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Monthly Archives: July 2018

Myths of the Veritas: The Orange Man

31 Tuesday Jul 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, psychology, story, Uncategorized

≈ 106 Comments

Tags

deception, falsehood, greed, legend, liar, lie, life, myth, politics, religion, truth

(A continuation of the thread: the myths of the Veritas. The immediately preceding myth describes the creation of humans).

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

In this age, each person had enough. But one day, a man, who happened to be astoundingly fat and orange had an astounding idea. Enough was not enough. He had plenty to eat. But it occurred to him that he would feel even more satisfied if other people had less. So he decided to steal some of the food of others to test whether this would indeed make him feel even more satisfied. It worked! On the second day, he again went to steal from his neighbors, but they objected. Still, he tried to steal their food so they would be hungry and in their hunger he might again feel even fuller and more satisfied than ever before. 

His neighbors grew impatient and when the one they called Orange Man continued to try to steal his neighbors’ food, they eventually beat him with their fists and drove him away. He sat alone in a barren cleft of rock and out of the sunlight and thought long and hard. “True, I am satisfied with enough food. But I felt so much better when I had more. Perhaps I will go in the night when everyone else is asleep and steal their food. Because when they are hungry, I will feel so much better when I am fat and full.” 

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That night, when everyone was asleep, Orange Man snuck into the camp of his neighbors and began to steal their food. But Orange Man was quite fat and graceless and soon woke his neighbors who quickly surmised what he was up to and again drove him out of the camp. Now, the people were genuinely angry with him and told him that from now on, he would have to gather his own nuts and catch his own fish. None wanted to share with the greedy Orange Man. 

That night, Orange Man went hungry. He had had enough all his life. He tried to steal more than his share and now he was hungry. From this experience, many might learn the value of sharing. But not Orange Man. Instead, he plotted and schemed; schemed and plotted. How could he steal from people when they were all on the lookout for him? That was the question that obsessed him. 

He had never learned to make a fire on his own, so he was cold as well as hungry that night. He at last cried himself to sleep and began to dream. In his dream, he saw all the people sitting around their campfire talking and laughing. They were not only sharing their food. They were sharing stories. This was not a strange dream, for indeed, this is exactly what they did every night in good weather. They shared their food. They shared their fire. And they shared their stories so that they could work together better; make better houses; find game more easily. 

The next morning, Orange Man awoke more hungry than ever and very very angry. He was angry with his neighbors for not letting him steal more than his share. He was angry with the gods for making them too smart to give away all their food to him. Surprisingly, he wasn’t even a little bit angry with himself for being so greedy. Nonetheless, he was too hungry to mope all day. He needed to find some food. So, he went foraging for insects. Some of the bugs were much too fast to catch, but many were not. Of course, while searching for bugs, the Orange Man saw many weeds and twigs but he had never bothered to learn which ones were edible and which ones were poison. He happened to be staring at a twig trying to see whether there were any bugs under it, when all at once the twig walked. It was not really a twig at all! It was just another bug that looked like a twig. Once he realized it was a bug, the Orange Man grabbed at it to eat it straight away.

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Before he could snatch it up, however, the bug waved one of its little insect claws back and forth and stared into the little insect eyes of the Orange Man with its little insect eyes. Weird, thought the Orange Man just as he gobbled it up.  It wasn’t very tasty compared to some bugs, but it gave him pleasure to eat it because he was angry at the bug. He didn’t know why he was angry. Indeed, it never occurred to Orange Man to wonder why he was angry but if he had thought about it, he might have realized it was because the bug made Orange Man change his mind. First, he thought it was a twig and then he had to change his mind and realize it was a bug. And, then the little bug had seemed to wave to him in that annoying way that other people seemed to wave at friends. Of course, as a child, Orange Man may have felt love, but he worked hard all his life to kill love within himself and eventually he succeeded. 

After another afternoon of eating bugs, Orange Man at last grew thirsty and he knelt down to drink from a nearby lake. As he did so, he could see his reflection in the water. There he was, fat, ugly, and orange. Orange Man ate up many more bugs that afternoon and was less hungry than the night before. He fell into a fitful sleep and dreamt that night of returning to the lake for a drink of water. Again in his dream, as he had done in real life, he knelt down to drink. But in his dream, he heard frogs creaking and croaking. They seemed to be saying, “Greenie, greenie, greenie” and this time, when he looked at his reflection, instead of being fat, ugly, and orange, he appeared to be fat, ugly, and green. How could this be, Orange Man wondered. Even in his dream, he remembered that he was orange. This weirdness wakened him with a start, the sound of the frogs reverberating in his ears: “Greenie, greenie, greenie.” Is it possible that he saw himself as green because the frogs were saying the word “green” the whole time he was looking? 

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The next day, the Orange Man had much to think about. So far, words and stories had been used by the people mainly to work together by sharing knowledge. On a few occasions though, people told stories for entertainment. They made up stories about the stars and how mountains came to be, and how deer grew antlers. Everyone knew that they were simply made up stories. But now, the Orange Man thought of the bug that looked like a twig and how the frogs made him look green even though he was orange. What if I told people a story about where to find game but it was really just a made-up story to get people to go hunting and leave their things where I can steal them? 

The next morning, the Orange Man decided to test his plan. He went to the village and told everyone that he had seen a giant mammoth just over the layered ridge at the edge of the village. Most were skeptical, but a few argued that it might be worth a look since felling a mammoth could help feed the village through many moons. The Orange Man jumped up and down and yelled and screamed telling them that they should all go because a mammoth is a huge animal and they would need everyone to hunt it. One young boy named Micah pointed out that it wouldn’t be a good idea for everyone to leave the village. “Rats may come and eat all our food,” the youngster argued. 

“I’ll stay here and protect the food,” offered the Orange Man. Try as he might, twisting the truth this way and that, he was unable to convince everyone to go on the mammoth hunt. A few braves went off and returned at dusk. They were, of course, empty-handed but they also reported to the tribe that they had seen no evidence of a mammoth. There were no tracks, no spoor, not so much as a toppled sapling to indicate a mammoth. The eyes of the tribe turned toward the little insect eyes of the Orange Man. He yelled and screamed and jumped up and down and said they were blind or liars or both.  

It was hard to get a word in edge-wise because the Orange Man screamed continuously, but at last when he stopped to take a break, Micah asked, “What is this word that you used? What is a ‘liar.’?” 

That stopped the Orange Man. He had called them liars because that’s what he was doing. None of the people in the tribe had ever used language to intentionally mislead others for their own gain so they were unfamiliar with the word as well as the concept. In a flash, the Orange Man realized he had made a mistake to use such a word. “Oh, Micah, you must have mis-heard me. I said, ‘They must be blind as briars.’ or something like that.” But Micah knew he had heard a new and different word. Several others chimed in as well. But the Orange Man would hear none of it. 

“Look, I saw a mammoth. I have very good eyes. The best eyes, in fact. If you hunters can’t find it, you’re not very good hunters. But I don’t really care. Go hungry. Don’t find the mammoth. I don’t care. More mammoth for me. I’ll go get it myself. I’ll bring the mammoth back here single-handedly and show it to you big as life! Good-bye.” 

No sooner had the Orange Man uttered these words than he realized he had made a big mistake. Before people started questioning him, he strode off, refusing to engage in any questions and answers about how he would kill a mammoth all his own. Day after day, the Orange Man ate bugs, planned lies aimed at convincing the villagers to leave their village while he and he alone guarded it. And each day, he tried to be more and more convincing about his lies. But each day, the villagers became harder and harder to convince. The Orange Man was careful never to use the word, “liar” again, but people discounted what he said nonetheless. 

At long last, The Orange Man decided that it would be easier to convince another tribe of his lies. So, off he trudged across the plains to find another tribe. IMG_1224From a mesa, he observed the tribe from afar and watched them come and go, waiting for a time when the village was unguarded so that he could go in unseen and steal everything for himself. But people always hung out in the village, grinding corn, drying skins, or sitting around campfires talking. All in all, he found it quite disgusting. Why wouldn’t they leave so he could steal their stuff?

Then, one day, he had a wonderful inspiration. Buffalo! He would tell the people in the village that a great herd of buffalo was coming to destroy their village. They would all have to leave immediately and leave everything behind because there was no time! He too was fleeing from the buffalo but, he would caution them not to wait for him but to save themselves running as fast as they could to the next bluff to save themselves from trampling. He went into the village at dusk, yelling and screaming and waving his arms. He told them that a great herd of buffalo were coming to destroy the village and that they should save themselves and run to the bluff and clamber up it as best they could. Some of the villagers indeed panicked and began to gather up their children. But some of the villagers put their ears to the ground and heard no such stampede coming. Several of the villagers did not wait to see the outcome, however, and ran off as fast as they could. In their haste, a few fell and one woman dropped her baby on a rock which broke its soft head and killed it. But not everyone left the village and so Orange Man was not able to steal anything. He claimed that he had a potion back at his camp which would bring the broken baby back to life and he hobbled off to get it, or so he claimed. Of course, when he saw that everyone was not leaving the village, Orange Man realized he needed to leave before it became obvious that no giant herd of bison was coming.  

Several days went by before the Orange Man ventured to try again. He was heartened by the fact that his lie about the bison herd had almost worked. Several people did flee the village and at least one person died and several were injured. This, he chuckled at, but it wasn’t really the full scale all-out panic he was aiming for. 

That night a great thunderstorm flashed all about him. Atop the mesa, a bush was struck by lightening and it smoldered and flamed. He took some of the smoldering branches and made a little fire in a crook of rocks, feeding it dry firewood he had stashed nearby for just such a lucky occasion. Finally, he had found fire to keep him warm. Then, he had a great inspiration: Fire! “That’s it!” he thought. He would tell people a great fire was coming to destroy their village. Surely, that would cause panic and this time, everyone will leave the village and I can steal everything. 

night fire flame fire pit

Photo by Bob Clark on Pexels.com

The next morning just as the sun rose, the Orange Man walked toward the village, rehearsing his lies in his head to make them more convincing. When he came in sight of the village, he trot-wobbled up the path waving his arms and yelling at the top of his lungs, “FIRE! FIRE! Run for your LIVES!” Sure enough, the villagers were worried. But they all recognized the Orange Man and although they did not yet realize that he was simply lying to steal all their stuff for himself, they did realize that his judgement was not sound. So, instead of immediately racing out of the village, they instead scanned the horizon for signs of smoke. There were none. Indeed, the ground was still damp from last night’s rain. While lightning sometimes did cause prairie fires, this seemed unlikely in the present circumstances, and no-one believed him. He shouted and screamed and waved his hands but no-one believed him. There was no smoke. At last, realizing that he would again leave empty-handed, he headed back to his mesa to gather some bugs and grubs. Well, he thought, as he trudged back. At least I have my fire now. 

The days grew hot and dry. The Orange Man grew still fatter on his diet of grubs and bugs. Then, at last, he reckoned that perhaps the people would have forgotten his lies and be willing to believe him again. This time, however, he would be smarter about his lies. He waited for a dry windy day and took a torch from his fire with him. He descended the path at the edge of the mesa and walked toward the village. He again planned to trot-wobble into the village while waving his arms and screaming about a fire, but this time, he would be smarter! He laid his lighted torch into some of the brush and grass near the edge of the village. This time the villagers would see smoke and maybe even see flames. This time, they would all panic as he hoped. After setting several small fires, the Orange Man trot-wobbled down the path to the village. As he approached, he began shouting, yelling, and waving his hands wildly. “Run!” he yelled. “There’s fire coming! FIRE! RUN!” Oh, yes! At last, this time, his lies were working! He could see that indeed, this time, people were grabbing things at hand and running away. It’s the smoke, he thought! I’m so smart! And, they are so stupid! Everything in the village will be mine. He smiled a broad smile at the stupidity of people who would fall for such a lie. The Orange Man turned back to glance at his little smoke trick to see what it looked like. What he saw, however, pounded his heart right through his chest and out the other side. Rather than clouds of smoke, what he saw was a wall of fire behind him. Now, the Orange Man trot-wobbled in earnest. He immediately fell over his own feet. He crawled back to his feet, but the cuffs of his pants were already on fire. He frantically waved and twisted but the fire burned his pants and soon the flames engulfed him. His last thought was, “It’s not fair! I’m so much smarter than everyone else. I deserve it all.” 

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Indeed, it wasn’t fair. Everyone from the village also perished in the flames. No food was left to plunder had there been anyone nearby to plunder it. Many miles away, it happened that Micah looked up from chipping an arrowhead to see plumes of black smoke on the horizon. For some reason, the thick, ugly, black smoke reminded him of the Orange Man. He wondered what had become of him. Once again, Micah wondered what that word had meant. An odd word: Liar. Liar. 

It seemed to Micah that everything the Orange Man said had been for the sole purpose of getting the villagers to leave so that the Orange Man could steal everything. But why would someone do that? After all, the Orange Man had not been starving. Far from it! He was the fattest person Micah had ever seen. Perhaps he had wanted just some of the things in the village; things he had no way to craft himself. But if that were the case, why not just trade for one? The Orange Man could have traded something he was good at for something he wanted whether it was blankets, spears, or baskets. Theft was extremely rare among Micah’s tribe. Perhaps the Orange Man had come from a tribe where everyone stole from each other rather than making and trading things. Micah shuddered to think how terrible it must be to belong to such a tribe as that. The rest of the day, as he gathered acorns, Micah contemplated what “Liar” meant and he concluded that a liar was a kind of thief. If you said something that you knew was not true, it must be to steal something. 

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It occurred to Micah that while the Orange Man might have wanted to steal blankets or baskets or food, he would have stolen much more than that. He would have stolen the soul of the tribe. As they worked together, loved together, hunted together, ate together, sang together, the words of the tribe were a bond that held them together, each to each. This was so because everyone was doing it together and each word spoke, carefully measured, acted like an arrow aimed at a larger prey. Together these arrows could bring down a mammoth. But the Orange Man would use these words like arrows aimed at other Humans. A liar could destroy the entire tribe! Micah did not then know that the Orange Man had literally destroyed a tribe with fire in order to make one of his lies more credible, but Micah foresaw that if people in a tribe lied to each other, it would ultimately destroy the working togetherness of the tribe and therefore the tribe. 

If someone said that they would watch a toddler and then they didn’t, the toddler might wonder into the river and be drowned. If a hunter said they would be ready with a large boulder up above to smash the prey that someone below was luring into a narrow canyon but then never showed up or never dropped the boulder, the person luring below would be eaten or trampled. Just as the mortar held their bricks together to make a house, the truth held the tribe together as a whole; a whole who could survive long winters and floods and dry spells and fend off predators. A tribe of liars would destroy themselves. Micah shuddered at such a prospect. He tied the ends of the great blanket filled with acorns he had gathered, for a chill and a fog lay heavy in the air. He trudged back to the village and heard the distant voices of his tribe, the Veritas singing together sharing their food and their love and their songs of true talk. 

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The Creation Myth of the Veritas: Part I

29 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, apocalypse, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 32 Comments

Tags

cheating, collaboration, cooperation, creation, lies, myth, social capital, Storytelling, trust, truth

The Creation Myth of the Veritas: Part I 

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The gods grew bored and decided to hold a kind of maker fest. Using the wet clay by the River of Life, they fashioned all sorts of strange and wonderful life forms including whales that swam in the seas, giraffes, tigers with strength and speed, cunning and claws, They created birds that soared in the skies and tiny worms that squirmed in the dirt. After many eons, all of creation was done and the world was filled with wondrous creatures of all sorts. All the gods had participated and each admired the work of all the others. Only Dionysius had failed to participate. As usual, he had been roaring drunk the night before, and as usual, arrived late to the party. 

Ever the bon vivant, Dionysius after glancing around at all the beautiful creatures, said, “Hey! Cool! I want to play too!” 

Zeus shook his head for no matter how many times Dionysius missed out by being drunk, he never seemed to learn. “Well, Dionysius, had you been here on time, you could have played. But all the materials are gone. All the best fangs, the sharpest claws, the keenest eyes and ears, the strongest bones are all gone. You can see that all that’s left is a tiny pile of clay by the estuary and that little cluster of the very most pathetic weapons, over by that mesa. 

“Oh, crap,” opined Dionysius. “No matter, I’ll make something cool.” Unfortunately, Dionysius was not a morning person. In fact, when he was this badly hungover, his design skills were, if anything, even worse than when he was besotted. Worse, he rushed everything and today was no exception. He hastily slung together the remaining wet clay in a kind of rough approximation of a bear or an ape. He threw in a few bits of bone, teeth, and claws and was ready to call it a day and then try to locate the next party. But the result was so pitiable that it didn’t even meet his own low standards. 

Zeus, not for the first time, considered banning Dionysius from Olympus. “My god, Dionysius, could you make it any uglier?” 

Dionysius felt a twinge of guilt at his shoddy work. No sooner had he felt this than he decided to show Zeus a thing or two. “Indeed I can!” The only saving grace of the poor design of Dionysius had been the luxurious silver and black fur that covered the poor creature head to foot but, out of spite, he now hastily stripped it all off, save for a few odd hanks here and there. “There! That’s better!” 

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The other gods simply shook their heads in disgust. Dionysius was Dionysius after all. Without comment they walked off. “I’ll show them,” he thought. While their backs were turned to him, Dionysius took a tiny spark of creative curiosity out of his own heart and imbued his creation with it. He dubbed the result “Human” but it held little interest for the other gods. He placed “Humanity” on the earth and gave it no more thought, caring nothing for how it might or might not survive. 

When the other nearby animals saw the featherless, scaleless, nearly furless monstrosity, they chuckled to themselves. Some, such as Lion, Tiger, and Bear were hoping it would prove tasty despite its looks. Zeus however, felt some pity for the poor creature and asked the other animals if any would be willing to give Human something to help it survive. Lion and Tiger did not want to give up their speed, their claws, or their fangs. Eagle would not give up his superior eyesight. Elephant had no desire to give up his trunk, his great strength or his amazing hearing. Mammoth loved his thick coat of fur. Even the lowly chameleon would not give up his camouflage. Without knowing about the strictly illegal spark of creativity that Dionysius had bestowed, Zeus took pity and added just a small spark of intelligence. 

Those first years were very hard on Human. His only gifts were creative curiosity, some small intelligence, and, like all life, love. (For love, was not a gift bestowed by the gods, but inherent in the very stuff of Life itself). Upon seeing how hard life was for Human, Zeus again asked whether any of the other animals would give up any of their gifts. None really wanted to give up their great gifts, but one by one, they gave some small gifts out of pity for poor Human. 

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Snake, for example, allowed Human to borrow the sound of his hissing sizzle and thus did Human receive “ssss.” Crow, not to be outdone, allowed Human to share his cursing “Caw! Caw!” Mourning Dove shared his “Cooo. Cooo.” Chattering squirrel offered up “t-t-t-t.” Sheep let Human borrow, “aaaa – aaaa!” Horse let Human use “Neigh! Neigh!” Eagle, ever jealous of his keen eyesight allowed human the use of “Eeee.  eeee.” Busy buzzing bee bestowed a “zzzz” for Human’s use. 

In this way, Human was able to make the sound of many animals. Though the animals did not realize it at the time they bestowed these gifts, they were actually quite useful. Making these sounds helped disguise Human as he went about hunting and gathering. Because Human, like all the other animals, had the gift of love, they also began using these sounds to share their treasures with others. If a Human found some honey, they would make the buzzing sounds of a bee and point to the direction of the honey. 

Humans lived in small tribes and it happened that some particularly smart Humans fell in love with other smart Humans and produced a Very Smart Human. Very Smart Human saw how spider spun a strong web made in a pattern and learned how to weave baskets of reeds. 

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Then, Very Smart Human saw how the sounds of the beasts could be woven into words and the words could be woven into statements and the statements woven into stories. And these stories could be shared. Over time, leaders learned to weave stories into a shared vision so that many people could have their purposes woven into a strong fabric of purpose to make projects to help all the people. They told a story of making dams to catch fish. And it was so.They told of making rooms to hold corn. And it was so. They told of traps and plans to corner prey. Working together, people could plan and build for all the people. And Humanity prospered.


Author’s Note: The first three pictures above are original artworks by Pierce Morgan.


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Buggy Whips to Fingertips

26 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

computers, Democracy, Dictatorship, experiment, Feedback, HCI, human factors, Human-Computer Interaction, politics, programming, UX

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Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com

My degrees are in psychology.  I have also been fascinated by computers. One main reason I went into HCI/UX/Human Factors was that I saw computers as devices that would amplify collective human intelligence. Thereby, with a mixture of people and computers, we would be able to solve such complex problems as world hunger, overpopulation, disease, global climate change, wars, and so on. I definitely saw myself as most interested in the people side though I thought comparing and contrasting computers and people shed new light on the people side. If you only have one type of computational mechanism; viz., us, then it’s hard to know how much of what happens in trying to solve a problem is because of our common human heritage and hardware and how much is intrinsic to the problem. 

This interest in the novel light that computing could shine on human intellect was what initially drew me to computers, but I later saw them as fascinating in their own right as well as being extremely important tools for a psychologist. For example, I used a PDP-8 to run experiments on the psychology of aging and to analyze the data. Only when I joined IBM did I begin to change my focus from how computers could be useful tools for psychologists, but how psychology could be useful tools for improving computers (or at least the actual performance of the computer in doing useful work when used by a person). 

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Although I took a number of programming courses, I only ever became an amateur programmer. My main method for programming some task was to think about how I would do it and then step by step, make the computer do it. This process has many limitations, a few of which are obvious even to me. For example, when doing my dissertation work, I had the computer register the time whenever any one of five subjects made a response. While sitting in the computer room (while the subjects were in their booths), I was sitting and reading something while the disk kept buzzing next to me: Bz-b-bz-bz. Bz-b-bz-bz. Bz-b-bz-bz. 

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I had used my “What would John do?” method of programming. If I saw a long number and had to go write it down, I would want to do it immediately, and then be ready for the next number. But this was insane for the computer! The computer could “remember” hundreds of these numbers and then write them out to the disk en masse. Anyone who had gone through even an introductory programming course would approach the problem differently than I had — at least until the computer used its disk buzzing to wake me up to its modus operandi which are really quite different from mine. 

Like every other human, I make mistakes all the time in every sort of endeavor. For example, I like to play tennis and I like to hit a serve that’s hard to return. So, I am typically trying to serve to a particular spot. I’m not dead on accurate. I might miss long or wide by a couple inches or hit the net. But I will not (or at least haven’t yet) turned around and sailed the ball out of the court behind me. Nor have I ever yet struck the ball straight down at my feet. Nor, have I tossed the ball sideways into the screen and then swung anyway (!), and accidentally let go and flung the racquet across the net. But if you have ever programmed a computer, you know any of these behaviors might be possible based on the slightest error you can imagine. 

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It is ironic because most people think people are unreliable while computer are reliable. Well, it’s not that simple. Most people are pretty reliable most of the time and especially when they are acting within their bailiwick. Yes, they slip up and make mistakes but they are usually (not always) both understandable and fixable. A computer can do anything. The hardware is typically reliable but can still fail. Much more likely is that there are differences between what the programmer thought she or he was telling the computer and what the programmer actually told it to do. But wait! There’s more! Even more likely is that the intent of the programmer solves only a small part of the overall problem, solves the wrong problem, or actually makes the situation worse. That is not — or at least not solely — the fault of the programmer (more likely, the fault of an entire bureaucratic process). 

This kind of weird and catastrophic error appeared in the program that ran my dissertation experiment at Michigan. Worse, it was a different weird and catastrophic error that appeared every time I ran the program! Often, the program would run correctly for five minutes or fifty minutes and then – BANG – unrecoverable error. 

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The program was in FORTRAN 2. Someone had added some useful macro functions for doing experiments. For instance, there were a number of initializations for the displays. We had five displays so these functions all had the form FUNCTION1(2) which applied the function1 to the second display. To make it even more convenient, if you wanted to do the same thing to all five displays (which was always the case for me), you could simply pass it the argument (7) and the macro code would apply it to all five displays. So, I had a list of about 5-6 commands of that form: Function1(7), Function2(7), Function3(7) etc. Having initialized the displays, the next thing on my agenda was to initialize the array that held the timing information. Since I wanted to do this for all five of the arrays, it seemed as easy as rolling off a cliff to use the (7) convention and thereby apply it to all five reaction time arrays. In more modern version of FORTRAN, they won’t allow you to do that (you will get a compile time error). But back when Joy to the World by Three Dog Night topped the charts, there was no error message at compile time. Secretly, of course, you just know that compiler was snickering as it thought: “Oh, you want to write some time stamp into the seventh element of a five element array? Fine. The customer is always right. Be my guest. Good luck with that.” This is the computer trying to “serve” and instead smashing the ball directly into the ground. 

Yet, keep in mind that there are some (not all) very rich and powerful people out there who sincerely wish that “people” could just be more like computers and do precisely as they’re told, always, and without question. And, when I say there are “people” they want to control like a computer, I mean you. That is exactly what they want. For you to do what they insist you do. They are about to get away with it – and if they do, there will be no Joy to the World – not for a very long time. Because if someone else lays out all the choices for you, you are not living your life at all. You are a tool in their life. 

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It isn’t even really a good system for them. Willing collaborations yield insights and creativity and productivity. It is precisely what has taken us from buggy whips to fingertips in an astoundingly short time. Society and technology and learning progressed at a snail’s pace in Medieval times. I don’t mean those really speedy thoroughbred racing snails either; I’m referring to the garden variety garden snail. A politician who has competition will want to show some sort of real progress. But a dictator? Maybe if they are particularly partial to scientific advancement or the fine arts, they might throw a few dollars that way. And some have. But many have not. What they typically put time, energy and thought into is war and the weapons of war. 

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Now, instead of, or at least in addition to, having computers help provide a coordinating infrastructure of knowledge so that human beings can collaborate and solve more interesting problems as I had initially hoped a half century ago, computers and social media are being used to trick people into denying the validity of their own experience and existence. How do we debug this situation before it’s too late? I sometimes think that part of the problem is that we have tried to jam seven elements of serious social and technological change into an array that can only hold five elements. But maybe that’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that people are at their best when they are free to be people and at their worst when they are made to pretend that they are machines. 

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Study Slain by Swamp Monster!

19 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Business, Design, experiment, HCI, human factors, innovation, politics, science, Study, usability, UX

Study Slain by Swamp Monster!

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I’m trying a new format for blog posts. 

For those of you in a hurry, to get to the “bottom line” of this post, you can skip the story and go right to the bold-faced “lesson” at the end. I’d really you rather read the whole thing of course, but I know some readers are harried and hurried. So, if that describes you right now, feel free. 

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In the early 1980’s, researchers at the IBM Watson Research Center invented a new kind of system. Originally, this was called the “Speech Filing System.” It was initially designed to allow so-called “office principals” (sales people, managers, executives, engineers, etc.) to dictate letters and memos which could then be typed up by the pool of typists. Instead of requiring each “office principal” to have (or borrow) a dedicated piece of dictation equipment, they could accomplish this dictation from any touch tone phone. While this offered some savings in cost and convenience in the office, it was even more wonderful on the road. People did not have to take their dictation equipment with them on their travels. They could use any touch-tone phone. 

antique business call collector s item

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The system was invented largely by tech-savvy psychologists (including Stephen Boies, John Gould, John Richards, & Jim Schoonard). When they observed people actually using the system, they discovered that the trial users more often used the ancillary messaging facility than they did the “real” dictation features. So, the system was redesigned and repurposed and then renamed, “The Audio Distribution System.” In some ways, using the “Audio Distribution System” was much like leaving a message on an answering machine. However, there were some crucial differences. Typically, a person calling someone and encountering, instead of a human being, a message asking them to leave another message was somewhat taken aback. Many messages on answering machines went something like this: “Hi. Stephen? Oh, you’re not there. OK.  This is John. I was hoping … well, I thought you’d be in. Uh. Let’s see. You know what? Call me back. We need to talk.” And, when Stephen discovered that he had a message, he might listen to it and call back John. “Hi, John. Stephen here… I … oh. OK. A message. Sorry. You just called me. Well, um. I’m not sure what you wanted to talk about so. Call me back when you get a chance.”

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By contrast, when someone called the “Audio Distribution System” they knew ahead of time they’d be interacting with a machine. So, they could compose a reasonable message before calling the system. Hence, the messages tended to be more coherent and useful; e.g., “Hi, Stephen. This is John. If it’s okay with you, I’m taking off this Friday for a long weekend. If you have any issues with that, let me know.” See? Easy and efficient. 

A second critical difference was that you could listen to your message and edit it. People didn’t do this so often as you might think, but it was comforting to know that you could in case you really messed up. (For instance, a person might say, “You are fired!” when all along they meant to say, “You are NOT fired.”). 

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Introducing any new system will have consequences, both intended and unintended. I wanted to see what some of these consequences might be. Corporations, IBM included, like it when they sell lots of product and make lots of money. A related question then was – what is the value of this product to the customer? Why should they want to buy it? 

One hypothesis I wanted to test out was that such a system would increase people’s perceived Peace of Mind. After you leave a meaningful message for someone, you can “cross off” that little item off your mental (or written) “to do” list. By using the Audio Distribution System, I thought one of the user benefits would be increased “Peace of Mind” because they would be able to leave a message any time and any place they had access to a touch tone phone. They could save their working memory capacity for “higher level” activities such as design, problem solving, and decision making. We were going to roll out a beta test of the Audio Distribution System at the divisional headquarters for the IBM Office Products Division (OPD), in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey. Not coincidentally, OPD would be the division selling the Audio Distribution System (just as they were now selling dictation equipment). Before the trial commenced, I developed a questionnaire designed to get at how much people felt harried, too busy, coping, etc. The hope was that I could compare the “Peace of Mind” scores of people who did and did not get the Audio Distribution System and perhaps show that those with the system felt more at peace than those without. I could also compare “before and after” for those internal beta customers who had the system. 

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Before I was to roll-out and administer the “Peace of Mind” questionnaire to a sample of people at the OPD Franklin Lakes location, guess what happen just two days before the beta roll-out? OPD was re-organized out of existence! The people who worked there would now be looking for another job elsewhere in IBM (or, failing that, just elsewhere period). The beta trial was cancelled. In any case, even if it hadn’t been cancelled, the impact of the re-organization would have completely swamped (in my estimation) the impact of this new tool. Moreover, it struck me as insensitive and slightly even unethical to ask people to fill out a questionnaire about how hassled they were feeling just days after finding out their entire division had been blown up. How would you react if some psychologist from the Research Center showed up asking you to fill out a questionnaire two days after finding out you no longer had a job?

photography of green and red fire works display

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What is the lesson learned here? You have to understand what is going on in the lives of your users over and above the functions and features directly related to your product or service. Of course, there is always a fairly good chance that some of your users will have overwhelming things going on in their lives that will impact their reactions to your product. Generally you won’t know about divorces, deaths in the family, toothaches, etc. But if something is impacting all your users, you’d best be aware of it and act accordingly. 

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Speech Filing System

Audio Distribution System – NY Times

Longer explanation of Audio Distribution System

Video of Audio Distribution System’s cousin: “The Olympic Message System”

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Author Page on Amazon

 

In the Brain of the Beholder

17 Tuesday Jul 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Design, experiment, HCI, human factors, politics, psychology, science, UX

In the Brain of the Beholder. 

MikeHurdles

Most people in the related fields of “Human Factors”, “User Experience”, and “Human Computer Interaction” learn how to run experiments. Formal study often largely focuses on experimental design and statistics. Indeed, these are important subjects. In today’s post though, I want to relate three experiences with actually running experiments. Just for fun, let’s go in reverse chronological order. 

In graduate school at the University of Michigan Experimental Psychology department, one of my classmates told us about an experiment he had just conducted. Often, we designed experiments in which a strictly timed sequence of stimuli (e.g., printed words, spoken words, visual symbols) were presented and then we measured how long it took the “subject” to respond (e.g., press a lever, say a word). Typically, these stimuli were presented fairly quickly, perhaps 1 every second or at most every 4-5 seconds. This classmate, however, had felt this was too stressful and wanted to make the situation less so for the subjects. So, instead of having the stimuli presented, say, every 4 seconds, my classmate decided to be more humane and make the experiment “self-paced.” In other words, no matter how long the subject took to make a response, the next stimulus would be presented 1 second later. So, how did this “kindness” work out in practice? 

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A few days later, I heard a scream in the lab down the hall and ran in to see whether everyone was okay. One of my classmate’s first subjects had just literally ran out of the experimental room screaming “I can’t take it any more! I quit!” My classmate was flabbergasted. But eventually, he got the subject to calm down and explain why they had been so upset. The subject had begun by responding carefully to the stimuli. So, perhaps they took ten seconds for the first item, and the new stimulus came up one second later. On the second go, they took perhaps 9.5 seconds and then the next stimulus came up one second later. As time went on, the subject responded more and more quickly so the next stimulus also came up more and more quickly. In the subject’s mind, the experiment was becoming more and more difficult as determined by the experimenter. They had no idea that had they slowed back down to responding once every 10 seconds, they’d only be presented with stimuli at that, much slower speed. 

So, here we have one way that these so-called subjects differ from each other. They may not interpret the experiment in the framework in which it is thought of by the experimenter. In this particular case, there was a difference in the attribution of causality, but there are many other possibilities. This is one of many reasons for doing a pilot experiment and talking with the subjects. 

The next earlier example took place at Case-Western Reserve. In my senior year, I was married and had a kid so I worked three part time jobs while going to school full-time. One of the jobs was teaching “Space Science” and “Aeronautics” to some sixth graders at the Cleveland Supplementary Educational Center. Another one of the jobs was as a Research Assistant to a Professor in the Psychology Department. We were doing an experiment with kids in an honest-to-God “Skinner Box.” The kids pulled a lever and won nickels. Meanwhile, on a screen in front of them, there appeared a large red circle and then we looked at how much the kid continued to press the lever (without winning any more nickels) when confronted with the same red circle, a smaller red circle, a red ellipse, etc. 

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There was a small waiting room next to the Skinner Box and that had a greenboard on it. So, since there was another kid waiting there just twiddling his thumbs, I decided to give him a little mini-lecture on the solar system: sun at the center, planets in order, some of the major moons, etc. 

After each kid had finished the experiment, I always asked them what they thought was going on during the experiment. (This was despite the fact that the Professor I was working for was a “strict behaviorist”). When I asked this kid what he thought was going on, he referred back to my lecture about the solar system! 

Oops! Just because the lecture and the experiment were two completely unrelated things in my mind didn’t mean they were for the kid! Of course, they seemed related to him! Both involved circles and they both took place at the same rather unique and unusual place: a psychology laboratory. 

And this too is worth thinking about. We psychologists and Human Factors people typically report on the design of the experiment and hopefully relate the instructions. We, however, do not typically report on a host of other things that we think of as irrelevant but may impact the subject and influence their behavior. Was the receptionist nice to them or rude? What did their friends say about going to do a psychology experiment or a UX study? When the experimenter explained the experiment and asked whether there were any questions, was that a sincere question? Or, was it just a line delivered in a rather mechanical monotone that encouraged the subject not to say a word? 

Of course, the very fact that humans differ so much is why some psychologists prefer to use rats. And, the psychologists (as well as a variety of biologists and medical doctors) don’t just use any old rats. They use rats that are carefully bred to be “lab rats.” They are expected to act in a fairly uniform fashion. And, for the most part, they do.

two gray mice

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I was helping my girlfriend with her intro psych project. We were replicating the Yerkes-Dodson Law. This states that as you increase stress, performance improves, but only to a point. After that, additional stress causes performance to deteriorate (something that software development managers would do well to note). One of the ways I helped was to get some of the rats out of their cages. I would open up the top of the cage, reach around the rat behind their next and pull them out. Not a big deal. All the rats were quite placid and easy to handle. They all acted the same. Then, it was time to get the day’s last rat who was to be placed in the “high stress” condition. I went to the cage and opened it just as I had done for the last dozen rats. But instead of sitting there placidly and twitching it’s nose, this rat raced to the bars of his cage and hung on with both of his little legs and both of his little arms with all his might! Which might was not equal to mine but was rather incredible for such a tiny fellow. Rats sometimes squeak rather like a mouse does. But not this one! This carefully bred clone barked! Loudly! Like a dog. Whether this rat had suffered some previous trauma or was subject to some kind of odd mutation, I cannot say. 

But this I can say. Your “users” or “subjects” are not identical to each other. And, while modeling is a very useful exercise, they will never “be” identical to your model. They are always acting and reacting to a reality as beheld by them. And their reality will always be somewhat different from yours. That does not mean, however, that generalizations about people — or rats — are always wrong or that they are never useful. 

It does not mean that gravity will not affect people just because they refuse to believe in it. There really is a reality out there. And, that reality can kill rats or people in an eye blink; especially those who actively refuse to see what is happening before their very eyes. 

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Who knows? You might be about to be placed in the “High Stress” condition no matter how tightly you hang on to the bars of your cage – or, to your illusions.  

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Author Page on Amazon

Chain Saws Make the Best Hair Trimmers

12 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

autocracy, Business, collaboration, Design, fascism, Feedback, meritocracy, politics, teamwork

Continuing with the theme of deciding how much risk is “reasonable” to take in your career and your life, I’d like to share a story about my time at a mythical company we will label as NYNEXX. NYNEXX we’ll imagine, was one of the so-called “Baby Bells” who provided local phone service. It was created from the break-up of AT&TX. NYNEXX paid some marketing company millions to come up with the name which is for New Yorkx (telephone), New Englandx (telephone) and XX = who knows what we might do in the future!? And sure enough, within five years most people who were served by NYNEXX knew it was a brand of headache remedy. See, marketing is not nearly so scientific as some (particularly those selling marketing services) would have you believe. More about that another time. NYNEXX later merged with Bell Atlanticx and then with GTEx and has transmogrified into a company known as Verizonx. (Any resemblance to similarly named companies, such as NYNEX, of course, is purely coincidental).  

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This story concerns itself with professional advice I was asked to render. At the time, I was the executive director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at NYNEXX Science and Technology. But my management chain knew that I was knowledgeable in Human-Computer Interaction, Human Factors, User Experience etc. In fact, I was asked to start up and then head up the AI Lab to do work in speech recognition, expert systems and machine vision. Before even accepting the job, I explained how much we also needed a group doing Human-Computer Interaction research. This turned out to be a wonderful thing for all the obvious reasons, but one of the non-obvious reasons was that it helped cement HCI into the minds of my management. 

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A hot summer day, several of us were called into a conference room by one of the chief aids to the CEO so we could advise on a new proposal the CEO had for increasing trust of top management. You probably intuit quite well that it’s important for workers and managers to trust the top management of the company. The numbers for NYNEXX at that time (decades ago) had been abysmal several years running. The first year that they reported results, only something like 14% of the workers trusted top management. The numbers were even worse for lower management than for union workers. Top management decided the reason for these terrible results was that people did not know enough about top management and the reasons for their decisions. So, they instituted a plan to TELL people more about why what top management was doing was RIGHT, damn it! They did this for a year and then re-measured the results. Now, the percentage of workers who trusted top management had skyrocketed all the way to about 10%! Wow! In the company rag, which I believe was called The Leader, they reported last year’s numbers, this years numbers, and then said that with all their success, they would continue the program for another year. Huh? Yeah, right? And this was way back when Donald Trump was still merely a racist, misogynistic, unfaithful, bankrupt builder.  

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The top NYNEXX management had called in one of the top business consultants on the topic of trust and he related to them the story of Sam Walton. You have to understand that whatever you may think of Sam Walton, Wal-Mart, or the Walton heirs, he was a down to earth, hands-on manager. He would spend half his time riding around in his pick-up truck with his hound dogs in the rear of the truck and go personally to the stores and see how things were going and talk to his store managers. At some point, the business grew so large that it took a long time to get back to every store so they started an hour long conference call each week. Each of his store managers called in to a conference call number and any manager could explain in one minute, a problem that they had encountered and solved. Since each of the store managers might face many of these same problems, this sounded like a very useful exercise in knowledge sharing and organizational learning. Part of the reason it worked as well as it did was no doubt because the managers could relate to Sam Walton. They already trusted him because of all his personal contact and the reputation that arose from that personal contact. I am sure the conference calls served to further enhance mutual trust in the organization as well as provide valuable organizational learning. 

The chief aide from the CEO’s office explained all this to us by way of background. Next, he revealed their “take-away” and plan from the consultant’s consultation. They would do what Sam Walton did! He was trusted! So, now they would be trusted. Well, the design rationale thus exposed caused that same facial expression to appear on my face as when I discover that the jar of garlic-filled olives I was looking forward to consuming is completely encased in a finely feathered grey mold. Why the crinkled nose? Because NYNEXX top execs were nothing like Sam Walton when it came to being content to be “just folks.” They didn’t drive pick-up trucks, but were chauffeured in stretch limos. They didn’t ever wear jeans and a plaid shirt. They wore 3-piece suits. Even in the shower. So, already this plan was showing a serious issue. It seemed to me that it would succeed in about the same degree as my wearing the same brand of shoes that Rafa Nadal wears would enable me to create the same degree of speed and top-spin on my forehand drives that he does. Aside from the much more collegial nature of Walton’s relationship to his employees than our executives enjoyed, the other major difference is that all the Wal-Mart store owners faces at least some similar problems. There was a reason to share information. By contrast, the diversity of contexts and jobs and roles that NYNEXX managers faced was tremendous. Some sold yellow page advertising. Some led AI labs. Some managed repair crews. Some managed coin-counting operations. Still others were in charge of long-distance operators.

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At the time, there were about 1000 Wal-Mart stores but there were 70,000 NYNEXX managers, so the top management at my company decided it simply would not do to allow them all to talk; it would be chaos. So, to increase “trust” in top management, all 70,000 NYNEXX managers would leave whatever else they were doing each Friday morning at 9 am and dial in to a conference call and hear the CEO talk at them for a solid hour. So, here’s one dilemma. As a so-called Human Factors Expert, I am supposed to take humans as they are and design to them. But I am sitting in the meeting thinking, “How the hell can adult human beings in management not be smart enough to see what a bad idea this is!” But it’s antithetical to the premises of the field to yield to the temptation to shout that. 

And now the aide approaches the punchline, with this gem. “But we do want to make it interactive. At the very end of the hour, each manager will press one of the keys on their touch tone pad and we’ll record their answers. So, for example, the CEO might talk for an hour about how important it was for each manager to know precisely their job responsibilities. And, then, at the end of the talk, every manager would be told to indicate by touch tone on a ten-point scale how well they knew their job responsibilities.” So, this was the plan. Now, the aide turns to me and says, “So, that’s why we need your help. You’re a human factors expert. Should we have them use the “0” key for ten? Or should we use “9” for the top of the scale and “0” at the bottom? Which one?”

antique business call collector s item

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Here we have an example of a classic dilemma in human-computer interaction. The boss/developer/client/customer asks you a very specific question. You could answer the question, but you know that it is the wrong question. Do you answer their question? Or, do you point out that they’ve asked the wrong question? And, what if you point out that it’s the wrong question and they insist that you answer the question asked, not the one you think they should have asked? I do not think that one answer is correct for all circumstances. How much are you willing to risk? It will depend on culture, for instance, and your circumstances; how much your own boss supports you; how much you care about keeping your current job – and many other factors. Here is what happened in this case: 

I explained to this aide as clearly and calmly as I could that this whole idea sucked big time and why it sucked. No, I didn’t use that term. On the other hand, I probably could have toned down the exasperation in my voice just a tad. But sometimes, a degree of righteous anger is appropriate. It wasn’t simply that this was a bad design. It was a bad design because they had no understanding of how trust is created or any ability to empathize with their 70,000 managers that they were supposed to be leading. So, it’s not clear to me that it was inappropriate to be a bit exasperated. 

The aide’s face grew red. He got a pugnacious look on the front of his head and said, “WELL! When my boss, who by the way, is the CEO, asks me what the best way to do something is, it is my job to tell him the best way, not to tell him it’s a bad idea!” 

To which, I responded, “Well, when my boss asks me which type of chain saw is best for him to use to trim his hair, it’s my responsibility to tell him that a chain saw is a really bad way to cut his hair!” 

It makes me chuckle to recall it, but the aide didn’t find it all that funny. One of my colleagues also pointed out the telephone traffic congestion peak created by having 70,000 people call in simultaneously. We apparently put enough doubt in their collective corporate mind that they ran some focus groups on the idea and it was thankfully never actually implemented. 

Silly ideas like this may soon grow more common and the penalties for pointing out the truth may well grow more severe. We all have to ask ourselves how much we will tell the truth — and how much we will answer the wrong question in order to save our jobs, our ratings, our lives. This is not an issue limited to human factors and user experience. It can happen anywhere when people are put in charge based on something other than experience, expertise and a commitment to excellence. 

man cutting tress using chainsaw

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Author Page on Amazon. 

Madison Keys, Francis Scott Key, the “Prevent Defense” and giving away the Keys to the Kingdom. 

07 Saturday Jul 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, family, management, psychology, sports, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Business, career, HCI, human factors, IBM, life, school, sports, UX

Madison Keys, Francis Scott Key, the “Prevent Defense” and giving away the Keys to the Kingdom. 

Madison Keys, for those who don’t know, is an up-and-coming American tennis player. In this Friday’s Wimbledon match, Madison sprinted to an early 4-1 lead. She accomplished this through a combination of ace serves and torrid ground strokes. Then, in an attempt to consolidate, or protect her lead, or play the (in)famous “prevent defense” imported from losing football coaches, she managed to stop hitting through the ball – guiding it carefully instead — into the net or well long or just inches wide. 

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Please understand that Madison Keys is a wonderful tennis player. And, her “retreat” to being “careful” and playing the “prevent defense” is a common error that many professional and amateur players fall prey to. It should also be pointed out that what appears to be overly conservative play to me, as an outside observer, could easily be due to some other cause such as a slight injury or, even more likely, because her opponent adjusted to Madison’s game. Whether or not she lost because of using the “prevent defense” no-one can say for sure. But I can say with certainty that many people in many sports have lost precisely because they stopped trying to “win” and instead tried to protect their lead by being overly conservative; changing the approach that got them ahead. 

Francis Scott Key, of course, wrote the words to the American National Anthem which ends on the phrase, “…the home of the brave.” Of course, every nation has stories of people behaving bravely and the United States of America is no exception. For the American colonies to rebel against the far superior naval and land forces (to say nothing of sheer wealth) of the British Empire certainly qualifies as “brave.” 

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In my reading of American history, one of our strengths has always been taking risks in doing things in new and different ways. In other words, one of our strengths has been being brave. Until now. Now, we seem in full retreat. We are plunging headlong into the losing “prevent defense” borrowed from American football. 

American football can hardly be called a “gentle sport” – the risk of injury is ever present and now we know that even those who manage to escape broken legs and torn ligaments may suffer internal brain damage. But there is still the tendency of many coaches to play the “prevent defense.” In case you’re unfamiliar with American football, here is an illustration of the effect of the “prevent defense” on the score. A team plays a particular way for 3 quarters of the game and is ahead 42-21. If you’re a fan of linear extrapolation, you might expect that  the final score might be something like 56-28. But coaches sometimes want to “make sure” they win so they play the “prevent defense” which basically means you let the other team make first down after first down and therefore keep possession of the ball and score, though somewhat slowly. The coach suddenly loses confidence in the method which has worked for 3/4 of the game. It is not at all unusual for the team who employs this “prevent defense” to lose; in this example, perhaps, 42-48. They “let” the other team get one first down after another. 

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America has apparently decided, now, to play a “prevent defense.” Rather than being innovative and bold and embrace the challenges of new inventions and international competition, we instead want to “hold on to our lead” and introduce protective tariffs just as we did right before the Great Depression. Rather than accepting immigrants with different foods, customs, dress, languages, and religions — we are now going to “hold on to what we have” and try to prevent any further evolution. In the case of American football, the prevent defense sometimes works. In the case of past civilizations that tried to isolate themselves, it hasn’t and it won’t. 

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This is not to say that America (or any other country) should right now have “open borders” and let everyone in for every purpose. Nor should a tennis player hit every shot with all their might. Nor should a football team try the riskiest possible plays at every turn. All systems need to strike a balance among replication of what works, providing defense of what one has and exploring what is new and different. That is what nature does. Every generation “replicates” aspects of the previous generation but every generation must also explore new directions. Life does this through sexual selection, mutation, and cross over. 

This balance plays out in career as well. You need to decide for yourself how much and what kinds of risks to take. When I obtained my doctorate in experimental psychology, for example, it would have been relatively un-risky in many ways to get a tenure-track faculty position. Instead, I chose managing a research project on the psychology of aging at Harvard Med School. To be sure, this is far less than the risk that some people take when; e.g., joining “Doctors without borders” or sinking all their life savings (along with all the life savings of their friends and relatives) into a start-up. 

At the time, I was married and had three small children. Under these circumstances, I would not have felt comfortable having no guaranteed income. On the other hand, I was quite confident that I could write a grant proposal to continue to get funded by “soft money.” Indeed, I did write such a proposal along with James Fozard and Nancy Waugh who were at once my colleagues, my bosses, and my mentors. Our grant proposal was not funded or rejected but “deferred” and then it was deferred again. At that point, only one month of funding remained before I would be out of a job. I began to look elsewhere. In retrospect, we all realized it would have been much wiser to have a series of overlapping grants so that all of our “funding eggs” were never in one “funding agency’s basket.” 

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I began looking for other jobs and had a variety of offers from colleges, universities, and large companies. I chose IBM Research. As it turned out, by the way, our grant proposal was ultimately funded for three years, but we only found out after I had already committed to go to IBM. During this job search, I was struck by something else. My dissertation had been on problem solving but my “post-doc” was in the psychology of aging. So far as I could tell, this didn’t bother any of the interviewers in industry in the slightest. But it really freaked out some people in academia. It became clear that one was “expected” in academia, at least by many, that you would choose a specialty and stick with it. Perhaps, you need not do that during your entire academic career, but anything less than a decade smacked of dilettantism. At least, that was how it felt to me as an interviewee. By contrast, it didn’t bother the people who interviewed me at Ford or GM that I knew nothing more than the average person about cars and had never really thought about the human factors of automobiles. 

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The industrial jobs paid more than the academic jobs and that played some part in my decision. The job at GM sounded particularly interesting. I would be “the” experimental psychologist in a small inter-disciplinary group of about ten people who were essentially tasked with trying to predict the future. The “team” included an economist, a mathematician, a social psychologist, and someone who looked for trends in word frequencies in newspapers. The year was 1973 and US auto companies were shocked and surprised to learn that their customers suddenly cared about gas mileage! These companies didn’t want to be shocked and surprised like that again. The assignment reminded me of Isaac Asimov’s fictional character in the Foundation Trilogy — Harry Seldon — who founded “psychohistory.” We had the chance to do it in “real life.” It sounded pretty exciting! 

antique auto automobile automotive

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On the other hand, cars seemed to me to be fundamentally an “old” technology while computers were the wave of the future. It also occurred to me that a group of ten people from quite different disciplines trying to predict the future might sound very cool to me and apparently to the current head of research at GM, but it might seem far more dispensable to the next head of research. The IBM problem that I was to solve was much more fundamental. IBM saw that the difficulty of using computers could be a limiting factor in their future growth. I had had enough experience with people — and with computers — to see this as a genuine and enduring problem for IBM (and other computer companies); not as a problem that was temporary (such as the “oil crisis” appeared to be in the early 70’s). 

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There were a number of additional reasons I chose IBM. IBM Research’s population at the time showed far more diverse than that of the auto companies. None of them were very diverse when it came to male/female ratios. At least IBM Research did have people from many different countries working there and it probably helped their case that an IBM Researcher had just been awarded a Nobel Prize. Furthermore, the car company research buildings bored me; they were the typical rectangular prisms that characterize most of corporate America. In other words, they were nothing special. Aero Saarinen however, had designed the IBM Watson Research Lab. It sat like an alien black spaceship ready to launch humanity into a conceptual future. It was set like an onyx jewel atop the jade hills of Westchester. 

I had mistakenly thought that because New York City was such a giant metropolis, everything north of “The City” (as locals call it) would be concrete and steel for a hundred miles. But no! Westchester was full of cut granite, rolling hills, public parks of forests marbled with stone walls and cooled by clear blue lakes. My commute turned out to be a twenty minute, trafficless drive through a magical countryside. By contrast, since Detroit car companies at that time held a lot of political power, there was no public transportation to speak of in the area. Everyone who worked at the car company headquarters spent at least an hour in bumper to bumper traffic going to work and another hour in bumper to bumper traffic heading back home. In terms of natural beauty, Warren Michigan just doesn’t compare with Yorktown Heights, NY. Yorktown Heights even smelled better. I came for my interview just as the leaves began painting their autumn rainbow palette. Westchester roads even seemed more creative. They wandered through the land as though illustrative of Brownian motion, while Detroit area roads were as imaginative as graph paper. Northern Westchester county sports many more houses now than it did when I moved there in late 1973, but you can still see the essential difference from these aerial photos. 

YorktownHts-map

Warren-map

The IBM company itself struck me as classy. It wasn’t only the Research Center. Everything about the company stated “first class.” Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t a trivial decision. After grad school in Ann Arbor, a job in Warren kept me in the neighborhood I was familiar with. A job at Ford or GM meant I could visit my family and friends in northern Ohio much more easily as well as my colleagues, friends and professors at the U of M. The offer from IBM felt to me like an offer from the New York Yankees. Of course, going to a top-notch team also meant more difficult competition from my peers. I was, in effect, setting myself up to go head to head with extremely well-educated and smart people from around the world. 

You also need to understand that in 1973, I would be only the fourth Ph.D. psychologist in a building filled with physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, and materials scientists. In other words, nearly all the researchers considered themselves to be “hard scientists” who delved in quantitative realms. This did not particularly bother me. At the time, I wanted very much to help evolve psychology to be more quantitative in its approach. And yet, there were some nagging doubts that perhaps I should have picked a less risky job in a psychology department. 

The first week at IBM, my manager, John Gould introduced me yet another guy named “John” —  a physicist whose office was near mine on aisle 19. This guy had something like 100 patents. A few days later, I overheard one of John’s younger colleagues in the hallway excitedly describing some new findings. Something like the following transpired: 

“John! John! You can’t believe it! I just got these results! We’re at 6.2 x 10 ** 15th!” 

His older colleague replied, “Really? Are you sure? 6.2 x 10 ** 15th?” 

John’s younger colleague, still bubbling with enthusiasm: “Yes! Yes! That’s right. You know. Within three orders of magnitude one way or the other!” 

I thought to myself, “three orders of magnitude one way or the other? I can manage that! Even in psychology!” I no longer suffered from “physics envy.” I felt a bit more confident in the correctness of my decision to jump into these waters which were awash with sharp-witted experts in the ‘hard’ sciences. It might be risky, but not absurdly risky.

person riding bike making trek on thin air

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Of course, your mileage may differ. You might be quite willing to take a much riskier path or a less risky one. Or, maybe the physical location or how much of a commute is of less interest to you than picking the job that most advances your career or pays the most salary. There’s nothing wrong with those choices. But note what you actually feel. Don’t optimize in a sequence of boxes. That is, you might decide that your career is more important than how long your commute is. Fair enough. But there are limits. Imagine two jobs that are extremely similar and one is most likely a little better for your career but you have to commute two hours each way versus 5 minutes for the one that’s not quite so good for your career. Which one would you pick? 

In life beyond tennis and beyond football, one also has to realize that your assessment of risk is not necessarily your actual risk. Many people have chosen “sure” careers or “sure” work at an “old, reliable” company only to discover that the “sure thing” actually turned out to be a big risk. I recall, for example, reading an article in INC., magazine that two “sure fire” small businesses were videotape rental stores and video game arcades. Within a few years of that article, they were almost sure-fire losers. Remember Woolworths? Montgomery Ward?

At the time I joined IBM it was a dominant force in the computer industry. But there are no guarantees — not in career choices, not in tennis strategy, not in football strategy, not in playing the “prevent defense” when it comes to America. The irony of trying too hard to “play it safe” is illustrated this short story about my neighbor from Akron: 

police army commando special task force

Photo by Somchai Kongkamsri on Pexels.com

Wilbur’s Story

Wilbur’s dead. Died in Nam. And, the question I keep wanting to ask him is: “Did it help you face the real dangers? All those hours together we played soldier?”

Wilbur’s family moved next door from West Virginia when I was eleven. They were stupendously uneducated. Wilbur was my buddy though. We were rock-fighting the oaks of the forest when he tried to heave a huge toaster-oven sized rock over my head. Endless waiting in the Emergency Room. Stitches. My hair still doesn’t grow straight there. “Friendly fire.”

More often, we used wooden swords to slash our way through the blackberry and wild rose jungle of The Enemy; parry the blows of the wildly swinging grapevines; hide out in the hollow tree; launch the sudden ambush.

We matched strategy wits on the RISK board, on the chess board, plastic soldier set-ups. I always won. Still, Wilbur made me think — more than school ever did.

One day, for some stupid reason, he insisted on fighting me. I punched him once (truly lightly) on the nose. He bled. He fled crying home to mama. Wilbur couldn’t stand the sight of blood.

I guess you got your fill of that in Nam, Wilbur.

After two tours of dangerous jungle combat, he was finally to ship home, safe and sound, tour over — thank God!

He slipped on a bar of soap in the shower and smashed the back of his head on the cement floor.

Wilbur finally answers me across the years and miles: “So much for Danger, buddy,” he laughs, “Go for it!”

Thanks, Wilbur.

Thanks.

—————————————-

And, no, I will not be giving away the keys to the kingdom. Your days of fighting for freedom may be over. Mine have barely begun.


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Happy July 4th

04 Wednesday Jul 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, Uncategorized

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Business, collaboration, competition, Feedback, Human-Computer Interaction, learning, life, politics, psychology, science, teamwork, UX

As we celebrate in America, let’s not forget that many people fought long and hard to gain our independence and then to keep it. Let’s honor them by making sure we keep our independence. It would be a shame to lose it on the battlefield…and even more of a shame to lose it to greed.

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It would also be a good time to recall that America is not alone in the struggle against tyranny. Many other countries had to fight and win their independence – and in other cases, people are still fighting for their freedom.

 

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

As I mentioned before, I am temporarily suspending additions to the Pattern Language of ‘best practices’ in collaboration and teamwork and shifting to a different genre for a time. I’m still quite interested in collaboration and teamwork; I am interested in working together to learn from each other how to do that better. As I’ve tried to point out, while competition certainly has a place, both in nature and in human civilization, in human civilization, it needs to be done within an agreed upon framework. Otherwise, competition spins out of control into anarchy and violence. Of course, this has happened before in human history. This time, when our very lives depend on a global network of interconnectedness, anarchy will be worse than ever before. For now, however, I’ve listed most of the major Patterns I’ve run into. I will continue to elicit and look for additional relevant Patterns. If you think of one, please comment on the summary/index or email me at: truthtable@aol.com

 

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Meanwhile, I’ve decided to share a number of experiences from my career as a researcher and practitioner in psychology, AI, and the field of human-computer interaction/user experience. I will relate these as honestly and completely as I think useful. In some cases, I may use pseudonyms to avoid embarrassing anyone. Clearly, stories are told from my perspective, and others might remember things differently, if at all. 

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The reasons for recounting these stories is basically threefold. First, studying a field such as psychology, or human-computer interaction is related to actually working in the field but not so much as you might think. For the most part, the errors I’ve made and the lessons that I’ve learned in the course of a long career are not primarily technical. The main lessons are socio-technical. Hopefully, people considering a career in a related field may learn from my mistakes. But aside from pointing out mistakes made, I hope to give a flavor for what it’s really like to work in the field. 

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