15th
Abstract vs. concrete
This article, from my daily science digest, is an interesting one. It describes an Ohio St. experiment suggesting that using “real-world examples” - like measuring cups or pizza slices or trains heading toward each other - actually inhibits mathematics teaching. Students who were taught abstract principles only performed better than those taught using concrete examples - and also did better than those taught using both abstract and concrete methods.
I’ll admit a bias here: I’m a 100% N (“intuitive”) in the Meyers-Briggs personality framework, which means that I’m naturally disposed toward abstract theory and frameworks. Give me a couple of general principles and a set of empirical data points and I’ll usually trust and use the principles. Not always, of course; to be good at theory, one needs good judgment about when and how the theory applies. Often, too, the data is the input to the theory. … but, most of all, heuristics and principles tend to be reusable and adaptable - and the more I can collect, the bigger & better a toolkit I have to apply to future problems.
A long example: at my previous employer, I developed a healthy skepticism for the B2B e-marketplace model. In trying to get big electronics companies and their trading partners to buy & sell on our exchange, a primary difficulty that we encountered was resistance to change from employees who controlled the inventory. A C-level exec would sign a deal committing multi-millions-of-dollars worth of end-of-life goods to be liquidated through us, and when we would send a program manager to the warehouse to look at the product, the place would be empty, the inventory sold off by the ”liquidity manager” to his buddies in the broker business. Was it in the best interests of the company to use our exchange? Absolutely. Was it in the interest of the lower-level employees? No way - they wanted to protect their relationships with brokers, who got inventory at below-market prices and, in return, took the manager golfing, to the Super Bowl… and in one case, bought the manager a vacation home in SoCal.
Fast-forward to my current role, where I’m reviewing a lot of different internet startups. In a couple of cases, I’ve seen companies whose model depends on disrupting or removing certain pieces of the workflow within the organization - for instance, streamlining contract negotiation and review for licensing certain kinds of media. (I’m intentionally being a little vague here, to not disparage specific companies.)
We’re talking about a completely different part of the value chain here - biz dev and legal types, not liquidity managers - but it still raised alarm bells in my head, because of the general principle from my previous experience: namely, disrupting workflows within an organization can be hard, especially when those that are in charge of the workflow have a vested interest (bribes, keeping their jobs) in maintaining the status quo. Concrete examples don’t get you to that realization, but if I can draw a principle from an experience and adapt it to an outwardly-different situation that nevertheless has fundamental similarities… that’s useful.