How To Break Anything

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21 Jan 2011

Understanding seemingly invisible things
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Of all the abstract concepts of the world, I'm most presently enamored with "seeming." That is to say, I like things that seem like something until later we find out that they are in fact something else. As I see it, there are at least a few types of "seeming" things: paradoxes, illusions, and the invisible.

I say "invisible" as in "undetectable," and I say "undetectable" as in "difficult for humans to detect if using only their natural sensory organs." The above is a clear example of this. As you know, what we call the visible spectrum of electromagnetic radiation is a remarkably small subset of the spectrum in its entirety.

For most of human history, anything that was outside of the visible spectrum didn't exist. In fact, it didn't even fit that category of knowledge that contains imaginary things we know we don't exist - these things that we can currently detect only though their extreme-scale electromagnetic radiation lived in that category of things we didn't know we didn't know about.

We developed with a particular talent for perceiving light within the 'visible' spectrum. What I like about the above display is that it helps demonstrate that this fact shouldn't necessarily limit us from understanding the existence of other things - and more importantly: their impact on the world.

This applies to physical phenomena, but I'd like to make a parallel jump to the cognitive. The common thread is as follows: the only things we think are meaningful are the things that we perceive. I was in a conversation yesterday about 'understanding' vs 'relating.' The classic example I tend to bring up is the idea of the loud motorcyclist who blasts his engine for passersby at every opportunity. This is something I clearly don't relate to. It's another thing to say that I don't understand. I know that the world is governed by cause and effect, and I know that if I were interested enough I could in some way uncover what the circumstances were that would lead someone to taking pride in something I wouldn't take pride in.

Unfortunately, far too many people genuinely *don't* understand the behaviors of others. Since I spend my time observing the world, I try to keep in mind that there are multiple methods for doing so, and the most natural ones aren't necessarily the most useful. Most of the things that lead to understanding are 'invisible' in the seeming way I've described above, but if you're in a field that requires you to understand other humans (read: most) it's certainly worth doing the work to shift one's perspective to a different spectrum of perception.
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29 Nov 2010

Wikileaks, social intelligence, and the challenge of chronological proportionality
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One thing the last 30 years have taught us that the media is consistently terrible at identifying what's going to be important 30 years later. [see: Frank Gavin - Five Ways To Use History Well]

Watching the wikileaks conversation spread gets me thinking that I suppose in 30 years we'll see how much better "empowered networks of individuals" are at it. ('it' being the task of correctly assessing the chronologically proportional weight of events, in the present, without the advantage of historical perspective aka hindsight)

My initial response is to reflect on our characteristic short-sightedness and propensity to get excited about *seemingly* important things and think "probably not much better," but then I get to thinking what we'd be talking about would be an emergent display of social forecasting, and a key property of emergent behavior is in fact its unexpectedness.

Sort of like ants that correctly predict the oncoming of a flood and build barriers accordingly, that might be the quintessential example.
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28 Nov 2010

from BigThink: an account of how our conception of what 'real' science is changes over time
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If you were a sophisticated and up-to-the-minute science buff in 17th century Europe, you knew that there was only one properly scientific way to explain anything: "the direct contact-action of matter pushing on matter," (as Peter Dear puts it The Intelligibility of Nature). Superstitious hayseeds thought that one object could influence another without a chain of physical contact, but that was so last century by 1680. Medieval physics had been rife with such notions; modern thought had cast those demons out. To you, then, Newton's theory of gravity looked like a step backwards. It held that the sun influenced the Earth without touching it, even via other objects. At the time, that just sounded less "sciencey" than the theories it eventually replaced.

This came to mind the other day because, over at Edge.org, Richard H. Thaler asked people to nominate examples of "wrong scientific beliefs that were held for long periods." He also asked us to suggest a reason that our nominee held sway for too long.

My nominee was that notion that only physically touching objects were allowed in legitimate scientific explanations. It endured because in the context of recent history, it looked more serious and rigorous than what came before. A lot of theories have hung on like that—because their rivals look old-fashioned or naive or simply chaotic. More than once I've heard people defend the old rational-economic-man paradigm on the grounds that, flawed though it be, it's rigorous and formal and lets people think clearly. Another example of how the science-ish is the enemy of actual science? Time will tell.

Anyway, there are many interesting candidates over there (I liked, for example, the notion that the brain had nothing to do with thought or feeling, and the notion that we understand the interactions we call "nature and nurture

via bigthink.com
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27 Nov 2010

How our limited understanding of causality impacts daily decision-making
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The above is from the Dictionary of the History of Ideas; I'm presently studying causality. I sometimes think it's the only thing worth studying*.

Especially considering the nice little bit inside this article on Malebranch's thinking in The Search For Truth, where he defines a real cause as "something between which and it's effects, the mind perceives a necessary connection."

'Perceives' is the critical word here. The foundation of a thesis that is slowly brewing in my mind is that the human brain is distinctly, consistently, and measurably limited in a number of interesting and important ways - this has profound implications on the things we perceive, and therefore the things we believe (subtext: we should have little expectation that the things we believe correspond with reality).

Another way of thinking about this is that if we're limited in the way we perceive things, then the connections we make between causes and effects aren't necessarily the reality of what causes an effect. The connections we make just happen to be the ones that are most intuitive to us.

What follows from this is that if our conception of cause and effect is suspect, then we should be careful about the way we think of something a little more tangible: decision-making.

That is to say, if we are aware of our limitations in understanding the impact of our decisions, perhaps we can be a little more careful about judging what "right" and "wrong" decisions look like.

One idea I really like around this topic is Frank Gavin's notion of Chronological Proportionality, which I take as a framework for illustrating how the decisions and events we think are important almost never are.

*I don't think this all the time, obviously. Studying general concepts gives you a high-level scope, like looking down on the world from the furthest zoom on a digital map; useful for understanding the world, not so useful for understanding how to get from your house to the mall. When I say "making things a little more tangible" in the above, I'm essentially saying something like "zooming in a little bit."
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3 Nov 2010

On the future of intelligent, user-recognizing technology and the threat of spam
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[There seems to be] a potential darkside in waiting. Aside from all the surveillance concerns you've suddenly got objects that can swarm in three dimensions and might get cheap enough for the economics of spam to apply. Never mind walking past a Starbucks gets you a coffee voucher on your phone - we'll just soak the area with robovouchers that'll get in your hair until you buy a cappucino.

via russelldavies.typepad.com

The above is from Russell Davies' Designing Behaviour and Robospam. A short section from an excellent post that is otherwise on designing for emotional experiences.

The above reminds me that in a very Douglas Adams-esque "anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things" way, people tend to worry about the future of intelligent technologies.

It's plain to me that it's not intelligent technology that people should be worried about. It's unintelligent, short-sighted people poorly designing intelligent technology that they should be worried about.

...Those people have always existed, of course. And of course they will continue to exist.

I just got this email that I think illustrates the point nicely, given people's nervousness around Facebook's new Places and tagging features:

When people get emails like the above, the first thing that probably comes to mind is probably against Facebook tagging features. The technology isn't the problem here, it's people like shoppybag.
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3 Oct 2010

[offline inspiration] "Some great goods are logically bound up with certain evils."
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[Bertrand Russell interpreting Spinoza and Leibniz, from Simon Van Booy's "Why Our Decisions Don't Matter"]
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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

A Guide To Long-Term Perspective On Trends
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Hello friends, readers, and legions of followers. I've organized a panel in consideration of SXSW 2011, titled A Guide To Long-Term Perspective On Trends. The synopsis is below; I'd be entirely thankful if you were to follow on over and click the thumbs up vote as hard as you can.
This discussion will inspire attendees with the means to observe short-term phenomena through the lens of long-term perspective.
Many savvy SXSW attendees follow immediate-term trends as part of their daily business; this level of trend includes new technologies/platforms & hot items of public discourse. Just beyond this level of trend exist short-term microtrends, which help explain the 2-5 year impact of immediate-term trends by highlighting patterns that emerge through analysis of individual manifestations.

Understanding these types of trends is indeed important, but this discussion aims to illuminate how these short-term patterns fit within long-term sociological narratives that span decades. These are difficult to see manifest, and it is even more difficult to consider how they might impact long-term value when making decisions about the near-term.

Attendees will leave with insight on why long-term perspective is valuable to anyone hoping to design tools that speak to fundamental human truths. The concepts of "revolution vs evolution" and change blindness play important roles in our story, as considerations in capturing perspective on present-day developments.

This discussion does not aim to teach attendees how to predict future trends. Instead it will provide the tools for thinking about micro-level manifestations within a macro-level scale of historical development, as a way to better think about potential implications for the future.

via panelpicker.sxsw.com

Thanks for considering this concept. The team at SXSW had nice things to say about it in their confirmation letter; I agree with their sentiment and the sentiment of the commenters thus far that it's a discussion that we could all stand to be a part of. I try to speak to this briefly in the above - most SXSW attendees and readers here are all quite savvy when it comes to staying abreast of daily culture and hot items of public interest. But there's also deeper value in being able to pull out long-term patterns from analysis of these nanotrends, driven by an understanding of how humans fundamentally interact with each other and their technologies that is grounded in historical consistencies.

This is organized as a dual-panel discussion, which leaves room for fascinating friends of PSFK who have identified interest in sharing their great insight on long-term perspective. We're looking forward to this as an exploration of value, as it applies to seeing past the hype and excitement of near-term nanotrends into capturing a deeper socio/techno-cultural understanding of how people interact in the world.

Update: Timely enough, Seth here has just shared some thoughts on this exact subject, in characteristically pithy fashion; do read on, if you're interested: Resilience and the incredible power of slow change
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4 Aug 2010

[weak signals] "Most College Students Don’t Think Twice Before Plagiarizing From The Web"
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New York Times reports on a disturbing trend among college students who are simply unmindful or intentionally involved in plagiarism when it comes to using resources from the web. Several surveys conducted have proved that many students do not cite the author or credit the source when copying from a site, even believing its not “serious cheating”. The Times adds that the Internet may be changing the way how students understand the concept of authorship on the web.

Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.

But why is this phenomenon of plagiarism so widespread in the digital world? Sarah Brookover, a student at the Rutgers University provides an apt explanation:

This generation has always existed in a world where media and intellectual property don’t have the same gravity. When you’re sitting at your computer, it’s the same machine you’ve downloaded music with, possibly illegally, the same machine you streamed videos for free that showed on HBO last night. Because you’re not walking into a library, you’re not physically holding the article, which takes you closer to ‘this doesn’t belong to me,’ ” she said. Online, “everything can belong to you really easily.”

NY Times: “Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age”

via psfk.com

A fantastic discussion brewing around this development. On one level this is about the form/style of attribution, and it's relation to academic honesty, etc. On another it reflects the impact of digital accessibility to/ephemeralization of content - most notably manifested in notions like Faris' idea of recombinant culture/remix culture; one critical question here is "to what extent is one person's ideas their own?" It's a question that can now be asked and studied in a meaningful way directly because this digitization.
via weaksignals.posterous.com
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28 Jul 2010

Profit, value, and the entrepreneur's ability to take advantage of opportunity
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via ted.com

The above talk is by Cameron Herold, titled "Let's raise kids to be entrepreneurs." Like most I find the entrepreneurial spirit valuable and inspiring.

Though, watching the above actually left me with the following idea: what all entrepreneurs are good at is taking advantage of opportunity. But almost no entrepreneurs are good at taking advantage of opportunity to do anything besides make money.

A rare few people know how to take advantage of opportunity as a means to do something valuable. It requires being comfortable with seeing feedback from one's actions not in immediate "if, then" terms, but in nebulous, extended terms. This is in direct opposition to the comfort of seeing feedback from one's actions immediately and being able to immediately draw causal inferences from them. It requires an understanding of long-term value. These are not skills that are natural for humans, thus they are not skills that most people have. It's an idea that's been sitting on my mind lately, something that seems appropriate to share now having just run into the following:

"The people who run our cities don’t understand graffiti bc they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit." -Banksy

[thx thesociologist]

Some people truly argue that that short-term gain - immediate return - is the only real measure of value. What an unfortunate perspective to have developed.
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25 Jul 2010

Comparing two methods of assigning value to actions - direct causality vs "irreplaceable" causality
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The following describes part of a challenge of spending time efficiently, as posed in an essay titled "The Hidden Costs (in Time) of Spending Time":

Any given goal that I have tends to require an enormous amount of "administrative support" in the form of homeostasis, chores, transportation, and relationship maintenance. I estimate that the ratio may be as high as 7:1 in favor of what my conscious mind experiences as administrative bullshit, even for relatively simple tasks.

For example, suppose I want to go kayaking with friends. My desire to go kayaking is not strong enough to override my desire for food, water, or comfortable clothing, so I will usually make sure to acquire and pack enough of these things to keep me in good supply while I'm out and about. I might be out of snack bars, so I bike to the store to get more. Some of the clothing I want is probably dirty, so I have to clean it. I have to drive to the nearest river; this means I have to book a Zipcar and walk to the Zipcar first. If I didn't rent, I'd have to spend some time on car maintenance. When I get to the river, I have to rent a kayak; again, if I didn't rent, I'd have to spend some time loading and unloading and cleaning the kayak. After I wait in line and rent the kayak, I have to ride upstream in a bus to get to the drop-off point.

Of course, I don't want to go alone; I want to go with friends. So I have to call or e-mail people till I find someone who likes kayaking and has some free time that matches up with mine and isn't on crutches or sick at the moment. Knowing who likes kayaking and who has free time when -- or at least knowing it well enough to do an intelligent search that doesn't take all day -- requires checking in with lots of acquaintances on a regular basis to see how they're doing.

There are certainly moments of pleasure involved in all of these tasks; clean water tastes good; it feels nice to check in on a friend's health; there might be a pretty view from the bumpy bus ride upstream. But what I wanted to do, mostly, was go kayaking with friends. It might take me 4-7 hours to get ready to kayak for 1-2 hours.

My take on the challenge here is that the above advocates a method of assigning value to actions based on the causal relationship between performing it and the direct impact of that action on the desired goal. To simplify, I'll reference the above elements as processes of 1) assigning value to individual actions based on causal relationships, and 2) determining a causal relationship between performing an action and its direct impact on the world.

In the above model, an efficient action is one where we can clearly determine that its rationally causal relationship with impact on the world contributes to our desired goal. More importantly, in this model it is critical that the action contributes to our desired goal directly.

Consider an action that is homeostatic in nature - buying food. Spending time buying food does not directly contribute to our desired goal of "engaging in the act of kayaking"; as such, it isn't valued as efficient in the above model.

We do recognize however, that buying food is an irreplaceable step in the system of actions required to "engage in the act of kayaking." To the extent that an individual action is irreplaceable in a system of actions required to accomplish a goal, that action is important and valuable [this is a premise I'll call the irreplaceability premise]. With this premise in mind, it is easier to see that the act of buying food has an impact on "engaging in the act of kayaking" that is just as important as the act of pushing the kayak into the water - both are equally irreplaceable.

Using the directness model, we consider buying food as less valuable because it is less directly related to the happiness we experience from kayaking. If the irreplaceability premise is well-founded, then the directness model is a weak method of assigning value to actions - and thinking about irreplaceability may help resolve some of the concerns that arise with how to most optimally spend one's time, as described below.

[It's important to note as an aside that this particular application of the irreplaceability premise is founded on the notion that if the act of eating is removed, the act of pushing the kayak into the water will never take place. We can easily imagine an alternative scenario - you push the kayak into the water while hungry - so I'm supporting this irreplaceability with the sentiment contained within the statement "my desire to go kayaking is not strong enough to override my desire for food." It is in fact worth considering the function of time and our ability to delay homeostatic actions in this notion of "irreplaceability," but as an absolute definition, homeostatic actions will always be necessary and ultimately irreplaceable - it is equally easy to imagine an alternative, lengthier goal where delaying homeostatic behaviors ultimately do not reduce their necessity.]

To help make the irreplaceability premise more clear, consider also actions that are not homeostatic. As an undergraduate, I would often be conflicted about the directness of my actions and how to assess their value - most notably when the desired goal was something like "delivering a presentation for a class final." At some point it occurs to you that you're spending hours or even days preparing for a goal defined as a 20 minute task, and this seems like the same kind of waste mentioned above in the expression "it might take me 4-7 hours to get ready to kayak for 1-2 hours." But it is relatively easy for one to intuitively see a causal relationship between preparing slides and organizing sources as important to the end goal, so operating under the directness model our worries of wasted time are at least somewhat assuaged.

The problem is that the directness model again breaks down over lengths of time, where irreplaceable actions are not intuitively direct actors in the causal relationship between action and goal. 30 seconds of the presentation may come from ideas fostered over hours and hours of time going to class - and worse yet for directness, they may reflect the synthesis of disparate ideas captured across various chunks of time spent in lecture.

I'm not necessarily sure that the irreplaceability model is any better a tool for assigning value in our attempts to calculate efficiency (in a complex enough system it quickly becomes easy to identify every action as irreplaceable), but the above examples help illustrate the challenges of assigning value based on direct causality.
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6 Jul 2010

The "cultural attaché," and exploring the idea that "under no condition can you teach curiosity"
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The other day I was talking with the interesting Brad Grossman, who shared a bit of his experience as a "cultural attaché" for producer Brian Grazer, described in this New Yorker article as the following:

This person would be responsible for keeping Brian abreast of everything that’s going on in the world; politically, culturally, musically. . . . They’re also responsible for finding an interesting person for Brian to meet with every week . . . an astronaut, a journalist, a philosopher, a buddhist monk. . . . There is LOTS of reading for this position! Grazer may ask you to read any book he’s interested in. You’ll probably get to read about 4 or 5 books a week and you may be required to travel with him on his private plane to Hawaii, New York, Europe—teaching him anything he asks you about along the way. . . . You will also be provided with an assistant. . . . Salary is around $150,000 a year. . . . You will be to Grazer what Karl Rove was to Bush.

There's an interesting bit of the history around those kinds of roles in the article, but the below in particular caught my attention:

Grazer has had one bad attaché experience. “A few years ago, I hired this really smarty-pants Harvard guy,” he said. “He was just remarkably lazy. If he didn’t get the Wall Street Journal on his desk, it was like it didn’t exist.” Still, he said, the experience came with a lesson: “Under no condition can you teach curiosity.”

The thought that "under no circumstances can you teach curiosity" is particularly interesting to me. It's something I've thought on quite a bit, ever since first being a part of this world of planners/strategists - all my best conversations about what it means to be insightful in these kinds of roles ultimately end on the idea of curiosity.

I too tend to get to the point where I feel it cannot be taught; I sometimes think that this is in part because it requires the willingness to expose oneself to things that critically invalidate one's own (present) worldview. I think of this as a spectrum ranging from having a solid identity and perspective of how things should be, to being curious and understanding of the world but without any solid, unchanging core perspective.

The reason curiosity cannot be taught is because this is a tradeoff not everyone is willing to make.

I drew a quick sketch of this once, come to think of it:

That said, I think it might be better to say that curiosity cannot be taught, but it can in fact be fostered. This would be something like fostering the idea that there are lots of ideas out there in the world (lots of perspectives), and they don't so much hold objective right or wrongness as much as they hold measures of value in terms of how they impact other people.

Perhaps that counts as "teaching."
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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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30 Jun 2010

"___ was the logical thing to do": Control versus decentralization as it relates to human-interest vs self-interest
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Russell Kirsch says he’s sorry.
More than 50 years ago, Kirsch took a picture of his infant son and scanned it into a computer. It was the first digital image: a grainy, black-and-white baby picture that literally changed the way we view the world. With it, the smoothness of images captured on film was shattered to bits.

The square pixel became the norm, thanks in part to Kirsch, and the world got a little bit rougher around the edges.

Yet science is still grappling with the limits set by the square pixel.

“Squares was the logical thing to do,” Kirsch says. “Of course, the logical thing was not the only possibility … but we used squares. It was something very foolish that everyone in the world has been suffering from ever since.”

via wired.com

I read this as “____ was the logical thing to do. Of course, the logical thing was not the only possibility … but we used _____."

I'll elaborate on how the idea of "the logical thing to do" relates to control/decentralization/self vs human interest by beginning with an excerpt from TechCrunch's take on the potential implications of/reactions to Google Me:

This obviously has the potential to be huge, and Facebook needs a strong competitor. But even if Google has an amazing site in the pipeline, creating the next Facebook is going to be easier said than done — nearly 500 million people already have their content stored on Facebook, and despite what Facebook has claimed about being open, I doubt they’ll make it easy for anyone to jump into the arms of a competitor.

The logical business move for an organization like Facebook, facing the threat of a competitor drawing from their user base, is to implement measures that make it less worthwhile for users to switch. Or, more directly, make it difficult for other competitors to draw followers in.

(This happens all the time in the tech/digital/social world, of course; while grabbing the above link from TechCrunch, I saw the following in their "Featured Articles" section: Twitpic Blocks Posterous’ Import Tool; Out Come The Lawyers)

What Kirsch above is apologizing for is that in the human-wide interest of future development, a standard was set without the foresight of understanding how that standard would actually impact future development.

I'm of the mind that given our limited capacity for calculating that impact, there's really nothing to apologize for in this case. Contrast this to the tech control battles, which are a matter of self-interest. Tim O'Reilly comments on this below, in a discussion of the Internet of Things:

"You see increasingly the giants of the internet are trading for their own account, they are building a platform in which all roads lead back to themselves. Now there is a contervailing force for openess, but we have to wary, we have to be aware of that, we have to work for openess in that web."

It's an expression of our natural human short-sightededness, to measure 'success' as a reflection of 'control'; that is to say it's natural for us to think that if your platform controls more users, your platform is 'successful'. This notion of "success through control" has of course been reflected time and again ever since humans began fighting each other over the control of resources.

The key question to ask has always been that of the degree of efficiency allowed by centralized control versus the degree of efficiency allowed by distributed openness.

Returning to the "___ is the logical thing to do": centralizing resources is not the only possibility, but it is the one that makes logical sense in the immediate-term. In fact, for a good amount of human history, going to war in an attempt to centralize resources could be argued as the better of the two options in the key question just highlighted. But in a new world where advanced communication networks allow for an exponentially greater degree of efficiency allowed by decentralization (especially in the long-term), I'm not so sure control is the right answer anymore.
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17 May 2010

A simple list to determine how old your are - thoughts on technology, perspective, Internet of Things etc
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1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

via douglasadams.com

The rest of the article is even better. (How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet)

"Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things."

Or in other words, the Internet of Things will be as invisible as the things themselves are.
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13 May 2010

On why exposure and experience are so important; "you don't know what you don't know," etc
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All you need to know...

is that it's possible.

Mike sent me a great story about an ultra-lightweight backpacker:

"Wolf was carrying a super-small pack which weighed 14 pounds including food and water. When asked how he got his pack weight so low, Wolf would reply, 'All you need to know is that it’s possible.'"

One of the under-reported stories of the internet is this: it constantly reports on what's possible. Somewhere in the world, someone is doing something that you decided couldn't be done. By calling your bluff and by pointing out the possibilities, this reporting of possibility changes everything.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

The statement "all you need to know is that it's possible" might sound a bit sugary or idealistic.

But it's precisely why I'm so big on exposure and experience. It's about worldview, perspective, etc.

The age old idea is that you don't know what you don't know; you only like or hate what you've been exposed to. On some level its a simple idea but on another level it completely explains to me why the kids I grew up believe completely in the Mormon faith and all it comes along with, when across the world others believe completely in something completely different and neither can seem to figure out why when they think about the other.

In fact, I drew a chart recently that I originally considered for #makeachartday:

To me, "all you need to know is that it's possible" captures why it's so important to understand that you're entirely blinded to what you don't think exists - whether physical things, declarative facts, procedural knowledge or abstract concepts.

The only cure is exposure.
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11 May 2010

What time travel might look like - perception, relativity, etc
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A bit of abstract thinking out loud, since there's been a good amount of buzz on time travel floating around lately with Stephen Hawking's most recent comments.

The thing about time travel is that because we humans are naturally blinded to see things only from our own individual perspectives, I suspect our natural assumptions about distorting time are a bit backwards.

That is to say: we think about "time travel" as a phenomenon primarily concerned about how we would be seeing the world through time.

This phenomenon might better be described as the way the rest of the world sees us.

This isn't too profound on some level - special relativity and general relativity is precisely about the perception of others.

A way to clarify this is to think about the event horizon, which is the point in space at which light can no longer escape the gravity of a black hole. As a primer:

Special relativity illustrates that because 'time' is intrinsically interwoven with perception, that perception (particularly what we 'see' on a watch) will change at very high speeds and within high gravitational fields - as we approach the speed of light (either through our moving fast enough or it's moving slow enough thanks to gravity), the perception of what it 'shows' us changes completely. This is why time slows down at high speeds and in high gravitational fields, measured by the comparison of two watches that have moved through different conditions.

One key point about relativity is that you don't notice this, others do. In fact, that's precisely why the term 'relativity' is used.

Back to the event horizon:

If you were able to observe someone moving towards a black hole, what you would be observing is the light reflecting off them. At some point - just past the event horizon - this light would never be able to escape the gravity of the black hole. At this point in the gravitational field, their watch would slow down to the point that it has actually stopped. The light that you perceive would be frozen. They of course would continue moving towards the black hole, and would perceive all the grisly experiences that come along with things like being ripped apart by gravity, but for you, they have been frozen in time.

I'm wondering if this is what we will discover "time travel" to be: not our own individual selves moving through space-time, but the relative perception of the world moving around us.

In other words, when we "travel through time," we won't notice - others will.

[img/meaningful metaphor via fernando]
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9 May 2010

"I make, therefore I am": historical evolution, philosophical/scientific/entrepreneurial/artistic revolutions
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[via situated urbanism]

The above speaks to something I think about when I wonder about the Philosopher/Scientist/Entrepreneur/Artist balance: how does this balance shift back and forth (or alternatively: in one direction) over time?

To me it hints at the idea that throughout history cultural sentiment has shifted from "the Philosopher is the most important figure of our time" (circa 1350 - 17th century?) to "the Scientist is the most important figure of our time" (circa 1473 - late 19th century?) to "the Entrepreneur is the most important figure of our time" (early 18th century - present??). (obviously these overlap in time, much like they overlap in individuals)

I should take a second to distinguish between what the statement in the image means to me and (my impression of) what the individual is trying to express because there's an important point to be made here about perspective: the statement in the image expresses the assertion that "the Entreprenuer is the most important figure ever, because Entrepreneur actually makes things."

Not so sure I would go as far as to say "____ is obviously the best thing to be." Making things is obviously important; it's why I've devoted a full half of the PSAE model to it (the 'popular' half). But one of the reasons I started building this framework is to answer the question of how 'making things' fits into a larger scheme of what things are valuable and why.

One last thought, that if people like Hugh MacLeod, Lewis Hyde, Seth Godin, et al are right we'll be entering the age of the Artist soon enough as well.
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7 May 2010

Drivers vs cyclists vs pedestrians, my favorite chart from #makeachartday
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via buzzfeed.com

My favorite chart from #makeachartday. Generally expresses what I sometimes try to capture when I tag something with 'perspective' here.
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29 Apr 2010

I tend not to worry about people stealing my ideas: a few thoughts on the 'perfect' idea
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For every idea you come up with, there are probably ten other people in the world executing that same idea.

via mikekarnj.com

I tend not to worry about people stealing my ideas.

One of the things that has developed this attitude over the years is the above thought, expressed today by Michael Karnjanaprakorn.

The other thing that has helped is something that's crossed my mind more recently, and it's about the concept of the perfect idea:

It doesn't exist.

We tend to approach life like this:

"All I need to do is think of the perfect, groundbreaking idea. Then I can execute on it. Riches, profits, fame shortly after."

That's backwards, actually. Nothing great in the world has ever started with a perfect, unchanging idea.

Ideas evolve, and they grow. Also, ideas need air to grow - they only develop when shared.

There's a third concept as well now that I think of it:

Ideas aren't valuable - being able to generate ideas is valuable. If you truly have a good idea, then it is merely an extension of the fact that you have an infinite supply of truly good ideas.

On the other hand, if you're holding on to that one, perfect idea, you've got a bigger problem than someone stealing it: it's your only one.
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