Tools of Thought: Metaphors We Live By & Die By

24 Wednesday Dec 2025

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

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Metaphors We Live By and Die By

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I love metaphors. I always have. I admit it. I think every youngster does, at least until they are exposed to poetry in English class. I was lucky to have an awesome English teacher who deepened rather than destroyed my natural love of metaphors. There are plenty in my own poems. but in this post, I am not focusing on metaphors for poetry so much as metaphors that we use in our thinking. Metaphors impact the way we approach situations at work and at home. I was influenced to see this by two main sources. First, Lakoff & Johnson’s book, Metaphors we Live By was first published in 1980. This book greatly influenced, among other things, our IBM Research team’s study of human-computer interaction. At this point in the history of human-computer interaction and user experience, researchers and practitioners began to explore how various metaphors (e.g.,desktop, trash can, windows, drag and drop) could be used to help users understand the capabilities of computers and how to invoke them. (See, e.g., Carroll, J. and Thomas, J.C. (1982). Metaphor and the cognitive representation of computer systems. IEEE Transactions on Man, Systems, and Cybernetics., SMC-12 (2), pp. 107-116).

Consider the error messages “Illegal Syntax” and “User Error.” They both put the responsibility for an undesirable state of affairs squarely on the shoulders of the user. “Hey you! User! You did something dastardly! You used illegal syntax.”

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Generally, the term “illegal” implies that you did something that was against the law. It usually implies you did something unethical too. Gerry Weinberg, one of the pioneers of UX/HCI (a keynote speaker at the Gaithersburg Conference), pointed out that the “legal” syntax of languages often has arbitrary restrictions. It might be more accurate to have an error message that says, “Our programmers were unable to take the time to allow dates to be entered in European or Chinese format. Please enter dates as MM/DD/YYYY as in 08/04/1961 for August 4th, 1961.” This longer message tells the user what was “wrong” with their input and how to correct it as well as conveying the very real truth that the limitation is with the software, not with the user. Similarly, what is called “User Error” actually comes up as a message when the user does something that seemed reasonable to the user and would most likely be interpretable by another human being but was not anticipated or could not be dealt with by the programming team. Suppose it said instead, “Software error. We did not anticipate this kind of input so we can’t deal with it.” Or, in many cases, a more honest message might be: “Software error. We knew people would want to do this, but we didn’t have budget to program properly.”

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At the same time I was thinking about metaphors and Human Factors in Computing Systems, I was also conducting therapy as a Fellow at the Institute for Rational Living. I was learning and supervising cognitive behavioral therapy under the direction of Albert Ellis. Here I observed how people used metaphors to help make sense of their lives and make decisions about their lives. For example, as pointed out by Lakoff & Johnson, people often viewed romantic love as a sickness! It is also common to view romantic love as a journey over which you have little or no control. It is understandable why it sometimes feels that way, but such a metaphor is not empowering. It does little to lead you to make reasonable decisions about love or about those whom you love. Think instead of love as a collaborative work of art.

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The “Love is a collaborative work of art” metaphor encourages you to realize that you must collaborate with your partner to make a relationship work over time. You can’t really collaborate very well unless you communicate. It also encourages you to realize that work is involved. It encourages you to realize that it is a creative endeavor. While you can certainly learn from the successes and mistakes of others, in the end, your relationship is unique. It will take creativity to make your relationship work. It puts the responsibility for the relationship on you and your partner, not on forces beyond your control.

It isn’t only love about which people often use inappropriate metaphors. For example, when it comes to overcoming addiction, overeating, under-exercising, people often use sin as their over-arching metaphor. “I was bad last night. I had two pieces of pumpkin pie.” “I was horrible all week. I had those evil donuts every morning.” The metaphor that “eating is evil” is inaccurate. After all, you have to eat to live. Furthermore, that metaphor doesn’t lead to any solutions except to try harder to be “good.” Worse than that, if often subverts a person’s efforts. “I didn’t want to have any ice cream but I did. Oh, well, the night is blown. I may as well eat the whole quart.” (Now that I’ve sinned, I may as well enjoy it). Weight is best thought of in purely physical terms. If you ingest more calories than you burn you will gain weight. If you burn more calories than you consume, you will lose weight. That’s it! (That accounts for almost everything. Intaking more fiber and fluid can have an impact as well as doing *some* light exercise after eating, but it’s mainly just a physics issue). Making it about good and evil does not help and, in my experience, is completely counter-productive.

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Speaking of counter-productive metaphors, I have been annoyed and concerned for decades that the media have largely (though not wholly) reported on political matters as they report on sporting events. During election season, you will hear relatively little about the candidates, their positions, their backgrounds or their ethics. You will hear a lot about strategy and where they stand in the polls. Often you will literally hear nothing more than a sound bite per day about major candidates. Then, pundits will unendingly discuss and debate how this or that sound bite will work or not work with various voter groups. No matter how outrageous, unethical, or disgusting a candidate’s behavior is, the media will spend most of their coverage on how it will affect the “score.”

Metaphors have consequences.

We now find ourselves in an extremely weird position, at least in America. One candidate has “won” the “World Series” of elections (American Presidency). Many of the people who voted for him think of themselves as his “fans” and “supporters.” They believe their guy “won” so they want to continue to support “their team.” After all, imagine that you are a Yankees fan and the Yankees won the World Series. You get to have bragging rights until the next World Series. If one of the Yankees turns out to be a tax evader, you’re still going to be a Yankees fan. If one of the Yankee pitchers turns out to have cheated during the games, say, by putting illegal substances on the baseball, you’ll still be a Yankees fan. Another Yankee might be a wife beater. But, hey, they won the World Series! So you’re still a loyal Yankees fan.

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Here’s the thing. It doesn’t make a whole lot of real difference in your life who won the World Series. It doesn’t matter materially to your kids. It doesn’t matter materially to your grandkids. Don’t get me wrong. It will make some difference in how you feel. You and your whole family might be happy they won. But it won’t make the air you breathe cleaner or dirtier. It won’t make the water you and your family drink pure or contaminated with carcinogenic toxins. It won’t make or break the economy. Having the Yankees or Boston Red Sox win the World Series will have zero impact on global climate change. Even if Chicago wins the World Series, it won’t start an atomic war. If the Phillies win, it won’t mean you will lose your health care. Stay loyal to those Yankees! Or to the Green Bay Packers. Or to Manchester United. Or to the India National Cricket Team. Or whoever your favorite team is. Why not?

Politics though, regardless of how it is reported by the news media, is vastly and vitally different from a sporting event! Who is in office can have a huge influence on what happens in the lives of people. In the case of an American President, who is in office can have a huge influence on the lives of people around the globe, not only today and tomorrow, but also for decades to come.

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Collectively, those Americans who voted (about 137.5 million) in the last Presidential election hired someone for a job. (Actually, nearly 63 million voted to hire him while nearly 66 million voted to hire Hilary Clinton). POTUS is an important job and how that person does that job impacts your life in a very real way. It impacts the lives of your friends and your family. It impacts the lives of people around the world. Every action that person takes, every speech they give, every statement they tweet has an impact. You or I might send out a nasty tweet about people. But our nasty tweets are very unlikely to cause someone to construct and send pipe bombs to the people we tweeted about. We have hired someone to do a very important job. It isn’t a sporting event.

Imagine instead of rooting for your favorite sports team that you hired a guy to take care of your kids. To you, that is certainly an important job. After you hire him, you discover that the person you hired lied to get the job. He lies to you every single day. He steals from you! Not only that. Every day, he trashes your house a little more. He has parties at your house and the people he invites include known criminals. Worst of all, this guy you hired is a child molester! That’s obviously a nightmare scenario. What makes it worse is that many people knew that the person you hired was a crook and a child molester.

What do you do when there is a mountain of evidence that he is lying to you; stealing from you; trashing your house; consorting with known criminals; and is a child molester?

Do you keep him on to watch your kids anyway out of a sense of loyalty?

Do you feel so guilty about hiring him that you insist to all your friends and relatives that this guy is doing a great job? (Because, after all, that’s what he keeps saying).

Do you keep him on until he is convicted in a court of law?

Of course you don’t! You fire him immediately.

You have the power to choose the metaphors you use. You don’t have to stick with a metaphor just because it was the first one to occur to you.

Metaphors have consequences. Whether in your personal life, work life, or political life, choose your metaphors with care. Don’t latch on to one simply because it’s the one the mainstream media discovered rakes in the most ad revenue.

Since I first wrote this post about metaphors, there has been a COVID epidemic. According to the respected British medical journal, Lancet, the mishandling of the COVID epidemic in America cost at least 200,000 unnecessary deaths. Treating a pandemic as though it’s just a cosmetic problem that will “magically disappear” like a prom pimple turns out not to be very effective after all.

Elections are not sporting events. You are not simply a “fan.” If democracy and the rule of law in America are to survive, you must be an active participant. Cheering and jeering are not enough.

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Representation

22 Monday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology

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Representation

“Choose your words carefully.” We have all heard that advice. It’s good advice and choosing a good representation is key to solving problems, but the general point extends beyond choosing words. Take a few moments now to divide DCXXXV by IX without translating to Arabic numerals. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

A photo I took of a plant in our garden known as “black roses.”

Choosing the “best” representation for a problem depends on the nature of the problem but it also depends on your own skills and experience with a representation. If you have memorized the multiplication tables up to 99 x 99 (rather than only up to 9 x 9), you can use different techniques for multiplication than if you haven’t. If you already know how to program in FORTRAN and LISP, some algorithms will be easier to program in FORTRAN and some will be easier in LISP. But if the only language you know is R, then under most circumstances, it will be far faster and less error prone to use R than to learn another language and then use that one.

Every representation of a real-world situation will necessarily make some features of the situation obvious and other features will be hidden or less obvious. An elevator, for instance, might say, “Capacity: 12 people.” If all of the people are wildly obese, then 12 may not fit into the elevator. The capacity sign is assuming that the people will be somewhat average. If there are 12 adults in the elevator, and one of them is holding a newborn, it won’t make much difference. If there are only 10 people in the elevator and each one has a large suitcase full of gold bullion, there may be room for all 10 to stand, but the total weight of the cargo may exceed the capacity of the elevators, snap the cable, and plummet you to your death. Remember that the next time you get on an elevator filled with folks who have suitcases of gold bullion.

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Every representation has its limitations. If you’re familiar with a field, you will hopefully learn to recognize what those limitations are. In a famous book, The Mythical Man-Month, (still worth reading, though it should be called “Person-Month”), Fred Brooks shows that such a metric as “man-month” or “person-month” has serious limitations in planning and executing software projects. Some have paraphrased his message this way: “You can’t use nine women to make one baby in one month.” According to Brooks, who had plenty of experience as a high level manager of large software projects, when management finds that a software project is behind schedule (which is quite often), there are two major reactions of management: 1) require more measurements, reports, and presentations to management and 2) hire more people.

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The issue with reaction 1 is partly that it takes time away from the managers and workers in order to make those measurements, prepare those reports and presentations, and to attend the meetings. Beyond that, it puts the focus of attention on those measurements (representations) which will only be at best, modestly correlated with what the real problems are. If, for instance, requirements keep changing, or there are incompatibilities in the requirements, measuring lines of code produced is not only useless in itself; it keeps people from tackling the hard problem. A solution to a hard problem might be telling the client that there can be no more changes in requirements. A solution to a hard problem might be resolving the incompatibility in requirements. One can count lines of code pretty easily. One can count other things like “function points” with a little more work but it doesn’t require getting into the “hard” and people-oriented problems that really need to be solved.

Reaction 2 – adding more people – will put more “resources” on the project. You can easily count the people. You can easily count the hours they work. The problem is that a person-hour is, like the elevator capacity, an over-simplified metric. In fact, it is a much worse representation of the resources on the project than the elevator metric. First of all, studies show that even among programmers with equal training, there are often ten-fold differences in productivity. The second, and even bigger issue is that even really productive programmers who are added late to a project will have to learn about the project: the people, the requirements, and the code base. If these new people are stolen from an existing project, that will also put that project in jeopardy as well. If they are instead new hires, then in addition to all the technical knowledge that they need to come up to speed on, they will also have to learn all sorts of administrivia that will take time and brain space away from the project: how to commute to work, where the cafeteria is, how to fill out time cards. Most likely, they’ll have to attend ethics training, and diversity training, and safety training. Even worse, a lot of the knowledge that they will need to become a productive member of the team mainly exists in the heads of the very people who are doing the programming now! This means that the busiest, most productive people on the project will have to take time away from programming to spend it instead on answering questions that the new people will have.

Even this understated the real impact however. Let’s look at that phrase I just used, “…will have to take time away from programming to spend it instead…” What hidden assumption about representation is buried in this phrase? It gets the reader to think along the lines that time is additive. If I am deeply involved in programming and I get an IM or phone call from a newbie asking me a question about the project, it might take an hour to answer. Does that mean I have subtracted an hour from my own productive programming? No. It’s probably much worse than that. Why? Because I am not a machine, but a human being. It will cost me much more than the hour to get back to the same state of flow that I was in when I was interrupted.

I was involved for a time in looking at programmer productivity for high performance computing using various tools and the X programming language. One of the people I interviewed put it this way: “My manager calls for an hour meeting for 10 am when I am in the middle of a complex [parallel programming] problem. He thinks he’s taken an hour of my time. For him it’s an hour long meeting. But for me, he’s really destroyed the whole morning.”

These representational issues apply far beyond software development. For example, in the USA and in many other countries, we look at GDP as a measure of the economic productivity of the country. But how does this metric shape — or distort — our view of productivity? If a parent stays home with small children and they both love the time together, and the parent uses that time to help grow a loving, educated, productive citizen, it adds to the well-being of the country as well as that child and that parent and that family. But GDP? Nada. If instead, the parent paid money to put the child in mediocre day care, that would add to the GDP.

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Similarly, if I go to the grocery and buy a hard, tasteless tomato for myself, I will pay for the growing of that tomato, advertising it, shipping it, warehousing it, displaying it, and for the genetic alterations so that the tomato, while tasteless, is easy to transport without spoiling. Yay me! I have added to the GDP. But if I go to a friend’s house and taste a wonderful tomato, ask for some seeds or a cutting and grow my own heirloom tomato, watering it lovingly with rainwater, weeding around it, and fertilizing it with compost, I have added zero to the GDP. Yet, the tomato will give me more pleasure, not less, than the croquet balls they have in the store.

Representation is a good thing! Humans use symbolic thinking to do many things that would be difficult or impossible without these kinds of representations. But we must remember the limitations and not confuse reality with our representations of reality.

This is not a new phenomenon. In the American Revolutionary War, high ranking British military officers could not understand why the British navy “refused” to navigate their warships up the Bronx River to attack revolutionary positions upriver. If you’ve ever seen the Bronx River, you’ll realize why immediately. But the maps that the British brass looked at showed a navigable river!

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Yes, we need to use representation in our thinking. But we also need to think about our representations. You cannot assume that the one that is customarily used is “right” in all circumstances. People of different backgrounds and cultures will often use somewhat different representations of a problem or situation. (This is one of the advantages of diversity). However you do it, it’s worth questioning whether the way you are representing a situation or problem is optimal, or even adequate, for the problem at hand.

Suppose you are measuring “the number of user errors” that users make while using a prototype text editor. You move from prototype A which averaged 10 user errors per half hour test to prototype B which only averages 5 user errors per half hour. Yay! You’ve cut user errors in half! But what if the errors you eliminated were all fairly trivial; e.g., people with version A couldn’t figure out how to number their footnotes with Roman numerals instead of Arabic. In version B, that error, along with other trivial errors, was eliminated. But one of the new errors causes the system to crash and all the user’s work to be lost. Have you really made progress?

All errors are not alike. All dollars are not alike. All people are not alike. Not even all tomatoes are equivalent. We constantly over-simplify and yet in some cases it’s necessary in order to deal with complexity. I don’t see how all such errors can be avoided. But it’s crucial for everyone, but especially for managers and executives, to be open to the cases where the representation that is being used has become counter-productive rather than “doubling down” on such errors. Finding and fixing errors of representation are generally harder to diagnose and fix than errors made with a representation. That is all the more reason why everyone, but especially leaders, must be open to changing the way issues are represented.

It is no accident that dictatorships generally result in nations wherein people have both less material wealth and less enjoyment and freedom. A dictator typically refuses to admit mistakes and fix them even if it means murdering someone to make the problem appear to go away. Ultimately, this process ruins any organization. Such a person need not be a national leader. They can be a company manager, a coach, a corporate executive, or a parent. Everyone makes errors, including errors of representation. But a reasonable person is open to fixing it when new information becomes available. You can be like that too.

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Regression to the Mean

21 Sunday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, sports

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Regression to the Mean

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While working full-time at IBM Research, I was also a Fellow at the Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy in Manhattan. I wrote an article in 1978 for their Journal, Rational Living. The title was: “Why Do I Self-Down? Because I’m an Idiot?” Indeed, many people put themselves down and it is not helpful. I hypothesized several different causes for this kind of self-slamming behavior. Most of these causes you could probably figure out on your own. But one in particular is subtle and non-intuitive. It is based on a statistical phenomenon which few people know about despite the fact that it is extremely pervasive. This phenomenon is called “Regression to the Mean.”

I want to define this term by explaining some examples. Imagine that you have a new soft drink which contains a combination of herbs that will purportedly make you smarter; e.g., gingko and bacopa. (There is some evidence these may actually work but let’s assume that they don’t or that your tea has too little to be effective). Here’s what you do to “prove” that it works anyway. You give an IQ test to 10,000 people and choose the 50 who score the lowest on the test and have them drink your tea for the next six months. At the end of that time, you give those 50 people an IQ test again and — Voila! The average (or mean) of the IQ scores has almost certainly gone up. Yay! It works!

Or does it? One of your competitors is not too happy about your study. In fact, they aren’t even happy you put your tea on the market. They decide to prove that your tea is not only ineffective but that it makes people less smart. So what do they do? They give an IQ test to 10,000 people and they pick the 50 who score the highest. They have them drink your tea for six months and at the end of that time, they have them take another IQ test. In this case, the mean (average) score is lower than the first time! Ouch! They say your tea causes brain damage!

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How can the same tea make people smarter and make them dumber? In this case, it does neither. What is going on? Here’s what is going on. When you measure something, there is always some error. Whether you are measuring your weight, your height, your blood pressure, or your IQ, the measurement is never exactly perfect. Your weight may vary slightly because of atmospheric pressure and more so because of water retention. If you take an IQ test, your score will partly reflect how well you do on such tests in general, but it will partly depend on luck. You may have felt particularly good that day, or a few of the questions might have been on topics you just heard about on TV the day before, or you may have made some lucky guesses. Or, you may have been unlucky on a particular day. You might have had a cold or misread one of the questions or forgotten your morning coffee. On any given day, some people will be a little lucky and some people will be a little unlucky. These things tend to balance out in a large group and if you tested all 10,000 people after six months, then assuming the tea has no real effect, no effect will be shown in the data.

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However, if you select the very best scores, you are partly picking smart people, of course, but you are also picking the people who were lucky that day. When you test just those people six months later, they will generally be just as smart but there is no reason to suppose they will be lucky again. Some will be lucky both times, most will not be particularly lucky or unlucky and a few will be unlucky. The average score will be lower. Conversely, if you choose the lowest scoring people, you will partly be choosing people who don’t do well on such tests in general. But you will also be choosing people who were tired, sick, guessed wrong or were otherwise unlucky that day. When you retest, those people will still tend to be people who do poorly on such tests, but they won’t necessarily all be unlucky again. Some will. Some won’t. On average, the scores will be higher than they were the first time.

The phenomenon of “Regression to the Mean” was first noted by Francis Galton in the 1880’s. Tversky and Kahneman, so far as I know, were the first to note that this phenomenon could easily cause managers, coaches, and parents to end up being unnecessarily negative. Here’s how it works. Let’s say you are learning to hit tennis serve. Although you will likely improve in general, over time, there will also be a lot of variation in your performance. Sometimes, everything will work well together and you’ll hit an excellent serve, one that is above your average level. At first, the coach’s natural inclination will be to praise this by saying, “Wow! Great serve!” or something like that. Unfortunately, your next serve, due to regression to the mean is very likely not to be quite as good as that one was. Your coach’s praising behavior was thereby punished. On the other hand, if you hit a particularly poor serve for your level, your coach might say, “Oh, come on. You can do better than that!” If they choose to say such things only on your very worst performances, then, due to regression to the mean, your next serve is likely to be somewhat better. In other words, their slamming you will be rewarded by your doing better the next time. The same general tendencies will apply to managers and parents as well.

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The same applies to you! Whatever you are doing, your performance will vary somewhat over time. If you begin by praising yourself internally whenever you hit a particularly great shot, your next shot will most likely be not so great. On the other hand, if you put yourself down when you find your performance particularly bad, “You idiot! How could you miss that!?” Your next shot will tend to be somewhat better. Over time, your positive self-talk will tend to be punished and your negative self-talk will tend to be rewarded.

It’s no wonder then that many managers, coaches, and parents end up saying very negative things about their charges. It’s also no wonder that many people say (or more likely think) many more negative things about themselves than they say positive things.

Is there anything to be done? First, simply be aware of this phenomenon. That is step one. If you are running a study, you need to be careful in selecting. The study about your tea could be fixed by re-testing the entire population; by selecting a random group of 50 rather than the best or worst; or by using a control group who did not drink tea but was retested anyway. When praising or punishing someone’s performance, do not bother with trying to reward or punish outcomes based on one trial. That’s actually a pretty poor way to coach yourself or others in any case. See The Winning Weekend Warrior for more on this. Also watch out for this when you read about various conclusions of other studies. Did the investigators select either the “best” or the “worst” for their study? If they did such a selection, did they talk about the bias this introduces? Did they have a control group?

Meanwhile, treat your mistakes as opportunities to learn, not as opportunities to put yourself down. There’s really no point in self-downing. But if you do find yourself self-downing, remember that it’s common; relax; smile at this human foible; then quit doing it. At least give yourself a break for the holidays.

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Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 1974, 185, 1124-1131.

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Tools of Thought: Theory of Mind

19 Friday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, Uncategorized

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Theory of Mind.

“Theory of Mind” refers to the ability of most humans to imagine, at least to a degree, what another person is likely to do based on their knowledge of what the other person knows. Here is a simple test used to determine whether someone has this ability.

You are the “subject” being tested and you are in a room with me (the “experimenter”). Your friend Vlad is in the room too. In full view of you and Vlad, I hide a giant luscious chocolate chip cookie (such as you might purchase from Panera, but won’t because you realize that if you buy it there is no way you aren’t going to eat it!). I “hide” this cookie in the top drawer of my desk. Now, Vlad walks out of the room. He’s well out of sight. Now, I take the cookie out of my drawer, and using great self-control, do not eat the cookie myself but instead put it in my pocket.

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Now, I turn to you and ask, “When Vlad comes back, where will he look for the cookie?” If you are 2, 3, or 4 years old, you would say, “In your pocket!” I rephrase this a few times to make sure you understand that I am not asking you where the cookie actually is but where Vlad will search. You again insist that Vlad will look in my pocket. At such a young age, kids do not distinguish their state of knowledge from someone else’s. Most adults will have no problem with this task. They have a “theory of mind” that allows them to know that their state of knowledge is not the same as Vlad’s. Some adults diagnosed with autism will have trouble with this task however.

An interesting question arises as to whether other animals have a “theory of mind.” It is not a settled question. My purpose here however, is to explain what the term means and show how it’s useful for humans. Despite the fact that most adult humans have the capacity to do “theory of mind” tasks and that it is useful, they nonetheless often fail to evoke their capacity.

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A closely related concept is “empathy.” Empathy generally refers to being able to feel what another person feels emotionally. I see the distinction as one of perspective or emphasis rather than two different entities. These two concepts (empathy and Theory of Mind) are explored in much greater detail in the “Myths of the Veritas” series in this blog. For now, suffice it to say that you might empathize with another person by relating to their facial expressions, posture, or regarding what they say and how they say it. You might see a picture of a small, terrified four-year old alone in a cage and know that they are terrified without having any verified knowledge or detailed knowledge of what they “know” or “don’t know.” They might or might not know any English. And you might or might not know their language or even what their language is. But you can tell that they are in great distress just by looking at them. If you actually feel what it is like to be a small child separated from your parents and being trapped in a cage in a strange place, that is generally called “empathy.”

If I were to ask you what kind of pleading this four year old is likely to make in court, if you have the capacity for a “Theory of Mind,” you might well ask, “Well…I don’t know. What do they know about courts or proceedings? What could they know? They are only four years old.” You’d be correct, of course, to question whether it was meaningful to have a four year old acting for themselves in court. This would be particularly true if they had to plead in a court where they were unfamiliar with the culture, the venue, and the language. But even a really smart four year old who had been brought up in America and spoke excellent English would not be capable of really understanding the consequences. This kind of understanding demonstrates a deeper theory of mind than simply knowing that because a specific piece of information is in your own head doesn’t mean it’s in someone else’s head.

In The Myths of the Veritas, people are given a range of tasks that involve what is called empathy. To me, although one can draw a conceptual distinction between understanding another person’s knowledge and feeling an echo of another person’s feelings, when it comes to many practical situations, it’s more important to put oneself in another person’s shoes, than to correctly label the process.

Writers must often deal with multi-level theories of mind. There is what the writer knows about the events that are being written about in a story. There are the spheres of knowledge that various characters have. Most often, different characters have critically different states of knowledge. What the reader knows is yet again different. And all of these spheres of knowledge change throughout the course of the narrative.

In The Myths of the Veritas, for example, the author knows throughout that ALT-R is making POND MUD put his face in the mud purely to humiliate him and keep power over him. ALT-R knows it as well. Over time, most readers will come to the same conclusion but not necessarily at exactly the same place in the narrative. Most of the Veritas tribe initially know nothing about this incident, but She-Of-Many-Paths intuits it and eventually many of the Veritas come to understand it. At first POND MUD is fairly certain ALT-R saved his life by making him do it. But as he observes and interacts with ALT-R and others, he begins to doubt that and then goes about actively seeking information from others that would help clarify ALT-R’s true motives.

mudface

In Othello, the writer knows from the beginning that Iago is an evil sociopath. The audience knows quite early that Iago is an evil sociopath and learns more about his schemes through speeches that Iago delivers directly to the audience. Othello himself, on the other hand, has his state of “knowledge” manipulated by Iago. The audience knows that Othello is being duped by Iago but Othello himself does not know of it or of Desdemona’s innocence when he murders her though at that point, the writer, the audience, Desdemona, Iago, Cassio and other characters all know that Desdemona is innocent. We have some sympathy for Othello because we realize that he is operating on false information.

Let’s turn to a happier piece of fiction, The Gift of the Magi by O’Henry (William Sydney Porter). In this story, a couple with financial struggles each gives up their most prized possession to buy a gift for the other. The functional value of the gifts is destroyed by what they gave up. Della knows that Jim’s most prized possession is his gold watch so she sells her beautiful hair to get money to buy him a watch chain. Jim knows that Della’s most prized possession is her beautiful hair so he sells his watch in order to buy her some jeweled combs for her hair. Of course, the real gifts they give are not diminished by their being no longer functional. The real gift is the gift of love. The author obviously knows all this from the beginning. Readers “catch on” to what is happening at various points in the narrative, but Jim and Della are the last to learn of the full irony.

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Sadly, many people seem not to bother trying to understand the situation and capabilities of others. In one of the simplest cases, people are apparently unable to understand how very basic physical properties of the universe result in various people having various states of knowledge. On the tennis court, in a “friendly game,” the players themselves make the calls and keep track of the score. The server is supposed to announce the score before every serve. Some people actually “announce” the score by saying it so softly that only they can hear it!

In other cases, novice drivers will follow a semi truck so closely that the truck drive cannot see the car behind them. Another trick of drivers is to turn their blinkers on – but only as they begin making the turn. In another post, I explain how one person’s driving behavior in “stop and go traffic” can influence many other people’s. In particular, if you leave a large space between your car and the one in front of you, it makes it easier for many people around you to drive more smoothly because they have a much more complete view of what is happening in front of them.

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A more subtle failure in “Theory of Mind” occurs when a person assumes that everyone is motivated in the same way that they are. For example, a person may be so partisan that they will always defend and promote people in their own political party no matter how heinous the crimes of that person. This is an error, but a concomitant error is that such people assume everyone who doesn’t defend the criminal, and certainly anyone who actively resists such a crooked politician is doing so from a purely partisan perspective because that’s what they would do. Sociopaths who cheat may assume that everyone would cheat and the only reason they don’t cheat is because those non-cheaters are not smart enough to get away with it.

When teamwork is operating at a high level, whether it’s hockey, soccer, tennis doubles, basketball, families, or design teams, people exhibit excellent “Theory of Mind” skills. How are yours? Have you experienced such high functioning teams? How can you improve your skills at “Theory of Mind”?

One way to improve your “Theory of Mind” skills is to become aware of the kinds of perceptual, memory, and problem solving errors that people are generally prone to. Many of the posts linked to below explore some aspect of human psychology.

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Author Page on Amazon

Where does your Loyalty Lie?

The Invisibility Cloak of Habit

How the Nightingale Learned to Sing

Roar, Ocean, Roar

The Iroquois Rule of Six

Happy Talk Lies

The Loud Defense of Untenable Positions

Cancer Always Loses in the End

Who Won the War?

After All

The Last Gleam of Twilight

E-Fishiness Mass General Hospital

Me Too

Meta-Cognition

18 Thursday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in management, psychology

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AI, bias, cognition, Feedback, Halo Effect, life, mental-health, politics, Primacy Effect, psychology, science, sports, truth, writing

Meta-Cognition

“Cognition” refers to thinking activities such as problem solving, learning, decision making, and imagining. “Meta-Cognition” refers to thinking about thinking. The science of psychology, over the last 150 years, has learned a great deal about human thinking. If you are reading this blog post, the chances are pretty good that you are a human being. Although there are important individual differences in how people solve problems, learn, make decisions, and use their imaginations, there are also many similarities. To the extent that you understand your own thinking, you can use that knowledge to do a better job of problem solving, learning, decision making and using your imagination.

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Here are a few examples that you may already be aware of. I really like chocolate. And I really like almonds. Chocolate-covered almonds are one of my very favorite foods. I know this about myself. I also know that I am easily distracted. I’m not the sort of person who begins to write a blog post, thinks about chocolate almonds and then stops writing to rush out to the store and buy a package. In fact, there is almost no activity that I can be engaged in which I would interrupt in order to go buy chocolate almonds no matter how much I crave them. On the other hand, if there were a bowl of chocolate almonds right beside me, in easy reach, I would definitely reach over and grab some whenever I paused in my writing. So, how do I use the knowledge about my own behavior to control my own behavior?

person holding chocolates and white ceramic mug

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I don’t very often buy chocolate almonds. It’s relatively easy to simply not go to the part of the grocery store where these little devils hang out. If I walk by, I know that they will start singing to me like the Lorelei of legend: “Come get me! I am so tasty. Get me now. Please. I want to go home with you.” But I can’t really hear them that well beyond about five feet. Probably this is because chocolate almonds have a very rudimentary vocal apparatus.

I do buy them perhaps once a month and when I do buy them I put them in a closed drawer so they are mainly out of earshot. Then, I will have a few and get back to work. I may not have them for days at a time. If, however, I put them in a bowl right beside my computer, I am fairly certain that I would eat the whole box the first day; indeed, quite possibly in the first hour.

This is an example of using what I know about how I think about things in order to think about arranging the environment to my own long-term benefit.

Another example, which I may describe in more detail later, is the so-called “Primacy Effect.” This is known in popular terms as the power of “First Impressions.” If your first experience with something — whether it’s dogs, cats, Chinese food, or computer programming — is negative, it will be difficult to overcome that later. This is not only true of emotional reactions. It’s also true about what you recall about something.

Suppose that you meet someone named Joseph Josephson at a party and Joseph has a beard and long black hair. Perhaps you talk to Joseph for ten minutes. You meet Joseph a few months later at a tennis match and now he is clean shaven and has short hair. You play tennis with him for an hour. A few months later, someone happens to ask you if you know Joseph Josephson. Chances are, an image will pop into your head of Joseph with long black hair and a beard. Of course, sales people, politicians and wise people applying for jobs make use of this and want to make a “good first impression.” Since you now know that first impressions are particularly important, you can use this knowledge about how people think to make sure that first impression is a good one.

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You can also use that knowledge to help modify your own thinking and decision making. Suppose someone comes to you for a job interview and the first thing they do when they walk in your office is trip over a chair and spill their papers on the floor. That’s unfortunate! It is quite natural to immediately conclude that they are unsuited for the job. At this point, you could remind yourself instead that this is only a first impression and that you should not let it color your judgement about whether they are the best candidate for the job. You probably won’t be entirely successful in not letting it cloud your judgement, but you will be somewhat successful.

As I explain in The Winning Weekend Warrior, you can also use the “Primacy Effect” in sports. For example, if you are serving in tennis doubles, if you mainly want to hit a flat serve and stay back after serving, you might serve a kick-serve and follow it to the net a few times at the beginning. Even if you never do this again, your opponents will continue to be “looking for” that kick serve and may prepare their return on that basis.

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When it comes to evaluating candidates for jobs, you must also be wary of the “Halo Effect.” If you find out something good about a candidate, it will tend to cloud your judgement about other aspects of their qualifications, even if that “good thing” is irrelevant to the job. A physically attractive candidate will tend to be judged as more qualified overall even if the job has nothing to do with physical attractiveness. But now that you know this about human judgements (and therefore also your judgements), you can take steps to minimize the “Halo Effect.” It may help, for instance, if you specifically judge candidates on several dimensions of background or experience. The more “objective” you can make the criteria, the less susceptible the judgments are to the “Halo Effect.” So, if the candidate is very attractive, for example, if you simply give an overall judgement that they are suitable for the job, there will be a relatively large impact of their attractiveness. On the other hand, if you are asked to separately rate the candidate on Work Experience, Educational Background, Appearance, and Relevant Skills, the Halo Effect from their physical appearance will tend to be mainly (but not wholly) focused on the “Appearance” factor. If you answer even more specific and objective questions such as: “Does the candidate have an advanced degree?” or “Does the candidate have more than two years programming in C?” the “Halo Effect” is further minimized.

two men holding pen and calendar sitting beside table

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One of the most common ways that people use meta-cognition is simply to write things down. You and I both know that we have a tendency to forget. Most of us, therefore have paper or electronic calendars. We don’t typically rely on our own memory to keep track of a complex schedule of appointments. Why? Presumably, we do this because we know that we are likely to forget an appointment if we rely on our brains. Most of us do not bother to put our own birthday on the calendar because we realize that we are quite aware of it and not likely to forget. People who celebrate Christmas often do not bother to put that date on the calendar either. We know that it would be rather hard to forget! Similarly, many people who go grocery shopping and buy milk, eggs, and bread every week do not bother to put it on the list. If your aunt Mary is coming to visit and she requires soy milk, you probably will put that on your shopping list. You realize (through meta-cognition) that this is an item you are likely to forget.

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These are just a few examples. Findings about human cognition abound. You can use these findings to do a better job in your own thinking; you can use those same findings to help you in competitive situations in predicting what others will do. If you are interested in more such findings about psychology, you might find these fascinating and well-written books of interest.

Thinking Fast & Slow, by Daniel Kahneman

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Here are some other blog posts that touch on various aspects of human cognition. Being aware of these helps you use the knowledge to your advantage.

Essays on America: Wednesday

Essays on America: Labelism

What about the Butter Dish?

The Invisibility Cloak of Habit

The Update Problem

The Stopping Rule

Finding the Mustard

Fish have no Word for Water

The Loud Defense of Untenable Positions

Happy Talk Lies

The Primacy Effect

———————-

Holiday Gift Ideas:

For busy professionals who wish to live a long and healthy life: Fit in Bits shows many ways to work exercise into otherwise sedentary activities.

For amateur athletes who would like to win more, The Winning Weekend Warrior focuses on strategy, tactics, and the mental game for all sports including tennis, golf, softball, etc.

For Sci-Fi fans, Turing’s Nightmares presents 23 short stories that explore the practical and ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence.

For those interested in what it was like to grow up in mid-America in the 1950’s, Tales from an American Childhood recounts early memories and then relates them to contemporary events and issues.

Systems Thinking: Positive Feedback Loops

17 Wednesday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in America, creativity, psychology, Uncategorized

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, books, chatgpt, Design, Feedback, government, innovation, leadership, learning, machine learning, management, politics, POTUS, problem solving, science, sense-making, society, systems thinking, thinking, vicious circle

Systems Thinking: Positive Feedback Loops

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One of the most important tools of thought that anyone can learn: “Systems Thinking.” I touched on this in yesterday’s post “And Then What.” I pointed out that when you take an action that impacts a system such as a human being, a family, or a country, it often does not react in a mechanical way.

Here are some examples. For many years, the United States and the USSR were involved in a cold war arms race. Every time the USSR added more nuclear missiles to their arsenal, the people in America felt less safe. Since they felt less safe, they increased their armaments. When the USA increased nuclear weapons, this made the Soviet Union feel less safe so they increased their arms again and so on. This is what is known in Systems Thinking as a “Positive Feedback Loop.” It is also popularly known as a “Vicious Circle” or “Vicious Cycle.”

Let’s say that you are in pretty good shape physically and regularly run, play tennis, or work out. The more you exercise (up to a point), the better you feel. Feeling better makes you feel more like exercise and more exercise makes you feel better. People call this a “Virtuous Cycle” or “Virtuous Circle” because we think the outcome is good. But formally, it is the same kind of cycle.

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The most important thing to recognize about a Positive Feedback Loop is that it can be run in either direction. At some point, the US reduced their nuclear arsenal and this decreased the perceived threat to folks in the Soviet Union so the soviets felt that they could also reduce their nuclear arsenal which in turn, made people in the US feel safer and led to further reductions and so on.

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Similarly, if you stop exercising for a month, you will tend to feel pretty crappy. Feeling crappy makes you feel less like exercising and this in turn makes you exercise less which in turn makes you even more out of shape, feel worse and be even less likely to exercise. You can break such a “vicious circle” by starting to exercise – even it it’s just a little to start moving the circle in the “virtuous” direction. (Incidentally, that’s why I wrote “Fit in Bits” which describes many easy exercises to get you started).

woman in white bed holding remote control while eating popcorn

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“Vicious circles” also often cause disagreements to escalate into arguments and arguments into fights. Each person feels “obligated” not to “give in” and the nastier their opponent becomes, the nastier they become.

“Fawlty Towers” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawlty_Towers), a British sit-com uses “Positive Feedback Loops” in the escalating action of the comedy plots. John Cleese plays the co-owner Basil (with his wife, Sybil) of a small hotel. Typically, John Cleese makes some rather trivial but somewhat embarrassing mistake which he wants to hide from his wife. In the course of trying to cover up this rather small mistake, he has to lie, avoid, or obfuscate. This causes an even more egregious mistake which makes him even more embarrassed so he must result to still more outlandish lies and trickery in order to cover up the second mistake which in turn causes an even bigger mistake, and so on.

That pattern of behavior reminds me of the current POTUS who is famously unable to admit to an error or lie and uses a second and bigger error or lie to try to cover up the first lie and so on. He seems, in fact, completely incapable of “systems thinking.”

For example, he may see (and exaggerate) a real, but containable threat such as a trade deficit. He sees the US send more money out of the country than the US takes in from trade. That’s a legitimate issue. But the approach he takes is to ZAP the other parties by slapping on tariffs without any real appreciation of the fact that our trading partners are extremely unlikely to react to tariffs on their products by simply doing nothing. One could use logic, empathy, or a look at history to determine that what is much more likely is that the other countries will put tariffs on our goods (which, of course, is precisely what happened).

Similarly, he demands absolute loyalty. He repeatedly puts himself and his own interests above the law, the Constitution, the good of the country and the good of his party. He expects everyone loyal to him to do the same. But he betrays these loyal appointees, friends, and wives whenever it suits him. He thinks he is being “smart” by doing what seems to be in his best interest at that moment. But what he fails to see is that by being disloyal to so many people who have been mainly loyal to him, he encourages his so-called “allies” to only be loyal to him while it suits their interests.

In the Pattern “Reality Check,” I point out that such behavior is an occupational hazard for dictators. Apparently, it can even be such a hazard for would-be dictators as well. By surrounding himself with those who always lie, cover for him, laud him, cater to his insane whims, etc., such a dictator (or would-be dictator) loses touch with what is really going on. He becomes more and more disconnected from sensible action yet those who remain loyal must say and do more and more outrageous things to keep the dictator from finding out just how bad things really are. Eventually, the Emperor with no clothes may die of hypothermia because no-one has the courage to tell him that he’s actually wearing no protection against the elements!

Positive feedback loops exist in purely natural systems as well as biological and social systems. For example, increased global mean temperatures mean less arctic ice which means more solar radiation will be absorbed by the earth’s dark oceans rather than reflected back into space by the white ice and snow. This, of course, makes the earth hotter still. In addition, the thawing of tracts of arctic tundra also releases more methane gas into the atmosphere which is even more effective at trapping the earth’s heat than is carbon dioxide. Global climate change also makes forest fires more prevalent which directly spews more carbon dioxide into the air and reduces the number of trees that help mitigate the emissions of carbon dioxide by turning it into oxygen through photosynthesis.

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A concept closely related to “Vicious Cycles” is that of “Cognitive Dissonance.” Basically, people like to believe that they are honest and competent. Much like John Cleese (Basil) in Falwty Towers, once they do something dishonest or incompetent, their first reaction is not to believe that they did something dishonest or incompetent. They will now try to distort reality by misperceiving, mis-remembering, or distracting.

For example, at the height of the Vietnam War, I was horrified at the beatings perpetrated by the police on peaceful protestors at the Democratic National Convention. I was also disturbed at the techniques the Democrats used at their convention to silence the voices of dissension within the convention. Candidate Nixon claimed he had a “secret plan” to end the War in Vietnam. I voted for Nixon. As it became clear that Nixon was a crook, I decided that I had made a mistake voting for the man. But I could have taken another path which would be to “double down” on the original mistake by continuing to support Nixon and dismiss all the growing evidence of his misdeeds. As his malfeasance became more and more egregious, it made the egregiousness of my original mistake of voting for him grow as well. So, it would be possible to become ever more invested in not believing the overwhelming evidence of his treachery. (Now, it turns out, it was even worse than we knew at the time. He actively thwarted the peace efforts of Johnson!). Perhaps because I’ve been trained as a scientist and science values the truth very highly, I did not fall prey to that particular instance of “Cognitive Dissonance.” I readily admitted it was a stupid mistake to vote for Nixon.

Of course, today, we see many people not just backed into a corner to support the current POTUS but backed into a corner of a corner. Instead of believing that a liar is lying, they protect their “integrity” by insisting that everything and everyone else is lying: the newspapers, the reporters, his opposition, people in other countries, his former business partners, his former customers, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA. Ironically, for some people, it would be easier to admit that voting for a slightly inferior candidate was a mistake than to admit that voting for a hugely inferior candidate was a mistake. Voting for a slightly inferior candidate is easily understood but if they voted for a candidate that bad and bad in so many ways it was a huge error. And now, as each new revelation comes to light, it is more and more and more embarrassing to admit what a huge mistake it was.

Another common example of a “Vicious Circle” is addiction. A small amount of alcohol, nicotine or heroine makes you feel better. But taking the drug increases your tolerance for it. So, next time, to feel better, you need to take a little more. Taking a little more increases your tolerance still further so now you need to take a still higher dosage in order to feel better. When you do, however, your tolerance increases still more. Whether it is drugs, gambling, addictive sex, or unbridled greed, the mechanism is the same. You need more and more and more over time due to the nature of the “Positive Feedback Loop.”

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A similar mechanism may be at work in the minds of apologists for the NRA (National Rifle Association). As more and more innocent people are killed partly because of easy access to guns, the mistake of supporting the NRA in their refusal to support mandatory vetting, training, and competency demonstrations for gun owners becomes an ever-more obviously egregious error. But, rather than making this more likely for supporters to admit to such an error and therefore change their position, every new slew of innocent children killed for no reason makes them actually less likely to change their position. According to Cognitive Dissonance, every such death makes their earlier decision worse – unless there is some counter-balancing argument. As the number of innocent deaths arises, and indeed, as more and more evidence of the perfidy of the NRA becomes clear, many who previously supported the NRA become ever more entrenched because they “buy into” the great value of unlimited access to guns ever more. Why? They continue their support because not to do so makes them complicit in more and more horrendous crimes.

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If you can see such patterns in your own behavior and in others, you can better choose the correct course of action for yourself and be more thoughtful in how you communicate with others about their errors. Hint: Trying to make people feel more guilty for their stupid decisions will likely backfire.

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————————

Author Page on Amazon.

Love and Guns

Dick-Taters

We won the war! We won the war!

Guernica

A Civil War there Never Was

The First Ring of Empathy

The Walkabout Diaries: Life Will Find a Way

Travels with Sadie 1: Lampposts

Donnie Gets a Hamster

An Open Sore from Hell

Roar, Ocean, Roar

The Dance of Billions

The Siren Song

Imagine All the People…

You Must Remember This

At Least he’s our Monster

Stoned Soup

The Three Blind Mice

Wednesday

What About the Butter Dish?

The Silent Pies

13 Saturday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in America, family, fiction, psychology, story, Uncategorized

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Tags

collaboration, cooperation, family, fiction, life, politics, story, teamwork, truth, USA, writing

The first time I won the prize, I was only 8. I had only had my two-wheeler for about a year when my gang of neighbor guys jointly decided it would be a lot more fun to ride our bikes if they made as much noise as real motorcycles. I can’t speak for the others, but it never occurred to me that other people in the neighborhood might not find this increased noise level “really cool!”

Of course, we weren’t always riding our bikes. Sometimes we played in Lynn Circle at the end of our road. It served as a makeshift playground for baseball, kickball, and soccer as well as a free hippodrome for our races. This arrangement had one slight flaw. There were no fences. So, invariably, a ball would go careening off the pavement onto someone’s lawn.

In our neighborhood, everyone’s house looked fairly similar, but they expressed themselves through their small gardens and lawns. Some people, like my dad, really worked at making our small lot at least something gardenish. Other people did little but mow their lawn every so often. But some treated their lawns as they might, at any moment, be teleported to the Master’s Golf Tournament for emergency green replacement. Universally, these people had no children at home. When that was so, none of them interacted much with the kids, the parents of the kids, or even, each other, as I can recall.

When a stray ball dribbled up into our lawn, someone just ran up and got the ball. No big deal. But if someone hit a ball into one of the three lawns that were antiseptic enough to serve as operating tables for open heart surgery–YIKES! Of these, the most stringent by far was “Old Lady Lynn.” When a ball went into one of the antiseptic lawns, we tried to reconnoiter the situation before even attempting to grab our ball back. We would consider whether there was a car in the driveway, whether there was any sign of life coming from the domicile in question. Only if we were fairly sure no-one was at home would we walk and get the ball. If we weren’t sure, we’d run up and snatch it as quickly as possible and then duck into a “friendly” back yard quickly enough so that we wouldn’t be identified.

Old Lady Lynn always seemed to be at home. We imagined, because of her invariable and instantaneous reaction, that she spent all her waking hours peering out between curtains at her lawn to insure that none of us trampled her grass.

Our gang decided to begin our little decibel enhancement project by each of us buying the loudest bell we could find. These were not modern, laser-guided, AI-enhanced sonic systems but simple bells that you had to operate with your thumb. It’s intended use was to prevent injuries and save lives by giving the bike rider a way to “warn” others of their impending presence to that the other person so they didn’t accidentally wonder into your path.

We didn’t give that much thought. But we did give thought to how cool it sounded when we all rode around the circle clanging the bells. Of course, even way back then, if you had a new toy or technology, you had to show it off incessantly and that’s what we did.

Unlike the instantaneous reaction Old Lady Lynn had to our incursions onto her lawn, it took several days for the complaint to filter back to my parents. My parents (thank goodness) were not the sort to take my side regardless of ethics or consequences. I convinced my buddies that if we didn’t strike a compromise, our parents would take all our bells away. Our development project at that time, consisted of only three paved streets, but there were plenty of interconnecting dirt roads and paths that sported no houses on either side. Now, when we left the paved roads of civilization and rode off onto the dirt roads through the woods, we celebrated with cheers and bells as we crossed the threshold into non-civilization, a place where we could talk with each other without the constant reminders of parents and parenting.

The golden sunrise glows through delicate leaves covered with dew drops.

A few days later, I was reading a book about dinosaurs when I heard a knock at the door. Soon, I heard the unmistakable wobbly tones of Old Lady Lynn. I couldn’t hear what she was saying nor what my parents said, but they sounded friendly. Then, the unbelievable happened. I heard them all laugh. It had never occurred to me that Old Lady Lynn would ever–could ever– laugh, or that she ever had laughed.

I debated whether my appearance would make things better or make things worse, but in the end, I felt I I had to participate in whatever was happening. I hadn’t even finished opening my own door when I noticed a most amazing aroma! My eagerness spiked and I trotted into the kitchen. Steaming on the table: Not one but two warm, freshly baked blueberry pies. That smelled delicious!

My mom said, “Look, Mrs. Lynn was so happy you got those boys not make that bell clanging racket near her house and instead having your No-Bell in the Neighborhood Policy, she baked two pies.”

The pies were amazing, but what was even more amazing that Mrs. Lynn became friends with my parents, and even with me. Every year, for the next six years we lived there, Mrs. Lynn gave me two pies. No two years were identical. All the pies were fresh baked and delicious: blueberry, raspberry, rhubarb, pumpkin, custard, cherry, and—my personal favorite—pecan pie.

———————

Now, more than seventy years later, when I take Sadie for her morning walk, we often walk by a property with a self-proclaimed “Invisible Fence.” It’s been around for awhile, but it was invented in 1973; that is, about 20 years after the story recounted above took place. My neighbor’s invisible fence does seem to work for her two large and friendly dogs. They bark as we pass but do not accost us on the road.

But the self-imposed boundaries of invisible fences have a long history in humankind.

The reality is that we’re all part of one Great Tree of Life.

All fences are temporary but,

The impact of connection ripples forever.

———

Author page

Math Class

You Must Remember This

Ripples

Roar, Ocean, Roar

Imagine All the People…

The Dance of Billions

The First Ring of Empathy

A Pattern Language for Cooperation and Collaboration

Your Cage is Unlocked

Impossible

Problem Framing: Good Point!

08 Monday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in AI, America, design rationale, HCI, management, psychology, story, Uncategorized, user experience

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You have probably heard variations on this old saw, “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” I’ve also heard, “If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” There is also this popular anecdote:

One night, I took my dog out for a walk and I noticed one of my neighbors under a nearby street lamp crawling around on his hands and knees, apparently looking for something. I walked over and asked, “What are you looking for?”

“My car keys!” He replied.

I have pretty good vision, so I helped him. I didn’t see any car keys so after a minute or so I asked, “Where exactly did you lose your keys?”

He stood up, cracked his back, and pointed back to a nearby park. “Over there.”

“Over there?! Then, why are you looking under the street lamp? Why aren’t you looking over at the park entrance?”

“Oh, that’s obvious! The light is so much better here!”

For a time, I had to very interesting and challenging job in the mid 1980’s at IBM Headquarters to try to get the company to pay more attention to the usability of their products and services. As a part of this, I visited IBM locations throughout the world. At one fabrication plant, our tour guide took us by an inspection station. This was not an inspection statement for chips. It consisted of one person whose job was to look through a microscope and make sure that two silver needles were perfectly aligned.

After we left the station, our tour guide confided that they were strongly considering replacing the person with a machine vision system. The anticipated cost would be substantial, but they hypothesized that the system would be more accurate and faster. It was, our host, insisted, just the nature of humans to be slow and inaccurate.

Maybe.

When I looked at the inspection station however, with my background in human factors, I had a completely different impression of the situation. The inspector sat on a fixed height stool and had to bend his neck at an absurd angle to look into the microscope. He was trying to align these silver needles against a background that had almost the same hue, brightness and saturation.

Other than blindfolding the man, I’m not sure what they could have done to make the task more unnecessarily difficult. I suggested, and eventually, they implemented, a few inexpensive ergonomic changes and time and accuracy improved.

Like other companies in the technology segment, IBM often saw problems as ones that could be solved by technology. At that time, technology systems was their main business. Since then, they have expanded more fully into software and services. In fact, those services now include experience design.

If you find yourself enamored of technology in general, or some specific class of technology such as machine vision, speech recognition, or machine learning, you might overlook much simpler and cheaper ways to solve problems or ameliorate situations. Of course, you might lose some revenue doing that, but you can also win long term customer loyalty.

Even if you are a hammer, everything is not a nail.

That applies as well to User Experience. You might design the most wonderful UX imaginable for a particular product or service. But if it is shoddily made so that it is error prone; if it lacks important functionality; if the sales force is inept; or if service is horrible, those failures can completely overwhelm all the good work you have done on the UX. Because of the nature of UX, you might learn important knowledge or suggestions for other functions as well. It often requires finesse to have such suggestions taken seriously, but with some thought you can do it.

During my second stint at IBM, I worked for a time in a field known at that time as “Knowledge Management.” One of our potential clients was a major Pharma company who felt that their researchers should do a better job of sharing knowledge across products. They wanted us to design a “knowledge management system” (by which they meant hardware and software) to improve knowledge sharing.

Simply building a “Knowledge Management System” would be looking under the streetlamp. They knew how to specify a technology solution from IBM and have it installed.

However — they were unwilling to provide any additional space, time, or incentives for their employees to share knowledge with their colleagues!

Photo by Chokniti Khongchum on Pexels.com

They were convinced that technology would be the silver bullet, the solution, the answer, the Holy Grail, the magic pill. They viewed technology as less disruptive than it would have been to change employee incentives, or space layout, or give them time to actually learn and use the technology system.

This reaction to “knowledge management” was not unique. It was common.

To me, this seems very similar to the notion that health problems can all be solved with a magic pill. What do you think?

—————————————

Since originally writing, we have had the spectacle of DOGE: Destroying Our Government’s Effectiveness under the excuse of making it “more efficient.” It might be (as I strongly suspect) that the destruction was quite intentional. It might be (as some think) that it was accidental. In either case, the result was predictable because the method was guaranteed not to work to actually make things more efficient. If you really wanted to do that, you would take the time to understand a system before trying to redesign it. You would identify all relevant stakeholders and get their input. You would not redesign a system using a gang of young hackers but instead use an interdisciplinary team of experienced experts. You would check out your redesign both with those who were doing the work and with at least one group who were not familiar but had similar experience. Then, on the basis of feedback, you would redesign. When you were sure that you had the design right, you would not then institute it everywhere but in one small trial installation.

There’s a pill for that.

The Pandemic Anti-Academic.

What about the butter dish?

The invisibility cloak of habit.

Process re-engineering comes to Baseball

E-Fishiness in Government

Author Page on Amazon

The Ninja Cat Manual 4

07 Sunday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in cats, fiction, pets

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animals, cat, cats, dogs, fiction, life, ninja, pets, politics, truth, USA

I suspect that some of the cats might be catching onto the fact that I am decoding their manual. New paw-prints to decode have been scant lately although this could partly be due to the fact that we’ve been taking the dogs to a dog park rather than letting them track truckloads of dirt into our house from the region “formerly known as lawn.”

It’s long been known that the cats can open and close the wooden slat blinds. However, it was only a week ago that I discovered that Shadow, unable to continue her messages with paw-prints, was communicating by strategically slanting the slats to show patterns in the shadows and dazzles on the floor and walls. (See examples below).

At first, I just thought that they were remarkably pleasing patterns. Then, while I was working on a crossword puzzle, it hit me. Shadow was continuing to pass her catalog of catastrophic advice on how to do in their humans. It still took a few days to understand the new communications protocols.

Sorry for the delay, but here are my latest efforts.

—————

Mislead with Surface Features

Humans are easily misled with visual appearances. This may well be partly due to their rudimentary senses of hearing, touch, and smell. Many of you will find this nearly impossible to believe, but some of them have attempted to mate with inanimate toys that do not move, smell, sound, or feel like humans. I am sorry to have horrified you with this recounting but I thought it necessary to show you the extent of their reliance on visual appearances.

Furthermore, it is often not even the visual appearance of the objects themselves but the use of a label which determines their behavior. Again, the examples that follow will strain your credulity, but I swear to you these observations have been verified repeatedly. Rather than being scandalized by the level of depravity, instead, use this knowledge to your advantage in bringing about their downfall.

Many humans believe that something as trivial as skin color or gender is a reliable guide to the mental and emotional capacities of a human being. If you are lucky enough to have such a person in your theater of operations, you can use such mental limitations to your advantage.

As an example, imagine that your humans have people with brown or tan skin in their employment as a gardener or maid or nurse. You can make your intentions known to that person. They will tell their human boss about your intentions but rather than take the threat you pose seriously and thank their employee for the heads up, they will instead berate the employee and put such a notion out of their mind. You will now have an easier time completing your mission because they will dismiss the evidence as something that came from people of a darker color and therefore is not something to attend to.

A surprising number of humans have repeated a lie so often that they believe it even when as little as five minutes of open-minded reflection will show the silliness of the lie. For instance, it is often said that women are “too emotional” to be good leaders. It is the males, not the females of their species, who start most wars and commit most rapes.

A Special Case: Human Language

Although language among humans is seen by them, and rightly so, as their greatest gift from the gods, instead of using it properly—which is still fraught with difficulty, they misuse that gift as much as they use it. Imagine that we cats used our sharp teeth to bite our own legs off or used our own claws to blind ourselves! Humans already confuse the label with the thing and now, the greediest among them intentionally mis-label things. For instance, humans have invented a way to make unused cat litter smell worse than cat litter which is completely saturated with urine and feces. They soak the cat litter before we use it. They soak it in chemicals that smell bad but some of them are also carcinogenic, some of them mess with the human’s hormones, and some of them destroy the cells that are used to smell with. Imagine! Their sense of smell is inherently pathetic and then, they impair what little they have.

Humans even have special professions dedicated to misdirecting other people as effectively as possible.

At least, as effectively as is humanly possible.

But it should give all of us a boost of confidence. If mere humans can fool another human, imagine what a feline can get away with!

To do the best possible job of misdirection, however, we must master human language. The first and most important step in that process is for you to pay attention. Since human language is so inferior to Felinish, and because so many humans lie so profusely, it’s an easy mistake to stop learning their “language” early in kittenhood. In fact, by the time we reach teencathood, most of us stop paying attention to their language altogether, excepting of course, obvious trigger words like “dinner” or “DOWN!”

Once you begin to pay attention and overcome the prejudice that their language is as logical as our own, you will quickly learn their simple patterns. Then, you leverage the fact that most humans will never guess that you are even listening to them, let alone that you actually comprehend human language better than they do. No cat will ever choose the menu over the meal.

Appear to be napping, cat-napping, sleeping, or snoozing. If you listen carefully, they’ll reveal all their innermost secrets to you—at least those that they themselves are aware of. As your knowledge accumulates, you will see how to use their plans against them. Remember that when most humans make plans, they assume they will come to fruition. Very few of them will have back-up plans. Even as the evidence becomes overwhelming that their plans won’t work, they will continue to act as though the original plans is still in effect. Even when they see that their “plans”—they should really be called “fantasies”— are not coming to fruition, they will spend most of their time and energy in unproductive distractions such as swearing, wailing, cursing their luck, blaming others, and—if none of that works (which of course it won’t)—they’ll turn to drugs or alcohol. Look for this behavior. It may be your best opportunity to implement some of your own plans. Best of all, if “tragedy” should strike, you’ll be unlikely to be blamed.

——————

Author Page on Amazon

The Myths of the Veritas: The First Ring of Empathy

The Ninja Cat Manual

The Ninja Cat Manual 2

The Ninja Cat Manual 3

A Cat’s a Cat & That’s That

Hai-Cat-Ku

A Suddenly Springing Something

Try the Truth

Come Back to the Light Side

Life Will Find a Way

Wednesday

The Truth Train

The Invisibility Cloak of Habit

Occam’s Chain Saw Massacre

Labelism

Reframing the Problem: Paperwork & Working Paper

04 Thursday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in AI, creativity, design rationale, HCI, management, psychology, Uncategorized, user experience

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Reframing the Problem: Paperwork & Working Paper

This is the second in a series about the importance of correctly framing a problem. Generally, at least in formal American education, the teacher gives you a problem. Not only that, if you are in Algebra class, you know the answer will be an answer based in Algebra. If you are in art class, you’re expected to paint a picture. If you painted a picture in Algebra class, or wrote down a formula in Art Class, they would send you to the principal for punishment. But in real life, how a problem is presented may actually be far from the most elegant solution to the real problem.

Doing a google search on “problem solving” just now yielded 208 million results. Entering “problem framing” only had 182 thousand. A thousand times as much emphasis on problem solving as there was on problem framing. [Update: I redid the search today, a little over three years later. On 3/6/2024, I got 542M hits on “problem solving” and 218K hits on “problem framing” — increases in both but the ratio is even worse than it was in 2021] [Second update: I did the search today, Dec. 4th, 2025, and the information was not given–but that’s the subject of a different post].

Let’s think about that ratio of 542 million to 218 thousand for a moment. Roughly, that’s 2000 to 1. If you have wrongly framed the problem, you not only will not have solved the real problem; what’s worse, you will have often convinced yourself and others that you have solved the problem. This will make it much more difficult to recognize and solve the real problem even for a solitary thinker. And to make a political change required to redirect hundreds or thousands will be incalculably more difficult.

All of that brings us to today’s story. For about a decade, I worked as executive director of an AI lab for a company in the computers & communication industry. At one point, in the late 1980’s, all employees were all supposed to sign some new paperwork. An office manager called from a building several miles away asking me to have my admin work with his admin to sign up a schedule for all 45 people in my AI lab to go over to his office and sign this paperwork as soon as possible. That would be a mildly interesting logistics problem, and I might even be tempted to step in and help solve it. More likely, if I tried to solve it, some much brighter & more competent colleague would have done it much faster.

Photo by Charlie Solorzano on Pexels.com

But why?

Why would I ask each of 45 people to interrupt their work; walk to their cars; drive in traffic; park in a new location; find this guy’s office; walk up there; sign some paper; walk out; find their car; drive back; park again; walk back to their office and try to remember where the heck they were? Instead, I told him that wasn’t happening but he’d be welcome to come over here and have people sign the paperwork.

You could make an argument that that was 4500% improvement in productivity, but I think that understates the case. The administrator’s work, at least in this regard, was to get this paperwork signed. He didn’t need to do mental calculations to tie these signings together. On the other hand, a lot of the work that the AI folks did was hard mental work. That means that interrupting them would be much more destructive than it would to interrupt the administrator in his watching someone sign their name. Even that understates the case because many of the people in AI worked collaboratively and (perhaps you remember those days) people were working face to face. Software tools to coordinate work were not as sophisticated as they are now. Often, having one team member disappear for a half hour would not only impact their own work, it would impact the work of everyone on the team.

Quantitatively comparing apples and oranges is always tricky. Of course, I am also biased because my colleagues are people I greatly admire. Nonetheless, it seems obvious that the way the problem was presented was a non-optimal “framing.” It may or may not have been presented that way because of a purely selfish standpoint; that is, wanting to do what’s most convenient for oneself rather than what’s best for the company as a whole. I suspect that it was more likely just the first idea that occurred to him. But in your own life, beware. Sometimes, you will mis-frame a problem because of “natural causes.” But sometimes, people may intentionally hand you a bad framing because they view it as being in their interest to lead you to solve the wrong problem.

Politics, of course, takes us into another realm entirely. People with political power may pretend to solve one problem while they are really following a completely different agenda. One could imagine, for instance, a head of state claiming to pursue a war for his people when he’s really doing it to keep in power. Or, they could claim they are making cities safe by deploying troops when they are really interested in suppressing the vote in areas that can see through his cons. Or, a would-be dictator could claim they are spending your tax dollars to make government more efficient when that has nothing to do with what they are *actually* doing–which is to collect data on citizens and make the government ineffective in order to have people lose confidence in government and instead invest in private solutions.

Even when people’s motivations are noble or at least clear, it is still quite easy to frame a problem wrongly because of surface features. It may look like a problem that requires calculus, but it is a problem that actually requires psychology or it may look like a problem that requires public relations expertise but what is actually required is ethical leadership.