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~ Finding, formulating and solving life's frustrations.

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Ohayōgozaimasu

18 Thursday Feb 2021

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culture, decision making, problem finding, problem formulation, problem framing, problem solving

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One way to mis-frame a problem is to use your own cultural framing when you are in another cultural context. Of course, most of us recognize that different languages are spoken in different places. Communication is much more time-consuming and error-prone when you are speaking different languages. But the frameworks that we use can also be different and those can be more subtle. 

The first time I visited Japan, around 1977, I had spent some time learning something of the Japanese language before arriving. I had had some experience learning French and a bit more learning German. As a native speaker of English, when you learn a German word or a French word, you can generally find cognates in your own native language for most German or French words. I find that helps me recall the German or French word. 

For instance, my first word as a child was supposedly “Moon.” In German, “the moon” is “der Mund.” The vowel sound is very close to that in the English “moon” so it’s fairly easy to remember. In French, “the moon” is “la lune” which sounds very similar to “the moon” but is also related to the English words “lunar”, “lunacy” (people used to believe too much time in the moonlight could drive you crazy” “lunette” (an architectural space shaped like a half moon), etc. 

These similarities are not surprising because English grew out of the Germanic Anglo-Saxon but was heavily influenced after the Norman Conquest of 1066 by French. Typically, English has words related to both the French word for something and the German word. For example, in English we have the word “hand” which is similar to the German “die Hand” and we have the words “manual,” “maintain,” and “manicure” which are similar to the French for “le main.”

In fact, this duality is so common, that if you happen to know that the German word for “the forest”is “der Wald” (which is like “the woods”) then you can be fairly certain that the French word will be similar to “forest” and indeed we have “la forêt” in French. Or, if you happen to know that the French word for the English “the foot” is “le pied” (which is similar to “pedicure” and “podiatrist”) you can guess that the German word will be close to “the foot” and, indeed, it is “der Fuß.” 

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When it comes to Japanese, however, these kinds of mind games are not possible. In a few cases, foreign words have been adopted by Japanese. “Coffee” for example is “kōhī” but apart from a few such cases, you won’t be able to use your knowledge of Indo-European languages to much advantage in learning Japanese. 

If you enter a “Restaurant” in Berlin or a “Restaurant” in Paris, you will not only see many English words, you will be almost certainly following the same “script” for how things happen at a restaurant in England, American, Australia, or Canada. You go in. You are typically greeted near the door by a host or hostess. You are shown to your table. You are given a menu. You order off the menu. Your meal is brought to you; you eat; you get a bill; you pay your bill. You leave.

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When I went to have my first breakfast in Japan, I went with dictionary in hand. I knew I had not come anywhere close to learning enough of the language to manage on my own. But what I had not counted on was that the “script” for eating in that particular restaurant was quite different from what I was used to in America. 

I went in, and sure enough, I was greeted by my host. “Ohayōgozaimasu” which basically means “Good morning.” She didn’t seem to be in any hurry to show me to my table, however, so I began to walk past her and find a table on my own. She again said, “Ohayōgozaimasu!” But, this time, she said it, a little more insistently; indeed, she moved as though to block my entry. I checked my little Japanese guidebook and again said, “Ohayōgozaimasu!” I said it a bit more enthusiastically and distinctly this time, sure that I had mispronounced it slightly and that was causing some confusion. I moved to walk past her and this time she once again said “Ohayōgozaimasu!!’ She bracketed this with some other things that were not in the guidebook and that I did not understand. And, this time, there was no mistaking it. She was actually blocking me from entering the restaurant! 

Two things occurred to me. First, I must not have said “good morning” correctly. Second, I must have said “good morning” without being sufficiently polite. I tried again, this time, being sure to bow to her and she had bowed to me. 

No. Something else was going on. 

Eventually, she explained to me with Japanese and gestures that there was a completely different script in play. Here, you were supposed to go in where the hostess greeted you and then you were meant to immediately pay the price of breakfast. In return, you receive a wooden token. You walk in, choose your own place to sit, and display your wooden token on the table conspicuously. Then, at some point, your breakfast arrives. You eat your breakfast and then you leave. When do you order? You do not order at all, because everyone has the same breakfast! 

Next time you find yourself confused by what is happening, you might consider that you are playing a part in a very different script. 

By the way, a traditional Japanese breakfast is probably my very favorite breakfast. Yes, I love pancakes. Yes, I love bacon and eggs. But, I not only love eating a Japanese breakfast. I love how I feel afterwards: satisfied, clean, healthy, and not sluggish from being overfed. What is shown in the photo below is close to what I had. The main difference is that I was given a raw egg, not tamago. As recently as 1977, raw eggs did not presumptively have salmonella. 

You may or may not ever have the pleasure of visiting Japan. If you do, I can pretty much guarantee that you make some sort of cultural faux pas. If you do, you may or may not realize it, because, generally speaking, Japanese are polite and will cut you more slack than if someone brought up in Japan did as you did.

And, speaking of guaranties, I would be surprised if you did not at some point find yourself not understanding the “language” of those you were working with who came from a different background or discipline. Sure, some words will be similar. Others won’t. And the worst will be words that are spelled and sound the same but in fact refer to different concepts. For example, in my field, psychology, the word “reinforcement” has a very specific meaning that is similar but distinct from its daily usage. The word “force” in physics means something quite different and more objectively measurable that the “force” of an argument or my using “force” to get my way. 

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Even more subtle traps, some inadvertent, arise because people you collaborate with may have different cultures. In my research roles, for example, it came to pass that I had occasion to interact with people with a business background. In some cases, I was asked to present a “business case” to show how a product or research program would have a good ROI. They wanted me to mathematically “prove” an idea financially worthwhile. 

Only they did not really want a “mathematical proof” in the sense that a mathematician (or a research psychologist) means “mathematical proof.” Of course not! How could they. They want reasonable assumptions with some back up and a plausible story, laced with math, that can be used to support their decision to their management. If I had a “mathematical proof” that they could not understand, they would be unable to use it with their management. Partly, this is a case of a word meaning different things, but more, it is a story about two different cultures.

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Business propositions can never be proven to be wise ahead of time. Unlike the frictionless plane of the physicist or the “controlled lab experiment” of the psychologist, or the well-defined axiomatic system of the mathematician, actual business outcomes can be impacted by a huge number of unpredictable factors; e.g., weather, legal actions, public relations disasters, etc. In addition, a scientist usually has a longer time-frame in mind. While the business decision maker only needs to explain or persuade a layer or two of management who will typically spend less time and have less expertise than the presenter, the scientist must be prepared to present her or his work to the most brilliant and experienced people in the field.

These and other natural differences between “business thinking” and “science thinking” lead to different cultures. In 1977, when I visited my colleagues in Japan who worked in Human-Computer Interaction, I felt more akin to them while talking about computing than I did to my next door neighbors back home who worked in sales or construction. 

Every field develops its own culture. 

Be aware. Be respectful. 

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The Invisibility Cloak of Habit

Introduction to a Pattern Language for Collaboration and Cooperation

Index to a Pattern Language for Collaboration and Cooperation 

The Myths of the Veritas: The Forgotten Field 

https://petersironwood.com/2020/03/20/the-mysterious-american-continental-breakfast/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/04/05/imagine-all-the-people/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/04/21/choosing-the-script/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/11/28/take-a-glance-join-the-dance/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/07/25/the-only-them-that-counts-is-all-of-us/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/11/03/opponent-does-not-mean-enemy/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/04/25/process-re-engineering-moves-to-baseball/

Author Page on Amazon

Tag! You’re it!

08 Monday Feb 2021

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

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BLM, Design, empathy, HCI, problem formulation, problem solving, UX

As I mentioned before, one of my part-time jobs during my Senior year in college was as a teaching assistant at the Supplementary Educational Center (SEC) in Cleveland. In addition to actual teaching, I did a variety of other chores as well including erecting and painting walls, setting up lighting, putting up NASA exhibits, etc. One of the worst tasks I was assigned was putting a straight pin into each one of a billion variously colored squares of construction paper. 

No, there weren’t really a billion. It just seemed that way. I sat at a desk with a very large pile of these 3” x 4” pieces of paper on my left and a large supply of straight pins straight ahead. I picked up a rectangle of paper, picked up a pin and poked it through in two places so that friction held the pin in place. Then I placed it in a pile on my right. I picked up another piece of paper and did the same thing. Again. And again. After awhile, I looked down and noticed that there was a large pile of these pinned pieces of paper on my right — and none left undone on the right. But I only “noticed” doing the first several. After that, my brain took a vacation. 

It’s not the only time my brain has taken a vacation when faced with a boring task. If I had a heavy industry job on an assembly line, I have no doubt that I’d be mangled or dead within a week. I just “tune out” of the task at hand. Perhaps you have experienced something similar while driving a well-known route. You get in your car to drive home from work — and then — you find yourself at home — and you have no conscious recollection of driving home! It’s an interesting phenomenon but not the one I’m going to explore in this post. 

Hopefully, you are also curious about why I had been assigned the task of putting these pins in all the various pieces of colored paper. 

Here’s the deal. The school system of Cleveland, like many others at the time, was very racially divided. There were many neighborhoods in the Cleveland area that were nearly 100% black and others which were nearly 100% white. One of the goals of the SEC was to bring kids from various neighborhood schools together so that they could have at least some experience interacting with kids of different races and ethnic backgrounds. Sadly, the situation is pretty much the same today as the map below from 2018 shows. (Red are majority black areas; orange are Hispanic; Green is Asian; Blue codes for white).

https://www.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/2018/05/10/new-data-map-reminds-us-cleveland-is-hyper-segregated
 
  So, cast your mind back to your time in the sixth grade (about 10-11 years old, typically). One day, you get in a bus and ride to downtown Cleveland and go into the Supplementary Educational Center and there are kids there from two other neighborhoods — kids you’ve never seen before and will likely never see again. Are you going to hang out with your friends? Or, are you going to walk up to some total stranger — of a different race — and introduce yourself and hang out with them for the day while you learn about American history or space science? I don’t have any conscious recollection of ever being a racist, but I have no doubt whatever that I would spend time with my own classmates; in fact, I would hang out with a subset of my classmates who were my friends. 

Guess what?



That’s exactly what the kids did as well. They hung out with their friends. The administrators of the SEC eventually noticed this and constructed a social engineering “solution.” They gave every kid who entered a tag of green, blue, yellow, or red. For the day, at least, the “greens” would be with each other. The “blues” would hang out together with other “blues.” And so on. 

Thus my assigned task of putting pins so that the kids would have a tag that they could pin on their clothes. This way, so the thinking went, people from diverse neighborhoods would end up in the “green” group. Sounds reasonable in theory.

If you’ve never actually been a kid. 

Or, if you’ve been a kid but have nonetheless convinced yourself that you weren’t. 

Or, if you’ve been a kid but you never think back on your actual experience in order to inform your design decisions when you’re designing for kids. 

Cast your mind back to when you were ten or eleven years old. You get on a bus and ride to downtown Cleveland and as you walk in the door of the Supplemental Educational Center, you’re handed a red tag and the two friends you typically hang out with are handed a green tag and a yellow tag. You discover that these tags will determine who you get to hang out with for the day. 

What would you do? 

I can tell you what the kids at the SEC did.  They immediately traded tags with other kids so they could still hang out with their own friends! Mostly, they could do this with kids in their own school. On rare occasions, they also went to kids from other schools in order to get the “right” tags so they could hang out with their friends. At least for a few moments, some of them did actually interact transactionally with kids of other races long enough to trade tags. 

Please understand. The administrators and teachers at the school weren’t dummies. But … ? Did they really think this ploy would work? 

I’m not saying that empathy is an infallible guide in design. Things change. It’s possible that your experience as a child would be quite different from what children today would do. Technology changes; culture changes; nutrition changes. 

Nonetheless, thinking back to your own experience as a child should at least be consulted when you’re designing for kids. Your experiences are vast. You can not only think back about your experience as a kid. You can think back about your own experiences of being thirsty or hungry or afraid or angry. If you’re designing for users who might be experiencing these states, that can be useful information. 

I’ll say it again. Your own experience is not an infallible guide. User testing is still necessary. Just because you might have liked something doesn’t mean others will. On the other hand, when it comes to any real world problem, the design space is huge. You can use your own experience as an inspiration to design and you can also use it as a first level check on design ideas. 

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Myths of the Veritas: The First Ring of Empathy

Author Page on Amazon

https://petersironwood.com/2020/02/26/race-place-space-face/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/03/02/dont-they-realize-how-much-better-off-they-are-now/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/03/27/the-most-serious-work/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/05/24/blood-red-blood/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/06/15/answers-to-your-many-questions/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/07/13/who-are-the-speakers-for-the-dead/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/12/14/how-the-nightingale-learned-to-sing/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/02/24/the-pie-of-life/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/07/25/the-only-them-that-counts-is-all-of-us/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/02/21/the-touch-of-one-hand-clasping/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/03/20/cars-that-lock-too-much/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/02/29/the-lost-sapphire/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/03/22/jennifers-invitation/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/07/13/how-did-i-get-here/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/11/01/that-cold-walk-home/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/12/01/that-first-time-is-so-special/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/12/08/the-itsy-bitsy-spider-the-waterspout/

Astronomy Lesson: Invisible Circles

05 Friday Feb 2021

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decision making, experiment, problem finding, problem formulation, problem framing, problem solving, psychology, Skinner, thinking

My senior year at Case-Western Reserve, I went to college full-time but I was also head of a small family. I was married and we had small baby to take care of. I worked three jobs. One of those jobs was as a teaching assistant in downtown Cleveland at a place called “The Supplementary Educational Center.” The job involved a wide range of activities including putting new walls in, painting them, putting up NASA exhibits, running a planetarium and teaching about space and how airplanes worked. The Supplementary Educational Center bussed in sixth grade students (around 11 years old) from diverse parts of the city to learn about American History and about Space Science. 

Another job grew out of my class on Learning. The Professor in the previous story about operant conditioning without awareness recommended me as a research assistant for another professor who was also a Skinnerian. He was doing studies on operant conditioning. I “programmed” the experiments by literally plugging together components such as timers and relays. I also ran the experiments. By sheer coincidence, the “subjects” for the Professor’s experiments on operant conditioning were also sixth graders. 

The kids would go sit in a chair in front of a screen. On the screen, an image of a red circle would appear from time to time. In front of the kids was a lever. If they pulled that lever when the red circle appeared, a nickel would fall down as a reward. They were completely enclosed in what can be fairly described as a large Skinner Box. After a kid pulled the lever and received their nickel a few times, we began to “thin” the schedule. Now, they had to pull the lever 2 or 3 times before getting a nickel. Then, only every 5-7 times. Then, only once every 10-12 times. (Remember, it only “worked” if they pulled the lever while the red circle was there.) Finally, they were put into a phase where they would never get any more nickels no matter how many times they pulled the lever. 

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At that point, we (or more accurately, the relays we had programmed) stopped showing the red circle and showed other things such as a smaller red circle or a larger red circle or a green circle or a purple circle or a red ellipse. None of these ever paid off. But the instruments recorded their level pulling and we would soon satisfy our curiosity whether they would “generalize more” (i.e., pull the lever more) to a stimulus that varied in color, shape, or size from what they were originally trained on. I cannot recall how that actually turned out. As I look back on it, the notion that we would have a “general ordering” about the relative importance of these dimensions based on this experiment seems rather…naive.

Although the kids were run as subjects one at a time, it often happened that they came with a friend or two. The kids who were not being a subject just then, sat in a nearby waiting room and stared at the floor. I felt sorry for them. There were no magazines, games, books, etc. The room did have a blackboard though, so I picked up the chalk and began “teaching them” about the planets in the solar system. They seemed to enjoy my mini-lecture so I felt pretty good at having spread some enlightenment among the masses. 

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Despite the fact that the Professor was a devout Skinnerian, he still suggested that I debrief every subject — ask them what they thought they had been doing. So I did. What I discovered to my amazement was that some of them thought that my astronomy lecture was an advance organizer for the task in the Skinner box! “Well, first you showed me a picture of Mars many times and then Jupiter came up….”

In my mind, the little mini-lecture and the Skinner box experiment were two entirely different things that were not at all connected to each other, but each of which was connected with a specific job and conducted miles apart. The people I saw in these two roles were different; the hours were different. In this specific instance, I had used a bit of what I knew — and more importantly, what kids that age were interested in — to help them pass the time while waiting their turn. It never occurred to me how the situation appeared from their perspective. 

From their perspective, they go to this strange place on a college campus and meet this college kid (me) who greets them and takes their permission slips and has them take turns at some weird way to earn nickels involving looking at circles and ellipses. And, this same college kid (still me) teaches them about the solar system with circles and ellipses. Of course, they would think they were related.

For me, there were two distinct circles. For the kids, there was one circle. 

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“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!”

—- Robert Burns, To a Louse

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First in a series of stories about the mythical Veritas tribe who value truth, love, and cooperation and their struggles against the Cupiditas who value power, greed, and cruelty. Our tale begins as the shaman/leader of the Veritas seeks an eventual successor so she devises a series of trials that mainly test empathy.

https://petersironwood.com/2018/08/07/myth-of-the-veritas-the-first-ring-of-empathy/

Author page on Amazon

Training Your Professor for Fun & Profit

04 Thursday Feb 2021

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problem finding, problem formulation, problem framing, problem solving

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The name of B. F. Skinner is not often invoked in discussions of User Experience. There are limitations to his basic theory, but perhaps it is time to revisit the baby that was, by many, thrown out with that bathwater. Skinner’s approach has two major limitations that come to mind. First, human behavior is moderated by internal structures such as beliefs, framings, assumptions, labels, and so on. If one ignores these cognitive structures and tries to predict human behavior solely on the basis what behavior is “reinforced” those prediction efforts will often fail. 

Second, humans (and other animals) are not born as “blank slates.” We have a number of inborn predispositions. For example, if you “punish” a rat by shocking the rat after performing a particular action, it will quickly learn to avoid that action. Similarly, if you feed the rat a food with a distinctive taste and that food will make it nauseous, it will quickly learn to avoid that taste. Some readers may have also experienced this. If your first experience with oysters, say, made you vomit, you may never try them for the rest of your life. 

Photo by Rachel Claire on Pexels.com

On the other hand, if you shock the rat after it tastes something, that is a much harder association to master. Or, if you make the rat nauseous after pressing a level, that is also a difficult association to learn. 

Despite these and other limitations of the strictly Skinnerian approach, reinforcement still works in many situations. It is even possible for people to “learn” a behavior because of reinforcement and to learn without any conscious awareness of the fact that they are being trained in this way. 

As an undergraduate at Case-Western Reserve, one of my psychology courses (on learning) was taught by a “Skinnerian.” He was an excellent instructor and I enjoyed the course immensely. Since we had a syllabus, I knew exactly when he would be lecturing on the topic of “unconscious conditioning.” As usual, almost the entire class was seated before the Professor arrived. This gave me time to explain to my classmates my idea for what the class would do: condition him to stand in a corner and comb his hair with his hand. 

I think you will appreciate the fun here. He was giving a lecture about how people could be conditioned without awareness and while he was doing that, we were going to condition him without his awareness. 

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

I will return momentarily to explain just how we managed, but first, I must explain the concept of “shaping.” Shaping is an extremely important concept for training your pets or your kids to behave in convenient or useful ways. Basically, the idea is to begin by reinforcing any behavior that is in the direction that you want the behavior to go in. If you want to potty train your child, for instance, you don’t initially wait for complete success. You praise the child even if he or she sits on the potty. You praise the child if they try to make it to the bathroom but have an “accident” on the way. Gradually, your criteria become stricter and you only reinforce behavior closer and closer to the goal. Similarly, if you want to train your dog to “shake hands” you initially praise them for anything even close. For instance, if you put your hand out and they lift their paw even slightly off the ground, you praise them. As they become more adept, you change your criteria for reward. Eventually, you only reinforce them then when they are “shaking hands” as well as you think possible. 

Now, let’s return to the Skinnerian Professor and his lecture on unconscious conditioning. If the class had waited until he stood in the corner and combed his hair with his hand, we never would have succeeded. At first, we only reinforced him (by looking up and looking very eager and interested) when he stood to the right of his lectern (from our perspective). Then, we only began to reinforce him when he was near the corner. Then, we only began to reinforce him when he raised his hand slightly. Then, we only acted eager and interested when his hand went up toward his head or face. Finally, we only acted eager and interested when he stood in the corner and combed his hair with his hand. It took almost the entire hour for this to work. I kept a written record of his behavior and noted the times and the changes in our criteria for success. When the lecture was over, I walked up and explained what we had done. I showed him my records. 

He was astounded! It was awesome. I suppose theoretically, he could have been putting it on, but if he was, it was the best acting performance I saw in all my years attending Eldred Theater or the Cleveland Playhouse. Once he recovered from his initial shock though, to his credit, he didn’t get angry with me or deny the reality of what had actually happened. He just nodded and said (essentially). “Yeah. This stuff really works.” 

Yeah. It really does. And, although B. F. Skinner’s approach to human behavior is overly simplistic, it still does work in many circumstances, including a human’s behavior interacting with a computer system. 

Another important contribution of B. F. Skinner is his work on “schedules of reinforcement.” It’s worth understanding this in some detail, but for now, I just want to focus on one aspect. The “schedule of reinforcement” that leads to the highest rates of behavior is to reinforce, not every time a desired behavior is observed, but very seldom and randomly. 

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Las Vegas comes to mind. I only visited once. For a time, I watched people at the slot machines. Unlike the people who win on TV commercial casinos, in the “real world” (to the extent Las Vegas is part of the “real world”), I saw four people win and not a single one of them showed even a glimmer of pleasure. They simply started feeding their winnings back into the machine. This is how the Casinos make their money. Basically, they are using “a thin Variable Ratio Schedule” to get people hooked on behavior that is statistically guaranteed not to be in their financial interest. (Of course, it’s understood, people also gamble for fun. That’s okay.) But if you are gambling against the Casinos in order to make money. Well….good luck. Remember: they have chauffeurs, yachts, and mansions. You do the math. They say, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” But they might instead say, “Money that comes to Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

In most User Experience contexts, we want the relationship between what the user does and the consequences to be consistent. I say “most” because, when it comes to games or learning experiences or computer art, this is not always true. In most work-related applications however, we want the user to be reinforced every time he or she takes appropriate action. I think that’s what designers mainly strive for. 

I believe, however, that the users themselves sometimes fall into doing something that only occasionally pays off. For example, let’s say a college student has ground floor dorm room and connects to the internet via satellite. The connection is flakey. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But it works much better on the top floor. So, when he or she tries to access the Internet and fails, they walk the three flights of stairs and they successfully connect every single time. But walking three flights of stairs is a pain so the student in question decides it might help if they close all their windows before trying to connect. Now, say that didn’t work so they decided to close all the windows and then reboot. Well! What do you know!? It worked. So, the next time they have trouble connecting, instead of walking up three flights of stairs, the student closes all the windows and reboots the machine. Maybe, by sheer chance, it worked again! 

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The next time, perhaps it doesn’t work. But three flights of stairs? That’s a long ways. So, they try again! It works! 

Photo by Harrison Haines on Pexels.com

But winter is coming. 

And with winter comes rain. And with rain comes worse connectivity to the satellite. So, as the rain goes from San Diego rain frequency to San Francisco rain to Portland rain to Seattle rain frequency, our student becomes less and less successful in actually connecting. But every so often, the procedure works. They may have rebooted their machine ten times before it finally connected, but that just makes it more likely they will be willing to try twenty times before giving up. Furthermore, the student may have “given up” on even considering walking up 3 flights of stairs. Having the persistent habit of rebooting the machine multiple times actually prevents the student from either doing the thing that has always worked or working toward a more permanent solution (e.g., changing rooms, getting an antennae, finding a wired hookup, etc.). 

It is possible in this way to train a rat or a pigeon or a college student — or even a professor — to do something they would not have consciously chosen to do — or to do something at a much greater frequency than they would have chosen to do it. 

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Next (Perhaps): “The Skinner Box and the Box Next Door.”

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Author page on Amazon

https://petersironwood.com/2018/07/12/chain-saws-make-the-best-hair-trimmers/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/02/28/essays-on-america-addictions/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/05/08/what-about-the-butter-dish/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/06/02/essays-on-america-my-cousin-bobby/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/07/31/essays-on-america-the-update-problem/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/08/21/the-primacy-effect-the-destroyers-advantage/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/12/17/bounce/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/04/25/process-re-engineering-moves-to-baseball/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/12/03/living-on-the-edge/

https://petersironwood.com/2017/01/09/trumpism-is-a-new-religion/

https://petersironwood.com/2019/07/18/essays-on-america-wednesday/

A Long Day’s Journey into Hangover

03 Wednesday Feb 2021

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

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alcohol, drama, problem finding, problem formulation, problem framing, problem solving, thinking

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Closely aligned with the notion of “Problem Framing” is the notion of “Attribution.” 

My dad was an electrical engineer. My mother was an English and Drama teacher. I’ve always enjoyed acting though I never pursued it as a career. My mother’s mother founded the “Akron Dramatic Club” and held meetings for many years at the house where my mom grew up. Typically, the group would read plays. I happened to have a very good memory at a young age and often I would “fill in” for anyone who was missing, even before I could read. 

In high school, I had the lead in our Senior Class Play, One Foot in Heaven. In college, I continued to take acting classes as well as technical subjects. In one “Studio Production,” we presented a scene from Eugene O’Neil’s drama, Long Day’s Journey into Night. I played the part of Jamie, based on Eugene O’Neil’s older brother. In the particular scene in question, the father and his two sons sit around a table drinking Irish Whiskey and, as they get drunker, blaming themselves and each other for various things including their mother’s drug addiction. 


In preparation, we rehearsed on a dozen occasions. At the time, my friends and I typically went out to bars several times a week and drank “3.2 beer.” In Ohio, at that time, the only alcoholic beverage one could legally drink from age 18 to 21 was beer with no more than 3.2% alcohol. I had gotten a “buzz” a few times, but had never been drunk.

I had, however, seen people drunk in real life a few times and seen them many times on TV and in movies. I pretty much knew how to “act drunk.” So, each time we rehearsed the scene, as I drank more and more tea, I pretended to get drunker and drunker. Some say, “in vino veritas.” I don’t totally agree, but it is true that people will say nastier things to each other sometimes under the influence. Jamie, O’Neil’s play blamed his mother’s addiction on Jamie having been born and, given enough Irish Whiskey, he told him so in no uncertain terms. 

In our last dress rehearsal, for some reason, our director thought it would be a great idea if we ran through the scene three times using actual Irish Whiskey instead of weak tea. So, we did. As best I can recall, I had about a third of a bottle of wine before we began the rehearsal and each time through, I had a beer mug half filled with water and half with Irish Whiskey. It tasted pretty horrible, but I could down it. I simulated drunkenness pretty well, if I do say so myself. Each time I went through the scene, I would begin by acting “sober” and then gradually become drunker and drunker. Then, we would do the scene again. I still had a good memory, so I didn’t flub my lines. I don’t think the rest of the cast messed up either. Everything was fine. 

Until the rehearsal was over. 

During the rehearsal, I was repeating words and gestures that I had done many times. And in every rehearsal before this one, I had acted as though I was drunk even though I had been perfectly sober. Now that rehearsal was over and I found myself faced with the task of getting off the stage, remembering where my dorm was, and navigating myself home, I realized that I was not acting drunk. I was drunk. Very drunk. Walking was a problem.

While I had been rehearsing, I had attributed my behavior and the way I felt and my slurred speech to my superb acting. 

Attribution can be tricky. 

If feedback is delayed, trying to do the “right thing” can be completely counterproductive. You may attribute good outcomes to actions that are actually making things worse!! 

(Here’s a post on how that might apply to controlling a pandemic).  https://petersironwood.com/2020/04/29/essays-on-america-oops/

Dave Pelz has a Ph.D. in physics from MIT and is a former astronaut. More recently, he has become an expert in the “short game” part of golf. He applies his analytic and scientific skills to the game and has inventions to help the golfer make correct attributions; a foundation for improving your skill.

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Here’s how it works. Let’s say you line up to hit a putt (a short golf stroke) about ten feet from the hole. You strike the ball and it veers to a position about six inches left of the hole. It’s easy for you to see that you’ve ended up six inches left, but you probably have no idea why. Dave Pelz could tell you that you might have misread the slope; you might have misread the grain; you might have pulled the club a little left; you might have hit the ball slightly off center of the putter head causing it to twist ever so slightly and take energy away from the putt; you might, indeed, have done absolutely nothing wrong at all. Your ball might have hit a teeny unseen pebble or been blown off course by a puff of wind. Your golf ball might even possibly be a little off balance. 

Dave Pelz has invented various devices to help you disambiguate these (and other) potential sources of error. For example, if your ball ended up 6 inches left because you hit the golf ball slightly off the center of your putter, this would be extremely hard to notice. Dave Pelz has a device however, that you can put on your putter blade. It has “prongs” on both sides of the center line. If you hit the middle of the back of a golf ball with the exact center of your putter blade, the golf ball will go straight ahead as it normally would. However, if you’re off center ever so slightly, the ball will careen off at a strange angle. You’ll know immediately that you haven’t hit the center of the putter blade. 

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I’ve played many rounds of golf. I’ve never observed someone miss a putt and then say, “Oh, shoot! I hit the back of the ball, not with the exact center of my putter blade, but with a spot an eighth of an inch away from the center point. Damn!” 

In complex situations, it can be very tricky to discover attributions. And if you make the wrong attributions, you will almost certainly mis-frame the problem to be solved.

Framings exist at different levels. You might seek to improve your putting by discovering mistakes you make while putting and then correcting them. It helps if you have good feedback, whether from a coach or from mechanical devices or from your own nervous system. 

At a higher level, you might also need to reframe your expectations. You see, missing a ten foot putt by six inches is actually a pretty good result! Pro Tour Golfers make less than half of their ten foot putts. What you see on TV coverage of Pro Tour putts is mostly of pros making 10, 20, or 30 foot putts. But that is not, on average, what happens. 

Similarly, society is inundated with stories and images of people seeming to overcome impossible odds to become insanely successful. And quickly. At least, in the movies, it happens quickly, because otherwise, we would lose patience and not keep watching. Only, in real life, it doesn’t happen quickly. If you frame your “life problem” as: “How do I become a millionaire by age 25?” you may be setting yourself up for failure. 

A different framing might be: “What can I do that I love that also contributes to society so much that society will provide me the things I need.” 

Of course, some people may be born rich. In such cases, it is very easy to fall into the misapprehension that all your success is due to your hard work, judgement, intelligence, etc. when, basically, it’s mainly luck of the draw. 

Consider. However brilliant you might be, or physically gifted, how do you think your life would look right now if you had been born 100,000 years ago? You wouldn’t be reading these words on a computer, clearly. You wouldn’t be reading at all. Your surroundings, your clothing, your diet, your tools — these are much more determined by the circumstances you were born into than you likely imagine. 

It’s not crazy to focus on your own decisions. After all, no-one can determine the circumstances of their birth. You can change your decisions though. Usually, therefore, it makes sense to focus on your decisions, not on the circumstances of your birth. 

Usually. 

But not if you use the sheer luck of your birth circumstances to argue that you should have more than your fair share. Making your success out to be the results only of your personal perspiration and perspicacity is petty. 

Consider the gratitude you owe for what was granted. Your generosity grows correspondingly. 

It’s a good antidote for a hangover. You might even call it an antedote. 

Attributions are often made without your awareness. They can easily lead you astray. They can even lead you to becoming drunk without knowing it. You might be drunk on whiskey, as I was on that Long Day’s Journey, but people may also become drunk on power, money, or status.

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An essay on mindfulness and gratitude: Corn on the Cob

https://petersironwood.com/2020/04/05/imagine-all-the-people/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/07/13/who-are-the-speakers-for-the-dead/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/08/17/roar-ocean-roar/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/12/14/how-the-nightingale-learned-to-sing/

https://petersironwood.com/2020/02/29/the-lost-sapphire/

Author Page on Amazon

The Slow-Seeming Snapping Turtle

01 Monday Feb 2021

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

affordance, deception, Primacy Effect, problem formulation, problem framing, problem solving, psychology, thinking

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The Slow-Seeming Snapping Turtle

(Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover Story)

One find summer day, driving down the long curved driveway of IBM Research in Yorktown, I noticed a manhole-sized snapping turtle in the middle of the driveway. I pulled the car over. I didn’t want someone running into the reptile, looking as he did, such a splendid living fossil. 

Naturally, I knew snapping turtles could be dangerous, though as I watched him plod ever so slowly down the road, I felt no threat. Surely, my mammalian reflexes were far superior to this reptilian beast. But, in a seeming excess of caution, I made no attempt to touch him with my bare hands. Instead, I found a thigh-sized dead tree branch that seemed suitable for pushing him off the road and thus to safety. 

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I pushed hard on one side of his carapace. At first, he just kept plodding ahead, but my superior strength overcame his squat stubborn frame and he gradually angled toward the berm. Then, an unbelievable thing happened. In a split second, the viscous snapped to vicious. His head shot out a good foot from his shell and whipped around to the side, still managing his neck-lengthening trick. He chomped down and completely through the tree limb before I even had a chance to be startled. 

Our first impression of a situation can often lead us to dangerously erroneous actions. 

Here’s another example. 

As most Americans now know, there are 435 people in the House of Representatives. What is the probability that at least two in the House of Representatives share a birthday?

This is actually an exceedingly easy problem to solve. 

Unless…

Unless, you are familiar with a similar-looking problem called “The Birthday Problem” which may be stated something like this:

You are starting a new class of thirty people. What are chances that at least two of them share a birthday? 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

It turns out that at least two people will share a birthday in a room with 30 random people over 70% of the time. The “break-even” point where the chances that at least will share a birthday is 23 people. It’s a bit counter-intuitive. But the math is sound. 

So, if you have heard of “The Birthday Problem” before, and heard the question about The House of Representatives, you’d be likely to say something like: “Oh, that’s the birthday problem and it turns out you don’t need many people for their to be a likely double birthday. So, with 435, it must be very hight. Perhaps 99% or even 99.9%”

With 435 people in The House of Representatives, you don’t need to “calculate” any probabilities at all. You cannot arrange any way for more than 365 people to “fit into” 365 days without starting to overlap. 

Beware of approaching problems (or snapping turtles) based on their eternal appearance. It might or might not be a good clue to its actual behavior. 

In the Pattern Language for Collaboration, one is based on this called “Context-Setting Entrance.” Because we are prone to pay attention to the entrance, then if we design one, we should let that entrance set appropriate expectations. 

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Author Page on Amazon 

The Winning Weekend Warrior focuses on the mental game for all sports.
http://tinyurl.com/ng2heq3

Turing’s Nightmares explores the possible futures of how people communicate with computers and each others. http://tinyurl.com/hz6dg2d

Fit in Bits describes many ways to work more exercise into daily activities. http://tinyurl.com/h6c7fce

Tales from an American Childhood recounts early experiences and relates them to contemporary issues and events. https://tinyurl.com/y9ajvz9j

Beware of Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing

Measure for Measure

28 Thursday Jan 2021

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

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Tags

context, decision making, framing, HCI, problem formulation, problem framing, problem solving, thinking, UX

(More or Less is only More or Less, More or Less)

Confusing. I know. Let’s unpack. 

We like to measure things. And, generally, that can be a very good thing. Once we measure and quantify, we can bring to bear the world’s most incredible toolbox of mathematical, engineering, and scientific methods. However…

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It often happens that we can’t really measure what we’d like to measure so instead we measure something that we can measure which we imagine to be a close cousin to what we’d really like to measure. That’s still not a bad thing. But it’s risky. And it becomes a lot more risky if we forget that we are measuring a close cousin at best. Sometimes, it’s actually a distant cousin. 

Here’s an example. Suppose a company is interested in the efficient handling of customer service calls (who isn’t?). A typical measure is the average time per call. So, a company might be tempted to reward their Customer Service employees based on having a short average time per call. The result would be that the customer would get back to whatever they were doing more quickly. AND — they wouldn’t have to be on hold in the service queue so long because each call would be handled, on average, more quickly. Good for the customer. The customer service reps would be saving money for the company by answering questions quickly. Some of the money saved will (hopefully) mean raises for the customer service reps. It’s a win/win/win! 

Or is it? 

Imagine this not unlikely scenario:

The managers of the CSR’s (customer service reps) say that there’s a big push from higher management to make calls go more quickly. They may hint that if the average service time goes down enough, everyone will get a raise. Or, they might set much more specific targets to shoot for. 

In either case, the CSR’s are motivated to handle calls more quickly. But how? One way might be for them to learn a whole lot more. They might exchange stories among themselves and perhaps they will participate in designing a system to help them find relevant information more quickly. It might really turn out to be a win/win/win.

On the other hand, one can also imagine that the CSR’s instead simply get rid of “pesky” users as quickly as possible.



“Reboot and call back if that doesn’t work.” 

“Sounds like an Internet issue. Check your router.” 

“That’s an uncovered item.” 

“What’s your account number? Don’t have it? Find it & call back.” 

With answers like this, the average time to handle a call will certainly go down!

But it won’t result in a win/win/win!

Users will have to call back 2, 3, 4 or even more times to get their issues adequately resolved. This will glut the hold queues more than if they had had their question answered properly in the first place. Endlessly alternating between raspy music and a message re-assuring the customer that their call is important to company XYZ, will not endear XYZ’s customers to XYZ.

Ultimately, the CSR’s themselves will likely suffer a drop in morale if they begin to view their “job” to get off the phone as quickly as possible rather than being to be as helpful as possible. Likely too, sales will begin to decline. As word gets around that the XYZ company has lousy customer service and comparative reviews amplify this effect, sales will decline even more precipitously. 

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There are two approaches executives often take in such a situation. 

Some executives (such as Mister Empathy) may be led to believe that quantification should be less emphasized and the important thing is to set the right tone for the CSR’s; to have them really care about their customers. Often, the approach is combined with better training. This can be a good approach.

Some executives (such as Mister Measure) may be led to believe that they need to do more quantification. In addition to average work time, measures will look at the percentage of users whose problem is solved the first time. Ratings of how effective the CSR was will be taken. Some users might even be called for in-depth interviews about their experience.  This can also be a good approach. 

There is no law against doing both, or trying each approach at different times or different places in order to learn which works better. 

There is a third approach however, which never has good results. That is the approach of Mister Misdirect.

Original drawing by Pierce Morgan



Mister Misdirect’s approach is to deny that there is an issue. Mister Misdirect doesn’t improve training. Mister Misdirect doesn’t put people in a better frame of mind. Mister Misdirect does not add additional measures. Mister Misdirect simply demands that CSR’s continue to drive down the average call time of individual calls and that sales go up! In extreme cases, Mister Misdirect may even fudge the numbers and make it appear that things are much better than they really are. Oh, yes. I have seen this with my own eyes. 

Unfortunately, this way of handling things often makes Mister Misdirect an addict. Once an executive starts down the path of making things worse and denying that they did so, they are easily ensnared in a trap. Initially, they only had to take responsibility for instituting, say an incomplete measure and failed to anticipate the possible consequences. But now, having lied about it, they would have to not only admit that they caused a problem, but also that they lied about it.

The next day, when executive wakes up, they have a choice: 


1. Own up 


OR

2. Continue to deny

If they own up, the consequences will be immediately painful.
If they continue to deny, they will immediately feel relieved. Of course, if they have surrounded themselves with lackeys, they will feel more than simply relieved; they will feel vindicated or even proud. It’s not a “real pride” of course. But it’s some distant relative, I suppose. 

For a developer, UX person — or really any worker in an organization, the lesson from this is to anticipate such situations before they happen. If they happen anyway, try to call attention to the situation as quickly as possible. Yes, it may mean you  lose favor with the boss. If that is so, then, you really might want to think about getting a new boss. Mister Misdirect will always ultimately fail and when he does, he will drag down a work team, a group, a division, or even an entire company. Mister Misdirect has one and only one framework for solving problems:

Try whatever pops into consciousness. 

If it works, take the credit. 

If it fails, blame an underling. 

But the real fun begins when he takes credit for something and then it turns out it was really a failure. Then, there is only one choice for Mister Misdirect and that is to claim that the false victory was real. From there on, it is Lose/Lose/Lose.

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Author Page on Amazon

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Relevant essays, poems, & fiction about the importance of speaking truth to power:

Pattern Language: “Reality Check”

The Truth Train 

The Pandemic Anti-Academic

How The Nightingale Learned to Sing

Process Re-Engineering Comes to Baseball

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Posts on Problem Framing:

How to Frame Your Own Hamster Wheel

Wordless Perfection

Problem Formulation: Who Knows What?

I Went in Seeking Clarity

I Say Hello

Problem Framing: Good Point

Reframing the Problem: Paperwork & Working Paper

The Doorbell’s Ringing! Can you Get it?

How to Frame Your Own Hamster Wheel

22 Friday Jan 2021

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

decision making, problem formulation, problem framing, problem solving

Graduate school at the University of Michigan (in Ann Arbor, Michigan) provided me with a rich, rewarding experience. I was in a program aimed at understanding more about how human beings perceive, decide, learn, and solve problems. I loved it! I still love thinking about those issues. Part of my joy sprang from interacting with my classmates and sharing experiences with them. I thought I would pass along one of the experiences that a classmate told me about. It might prove valuable to you as well. 

My classmate ran an experiment and one of his subjects ran out of the room screaming that they couldn’t take it any more. My classmate was horrified that he had caused such stress and completely mystified that he had done so. He felt terrible. He calmed the subject down and eventually discovered what had happened. 

In many psychology experiments, one of the things we look at is how long it takes for a person to make a decision. The longer it takes to make a decision, roughly speaking, the more difficult the task and the more thought that it takes to reach a decision. If you were a subject in a psych experiment circa 1970, you might well be part of an experiment to study the “Sternberg Search Task” named after Saul Sternberg (link below). The point is to understand more about people’s “working memory.” This is a facility that comes into play nearly constantly for us in daily life.

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For example, your dinner server knows that they are out of four of the items on the menu right now. Rather than tell you all that up-front, they take orders and many times, no-one asks for the items they’re out of. But every time people order she has to compare what people order to this list in her head and let them know. Either that or they will go back to the kitchen and put in an order that can’t be fulfilled. They would then have to go back and tell them. Time is money in the restaurant business and particularly so for the server, who often relies on tips.

Here’s how it would be for you to be a subject in one of these tasks. You’d be presented for a few seconds with a set of letters such as: {A J D H C Z}. The letters would disappear and then, a few seconds later, a single letter would appear; e.g., “Q” and you would press the left lever as quickly as you could if the letter was not in the list and press the right lever if it had been in the list. After a few seconds, you’d be presented with another set such as {X I U W B M} for a few seconds and then, a single letter would appear and you’d be once again asked to decide whether the letter “W” for instance, had been in the list. 

Ah, but how many variations on that general theme can you create? Does it matter how large the set is? (yes) How much? (a lot) Do people of different ages do differently on this? (they do) How much does it degrade your performance to be doing something else? (depends what it is). So, that was the game for us.

Usually, if you were a “subject” in such an experiment, you would do this task for 30-60 minutes. It would be tedious and a little mentally taxing, but not so mind-wrenching as trying to learn an insane foreign language such as English (for non-native speakers). (Actually, it’s pretty damned hard even for native speakers, but we don’t like to let on). Nor, would it be like trigonometry is to some; nor trying to “analyze” a poem is for others; nor like trying to sing a tune on key is for some of us. I have been a subject many times in such experiments and this one is not over-taxing. It’s perhaps the level of “stress” that solving a moderate crossword puzzle would generate. 

So, I could understand my classmate’s shock. Wouldn’t you be if you handed someone a cross-word puzzle and a few moments later, they ran screaming from the room?

Here’s what happened. Usually, these studies are experimenter-paced. That means, that whatever happens is controlled by a preset schedule. In this study, for instance, a new set of letters might appear every 20 seconds. You would look at the set of letters and it would disappear after 5 seconds. Perhaps you’d look at a blank screen for 5 seconds and then the single letter would appear. You’d have up to five seconds to make your decision and get ready for the next set of letters to appear. 

My classmate, however, decided to be “nicer” so he made the experiment self-paced. The subjects could take as long as they liked to start the next trial. When they were ready, they could press both levers at once and the next set would appear. That certainly doesn’t sound stressful.

How did the subject interpret this situation? They thought that they had to press both levers before the next set appeared. And, from their perspective, every time, they reacted just a little faster. But it didn’t help! They tried to go faster and faster, but no matter how fast they went, the next set appeared immediately after they pressed the levers. Although the “subject” was actually in complete control, they perceived it as though they had zero control. 

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The way you frame a situation may be quite different from the way others frame the situation. It’s no wonder that people may try to solve a problem differently based on their own experience and interests. It’s even more fundamental when people are not even trying to solve the same problem. A problem framed as differently as the Experimenter and the Subject framed the situation in the above scenario is really a completely different problem. In this case, the problem that the experimenter had set for the subject was an easy one: “Decide when you feel like doing another one of these little puzzles and I shall give you one.”

Meanwhile, the problem that the subject was trying to solve was this: “How do I keep speeding up so that I can always press the two levers before the next puzzle comes up?!?!” 

That second problem is a stressful one. 

But it only exists because of the way the Subject framed the problem.

Have you ever framed a problem “into existence?”

I think that it’s not uncommon for “Madison Avenue” (synecdoche for American Advertising Industry) to do just that. Unlike my classmate, Madison Avenue is intentionally framing a problem for their clients. 

“Do you suffer from straight elbow wrinkle? Millions of Americans suffer from straight elbow wrinkles without even knowing! Check right now. It may save you millions! Go to a mirror and straighten your arm. Is your elbow skin nice and tight? Or is it filled with unsightly wrinkles? Don’t be embarrassed! Millions of your fellow Americans also suffer. Now, you need suffer no longer! By use of this ointment, one shilling the box, your elbow skin will stay fit, taught, and youthful looking!” 

Photo by Marlon Schmeiski on Pexels.com

Is this a real problem? It may become one for anyone who succumbs to the advertising pitch above. The company promoting “Elbow Cream” had a problem: “How do we make more money even though we have no decent products that solve real problems?” They transfigured their problem into one for their customers. Some would say this is just business as usual. And, if the Elbow Cream has horrendous side-effects, that’s no big deal so long as you sputter out those side-effects quickly & unintelligibly on your TV commercials against a background of music, dancing, and flowers. 

Photo by Jackson David on Pexels.com

Maybe it’s business as usual. 

There is an alternative though. The “Elbow Cream” company could have instead sought to understand some real problem, figured out how to solve it and then marketed that solution. To me, the difference between the two, in terms of ethics is huge. 

What do you think? 

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Sternberg

https://www.tutor2u.net/psychology/reference/research-methods-key-term-glossary

https://petersironwood.com/2017/10/02/you-know/

https://petersironwood.com/2017/02/25/the-invisibility-cloak-of-habit/

There’s a Pill for That!There’s a Pill for That!

https://petersironwood.com/2017/03/24/the-great-race-to-the-finish/

Author Page on Amazon

Wordless Perfection

20 Wednesday Jan 2021

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

art, drawing, education, intuition, problem formulation, Representation, Right-brain, thinking

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Sirius Black

I like to write. In fact, I like to write so much that I wrote before I could even read. When my early crayon “writings” in my grandfather’s books were discovered, instead of praise, I was spanked. I’m not even sure they really tried hard to read my learned annotations. Their missing the point didn’t deter me though. I like words! I like writing poetry, essays, stories, plays, and even novels. Words help human beings communicate and collaborate. However…

In this essay, I’d like to mention some instances of wordless success.

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In the neighborhood where I grew up, we spent most of the summer playing baseball, basketball, and football. I had never played golf nor paid much attention to it as a kid and when it came on TV I walked by with hardly a glance. At that point in my life, it was really only a sport if there was a good chance to smash into one of the other players. I had never touched a golf club or a golf ball until one summer day when I was about ten, one of the kids brought one of his uncle’s golf clubs to our baseball field along with a tee and a golf ball. He demonstrated how to hit the ball and showed us how to put our hands on the club. Kids took turns hitting the ball and retrieving it for another go. 

When it came to my turn, I mainly remember just loving the shiny wood of the club. I loved wooden baseball bats back then, but the driver!! Wow! That was in a whole different category of cool. You didn’t need to be an adult or a golfer to know that! It shone opalesquely. I teed up the golf ball, and swung the unfamiliar and impossibly long club.

The resulting sound – exquisite! An explosion! A rifle shot. A cousin of the crack of a home run shot into the upper deck. But more penetrating. More elegant. More poignant.

We all looked up in amazement. My golf shot started low and straight. Then it rose and rose and disappeared far beyond the dirt road that marked the outer limit of our makeshift baseball field. It rose over the hill beyond the road and disappeared into the field beyond. There was no hope of retrieving the golfball. None of us even suggested trying. My shot was wordless perfection. 



Fast forward to graduate school. In the summer afternoons, I got into the habit of playing frisbee with the neighbors. One day, I parked my car and ran into the back yard. My neighbor saw me and threw me the frisbee, I noticed that they had placed an empty beer can atop a utility box about a hundred feet away. I caught the frisbee on the run and threw it with the next step. The frisbee sailed with a nice arc and smacked the beer can right off. My neighbors said that they had been trying to knock that beer can off for about a half hour.  My throw was wordless perfection.

Photo by Brixiv on Pexels.com

Meanwhile, at the University of Michigan, several of my friends and classmates like puzzles as much as I did. One such puzzle consisted of a set of triangular “board” with a regular pattern of holes. There were pegs in every hole save one. The goal was to “jump” pegs much as one does in checkers and then remove that peg from the board. Eventually, one was supposed to end up with one and only one peg. I worked on it for awhile and thought about various strategies and moves. I couldn’t seem to solve it. My phone rang. I picked it up and conversed with my friend. Meanwhile, I toyed with the puzzle while my “mind” was on the conversation. I toyed with the puzzle and solved it. Wordless perfection.

A few months or weeks later, we worked on another puzzle. This one consisted of four cubes (aka
“instant insanity”). Each cube had a different arrangement of colors. The goal was to arrange the cubes so that every “row” of faces had four different colors. I fiddled with the puzzle trying out various strategies and noting various symmetries and asymmetries. Once again, someone called and interrupted my musings. Again, I idly fiddled around with the cubes while talking on the phone. And solved it. Wordless perfection strikes again! 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_Insanity

Fast forward four decades. For best results, borrow Hermione’s time-turner. Otherwise, you’ll have to rely on your imagination. 

Betty Edwards (“Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain”) gave a plenary address at one of the Association of Computing Machinery’s premier conferences: CHI. Among other things, she showed example after example of how much people improved in their drawing skills based on her methods. A few months later, it so happened that my wife and I had an opportunity to go to one of her five day classes. 

I would have to honestly say, that course was one of the best educational experiences of my life! It was an immensely pleasurable experience in and of itself. Beyond that, the results in terms of improved drawing skills were dramatic. And, as if that were not enough, I looked at the world differently. I noticed visual things about the environment that I had not seen before. 

The essence of the method Betty Edwards uses is to get you to observe and draw — while “shutting up” or “turning off” the part of your brain (or mind) that talks and plans and categorizes. In one exercise, for instance, we took a line drawing and turned it upside down. Then, we copied that image onto our pad of paper by carefully observing and drawing what we saw. She also instructed us not to try to “guess” what they were drawing, but just to copy the line. When every line had been copied, we turned the drawings right side up again. The result jolted me! I had created an excellent likeness of the original! The quality stunned me. Wordless Perfection.

There’s a larger lesson here, too. 

I had within me, the capacity to make a very decent copy of a drawing, but had never achieved that result for 60 years! All it took was five minutes of instruction to enable me to achieve that. 

What else is like that? Imagine that we have, not just one, but a dozen or even a dozen dozen “hidden talents.” Some of them, like drawing, may depend more on Not-Doing than on Doing; on Being rather than Achieving.

There was a longer lasting side-effect of the drawing course. My day to day life, as is typical of most achievement-driven people had been very much “goal-driven” and there was always an ongoing plan and dialogue. After having learned to turn that off in order to draw, I can also turn it off in order to see, whether or not I draw. Seeing (or otherwise sensing or feeling) in the moment also makes me much less judgmental. If you decide to think about the physical appearance of people in terms of how interesting they would be to draw, you end up with an entirely different way of thinking about people’s appearance. 

What are your hidden talents? 

——————————————

The Invisibility Cloak of Habit 

Big Zig-Zag Canyon 

The Great Race to the Finish!

You Fool!

Horizons University

How the Nightingale Learned to Sing

Comes the Dawn

Author Page on Amazon

Problem Formulation: Who Knows What?

18 Monday Jan 2021

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

browser, HCI, problem formulation, problem framing, problem solving, query, search, thinking, usability, UX

Photo by Nikolay Ivanov on Pexels.com

This post focuses on the importance of discovering who knows what. It’s easy to think (without thinking!) that everyone knows what you know. 

At IBM Research, around the turn of the century, I was asked to look at improving customer satisfaction about the search function on IBM’s website. Rather than using someone else’s search engine, IBM used one developed at IBM’s Haifa Research lab. It was a very good search engine. Yet, customers were not happy. By way of background, it’s worth noting that compared with many companies who have websites, IBM’s website was meant for a wide variety of users and contained many kinds of information. It was meant to support people buying their first Personal Computer and IT experts at large banks. It had information about a wide variety of hardware, software, and services. The site was designed to serve as an attractor for investors, business partners, and potential employees. In other words, the site was vast and diverse. This made having a good search function particularly important.  

A little study of the existing data which had been collected showed that the mean number of search terms entered by customers was only 1.2. What?? How can that be? Here’s a website with thousands of products and services and designed for use by a huge diversity of users and they were only entering a mean of 1.2 search terms? What were they thinking?!



Of course, there were a handful of situations when one search term might work; e.g., if you wanted to find out everything about a specific product that had a unique one-word name (which was rare) or acronym. For most situations though, a more “reasonable” search might be something like: “Open positions IBM Research Austin” or “PC external hard drives” or “LOTUS NOTES training.” 

We had users of IBM products & services come into the lab and do some tasks that we designed to illuminate this issue. In the task, they would need to find specified information on the IBM website while I observed them. One issue became immediately apparent. The search bar on the landing page was far too small. In actuality, users could enter as many search terms as they liked. Their terms would keep scrolling and scrolling until they hit “ENTER.” The developers knew this, but most of our users did not. They assumed they had to “fit” their query into the very small footprint that presented itself visually. Recommendation one was simply to make that space much larger. Once the search bar was expanded to about three times its original size, the number of search terms increased dramatically, as did user satisfaction. 

In this case, the users framed their search problem in terms of: “How can I make the best query that fits into this tiny box.” (I’m not suggesting they said this to themselves consciously, but the visual affordance led them to that constraint). The developers thought the users would frame their search problem in terms of: “What’s the best sequence of terms I can put into this virtually infinite window to get the search results I want.” After all, the developers knew that any number of terms could be entered. 

Although increasing the size of the search bar made a big difference, the supposedly good search engine still returned many amazingly bad results. Why? The people at the Haifa lab who had developed the search engine were world class. At some point, I looked at the HTML of some of the web pages. Many web pages had masses of irrelevant metadata! I found some of the people who developed these web pages and discussed things with them. Can you guess what was going on?



Many of the developers of web pages were the same people who had been developing print media for those same products and services. They had no training and no idea about metadata. So, to put up the webpage about product XYZ, they would go to a nice-looking web page about something else, say, training opportunities for ABC. They would copy that entire page, including the metadata, and then set about changing the text about ABC to text about product XYZ. In many cases, they assumed that the strange stuff in angle brackets was some bizarre coding stuff that was necessary for the page to operate properly. They left it untouched. Furthermore, when they “tested” the pages they had created about XYZ, they looked okay. The information about XYZ was there. Problem solved.

Only of course, the problem wasn’t solved. The search engine considered the metadata that described the contents to be even more important than the contents themselves. So, the user would issue a query about XYZ and receive links about ABC because the XYZ page still had the “invisible” metadata about ABC. In this case, many of the website developers thought their problem was to put in good data when what they really needed to do was put in good data and relevant metadata. 

A third issue also revealed itself from watching users. In attempting to do their tasks, many of them suggested that IBM should provide a way for more than one webpage to appear side by side on the screen so that they could, for instance, compare features and functions of two different product models rather than having to copy the information from the web page about a particular model and then compare their notes to the second page. 

Good suggestion. 

Of course, IBM & Microsoft had provided this function. All one had to do was “Right Click” in order to bring up a new window. Remember, these were not naive users. These were people who actually used IBM products. They “knew” how to use the PC and the main applications. Yet, they were still unfamiliar with the use of Right Click. Indeed, allowing on-screen comparisons is one of the handiest uses of Right-Click for many people. 

This issue is indicative of a very pervasive problem. Ironically, it is an outgrowth of good usability! When I began working with computers, almost nothing was intuitive. No-one would even attempt to start programming in FORTRAN or SNOBOL, let alone Assembly Language or Machine Code without look at the manual. But LOTUS NOTES? A browser? A modern text editor? You can use these without even looking at the manual. That’s a great thing. But — 

…there’s a downside. The downside is that you may have developed procedures that work, but they may be extremely inefficient. You “muddle through” without ever realizing that there’s a much more efficient way to do things. Generally speaking, many users formulate their problem, say, in terms like: “How do I create and edit a document in this editor?” They do not formulate it in terms of: “How do I efficiently create and edit a document in this editor?” The developers know all the splendid features and functions they’ve put into the hardware and software, but the user doesn’t. 

It’s also worth noting that results in HCI/UX are dependent on the context. I would tend to assume that in 2021, most PC users now know about right-clicking in a browser even though in 2000, none of the ones I studied seemed to realize it. But —

I could be wrong. 

————————————

The Invisibility Cloak of Habit

Essays on America: Wednesday

Index to a catalog of “best practices” in teamwork & collaboration. 

Author Page on Amazon

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