How To Break Anything

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13 Jul 2010

Communicating with robots, and a few thoughts on the complexity of communication
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New York Time's Interview With A Robot (video here, no embed code) gives an interesting look at how we think about interaction and conversation. Much of the commentary around the video is on it's "disturbing" nature, reminding me of the idea I ran into once that if something attempts to appear human, but falls short of being 100%, we find it to be disturbing.

I recommend watching it. The video got me interested again in an old hobby of mine: conversing with the Jabberywacky artificial intelligence bot. Evidently the creators have now built the similar Cleverbot. I had a couple conversations with it below (the first couple of lines were cut off from the screenshot):

Kyle: Hi Cleverbot, let's talk about what it means to be human

Cleverbot: I know I am human.

Cleverbot got a little distracted at that point so I decided to start again:

Clearly, as in the above video, one of the problems we're still struggling with in terms of recreating intelligent conversation is understanding how humans react not to just individual fragments of conversations but maintain a memory of the context of entire conversations. As you might imagine this is no simple task; it requires a deceptively complex understanding of how memory works, in allowing us to relate just the right amount of information now to just the right amount of information from the past.

A good way to think of how this problem is exponentially complex is to think of the potential semiotic significance of one statement as limited to let's say just 5 different meanings. The potential expression is much more difficult to pin down when considering it within the context of an earlier statement with another five potential meanings, and another statement before that. Conversation is clearly much more than an exercise in reacting to the last thing stated.

(As an aside, I found it interesting to note that Cleverbot responds back in deliberately slow typed characters, simulating human typing. Nice touch.)
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4 Jul 2010

Ideas in long-term pattern recognition and analysis
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There's one particular and notable step in the path that has led me here to the world of analysis and pattern recognition that I always look back and kind of laugh at. Once upon a time I had a university class assignment centered around selecting & analyzing a "self-help" book. While browsing the bookstore I couldn't help but pick out Reading People: How to Understand People and Predict Their Behavior - Anytime, Anyplace, primarily because of it's absurdly ridiculous title.

As it turns out, the book is very much in the same camp as the "building layers and layers of understanding from thin slices of experience" idea from Malcom Gladwell's Blink. So it makes sense that a detailed analysis of the book and how it applies to pattern recognition has popped up on LessWrong.org, calling attention to the author's primary charge:

If this book could deliver but one message, it would be that to read people effectively you must gather enough information about them to establish a consistent pattern. Without that pattern, your conclusions will be about as reliable as a tarot card reading.

The author of the article relates the key points of the book to an earlier post of theirs, What is Bayesianism?. I've selected some highlights below that you might find helpful when thinking about identifying patterns; they are primarily written through the lens of observing individuals, but for the most part the ideas behind them apply to larger trends as well.

1. Start with the person's most striking traits, and as you gather more information see if his other traits are consistent or inconsistent.

As computationally bounded agents, we can't simply take in all the available data at once: we have to start off some particularly striking traits and start building a picture from there. However, humans are notorious about anchoring too much (Anchoring and Adjustment), so we are reminded to actively seek disconfirmation to any initial theory we have.

2. Consider each characteristic in light of the circumstances, not in isolation.

The second core tenet in What is What is Bayesianism was "How we interpret any event, and the new information we get from anything, depends on information we already had."

A Bayesian translation of this might read roughly as follows. "Suppose you told me simply that a young man wears a large hoop earring. You are asking me to suggest some personality trait that's causing him to wear them, but there is not enough evidence to locate a hypothesis. If we knew that the man is from a culture where most young men wear large earrings, we might know that conformists would be even more likely to wear earrings. If the number of conformists was sufficiently large, then a young man from that culture, chosen randomly on the basis of wearing earrings, might very likely be a conformist, simply because conformist earring-wearers make up such a large part of the earring-wearer population.

3. Look for extremes. The importance of a trait or characteristic may be a matter of degree.

4. Identify deviations from the pattern.

5. Ask yourself if what you're seeing reflects a temporary state or a permanent quality.

6. Distinguish between elective and nonelective traits [events]. Some things you control; other things control you.

7. Give special attention to certain highly predictive traits.

Full explanations at Applied Bayes' Theorem: Reading People
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23 Jun 2010

Social Conditioning Through Clothing: early signals of devices physically shaping interactions
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Designer Lauren McCarthy of the UCLA Design / Media Arts program has developed a set of wearable devices intended to inspire thought on integrating technology into our social interactions. Within this project, social behaviors changing through negative reinforcement is the general operating principle; each device is programmed to deliver some kind of intense stimulus in response to various social inputs, and wearers are forced to adjust their behavior to reduce the stimulus. In the case of the Body Contact Training Suit, the wearer is subjected to static white noise if they are not in physical contact with other humans for too long of an interval. The Happiness Hat trains wearers to be more expressive, delivering a sharp metal point if the wearer is not smiling. The Anti-Daydreaming Scarf vibrates to remind the wearer to pay attention when in conversation.

Watch a video explanation below:

On some level, the concepts may not be directly practical, given that they primarily assume that this kind of negative reinforcement is a lasting way to influence behavior. Judging by the subtext of the video one suspects McCarthy is aware of this as well, and hopes to inspire deeper conversation on how physical technology can work its way into our interactions in general.

This is becoming more the case as devices are driven by increasingly accurate, responsive, and intelligent sensor systems. To help give some context for how these kinds of devices will work their way into our lives, it helps to consider how present-day digital/social platforms are integrating into our lives ever more seamlessly. Twitter, Foursquare, and any number of other networks subtly guide the contexts in which we communicate, and our behaviors, by extension. This is evident anytime we first look up an unknown contact in Facebook/LinkedIn, and then change our response behavior accordingly. The idea that physical/ubiquitous computing devices will begin to do the same, helping us determine how to best interact with others through physical cues, is not far-fetched.

Lauren McCarthy

[via Talk2MyShirt]
[this originally appeared on psfk.com]
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12 Mar 2010

"Learn from everything." - @kevinrothermel. Only when you know how the rules work can you break them effectively
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The world is a funny place. And it get’s really easy to get caught up in that funniness and start dismissing the unfamiliar or the seemingly ridiculous as a waste of time, a threat to the very fabric of society, or just something for other people. If anything, it is growing more and more of a natural reflex as new ideas continue to spew forth into the world at exponential rates, many of which are reaching people that are very different than the people who are the intended audience. And it’s probably a good thing for most people. It helps to filter out the noise. For people that work with ideas for a living, it can be really useful to be good at it, but I think that the truly great creative thinkers in the world, from the greatest planners to the greatest creative people to the greatest entrepreneurs, are unique in their ability to turn that off, suspend judgement, and learn from everything.

I’m guilty of over-judgement in spades. I’ve suspected it for a long time, but it was confirmed the other day when my wife called me a bully after I made fun of someone we saw while driving. It’s sort of my schtick.

But I’ve realized the error of my ways. Moving forward, I’m going to actively try to be less of a curmudgeon. In fact, it might make a swell platform for a weekly blog post series. Time will tell.

via kevinrothermel.com

Before making the switch to Posterous, I had an 'explanation' page describing what 'how to break anything' means to me. Essentially it is this: rules are indeed meant to be broken, but only when you know how the rules work can you break them effectively. The rules governing human behavior are no different.

"How to break anything? Observe everything." is what I was saying at that point. Kevin's thoughts above resonate with the idea I've tried to get across, that if you want to understand human behavior, you have to understand all of it, not just the behaviors you're used to.

It requires a certain level of openmindedness, and one that I'm genuinely not sure many people are able to approach or are even willing to. I think we want to feel we can, until we realize that on a very important level it's quite different from what you might initially expect: as you approach a place of openmindedness, you increasingly leave a place of consistent identity and moral/conceptual/ethical/whatever standards. This is an important idea worth thinking about when considering the idea of "openmindedness" so I'll repeat it in different words: the level at which you genuinely understand other people is inversely proportional to the level at which you can firmly justify your own beliefs.

Just something to consider.

I certainly have my share of flaws, but one of the strengths (?) that has led me here today is being able to comfortably approach that level - solely because of my experiences and environment growing up, as evidenced by this more recent interpretation of the "how to break anything" idea: Danah Boyd on ChatRoulette, and myself on exposure and intelligence
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8 Mar 2010

How games/reward mechanisms work, and an interesting perspective on the definition of "game"
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via cracked.com

5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted

This article is fascinating and of course hilarious, being Cracked (though I'm not prone to calling these types of things "creepy"...). Some things it calls to mind:
- Sheena Iyengar's The Art of Choosing, a brief section where she makes a bit of a case analogous to the "you're in a prison" idea of The Matrix
- Skinner Box? There's an app for that.
- Seth Godin's Linchpin, and the work culture we've created to indoctrinate employees. From the Cracked article:
Why do so many of us have that void? Because according to Everything Expert Malcolm Gladwell, to be satisfied with your job you need three things, and I bet most of you don't even have two of them:

Autonomy (that is, you have some say in what you do day to day);

Complexity (so it's not mind-numbing repetition);

Connection Between Effort and Reward (i.e. you actually see the awesome results of your hard work).
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4 Feb 2010

Insights From IDEO’s Humanizing Social Media Event - PSFK
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As part of Social Media Week in NYC, design firm IDEO hosted the event Humanizing Social Media. Check-in to the event required attendees to leave their mobile devices behind with their coats, setting the stage for an experiment in human interaction. Participants were given a large blank white t-shirt to cover whatever they were wearing, and their choice of a range of buttons with which to express interests and identity. Below are two brief perspectives and insights on human social behavior that team PSFK walked away with:

Kyle Studstill:

The event was framed as an experiment in bringing social interaction back to its basics, in the face of complex digital platforms like Facebook, foursquare, Twitter and the like – the idea being that impersonal nature of these networks take something away from the simplicity of face-to-face interaction.

What I observed reflected the idea that all social interaction – digital or not – is an exercise in individuals using whatever they have at their disposal to say something about themselves. The buttons were an obvious example of this, but it was also clear in the vastly varied ways participants placed their buttons or even wore the blank t-shirt itself. The entire event begged the question “what parallels can we draw between what happens here in this experiment, and what happens in social networks?”; one clear one that emerged is that the expression of identity through carefully (and often subconscious) curated details of one’s personality applies both online and off.

As far as the digital disconnect (no one knew they would be without their phones for two hours until they walked in the door), I don’t think I had that feeling of ”everyone is paying more attention now” that one might expect. Perhaps the rest of the crowd did. But it has been my experience that we are getting better at dipping in and out of both digital and offline conversations, pulling ourselves away from a casual group to share an idea on Twitter and diving back in seamlessly; I haven’t experienced the feeling that people being connected to their mobile devices has made them any less “social,” even in the physical space.

Francisco Hui:

Kyle makes a good point that the lack of phones didn’t particularly change how we socialized for those two hours. The blank t-shirts, like current social media platforms, placed everyone on the same footing, regardless of their age and what they came in wearing.

Learnings from the discussion alluded to an interesting group dynamic that occurs in real life that hasn’t been replicated in social media. While you can broadcast messages to your followers, it’s still an individual act that is occurring in on your phone or at your desk.

From another conversation, we learned that current status updates are very much about the past tense; what you did yesterday or earlier during the day, but we’re slowly moving towards the present and future tense, what you’re doing right now, and what you plan to do.

via psfk.com
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