Books
Epistemology And Human Fallibility
Aug 25th
I read quite a bit. I’m constantly energized by new ideas and books provide a way for me to swim in them. As I read, it’s fascinating to see interesting themes that tie different books together. I don’t recommend every book I read, but there are three books that I think are must reads.
- The Black Swan – Nicholas Taleb
- Amusing Ourselves To Death – Neil Postman
- Revising Prose – Richard Lanham
These three books are all extremely well written and all deal in one way or another with our epistemology — how we know what we know.
The Black Swan illustrates how poorly we, as humans, understand random events. We proudly predict the future, then something happens that we didn’t expect. We then rationalize that it was totally predictable, thereby returning our pride in our predictions. Knowing how much you don’t know is critical. Many of my blog entries illustrate this very theme. We delude ourselves into believing our perspective is whole when it is only partial.
Amusing Ourselves to Death is a polemic on how our culture establishes its standard for truth. A cultures media for discourse affects its standard of truth. We’ve moved from an oral culture, to a written culture, to a pictorial culture. Postman’s well written polemic reveals the TV’s inadequacies as a medium of discourse.
I’ve long had a hard time watching most news programs and this book enumerated why. Recently, my mother-in-law was watching the news and one reporter made a passionate plea for the US to exit Afghanistan. People are dying for a reason that no one knows, he argued sincerely. This was then followed by: “The Rockies lost the game against the Dodgers 3-2 last night…”. *sigh*
Revising Prose is the most specialized of these three and may only interest you if you’re interested in writing. Nevertheless, it shows the horrendous nature of the “Official Style”. He revises sentences like:
“The purpose of an environmental scan is to obtain a general understanding of the external business environment we are currently in and expect to be in over the near-term”
into:
“An environment scan surveys the current and foreseeable business environment.”
Revising Prose requires us to consider how we write is an expression of how we think. Writing vaguely indicates vague thinking.
We are limited in our ability to know. We prefer to think without considering how we think. All three of these books will challenge and provide clarity on how we can swim in the world of ideas with greater clarity.
Book Worth Reading: The Inmates Are Running The Asylum
Mar 1st
This week I got a rental car that had three buttons on the front of the dongle with the keys. In most cases, it’s lock, unlock, and open trunk. On this key chain, it was lock, unlock, and alarm. Seriously, the alarm was front and center and exactly where you would normally expect another function. At least twice in three days, I hit the alarm button while thinking I was unlocking the trunk. And there’s nothing that feels more foolish than drawing everyone’s attention as you scramble to turn the stupid thing off.
No one likes to feel stupid, and yet that’s exactly how so many computer interfaces make us feel. Making matters worse, computers are now integrated into almost every part of our lives – from our car remote to our kitchen appliances.
But why are computer interfaces so bad? Alan Cooper explains why in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. Unfortunately, computer programmers build interfaces that they would like to use personally, but computer programmers are not like everyone else, and they see the world differently. Cooper points out 4 key differences:
- Programmers trade simplicity for control:
Cooper explains the difference by comparing it to the direction you take as you board a plane. When programmers enter the plane, they turn to the left and sit surrounded by controls and gauges in the cockpit. They want to see and be able to control as much as possible the system in front of them. Everyone else turns to the right, they just want to get to where they are going. The result is that most of our software has about as many or more options than a plane cockpit. - Programmers exchange success for understanding:
Cooper asked a large group of programmers: How many of you took apart an alarm clock when you were young? Almost everybody. Okay, now how many of you put it back together. Three. Programming is about problem solving and in the process, you end up with many failed solutions before finding the one that works. Programmers delight in this process of understanding and subsequently solving this complex problem. Because complexity is fascinating, they assume the user will be as fascinated with the complexity as they are and want to understand all of the nuances. Reality: they don’t. - Programmers focus on what is possible to the exclusion of what is probable:
In computer programming, if you don’t consider all of the corner cases, your program will fail. As a result of the focus on edge cases, the interface prioritizes the possible (there might be some customer out there that wants to do this) vs. what is probable (Most of our customers will want to only run this operation). This is why most of the software you use has menus that contain 90% more items than you likely use. - Programmers act like jocks:
While I know many people in computer programming who behave exactly this way, this one didn’t resonate with me, but is probably summarized by a quote occasionally heard: “It was hard to write, therefore it should be hard to use”.
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum provides an excellent explanation and defense for why user experience design is needed in order to create a product that is actually desirable rather than simply being functional. Most of the process employed by User Experience Designers is to develop a sense of empathy for the customer that can be shared within the entire company. The result is a product that people love to use instead of put up with. An iPod instead of a key dongle that makes lots of noise.
Corporate Welfare and The Motivated Bureaucrat
Dec 19th
A related problem to the green fuzz of government debt-based spending, is the nature of accountability in the government. Here is what happens: the government decides to take on a social project, or perhaps is already owning a certain business (as in the case of socialist governments becoming less so). The argument is that government is not well equipped to deal with running large social programs because of the lack of incentives for those running them. Both non-profit and for-profit private enterprises have a greater sense of incentives for making sure things are run right (though there can obviously be excesses and irresponsibility in both). The incentive tends to go beyond money. There is something at risk if they don’t perform as they have promised to those who care. Yes, the government bureaucrat at the top is elected, but those appointed deeper down in the government have little at risk.
As a result, there is a push to privatize a part of what the government is doing. This amounts to paying a private entity to do the function that previously the government was doing. The problem of course is that the incentive to run things more efficiently doesn’t change. A genuine private entity has something to lose (customer loyalty or donor loyalty), but when the government is footing the bill the risk of lose is gone. In other words, you’ve simply shifted the bureaucrat with nothing to lose from a government employee to ones in the private sector. There is no shift in their desire to perform differently.
Enter moral hazard in a whole new way. The new entities end up serving themselves and trying to take as much as they possibly can in the process.
In spite of being in favor of reduced government spending and programs, I don’t think the way to do that is to outsource them. Even in the bidding processes that try to create competition for things, you are still relying on the judgement of bureaucrats that didn’t have the right set of incentives to run it themselves. While I don’t full agree with Naomi Klein’s conclusions in “The Shock Doctrine”, it does very well outline that privatizing government does not create a proper sense of incentives that cause companies to work for common good (and is worth reading).
In the end, the government should unwind from it’s positions but in a way that enables private entities to both take on the risks that are associated with those things.
Why Read Books?
Nov 19th
How often have you heard someone suggest after reading a book:
“The point of this book could have been summarized in a few pages and didn’t need a few hundred.”
While this critique is valid of a large number of books whose ideas are simple and shallow, it often gives people an excuse not to read books. Even though almost all books can be summarized briefly, the true value to reading a book is spending time living with and dwelling on the ideas. This can only come from spending the time to read.
Our brains remember and deal better with situations or ideas that actually have more detail (consider that a story with more information actually makes it easier to remember than a story with little information). As a result, spending time reading a book allows you to remember and apply ideas to your life where as reading summaries just lets you look smart at cocktail parties. 
All that said, some ideas are clearly not worth spending that much time dwelling on and therefore aren’t worth reading and in those cases, I highly suggest just getting the summary. But if the ideas are of sufficient quality, spending time dwelling on them is really the only way to truly understand them.
Book Worth Reading: Made To Stick
Nov 8th
About a year ago, I read Made To Stick and would put this book up there with one of the must reads for anyone that is desiring to communicate and propagate an idea. The two authors, Dan and Chip Heath, were both trying to figure out what caused ideas to stick in the world of business marketing (Chip Heath) and what made good teachers (Dan Heath). In their research, they discovered several concepts that were useful in making ideas and messages stick.
One of the main premises they mention is, “The Curse Of Knowledge”. Essentially, experts in a field have created a huge vocabulary and set of abstractions to facilitate their communication about a topic. When they are teaching it to someone new, they speak to them as someone that already is fully aware of what they are trying to say and therefore, there mechanism makes complete sense to them but looses their audience.
In order to over come this, they suggest 6 principles that follow the Acrostic: SUCCES [sic].
- Simple – The message should be a simple as possible and no simpler. Don’t try to boil the ocean or necessarily show all of the details. Give the 50,000 foot view of the message because when your audience doesn’t need to know all of the details. This can be a challenge with those that have the Curse Of Knowledge because they believe an over simplified view is inaccurate or even deceitful. The reality though is that the audience can’t understand the full view and you need to hook them first with a high level view that they can understand
- Unexpected – Secondly, the idea should be presented in a way that is unexpected. This concept is well known in speech writing – i.e. use a teaser. This grabs peoples attention and makes them want to pay attention to the rest.
- Credible – Third, the message should come from a credible source. They talk about various ways to get this credibility, one interesting way is to use the anti-authority. For example, the person with a tracheotomy who is telling you not to smoke.
- Concrete – Fourth, make the message as concrete as possible. The authors give several excellent examples on how to do this is a way that facilitates the audiences comprehension.
- Emotional – Fifth, engage the emotions in the message as much as possible. Emotional reactions creates a more memerable experience in how the brain is able to store information.
- Stories – Finally, use stories. I’ve discussed the importance of using stories quite a bit on this blog. The most fascinating conclusion that came from this book was the statement that stories are how we simulate reality. We listen to stories in a completely different way than we do facts and figures.
I would recommend this book to pretty much anyone and believe it to be one of the more enlightening books that I have read. That I can remember much of the book a year after reading it, should be a testament to their ability to follow their own advice.
What Motivates Us
Oct 15th
Recently, I read this study regarding whether rewarding altruism causes it to disappear, and it reminded me of the two other examples that illustrate that our motives tend to be far more complicated then things first appear.
For example, Freakonomics discusses a day care center which decided to start charging parents extra if they picked their children up late. The result, the number of children who were left late actually went up. The motivation shifted from a moral decision to a monetary one, and for many the monetary fee was worth the extra time. This was not what the day care wanted so they went back to not charging, but it was to late, people were now evaluating this in a different context.
Another example in the book Influence regards our feeling of obligation. If a Hare Krisha gives you a flower, many feel obliged to give something back even if they then throw the flower in the next garbage they come across. The book pointed out that one of the Hare Krishna members was assigned the task of getting the still very usable flowers from the trash in order to give them to the next unsuspecting person.
Consider, that in the above study on rewarding altruism, it seems that when the toddler was expected to help they did. When they started receiving praise, it opened up the possibility that this action was “extra”, and when there was a reward, kicked in a scenario of monetary trade-offs (is it worth continuing playing with this toy or should I go get a reward, hmmm, I think I like this toy more). What motivates us is varied, can unfortunately be manipulated by others, and is complicated.
Books Worth Reading: Getting Real
Oct 7th
As we start doing more exploration into what makes a good web based applications, I’ve starting doing more reading on how to visualize data graphically and create a clean interface. The guys at 37signals.com have grown quite a reputation for their applications. They have a book called Getting Real that is available in several forms (free online, or PDF).
There are a number of sections that are worth reading, but this one struck me as pretty good:
It’s a Problem When It’s a Problem
There are two extremes that companies can find themselves having to balance between. The first is designing without forethought and creating something that barely works when it’s first conceived and then requires lots of hacking in the future. The second is to solve “imaginary” problems. Problems that may genuinely come up, but don’t need to be solved right now.
Anyway, I recommend taking a look at this (especially since the content is free). I have found it pretty insightful.
Missing Experiences That Never Occurred
Oct 1st
For some lighter reading, I have recently been reading “Ender In Exile” by Orson Scott Card. If you haven’t read, “Ender’s Game”, I highly recommend it, this book is really just filling in a little more in the story line and the more I think about it, is allowing Card to express some of his own sentiments on those near the end of their life.
Anyway, one of the characters in the book writes a farewell letter to his protégé at the end of the characters life. He encourages his protégé to have kids because of the emotional satisfaction that comes from the process of raising them. He describes this with a high amount of specificity.
It’s not that I doubt that it is satisfying or even his description of it, but it is hard to have a character who never had kids talk so powerfully about the experience that he missed out on. The reality, of course, is that Card is simply putting his own reflections on paper and writing with the power of his own convictions. The reflections of a father put into the mouth of someone who never was.
This got me thinking about the various experiences that we have in life. There are certainly many things we enjoy as we go through life, but with every choice for one experience, we miss out on a different experience. Can we genuinely miss things we never experienced? It seems to me, we can miss them conceptually and we can create a simulation about what the experience might have been like (from stories or the like), but there is still a difference in the impact that it has on us. How often have you missed the person you never met?
I’m not sure it’s wise to look back on life regretting experiences that we never had seeing that it’s genuinely impossible for us to truly know what life would have been like had we had them. Learn from the past, make good decisions, but enjoy the things God has provided.
Book Worth Reading: Rapt
Sep 17th
Recently finished the book, “Rapt – Attention and the Focused Life” by Winifred Gallagher. I’ve recently been reading books on attention as I believe this will be an increasingly important theme in business and in life as the pace of change continues to accelerate.
Winifred was diagnosed with cancer and this book really is about her learning during that period, particularly as it related to where she placed her attention. At first, I thought the focus on the individual would be not as interesting, but I was wrong. The book contains a good amount of behavioral economics studies that I haven’t heard in other similar books (Outliers, Predictably Irrational, etc) and also spent a lot more time discussing the impact of what we personally pay attention to. I highly recommend reading (or listening) to this book.
One of the anecdotes/studies that the book discusses is a study that was done in the 1970’s that created a home that was decked out to the nines in 1950’s regalia. They had several older men live in this house for one week. They had physicals done both before and after and at the conclusion of the week, they were all walking taller, visibly looked younger, and were in better health.
But the book covers a wide cadre of topics from how attention affects our emotions to what we remember in a given situation. It also was a refreshing take from talking more about what others have noticed about human behavior to how we can influence the way we think about the world around us.
Commoditizing Information
Sep 9th
The hackers of old have long held that data must be set free. Google is doing just that by aggregating the content of the internet, it no longer mattes where information comes from. When people are questioned afterward regarding the source of the information they are reciting, they respond: Google.
The problem, of course, is that the information can be half baked (see the myriad of urban legends that I still get forwarded to me) and there is a lack of financial incentive to provide generic information.
However, as you provide an increasingly compelling set of data, you can make money on advertising (one of the ways information providers monetize the attention they are receiving). For instance, if you have a medical question, I might just go immediately to webmd instead of googling for it. Interestingly, Google makes it’s money from advertising both on it’s pages as well as on the pages of the information it is aggregating. This is one way information providers can get paid for the information they provide, but they are in desperate competition with passionate hobbyists and verbose bloggers who would willingly provide the information for free.
Like most of the changes that are occurring with the new abundance of information and distribution, anyone can contribute, which allows those who simply have a passion for sharing to do so, for free, but if they make their data remarkable enough, they can certainly be paid to provide it.
[Side note: Jeff Jarvis' "What Would Google Do" is a good book that challenges the normal way people are perceiving the changes that the internet is truly causing and I recommend it]