Writ Large

Writ Large

Paul could not turn on cable news without hearing the term “writ large” over and over again. It is used to mean clear and obvious in context, and sometimes even a fully exaggerated form. The reason for Paul hearing this term being overused is a function of the goings on in Washington D.C. At this time of year, cherry blossoms are writ large all over the capital. One of Paul’s favorite movies was The Last Samurai where the last samurai, Katsumoto, ponders the search for the perfect cherry blossom. The movie ends with the noble death of Katsumoto on the field of battle where he observes with his dying eyes that every cherry blossom is perfect.

The term perfection and Washington D.C. do not find themselves in proximity very often, perhaps even less so today. What is writ large in the capital is the degree of dysfunction and the imperfection in the manner that we are all conducting ourselves. Paul was more or less indifferent about it all. He was young and largely non-political in orientation. Nothing about Washington was ever writ large to his way of thinking.

Paul was a research analyst for a start-up that was trying to change the world by refocusing energy storage and production on the back of ammonia. Everyone had tried to do this in years gone by with hydrogen, but that stuff is just too volatile and too hard to handle. Ammonia was toxic and smelly, but it was pretty well understood by the industrial world in terms of how to store it, transport it and use it. Paul liked complex systems. Ammonia, used in fertilizer or cleaning solutions was not terribly complex. But ammonia used as an alternative energy vehicle was very complex. It was so complex that it needed governmental support to really make the turn.

Paul’s world was the world of data and finance He liked numbers that told a story. He loved spreadsheets. To him, spreadsheets ranked right up there with the thermos bottle as the world’s greatest invention. Paul loved that old thermos joke (put hot things in and they stay hot, put cold things in and they stay cold…..how do it know?). Seriously though, the lowly spreadsheet is such a radically different format in which to do analysis, that Paul thought it deserved extra-special consideration. Think about it, word processors may have speeded up writing and editing, but you input information in the same way, get it out in the same form and generally don’t change it at all. Maybe spell-check is sort of new and special, but barely. How about databases? Clearly, they lend themselves to digitization, but database management or presentation management (I’m working through the Microsoft Office Suite) simply don’t change much moving from analogue to digital.

Not so with spreadsheets. Paul marveled at the concept of filling cells with formulas and setting up spreadsheets in four dimensions. Rows and columns supplemented by sub-spreadsheets that allowed all of them to interact….and then macros that can operate within and across spreadsheets. It blew Paul’s mind. He could recite the history of spreadsheets with the best of them. VisiCalc begat SuperCalc begat Lotus 123 begat Symphony begat Excel. Technically, Paul knew that there were predecessor programs to VisiCalc, but it was the PC (technically the Apple II) that started making spreadsheets ubiquitous.

Paul had, in the past, spent as much as sixteen hours a day working on spreadsheets when he had worked on the trading desk. Back in the days of green diode screens, that was much harder on the eyes than today’s white screens. But any day spent on just a spreadsheet can drive anyone crazy. Paul was one of those guys who was far more comfortable with numbers and logic than people and prose. He felt that people could be categorized by how they interacted with spreadsheets. There were people like him that could build a model. There were people who were comfortable assessing spreadsheets online where they could drill down into the cells to understand the fullness of the analysis. And then there were the great unwashed that could read a spreadsheet only if you printed it out for them. That meant they could only assess the big picture told by the spreadsheet and not grasp the nuances of the analysis.

It was Paul’s experience that those in the last category were mostly over 50 years old. The model builders were mostly under 35 years old, but there were exceptions like him. He was older and was not as fast building models as the youngsters, but could create far more complex models because he simply understood the analytical dynamics better. His mind worked like a spreadsheet …which was a scary thought to most of the rest of the world.

After a long day at work one day, Paul came walking into my office across the hall (he preferred a windowless office with a whiteboard). He knew I listened to MSNBC with one ear all day long. He had been listening to the latest legal/political nonsense from Washington as it built to a crescendo. He offered up an interesting thought, “Do you think it would be helpful for me to create a spreadsheet for all the Mueller investigation facts and other legal actions and factoids, so anyone can make sense of all this stuff?”

That caught me flat-footed. “Do you think it lends itself to that sort of analytical format?” I said.

“Of course?! It’s just like any other fact patterns. It’s not mathematical for the most part, but it is all about conditional statistics.” Paul blurted out, unable to disguise his difficulty with someone questioning his ideas.

“What would be the output it would give me?” I innocently asked.

“Well, it would tell you the likelihood that Trump would get indicted or impeached. The outcome would be writ large for you to see. Would that be helpful?”

Paul really was an oblivious analyst, but this was one cherry blossom I was anxious to see.