These contrafactuals are incredibly useful and important. This has a lot in common with science fiction, a genre full of thought experiments that ask Heinlein's famous three questions: If you're adding three more people to your camping trip, will the amount of additional water require renting another vehicle? No need to guess: just check and see. Change the input and watch as that change ripples through the whole system in an eyeblink.
But intuition can calcify, become a rigid set of rules that increasingly diverge from the best strategy.īy contrast, spreadsheets yield a set of crisp, instantly tallied answers to any question you put to them. Historically, the answers have sprung from intuition, from fingerspitzengefühl – the "fingertip feeling" of how a system's components work and what their potential and limitations are.
These are the questions that anyone managing a complex system asks themselves all the time. Once the model is built, we can easily test out counterfactuals: what if I add a third shift? What if I bargain harder for discounts on a key component? If I give my workers a productivity-increasing raise, will the profits make up for the costs? Using a spreadsheet, a complex process can be expressed as a series of mathematical operations: we put these inputs into the factory and we get these finished goods. While many people use spreadsheets as an overgrown calculator, adding up long columns of numbers, the rise and rise of spreadsheets comes from their use in modeling. Working through this book – and its two sequels, which travel back in time to the 1980s and Marty's first encounters with VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 – I was struck by the similarities between spreadsheets and science fiction. Marty Hench (the protagonist of Red Team Blues) is a 67-year-old forensic accountant who specializes in unwinding Silicon Valley financial frauds, a field he basically invented 40 years ago, when, as a PC-struck MIT dropout, he moved from Cambridge to San Francisco to recover the stolen millions hidden in spreadsheets. This week, John Scalzi was kind enough to let me write a guest-editorial for his Whatever blog about the themes in my new crime technothriller, Red Team Blues specifically, about the ways that spreadsheets embody the power and the pitfalls of science fiction at its best and worst: The seductive, science fictional power of spreadsheets ( )
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