Cryptography and the Wasson test
Slouching towards Malcolm Gladwell
Presumably it’s early onset dementia but as I start this post I can’t remember the name of the man with silly hair1 who writes bestselling pop contrarianism. But I have gained a sudden sympathy for his methods. I’ve spent part of the last fortnight fiddling again and again with my account of the Floradora cypher, how it worked, and what made it hard to crack.
There are two ways to describe a cypher — as a system or as a struggle. The mathematically inclined, or those who want to understand it deeply, will want to see it as a system, and understand how the various parts fit together, the better to disassemble them. This is how my mother’s own account for the troops appears. It is a style that makes use of jargon, because jargon properly used can describe features of a system more clearly than anything else but for outsiders who have no understanding of why such precision is important, it is simply bewildering. You would derive little benefit if I were to tell you that “Floradora was double hatted”. The difference between that and a system that was bald on top, or wore only one hat at a time, would mean nothing to you.
To understand a system in this way is rather like appreciating a chess problem: you come to appreciate the logic as something beautiful and worthwhile in itself. You see how changing the parts affects the whole and why. There is a satisfaction in this glimpse of things but that’s not why most people — most grandmasters, even — play chess. We play to win. “I like to watch the other man’s ego crack” as Bobby Fisher said in a moment of unlovely honesty. And when a problem is presented as a struggle, not a system, it gets easier to understand.
If I tell you to list 100 five letter words, you might struggle. But play wordle for 30 days running and you will have thought of 100 five letter words without tiring at all of the effort. And so I came to believe that the way to explain Floradora was as a struggle: to position the reader not as a disembodied problem solver, but as someone for whom the problem is part of a competition.
Obviously there is a subset of elite educated readers for whom problem solving is always a competition. I suppose that’s how I learned the Latin grammar I have now almost entirely forgotten. But that’s not how most people learn today. And if you want to reach people not much interested in systemic comprehension, then it’s clearly better to push it as a struggle.
So I have rewritten the material that went into last week’s post yet again and now I am reasonably happy with it.
But as I write this, I realise it is also a flaw in my pitching technique. When people ask what is happening in the Church of England, say, I look for a new way to understand the system involved. This is partly because I am bored with the old ways but mostly because I really want to understand it, and to isolate the factors which are actually shaping the future. But a systems view is about the struggle between abstractions, and the people in them appear as the tools or playthings of historical forces. In a systems view, the troubles of the Church of England are best understood as a consequence of the disappearance of the culture of which it was a vital part. The motives of individual actors are not really terribly important in this. They are constrained by where they find themselves. Justin Welby is condemned to reinvent George Carey’s programme irrespective of the differences between the two men and their aims.
But unless you have reason to care about the Church at all — and it is part of the problem that most people don’t — this reasoning is too hard to follow. One woman’s struggle against entropy is better; one woman’s struggle against the diocesan bureaucracy is better still. Never mind that they distort the real story horribly. I suppose the answer is to start with a human eye and dolly back at the end so that the very limited significance of that eye becomes apparent. We should write features as if we were writing historical novels — good ones, that is.
Malcolm Gladwell