How To Break Anything

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29 Nov 2011

Why we're consistently surprised by the consistently unsurprising future (ft. Little Printer)
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But why paper? Isn't that so 20th century? ...My first knee-jerk reaction to Little Printer was bemused bewilderment--really? this?--but it's hard to deny Webb's point. He cited Bret Victor's recent rant against the "pictures under glass" interaction paradigm, in which all our media is sequestered beyond our reach, divorced from the physical world that we actually live in. Little Printer may seem like a throwback at first, but it's actually a disruptive, weird, but undeniably innovative way to liberate digital content from its screen-based prison. It's about making "the cloud" tangible and intimate again, by bringing it into the home in a physical way.

via fastcodesign.com

The above from a reaction to BERG's new product "Little Printer." A fascinating object in itself, but the excerpts above reminds me of something more important: The surprising part about the future isn't that it turns out to be an exciting, unknown world. It is surprising precisely because it's so much like the present while we think it's supposed to be an exciting, unknown world.

This is a natural consequence of the difference between the past and the future. I can explain.

We can be surprised by the past, because the past we can look back far enough and see that it was a completely different place. The surprise we're looking for is in contrast, and that contrast really exists in the past. We're not surprised when we're shocked by the past.

We can in fact imagine far into the future. But in the sense that the contrast of the past "really" exists the further you go back, the future only "really" exists one day at a time. So we are surprised when we aren't shocked by the future, because a day from now looks a lot like today.

(This may seem trivial, but I find this of importance and of interest because this is a human limitation, not a limitation of the future. The lack of contrast only matters to humans, who are remarkably susceptible to change blindness of the "slow change" sort. You may continue to think it's trivial, but my experience in studying both humans and the future has lead me to feel that understanding human limitation is much more important than understanding the future. The short version of my argument might be something like: "If you can design for humans, then you can design the [unsurprising] future.")
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22 Jun 2011

The Pathetic Fallacy, from "The monsters we deserve"
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The monsters we deserve

Recently, a video clip has been circulating the web that purportedly shows a rabbit born earless due to the radiation at Fukushima. BoingBoing has a convincing take-down of the claims of the video: earless rabbits are a fairly common mutation, mother rabbits sometimes chew off their ears of their young due to stress, and no one even knows where the video was filmed.

More interesting than the video is the fact that we want to it to be real. Radioactivity should have immediate, visible consequences. Bodily harm should be made manifest, and any disturbances in the natural order need to be seen to be believed. After the nuclear bomb explodes, we all head to the ocean to watch Godzilla pop out of the waves.

The earless rabbit is an example of the pathetic fallacy, a form of personification that attributes human sentiment, morality, or motives to random natural occurrences. Nature, is this case, holds a mirror up to human actions. The rain cries with you, the sun shines when you smile. While the bunny is cute, other monsters of technology are usually bloodthirsty, unpredictable and nearly indestructible.

via nextnature.net

On our need for immediate tangible feedback, a subset of our paradoxical need for reality to match our constructed (read: not real) narratives of it.
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9 Jun 2011

A type of change blindness that distinguishes "microtrends" from "macrotrends"
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Google's search for future profit targets the Sun, not just the cloud

Published on Teradome. | shared via feedly

Google's search for future profit targets the Sun, not just the cloud:

These humble-looking contraptions were revealed in a Google patent application for a “heliostat control system” that automatically adjusts solar thermal mirrors to their optimal energy-harvesting angle. […] Sound like a strange distraction for an Internet company?

Nope. Internet doesn’t exist without power. Therefore, Google should have an interest in the energy industry.

Imagine for a moment that you, ten years ago, started thinking about a world in which the major players were competing on the level not of their products but of their ecosystems. Then enters Apple/Google/Facebook.

The "who would have seen Apple and Facebook and Google being so influential back in 2001" point is now something we're familiar with. But back then it would seem a bit unfamiliar. Another idea that would seem a bit unfamiliar is a world 10 years in the future in which the major players compete again not based on their products or even their ecosystems of apps and data and developers, but the surrounding industries that provide resources and power as alluded to above.

The above thoughts remind me of that unfamiliarity, and remind me that we all get the microtrends (the gamifications, the connected screens, the cloud thinking, etc), and it's easy to think that follow "trends," but the macrotrends that the above article alludes to still catch all of us off guard.

When people ask about trends I tend to find myself needing to distinguish between micro and macro trends, a model I've taken from Magnus Lindkvist's Everything We Know is Wrong!: The Trendspotter's Handbook. I'm guessing he'd refer to the above as a form of change blindness, the kind of change blindness that manifests in the inability to detect large change because it looks too different from our current model of the world.
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29 Apr 2011

The persistence of illusions
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via engadget.com

Engadget is reporting on the difference in thickness between the white and black iPhones.

What's important for our purposes is the way this image highlights the power of contrast. You'll probably remember from your university class on perception the way that the lighter or darker environment surrounding the piece of the lead impacts our perception of it - it appears darker on the right side. Those unconvinced by gadget blogs may prefer being reminded about Richard Russell's "The Illusion of Sex":

via scientificamerican.com

Two androgynous faces, distinguished only by the amount of contrast in each image. One appears convincingly female, the other convincingly male.

Look back at the Engadget image. What's interesting is that the right portion of the lead still appears darker. The illusion persists, even as we're well aware of it.

Persistence is one of the more fascinating aspects of illusion, because cognitive illusions are no different from visual ones in this regard. I sometimes think that the only difference between the two is that we recognize and accomodate the importance of our physical limitations, while overlooking and underplaying the importance of our cognitive ones (an idea popularized by Dan Ariely at the end of his recent TED talk).

That is to say, we'll gladly build staircases to help reach higher ground, and craft clothing to protect us from the elements, but the best we can come up with is "just be rational" when it comes to helping us reach better decisions and protecting ourselves from cognitive error.

So I've started working against that. I've captured the sentiment within the link below, which resonates more and more deeply each time I read it.

Designing social structures that work with human limitation to shape better decisions for the future
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16 Apr 2011

Art and causality that matters, from "Art and Attribution: Who is an “Artist”? "
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I'm fascinated by how humans think about causality, in the same way I'm fascinated by cognitive fallacy. The below is an abstract take on it, thinking about what we reward as "art."

Art and Attribution: Who is an “Artist”?

by Lisa Wade, 1 day ago at 10:47 am

Enjoying a show last year at The Magic Castle, I was struck by the magician/assistant distinction. The magician would make a dove disappear, and his assistant would suddenly reveal it in her possession. ”Who was doing magic,” I wondered? It looked like a team effort to me.

I was reminded of this distinction while watching an NPR short on artist Liu Bolin. Bolin, we are told, “has a habit of painting himself” so as to disappear into his surroundings. The idea is to illustrate the way in which humans are increasingly “merged” with their environment.

So how does he do it? Well, it turns out that he doesn’t. Instead, “assistants” spend hours painting him. And someone else photographs him. He just stands there. Watch how the process is described in this one minute clip:

So what makes an artist?

One might argue that it was Bolin who had the idea to illustrate the contemporary human condition in this way. That the “art” in this work is really in his inspiration, while the “work” in this art is what is being done by the assistants. Yet clearly there is “art” in their work, too, given that they are to be credited for creating the eerie illusions with paint. Yet it is Bolin who is named as the artist; his assistants aren’t named at all. What is it about the art world — or our world more generally — that makes this asymmetrical attribution go unnoticed so much of the time?

via thesocietypages.org

In an abstractly related way, this is precisely why I found Harvard law professor Michael Sandel's book "Justice" so compelling. His take on the nebulous topic of ethics is much less concerned about defining what makes things good/bad or even ethical/unethical, and much more concerned about what society rewards and why.

Causality to me falls in the same category of abstract notions. Throughout history there have been a number of ways we've thought about the causes of things. And we've got a consistent track record of been wrong about it - we're not likely to stop being wrong about it anytime soon. Causality may well turn out to be a butterfly effect-esque representation of chaos theory, only instead of one butterfly flapping its wings there's an infinitely complex network of organisms acting and reacting to one another. But when struck by a bat, that won't stop us from blaming the assailant.

That is to say, there's pure causality, and then there's the causality that matters to humans. We could debate over what the true source of art is, and maybe even someday come to an answer. But it doesn't matter if we're compelled to reward something else.
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13 Apr 2011

Two kinds of intuition - evolutionary and multiplexed
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Yesterday I was reflecting on Thad Starner's distinction between mutlitasking and multiplexing. It reminded me that not too long ago I made made the statement "most things worth thinking about are counter-intuitive, because human intuition is wrong about just about everything."

To which my smart friend Alicia promptly replied that she strongly disagreed. Smart because it got me thinking that there are in fact at least two different kinds of intuition.

There's a first kind of intuition that I was originally thinking about when making the statement - this is intuition based on biological and evolutionary process. This is the kind of intuition that is captured on my favorite page of all the internet, Wikipedia's list of human cognitive biases. This is a list commonly referred to as "all the ways that you could be completely wrong about everything."

So, well-designed environments (both physical and cognitive) - the kind I mentioned are worth thinking about - are the types that recognize that humans are constrained by these limitations, as seemingly unnecessary their design elements may be. The Mother Bear Proverbial Wallet for example, shown below - it's seemingly counter-intuitive to build a product that is intentionally hard to use (the opening mechanism is wirelessly synced to your bank account - becoming more tense as your funds get lower). Though, like great architects might masterfully make use of physical limitations to create efficient physical space, great interaction designers use human cognitive limitations as design constraints for better behaviors.

But there's also a second kind of intuition, the kind Alicia reminded me of - which is more akin to muscle memory or something from the Gladwell-popularized idea of "10,000 hours." This kind of complex intuition is developed by way of individual microexperiences, over time, perhaps through Starner's notion of multiplexing. The kind of intuition that gets me wondering if perhaps much of the charge of long-term memory mechanisms can be characterized by the process of reconstructing neural pathways from disconnected to synergetic, when long-term experience and exposure shape them to do so. (sorry, that statement's a mouthful; see David Linden's The Accidental Mind for a nice primer on the biochemical basis of experience-based memory.)

This kind of intuition is what makes a magician's slight of hand truly "magic" - magic is impressive not because there's some secret that could be divulged, rather it's because the magician has put in the hundreds of hours of work necessary to make 15 seconds of performance seamlessly invisible.

This is the kind of intuition that is behind the original charge of this blog: "how to break anything? observe everything" - a statement about pattern recognition through broad and unrestricted exposure.
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4 Mar 2011

from: The Strange Powers of the Placebo Effect
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via kevinmd.com

Might end up calling this "manufactured value through cognitive programming."

Again, I don't necessarily think there's anything less 'real' about the things that we don't immediately understand as 'real.'

In fact, I'll probably expand on this later, but it's been on my mind that I've become something of a "modified relativist." That is to say, I'll argue against absolute truths like the "realness" of things, but I'll concede something like "there are levels of truth that - in an absolute sense - either matter or don't matter to humans."

For example, the true nature of a plank of wood may be a strange blend of space and quantum particles that scientists are now starting to discover may or may not exist in two places at once, and on some level it's fascinating to question the nature of its reality, but when the plank hits you across the face that's probably not the first thing that comes to mind.
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21 Dec 2010

Facts, reality, and our ability to observe both
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via thesociologist.tumblr.com

Lately I've been fond of saying things like "reality is just reality and it doesn't really care what you think of it," expressed in a couple different ways here.

The above is a classic take on the idea, though focused on our consistent tendency to filter things we're exposed to. I like to also include the things that we're limited from being exposed to. A nice example might be the idea that we didn't know what germs were until we had technology sufficient enough to capture them in a way that accommodated our natural visual limitations. So I'd probably add to "ignored" something like "intangible" or "out-of-reach," or "unintuitive," etc.
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21 Sep 2010

A model for thinking about exposure, predictions, and perspective (1 of 2)
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Click the above for a larger image, read below for a lengthier explanation.

Pattern Recognition

If there's one thing modern humans have had 35,000 years of evolutionary conditioning to spend developing, it's our ability to recognize patterns. Patterns tell us how our actions will impact the world. Patterns tell us what we can expect from our environment. Pattern recognition is a primary prerequisite to learning.

Pattern recognition in this sense is constrained by at least two conditions:

First, we must be able to observe the events that make up a pattern. We call this experience, and naturally, experience is limited by our ability to sense the world and by our ability to act on it.

Second, we must be able to intuitively link the events we observe. This is easy in the case of flipping on a light switch, or in the case of putting our hand on the stove. It is not so easy to make an intuitive link between smoking a cigarette and one's poor health later, or waking up early for a test in high school and being successful in one's career later.

These examples reflect our trouble thinking about temporality, but the two conditions above are muddled severely in any number of ways outside of our difficulty with time; for a primer, consider stopping by my favorite page of all the internet: this wonderful list of cognitive biases.

Exposure

When it comes to interpreting the world, we are limited by a third thing, which I'm calling exposure. Exposure represents the whole of all things you've experienced - even those things that just sit subconsciously in the back of your head, waiting to be combined with other ideas. Exposure includes those things that you cannot intuitively and consciously comprehend, but exposure is limiting in an absolute sense - one's cognition can only draw from the pool of things that it's been exposed to.

This is pretty intuitive on some level, but it's important to note that it means that ideas do not come from nowhere - this idea can potentially get controversial.

It means that every idea - no matter how novel it seems - is in fact the result of two or more disparate ideas coming together in a novel way. An idea is created, but not from nothing.

As such, our interpretations of the world are limited to our exposure to it; I'll reference this image again:

Predictions

The primary function of learning is so that we can make accurate predictions about the world. To that end, we've developed a superb ability to make predictions using linear, short-term models.

Our primary challenge is that reality doesn't care about our human limitations. The world couldn't care less about what we'd like to think about it, and the long-term world is non-linear no matter how good we are at intuitively predicting patterns linearly. Hence the model at the top. When it comes to long-term thinking, we are consistently thwarted by the reality of the world.

So clearly, the problem is a bit more complicated than I've illustrated above. What I'd most like to get across right away is that we factually cannot even conceive of ideas that lie outside of our experiences (again, ideas do not come from nowhere) - and we're often too shortsighted to wield the long-term thinking necessary to recognize non-linear patterns. This complication can be illuminated by the idea of perspective, to be covered in part 2 of this series.
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12 Aug 2010

How feedback loops and distributed behavior relate the brain to the internet
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Researchers from the University of Southern California recently found that brain regions were connected through feedback loops and not top-down command structures. The research counters the assumption of neurology that the brain is hierarchical. In order to reach this conclusion, the researchers used tracing technology on the brain tissue, which revealed the relationships between different parts of the brain’s circuitry. Specifically, the research focused on the relationship between neurocenters associated with appetite, depression and anxiety. Researchers believe that this technique could help reveal an entire map of the nervous system.

The BBC reports:

“You would be amazed at how much of the current experimental neuroscience literature is dominated by ‘top down-bottom up thinking’, which goes back to the 19th Century, especially in neurology,” Professor Swanson told BBC News.

“The bottom line is that no matter what you might think, the circuitry we’ve shown – that specific set of structural connections – has not been demonstrated before.”

BBC: “Brain works more like internet than ‘top down’ company”

via psfk.com

An excellent blurb on the emergent, networked nature of the brain. That "top-down" assumption comes from our all-too-frequent illusion of control and our misguided thoughts about volition, conscious will and the like. Neurons - like ants and like computers and like humans - don't act because of some overarching, macro-level force or set of principles directing all behavior; they act because of nano-level responses to local, immediate-term conditions that exist around them.
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6 Jul 2010

Proverbial Wallet: Technology to increase the cognitive impact of increasingly abstract exchanges of value
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Behavioral economists and psychologists have long been discussing the cognitive implications that naturally come with the abstraction of currencies. Cash is a more abstract form of exchanging value than physical barter/trade, and the credit card is an even more abstract form of exchange than cash. Generally speaking, the more abstract the exchange, the less cognitive impact it has on our long-term thinking and decision-making – often with negative results, as indicated by the rates of credit card debt in the US and elsewhere. As we move into virtual currencies where value is increasing exchanged via SMS, mouse click, or natural gesture motion, many design and cognitive thinkers are expressing their concern about the implications of these even more abstract methods of exchange.

The Proverbial Wallet series of concepts have these thoughts in mind, developed by a tangible interaction team at the MIT Media Lab. These concept wallets incorporate elements of physical and social feedback into the act of spending, bringing a level of cognitive impact back into the purchase process. Each gives a nod to the principles of at-a-glance information and immediate feedback, and their importance in giving people the tools to make better decisions. See below for the team’s description of these concepts:

Peacock: The wallet appears to grow and shrink using a servo to reflect the balance in your accounts. Your assets will be on display to attract potential mates.

Mother Bear: The wallet protects the money within it when you need to be thrifty with a shorted motor in the hinge that resists opening. It promotes saving to weather out financial winters.

Bumblebee: The wallet buzzes through a vibrator motor whenever your bank processes a transaction. This encourages a conscious connection between handing over your credit card and your hard-earned money being harvested from the bank, and alerts you to fraud when you get a buzz without making a purchase.

Proverbial Wallet

[via @carlablumenthal | img via Boston.com]

this post originally appeared on psfk.com
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6 May 2010

Cognitive bias video/song, and some thoughts on optimization
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Totally love the above video @fatgator passed along to me ha.

At some point in life one of the questions you have to answer for yourself is this:

To what degree is cognitive bias a fundamentally negative part of the human condition?

For example, the charge behind lesswrong.org is that bias is fundamentally wrong in the purest sense of the word; one's goal should be to become less biased, thus optimizing one's life.

There's another angle that wonders what it means for the universe to even have something like "wrong in the most pure sense of the word." This has to do with the question: what does it even mean to optimize one's life?

The quintessential example is the machine that knows so much about you that it can perfectly 'optimize' your life (and I mean optimize in the purest sense of the word - that is to say that it is unbiased, perfectly calculating, and error-free): when it tells you in a morning email exactly all the steps to follow in order to have an 'optimized' life, do you follow it to the letter?

I've only been asking this question for a couple months but I have yet to run into someone who calls this 'optimal.'

In other words, even optimization strategies have optimization strategies.

Just a thought, but it's what I think about when I wonder about the idea of 'better living through less bias.'
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16 Mar 2010

Why I believe in irrationality: cognitive and physical limitations, etc
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[img via Benchilada]

You may or may not be aware that I'm scheduled to write for the 3six5 project in about a month. I had a pretty insightful thought this morning relevent to what I'll be writing about so I set up a google calendar alert to remind myself about it.
Those of you who know me know I'm of the "memory is nothing close to our typical conception of it" camp, so I do things like this all the time. I set alerts constantly, and I always have a pad of paper and pen on my person.
If I could say one thing about why I believe so strongly in irrationality, it would be because I'm so aware of our cognitive limitations. Of those limitations, memory seems to be a relatively benign and acceptable one to us (though entirely pervasive), but it's our other limitations that make irrationality a dirty word.
I could go on and on about these limitations (see this list of how you could be completely wrong about everything) but suffice to say that if you tell anyone they are fundamentally irrational and far less in control of their deceisions than they think, they're inclined to argue you down about it.
This is because we tend to think of "control" and volition in terms of the things that the prefrontal cortex consciously determines, which is absurd given the ridiculously small amount of influence the PFC actually has.

Here's what's strange to me: if I tell someone that I can influence their ability to grab a box just by placing it high on a shelf where they can't reach it, they seem to be fine with that.

But if I tell them I can influence their decision between healthy fruit salad and fattening chocolate cake just by giving them some numbers to memorize beforehand, they're not so comfortable. (After all, they are in control of that decision, certainly...)

Or if I tell them that I can make them answer the question "do you like this [random, unknown] person?" either 'yes' or 'no' simply by having them hold a cup of coffee as I'm asking? Even less comfortable. (in fact, the description of the Radiolab link I just provided there even begins with the description "It's scary to think that choice might just be an illusion.")

The point being that I find it a little silly/humorous that we completely accept our physical limitations, but adamantly deny that we have cognitive ones as well.
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8 Mar 2010

Decision-making in multiple contexts, as told by Herodotus in The Histories
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[Herodotus on the Persians in The Histories]
Some of you who have talked to me recently on making decisions may know that I tend to talk about making decisions in multiple contexts. The idea is that if you make a decision once, you're assuming every fruit of that decision is going to be consumed in the exact same context in the future. This is absurd, of course.
Ideally, in order to effectively avoid regret, you'd be able to consider the outcomes of a decision in every context you might experience those outcomes in the future.
This is of course impossible, but the idea is to experience as many of then as you can as you think about your choices. Let's say you're considering whether to take a job across the country; the strategy would be to consider the proposition when excited, when depressed, when frustrated, when scared about the future, when glowing from positive feedback, and so on.
The relevant cognitive bias here is probably an iteration of the availability heuristic, in the sense that we tend to believe the way we feel right now is how we'll feel forever.
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