How many members can a committee have and still be effective?

Cyril Northcote Parkinson argued that beyond about 20 members, groups become structurally unable to come to consensus.  You can read more of Parkinson's insights on work from Parkinson's Law: And Other Studies in Administration

Below is an excerpt from Mark Buchanan's article  in issue 2690 of New Scientist magazine, page 38-39.

"A look around the globe today, courtesy of data collected by the US Central Intelligence Agency, indicates that Parkinson might have been onto something. The highest executive bodies of most countries have between 13 and 20 members. "Cabinets are commonly constituted with memberships close to Parkinson's limit," says Thurner, "but not above it." And that is not all, says Klimek: the size of the executive is also inversely correlated to measures of life expectancy, adult literacy, economic purchasing power and political stability. "The more members there are, the more likely a country is to be less stable politically, and less developed," he says.

Why should this be? To find out, the researchers constructed a simple network model of a committee. They grouped the nodes of the network - the committee members- in tightly knit clusters with a few further links between clusters tying the overall network together, reflecting the clumping tendencies of like-minded people known to exist in human interactions. To start off, each person in the network had one of two opposing opinions, represented as a 0 or a 1. At each time step in the model, each member would adopt the opinion held by the majority of their immediate neighbours.

Such a process can have two outcomes: either the network will reach a consensus, with 0s or 1s throughout, or it will get stuck at an entrenched disagreement between two factions. A striking transition between these two possibilities emerged as the number of participants grew - around Parkinson's magic number of 20. Groups with fewer than 20 members tend to reach agreement, whereas those larger than 20 generally splinter into subgroups that agree within themselves, but become frozen in permanent disagreement with each other. "With larger groups, there's a combinatorial explosion in the number of ways to form factions," says Thurner.

Santo Fortunato, a physicist who works on complex networks at the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy, thinks the result is convincing evidence for Parkinson's conjecture. But he would like to see further testing. "The outcome might well change significantly if you change the shape of the social network, or the way people's opinions influence one another," he says.

So might this kind of work offer a rational way to optimise our decision-making bodies? One curious detail provides an intriguing slant on this question. In the computer simulations, there is a particular number of decision-makers that stands out from the trend as being truly, spectacularly bad, tending with alarmingly high probability to lead to deadlock: eight.

Where this effect comes from is unclear. But once again, Parkinson had anticipated it, noting in 1955 that no nation had a cabinet of eight members. Intriguingly, the same is true today, and other committees charged with making momentous decisions tend to fall either side of the bedevilled number: the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, for example, has nine; the US National Security Council has six.

So perhaps we all subliminally know the kind of things that Parkinson highlighted and the computer simulations have confirmed. As Parkinson noted, we ignore them at our peril. Charles I was the only British monarch who favoured a council of state of eight members. His decision-making was so notoriously bad that he lost his head.

Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Cyril Northcote Parkinson explains in Parkinson's Law: And Other Studies in Administration

Mark Buchanan writes in issue 2690 of New Scientist magazine, page 38-39:

Is there anything more to that "law" than just a cynical slogan? Physicists Peter Klimek, Rudolf Hanel and Stefan Thurner of the Medical University of Vienna in Austria think so. They have recreated mathematically just the kind of bureaucratic dynamics that Parkinson described anecdotally 50 years ago. Their findings put Parkinson's observations on a scientific footing, but also make productive reading for anyone in charge of organising... well, anything.

Parkinson based his ideas not just on his war experience, but also his historical research. Between 1914 and 1928, he noted, the number of administrators in the British Admiralty increased by almost 80 per cent, while the number of sailors they had to administer fell by a third, and the number of ships by two-thirds. Parkinson suggested a reason: in any hierarchical management structure, people in positions of authority need subordinates, and those extra bodies have to be occupied- regardless of how much there actually is to do.

Parkinson was crystallising, with tongue half in cheek, classic work done by the German sociologist Max Weber in the early 20th century. Weber described the attributes of an ideal bureaucracy and possible "degenerating" influences - such as any system of promotion not based wholly on merit. Parkinson's own analysis spawned other, more po-faced and politically charged critiques of public bureaucracies from economists such as William Niskanen, who served on US President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. Niskanen theorised that bureaucracies grow because officials seek to increase the budgets they control and so boost their own salary, power and standing. He and other conservatives used such arguments to push for smaller government - but they could not give any supporting quantitative insight into the growth of bureaucracies.

The new work aims to do just that. "Parkinson's essays weren't quantitative," says Klimek, "but they're so clear that it's easy to cast them into specific mathematical models." From a simple system of equations using quantities such as the promotion and drop-out rates within a hierarchical body, a "phase diagram" can be computed to show what conditions breed ever greater bureaucracy. A high probability of promotion coupled with the hiring of more subordinates - the scenario Parkinson described- is unsurprisingly a recipe for particularly fast growth.

What is Reality? What constitutes the authentic human being?

From Philip K. Dick.  The quotations below came from How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later.


"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

"The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not."

To Marry or Not to Marry, by Charles Darwin

This is Darwin's memo, probably writen around July 1838.

This is the question

Marry

Children — (if it Please God) — Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, — object to be beloved & played with. —  —better than a dog anyhow. — Home, & someone to take care of house — Charms of music & female chit-chat. — These things good for one's health. — Forced to visit & receive relations but terrible loss of time. —

W My God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won't do. — Imagine living all one's day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps — Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro' St.

Marry — Marry — Marry  Q.E.D.

Not Marry

No children, (no second life), no one to care for one in old age.— What is the use of working 'in' without sympathy from near & dear friends—who are near & dear friends to the old, except relatives

Freedom to go where one liked — choice of Society & little of it.  — Conversation of clever men at clubs — Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle. — to have the expense & anxiety of children — perhaps quarelling — Loss of time. — cannot read in the Evenings — fatness & idleness — Anxiety & responsibility — less money for books &c — if many children forced to gain one's bread. — (But then it is very bad for ones health to work too much)

Perhaps my wife wont like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool —

^- These notes record Darwin's speculations about the prospect of marriage and his future life and work. They were written before his engagement and marriage to his cousin Emma Wedgwood in January 1839. The note has been conjecturally dated to July 1838. Darwin's notes on marriage are transcribed and annotated in Correspondence vol. 2, appendix iv.

*******

The above is from The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online.

Is the glorification of chefs a sign of a culture in decline?

B.R. Myers discusses the foodie fringe in the March 2011 issue of The Atlantic magazine: 

The Moral Crusade Against Foodies

Gluttony dressed up as foodie-ism is still gluttony.

The full article is available here.

Here's an excerpt:

It has always been crucial to the gourmet’s pleasure that he eat in ways the mainstream cannot afford. For hundreds of years this meant consuming enormous quantities of meat. That of animals that had been whipped to death was more highly valued for centuries, in the belief that pain and trauma enhanced taste. “A true gastronome,” according to a British dining manual of the time, “is as insensible to suffering as is a conqueror.” But for the past several decades, factory farms have made meat ever cheaper and—as the excellent book The CAFO [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations] Reader makes clear—the pain and trauma are thrown in for free. The contemporary gourmet reacts by voicing an ever-stronger preference for free-range meats from small local farms. He even claims to believe that well-treated animals taste better, though his heart isn’t really in it. Steingarten tells of watching four people hold down a struggling, groaning pig for a full 20 minutes as it bled to death for his dinner. He calls the animal “a filthy beast deserving its fate.”
Even if gourmets’ rejection of factory farms and fast food is largely motivated by their traditional elitism, it has left them, for the first time in the history of their community, feeling more moral, spiritual even, than the man on the street. Food writing reflects the change. Since the late 1990s, the guilty smirkiness that once marked its default style has been losing ever more ground to pomposity and sermonizing. References to cooks as “gods,” to restaurants as “temples,” to biting into “heaven,” etc., used to be meant as jokes, even if the compulsive recourse to religious language always betrayed a certain guilt about the stomach-driven life. Now the equation of eating with worship is often made with a straight face. The mood at a dinner table depends on the quality of food served; if culinary perfection is achieved, the meal becomes downright holy—as we learned from Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), in which a pork dinner is described as feeling “like a ceremony … a secular seder.”

The moral logic in Pollan’s hugely successful book now informs all food writing: the refined palate rejects the taste of factory-farmed meat, of the corn-syrupy junk food that sickens the poor, of frozen fruits and vegetables transported wastefully across oceans—from which it follows that to serve one’s palate is to do right by small farmers, factory-abused cows, Earth itself. This affectation of piety does not keep foodies from vaunting their penchant for obscenely priced meals, for gorging themselves, even for dining on endangered animals—but only rarely is public attention drawn to the contradiction. This has much to do with the fact that the nation’s media tend to leave the national food discourse to the foodies in their ranks. To people like Pollan himself. And Severson, his very like-minded colleague at The New York Times. Is any other subculture reported on so exclusively by its own members? Or with a frequency and an extensiveness that bear so little relation to its size? (The “slow food” movement that we keep hearing about has fewer than 20,000 members nationwide.)

The same bias is apparent in writing that purports to be academic or at least serious. The book Gluttony (2003), one of a series on the seven deadly sins, was naturally assigned to a foodie writer, namely Francine Prose, who writes for the gourmet magazine Saveur. Not surprisingly, she regards gluttony primarily as a problem of overeating to the point of obesity; it is “the only sin … whose effects are visible, written on the body.” In fact the Catholic Church’s criticism has always been directed against an inordinate preoccupation with food—against foodie-ism, in other words—which we encounter as often among thin people as among fat ones. A disinterested writer would likely have done the subject more justice. Unfortunately, even the new sociological study Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape is the product of two self-proclaimed members of the tribe, Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann, who pull their punches accordingly; the introduction is titled “Entering the Delicious World of Foodies.” In short, the 21st-century gourmet need fear little public contradiction when striking sanctimonious poses.

The same goes for restaurant owners like Alice Waters. A celebrated slow-food advocate and the founder of an exclusive eatery in Berkeley, she is one of the chefs profiled in Spoon Fed. “Her streamlined philosophy,” Severson tells us, is “that the most political act we can commit is to eat delicious food that is produced in a way that is sustainable, that doesn’t exploit workers and is eaten slowly and with reverence.” A vegetarian diet, in other words? Please. The reference is to Chez Panisse’s standard fare—Severson cites “grilled rack and loin of Magruder Ranch veal” as a typical offering—which is environmentally sustainable only because so few people can afford it. Whatever one may think of Anthony Bourdain’s moral sense, his BS detector seems to be working fine. In Medium Raw he congratulates Waters on having “made lust, greed, hunger, self-gratification and fetishism look good.” Not to everyone, perhaps, but okay.

How to send condolences, by Andrew Tobias

HOW TO SEND CONDOLENCES

The main thing to say is that it’s “pass/fail.”  As my wise friend Patty Marx, the writer, explained to me, “People agonize over what to say, as if there’s something they could say that would actually make it better” – certainly I always agonize in these situations – “when in fact there’s nothing to say except, thinking of you in this difficult time.”  Or words to that effect.  Sure, there will be the occasional piece of amazing advice, or the perfect anecdote or shared memory.  But basically, Patty says, you either send a note (and pass) or become paralyzed trying, as I so often have (and fail).

Now that I’ve experienced it from the other end, I plan to fail less often.  (And to send nicer flowers.)  Not least because it’s now okay to do it by email.  Sure, it’s classier to send a handwritten note.  But I have lost the ability to write anything legible by hand.  And if one does send a physical note, one sort of puts an obligation on the recipient to reply in kind, and, well, I’m sorry, but I’m responding by email.

If you’re close to the bereaved – or someone important, like CEO of the company she works for – don’t be shy about calling the day of the event, as soon as you hear.  If you’re (both?) lucky, you’ll get voice mail.  But whether you do or get her actual ear, Patty’s advice holds: it’s not so much what you say (“I’m so sorry!  Is there anything I can do?”) as the fact that you summoned the courage to call.  Again, something I have too often failed to do in the past.

TONY TAKITANI, A Short story by HARUKI MURAKAMI

TONY TAKITANI

A Short story by HARUKI MURAKAMI

Published in New Yorker Magazine Issue of 2002-04-15

Tony Takitani's real name was really that: Tony Takitani.

Because of his name and his curly hair and his deeply sculpted features, he
was often assumed to be a mixed-blood child. This was just after the war,
when there were lots of children around whose blood was half American G.I.
But Tony Takitani's mother and father were both one-hundred-per-cent
genuine Japanese. His father, Shozaburo Takitani, had been a fairly
successful jazz trombonist, but four years before the Second World War
broke out he was forced to leave Tokyo because of a problem involving a
woman. If he had to leave town, he figured, he might as well really leave, so
he crossed over to China with nothing but his trombone in hand. In those
days, Shanghai was just a day's boat ride from Nagasaki. Shozaburo owned
nothing in Tokyo - or anywhere else in Japan - that he would hate to lose. He
left without regrets. If anything, he suspected, Shanghai, with its well-crafted
enticements, would be better suited to his personality than Tokyo was. He
was standing on the deck of a boat plowing its way up the Yangtze River the
first time he saw Shanghai's elegant avenues glowing in the morning sun,
and that did it. The light seemed to promise him a future of tremendous
brightness. He was twenty-one years old.

And so he took it easy through the upheaval of the war - from the Japanese
invasion of China to the attack on Pearl Harbor to the dropping of two atomic
bombs. He played his trombone in Shanghai night clubs as the struggles took
place somewhere far away. Shozaburo Takitani was a man who possessed
not the slightest inclination to influence - or even to reflect upon - history. He
wanted nothing more than to be able to play his trombone, eat three meals a
day, and have a few women nearby. He was simultaneously modest and
arrogant. Deeply self-centered, he nevertheless treated those around him
with kindness and good feeling, which is why most people liked him. Young,
handsome, and a talented musician, he stood out wherever he went like a
crow on a snowy day. He slept with more women than he could count.
Japanese, Chinese, White Russians, whores, married women, gorgeous girls,
and girls who were not so gorgeous: he did it with anyone he could get his
hands on. Before long, his super-sweet trombone and his super-active giant
penis had made him a Shanghai sensation.

Shozaburo was also blessed - though he did not realize it - with a talent for
making "useful" friends. He was on good terms with high-ranking Army
officers, millionaires, and various influential types who were reaping gigantic
profits from the war through obscure channels. A lot of them carried pistols
under their jackets and never exited a building without giving the street a
quick scan right and left. For some reason, Shozaburo Takitani and they just
"clicked." And they took special care of him whenever problems came up.

But talent can sometimes work against you. When the war ended,
Shozaburo's connections won him the attention of the Chinese Army, and he
was locked up for a long time. Day after day, others who had been
imprisoned for similar reasons were taken out of their cells and executed
without a trial. Guards would just appear, drag them into the prison yard,
and blow their brains out with automatic pistols. Shozaburo assumed that he
would die in prison. But the prospect of death did not frighten him greatly.
They would put a bullet through his brain, and it would be all over. A split
second of pain. I've lived the way I wanted to all these years, he thought.
I've slept with tons of women. I've eaten a lot of good food, and had a lot of
good times. There isn't so much in life that I'm sorry I missed. Besides, I'm
not in any position to complain about being killed. It's just the way it goes.
Hundreds of thousands of Japanese have died in this war, and many of them
in far more terrible ways.

As he waited, Shozaburo watched the clouds drift by the bars of his tiny
window and painted mental pictures on his cell's filthy walls of the faces and
bodies of the women he had slept with. In the end, though, he turned out to
be one of only two Japanese prisoners to leave the prison alive and go home
to Japan. By that time, the other man, a high-ranking officer, had nearly lost
his mind. Shozaburo stood on the deck of the boat, and as he watched the

-----
For the rest of the story, please click here.

For information about the movie directed by Jun Ichikawa and starring Issey Ogata and Rie Miyazawa, click here.