Tools of Thought: Imagination

27 Saturday Dec 2025

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

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AI, art, chatgpt, creativity, Design, fun, HCI, human factors, imagination, innovation, life, neurosis, sports, testing, truth, UX, writing

Imagination.

It seems odd to bother to remind people that imagination is a tool of thought. I have four kids, thirteen grandkids, five great-grandkids and they all use their imaginations. I also worked as a camp counselor, Y leader, child care worker in a psychiatric hospital, and a sixth grade science teacher. Kids use their imaginations! In many cases, they do this for “fun” but they also are constantly using their imagination to do creative problem solving.

When I did therapy with adults however, I found that many had convinced themselves that they had no imagination. This is rather sad as well as being completely inaccurate. Furthermore, in the very ways that such adults exhibited neurotic symptoms, they were using their imaginations. But instead of using their imagination to further their enjoyment or to solve problems creatively, they mainly seemed to use their imaginations for one main purpose: to make themselves miserable.

For example, few of us enjoy being stuck in stop and go traffic. As it turns out, you can actually impact the traffic flow around you by driving differently. You can read about how in this link, but you can come to much the same conclusion by using your imagination to empathize with the drivers around you. Instead, the neurotic train of thought goes something like this: “WHY oh WHY are all these people out on the road?! MOVE! Oh, crap, I am going to be late. My boss is going to scream at me. Probably fire me. CRAP! MOVE! I’m going to be late. I’m getting fired. Damn! It’s not my fault. My boss doesn’t care. He hates people who are late. I should have left earlier. Where will I get another job at my age? I’m sunk. Once I lose my job, my spouse will leave me too. Crap. He won’t write a good letter of recommendation. Should I get off the highway and take surface roads? That might make me later. Damn! I’m sunk. Life sucks!”

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That train of thought certainly uses imagination.

But in all the wrong ways. That person is not using imagination to enjoy the moment, but using imagination to quite literally make themselves miserable. And it isn’t just the commuter. Plenty of people use their imagination to “awfulize” about situations. They think of the worst possible outcome and then imagine that that worst possible outcome is bound to happen. Often, they continue the negative line of thought beyond the immediate consequences much like the teenager who is grounded for a day and screams to her parents, “Thanks! You guys just ruined my life!”

Instead, if you are in a situation that you can’t change, you could use your imagination to have some fun. So you’re stuck in traffic. There are literally a million things you could do instead of writing a tragic screenplay in your mind’s eye. I won’t list all million, but here are a few. You could design a better transportation system. You could construct a joke to put your boss in a better mood. You could turn on the radio or listen to a podcast or a book on tape. You could look at the scenery. You could make up a rather salacious spy thriller about the people around you who are also stuck in traffic. And so on.

So too, in solving problems….hold on… someone’s at the door. I’ll be right back.

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Well, that was weird! Two of the characters from my last blog series came to the door! They wanted me to hurry up and finish this series on tools of thought so they can come back to life. I had to explain to them that my translator is on vacation and that there’s nothing else to write until more of the myths can be decoded. Right now, there is growing interest in recent, though mythological, archeological digs that will give us further clues about the Veritas. My own command of the mythical Veritas language is extremely rudimentary and I’m not even absolutely sure I understood correctly what they were asking. But I am sure it was She-of-Many-Paths and Shadow-Walker. It was definitely them, more or less as I pictured them, but taller, and more ripped than I had imagined. It’s also clear that the two of them are more than friends. Anyway, they seem to be of the opinion that I need to write their myths so that we real humans can avoid making the same errors that people made in their mythical universe. I don’t quite see how that’s possible, but I will use my imagination to try to understand how it might be done. I hope they don’t bother my neighbors.

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Meanwhile, back to the catalog of thinking tools in general and to the use of imagination in particular. Under some circumstances, of course, it is a useful skill to use imagination to think of what can go wrong. I use imagination in this vein for example, when asked to evaluate something from a user perspective. I try to imagine how various icons, words, transitions and so on can be problematic for users. Even though I am pretty good at that, when users are actually observed in real life, they still manage to demonstrate problems that neither I nor anyone else on the design team had thought of!

Even in UX work, it is also important to use your imagination to think of additional opportunities. “You know, we’ve been thinking about this calendar application as a passive recipient of the user’s information. But some users might also like seeing a weekly summary of their activity in different categories.” Or, you might think, “Suppose we tie the calendar in with the message system. The system knows where the user is; we could send a reminder when it’s time for them to leave for an appointment.” Or, you might think, “In some places the time to drive somewhere depends on traffic and weather. We could tie this calendar and reminder in with the map and weather apps to give better estimates of when to send a reminder.” Such musings could result in a better product. Of course, timing is important as well. Your colleagues will tend to appreciate these thoughts a lot more if you are not currently in beta test but instead at the conceptual design phase!

Even knowing that, your imagination might be more likely to kick in later in the project because the application seems more real. You can imagine the reactions of your colleagues and frame your response this way, “Trying this app makes me realize that we can make a number of enhancements in version 2.0, 3.0 etc. I’m going to start this shared file of potential additions, changes, and enhancements that we can all contribute to. We should take a look at this when we are doing 2.0 brainstorming.”

More generally, there are many possible triggers for using your imagination and you may find that some kinds of triggers are more fun for you. For example, you might read fiction and you enjoy following along with the story being presented. This requires a lot of imagination work.

You can also start with a goal or even desire and work outward from this internal state to imagine ways you might accomplish your goal or fulfill your desire. But you can also work inward. You look at what is before you; e.g., a computer screen like the one I am looking at now and ask yourself how it might be different in the future.

Such musings can follow a thread based on the characteristics. The screen is flat, for instance. What if it were curved, or dynamically reconfigurable, or foldable or moldable? What if I could shrink the actual screen depending on circumstances? You can inject your screen (and possibly yourself) into a different and unusual situation. What if I had the screen available on the tennis court? Well, I could project things on my glasses; e.g., as I walk over to retrieve a ball, I could be reminded of how to hit a kick serve. What if I had special lenses that I could pass over any word or icon on the screen? One might give me the history of any given word. Another might give me the definition. Another might give me alternatives that are more esoteric or are easier to understand; more general or more specific; more positive or negative in tone. Another tool might enable you to select a sentence, a paragraph or an entire article and ask, “Who has written similar things before?” Even without AI, a purely statistical approach might lead you find out about people with similar interests.

Another way to practice using your imagination is to pose a question or see how two things are or could be related. On the table beside me are a number of objects: a set of keys, an iPhone, a coffee cup, a checkbook, two of the books I wrote, copies of some papers that I reviewed for a recent conference, a quarter, some business cards. How could these be combined? It doesn’t necessarily matter at this point that the combination is feasible. Let’s just try it.

Putting together a set of keys and an iPhone suggests to me having an app wherein I could photograph all my keys and then, if I lost any (or all!) of the keys, I could have one 3-D printed at a local store or my home 3-D printer. I can also imagine that for another layer of security (at a cost of inconvenience) my iPhone would not turn on unless I took a picture of a particular physical key. A coffee cup and a checkbook seem to belong to different worlds indeed, but that only makes it more of a fun challenge! I like coffee. I don’t particularly like writing bills. On the day before the bills are due, perhaps the coffee machine might not deliver coffee till I wrote the bills. This strikes me as too controlling. For me, it might work better to have an ironic message delivered on the coffee cup such as, “Have a nice day! And save the insane interest rates for paying $25 a day late by paying your bill on time! Or, make some rich banker even richer. The choice is yours!” This approach would not be everyone’s “cup of tea” but that doesn’t matter. The point is to reawaken your imagination.

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What about a quarter and two books I wrote? I could offer a 25 cent rebate. I could write about about the history of the quarter. I could mail people books with a quarter inside. I could make an advertisement about The Winning Weekend Warrior that is aimed at tennis players and suggest that every time they lose a set, they put a quarter in a piggy bank. When they get to 40 quarters they can buy my book. I can design strategy and tactics sheets for different sports that are sold separately. The reader/user places quarters on the sheet to reinforce strategy. In tennis, for instance, such a sheet might be static and the user could use four quarters for the positions of the four players on the court. They could be asked to select smart shots, given the positions. Similarly, I might have 4 or even 18 sheets for golf and on these sheets I would show the slope and terrain and ask people to put the quarter on for their target. Eventually, I imagine, there is a way to capture the data of how the player actually hits the golf ball on real courses and that could be incorporated into what the best shot is for that particular player. This data could also be used as input to computer golf games so that a player might use the game to help select better clubs and targets. We are no longer necessarily talking about my book or about quarters. That doesn’t matter! All that really matters is that I have used these arbitrary objects to trigger my imagination. And you can do the same!

I’m done. Hold on. Doorbell. II see that it’s the Veritas power couple again. I’m inviting them in for coffee. I wonder if they’ve ever had coffee before….

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Choose one of these four books for everyone on your gift list! (Better late than never!)

Roar, Ocean, Roar

The Dance of Billions

After All

All that We Have Lost

Halloween: A Horror Story

As Gold as it Gets

The Walkabout Diaries

The Ailing King of Agitate

Fifteen Properties

Cancer Always Loses in the End

It was in his Nature

Tools of Thought: Metaphors We Live By & Die By

24 Wednesday Dec 2025

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

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analogy, Democracy, elections, Feedback, government, life, love, mental-health, metaphor, politics, problem solving, programming, sense-making, thinking, thought, writing

Metaphors We Live By and Die By

PicturesfromiPhone2 087

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

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

man wearing jacket and peaked cap grayscale photo

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

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

man standing beside his wife teaching their child how to ride bicycle

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

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

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

Metaphors have consequences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author Page on Amazon

Roar, Ocean, Roar

We Won the War! We Won the War!

Siren Song

The Ailing King of Agitate

After All

An Open Sore

All We Stand to Lose

At Least he’s Our Monster

Stoned Soup

The Tale of the Three Blind Mice

Travels with Sadie: Teamwork

The First Ring of Empathy

The Walkabout Diaries: Variety

Representation

22 Monday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology

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AI, Business, Design, Dictatorship, Feedback, leadership, life, measurement, politics, problem solving, programming, Representation, science, symbol, testing, thinking, truth, writing

Representation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

river inside forest near brown leaf trees — Photo by Nashwan guherzi on Pexels.com

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

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

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

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

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Author Page on Amazon

Essays on America: Labelism

Reality Check

Wednesday

The Invisibility Cloak of Habit

Fish have no Word for Water

After All

All We Stand to Lose

A Lot is not a Little

Happy Talk Lies

The Loud Defense of Untenable Positions

At Least he’s Our Monster

Plans for US; some GRUesome

Siren Song

We Won the War! We Won the War!

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Regression to the Mean

21 Sunday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, sports

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AI, Business, Democracy, experiment, family, Feedback, HCI, learning, life, mental-health, personal-growth, politics, science, sports, testing, truth, USA, usability, UX, writing

Regression to the Mean

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author Page on Amazon

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The Self-Made Man

Labelism

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After All

Roar, Ocean, Roar

Plans for US; some GRUesome

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Stoned Soup

The Tale of the Three Blind Mice

Fifteen Properties

A Pattern Language for Cooperation

Travels with Sadie: Cooperation

Tools of Thought: Theory of Mind

19 Friday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, Uncategorized

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"Theory of Mind", AI, cooperation, Design, education, empathy, life, mental-health, poetry, politics, psychology, religion, sports, teamwork, truth, writing

Theory of Mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mudface

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Author Page on Amazon

Where does your Loyalty Lie?

The Invisibility Cloak of Habit

How the Nightingale Learned to Sing

Roar, Ocean, Roar

The Iroquois Rule of Six

Happy Talk Lies

The Loud Defense of Untenable Positions

Cancer Always Loses in the End

Who Won the War?

After All

The Last Gleam of Twilight

E-Fishiness Mass General Hospital

Me Too

Meta-Cognition

18 Thursday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in management, psychology

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

Meta-Cognition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thinking Fast & Slow, by Daniel Kahneman

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

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

Essays on America: Wednesday

Essays on America: Labelism

What about the Butter Dish?

The Invisibility Cloak of Habit

The Update Problem

The Stopping Rule

Finding the Mustard

Fish have no Word for Water

The Loud Defense of Untenable Positions

Happy Talk Lies

The Primacy Effect

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Holiday Gift Ideas:

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

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

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

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

Many Paths

15 Monday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in creativity, psychology, sports

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AI, Business, competition, creativity, Democracy, Design, divergent thinking, family, innovation, learning, life, mental-health, sports, truth, writing

Many Paths

This is one of a series of posts about various tools of thought that are useful in a wide variety of situations. This particular tool is often called “Alternatives Thinking” or “Divergent Thinking.” I chose the name “Many Paths” because when I first posted this about seven years ago, I was in the middle of writing a trilogy called: “The Myths of the Veritas.” The new leader of the Veritas was known as “Many Paths” because she was particularly good at finding many possible alternatives to consider. Now, let’s see what this tool is and how it may prove useful to us.

The basic idea is simple. When we are confronted with a situation, we often “Jump to Conclusions” or “Spring into Action” before we have all the facts. Even when we have all the facts (which is rare), we also have a tendency to focus on our first interpretation or our first idea about how to handle the situation. This often leads to thinking of one (and only one) course of action. And, very occasionally; for instance, in some emergencies, that is the correct thing to do.

backlit breathing apparatus danger dangerous

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Even in emergencies however, our first terrified instinct about what to do can be dead wrong. For example, people see a small fire in their homes and immediately throw water on it. But if it’s a grease fire or an electrical fire, this is not a good course of action. Soon after I first began my dozen years as Executive Director of the NYNEX AI Lab, there was a fire in a nearby Stouffer’s Hotel. The charred bodies of a dozen IBM executives were found huddled in a closet. In the smoke and panic and confusion of the fire, they had apparently grabbed at the first door and gone into a dead end closet and they all perished there.

In daily life, there are a great many situations where a little extra thinking time would improve the outcome. For example, while working at IBM Research in the 1970’s, I drove about 10 minutes each way to work. At one point, I had a loose fan belt and my battery went dead. In a hurry to attend a meeting, I jump-started my car and drove to the IBM parking lot. Already late to a meeting, I went to turn off the car and just before I did so, I realized that I had not driven far enough to recharge the battery. So, I decided I’d better leave the car engine running for awhile. But as I gathered up my things and began dashing off to the meeting, I realized that it was insane to leave my car unlocked with the engine running! After all, someone could simply open the door and drive off! So, still in a hurry, I locked the car — with the engine running and the keys safely locked inside.

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Oops!

Most of us have done similar things. In some early experiments on design problem solving done at IBM, I found that when I asked people to come up with as many solutions as possible, they would generate ideas fairly quickly until they came up with one that they thought would really solve the problem. At that point, their idea productivity fell precipitously. It is hard for us to force ourselves to think of more than one good solution.

Why is this important? For one thing, conditions change. Something may happen that makes your first solution no longer apt. For another thing, there may be side-effects of your solution that make it unacceptable. Another common issue is that someone may object to your first solution for reasons you could not foresee. (See also, “Who Speaks for Wolf” as a way to help minimize that chance). In the context of invention and product development it is extremely unlikely that the first solution you come upon (and indeed even the first few solutions you think of) are novel. They are instead extremely likely to be the intellectual property of someone else. The most obvious solutions have likely already been patented and may already be in products or services that many customers are already using.

I have long been interested in observing people’s strategies and tactics in sporting events (See “The Winning Weekend Warrior”). One tactic that is overwhelmingly popular in tennis, for instance, is that the harder your opponent hits the ball, the harder you try to hit the ball. For example, someone hits a very hard ball while you’re at the net. You take this as an affront and think “I’ll show you!” Trying to hit the volley even harder means you take the racquet back farther. About half the time, the extra time it takes to bring the racquet back means you’ll mis-hit the ball or miss it entirely. On most of the remaining occasions, you’ll hit the volley too hard and it will go long. If someone hits the ball at you hard, what you need to do is simply block it back and guide it to the right spot. Trying to add extra power is unnecessary and too time-consuming. What is remarkable is not that you and I try to hit a hard ball harder. What is remarkable is that we never seem to try a different tactic!

There are many issues with focusing all your energy on the first solution you come up with. But the worst consequence is that you are overly invested in that first “solution” (which may not even be a real solution). This is bad in trying to solve problems in every domain I can think of and having others involved amplifies the badness.

For instance, let’s say that after 3 years without a vacation, you and your spouse finally have time for a nice two-week vacation. You want to visit Cuba for two weeks and your spouse wants to visit Vietnam for two weeks. If you each only comes up with one idea, you will almost always find yourself pitching for your idea, trying to convince the other person that Cuba is better while they will spend their energy trying to shoot down your choice and explain (patiently at first and less so as time goes on) why Vietnam is a much better idea. After many frustrating arguments that go nowhere, you may decide to compromise; e.g., you could visit an empty stretch of open sea in the Pacific Ocean half-way between the locations; or, you may decide to flip a coin. All this frustration and bad feeling might be avoidable. It might be that your second choice and your spouse’s second choice are both San Diego! But you’ll never even discover this because when each of you only thinks of one idea, what should be a collaborative problem solving exercise instead becomes a debate – a contest with precisely one winner and one loser.

man and woman wearing brown leather jackets

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One reason people may be prone to latch onto the first idea that occurs to them is that this is typically what happens in fiction. A TV detective gets a call that they must come alone and not tell the police but instead meet someone in an abandoned warehouse. For the sake of the drama, it puts our hero into obvious danger. They are outgunned and it looks like certain death for them. Then, due to their superior thinking, martial arts, dumb luck, or having a side-kick who followed them, they miraculously survive! Whew! But in real life, it’s almost always better to wait for back up and think through how various alternatives might work out.

Thinking of many alternatives will save you many headaches – at work, in your love life, in your recreational endeavors. When you force yourself to think of many alternatives, you will also be more open to the ideas of others. Over time, thinking of many alternatives whenever you get a chance will also increase your own creative potential. Who knows? You might even be chosen as the next leader.

For a leader, it is particularly important to consider many possibilities. Insisting that everyone get on board with the first idea that pops into your head will cause resentment and dissension. It will also make you far less willing to change to a different idea when circumstances necessitate it.

You may start a business and decide that you must be personally involved in every decision and with every customer contact. At first, when your company is small, this might work out wonderfully well. No-one knows the customer and the product quite so well as you do. But you are not God. You cannot be everywhere and know everything. If you never learn to delegate; never grow the capacity of your people; never take expert advice — you will drive yourself and everyone around you crazy. The very success of your business will guarantee its ultimate failure. Learn to consider many paths. You will be glad you did.

Author’s Page on Amazon.

The Invisibility Cloak of Habit

Labelism

Wednesday

You Bet Your Life

How the Nightingale Learned to Sing

Guns and Love

You Must Remember This

The Jewels of November

The Impossible

Guernica

We Won the War! We Won the War!

Peace

The Dance of Billions

The First Ring of Empathy

Travels with Sadie

Dog Trainers

The Iroquois Rule of Six

The Walkabout Diaries: Bee Wise

Tools of Thought

14 Sunday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in AI, creativity, design rationale, management, psychology, science, Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

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AI, chatgpt, index, life, problem formulation, problem framing, problem solving, sense-making, summary, technology, thinking, tools of thought, writing

Tools of Thought (Summary and Index)

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, then, 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. Readers are more than welcome to comment on uses, misuses, and variations.

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.”

Many Paths

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?

And, then what?

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.

Systems Thinking: Positive Feedback Loops

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.

Meta-Cognition

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.

Theory of Mind

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.

Regression to the Mean

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.

Representation

Metaphor I (December 12, 2018): Do we make a conscious choice about the metaphors we use? How can metaphors influence behavior?

Metaphors We Live By and Die By

Metaphor II (December 13, 2018): Two worked examples: Disease is an Enemy and Politics is War.

Metaphors We Live and Die By: Part 2

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.

Imagination

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: The Virulent “Versus” Virus

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.

Fraught Framing: The Presumed Being-ness of State-ness

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?

Negative Space

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.

Problem Finding

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.

The Doorbell’s Ringing! Can you get it?

Reframing the Problem: Paperwork & Working Paper

Problem Framing: Good Point!

I Say: Hello! You Say: “What City Please?”

I Went in Seeking Clarity

Problem Formulation: Who Knows What?

Wordless Perfection

How to Frame Your Own Hamster Wheel

Measure for Measure

The Slow-Seeming Snapping Turtle

A Long Day’s Journey into Hangover

Training Your Professor for Fun & Profit

Astronomy Lesson: Invisible Circles

Tag! You’re it!

Ohayōgozaimasu

Career Advice from Polonius

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Author Page on Amazon

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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.

Non-Linearity

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.

Photo by Kaboompics .com on Pexels.com

Resonance

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.

Symmetry

Other posts that are related to various mental errors you might want to avoid.

Labelism

Wednesday

The Stopping Rule

Finding the Mustard

What about the Butter Dish?

Where does your Loyalty Lie?

Roar, Ocean, Roar

The Update Problem

The Invisibility Cloak of Habit

The Impossible

Your Cage is Unlocked

We won the war! We won the war!

The self-made man

The Silent Pies

13 Saturday Dec 2025

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

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———————

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

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

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

All fences are temporary but,

The impact of connection ripples forever.

———

Author page

Math Class

You Must Remember This

Ripples

Roar, Ocean, Roar

Imagine All the People…

The Dance of Billions

The First Ring of Empathy

A Pattern Language for Cooperation and Collaboration

Your Cage is Unlocked

Impossible

Wordless Perfection

11 Thursday Dec 2025

Posted by petersironwood in AI, creativity, HCI, psychology, sports, Uncategorized, user experience

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

AI, art, creativity, drawing, education, intuition, life, problem formulation, Representation, Right-brain, sports, thinking, writing

————————————

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.

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, I deigned to consider something a sport only if there were 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. One of my neighbors spied 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 liked puzzles as much as I did. One such puzzle consisted of a 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, my officemates and I 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 never 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 lines. 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. So had everyone else in class. 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.