Bad Information

Tomorrow at 9:00 AM, the "Freeh Report on the Pennsylvania State University” will be published at this site. The report is the output from the $12 million USD investigation into “the facts and circumstances of the actions of The Pennsylvania State University surrounding the child abuse committed by a former employee, Gerald A. Sandusky”. The investigation was driven by former FBI Director Louis Freeh. I hope the IT staff that administers that website knows what they are doing. Something tells me that there might be some serious HTTP traffic heading their way tomorrow morning.

A blog reader asked me the other day why I hadn’t yet unloaded on the Penn State Child Molestation Scandal, sort of intimating that I should be chomping at the bit on that one. Meh. What hasn’t been blogged about on that mess at this point? It has all been written over and over and over again.

I have colleagues at work (folks that have treated me well) and family members that are hurting over this. I feel  badly for them - there is no sense in piling on and scoring silly “rivalry points” at the expense of something as serious as child abuse. Give me a little credit. As a Pitt Grad, it would be almost impossible to write a piece and not vomit a bunch of snark up that I would regret later – even though that snark is embedded in my DNA. Mr. Pot, I’d like to introduce you to Mr. Kettle. Besides, when you only play four times in 20-plus years in football, are you really rivals anymore?

So I am going to try to take the high road on this, and touch on a couple of the meta-aspects of the scandal, which are intriguing, to me at least:

• The seemingly unlimited appetite that people have to make judgments based on incomplete and out-of-context information. The discussion of the scandal on the Internet - seven months into this scandal, all the lame talking points have been refined, the themes established, caricatures created, and of course sides and positions taken – all based on a fraction of the facts that will be eventually disclosed. Yet everybody thinks they know how it went down.
• The fluidity of information – how it is filtered and spun and manipulated and transformed when it moves up and down a power hierarchy by sophisticated, powerful parties with plenty at stake.
• The devotion of a subset of the PSU fan base to a coach and his program – they continue to reinforce every stereotype for which they have been mocked for years. Talk about doubling down. Maybe they will all be vindicated in the end. Maybe not. Stay tuned. It is just…..weird. I just can’t grok the notion of tying my own self esteem so heavily to a university, let alone a stupid football program or a wealthy, powerful, egotistical, highly successful, legendary coach. Excessive Pride in One’s School Syndrome.
• The PR tug-of-war being played out between the Paterno Camp, the BOT, the AD, the President, and the Governor. Will make one hell of a movie or book one day. (Wonder who gets to play Scott Paterno?)

I am going to dive deeper in this post on the first two bullets. This thing has a life of its own. Seemingly daily, some new information emerges - selected email leaks or statements released from the Paterno family and lawyers. Hell, even ghost-written (pun intended) PR puff pieces seemingly hatched from the grave. What is up with that the day before the Freeh report is released? Who knew that Coach Paterno even used email? Apparently not his lawyers or the Paterno family. Let alone Microsoft Word? I will say that editorial from Coach makes my blogging look like elementary school chicken scratch. Really well-written. Bull-shite.) 

As each bucket of new information emerges, there is the standard rush to immediately pounce and pontificate, no matter how much context is missing from the new information. Each of the many sides then use their own brand of screwy pretzel logic to spin the new incomplete information to fit their narrative. Sound familiar? The wonders of The New Social Media. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong, just be the first and say something, anything! Oh and be 100% cocksure!

Take the example of the infamous quote from AD Tim Curley in one of the selected leaked emails:

"After giving it more thought and talking it over with Joe yesterday, I am uncomfortable with what we agreed were the next steps."

When I read those 23 words, here is what goes through my head – what I know and what I don’t know:

1. We know that there was a change in direction - from planning to report the 2001 Lasch Building incident to authorities to not reporting that incident to authorities.
2. We know, apparently, that the change in direction occurred after two events: Curley thought it over some more. Curley discussed the issue with Paterno.
3. We don’t know the sequence of those events. Did Curley think it over first and then consult with Paterno or did he consult with Paterno and then think it over. Or are we over-parsing that?
4. We don’t know the nature of the conversation between the two? That is sort of a big one to not know, isn’t it? Were their discussions focused on damage to the brand? Or were they truly unsure about Sandusky and simply being “humane”? Or were there some other considerations that triggered the change in direction?
5. We don’t know each parties position on the decision to report. Was Paterno in favor of reporting but convinced by Curley that was a bad plan? Or vice versa? Were they in agreement both at the start and end of the discussion?

I could go on and on. Mind you, I have an opinion on each of those points, but it is just that, an opinion. It is just conjecture. How in the hell can you look at those words and, unequivocally and with no hesitation whatsoever, assign responsibility for the change in direction to either party? Yet that is what damn near everybody in the media did, charging that Paterno was responsible for strong-arming Curley. Based on those 23 words?

Furthermore, why, at this point, do you need to even jump to any conclusion? By my count, there are four active investigations that have yet to publish their findings on this cluster-you-know-what including the Freeh investigation. Oh, and the upcoming perjury trials will shed some new information. So more information and context – hell, maybe even the truth -  is coming. Yet, that hasn’t stopped all the partisans from immediately digging in their heels and pronouncing their truths. Maddening. Does anybody feel any shame anymore about eventually being proven wrong because they jumped the gun?

In addition to incomplete and out-of-context information, the other theme I have been noodling on in thinking about the Penn State scandal is the phenomena of information filtering as it moves up and down a politically-based power structure. You see this consistently played out in all sorts of institutions. While my track record on these sorts of predictions isn’t great, I would be shocked if, after the “”truth” emerges, somehow this phenomena is not front-and-center in the Penn State mess. It gives all the key actors in the system plausible deniability even when the system as a whole failed so spectacularly to stop such heinous acts.

If you were working at IBM up through 1990, you are familiar with a document entitled the IBM Jargon and General Computing Dictionary. This was a collection of jargon for terms originating within IBM or that had an IBM-unique flavor to them. A real cultural artifact, a snapshot of an era, and a great resource for new hires – IBM is really its own little world.

Most of the dictionary is inside-baseball stuff for IBMers, but more than a few of the definitions provide a Dilbert-like perspective that is applicable to any large organization. There are some real jewels in there – LOL funny stuff. I was perusing that dictionary recently, when I came across the definition of “bad information”:

bad information 1. n. Lies. 2. n. The truth,
expressed euphemistically. There is a story (abbreviated
here) that well illustrates this:

• Programmer to Manager, “This code is shit”.
• Manager to Second-level, “This is fertilizer”.
• Second-level to Third-level, “This makes things grow”.
• Third-level to Director, “Must be good stuff”.

After an external audit, the
misinformed protect themselves by saying: “My
people gave me bad information”. See also CYA.

It strikes me that, if you replace the names of the “misinformed” in the above story with McQueary, Paterno, Curley, and Spanier, you can almost close your eyes and envision a seamless transition from child rape to horseplay (assuming all those parties could even conceive of the notion of rape between a man and a boy).