Abracadabra!

20 Tuesday Jan 2026

Posted by petersironwood in apocalypse, The Singularity, Uncategorized

Tags

"Citizens United", AI, Artificial Intelligence, biotech, chatgpt, chess, cognitive computing, Democracy, emotional intelligence, ethics, HCI, life, prediction, psychokinesis, technology, the singularity, truth, Turing, USA, UX

Abracadabra!

Here’s the thing.

There is no magic.

Of course, there is the magic of love and the wonder at the universe and so there is metaphorical magic. But there is no physical magic and no mathematical magic. Why do we care? Because in most science fiction scenarios, when super-intelligence happens, whether it is artificial or humanoid, magic happens. Not only can the super-intelligent person or computer think more deeply and broadly, they also can start predicting the future, making objects move with their thoughts alone and so on. Unfortunately, it is not just in science fiction that one finds such impossibilities but also in the pitches of companies about biotech and the future of artificial intelligence. Now, don’t get me wrong. Of course, there are many awesome things in store for humanity in the coming millennia, most of which we cannot even anticipate. But the chances of “free unlimited energy” and a computer that will anticipate and meet our every need are slim indeed.

This all-too popular exaggeration is not terribly surprising. I am sure much of what I do seems quite magical to our cats. People in possession of advanced or different technology often seem “magical” to those with no familiarity with the technology. But please keep in mind that making a human brain “better”, whether by making it bigger, or have more connections, or making it faster —- none of these alterations will enable the brain to move objects via psychokinesis. Yes, the brain does produce a minuscule amount of electricity, but way too little to move mountains or freight trains.

Of course, machines can be built to wield a lot of physical energy, but it isn’t the information processing part of the system that directly causes something in the physical world. It is through actuators of some type, just as it is with animals. Of course, super-intelligence could make the world more efficient. It is also possible that super-intelligence might discover as yet undiscovered forces of the universe. If it turns out that our understanding of reality is rather fundamentally flawed, then all bets are off. For example, if it turns out that there are twelve fundamental forces in the universe (or, just one), and a super-intelligent system determines how to use them, it might be possible that there is potential energy already stored in matter which can be released by the slightest “twist” in some other dimension or using some as yet undiscovered force. This might appear to human beings who have never known about the other 8 forces let alone how to harness them as “magic.”

There is another more subtle kind of “magic” that might be called mathematical magic. As known for a long time, it is theoretically possible to play perfect chess by calculating all possible moves, and all possible responses to those moves, etc. to the final draws and checkmates. It has been calculated that such an enumberation of contingencies would not be possible even if the entire universe were a nano-computer operating in parallel since the beginning of time. There are many similar domains. Just because a person or computer is way, way smarter does not mean they will be able to calculate every possibility in a highly complex domain.

Of course, it is also possible that some domains might appear impossibly complex but actually be governed by a few simple, but extremely difficult to discover laws. For instance, it might turn out that one can calculate the precise value of a chess position (encapsulating all possible moves implicitly) through some as yet undiscovered algorithm written perhaps in an as yet undesigned language. It seems doubtful that this would be true of every domain, but it is hard to say a priori.

There is another aspect of unpredictability and that has to do with random and chaotic effects. Imagine trying to describe every single molecule of earth’s seas and atmosphere in terms of it’s motion and position. Even if there were some way to predict state N+1 from N, we would have to know everything about state N. The effects of the slightest miscalculation or missing piece of data could be amplified over time. So long term predictions of fundamentally chaotic systems like weather, or what your kids will be up to in 50 years, or what the stock market will be in 2600 are most likely impossible, not because our systems are not intelligent enough but because such systems are by their nature not predictable. In the short term, weather is largely, though not entirely, predictable. The same holds for what your kids will do tomorrow or, within limits, what the stock market will do. The ability to do long term prediction is quite different.

In The Sciences of the Artificial, Herb Simon provides a nice thought experiment about the temperature in various regions of a closed space. I am paraphrasing, but imagine a dormitory with four “quads.” Each quad has four rooms and each room is partitioned into four areas with screens. The screens are not very good insulators so if the temperature in these areas differ, they will quickly converge. In the longer run, the temperature will tend toward average in the entire quad. In the very long term, if no additional energy is added, the entire dormitory will tend toward the global average. So, when it comes to many kinds of interactions, nearby interactions dominate, but in the long term, more global forces come into play.

Now, let us take Simon’s simple example and consider what might happen in the real world. We want to predict what the temperature is in a particular partitioned area in 100 years. In reality, the dormitory is not a closed system. Someone may buy a space heater and continually keep their little area much warmer. Or, maybe that area has a window that faces south. But it gets worse. Much worse. We have no idea whether this particular dormitory will even exist in 100 years. It depends on fires, earthquakes, and the generosity of alumni. In fact, we don’t even know whether brick and mortar colleges in general will exist in 100 years. Because as we try to predict in longer and longer time frames, not only do more distant factors come into play in terms of physical distance. The determining factors are also distant conceptually. In a 100 year time frame, the entire college may or may not exist and we don’t even know whether the determining factor(s) will be financial, astronomical, geological, political, social, physical or what. This is not a problem that will be solved via “Artificial Intelligence” or by giving human beings “better brains” via biotech.

Whoa! Hold on there. Once again, it is possible that in some other dimension or using some other as yet undiscovered force, there is a law of conservation so that going “off track” in one direction causes forces to correct the imbalance and get back on track. It seems extremely unlikely, but it is conceivable that our model of how the universe works is missing some fundamental organizing principle and what appears to us as chaotic is actually not.

The scary part, at least to me, is that some descriptions of the wonderful world that awaits us (once our biotech or AI start-up is funded) is that that wonderful world depends on their being a much simpler, as yet unknown force or set of forces that is discoverable and completely unanticipated. Color me “doubting Thomas” on that one.

It isn’t just that investing in such a venture might be risky in terms of losing money. It is that we humans are subject to blind pride that makes people presume that they can predict what the impact of making a genetic change will be, not just on a particular species in the short term, but on the entire planet in the long run. We can indeed make small changes in both biotech and AI and see improvements in our lives. But when it comes to recreating dinosaurs in a real life Jurassic Park or replacing human psychotherapists with robotic ones, we really cannot predict what the net effect will be. As humans, we are certainly capable of containing and testing and imagining possibilities and slowly testing them as we introduce them. Yeah. That could happen. But…

What seems to actually happen, however, is that companies not only want to make more money; they want to make more money now. We have evolved social and legal and political systems that put almost no brakes on runaway greed. The result is that more than one drug has been put on the market that has had a net negative effect on human health. This is partly because long term effects are very hard to ascertain, but the bigger cause is unbridled greed. Corporations, like horses, are powerful things. You can ride farther and faster on a horse. And certainly corporations are powerful agents of change. But the wise rider is master or partner with a horse. They don’t allow themselves to be dragged along the ground by rope and let the horse go wherever it will. Sadly, that is precisely the position that society is vis a vis corporations. We let them determine the laws. We let them buy elections. We let them control virtually every news medium. We no longer use them to get amazing things done. We let them use us to get done what they want done. And what is that thing that they want done? Make hugely more money for a very few people. Despite this, most companies still manage to do a lot of net good in the world. I suspect this is because human beings are still needed for virtually every vital function in the corporation.

What will happen once the people in a corporation are no longer needed? What will happen when people who remain in a corporation are no longer people as we know them, but biologically altered? It is impossible to predict with certainty. But we can assume that it will seem to us very much like magic.

Very.

Dark.

Magic.

Abracadabra!

Turing’s Nightmares

After All

All Around the Mulberry Bush

All We Stand to Lose

The Crows and Me

The Last Gleam of Twilight

Guernica

The Orange Man

Donnie Visits Granny

The First Ring of Empathy

An Open Sore from Hell

The Impossible

How the Nightingale Learned to Sing

Pattern Language Summary

The Midnight Flight to Crazytown

To Be or Not to Be

Peace

Who Won the War?

We Won the War! We Won the War!

The Dance of Billions

At Least He’s Our Monster

Stoned Soup

Fifteen Properties

Tools of Thought: And then what?

The Walkabout Diaries: Sunsets

All that Glitters is not Gold

When Greed’s the Only Creed

The Self-Made Man

The Story of Story 4: Character

19 Monday Jan 2026

Posted by petersironwood in design rationale, fiction, story, Uncategorized

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AI, creative-writing, fiction, life, politics, story, Storytelling, truth, user experience, writing, writing-tips

The Story of Story 4: Character

Character is revealed by choices under pressure. Character is one of the three main dimensions of story. Often people who write fiction — or developers who write “user stories” add details about the people in an effort to make their characters (or personas) more “interesting.” Adding irrelevant details in something as long as a novel might help the reader get a clearer image of the character. Even in a long novel though, it’s better to add details that relate to something else in the story. In something as short and “to the point” as a “user story” it is worse than pointless.

Consider these descriptive details:

“Jill had beautiful blue eyes.”

“Jill had beautiful brown eyes.”

“Jill had beautiful green eyes.”

So what?

It might be relevant to some stories. For example, if Jill were a slave on an antebellum plantation, her having blue eyes might relate to her mother being raped by a white overseer. Maybe Jill finds out and exacts revenge. In that case, her blue eyes might be meaningful. Or, in another story, Jack might insist on dating only blue-eyed blonds. That is part of his “ideal beauty.” Jack pursues Jill because of her striking blue eyes. He shares information all the time about his “conquests” with his best friend, Judy, a woman with black hair and dark eyes. If it’s a romantic comedy, we will know, long before Jack will, that he is falling in love with Judy. The physical characteristics of the women serve to reveal Jack’s true character, which turns out to be deeper than we at first surmised.

But suppose the story is about how someone might use an Uber app? Is it really going to matter what color her eyes are? Will it matter to someone playing a video game?

Irrelevant details only seek to distract the reader (or the developer). These details sometimes go by the title “characterization” rather than character. Character should be reserved for deeper things. Sometimes, characterization can be interesting in the way it contrasts with character. In Psych for instance, Sean Spencer pretends every week to be a psychic helping the Santa Barbara police. His aim is to get to the truth. But in the service of getting to the truth, and putting the bad folks in jail, he runs a scam where he pretends to be psychic.

In the James Bond movies, the character of James Bond is revealed by his choices under pressure. He will give up everything and anything in the service of his country. But on the surface, he seems like a playboy. He drinks martinis. Yet, he is highly disciplined. He wants things his way. Even in his instructions for his martini, his meticulous attention to detail comes out.

Spock, on Star Trek, plays a character who reminds us time and again about how “rational” he is and how he can control his emotions. Of course, what makes this interesting is precisely because he isn’t always rational and in fact, sometimes has more violent emotions than the humans he critiques for their emotionality.

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If “character is revealed by choices under pressure,” it’s also good to remember that character should be coherently related to setting and plot. Plot advances through conflicts. In The Sound of Music, for instance, Maria has an internal conflict. She wants to be “good” and “follow the rules” of the convent (and later those of the Captain’s household), but she likes joy and music and spontaneity. She also finds herself in love with the Captain. Conflict. She also has inter-personal conflicts with the authorities at the convent, with the children, with the Captain, and with the Countess. She also has conflicts with larger forces in the world – notably Nazism. None of these conflicts is random; they arise quite naturally from the setting that she’s in — and from her own character.

James Frey, in How to Write a Damned Good Novel, suggests a sequence of increasingly intimate reveals that helps the reader progressively care more and more about the character. First, you say something about the objective, external world that the character exists in. Second, you reveal what the character perceives and does about the situation. Then, you reveal how the character feels about what is happening. Finally, you let the reader “tune in” to the internal conflicts of the character by showing their internal dialogue. Consider:

“The snow began to fall. The wind began to howl. The “snow” morphed into sharp little knives of ice.”

“Joe began to shiver and pulled his coat tight about him, crossing his arms across his chest.”

“Damn it! I want to be in a nice warm bed. Grrr.”

“Why do I always let Sally talk me into these half-baked schemes?”

For me, this order “works” – I am now curious to see what this particular half-baked scheme is and what sort of power Sally has over Joe. Read the lines in the reverse order and it makes only a little sense. It also puts a greater memory load on the reader.

In some stories, character stays fairly constant and the world (and other people) change because of the character’s choices. In the “Hero Saves the World” plot, this is the main emphasis. In the “Growing Up” plot, on the other hand, the most important action is how the character “changes” over time. I put “changes” in quotes because sometimes the “change” is really that the character simply acknowledges their underlying character. For instance, in Sweet Home Alabama, Melanie never really stops being in love with her husband (or Alabama) but consciously, she claims to want a divorce and go back to NY to be a “success.” As always, character is revealed under pressure <spoiler alert> and she “forgets” to sign the divorce papers. In many of the best stories, the character changes (or saves) the world and the world also changes or matures the character. </spoiler alert>.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

This may all make sense when it applies to fiction, but how does it impact how we write stories in a business context? This is often tricky because in many business contexts, only the founder or CEO is even allowed to have character. Everyone else is basically supposed to behave the same way: put the company first; follow the rules; do a great job; work together cooperatively; be loyal to the company. As a result, official company stories are typically bland and two-dimensional. They are basically nothing more than procedures. “If this happens, do that.” Implicitly, this means, “If this happens, do that” regardless of your internal character.

If you’ve done an excellent job of observing and interviewing potential users of a product or service, you have hopefully discovered some interesting internal conflicts and some related aspects of character that can become a logical part of user journeys. Initially, your target user may be reluctant to use your product.

Users may be reluctant to use on-line banking, for instance, because of the possibility of hacking or fraud. If this is a genuine concern of 1% of your potential customers, you probably don’t want to make it a concern to the rest, unless it is something they really should worry about. On the other hand, if it’s a genuine concern of 99% of your potential customers, sweeping it under the rug won’t do. The user in your user stories can be portrayed with this concern including internal conflicts and then you can show them overcoming the concern, if and only if it really can be ameliorated through various actions like two-factor verification, password choices, etc. Telling a lie about how safe on-line banking is, will ultimately undo you no matter how well told the story is. But character and characterization of these users should be designed around conflicts that actually are relevant to the product or service.

“Mary had put all her life savings and all her energy into her small company. Her time had become gold. She was on a path to hire more people, but that took time. Now the bank was offering lower fees if she would switch to on-line banking. She had always wanted to be a soccer player but she knew she wasn’t coordinated enough.”

Photo by Lukas on Pexels.com

What?

Yes, that may be something that came out in an interview with a real Mary. And it may even be part of an interesting story. But not this story! The naturally occurring conflict here is Mary’s desire to be as efficient and cost-effective as possible — and yet also to be as safe as possible. Mary may initially see these in conflict, but you may have a legitimate way for her to avoid or rethink the conflict. Mary’s character might be made more intense by having her see her budding business as a legacy she wants eventually to hand off to her daughters. But it doesn’t really matter whether she has blue eyes or brown eyes. You could instead intensify Mary’s desires by making her a success-oriented second generation immigrant whose own parents spent countless hours of hard work so she could get through college. The family still cares about every dollar. It doesn’t matter whether she lives in a small flat in Brooklyn, Chicago, or LA. It does matter that she wasn’t gifted 10 million dollars to start a business by her billionaire parents who live in a mansion in Manhattan.

It doesn’t matter whether she likes her martinis shaken or stirred either, unless you are making the point, e.g., that she is a fanatic for having things her way and that your software allows more customization than does that of your competitors. In that case, you can introduce a detail that shows, rather than tells, this fact about her character.

When you think back about books, movies, or TV series you really “got into”, I’m willing to bet that, at least in many cases, it’s partly because of the characters. What makes a great character for you?

———————————

Author Page on Amazon.

If Only

It was in his Nature

The Orange Man

The Mango Mussolini

At Least he’s our Monster

Sadie the Sifter

The Con-Con Man’s Special Friend

A Query on Quislings

As Gold as it Gets

Stoned Soup

How the Nightingale Learned to Sing

What a teeny man

Donnie Boy Plays Captain Man

Donnie Boy Lets his Brother Take the Fall

The Story of Story, Part 2

16 Friday Jan 2026

Posted by petersironwood in creativity, HCI, psychology, story, Uncategorized

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AI, books, communication, education, fiction, HCI, interview, knowledge, narrative, needs, psychology, story, truth, user experience, UX, wants, writing

Introduction:

This is the second in a series about using stories and storytelling in the design, development, and the deployment of products and services. In each post, I will weave in some advice about what makes for a good story as well as how to use stories. In this first case, the emphasis is on using stories to help uncover customer needs and wants. Needs and wants are not quite the same thing. For an extremely worthwhile discussion on the difference, check out this classic article by George Furnas.

We Human Beings are not just Information Processors; we are also Energy Processors.

I had just attended a conference on “knowledge management” co-sponsored by IBM consultants and IBM Research. On the plane ride back, after finishing the crossword, I turned the page to find a full page color ad by an IBM competitor that proclaimed: “Knowledge Management is simply [sic] providing the right information to the right person at the right time.” Color me skeptical, I thought. It isn’t simple to do those things. Beyond that, the formulation seemed simplistic even in its formulation.

The image of one of my undergraduate professors flashed into my brain. Professor MacCaw, (as we will call him), taught advanced German, a language which he had learned in a Russian prison camp, which might explain his approach to testing. At semester’s end, he asked, “Who in class wants A?!”

All two dozen of us raised our hands, of course. At this point, he proceeded to — there is no other word — attack one of the students in the class who had had four years of German in high school and had also lived in Germany for two years. The contents of his questions were not really that difficult, but the manner in which he demanded the answers was horrid. He would ask, for instance, “In first story, main character went where?” (He would always ask the questions in English).

And she would begin to answer (necessarily in German), “Er geht…” And after a couple words were out of her mouth, he would scream, “Please to conjugate!” This meant that she would have to think back to the last verb she uttered and then conjugate it. “Ich gehe, Sie gehen, …” Then, he would interrupt again and scream a completely different and unrelated question in English. She would begin to answer; he would interrupt after she uttered only a few words: “Please to decline!” This meant, that she would have to give the various forms of the last noun she spoke according to the case. But once again, she could not finish but only begin declining the noun when he would once again interrupt. After 40 minutes, she was in tears and he looked menacingly around the room and asked, “NOW! Who in class STILL wants A?”

I have zero desire to go hang gliding or sky diving. But when it comes to the danger of mere social humiliation, I say, “Screw it. Been there. Done that.” I was one of only two of the remaining students who raised their hand. This act won me the next turn on the chopping block. He proceeded the same whip-saw questioning fest with me. The two-period class was almost over when he finished with me and began questioning “Mr. Lepke.” The bell rang and everyone else in the class left. Later that evening, I chanced to see Professor MacCaw in the Student Union. He walked up to me, eyes blazing. “Ha! I had Mr. Lepke after class for two hours! Finally, he said to me, ‘No, No, Dr. MacCaw, no more, I beg you. No more!’”

This oral exam was difficult (even with my “screw it” attitude). It was much “harder” than my dissertation defense, for example. Again, it was not the information requested but the manner of questioning that made it difficult. People are not emotionless robots, as it turns out.

The next semester, not surprisingly, only about half the class returned. One day in class, as Dr. MacCaw began one of his lengthy digressions on Eastern European history, he stopped himself in mid-sentence to say, “What is THIS!? Someone is passing notes in my class! I will take note and read in front of entire class!” He snatched the note, unfolded it, and indeed read the note in his loud ringing voice: “Doctor MacCaw: your zipper is down.” And, indeed it was. He had meant to humiliate someone in front of the entire class — and he had succeeded. He had the necessary information delivered at the right time to the right person, but — thanks to his own actions — it had not been done in the best manner — at least not the best manner for him.

Human beings are not just information processors. We are living things and as such, the emotions, the vibes, the manner, the intensity of presentation — these are all vital to how we will react at the time and also how we will feel about the people involved and what we will recall years later. And this fact also means that the atmosphere you create when you interact with various stakeholders will vastly impact the quality of the insights and stories that you receive. If you really care about the people and are really committed to doing something to making people’s lives better; if you are truly open to hear and take in something unexpected or even disruptive to the project; and if you allow your informant to feel that truth about you, you will obtain the gold ring.

Stakeholder Stories Solicited at their Sites.

If you use a mechanical method and a mechanical tone and a mechanical manner to ask your users and other stakeholders about their needs and wants, what you will uncover are the most mundane, most rudimentary, most superficial and socially acceptable needs and wants. You can indeed use this information to design a product or service, and you may even have a product or service that succeeds in the marketplace. It will likely be, however, a rather short-lived “win.” Why? Because you are designing to fulfill wants that are subject to the wild winds of passing fashion rather than to catch the fire of an underlying passion.

What I found for myself was that it typically took about an hour of talking with a stakeholder, and most importantly, listening attentively, before they began to tell me their real stories. Your mileage may differ according to culture, context, power relations, your personality, and so on. I like to use a semi-structured interview. In this type of interview, there are known questions that I want to ask. But I also schedule plenty of time to let them elaborate, tell me what’s what behind the scenes. I know that in the corporate world, there is an ever-present push for being “efficient” and getting the job done as quickly as possible. So, it’s tempting to get the informant “back on track.”

I always prefer to interview an informant in their workplace. This seems like common courtesy; it puts them more at ease; and it sometimes reveals their use of other people, references, private notes, etc. as well as what they are dealing with in terms of atmosphere, noise levels, interruptions, desk space, etc. It also makes it much more likely that they can retrieve more of their own memories about work incidents more accurately because of all the contextual cues.

John Whiteside, who ran the Usability group for Digital Equipment Corporation for a time, recounts running various usability studies and gathering data in various ways about a product they were designing for manuscript centers (places where human beings, historically almost always women, transcribed the dictation of others into text on a computer so that it could be edited, re-written, stored, etc.). The first time that they visited their users in the field, they discovered that they spent about seven hours a day typing and about an hour every day counting up, by hand, the number of lines they had typed. So, in one instant, they realized a feature that would improve productivity significantly.

Guidelines for Soliciting Stakeholder Stories.

When I managed the storytelling project at IBM Research, I was fortunate enough to hire Deborah Lawrence to help with the project. She thought it would be a cool idea to interview experts in a number of fields whose job, in one way or another, involves soliciting stories. So, she went out and did just that. I believe that her interviewees included medical doctors, policeman, reporters, social workers, and psychotherapists. These various practitioners had very similar guidelines.

Story Elicitation Guidelines:

Provide a “warm-up” period.
Tell something personal and revealing about yourself; perhaps tell a story that is a model of the kind of story you’re looking for.
Observe an implicit contract of trust.
Provide a motivation for the story — why it’s important.
Accept the storyteller’s story and worldview. Don’t resist the story.
Reveal who you are, how the story will be used, potential audience and goals, answer questions.
Use questions to probe. Sometimes, a totally “off the wall” question can create space for story to emerge.
Empower the storyteller — they are the expert.
Avoid threat; don’t appear as an expert yourself.
Listen with avid interest.

These may seem fairly obvious such as does a lot of the advice in the book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. (Come to think of it, that might be the single best book you can read if you want a career in HCI/UX). However — back to the guidelines. I think they seem obvious once pointed out, in much the same way that once someone points out the “pig in the clouds” (or the face in the tree) you cannot not see it.

The above list is not, of course, meant to be the definitive such list. This was based on one study. If you have additional guidelines or disagreements, please let me know.

Author Page on Amazon

The Walkabout Diaries

The Myths of the Veritas

A Pattern Language for Collaboration

Imagine All the People

The Dance of Billions

Roar, Ocean, Roar

The Story of Story, Part 1

15 Thursday Jan 2026

Posted by petersironwood in creativity, management, psychology, story, Uncategorized, user experience

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AI, Design, development, HCI, knowledge, leadership, life, management, persuasion, story, thinking, thought, truth, UX

The Story of Story, Part 1

Background.

Right around the turn of the century, I managed a research project at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center on the business uses of stories and story-telling. The project was part of a larger effort on “knowledge management.” One of IBM’s major reasons for being interested arose from their increasing revenue stream from services. However, services such as consulting required a lot of labor; it was competitive. Therefore, the margins on this business were not so high as, for instance, in hardware or system software. IBM invested a lot in tools so that they can make hardware very cheaply and effectively using relatively little labor. The company wanted to be able to something similar with consulting services. The idea was that we could use knowledge management so that the knowledge assets of top-level consultants could be, captured, organized, and then re-used by more junior (and less expensive) people thus rendering higher margins for the company. The success of this approach was fairly limited partly because the knowledge management methods were geared toward explicit rule-based knowledge and specific facts. Much of what experts “know”, including IBM’s top-level business consultants was tacit knowledge. Stories provided a natural way to capture tacit knowledge. Thus, the story project began.

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My simplistic initial idea was to build a story platform that would enable consultants to write stories about their experiences. After all, sharing stories orally is what experts naturally do anyway. Since I enjoy writing stories, I failed to realize initially all the reasons consultants would not want to share their experiences by writing stories. Writing stories is not so natural or fun for most folks. Partly because of the medium and partly because of higher expectations, it also takes more time. Perhaps, even more importantly, it takes extra time. When consultants share stories, they are often traveling, eating dinner, having drinks together. Sharing stories is something done in a friendly off-hand way, and importantly, it does not take extra time in the way that writing a story would.

In addition, when a consultant says something out loud it is not typically recorded. So, if they misspeak or said something untoward, they have plausible deniability. When someone tells a story live, they also can sense how the story is being received in real time. If the listeners are “into it” the teller can draw things out and make it more vivid. On the other hand, if they are starting to play “Candy Crush” on their phones, you can cut it short. In writing, typically, first you write and then you get feedback. Of course, professional writers often improve things considerably with the help of a copy editor, beta readers and a proofreader. Anyway, over the course of time, we did develop a feasible way to have people tell stories and from those stories, provide information of use to other knowledge workers.

Three Patterns for using stories.

Narrative Insight Method describes techniques for gathering valuable knowledge from experts through the use of storytelling.

Fostering Group Cohesion through Common Narratives is another storytelling technique: in this case, one focuses on building and disseminating stories that illustrate common values.

Fostering Community Learning via Transformed Narratives. This helps solve a dilemma. For organizational learning, it’s crucial to learn from people’s mistakes. Ordinarily though, mistakes are not just used for learning but can bar one from advancement, or from getting raises, and lessen the esteem one’s colleagues might have of the teller.

In this post, however, I want to describe some of the things I found interesting about stories from personal observations and, to a lesser extent by reading. Here are just a few examples of interesting aspects of stories.

Good story writing is not magic. It’s craft. Mastery is a life-long quest, but one can quickly learn a few important things that will help you to write better stories as well as to enjoy more thoroughly the stories you see or read.
Stories are memorable and motivating. If you watch people telling stories, they are animated and engaged in a way that is rare when people are discussing facts, pronouncements, or pleasantries.
Business-speak is grey, toneless, neutral, abstract and speaks to the intersection of people’s experiences. Stories on the other hand, can be colorful, concrete, emotional, and, collectively they add to the union of people’s experiences.
Although stories are generally presented in a linear sequence, beneath that, the story actually has a hierarchical structure. Most stage plays have three acts. Within each act, there are a number of sequences. Within each sequence, there are scenes. Within each scene, there are “beats.”
The three major dimensions of story are setting (where, when), plot structure (what happens), and character (the people; what they are like and what they want).
Story lives on conflict; a story explores the edges of human experience; it takes us on an empathic roller coaster ride.

In the next essay, we will begin to see more specifically how to use stories to help us discover problems and issues. Later, we will see that stories are a tool of thought that can be used in many different contexts and in many phases of problem solving and development.

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Author Page

There’s a Pill for That

Inventing a New Color

The First Ring of Empathy

The Forgotten Field

The Sound of One Hand Clasping

Stoned Soup

The Three Blind Mice

Finding the Mustard

What About the Butter Dish?

How the Nightingale Learned to Sing

Absolute is not Just a Vodka

My Cousin Bobby

If Only

Tools of Thought: Scenario Planning

15 Thursday Jan 2026

Posted by petersironwood in creativity, essay, psychology, story, Uncategorized

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AI, decision making, fiction, health, life, mental-health, problem formulaation, story, thinking, tools of thought, truth, writing

Scenario Planning is, in some ways, likely to be a very old “tool of thought.” I imagine when our ancient ancestors prepared for a hunt, they would imagine what they would do and where and how and also imagine how their intended prey might react. Personally, I don’t think this kind of imagining is limited to human thinking.

I take our Golden Doodle out for a walk every morning. She likes going for a walk. And, she has a pretty good “mental model” of the steps I take as I prepare. She gets more excited as she sees me getting close to the actual walk. On her morning walk, she typically urinates at least once and also defecates. She has numerous favorite places although she also improvises. Her walking behavior varies qualitatively if she “really has to go” and she aims for places to go that are closer. She also likes to steer us toward places where we’ve seen other people, dogs, animals, or other recent interesting phenomena. Her “imagined scenes” may be more olfactory than visual, but she’s anticipating.

If scenario planning is such a common mental phenomenon, you might legitimately wonder why it needs to be examined as a tool of thought.

Here’s the rationale. Although, in my experience as a researcher, as a teacher and as a therapist, almost everyone pictures possible future events but the way they do it could be vastly improved. For example, some people tend to imagine only negative consequences. In extreme cases, their habitual imagining focuses on the worst possible outcome. In fact, they sometimes focus, not only on the immediate worst outcome. They use that negative outcome as the onset for a whole train of imagined bad result. “There’s no way I’ll get an offer. I won’t get this job. Or, any job. It’s impossible. I’ll go broke and live on the street. I’ll likely be killed by one of those people who kill homeless folks for no reason. I’ll die lonely and forgotten. Now, I’m too depressed to go for a job interview. What’s the point? Just to end up dead?”

Other folks go to the opposite extreme. They focus only on the best possible outcome.
“We’ll attack Cuba with a small force and the Cuban people will immediately join us in a counter-revolution and oust Castro!” Or—“Once we take control of the oil, this war will pay for itself!”

To some extent, thinking of multiple possible outcomes is addressed in another tool: Many Paths.

It is important to be able to consider multiple scenarios. In general, it is also critical to be able to communicate imagined outcomes to others. That’s where storytelling comes in. Although scenario planning and storytelling are not identical, they are close cousins. Next, we will consider in some depth the topic of stories. How does one find, create, and personalize stories (or scenarios) and present them in a compelling fashion?

——————-

Author page

Many Paths

It was in his Nature

Donnie Takes a Blue Ribbon for Spelling

Small Successes Early

What Could be Better? A Horror Story.

The Walkabout Diaries

The First Ring of Empathy

The Orange Man

Stoned Soup

The Three Blind Mice

Don’t Throw Out the Baby with the Bathwater!

08 Thursday Jan 2026

Posted by petersironwood in creativity, essay, psychology, Uncategorized

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AI, leadership, life, management, mental-health, politics, Problem_finding, problem_solving, thinking, truth, USA, writing

On Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Babies are a pain. Let’s face it. Of course, they are. But they are also a joy. Not only that, they are the future of humanity. Yet, it’s true that they require a lot of attention. And, they have unpleasant by-products, bathwater being one of the least unpleasant. But we say, “Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater” because we humans do have a tendency to over-emphasize whatever the negative aspects of something are and take for granted the good parts.

For example, let’s say that your furnace goes out. You are sitting there one cold, wet November evening, before winter’s knife edge of cold is softened by the splendor of a snowfall’s sparkle. No, this is an evening for complete relaxation; it’s the end of a frustrating day at work. Time to settle down with a little Jack Daniels on the minimal rocks and watch the next episode of your favorite TV show. But you find yourself thinking: “It’s cold in here!” So, up you go to see whether someone — certainly not you — has set the thermostat too low. No, you see that it’s set to 72F. But the actual temp is only 67F. No wonder it’s chilly. You put on your slippers and pad down the basement stairs to look at the furnace. It’s not running.

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You feel that you have been cheated out of your richly deserved and eagerly awaited evening of relaxation. Instead, through no real fault of your own, you find these plans and dreams in shambles and you have to go through a series of hoops, each of which will steal some of your money, and equally important, steal some of your time away from activities you’d prefer. The path in thinking that is tempting to take is to “throw out the baby with the bathwater” and decide that the company or the manufacturer is evil. (They might be, of course; my point is simply that deciding that on the basis of the evidence at hand is not warranted). You might even decide that all heating companies or even all companies or, in extreme cases, everyone else is evil.

A similar line of thinking, again completely understandable, is something like the following. “Well, when I grew up, we just put everything in the trash. You know. We didn’t have to recycle things. If it was good enough for my parents not to recycle, it should be good enough for my kids.” It really doesn’t seem fair. After all, you were just doing what you had been taught was right and now, all of a sudden, like an infomercial embedded in a sit-com, you are supposed to do something different that does take some extra time. And why?

Photo by mali maeder on Pexels.com

As the population of earth grows and grows, our own behavior will inevitably be influenced by a greater and greater number of people. That would be true even without the fact that nearly half of earth’s 7 billion human beings [That was early in 2019; now, it’s 8.3 billion and 68% have access]. now have access to the Internet. Sometimes, that interconnectedness puts constraints on your behavior or makes you feel uncomfortable. On the other hand, that same interconnectedness is what allows so many people (hopefully you included) to live in far better circumstances than did any Medieval king.

Because we humans trade skills, and natural resources, and cultural strengths, and ideas, and money throughout this whole diverse world, our standard of living is a symphony of glorious possibilities instead of a tuning fork forever singing the monotone of “Sing, Johnny One Note.” But we tend to take for granted the affordable laptop, the central heating and air conditioning, the car now fitted with life-saving seat belts and air bags, the cancer treatment that saved your life, or the pollution regulation that prevented you from getting the cancer you would have gotten without those regulations. You have access, I hope, to a public library and the Internet where you can find out about the world’s great architecture, the world’s great ideas, the world’s great art. Think about that. The world’s knowledge is at your fingertips. Not just the knowledge of your family, or your town, or your state, or your country — the world’s knowledge. And, of course, it isn’t just you. More than 5.5 billion people on earth have this access. And, they can invent, and learn, and dialogue together to create a much better world.

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And that much better world will necessarily be different from the world of today. Being different means that people such as you and I will need to change; learn; and sometimes we will be uncomfortable. It’s understandable that it’s somewhat disconcerting. But we need to look at this in balance. The modern world gives us many good things. Yes, it has some unpleasant side-effects. If we work together though, with the knowledge of the world at hand, we should be able to find ethical and effective paths forward.

It isn’t only in terms of world-wide cooperation (or lack thereof) that we need to take a balanced look. It’s easy to get frustrated with an actual baby and temporarily forget how wonderful it is. It’s easy to get frustrated with college courses, or roommates, or spouses, or co-workers, or technology, or stop lights, or —- when what is really causing that frustration is not the totality of any one of those things. Stop lights actually speed you on your way! If you’ve ever been to a busy intersection when the traffic light stopped functioning, you’ll quickly see how much worse off things are without the traffic light.

Photo by Davis Sanchez on Pexels.com

So, please, let’s all have the best 2026 that we can. But when you encounter one of the many frustrations of modern life, let’s try to do a better job of seeing the totality of the system, not just the bothersome part. It’s not easy. When your down jacket, usually so comfortable and warm, happens to send the spiky end of a feather into your neck, it’s natural to focus for a moment on the sharp spike. Okay. We all do that. But let’s also remember that ancestors, not so long ago, would have loved to have a down jacket against the winter freeze.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!

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Author Page on Amazon.

Corn on the Cob

Finding the Mustard

What about the Butter Dish?

The Invisibility Cloak of Habit

You Bet Your Life!

Essays on America: The Game

Non-Linearity

04 Sunday Jan 2026

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, Uncategorized

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AI, environment, equilibrium, feedback loops, life, ping pong, politics, research, science, sports, story, systems thinking, table tennis, testing, truth, writing

Non-linearity

A Chessboard Full of Rice

According to myth, the Emperor’s wise adviser once did him a great favor. So grateful was the Emperor that he begged his wise advisor to take any gift she might like from the vast treasures of gold or jewels, any lands or gardens, any of the Emperor’s many male children to be her companion. However, the advisor answered as follows: “Thank you for your generosity, oh mighty Emperor. I have no need of great material wealth. My needs and wants are simple. I do get hungry and thirsty, of course, as do we all, and sometimes my household runs short of rice. You see this fine chessboard?”

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

“Oh, yes, my wise counselor, it is indeed finely made of gold and silver and I would gladly give you twenty such!”

“Thank you again for your generosity, but I only wish for a some grains of rice. Give me one grain on this space and tomorrow, two grains on this space and the next day, four grains on this space. Each day for 64 days, double the number of grains of rice you gave me the day before. At the end of the 64 days, I will ask for no more.”

The Emperor looked puzzled. “Surely, you must have something more valuable than rice! Name it!”

“No, Sire, that is all I desire. Just the doubled rice will do quite nicely.”

“Well, it shall be so!” And thus the Emperor told his staff that they were to provide a grain of rice for the first day, two grains of rice for the next day and to double the amount each day until all 64 days had passed. At first, it seemed such a pathetic gift for such a great favor.

Even after 8 days, the wise counselor only received 128 grains of rice – not even a bowlful.

Readers familiar with exponential growth realize that on the 64th day, the Emperor has promised to deliver 2**63 grains of rice. This is not only more rice than the Emperor had at his disposal. It is more grains of rice than exist in all the kingdoms of earth. To be exact, the last payment is meant to be 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 grains of rice while the total is one less than 2**64. To put the matter scientifically — it’s a lot of rice! Much more than exists in the world.

How would you like the story to end? A wise Emperor, to my mind, would thank the counselor after a couple weeks and say, “I see, oh wise Counselor, that you used my gift to give me another gift to enhance my wisdom. For I now understand that what seemed at first an easy thing to do is actually quite hard. Doubling soon undoes even the richest king. I will keep this in mind when I think about interest rates and population growth.”

A crummy Emperor, on the other hand, might say, “I offer you a gift and you see fit to embarrass me by making me agree to an impossible task? Boil her in oil!”

The Lily Pad Pond Puzzle.

Beside my house is a pond. In this pond, a lily pad began to grow. Every day, it doubled in size. On day 20, it completely covered the surface of the pond. The surface of the pond is 400 square feet. How many days did it take to cover half of the pond?

red and green lily pads focus photography

Photo by Skitterphoto on Pexels.com

At first glance, you might think this problem is insoluble because you don’t know how big the lily pad was initially. In fact, you don’t even need to know how large the pond is. It will cover half the pond on day 19.

The Ping Pong Table Ping Pong Player Population

When I began at IBM Research in 1973, I soon discovered that a fair number of researchers were avid table tennis players. At lunch time, somewhere between six and twenty researchers would show up to play. There were two tables and some small amount of room for spectators to stand on the edges of the two ping-pong rooms and watch. Our rule was that if a person won, they would stay at the table and a new challenger would play. However, if you won three times in a row, you had to sit down regardless. I didn’t go over every lunch time, but I went over quite a few times over the course of my first ten years there and there was invariably someone to play with. Sometimes, I had a longer wait time than others, but it was never too long a wait.

Then, because management wanted to use one of the two ping-pong rooms for other purposes, they repurposed one of the rooms. Now, there was only one ping pong table. In the two ping-pong table case, remember, I never had to wait too long nor did I ever go there and have no-one to play. As I said, the number of players varied between somewhere around six to twenty. What is your prediction about how many players showed up when there was only one ping pong table?

Here’s what happened. The first day after this change happened, I went over and about fifteen people showed up. I, like everyone else, waited a long time for a game. Our “official” lunch hour was actually 42 minutes and the building was a five minute walk away. So, if you had to wait a half hour for your chance to play, it really wasn’t that much fun. In addition, there were some more subtle effects. All the players were good, but there some substantial differences in skill level. People tried to arrange it so that they played someone at about the same level. WIth only one table, this was trickier. In addition, when a relatively large number of people showed up, it was too crowded for everyone to see the match without interfering with play. It happened that I was too busy to go for a few days. The next time I showed up, no-one was there. Some of us talked about trying to “organize” the ping pong to insure that enough people showed up but everyone was busy and no-one wanted to take this on. Scheduling researchers is harder than you might think. It was hard for people to make a commitment to show up at noon because a meeting might run over, their manager might give them extra work, etc. The number of people showing up swung wildly for about two weeks and then stabilized.

At zero.

What had been a vibrant community with two ping pong tables did not stay the same size, or shrink to half when we were limited to one table. It went to zero.

Warring Positive Feedback Loops.

We’ve already talked about “positive feedback loops” which are also known as “vicious circles.” Sometimes, there are actually (at least) two positive feedback loops hiding beneath what appears to be a stable system. In the Case of the Missing Ping Pong Table described above, one positive feedback loop was simply that when you went there and had a good time through some combination of watching good matches or playing yourself, you were more likely to go there again. There was also a positive feedback loop that was more of a social nature. The more people who were there, the more likely it was you would find a good or interesting match. It was also more likely to be able to find someone you wanted to have a conversation with although the venue prevented this from being a big part of the adventure. Another way that having more people there increased the chances that more people would be there the next day was that it was kind of exciting to have a larger audience watching, cheering, throwing the ball back when the ball crept under the radiator after pin-balling around for awhile after a decent slam.

At the same time, there were other feedback loops, sometimes of the same factors but in a different range. For instance, beyond the point of having the periphery of the playing field covered one or two deep, additional spectators added only a little excitement and they were more likely to infringe on the needed space around the table. In addition, while the first ring of spectators felt very much a part of the action, the experience for the second ring of spectators was far less engaging. While I mentioned above that more players meant a better change of finding a good match, it also meant that one had to wait longer between matches. The worst case scenario, of course, is that you are the only one who shows up.

Behind Every Abstraction are a Host of Personal Stories.

Yes, you can practice against the wall, and I did this a few times, but it is significantly less fun than a real match. I love to serve, for instance. I have a raft of difficult serves. Just to give you one example, with most set-ups, I can hit the right side of the ball so thinly that I put enough side-spin for the ball to appear as though it isn’t even going to hit the table on the second side, but it does; it curves radically back around to the left. Sometimes people are so surprised that they miss it entirely. Even if they get there, the sidespin often makes them hit it off the table or the curve causes them to mis-hit the ball on their thumb or finger. I can also add a fair amount of top-spin or under-spin as well. Anyway, I didn’t get to do any of that just hitting the ball against the wall. The wall was not perfectly smooth either. So I might hit three of four shots and then the ball would hit a little imperfection in the plaster and careen off to scribble scrabble along the floor and then crawl under the radiator. It’s the kind of annoyance that everyone has experienced. And if someone else is there, you can kind of glance at your friend who nods nearly imperceptibly as you get down on your hands and knees and stretch your fingers into the territory of God-knows what spiders or broken glass and feel around through the grit and dust until you retrieved the ball. And that little glance and that little nod actually make quite a difference. If you’re on your own, it’s not any fun at all. It’s just an annoyance. The only reason I even bother to hit against the wall is to learn to keep focus for extended periods of time. For this, it is good practice and a good challenge. But, if I’m interrupting this to go fish my hand into a pile of dust every couple minutes, it isn’t so likely I’ll come back.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

These various factors were all in a dynamic balance so long as there were two tables. When the tables went from two to one, however, what had been a stable equilibrium became a very unstable one. Eventually, of course, it did find a new equilibrium point and that was zero. To crawl out of that, one person might show up. But most of the time, they were the only one. So, they would be less likely to come again. Even if two showed up, since no-one could play every day, you might still find yourself wondering whether someone would be there the next time.

Photo by panumas nikhomkhai on Pexels.com

You might have read this whole story and wondered why the hell this building full of Ph.D.’s couldn’t get their act together and arrange some matches. It’s an interesting question and here is my personal opinion. When it came to these brilliant scientists and engineers, they came from every part of the globe and they came in all shapes and sizes. Some were vastly overweight and others were ultra marathoners. But the ones who liked to play table tennis were, by and large, athletic and “hyper” – an impatient lot. What all of us really loved was working to find out the truth. And, these truths that we sought were ones the company that we worked for wanted us to seek. True enough, but by the same token, that meant the truth found and utilized would make people’s lives better in some way in the not too distant future. But working in a corporation also meant doing a bunch of administrivia. So, the ping pong set of people, in particular, wanted to get up from their intense sedentary mental and administrative work and play hard at something completely physical and different. The last thing any of us wanted to do was add more administriva to our lives.

The Takeaway

It’s easy and common to assume implicitly that the systems you deal with are linear.

They often aren’t.

Things can go out of control extremely quickly (into a dominant positive feedback loop) once the dynamic equilibrium is disturbed.

Would the invention of the iPhone have kept the ping pong community going?

Another takeaway: there are two quite distinct ways of analyzing that are going on in the essay above: a fairly abstract one (even if it uses concrete examples like rice and lily pads) and a very concrete and experiential one. In my experience, both of these modes are useful and valid and if taken together give a fuller picture of what’s going on. My experience in this was mainly in human computer interaction but I think it is equally true for many in law, medicine, management and many other fields. What’s your experience?

———————————

Author’s Page on Amazon.

The Update Problem

What About the Butter Dish?

A Little is Not a Lot

The Jewels of November

The Stopping Rule

Wednesday

We Won the War! We Won the War!

Roar, Ocean, Roar

Destroying Government Efficiency

E-Fishiness Comes to Mass General Hospital

Small Things

Tools of Thought: Problem Finding

03 Saturday Jan 2026

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, Uncategorized

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AI, Business, creativity, Design, life, marketing, media, mental-health, problem finding, problem solving, research, thinking, thought, truth, writing

Problem Finding

Today (18 December, 2018), I googled “problem solving” and it returned 287,000,000 results. In most of our school life as well as most people’s work life, we are given problems and asked to solve them. “Problem finding” only returned about 2.5 million or fewer than 1/100th as many hits. Solving problems can make processes more efficient and more effective. Solving problems can even save lives. We generally reward people both at school and at work for being good problem solvers. We seldom train people in problem finding. In fact, the reaction of many teachers and many managers when someone finds a problem is to dismiss it as being a non-problem. (FYI, Google now leads with an AI summary rather than links nor does it provide the number of “hits.”)

I can understand this sentiment; the emphasis on solving problems rather than finding them. As a teenager driving my dad’s car home from a date with my girlfriend, somebody beside me tried to make a right turn from the left lane and ran right into my dad’s blue Dodge. I heard what sounded like the voice of God say “NO!!” loud and clear. It was actually louder than the sound of crumpling metal. For a split second, I was in complete denial. Even some moments later, when we pulled over to assess the damage, to me, it looked minor enough to ignore and to just drive off. A more experienced guy from the corner gas station near where this happened said that while it may look minor, it would cost hundreds of dollars to fix and we therefore needed to trade information. I was stunned.

grayscale photo of wrecked car parked outside

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In many cases, it is a human tendency to want to deny that a problem really exists. If you can get past that tendency however, and embrace problems and indeed, even learn to seek them out, you may be able to create tremendous value for yourself and for those around you. Problem solving can make your bookstore more profitable. Problem finding lets you invent Amazon. Problem solving lets you build a better internal combustion engine. Problem finding leads you to an electric vehicle.

What might you do to discover problems? First, you might take your own negative emotions as a jumping off place. If you find yourself angry, or anxious, or depressed, to the extent that you can trace back what is going on to the initiating event, you may be able to be consider whether that event is unique to you — or, more likely, that event is likely to trigger a negative reaction in many people.

person holding white polaroid land camera

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If you found that waiting even 48 hours to have your photographs developed and printed — and you thought others might also be impatient to see the results–you might invent Polaroid instant photos. If you found cooking a casserole too time-consuming and messy for your taste, you might invent frozen dinners. If you drove a lot in hot, humid climates, you might be motivated to put air conditioning in cars.

Of course, you do not have to limit yourself to your own misfortune. If you read about someone having a miserable time, you could dig a little deeper and ask yourself how a tragedy might have been prevented or how an accident could have been avoided. You can also look at a change that seems minor and ask yourself what will happen if this change becomes widespread.

For example, if you read in the newspaper that a robot has been invented that harvests tomatoes, you might extrapolate to a more universal situation. What if all crops were harvested by machine? This might make groceries cheaper. But what else would it mean? Tomatoes are rather delicate, after all. You might wonder whether growers using a machine to harvest tomatoes would harvest them early to avoid them being mashed by the machine. You might wonder whether they would even genetically alter the tomatoes so that they were easier to harvest by machine (even if they were no longer as tasty). You might wonder what will happen to the tomato pickers. Politicians may tell you that they will all be retrained for higher paying jobs as machine inventors, machine programmers, and machine maintenance folks. But this makes no sense. If there were an equal number of IT jobs as there used to be tomato pickers but each of the new jobs came with a higher salary, why would the growers use robots? There will be fewer jobs after automation and in some cases, far fewer.

close up of hands holding cherry tomatoes

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You might look at the global temperature trends and ask yourself what will happen if they continue. What will happen if global temperatures continue to rise? What can be done about it? Of course, once people start seriously mapping out the consequences, some people will react by saying, “Oh, it isn’t really happening!.” Why do they think that? Because it’s too scary to contemplate the truth; or too inconvenient to take the necessary actions. There are vested interests in old energy sources who will be happy to help you along in your fantasy of denial. In the short run, it’s often easier to imagine that problems do not exist, or are not that bad, or won’t get worse, or that there is just nothing to be done.

Even most of the people who rail against what most of us think of as sensible gun regulation (requiring a license, showing ID, getting at least some training and testing the would-be gun owner’s knowledge, competency, and eyesight as we do with cars) don’t think that mass shootings of innocent children is a fine thing. They see it as a problem — just one that cannot be solved or one that can only be solved by adding cost and inconvenience to the potential victims. After such a tragedy, they may even send “thoughts and prayers.”

Photo by Specna Arms on Pexels.com

There is a possible “down side” to problem finding. The greedy may decide that they can make a lot of money by generating a solution to a problem that isn’t really a problem and making you believe it is a problem. My favorite, and so far made up, example is “Elbow Cream” for those unsightly skin wrinkles that appear on the back of your elbow when you straighten your arm. But that made up example is not too far off. You eat spicy food and it upsets your stomach? We can fix that! Of course, you could too by simply not eating overly spicy food! But nobody makes money that way. So they will sell you something that supposedly fixes the “problem.” While it might be fantasy to imagine “Elbow Cream” that will “fix” your “unsightly elbow wrinkles” it is not fantasy to imagine that people have been hoodwinked into spending money on “fixing” their faces and bodies.

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Americans spent 16 billion dollars on cosmetic plastic surgery in 2017. There are 50 countries who each have a lower GDP than that. The beauty industry in the USA overall was supposedly around $445 billion in 2017. That’s more than the GDP of each of 151 countries! Both figures are also less than the federal government spends on reducing climate change. Or cancer research.

Do you see that as a problem? I do.

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Author Page on Amazon.

The Invisibility Cloak of Habit

Essays on America: The Game

One of the most enjoyable aspects of Science Fiction as a genre is that it often shows us problems that might occur in the future. In some cases, it suggests ways to prevent those problems and in some cases, it suggests how these future problems might be dealt with.

Turing’s Nightmares, for instance, comprises 23 short stories that explore the ethics and implications of AI. http://tinyurl.com/hz6dg2d

Dream Planet examines, among other things, the extrapolation of global warming and a radical attempt to stem it. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dream-planet-david-thomas/1148566558

FaceGook

The Ides of February

A Day at the HR Department

Putin’s Favorite DOG-E

Silent Screams of Dead Men’s Dreams

Namble Mamble Jamble

May You Live in Interesting Times

Plastics!

The Last Gleam of Twilight

The “Not-See” Party

An Open Sore from Hell

Happy Talk Lies

Negative Space

02 Friday Jan 2026

Posted by petersironwood in creativity, management, psychology, sports, Uncategorized

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AI, art, creativity, Design, HCI, illustration, music, negative space, painting, poetry, problem formulation, problem framing, sports, thinking, thought, UX, writing

Negative Space

When you look at a scene, it is natural to concentrate on the objects in the scene. So too, when one begins to design, it is natural to concentrate your attention on the things you intentionally put into the design whether those are menus, icons, images, banners, buttons and so on. You tend to give little thought to what is not there because, after all, there’s nothing there!

As your expertise grows, you will find it useful to spend some time and resources thinking about what is not there; the “negative space” if you will. In art, the “negative space” refers to the space around and between the objects. Often, paying attention to the “negative space” can result in a much more interesting and aesthetically pleasing composition. It is a concept that has applications far beyond artistic visual composition however.

Consider music for a moment, or better yet, listen to some and you will note that the silence is just as important as are the notes. Increase or decrease the silence in a tune by a factor of two and it becomes a different, and in most cases much worse, tune.

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The same can be said of great acting whether on stage or in a movie. The silence while we wait for the actor’s response to some news — while they are saying nothing and possibly even showing nothing or very little on their face, can often be the most poignant and moving parts of the picture. If the actor reacts “too quickly” with no space, we can tell that the stimulus presented is something that they “trigger” on because they are upset about it or trying to deny it. The leading man, for instance, asks a seemingly innocent question on a first date, such as, “So, do you like French Cuis…” “NO!” she cuts in. The audience’s attention is immediately drawn to see what comes next. The response that is too fast indicates a “sore spot.” Did the leading lady want to become a French chef? Did she just end a love affair with a Frenchman? What is going on here?

On the other hand, imagine the leading man, says, “So, do you like French Cuisine?” One beat, two beats go by. No answer. A long pause. The leading lady’s face shows nothing. Perhaps she tightens her lips ever so slightly or frowns to the slightest possible extent. The pause continues. The leading man tilts his head as though to ask whether she’s okay. Finally, we come to expect a tirade about the French or French Cuisine or French wine or … something. Instead, after this long pause, the leading lady says nothing but punctuates her silence with something that sounds like a cross between a humorless laugh and a karate grunt. There are probably no words she could have said which would have intrigued us more than the non-response. We think, “What the hell is going on with her and French Cuisine?”

Speaking of French Cuisine, when you go to a fine restaurant, your focus is on the food. So too is the focus on the chef and the server. But the space is important as well. It is annoying when you are paying good money to have a nice dining experience and you are shown to your table, given menus and then ignored for the next twenty-five minutes. On the other hand, it is equally annoying when your server comes back every 30 seconds and asks, “Are you ready to order yet or do you need more time?” The optimal time to wait between courses is not always obvious either. Some people need or want much more time between courses. Maybe this nice dinner is all they have planned for the evening. The patrons are having a nice quiet dinner with good conversation. They are in no hurry. Just as one of the diners launches into a complex story or joke, the server comes over and interrupts to tell about the specials. Conversely, another foursome may be planning on attending a play and long pauses between courses may mean missing the first act.

The negative space in dining is not just about the timing of events. It is also about the spatial arrangement of the food, the spacing between textures and colors. Often, the artistic arrangement is as much about the negative space as the objects on the plate.

Sometimes, the food itself has positive and negative elements. In a meal with varied and complex and contrasting tastes, for instance, the rice or the bread can provide a kind of “negative space” between the tastier and more salient constituents. These neutral or negative elements allow more contrast among the salient elements than if the more salient elements were enjoyed right after each other. I’m reminded of a line from Kahil Gibran’s The Prophet:

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness.”

Negative space is important in architecture, painting, typography, cinematography, the design of user interfaces, culinary arts, music, and the design of other stimuli. It is also important in activity.

One of the first popular video games was called “Asteroids.” In this black and white vector graphics game, you controlled a small space ship that shut bullets in the direction the space ship was aimed. All you could control was the speed and direction of the space ship and whether it was shooting. The screen also showed a number of large, irregular “asteroids” that you were meant to hit. When you hit one of these large asteroids with a bullet, it split into two moderate asteroids. When you hit a moderately sized asteroid with a bullet, it split into two small asteroids. When you hit a small asteroid with a bullet, it disappeared. If you got hit by an asteroid, you would die. There was also a flying saucer who came to hassle you. Anyway, I found that if I focused on all these floating asteroids and trying to not to get hit by one, it was a difficult game. For me, at least, it was much better to visualize a path among the asteroids and try to follow that path. In a way, concentrating on the negative space, helped.

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The importance of negative space in sports can hardly be over-emphasized. In American football, the back tries to find the holes to run through. In soccer, players seek paths between. In baseball, the hitter wants to “hit it where they ain’t.” In tennis, beginners often play only during half a point. Their attention is focused on the ball and the opposing player(s). They choose a target on the other side of the court and watch to see how well they hit that target. Just as their opponent begins to hit the ball they shift their attention to their opponent and watch where that opponent hits the ball, scurrying there as quickly as possible so as to hit the next shot. What does such a player do between the time they hit the ball and their opponent hits the ball? They watch! They want to see where the next ball goes. If you are young and fast and your opponent is not well skilled, you can often get away with this process. However, what higher level players do is something quite different though it may look similar. The good player has a target in mind but watches the ball while their mind has the target clearly in mind. By watching the ball, they are much less likely to mis-hit the ball. Furthermore, they are not giving away their intended target with their body language. Perhaps most importantly, long before their opponent hits a return shot, the good player thinks about the open spaces on their side of the court and go to cover the most likely of those spaces.

Many otherwise well-skilled athletes only focus on the game during play. For example, many hitters on amateur softball teams, pay little or no attention to the game while their team is batting until they are “on deck” (almost ready for a turn at bat). This is absurd in the majors, but it’s even more absurd in amateur games. You should be taking this time to learn about the opposing pitcher and about the weaknesses in the opponent team’s fielders. Just because you’re not in the batter’s box doesn’t mean you can’t improve your play. Similarly, in tennis, you can use the time between points to think about tactics and strategy, as well as to mentally “reset” yourself if necessary. Some players wave their hands in front of their face after a point as a reminder/trigger to forget about what just happened and focus on the next point. Some will even turn away from the play, seemingly to talk with their “imaginary friend.”

To close, a very short, short story based on true events in my first trip to Japan.

tokyo tower behind black and white dojo building during daytime

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The Touch of One Hand Clasping

Japan, Tokyo, 1977. I walk crowded streets and beautiful gardens where care is taken for spaces as well as things that grow. I struggle — try to speak Japanese language but usually mispronounce “Key-Ray-Ee-Des” (It is beautiful) as “Key-Rah-Ee-Des” (It is dirty). I tip-toe through minefields of culture steeped in subtlety; lose huge chunks of flesh and karma with my thunderous, blunderous New York strides.

Shin-Ju-Ku: lights dim Times Square into grandmother’s fruit cellar. Row on countless row of Japanese stare hypnotized at small vertical pin-ball game called Pah-Chinn-Koe. This bright hustle bustle hassle hides deeper subtlety, deeper calm, inside, beneath, where foreign eyes can peer not.

I enter Tokyo subway. Then — she enters — total stranger, totally beautiful, black hair, endless eyes. I, of course, having learned small little in my many minefield walks, look everywhere but at her. Better, she looks everywhere but at me. We ride, totally not looking at each other. She stands in middle — nowhere to hold on to — unprotected, beautiful, vulnerable.

Suddenly, train lurches. Simultaneously: she shoots hand out to only spot I can possibly reach while I shoot hand out to only spot she can reach. Our hands clasp strongly for instant and I save her from fall.

Slowly, we release.

Next stop, she rushes out. But — just before the doors bang shut, she turns — looks straight into my eyes. “Kohn-bahn-wah” she says (“Good Evening”).

Thus, Japanese beauty touches beyond body into very soul of clumsy Westerner.

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Negative space….

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Take a Glance; Join the Dance

Life Will Find a Way

At Least he’s Our Monster

What About the Butter Dish?

The Gods of Old

The Truth about Clouds and Gods

Camelot is in your Heart

The Tree of Life

Happy New Year, 2026; Reviewing 2025

01 Thursday Jan 2026

Posted by petersironwood in America, pets, poetry, politics, psychology, satire, Uncategorized, user experience

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AI, Democracy, essays, fiction, life, poem, poetry, politics, Review, thinking, USA, writing

Here’s a hint for having a happy 2026–or, at least one happier than it would otherwise be.

Your happiness actually depends more on how much you love than on how much you are loved. That turns out to be a wonderful thing because you have much more control over how much you love than you do over how much you are loved by others. You need not limit your love to your immediate family. You can love all the fish in the sea; every bird in a tree; every living thing on earth–all of which are in our extended family.

I thought it might be useful for reviewing 2025 for readers to have an index in one place. For instance, something happens or you read something on-line and you think, “Oh, I read something relevant to this on the Peter S. Ironwood blog. Now, what was it called?” Well, this should help.

January 1, 2025 began with a blog post about one of our Golden Doodles named Sadie. I take her for a walk every morning and sometimes write about it. Here are some posts about Sadie.

Travels with Sadie 5: 2025 is here

Travels with Sadie 6: Find Waldo

Travels with Sadie 7: Tolerance

Travels with Sadie 8 – Singing of the Rain

Travels with Sadie 9: Joint Problem Solving

Travels with Sadie 10: The Best Laid Plans

Travels with Sadie 11: Teamwork

Travels with Sadie 12: Taking Turns

During 2025, I found myself writing a number of poems. Many, but not all, were in response to the destruction of America that’s being directed by Putin.

Metastasized

Exauguration Day

The Ides of February

Destroying Our Government’s Effectiveness

The Unread Red

Silent Screams of Dead Men’s Dreams

We Won the War! We Won the War!

Namble Mamble Jamble

Co-Travelers

Autocrat: Putin’s Evil Traitor

Just Desserts?

The Last Gleam of Twilight

Oh, Frabjous Day!

The “Not-See” Party

A Cancerous Weed

An Open Sore from Hell

Baddies often have Bad Daddies

Aside from poetry, I also wrote a number of satirical pieces.

FaceGook explores how the value of social media is mainly created by the participants. Of course, the participants don’t get paid. The companies that own the media do.

Tomorrow’s Dinner is a satire on how the media normalize what is not at all normal.

A Day at the HR Department satirizes the utter incompetence of the Misadministration

Putin’s Favorite DOGE is a satire about DOGE

Interview with Putrid’s DOG-E

E-Fishiness Comes to Mass General Hospital

But Mommy! I had a Reason! satirizes the absurdity of the excuses

Here are links to a number of essays about contemporary issues

Ohms Come in Many Flavors

Running with the Bulls in a China Shop

Increased E-Fishiness in Government

Destroying Natural Intelligence

The Irony Age

Frank Friend or Fawning Foe?

May You Live in Interesting Times

Waves or Particles?

President Mush? Just Flush

The Agony of the Feet

Plastics!

Cooperation is More Common than Disruption

Wordless Perfection

On the lighter side, I’ve been translating sections of “The Ninja Cat Manual” into English

The Ninja Cat Manual

The Ninja Cat Manual 2

The Ninja Cat Manual 3

The Ninja Car Manual 4

From September 20th to September 30th, I began revising & reposting earlier posts about User Experience. Here’s a link to the first:
Customer Experience does not equal Website Design

Turing’s Nightmares is a book of 23 Sci-Fi short stories that examine the future and the ethics of Artificial Intelligence. It’s available on Amazon, but you can also read the chapters in October, 2025 blog posts and commentary on the chapters in November blog posts.

November 28th, I began recounting a series of experiences illustrating the importance of problem formulation.

Problem Formulation Who Knows What?

Starting December 14th, there are a series of essays about various “Tools of Thought”

Tools of Thought

Have a *wonderful* 2026!

petersironwood

~ Finding, formulating and solving life's frustrations.

Tag Archives: AI

Abracadabra!

The Story of Story 4: Character

The Story of Story, Part 2

The Story of Story, Part 1

Tools of Thought: Scenario Planning

Don’t Throw Out the Baby with the Bathwater!

Non-Linearity

Tools of Thought: Problem Finding

Negative Space

Happy New Year, 2026; Reviewing 2025