving them a good shape to refreeze into, and at worst deliberately encouraging them to refreeze around negative thoughts.

So the engineering challenge in building bridges between Muslims and non-Muslims will be big. Still, at least we grasp the nuts and bolts of the situation. It’s
a matter of bringing people into contact with the “other” in a benign
context...Philanthropists need to figure out how you build lots of little
bridges at the grass roots level. And they need to do it fast.

If any situation cries out for understanding systems, innovating, and leadership it's this one...but I have to admit that I'm at a loss. Personally, I think a significant percentage of America has already refrozen around a strongly anti-Islamic world view, and now they're working on shaking up (unfreezing) everyone else.

National Healthcare Reform Leadership

A new national healthcare system is in the works, or at least a modified one. Which is good, because no matter how you slice it the country needs to do something about steadily increasing healthcare costs, says the CBO.

If rising healthcare costs were a steamroller. . .

In BusinessWeek, Nikos Mourkogiannis proposes that the new system should focus on cutting costs. He also says that, while that is a fairly obvious consensus view, actually implementing it will require prodigious acts of leadership. The general idea is to create a system that ensures the average person will have a minimum level of benefits.

As Mourkogiannis points out, the new healthcare system will not be able to do everything for everyone, it will have to make triage decisions which first reduce costs (and do everything else second). From the White House:

President Obama is committed to working with Congress to pass comprehensive health reform in his first year in order to control rising health care costs, guarantee choice of doctor, and assure high-quality, affordable health care for all Americans.

The fun thing about mission statements is that they often utilize a lot of commas. Giving commas to a bureaucrat is the linguistic equivalent of giving a credit card to a teenager. All sorts of commitments are made with little consideration given to whether or not they can all be delivered. The term "high-quality" has a lot more wiggle-room than "affordable," and the situation demands the focus be on "affordable" anyway, so "high-quality" is really only in there to attempt to placate fears that the healthcare storm troopers are going to drag you off to the crematorium when you reach 65.

Your grandpa ran off to join the circus. Here's his replacement.

High-quality will have to be secondary to low cost. The only reason we need healthcare reform is that our current approach will bankrupt us. So, at a minimum, we have to do the same thing only cheaper. Improving quality would be nice, but it is not the primary driver; cost is.

Now, try explaining that to the people who will cost too much to take care of.

This healthcare reform situation is a good example of a situation that demands attention be paid to systems, innovation and leadership. The system is monstrously complex, implementing it won't work without some innovations that no one's thought of yet, and even then the leadership challenge is pretty much guaranteed to be beyond anyone's capabilities. We (Americans) are okay with the idea that the system can't take care of everyone. We are not okay with the idea that the system will officially not be taking care of everyone because they are officially on the wrong side of the cost/benefit analysis.

That being assumed, what sort of leadership approaches have the best chance of getting people to at least let the necessary changes happen, if not get people excited about the changes?

• "We are working hard for you, but someone/thing else is working against us." Whoever gets saddled with the job of representing healthcare reform can try casting themselves as the plucky, unquestionably-good-hearted hero valiantly struggling against an evil menace. The menace could be immigrants flooding our emergency rooms, greedy HMOs, or just the vast scale of the problem.
  
• "We all know more than you and we say this is a good idea/working." Several large stakeholders in the healthcare marketplace, like the pharm-companies and AARP, have already expressed support for healthcare reform. It could be possible to present a unified front that overwhelms any attempt to claim it's a bad idea.
• "Every alternative is worse, especially doing nothing." Proponents of healthcare reform, like me, have pretty much started here anway. This approach assumes that this will remain the primary tool moving forwards. It could be expanded upon by occasionally adding a new description of just how bad the future will/could get if things aren't done in a particular way.
• "I was worried, but now I see there's nothing to worry about." Instead of the leaders speaking, they could get average Joes and Janes to speak for them. That way the people who need to be convinced could see people just like them being convinced, rather than Ivy-league, smooth-talking socialist puppets trying to be convincing.