Why do you suppose there is a right to free speech in the US Constitution?
What so you see as the benefits of free speech?
Is it OK to scream “FIRE!” At the top of your lungs in a crowded theater when you know there is no fire?
Why do we need a license to own a car? Why do we have to prove that we know both the rules of the road and how to drive?
Why does almost everyone drive on the “correct” side of the road almost all of the time? Sure, it saves many lives and crippling accidents, but doesn’t it impinge on our freedom of expression?
Is there a distinction between freedom of expression and freedom of action?
Do you think people should be free to do whatever they want whenever they want regardless of how much it hurts others?
When is it okay for government to restrict personal choices?
Who exactly would benefit from a Civil War in America?
If there were a Civil War in America and the “north” won again, how should they treat those in the “south”?
If dictatorships are such a wonderful form of government, why do so many people risk their lives in order to leave them? And, again, if they’re so wonderful, why do they try to prevent their citizens from leaving? Why do they suppress criticism?
If a person says, “I am not a crook!” Does that prove he’s not a crook? How about if he screams it really, really loudly?
When is it better to keep being conned by a con man and when is it better to admit you were conned?
Some of the media lean left and some of the media lean right.
But nearly all the media lean toward the reporting of division and violence over the reporting of unity and peace. It’s understandable. We attend far more to things that make us afraid or angry than things that just seem pleasant. That means the advertisers who largely fund the media will push networks and newspapers and magazines to carry stories about division and violence. Is there anything that can be done? How much would you be willing to pay for news sources that were only funded by subscription and not by advertisers?
At the end of the Harry Potter movies, when the major source of evil, Voldemort, is vanquished and Harry himself has the most powerful wand, what do you suppose he does with it? Why?
What would you be willing to change in your own life if it would mean your great-grandchildren would likely have a much cleaner, safer, and more beautiful world than if you change nothing? Would you be willing to pay higher taxes? Change your habits? Travel less? Elect politicians who care about the environment?
Most scientists agree that climate change is real, exacerbated by human activity and that there will be disastrous consequences. But some people say it is a giant hoax. How can you tell which is correct? Why do you suppose some people might be motivated to say it’s a hoax even though it isn’t?
Large International Corporations have a lot of power in determining policies in America (and in most other countries). They rely on and benefit from our roads, ports, broadband, educated workforce, electricity, police, fire departments. Many pay zero taxes. What they do pay is lots and lots of campaign dollars to politicians. Do you think this might influence politicians to do what’s best for those large corporations rather than what’s best for America as a whole? If not, what do you think prevents that from happening?
If the majority of people in a state vote for a candidate but the people’s choice is overturned by a partisan state legislature, what do you think that would do to the quality and ethics of the candidates in office? How do you think the majority will react?
Who would benefit from a Civil War in America?
What do you think would happen to a baseball game in which one side consistently refused to abide by the umpires call?
What do you think would happen to a basketball game in which one side consistently refused to admit that the opposing team had scored?
How could a dictatorial head of state benefit by instituting policies that would actually increase the number of citizens who sickened and died from a deadly pandemic?
How do you decide when it is the right time to break the Elder Wand?
In December, 2018, I began writing a series of essays on “tools of thought.” I realize that many readers probably read these tools at the time they were first published. However, in times of great division such as those we now face, effective thinking is more important than ever yet every day in the news and in social media, I see many examples that overlook even the most basic tools of thought. I therefore decided that it would be worthwhile to reprint the index of such tools now.
I suppose many readers will already be familiar with many of these tools. Nonetheless, I think it’s worthwhile to have a compilation of tools. After all — plumbers, carpenters, programmers, piano tuners, sales people — they all have tool kits. I see at least three advantages to having them together in some one place.
Without a toolkit you may be prone to try to use the tool that just so happens to be nearest to hand at the time you encounter the problem. You need to tighten a screw and you happen to have a penny in your pocket. You don’t feel like walking all the way down into the garage to get your toolkit. A penny will do. I get it. But for more serious work, you are going to want to consider the whole toolkit and choose the tool that’s most appropriate to the situation at hand.
First, the existence of a toolkit serves as a reminder of all the tools at your disposal. This will help you choose appropriately.
Second, you may only be familiar with one or two ways to use a tool. I may have thought of ways to use a tool that are different from the way you use it. In the same way, you undoubtedly know useful things about these tools of thought that I have never thought of. We can learn from each other.
Third, having all the tools together may stimulate people to invent new tools or see a way to use two or more in sequence and begin to think about the handoff between two tools.
Here’s an index to the toolkit so far.
Many Paths(December 5, 2018). The temptation is great to jump to a conclusion, snap up the first shiny object that looks like bait and charge ahead! After all, “he who hesitates is lost!” But there is also, “look before you leap.” What works best for me in many circumstances is to think of many possible paths before deciding on one. This is a cousin to the Pattern: Iroquois Rule of Six. This heuristic is a little broader and is sometimes called “Alternatives Thinking.”
And then what?(Dec. 6, 2018). This is sometimes called “Consequential Thinking.” The idea is simple: think not just about how you’ll feel and how a decision will affect you this moment but what will happen next. How will others react? It’s pretty easy to break laws if you set your mind to it. But what are the likely consequences?
Positive Feedback Loops(December 7, 2018). Also known as a virtuous or vicious circle. If you drink too much of a depressant drug (e.g., alcohol or opioids), that can cause increased nervousness and anxiety which leads you to want more of the drug. Unfortunately, it also makes your body more tolerant of the drug so you need more to feel the same relief. So, you take more but this makes you even more irritable when it wears off.
Meta-Cognition.(December 8, 2018). This is basically thinking about thinking. For example, if you are especially good at math, then you tend to do well in math! Over time, if your meta-cognition is accurate, you will know that you are good in math and you can use that information about your own cognition to make decisions about the education you choose, your job, your methods of representing and solving problems and so on.
Theory of Mind(December 9, 2018). Theory of Mind tasks require us to imagine the state of another mind. It is slightly different from empathy, but a close cousin. Good mystery writers – and good generals – may be particularly skilled at knowing what someone else knows, infers, thinks, feels and therefore, how they are likely to act.
Regression to the Mean(December 10, 2018). This refers to a statistical artifact that you sometimes need to watch out for. If you choose to work with the “best” or “worst” or “strongest” or “weakest” and then measure them again later, their extreme scores will be less extreme. The tool is to make sure that you don’t make untoward inferences from that change in the results of the measurement.
Representation(December 11, 2018): The way we represent a problem can make a huge difference in how easy it is to solve it. Of course, we all know this, and yet, it is easy to fall into the potential trap of always using the same representations for the same types of problems. Sometimes, another representation can lead you to completely different – and better – solutions.
Imagination (December 14, 2018): All children show imagination. Many adults mainly see it as a tool for increasing their misery; viz., by only imagining the worst. Instead of a tool to help them explore, it becomes a “tool” to keep themselves from exploring by making everything outside the habitual path look scary.
Fraught Framing (December 16, 2018): Often, how we frame a problem is the most crucial step in solving it. In this essay, several cases are examined in which people presume a zero-sum game when it certainly need not be.
Fraught Framing II(December 17, 2018). A continuation of thinking about framing. This essay focuses on how easy it sometimes is to confuse the current state of something with its unalterable essence or nature.
Negative Space(December 17, 2018). Negative space is the space between. Often we separate a situation into foreground and background, or into objects and field, or into assumptions and solution space. What if we reverse these designations?
Problem Finding(December 18, 2018). Most often in our education, we are handed problems and told to solve them. In real life, success is as much about being able to find problems or see problems in order to realize that there is even something to fix.
More recently, I wrote a series of posts about the importance of Problem Finding, Problem Framing, and Problem Formulation. I haven’t yet put this in the form of “Tools of Thought” — these posts are specific experiences from my own life where I initially mis-formulated a problem or watched my friends do that.
Non-Linearity. (December 20, 2018). We often think that things are linear when they may not be. In some cases, they can be severely non-linear. Increasing the force on a joint may actually make it stronger. But if increased force is added too quickly, rather than strengthening the joint even further, it can destroy it. The same is true of a system like American democracy.
Resonance. (December 20, 2018). If you add your effort to something at the right time, you are able to multiply the impact of your effort. This is true in sports, in music, and in social change.
Symmetry(December 23, 2018). There are many kinds of symmetry and symmetry is found in many places; it is rampant in nature, but humans in all different cultures also use symmetry. It exists at macro scales and micro scales. It exists in physical reality and in social relationships.
Everyone seems about to go for the throat. Many people are not sure whom to trust. Should they trust doctors who spend years and years learning about calculus, chemistry, biology and then more years in Medical school learning about anatomy, physiology, and medicine and then more years as an intern and resident? Or, instead, maybe how about believing a yelling, screaming talk show host? Hard to tell? Maybe no-one ever taught us how to tell liars from truth tellers. There is no simple formula that will guarantee us to be 100% accurate, but maybe we can think together about it.
——————-
(Processed photo from one I took on Maui.)
Sam sit alone at the local sandwich shop, and began contemplating whether to have dessert after his nice lunch. It was a club sandwich, already a lot of calories, but what the hell, he thinks. With what the doctor said this morning, I should be free to eat anything I want,
Three older guys — strangers — come in and waddle up to a table next to Sam’s. The trio have their menus but before glancing at them, they look up at a nearby TV and raise their fists. There’s a roar because someone has just run back a kickoff for a touchdown.
Andy says, “Wow! What a run back. I played in high school. Not easy running back a kickoff all the way into the end zone.”
Sam regards the threesome. It’s hard for him to believe any of them were ever fit enough to play football, but most people do gain weight with age and lack of exercise, so — he could be telling the truth.
Bob says, “I played in high school and college. I was good. Blew my knee out as a sophomore though and lost my scholarship.” This too seems plausible to eavesdropping Sam.
Cal says, “I played in high school, college, and went pro. I was fantastic. Probably the best runner and wide receiver and quarterback in the history of Ohio State. I played free safety too. Had more tackles than anyone before or since. If I were playing quarterback, no way that guy would have scored. I was the top draft pick five years running. A lot of quarterbacks these days are too chicken to tackle anyone. I would have nailed him. I was breaking all the records for the Houston Texans! But I got bored. Football’s really a simple game.”
Sam thinks that Cal is bragging way too much. His story is a priori unlikely. Regardless of what he says or how he says it, the chances that a random person is the best anything at Ohio State is highly unlikely. He played back, wide receiver, quarterback and free safety? That’s unlikely. Extremely unlikely.
Sam frowns and shakes his head. What does it mean to be the “top draft pick” for five years? If that were true, it would lead naturally to an explanation but none was provided. Further, quarterbacks may be told not to risk their careers making a tackle on a punt return. But what quarterback is on the field to defend a kickoff return?
Houston Texans? Their first season was 2002. This guy looks to be at least 65. So…he was playing all those positions when he was 45? That seems highly unlikely. Got bored playing football? Possible, but again seems very highly unlikely. Football’s a really simple game? Really?
Cal’s story has a lot of holes in it. Now Sam laughs that he ever swallowed any of it.
Bob says, “You played for the Houston Texans? You mean the Oilers?”
Cal shoves his chair back hard enough to spill water on the table. He pushes on the arms of his chair and manages to stand up and he yells even louder, pounding the table to illustrate just how much he believes in what he’s saying. “I said Texans and I mean Texans! I was the best in the whole damned state of Texas! The whole south for that matter!”
Sam laughs to himself, thinking, Well, that settles it I guess. Cal is really passionate and loud so he must be telling the truth, right?
No.
Wrong.
People who are telling the truth do not feel the need to scream and yell and make even more outrageous claims the first time someone questions them.
Sam snorts at the ridiculous claims and then has an idea. It takes Sam 20 seconds to pull out his iPhone and look up Eli Manning, the first name that popped into his head.
Sam reasons: “If Cal were really the best football player in the history of Texas, he could have easily verified it by finding his own entry on the web (likely on Wikipedia) and shown his table mates the entry. He would not have had to scream and yell and pound the table.”
Sam thinks: Okay, but no-one’s going to fall for a con man like that.
{Really? Don’t be too sure, Sam}.
Cal says to the approaching and attractive server: “Hey, darling. You look yummier than anything on the menu. Do you know who I am? Do you know what I did before I became a billionaire? Go ahead guys. Tell this lucky sweetheart who’s going to be leaving someone a very big tip!”
Andy and Bob may think: Well, at least he’s going to leave the tip.
So, Andy and Bob outline Cal’s biography in the football hall of fame (where his name definitely does not appear should anyone actually look it up).
Andy and Bob feel pretty sheepish about joining in this pack of lies. But Cal doesn’t think they have been anywhere near lavish enough in their description of him. Cal says: “Oh, on, guys! Make this girl’s day! Tell her she’s had the pleasure of serving the greatest football player in the history of the game! I don’t say that. That’s what everyone says! Right, guys?”
Now Sam looks over and can see that Andy and Bob are both a bit embarrassed. They’ve gone along with Cal’s lies, but they don’t want to admit to that now because it makes them out to be liars too. So they go along with the bigger lie.
Andy says, “Yeah. Something else, right? He was OSU’s best player ever. Yep.”
Bob says, “Uh-huh.”
Cal shakes his head at Bob. “Come on! God, that’s the damndest weakest most candy-ass description I’ve ever heard, Bob. Tell her how many touchdowns I had. Just me. At OSU!”
Bob looks bewildered. He knows it’s all a lie. People all over the restaurant are starting to look over at the table and more than a few are looking admiringly at Cal.
Bob thinks to himself, Quite a few cute chicks here. Cal can’t handle all of them.” He feels inspired. He takes out his iPhone and says, “Damn. Battery’s about gone. Let me just … here … fifty touchdowns. My God! That is amazing!”
Cal rolls his eyes. “Give me that damned phone! That’s not right! It’s two hundred and fifty. Not fifty. Yep. There it is. I’m going to look up how many interceptions I had. Oh, crap! Battery dead. Hey guys, I gotta skedaddle. Here’s your crap cellphone back Bob.”
By now, Andy and Bob are both too embarrassed to come clean. Cal makes a big show out of taking out his wallet and thumbing a large pile of cash. He makes it look as though he’s leaving a big tip but actually only leaves a couple bucks. Andy and Bob split the entire bill.
Sam shakes his head slowly as he watches the three waltz out. Their server looks in awe of Cal and stares him out of the establishment. She even stares with some desire — despite the fact that Cal is grossly overweight and barely able to wobble his way out of the restaurant. But she imagines how once he must have been quite a specimen and it’s that image that is the real target of her desire.
She also looks forward to finding out just how giant of a tip he left her. A few moments later, she walks over to the “billionaire’s” table and before opening up the placard, tries to guess how much it is. Several of her colleagues have come over as well. She turns around and tells them to back off. “It’s my tip, thank you very much” she says. “Just remember, I’m the one who tried to convince you all to share tips but you wouldn’t have any of it.”
They back off, slightly miffed. Now, the young lady has made up her mind it will be at least a hundred dollars, but she dares to hope that maybe he did something crazy and left her a thousand!!
She notices her hands trembling as she opens up the placard and sees three bills.
She blinks. She sets her jaw. She’s not going to let her colleagues see her disappointment or that he stiffed her, especially after he felt her thigh. All the way up. She forces a gleeful tone into her voice and jams the outer corners of her lips up towards her ears. “Oh, boy!” She shouts with intended but pretended joy. “This will buy me a new iPhone!” As she said this, each successive word increased in loudness and pitch. She sounded a lot like someone desperately peddling costume jewelry on channel 666 at 4 am.
Her colleagues glance at each other. She fooled no-one. They all realize she got stiffed. Each is torn between comforting her, making fun or her, or just pretending along with her. For the sake of keeping a reasonably happy work environment, they all choose to go along with her.
Sam shakes his head and looks down at his melted coffee ice cream with hazelnuts. Now it’s just cold coffee with a lot of wet nuts.
And, then Sam realizes that that is the least tragic thing that happened here today. In the length of time it took his ice cream to melt, one liar became seven liars.
Same took a deep breath. This is what’s happening inside me, he realized.
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.
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.
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.
“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us!”
—- Robert Burns, To a Louse
————————————————————————
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.
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!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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…
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.
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.
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 wordlesssuccess.
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.
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!
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.
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 stopped by the bar at 3 A.M. To seek solace in a bottle or possibly a friend And I woke up with a headache like my head against a board Twice as cloudy as I’d been the night before And I went in seeking clarity” — Lyrics from The Indigo Girls: Closer to Fine
If you think programming is cognitively difficult, try parallel programming. It is generally harder to design, to code, and to debug than its sequential cousin. One of the fun projects I worked on at IBM Research was on the X10 language which was designed to enable parallel programmers to be more productive. Among other things, I fostered community among X10 programmers and used analytic techniques to show that X10 “should be” more productive. Although these analytic techniques are very useful, we also wanted to get some empirical data that the language was, in actuality, more productive.
One part of those empirical studies involved comparing people doing a few parallel programming tasks in X10 to those using a popular competitor. But, like many other “chicken and egg” problems, there were no X10 programmers (other than the inventors and their colleagues). I was part of a team who travelled to Rice University in Houston. The design called for one group to spend a chunk of time learning X10 (perhaps half a day) and another chunk of time coding some problems.
Besides the three behavioral scientists like me who were there to make observations, there were also three high-powered Ph.D. computer scientists present who would teach the language. Programmers tend to be very smart. Parallel programmers tend to be very very smart. People who can invent better languages to do parallel programming? You do the math.
Anyway, after the volunteers students had arrived, one of the main designers of the language began to “teach them” X10.
But — there was a problem.
The powerpoint presentation designed to teach the students X10 was far too blurry to read!
Immediately, the three computer scientists tried to issue commands to the projector to put the images in focus. Nothing worked. The three of them began a fascinating problem solving conversation about what communication protocol(s) among the PC, the projector, and the controller was the likely source of the problem. I suppose it might not have been fascinating to everyone, but it was to me. First, it fascinated me because I was learning something about computer science and communication protocols. Second, it fascinated me because I loved to watch these people think. I suppose many of the advanced computer science students who were in this classroom to learn X10 also found it interesting. But the study had completely stalled.
After a few minutes of fascinating conversation that did nothing to focus the images, something possessed me to walk over to the projector and turn the lens by hand. The images were immediately clear and the rest of the experiment continued.
The three computer scientists had “framed” the problem as a computer science problem and I found the discussion that sprang from that framing to be fascinating. But one of the part-time jobs I had had as an undergraduate was as a “projectionist” at Case-Western, and it was that experience that allowed me to try framing the problem differently. All of us have huge reservoirs of experience outside of our professional “training” and those experiences can sometimes be important sources of alternative ways to frame a problem, issue, or situation.
petersironwood 