URSABLOG: If You Can’t Take A Joke

It is a dream of many people to find a solution to a problem that no-one else has found before. This is a dream that goes way back, probably to the dawn of spoken language between the first humans. In some cases this is driven by ambition, or by a noble desire to make the world better place. A lot of the time however it is just the similarly age-old desire to make shit loads of money. ?

Every once in a while, ?after a lesson, or after a few drinks, someone brings up the great idea of Artificial Intelligence, or algorithms, or something, using predictive analysis, or big data, or something, with quants, or supercomputers, or something being able to predict something which must be fairly simple – right? – the freight markets of the future.

This is remarkably a fairly common theme too in university theses, or dissertations, the abundance of which leads me to suspect that even the professors and supervisors have a greater desire to inadvertently make shit loads of money too, rather than reach the Olympian heights of academic knowledge and wisdom. But none the less, thesis after thesis, dissertation after dissertation comes up with an answer varying on a common theme: you cannot predict the market…. yet. Hope dies last after all.

Now I could go to great lengths, yet again to tell you why this is. Indeed I have read many books to try and find some insight, some key, some silver bullet, to make me a better broker, and yes, make shit loads of money too. This complex nature of demand derived from other stuff, perfect competition, the imperfection of rational thinking, sentiment, mental heuristics, and downright greed and loathing mixed with emotional insecurity and psychological hang-ups. Computers can’t handle this. But the real reason, and I always suspected this, is that computers are simply not funny.

I am not saying for one minute that people that work with, and work on, big data, algorithms and all the other stuff are not funny, but I can’t imagine Mark Zuckerberg being a bundle of laughs, and Travis Kalanick seemed to me at least to not only socially challenged but a deeply unpleasant individual. In shipping, the people I have met from Marine Traffic, or Signal, seem to be perfectly balanced individuals, with funky job titles, and a progressive way of mind. But they will never take over the shipping world, but neither does it seem that they want to, because they understand that their innovations are to be used as tools rather for people to use in the market, rather than a monster to replace people in the market. Even VesselsValue was created not as a replacement to human beings coming up with values, but as a product for people who didn’t always trust the motivations behind people who gave the valuations. The product isn’t perfect either, it has to be said, but the people who subscribe to it realise that, and use it as a reference point, rather than something written in stone. At least I hope they do. And the people behind VesselsValue are delightful too, and funny too. I know this for a fact.

But computers, even at the high end of AI, just can’t get, or take, a joke. Machine learning is just that, machine learning. You can’t teach someone to understand a joke if they just don’t get it.

I found myself recently falling into a trap of saying in conversations “you just don’t get it.” This, I now realise, is a terrible thing to say, because instead of persuading, or helping someone understand something I felt to be correct or important, I was actually excluding them, or expelling them, from what I found to be correct or important, which was neither helpful or productive. To ‘get’ a concept, who not only have to understand it, you have to feel it, and live it. To tell someone that they are not wholly alive is not exactly helpful

Let me try and explain. Shipbroking is not a career that is held in especial esteem by the shipping community, or the world at large. I suspect that few parents exhorted their children to study so that they could become a shipbroker, instead of becoming a doctor or a lawyer. There are some shipbrokers I know that aspire to become lawyers, or regret their decisions – or lack of them – that would have enabled them to do so. But I never heard of that many lawyers that wanted to become a shipbroker, even as they envy the commission invoices they may see at a closing meeting of a ship sale.

Shipbrokers, however, are a fairly funny and witty bunch of people. More than that, the better ones are adept at distilling huge amounts of information and concepts into a small package that can then be negotiated, singling out the points of contention, and finding the ones that can easily reach a consensus. To do this requires something that cannot be taught although it is something that can be learnt through experience, but a lot of the time it is just instinct.

Sometimes during some difficult negotiations, it feels like you are getting off a bike that you have forgotten how to ride, and then proceed to completely re-invent the wheel. Other times, you feel that you are instinctively guiding the flow of negotiation to its natural conclusion, as if you were riding a bike without having to think about it, as if the bike was part of you. This is in fact how many cyclists feel when they ride a bike: you have good days and bad days. There are good deals and bad deals.

But the deals get done. What helps get the deal done? That instinct to find solutions, to fight and concede, to twist or hold, to shout or keep silent. Sure, sometimes the decisions taken are wrong. But the ability to get through the negotiations and succeed is not always a matter of Machiavellian intrigue of bluff and double bluff, smoke and mirrors, half lies and outright whoppers, but humour, wit, persuasion, and a gift for storytelling. Combined with greed, charisma and a thick skin, it is unstoppable. But without humour and wit, without “getting it” you end up with a rather unpleasant deceitful individual who can’t hold on to their clients.

So telling someone they don’t “get it” means you are not only condemning that person to exclusion, you are shooting yourself in the foot too.

When someone tells you they have a great sense of humour, it’s usually a sure sign that they don’t. When someone tells you they are a great broker, they are setting themselves up for a fall. They are already taking themselves too seriously and will cut corners, or worse, to maintain their appearance to the world; the rest of the world will just wait to prove that it is not the case, which happens sooner or later, for every broker in existence.

One of my oldest, closest and dearest friends in shipbroking, in shipping, and in life come to think of it, when faced with disappointment in his own broking life, or in sympathy with others suffering the same fate, had a catchphrase: “Well, if you can’t take a joke….” The end of the sentence didn’t need to be completed. And because computers can follow patterns, check potential decisions many hundreds or thousands or moves ahead, absorb data in mind boggling amounts and at superhuman speed, they are indeed useful tools for those that use them. But they lack context. More importantly they don’t have the instincts to read people, or body language, or how something is said. They don’t have a social life, so they lack the ambiguous and fluid tensions at play in human interaction. They can’t make assumptions about how people dress, or stand, or sit, or look at other people. They can’t walk into a room and notice a strange feeling about the mood of the people there. They are not easy to model, and the modelling will have to be done by someone, who because these things are all subjective, the modelling will be subjective. Arguably, all modelling is.

The long and short of it is that computers can’t take a joke. If they could tell one, it probably wouldn’t be that funny. But laughter, and humour, and anger, and wit, and seduction, and gossip, and despair, and flirting, and hatred, and displeasure, and all the other things that are uniquely human play a part in most negotiations that take place in shipping. So until you can make a computer, or even an app, that can join a witty conversation amongst brokers in a bar after a few drinks, then don’t even bother thinking of a platform, or an algorithm, or whatever that can replace the efficient price discovery mechanism at play in the world of perfect competition in the tramp freight markets. You will waste a lot of time, and it will be a long time before, if ever, you see the funny side.?

Simon Ward

www.ursashipbrokers.gr