Archives for 2009

How to Think Like Hercule Poirot

August 31, 2009 By

Last fall, I spent a long weekend in the Outer Banks region, a few hours south of Washington, DC, reading a collection of Agatha Christie pastiches called Malice Domestic, Volume 1 (now the title of an annual mystery  conference). The summer tourist season was over, and the hordes had moved on to Maine and Vermont to chase the Fall colors. The days were gray, windy, rainy and chilly.  The beach front properties had mostly emptied out, and most of the summer attractions were closed. We had a large three-level beach front house to ourselves, with a porch facing the troubled, ominous sea.

outerbanks

The ocean view from our hotel at Cape Hatteras, Outer Banks

Perfect conditions for bundling up in a blanket with a cup of hot cocoa and a mystery. Reading Malice Domestic was a revelation. None of the included writers even came close to creating Christie-like magic. Which led me to wonder: does Poirot endure because he represents certain truths about how to think effectively, which lesser fictional detectives lack? I think so.

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The Outlaw Sea by William Langewiesche

August 27, 2009 By

To most of us, the oceans are about romance, not shipping logistics. Violent thirty-foot waves and gripping piracy tales are conspicuously missing from The Box, the first shipping-themed book I reviewed. While that story (see my post the epic story of container shipping) had all the passion and high drama of a business thriller, it was essentially a human and technology story. The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime tells a parallel tale, one focusing on the realities of the oceans themselves . There are plenty of waves and pirates here, and this is easily the most absorbing maritime-themed book I’ve read since Treasure Island, which is saying a lot, since it is non-fiction.

Rainbow7

The "Alondra Rainbow", pirated and renamed "Mega Rama" (picture from Indian Coast Guard site)

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The Pregnancy Metaphor

August 24, 2009 By

Pregnancy is a rich, if slightly uncomfortable source of metaphors, especially for men.  For example:

  1. The idea of the startup incubator
  2. The idea that product launches are like birth events

The most interesting aspect of pregnancy metaphors is the difference between male and female attitudes towards them.

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On Going Feral

August 19, 2009 By
This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Regenerations

Yesterday, a colleague looked at me and deadpanned, “aren’t you supposed to have a long beard?” When you remote-work for an extended period (it’s been six months since my last visit to the mother ship), you can expect to hear your share of jokes and odd remarks when you do show up. Once you become a true cloudworker, a ghost in the corporate machine who only exists as a tinny voice on conference calls, perceptions change. So when you do show up, you find that people react to you with some confusion. You’re not a visitor or guest, but you don’t seem to truly belong either.

I hadn’t planned on such a long period without visits to the home base, but the recession and a travel freeze got in the way of my regular monthly visits for a while. The anomalous situation created an accidental social-psychological experiment with me as guinea pig. What’s the difference between six months and one month, you might ask? Everything. Monthly visits keep you domesticated. Six months is long enough to make you go feral. I’ve gone feral.

Feral cat (Wikimedia Commons, GFDL)

Feral cat (Wikimedia Commons, GFDL)

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The Tragicomic Exasperations of Expertise

August 16, 2009 By

The Dunning-Kruger effect is one of those cleanly stated insights that can at once make you feel relieved and hopeless. It is a cognitive bias which lends confidence to ignorance. Wikipedia compactly describes the effect as follows:

“…people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.” They therefore suffer an illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average. This leads to a perverse result where people with less competence will rate their ability more highly than people with relatively more competence.

This dry, academic version actually understates both the richness and emotional complexity of what is going on. This richness begins with the subjective consequences of the impasse: the expert is exasperated, while the novice actually feels contemptuous and superior. The situation is stable: the expert gropes for a way to demonstrate the validity of his view at a level the novice can understand and is reduced to sputtering incoherence, which only serves to strengthen the novice’s illusory sense of superiority. Play out the broader effects of this little piece of sketch comedy, and you get all the pathos and pageantry of human society at the grandest scales.

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Two Manipulative Ways to Close Conversations

August 12, 2009 By

I have a morbid fascination with the idea that conversations represent two computers trying to program each other in real time. Pondering this sometimes yields insights that seem to be valid but manipulative. Here are two examples; you can decide whether these moves should be used. The first has to do with IM/chat conversations. Do you ever tire of closing rituals that take too long?

A: Ciao!

B: Yup, ttyl

A: Have a good weekend

B: Thanks, am looking forward to chilling on my camping trip. You have a nice weekend too.

A: Oh, where are you going?

I’ve found a move that tends to cut off these sessions surgically. I call it repeat-or-complement. The first time the other person uses a closing phrase, you either repeat it exactly (mirroring) or provide the most ritualistic, banal complementary response available. In the example above, the response to Ciao! should have been Ciao!, not ttyl. This works for neutral/symmetric closings. If you get something like Thanks, you should choose You’re welcome (no exclamation point). Not no problem or anytime dude.

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Humor as Massage

August 10, 2009 By

As I grow older, I find fewer things funny. Curiously elephant jokes still work on me. The steady rise of my chuckle-or-cringe threshold hasn’t been a monotonic progression from childish to sophisticated. Things are more complex.

One reason, I suppose, is that over an adult decade-and-half, I’ve experienced at least one complete cycle of innovation in humor (the rise and fall of Seinfeld-Leno style observational humor) and consumed a critical quantity of at least three major kinds of humor (Indian, British and American, in order of influence on me). The result is that these days I can often place a joke or gag in space and time and explain it away quickly enough to kill the chuckle before it is born. Sometimes before the punchline.

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On Seeing Like a Cat

August 6, 2009 By

Cats and dogs are the most familiar among the animal archetypes inhabiting the human imagination.  They are to popular modern culture what the fox and the hedgehog are to high culture, and what farm animals like cows and sheep were to agrarian cultures. They also differ from foxes, hedgehogs, sheep and cows in an important way: nearly all of us have directly interacted with real cats and dogs. So let me begin this meditation by introducing you to the new ribbonfarm mascot: the junkyard cat, Skeletor, and my real, live cat, Jackson. Here they are. And no, this isn’t an aww-my-cat-is-so-cute post. I hate those too.

skeletorandjackson

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The Brain of the World

August 3, 2009 By

Metaphors frame our understanding of numbers.  The idea of per capita is one such. To use per capita in your arguments is to suggest that each of us is metaphorically associated with a “fair share” of something.  For instance, I once read somewhere that  the money spent on a typical American child was 30 times that spent on an Indian child, which in turn, was 30 times that spent on a Somalian child. Whether you are inclined to agree or argue (“yeah, that seems roughly right” or “the real disparity is much worse” or “it isn’t so bad if you look at purchasing power parity”), you’ve been trapped by the metaphor. It has stopped you from questioning whether per capita is a useful frame of reference.

I encountered another example in the ABC show Over a Barrel: The Truth about Oil. One of the talking heads, T. Boone Pickens, offered this thought: the US has only 4% of the world’s population, but uses 25% of its oil production.

Let me juxtapose a different metaphor: the human brain constitutes roughly 2% of the body weight of an average adult, but uses 20% of the body’s oxygen supply. I am suggesting, of course, that the metaphor of the world as a giant organism is the appropriate one here, and that America’s disproportionate energy consumption might be justifiable on the basis of its role as the “brain” within the body politic of the world.

I am not actually making this argument right now. I am merely wondering: to what extent are our ideological commitments hidden within our choice of metaphors?

[#2 in my short-posts experiment. 274 words]

The Book as a Social Signal

July 29, 2009 By

Thrice in recent memory, a stranger has come up to speak to me because of the cover of a book. Within the three great introvert institutions built by the book: the cafe, the library and the bookstore, book covers serve as social signals. They are ice-breakers par excellence. Or were. I recently bought the austerely cover-free Kindle.

kindle

From Wikimedia commons, GFDL

I am among those who celebrate the possibilities of the Kindle, but I have to acknowledge the dark side. With apologies to Joni Mitchell, we’ve digitized paradise, put up a plastic box. Finishing my first full Kindle-read, I realized with a sinking sadness that I was not holding a fringe toy. For all its rough edges, the Kindle is a legitimate book-killer, and it will prevail. In time, it will catalyze the formation of its own institutions and social-psychological landscape, complete with different social signals. But it will be too late for me. I am the sum total of the books I’ve read. Paper books with covers, with associated memories of intimate bookish conversations triggered by glimpses of covers. With the paper book, a part of me will die. I can imagine having a conversation with an 18-year-old Kindleworm in 2025. He will probably view me with the same incomprehension with which I, as a calculator-trained engineer, view 50-plus slide-rule-trained engineers.

This is my first stab at finding a short-format style that works for me. 250 words. What do you think? Still ribbonfarmesque?